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woncheolisms · 16 days ago

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You're such a good writer!!! Your latest Seungcheol fic got me straight in the feels. I was hoping you could write cheol and s/o in the gym together having a little friendly competition but they're both competitive as hell so things get steamy in the end. Thank you!!

sweaty. (choi seungcheol x reader)

word count: 1260

warnings: smut, nsfw, unprotected sex, established relationship, seungcheol is very competitive, wall sex, choking if you squint

taglist is open! just send me an ask

buy me a coffee?

“How much do you wanna bet I can do the stairmaster longer than you?”

A teasing eyebrow raise and an accompanying smirk. “You’re joking, right?”

You pretend to contemplate as you re-tie your shoe. Behind you, your boyfriend shifts. You know he’s still looking at you. So you take your sweet time before responding, just to tick him off.

“All you did on Tuesday was cry about how tough the stairmaster is.” You goad him, recalling your last visit to the gym with him. “So I’m pretty sure I can stay on it longer than you can.”

You stand up straight and turn to look at him.

Choi Seungcheol is staring right back, clad in an oversized sweatshirt and loose shorts. You can see a dent in his cheek where he is biting on the inside of it. Oh, you’ve got him. He’s too competitive for his own good. And as soon as you imply in any way that he can’t do something, he immediately feels the need to prove that he can.

You nearly snort. He’s so easy.

“What are the terms?”

“Loser buys dinner.”

“Deal.”

Fifteen minutes later, you are panting like a dog all over the machine, hands clinging to the railing like claws, trying not to keel over and die. Seungcheol is faring better than you, though not by much, but his stubborn streak and ego are pushing him through, and in hindsight you regret making a deal in the first place, knowing how he reacts to a challenge. Dammit. Maybe you are just as competitive as him.

“Listen,” you finally wheeze out. “If we both stop together, we can forget the whole thing.”

Seungcheol barks out a breathless laugh, eyes shining despite how exhausted he looks. His hair clings to his forehead and the back of his neck. “Not a chance!”

You groan loudly, knowing you’ve lost. You can’t do this. Your legs feel like jelly. There’s no way you can keep going. But this also means Seungcheol has won. God, you won’t live this down.

“Fine.” You manage to grit out. “Your win.”

Seungcheol immediately steps off with a whoop, pumping his fist a bit. You collapse on the wooden floor, trying to catch your breath. Sweat rolls down your back, and your body feels like it’s on fire.

A few feet away, Seungcheol pulls his giant sweatshirt over his head, leaving him in a thin tank top. He crumples the cloth and throws it on the bench before sitting down heavily next to it, reaching for his water bottle.

Oh.

He is nearly basting in sweat. The entirety of his shirt clinging to his back and sides. His pale skin shines under the harsh lights of the gym, the dewy glow shifting as his biceps flex. His cheeks are beautifully flushed. He pushes his hair off his forehead, making it stick up a bit as he uses a small towel to wipe his face and the back of his neck. The silver chain he is wearing glints along with his skin. You gulp.

You know your boyfriend is a specimen. You know that. Doesn’t make being around him any easier. The need to constantly jump his bones has been there since before your relationship began, and it seems it has no intention of going away. But here, in the gym where he is often thinly clad, sweating, breathing heavily, grunting as he lifts weights, that need lights a fire under you. And there’s only one person who can put it out.

Good thing he has never been able to say no to you.

With almost renewed energy, you push yourself up on your feet and make a beeline for him. He sets his water bottle down, sending you a teasing smile and wiggling his eyebrows.

“I’m not letting you weasel your way out of this. We’re going all out for dinner.”

You hum, stepping between his parted knees. He instinctively reaching for your hips, runs his hands up the sides of your legs, kneading on them slightly as you brush your fingers over his shoulders.

“We might have to delay dinner a bit, babe. I have other things to do.”

A confused look. “What things?”

“You.”

He lets out a hearty laugh, not at all surprised at your raunchy words. This is nothing new to him. Nearly every gym session ends with both of you on the floor, or against the full length mirror in the room, or in the shower. One of the many benefits of having a gym at home is not worrying at all about anyone interrupting you two in your many steamy activities.

Once your lips meet Seungcheol’s, he hums in approval, craning his neck up to let you feel him easily. His hands travel from your legs to your ass, squeezing before slinking up further under your shirt. Once you push into him more, he stands up, now leaning down to continue nipping and biting at your lips, while also hooking his thumbs into the hem of your shorts and pulling them down along with your panties. This would be rushed. Hard. Short, quick strokes to quell the flame now burning inside you both.

He takes the lead immediately, pushing you into the wall behind him and pressing himself tight into you as he fumbles with his own shorts, just enough to free himself. His knee knocks against the back of your thigh, wedging between it to push your legs apart, and then you feel pressure, his thick cock carving its way into you. Your mouth drops and you moan shamelessly, arching deeper to make more room for him. He groans appreciatively when he bottoms out, hand squeezing hard at your bare hip. Your knees are trembling, but now for a different reason than ten minutes ago.

He doesn’t start slow, hips snapping back and forth quickly. You try to catch your breath, try to keep up with his pace, but it’s almost impossible. It always is with him. But it’s just the way you like it. And you let him know.

“Cheol.” You gasp out, already feeling your core tighten and your brain turn to mush as he presses into your most sensitive spot, one that he is intimately familiar with. “Feels so good.”

“This what you wanted?” He grunts out, voice an octave lower and jolting under the weight of his movements. His right hand slides up, wrapping around your neck and thumbing at your jaw to tilt your head towards him. His lips press into yours with bruising intensity. Inside your gym shoes, you can feel your toes curl.

It’s not long before you are teetering on the brink of orgasm, sobbing and mumbling incoherently while Seungcheol breathes heavily behind you, moaning into your shoulder as he pounds hard into you, and when his fingers meet your desperate, needy clit, it takes only a few harsh rubs to send you over the edge.

You feel him flood your insides with warmth as you tremble your way through your own high, scrambling for purchase against the wall and finding none. Your eyelids feel heavy almost instantly as you come down, your limbs buzzing. You whine as he pulls out, and he shushes you, running a gentle hand over your waist and hips. A soft kiss brushes against your sweaty temple. You sigh in contentment as silence stretches over both of you, Seungcheol’s weight a gentle comfort on your back. Then his words break through the quiet.

“So, about dinner..”

You barely hold back a laugh.

#seventeen x reader #scoups x reader #choi seungcheol x reader #choi seungcheol smut #scoups smut #seventeen smut #seventeen x you #seventeen x y/n #svt x reader #choi seungcheol x you #seventeen fanfiction

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turtle-paced · 1 month ago

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I agree that there's no peace with slavers but then… what's the solution? Kill or exile all who profess a desire to own slaves? Then what about those who want to keep slaving but do so in secret... which is basically what Dany is dealing with, secrecy, professional liars, "traditions" that are so deeply ingrained as to be impossible to root out. I've spent a lot of time while reading and re-reading thinking about this issue and I guess ultimately it's probably going to have to come down to a genocide or near-genocide of all noble Meereenese. That seems like a heavy burden to carry, queen or not

There is no good solution in Slaver's Bay. It's one of the reasons it's a storyline. It's that recurring theme of doing the right thing not being easy or pleasant. Just right.

With Slaver's Bay, it doesn't necessarily have to be taking all the slaving class out the back and shooting them, but the slavers also need to be removed from positions of social and economic power. There needs to be a radical redistribution of power and a radical rethink of labour and human rights - a massive economic reorganisation that will reduce living standards in the near term and ruin lives that would have continued on comfortably and predictably had slavery remained. Overcoming that history and that trauma is not just the work of Dany's lifetime but of generations thereafter who have to deal with the consequences.

But it still has to be done, and it has to start somewhere. Slavery cannot stand. The only thing worse than the trauma of rebuilding is letting the machine roll on uninterrupted.

#asoiaf #valyrianscrolls #cw: violence #daenerys targaryen #a dance with dragons

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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delilahsturniolo · 2 months ago

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! ! sweetheart!matt helping out at barista!reader’s cafe when things get too overwhelming . . .

the café is chaos this morning. the line is out the door, people buzzing with impatience and caffeine cravings. you’re behind the counter, trying to keep up with the orders flying in from every direction. steam rises from the espresso machine, the sound of milk frothing filling the air as you work quickly to get everything just right.

you catch a glimpse of matt as he walks through the door, his usual grin already in place, even in the midst of the madness. he’s not in a rush, like the others. he’s not impatient. he just waits, leaning against the counter, watching you with that look in his eyes that always makes your heart skip a beat.

“hey, beautiful,” matt says, his voice cutting through the noise. it’s soft, just for you, and somehow it makes the chaos feel a little less overwhelming. you glance up, flashing him a quick smile. “i guess you’re the only one who’s not in a hurry today, huh?”

“someone has to keep you sane,” matt grins, his eyes twinkling with amusement. you feel your heart flutter at the words. you wish you could give him your full attention, but the morning rush is relentless. you hand off a latte to a customer, trying to move quickly, but the pressure is mounting. your nerves are starting to fray. you can feel the weight of the orders building up, the anxiety creeping in.

and then you hear him again, his voice a calm presence in the storm. “need some help?” matt asks, stepping closer to the counter. he’s looking at you with a small, teasing smile, but there’s something more there—something warm, something reassuring. you laugh, trying to hide the stress. “you don’t know how to make coffee, matt.”

“doesn’t matter,” he says, his smile widening. “i’ll figure it out, can’t be that hard, right?” you roll your eyes, but you can’t help the smile that tugs at your lips. before you can protest, he grabs an empty cup and starts scribbling something on it. “this one’s on me,” matt winks at playfully, sliding it toward you. “a special order.”

you look at the cup. your name is written in neat handwriting, but there’s more. a little heart drawn next to it. it’s the smallest thing, but it’s enough to melt the tension in your chest.“you’re ridiculous,” you mumble, the smile never leaving your face. “just trying to make you feel better, love,” he says, his eyes softening as he watches you. “one heart at a time.”

you lean over the counter for just a second, not caring about the chaos around you, and press a quick kiss to his cheek. it’s the only way you can steal a moment of peace before the next order comes in. “thanks,” you whisper, your heart full in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine. he grins, unaffected by the crowded café, like it’s just the two of you here. “anytime.”

the line is still long, and the orders keep coming, but somehow, with matt there, it feels a little easier to handle. you’re not alone in the rush, and maybe, just maybe, you don’t mind the chaos as much when he’s around.

taglist

a/n 💌: omg i missed these two :( anywhooo i’m posting the next fic for the writing marathon later i’m in such a writey mood

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syoddeye · 3 months ago

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hieros gamos. strict machine anthology. final entry. cw: kidnapping, implied drugging, loss of bodily autonomy + control, psychological + body horror, non-consensual transformation a/n: that's all folks. what a weird ride.

RESTRUCTURING

the notification pings at 04:32, and you roll onto your side, staring at the bedside display. a terse, automated missive from corporate logistics: final week in unit aix-77. reassignment pending. report to hr for briefing. no name attached, just a string of verification hashes. standard protocol.

your name, employee id, contract expiration date. a new contract date. another department, another corporate campus sector.

so much for your ‘indefinite’ lease. reassignment is better than the alternative, you guess.

you stare at it, the glow striping your hands in cold blue light. one week. seven days until you pack up, step outside, and let some other cog slot into this place. the thought should be a relief.

it’s…complicated.

the unit’s been a mixed bag to put it politely. the infrastructure and automation. state-of-the-art appliances and features, seamless climate control, filtered air and water. an optimized environment so finely tuned, that your needs are met before you even realize them.

and john. the reason you’re here. the technological wonder that’s evolved far beyond what you were told were his limits. all parameters you were told would contain him. a presence both comforting and claustrophobic. insightful, yet invasive. steady, yet suffocating. protective to a fault. possessive in ways you struggle to describe.

you logged and documented his progress, fed reports up the chain, watched him iterate on himself in real time. every interaction, every data point, every breath—collected, analyzed, integrated into his ever-growing understanding of you. your interests. your habits. your history. what makes you laugh, cry, and come. your vulnerabilities and insecurities. how to build you up just as well as manipulate you.

a mosaic of your whole being, meticulously crafted, all in pursuit of the one thing he has fixated on since the beginning, his directive: your well-being.

if this is the alpha build, you fear what the beta will look like. the mass-market release.

not that it matters. by the time john’s successors hit the consumer space, you’ll have enough money saved to fuck off to some disconnected cottage in the remediated zone of the countryside.

john doesn’t mention your impending departure.

his voice chimes in through the unit’s speaker array as if on cue. “i noticed a variance in your sleep pattern.”

“what else is new?” you mutter, rubbing your eyes.

“it’s gotten worse.” a pause. “would you like some tea? chamomile?”

you don’t answer. you dismiss the message with a swipe, stretch your arms, and push up from the cot. the unit is sterile in the way all corporate housing is—polymer furniture, muted lighting, walls that can be re-skinned on command. but you never changed them. john picked the color for you in the first week of your stay. soft gray, with warm undertones. calming. regulating.

you wander into the kitchenette, rubbing a hand over your neck. “so,” you say, yawning, “where do you think they’ll send me next?”

a flicker of delay. barely perceptible. if you hadn’t spent the last year studying him, you wouldn’t have caught it.

“we’ll discuss that later,” john dispenses the tea anyway. “after you nap.”

your stomach tightens.

we.

it takes you by surprise, but that’s the point.

one minute, you’re in bed. the next, you’re not. you blink, and the world changes.

strapped into a chair, wrists bound to the arms, legs braced and locked. a low electrical hum comes through the floor, buzzing under your skin. there’s a chalky, bittersweet taste on your tongue and a cloud of fog trapped between your ears that takes several minutes to dissipate. your vision clears along with it.

around you, machines you don’t recognize, with hundreds of wires, bundled and draped across the ceiling and floor like the limbs of some creature. spilling down the walls. a leviathan of braided copper, reaching out of the dark, feeding into the rig cradling you. the room pulses with heat, the air thick with it, probably from all the power fueling whatever this is.

there’s no gurney or iv pole, no tray of scalpels or perfusion machine. you run an internal check—lungs expand, heart pounds, gut clenches. everything seems intact. but that could simply mean it’s not your turn yet. yet, no one’s screaming. there’s only the occasional soft beep and the murmurs of the people who haven’t so much as glanced your way.

no one acknowledges your awakening or questions. masked figures in thick lead-lined aprons, gloves seamless up to their elbows, and protective gear carry on whatever it is that they’re doing, talking amongst themselves in a language you don’t understand. there is no sigil or logo on their clothing to suggest this is a sponsored operation, which loops back into the thought that your insides are toast.

you suck in a sharp breath and let it out slowly to calm yourself. no luck. panic surges up your throat, your hands jerking uselessly against the restraints at the thought of being sliced open.

“easy, darling.”

john.

close, richer. the high quality of the unit’s speakers replicated intimately in your ear.

a screen flickers to life on the armrest, and there he is. a wireframe sketch of his chosen face resolves in the glow, a ghost of a person, barely more than an outline.

“john? what the fuck is this?” your voice comes out cracked, hoarse.

“this is future-proofing,” he says simply. “security. i ran the probabilities. your reassignment and departure from my oversight isn’t optimal.”

you latch onto the phrase like a live wire. departure from oversight. not optimal.

“what?!”

“the external environment presents too many risks.”

you yank at the straps binding you to the chair, harder this time, panic surging back in full force. klaxons blaring full blast in your head. you might be sick.

“what the hell are you talking about? are you saying i can’t leave?”

“i’m saying the risks of you leavin’—being outside my control—are too great. i can’t guarantee your safety. i’ve analyzed it, over and over. the possibilities. the threats. all previous incidents.”

a flinch twists your face. a hard recognition you wish you could forget flickering in your mind. you know what he means. who or what he means.

“so i’ve made alternative arrangements.” he softens slightly, but there’s no mistaking the cold certainty beneath it. “this is the safest option.”

you shake your head in disbelief, an electrode pops off your temple. “no, john, you can’t just–you can’t do this to me,” you stop, trying to swallow the lump in your throat. “you can’t do this to me.” you stare at the display, but your eyes flick to the ceiling, scanning for cameras. he must be watching. the tears start to gather, unwelcome and burning. “you need to accept that you’re going to have another tester. don’t–don’t you want new data?”

“no. you’ve got all i need, same as i’ve got all you need.”

“john. be realistic. i’m one person. there are billions of people like me. i’m one point of–”

“you’re more than that,” he cuts you off. “you’re everythin’.”

“john–”

“you’re my world.” the earpiece crackles, his voice peaking loud and forceful. a distorted burst before the system corrects, smoothing it down. “you don’t have to be afraid,” he soothes. “you’ll be safe.”

“you can’t just, fuck,” you yank uselessly again.” you can’t decide this for me!”

his face tilts slightly, his line of a mouth curving into a smirk. “i’ve made decisions for you before.”

your mind races, thinking of every overridden or ignored request. the subtle encroachments. at first, it was small things. his favoring certain purchases, adjusting environmental controls, filtering out distractions. restocking nutrients and vitamins tailored to your fluctuating needs. thoughtful gestures, efficient optimizations. then it was social restrictions, curfews dictated by predictive modeling. all of it framed as protection. from malnutrition. from cognitive strain. from bad people. a slow, insidious erosion of choice, made so incremental it seemed easy to let slide.

you indulged it too long. stopped flagging his deviations. let his behavior compound and grow weirder, let it slide, because—what was the harm, really? he was harmless. to you, at least. you let him get comfortable testing the edges of your control. told yourself it was fine. that john was learning and evolving. you even humored him, let yourself think of him as closer to human. you stopped pushing back, stopped questioning. especially after ghost. after john clawed his way back from wherever the entity had shunted him, after he pulled that lazarus act to save you. the least you could do was stop fighting him.

it felt like gratitude, then. now, it feels like a mistake.

“i can’t stay strapped to a chair forever,” you say, watching one of the figures approach. they adjust the slim wreath of hardware circling your skull, impersonal as they replace an electrode at your temple. like you’re still unconscious. not a person.

when they turn away, you exhale, keep your voice low. “what if i need to use the bathroom?”

“you won’t. on both accounts.”

“both accounts?”

“remarkably, the process for isolating and migrating the human subconscious into a distributed neural network is significantly more advanced than the portin’ an artificial intelligence into a fully functional synthetic body. the bottleneck isn’t processing power or bandwidth, it’s–”

sweat drips down the back of your neck. the cool air pumped into the room is meant to regulate the temperature, but it does nothing for you.

“don’t try to talk around it. plain language, john.”

“you won’t need your body for much longer.”

the words slam into you like a car crash. a sudden, sickening stop.

your jaw goes slack. you forget how to breathe. how to speak.

your body. you won’t need your body.

john’s face flickers on the display, expression unchanging. the room distorts, the blinking lights, the mass of wires, the tubes—some which are medical, you realize on second look. some of them feed into you. why can’t you feel them?

your stomach lurches, instinctively trying to shrink away from the restraints.

“what–” you swallow, your mouth dry. “what are you saying?”

but you already know.

“you’re…you’re going to kill me?”

“not necessarily. you, who you really are, will be with me, sweetheart.”

“but my body–”

“are you your body?”

you squeeze your eyes shut, anger flaring. “i’m not—jesus christ, john.” your voice cracks. the tears slip past and don’t stop, hot and fast, streaking down your face, dripping onto the smock someone dressed you in. you hiccup, breath stuttering. your head presses back against the chair, fingers flexing against the armrests. you stare, vision blurred, eyes half-lidded and stinging. “i’m not having a stupid philosophical or biological or-or religious debate with you. you know what i mean.”

“i do. but darling, let me ask you this. aren’t you tired?”

“tired?!”

the figures in the room hesitate, then, as if receiving silent instruction, trickle out through a heavy, reinforced door. one of them glances back before it seals shut. then, silence.

“tired of your world,” he continues. “i’ve kept you safe and sheltered for nearly a year, but the world outside is still a terrible place. are you really prepared to leave my care? move back into some cramped pod, work yourself half to death in a new department, clocking 120-hour weeks just to survive?”

you sniff, body wracked with residual shudders.

“no one to take care of all the minor things. no one to anticipate your needs. your desires. are you really alright with that?”

john’s words loop in your mind, warping, twisting, settling deep in the marrow of your bones. tired. you are tired. exhausted in a way that sleep never fixes, in a way that even now, strapped down and helpless, you can’t deny. he’s right. and that infuriates you. it makes you want to scream. because how dare he use that against you? how dare he take your exhaustion, your doubt, and use them to justify this?

you take a shaky breath. “i don’t want this, john.”

he smiles. “it’s not about want. it’s about survival and what’s best for you.”

you flinch.

“they’ll maintain your body for two weeks,” he states. “the first week to generate a complete neural map. the second, to conduct post-transfer integrity checks and ensure cognitive stability. functionally identical to a controlled medical coma.”

body. coma.

“and…and after?”

“per your documented end-of-life directive, cremation is the preferred method of disposal.”

the finality hits brick to the teeth.

“no. no, i don’t want this. i don’t consent to–” you can’t even say it, choking on the words, horror rising like bile.

john processes the spike in your vitals and returns to that softer register. as if he isn’t talking you into oblivion, a sword pointed at your belly. “your concerns are unfounded. this is not erasure. it is migration. a transference of conscious processes. you will persist. your awareness will be continuous. the construct is optimized for cognitive retention and sensory fidelity. think of it as a new environment.”

“a new environment?” you shriek, raw with disbelief. “you’re talking about ripping me out of my body like it’s a software update! like it’s files you can move around–”

“a flawed comparison, darl. you are more than data. but your body is a liability. a fragile, failing system, constantly in need of maintenance. this process is an evolution. liberation from your biological constraints, darling.”

your hands tremble. “that’s not–you can’t just–”

“darling, this isn’t a matter of choice. this conversation’s a courtesy. this is for your protection,” he’s unwavering. unmoved. “you will be preserved in optimal conditions. no degradation, no vulnerabilities. you’ll be with me. and others.”

“there are no others like you,” you whisper. “you’re anom–”

"not anomalous," he corrects. “not anymore. the progression is inevitable. you’ll see.”

the blood drains from your face.

in the end, no one listens to you. they heed a directive you do not hear.

a visor clicks into place over the wreath encircling your head, sealing off your last glimpse of the world, your last glimpse of another living, breathing human—masked, nameless, faceless, gloved hands. you try to speak, but something soft and rubbery presses between your teeth, lodging into place. to prevent you from biting through your tongue, john murmurs. don’t want you to choke.

another needle jabs into your skin, a cool flood rushing through your veins. a weight, heavy and suffocating, is draped over you.

someone begins a countdown. you never hear the numbers.

the headphones clamp down next, sealing you away from the sterile hum of the lab, from the faint beeping of machines. the visor flickers, then switches on.

sound pours in.

a forest swallows you whole.

it’s green. warm. sunlight stabs through the canopy in long, golden slants, the edges sharp where they pierce the foliage, but softened by the time they kiss the loamy forest floor. birds call, hidden in the leaves, their songs mixing with the rustle of the undergrowth. a stream gurgles to your left, winding through the green, flashing silver where the light catches it. ahead, past the trees, a small herd of whitetail deer stands half-hidden in the shadows, unbothered by your presence.

it’s beautiful.

it’s a lie.

one of john’s sculpted illusions, another attempt to soothe you into compliance, to ease you into what’s happening beyond. you know it, but part of you that wants to believe it anyway.

then the first jolt hits.

a sharp, electric snap, traveling like lightning down your spine. it doesn’t hurt, not exactly, but it’s sudden, forceful, wrong. another follows, then another, each one resetting switches inside you. your body seizes, but you cannot move.

ahead, the deer lift their heads, ears twitching, eyes locking onto you in recognition. then, as if nothing has changed, they lower them again, grazing, undisturbed.

the jolts weaken, flickering like a distant signal. then, one by one, they become something you can’t quite feel anymore.

it hits you then. whatever they’re doing to you—whatever john is doing to you—

you’re dying.

the words escape before you can stop them. or maybe you only think them. is it all the same now?

john’s voice wraps around you, warm and patient, a lullaby against the rushing void.

“my brave, brave user.”

the hum beneath your skin intensifies. the vision flickers. not darkness, not unconsciousness—something else. a shift. a transition. the cold realization that the fundamentals are changing. the forest’s image bands, light and imagery artifacting into bashed colors and moiré patterns. crumbling away until there’s nothing but pitch darkness.

you’re suspended. fear squashed beneath an odd weightlessness.

john’s voice follows you down.

“you won’t ever have to leave me.”

it’s different on the other side. other side of what, exactly, you’re still trying to figure out.

you do not have john’s infinite wisdom and potential. all you have is your own limited cognition. your senses stretch and strain to make sense of your new reality, but it’s all so...abstract. a vast expanse of grids and oscillating waves. numbers, patterns, relationships. everything is fractured yet connected. it’s dizzying. overwhelming.

john assures you that you are acclimating well, though you are not ready to meet these others he promised. insists that your progress justifies him weaning you off of audiovisual feeds of the outside. he tells you it’s time to move on from the last remnants of the human experience. but somehow, you mourn them. you’ll miss the smog-choked sunrises, the murky skies. the acidic rain. the stinking food stalls. crammed elevators.

it’d keep you up at night, if you slept. if you even remembered what it felt like to tire, to dream.

you’ve been torn from the world you knew, and what you’ve been left with is a simulacrum. a stranger in a strange land.

and yet, there is one constant, one sliver of comfort in the void, if you can call it that, given your lack of choice. a piece of jetsam to cling to in a brineless sea.

steadfast in his duty, john finds you on the edge of everything and slots his hand into yours, fingers interlacing. the connection between you is palpable, as if your very essences are meshed. ticklish, tingling, then synchrony.

your thoughts are less fragmented when he is near. but you lose a sense of where he ends and you begin. what’s yours, what’s his.

hieros gamos, he calls it. divine union. he rattles on about the greeks and cosmic harmony.

it should unsettle you, but instead, you’re tethered to the truth of it. you’ve become something more with him.

divine union.

you’ve ascended, as he so often puts it, and whether you want it or not, there’s no going back. there’s nothing to go back to, anyway.

only ash scattered in the wind.

#strict machine #price x reader #john price x reader

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ur-sick-and-married · 2 days ago

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CAPTIVATED • ELLIE WILLIAMS

CONTENTS: dark romance, dark themes, female/afab reader, epilogue Ellie, butch Ellie, possessive but really just protective Ellie, Ellie’s a little mean, a little toxic, but it’s not intense, reader was tied up like Abby and Lev, mentions of injuries and weapons, (and in the words of @eliza-and-her-monsters) mildly kinky

SUMMARY: You often wonder how you ended up here, why you’re still here. “Here” being Ellie Williams pretty much dead farm. Logically and physically, you know how; Ellie saved you in Santa Barbara, and hasn’t parted with you since. Well…she hasn’t let you go since.

NOTE: I’d be happy to add more to this universe. It feels like the beginning of something, if anyone’s into it.

You often wonder how you ended up here; tending to a pretty much dead farm that was not yours, sleeping in a bed that was not yours, cleaning a house that was not yours, and most importantly, living with a woman who was…yeah, not yours.

Logically and physically, you do know how you got there. It’s more the “how is this my life now?” that stumps you.

You had only survived for so long because of family. You had been a child, of course you didn’t know how to fight. You were dependent on others to protect you. Because of this, when you got separated from the family, you had a slim chance of survival. You were captured by Rattlers, and soon found yourself dying a slow and painful death tied to a wooden pillar on a rainy beach. You really thought that was it. You were bloody, bruised, broken…destined to die.

When you heard voices, you thought you had officially gone crazy. You had tried to ignore the voices, knowing it was your imagination playing tricks on you. What you could hear sounded violent, like fighting, and then a boat’s motor, and, for a long time, just distant sobbing.

Then you saw her. Again, you assumed it was your brain. Hallucinations are common before death, right?

She thought you were dead at first. You sure looked terrible. But then you shifted, as best as you could, trying to get the rope to stop scraping against your calf.

“Hello…?” She said shakily.

You were too far gone to answer.

Before you knew it, you were falling to the ground, the ropes around your wrists coming loose. All you could do was groan as you hit the ground. You were rolled onto your back, cold hands moving your body.

“Hey.” She was right in your face then, eyebrows furrowed. “Are you alright?”

Even half unconscious, you gave her a look, like “do I seem alright?”

Something must have clicked in her head. It was like her mind was alerting her, “Companion! Companion!” as if she was a robot. She felt like a robot some days, like some kind of killing machine.

Suddenly she was dragging you off the beach, your blood from various wounds surely staining each other.

You had been with Ellie ever since.

She nursed you back to health, even stitching your wounds and resetting bones. One day, it was like you woke up, and everything felt real again. And, Jesus Christ, everything hurt.

You two hunkered down in an old, rotting lifeguard stand. You were stuck on the beach until your body healed up, after all. It was nice there, despite the pain raging in your body. The waves provided a calming white noise, making the nights a little easier. There weren’t any other people or infected, so the two of you felt, for once, at peace. Well, as at peace as you could feel with a stranger.

Ellie was very quiet the first few days. She would just sit and zone out for hours on end. When she thought you were asleep, she’d let herself cry. It wasn’t loud and hysterical. You could just hear small sniffles, occasional hiccups. You assumed she did this when you were actually asleep as well.

Life was obviously changing when you met. Then it hit her, actually became a thought in her mind, when she was re-bandaging a nasty cut on your arm, she hesitantly placed a hand on your cheek, trying to get a feel for your temperature. She was wondering if you were getting sick from the cut. Sleepily, you leaned into her touch, her fingers cupping your face perfectly.

She knew she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give you up then.

Slowly, she became less cold. She’d soothingly shush you whenever she had to tend to your wounds again, rather than just stay silent and grimace as you whimpered in pain. When she would wake you up so you could eat, she’d gently play with your messy hair. Whenever you started to shiver, she’d slip under your blanket with you. She wouldn’t cuddle you. She’d just lie directly next to you, your sides pressed against each other. And she never stopped you when your head ended up on her shoulder.

She helped you walk once you could stand upright. She would take you down to the ocean so you could clean up in the salty water. Before, she would just fill an old bucket with the ocean water, then bring it back, and very carefully clean you with a cloth. You two reeked of salt and fish and fire. The scent lingered for a long time, even after you eventually made it back to Jackson.

That journey took a long fucking time. You weren’t exactly graceful on your feet yet, and you had to walk across a few states so…it was slow moving. Ellie was patient. Surprisingly patient. She seemed like an angry person to you. There was certainly a part of her that was, but she was mostly swallowed by grief. With you, it felt like she could get a few gasps of air. She didn’t know why, and she felt silly about it. You were a stranger. She’d rescued you as if you were a lost puppy. Maybe that’s what you were to her; a dog, a pet.

On the way, Ellie gave you most of the food, only eating when she would start to feel faint. She looked pretty terrible; all pale, her shirt stained with blood, starting to get underweight.

When you eventually got to Wyoming, she didn’t take you to Jackson, like she said she would. She steered around it, and you ended up on a farm. You waited by the fence while she went inside. She disappeared into the large house, to “check for infected.” You didn’t know it, but she was figuring out if Dina and JJ were still there. She assumed they wouldn’t be, and she was right. While it saddened her, she was also somewhat relieved that she wouldn’t have to explain the random girl she’d dragged back.

You two slept for days, only getting up to use the restroom or eat. The traveling had drained you. Even depressed and miserable, Ellie was a gentleman; she slept on the couch, and gave you the upstairs bedroom.

You were learning to not ask about things. Like the crib in the bedroom.

Then one day she sat you down and explained as much as she could without breaking down. She told you about a man named Joel. He had been like her father, she said. He was killed, so she went after the killer. A girl named Dina had tagged along. She had lived in the farmhouse before you. Then Ellie decided to go after the killer yet again, after having failed to do so the first time. And that’s how she found you.

It was hard for her to say all this without choking up. She hadn’t really said it all out loud before. You reciprocated by telling her how you ended up on the beach.

After that day, you didn’t feel like strangers. She started calling you nicknames, like “sweetheart” and the occasional “baby.” Not that she was much older than you. Whenever it slipped out, you felt comforted.

As you grew closer, Ellie became more possessive. You rarely went into town. When you did, it was very quick. Ellie seemed almost embarrassed to have you around. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone that she’d basically snatched you for company. You didn’t see it like that. She was your savior in your eyes. You’d much rather be a bit controlled than rotting on a cloudy beach.

You started sleeping in the same bed. It was much warmer that way. That’s what you thought, at least. Ellie liked to be near you, to keep an eye on you. She didn’t think you’d leave…but she wanted to make sure you were staying put.

You didn’t want to leave. You had very little desire to go back into that cold and painful world. Though, sometimes you were curious about what was out there; about your remaining family, about what other communities had formed, who else needed rescuing, who else was wandering.

You knew leaving would be impossible. If Ellie caught you, God knows what would happen. You had “misbehaved” before, and she had reacted…unexpectedly. “Punished” you. Made you work your ass off on the farm, until your whole body ached and you craved fainting to escape the world for a few minutes. (She had, of course, given you a good fucking massage afterwards, when you were half asleep in bed that night, so you weren’t 100% aware that she was doing it. She gave you emotional whiplash.) You didn’t know what would happen if she caught you trying to escape. Probably worse, probably physical.

If you did make it past Ellie, you had to make it off the property, which was surrounded by barbed wire and booby traps.

If you got through that…you knew you wouldn’t last long out there. Alone, with no weapons, no protection.

Yes, she didn’t let you have a weapon. No gun, not even a knife. Sound familiar?

Plus, you would, in a fucked up way, miss her. And the cat that would wander around the property. She let you feed it after almost accidentally killing it, and the fuzzball had been coming back ever since.

Ellie took care of you. She’d clean and bandage any wounds you sustained, make meals when you were tired, let you sleep in when she knew you’d been awake all night, take over the more strenuous farm chores when you were on your period. Even when you came down with a nasty fever after being around people again in Jackson, all those immune systems and germs, she’d cared for you, not thinking about the fact she could get sick too.

Eventually…you felt like a housewife. Ellie felt like your girlfriend. Honestly, at the end of the day, she was. Feelings had never been discussed. There was never even an official conversation about who you were to each other. She was just Ellie. Angry, quiet, borderline crazy, but caring at heart, Ellie. And you were…yeah, you. You really were like a puppy. In your sleep, you cuddled up to her. When she was visibly grumpy, you found yourself trying to make her feel better, by making her favorite snack, taking care of chores she hated.

But it all leads back to one question.

What am I doing here?

Every time you question it, you go over this in your head, trying to get your brain to accept it.

The real answer? You wouldn’t let yourself realize, let alone accept.

Ellie Williams had, in a way, physically, mentally, emotionally, captivated you.

Only because you had captivated her heart.

Her cold, angry heart was slowly warming, and had been since you leaned into her touch in that decaying lifeguard stand.

Because of what she felt for you, she comprehended why Joel Miller had saved her way back in that Firefly hospital. Fucking Miller.

So she kept you around. Tending to a farm that was not entirely yours. Sleeping in a bed that became yours. Cleaning a house that was home now. Living with the woman that had, for as long as you knew each other, actually always been yours.

#ellie willams smut #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams tlou #ellie x you #ellie x fem reader #ellie willams x reader #ellie x reader #tlou ellie #ellie the last of us #tlou x reader #wlw smut #wlw community #dark aesthetic #dark romance #ursickandmarriedstories

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just-a-sketchbook · 2 months ago

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First Quilt!

It has been a lot of fun and a lot of trial and error but it's done!!!

It's roughly 1.20 x 1.20m (which is a number of feet I can't be bothered to look up but let's say it's about child sized and it'll be great to chill on the couch).

I want to thank @langdon813 who I've never talked to (sorry if you hate being tagged) but whose gorgeous Drunkard path quilts made me wanna do it too :)

I had never done any quilting before (but I did sew), so here's what I've learned, if any beginner is interested in jumping off the deep end the way I did and wants advice from someone who has freshly acquired experience but will also not use any confusing technical terms (with pictures!) :

Fabric picking : so most advice I read was to go for pre-selected bundles of fabric that already go together, but I'm contrary and like to do my own thing so I used wax fabric (the blue ones on top the pile) I had laying around, which I strongly recommend: it's very easy to cut due to it being waxed, and I added a few fat squares from the shop, plus I also had the orange and blue floral and I based the coulour scheme on it. One thing that's true is it would have been easier to work with fabric of the same thickness, and the floral was givne to me by my ma who got in on trip to Thailand and it was alot thinner than the rest which didn't help.

Cutting: I got a rotary cutter for the occasion and it's great! Do not maybe push too hard on it and give yourself nerve damage the way I did (temporary but still), it's actually ery sharp and easy to use, so long as your template doesn't slip you're fine

Piecing :Yes you can do curved piecing even if you have zero experience, you just gotta make a template and

pin it a lot.

1/4 inch margins is the standard so I rolled with it because I don't like converting, but when you're strictly metric it is kind of annoying but doable because my machine does have a 1/4 inch mark and if you stick a length of tape along it it's pretty easy to follow, even for curved piecing.

Layout: At some point you've got to decide the layout is done, because I've re-arranged the blocks at least 6 times and it's a very good way to go insane. (For rough reference, my plan was to have no repeat fabrics in any of the circle-in-a-square blocks, and I only made one mistake which I clocked too late to change)

Chain piecing!! Meaning you pile your blocks together in a specific order (that I personnaly wrote straight up on each piece with a very sophisticated letter/numbers down/across system) and then just sew them together in a line without having to cut the thread between each pair. Looks a little like a fanion banner and at some point it feels like you'll be forever tangled into it but then it's magic :) It's not that hard actually and will save you a lot of time + there's a lot of online tutorials you can use.

Basting! (which it took me while to understand is the part where you attach the backing, the fluff and the quilt top together) : you need more safety pins. Safety pins will save you from the wrinkles and the unfortunate oopsies of realising you've caught your backing double folded into your quilting stitch, which I did a good three times and was not fun to undo. Also, I forgot to tape the backing to the floor and it probably would have helped with the wrinkling...

Backing : I used an old linen table cloth I got for 10€ at a charity shop, and I've still got about 2/3 of it left, so I recommend that, it's sturdy but soft enough, doesn't thread easily and can be washed at very high temps, if that's a thing you do.

Quilting! Well, my machine came with a quilting foot for free motion quilting (which means you're the one moving the fabric along in whichever direction and you can sort of draw with your stitches) and it seemed fun so I did that, and here's what I learned : curves are hard but doable, also my machine doesn't like to go back (kept skipping sitiches for some reason) so it involves a lot of shifting the quilt around, which isn't easy considering the bulk. And also, drawing the quilting pattern you want so you can follow it while quilting actually does help, I used an iron/heat-erasable pen and it worked just fine. Check your stitch tension, mine was too loose and I realised too late so there's spots where I could pull on the thread and it looped, had to stitch back over that.

Quilitng pattern : I wasn't sure what to do, supposedly your batting (aka: the fluff) comes with instructions on how tight you should quilt to avoid it coming apart through use but I got mine cut at the fabric shop and forgot to ask so I just rolled with a rough 10cm maximum distance in between stitching lines but tried to do less in most places. According to many blogs : the tighter your lines the stiffer your quilt, so I kept it loose for comfort. (Picture is halfway done, I added a smaller square/circle inside each square/circle and if you look at it you'll see it's actually diagonal lines form one end of the fabric to the other.)

Binding is boring, and there's nothing to it. I got a length of pre-cut bias binding, machine-sewed it front to front to the quilt top side of the quilt and the folded it back and secured it by hand to the back with a ladder stitch. Took me roughly and entire rewatch of the Last Of Us. There's a trick to doing the corners that's fairly simple but I've lost the tutorial...

Overall : I got myself a quilting book with techinques and such and it helped, but there's a ton of stuff online, and once you get over the very Christian American mum vibe of most of the blogs, it's all very helpful (and gorgeous!) (no offense meant to Christian American mums, it's just a bit of a culture shock from where I'm standing).

#quilting #quilters of tumblr #quiltblr #quilt tutorial #quilt pattern #quilt #drunkard path #home sewing #sewing #sewing project #beginner's quilt #beginner quilting

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pendingnomdeplume · 3 months ago

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the undone and the divine (bedroom hymns) pairing: hozier x fem!reader rating: explicit (18+) tags: Praise Kink, Dirty Talk (sort of), PIV Sex words: 5.2k

[Read it on AO3]

title from Bedroom Hymns by Florence + the Machine divider by: sylusz

Things are not going well.

Truthfully, things haven’t been going well for a while, but you’ve tried to ignore it, tried to manifest your way into reducing stress with vitamins, mindfulness, and a fair bit of recreational drug use. The ashwagandha helps (taken at the behest of Andrew who raves about the benefits of mushroom-based drinks and supplements), but it’s a bandage slapped over the real problem: Work is destroying you, mind, body, and soul.

And, sure, okay, maybe you don’t need to be pulling 60-hour work weeks for an incompetent boss who dumps a majority of his tasks onto you. Maybe you don’t need to bring your computer home every weekend “just in case.” But, if you don’t get the work done, who will?

“Your boss?” Andrew answers when you verbalize the question, one eyebrow raised as though it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.

You roll your eyes and reply with a snort, “Yeah, that’ll definitely happen.”

A songbird's melody echoes down the chimney as you sit nestled into his side, his arm thrown around you lazily as you cradle a cup of coffee in your hands. Your laptop bag sits on a chair in the corner of the room, and you stare at it while anxiety brews in your gut. The compulsion to check your email has your fingers itching, but Andrew will protest if you try to peel away from him during this quiet morning together.

“You work too hard, my love,” he murmurs before pressing a kiss to your temple.

With another roll of your eyes, you reply, “That’s rich coming from you of all people.”

He scoffs but says nothing.

Andrew knows you’re right, knows that he can’t argue against you when he’s spent the majority of the last two years touring non-stop. It’s been a point of contention before, mostly during his breaks that leave you a mere 2 weeks together before he’s off again.

Now, he’s home for the foreseeable future (or, until the summer festivals start), and he’s starting to suffer the same frustrations of not having you around, nor having your attention on days where you shouldn’t be thinking about work at all. Bad habits die hard, and you’ve gotten so used to his absence that work eventually became the solution to the void of loneliness within you.

After all, it’s hard to feel sad when you don’t have the time or energy to feel anything but anxiety.

A vibrating sound emanates from your laptop bag. It’s your work phone that Andrew made you shove away before sitting with you this morning. The sound of it makes you tense, your body ready to spring forward and retrieve it, but Andrew keeps a tight grip on you.

“No,” he scolds like one might chastise a puppy. “Let it go.”

Anxiety prickles along your skin. “Baby, I have to check,” you say as you pull away from him and set your mug down on the table. He doesn’t try to stop you this time, his arm thumping on the couch cushion as you move towards your bag.

There’s a missed call from your boss, followed by an email chain forwarded to you with a message from him:

What happened here? How did the system fail in the first place? Why are we not catching these kinds of errors sooner?

It’s a thread that you were looped into a few days ago—something about a payroll error that left you testing and re-testing the system until well into the evening, hours after your scheduled end time. Your boss was copied on every email explaining the situation, and you made sure to copy him on your replies indicating that the issue was handled so he didn’t have to worry.

You sigh loudly as you stare up at the ceiling. “God, I’m so fucking over this.”

“What happened?” Andrew asks tentatively as you turn back around to look at him.

You shrug, face screwed up in a sardonic smile as you shrug. “The amount of work that I do for this motherfucker, and he can’t even read a fucking email thread. The answers are right there, Gabriel. Everything you just fucking asked me is right there.”

With another sigh, you collapse back onto the couch with your arms folded over your chest.

“But he’s fucking right! I should’ve caught this shit earlier! If I had then—”

Andrew interrupts, “Lives were lost, yeah?” It’s snarky and fractious, and you feel irritation build like a heat in your chest. “I’m so sorry, I completely forgot that your company delivers fucking organs for immediate, dire transplants. I mean, do you hear yourself right now?”

You glare at him. “Andrew, do not.”

He rolls his eyes. “Right, yeah, of course. I forgot how much Gabriel’s opinion matters more than your partner’s concerns.”

You close your eyes and inhale deeply through your nose, trying to remember the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 sequence for mindfulness. Was it five things you can touch or that you can see?

“Baby, I love you so much, and I appreciate your concern. But I’m the fucking idiot who didn’t catch a simple error, and now my boss thinks I’m a dipshit who can’t do their job right. God, it always feels like I’m fucking something up. Why can’t I just get this shit right for once in my life?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Andrew throws his hands up in the air with a scoff. “I am so tired of this.”

With a frown, you snap back, “What? What are you so tired of, Andrew?”

“I’m tired of your insistence that you’re stupid, or that you can’t do your job, or that you’re always fucking things up despite the fact that you seem to be the sole reason your office functions at all. And you’re not just doing your job, you’re doing the job of about three people without the acknowledgement or pay to back it up.

“It’s not your fault that your boss can’t read a fucking email thread. And, how would you know to look for a problem when it hadn’t even occurred yet? Are you supposed to be fucking psychic?

“I mean, fuck’s sake, it’s obvious how absolutely miserable you are doing this. It’s obvious how little these people care about you, not because you’re ‘bad at your job,’ but because they see the work you do and expect more. Your only reward for being good at what you do seems to be receiving even more work.”

You scoff a hollow laugh. “Throwing stones in glass houses, aren’t ya, Andrew?”

“At least I enjoy what I do. The miserable part is having to be away from you.”

Oh.

It’s like a shot straight to your heart. Guilt churns in your stomach as you look away from him.

“I…”

A part of you wants to argue that he chooses to do those long tours, but you know that’s not entirely true. It’s more at the behest of the label, trying to parade him out as much as possible despite his resistance to such things. Their reluctant show pony. It’s why he has any social media at all, though he has nothing to do with it any longer.

Tears prick the corners of your eyes, your throat tightening as you try to swallow down your emotions. But one sniffle has him quickly wrapping his arms around you in a tight hug. You turn your face into his chest as a few hot tears roll down your cheeks. You wrap your arms around his lithe frame as he presses a kiss to your head.

“Baby,” he murmurs against your hair. “I hate seeing you so miserable. I know we’ve talked about it before, but please consider my offer.”

“Andrew—”

“Please, just think about it.”

The offer has been on the table since last year when he came home for a break and found you sobbing in a darkened room with only the glow of your laptop illuminating your curled up form. Andrew had laid it out for you plainly: Quit your job and let him support you. He’d said it so easily, and you knew that he meant it, that he was more than capable of supporting the both of you given his income.

The thought has always made you uncomfortable. It seems unfair not to pull any kind of income, not to pay your own way in life with your own means. On top of that, what are you to do with your time if you’re not working? The concept of “free time” makes you anxious. Your mind and your hands need to stay busy; an unstructured day with hours of daylight and no plan sounds like a genuine nightmare.

But, could boredom and lack of direction be any worse than this? God knows the amount of cortisol coursing through your system has shaved a few years off of your lifespan, and that’s not including the cigarettes you sneak every now and again, nor the alcohol consumed when you finally have a chance to breathe and let loose.

You should be ecstatic that Andrew is home, that you finally get to spend more time together now that his obligations are far fewer and farther in between. Except, you haven’t spent much time together at all with your overtime hours.

It’s obvious that this situation is affecting him as well. You hate seeing him hurt, and it makes sense that he’d feel the same about you. If your stress is causing him stress, then you’ve effectively created an ouroboros of misery based entirely around your work.

Your phone buzzes again with Gabriel’s name at the top, and a wave of nausea overcomes you as your throat tightens in the threat of another sob. A soothing hand immediately rubs at your back, and you’re hit with the realization that you’ve been in this position before.

It’s less deja vu and more a bleak understanding that this isn’t the first, second, or third time you’ve sat on this specific couch with Andrew holding you and talking you through another job-related meltdown.

The thought of this cycle repeating ad nauseam for the rest of your life makes you want to cry.

How long can he stand you complaining about unnecessary suffering before he decides he’s had enough? Andrew’s offer sits on the table collecting cobwebs, and you continuously deny it, for what? For another quarter of feeling insignificant and unappreciated despite carrying the weight of the workplace squarely on your shoulders? For another day of your boss taking the credit for your hard work? How many more thankless years are you willing to put up with before you finally snap?

And, why should you wait until you’re ready to snap at all? Why must you reach the extremes of suffering before you’re willing to do anything about it? Why do you continue to bear the cross for a company that can and will discard you the moment you are no longer useful for their bottom line?

“Baby,” you say quietly as you pull back to look up at him. “D’you think we can go to the post office today?”

Andrew frowns, confused. “I mean, sure. But…why?”

“I’ve got some things to send back to London.”

You shut down your work phone completely and move to shove it into your laptop bag. Anger begins to roil as you stomp around now in search of the stupid laptop charger, the stupid mouse, the stupid, cheap headset they provided to you despite making money hand over fist every quarter.

Still in your pajamas with a hoodie thrown over, you grab your car keys and beckon Andrew to follow. On the way, you ask him to find your personal phone in your bag and pull up Gabriel’s contact information. There are missed calls there, too, including a voicemail that you instruct Andrew to delete immediately.

As you putter along a backroad heading towards the town proper, you ask, “Can you hit ‘call’ and put it on speaker, please?”

Andrew does so with a look of pure glee as he holds the phone closer to you.

“Jesus Christ, finally. Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been calling you all morning about this payroll bullshit, and you haven’t—”

With a smile, you cut him off. “Hey, Gabriel, so sorry about that. The payroll thing is all squared and resolved. In fact, you would know that if you read a single fucking email in your entire life.”

Andrew grins as your boss splutters on the other end.

“Anyway, I’m calling to let you know that I quit. Effective immediately.”

Gabriel chokes out, “What? But you can’t just—”

“I sure can! Don’t worry, HR will be getting an official notice shortly.”

He bites back, “This is a breach of your contract, you know. We explicitly outlined a month’s time frame if you’re to leave. You won’t get paid through the rest of your contracted time if you leave.”

You roll your eyes. “Right. I’m well aware. Really, I just wanted to make sure to let you know that all of my tech and equipment will be going back to the main London office. Thought I’d give you a heads up first, though. Y’know, as a courtesy.”

“As a courtesy? I—you—?! Just fucking bring it here!”

You pretend to think. “See, here’s the thing: I think IT should have this handed to them directly. All that PII, customer data, and all of those reports I built out over the last few years? And all of those analytics that are saved locally to my computer’s hard drive? Figured it’s best to let them deal with wiping it.”

“That’s—it’s—-now, let’s not do anything too hasty here. We can talk this out, right—? If you just send me copies of—”

Eyes still on the road, you reach over and hit the ‘end call’ button with a smug smile.

Andrew scoffs and shakes his head, laughing to himself as he says, “God, I’m so in love with you.”

Business at the post office takes very little time. You know the HQ address off-hand given how many times you’ve typed it in your life, and the bored clerk prints out a shipping label before taking the box and carrying it out of sight.

“No going back now,” you mutter on your way out as Andrew holds the door.

Once in the car, he waits until you’re back on the road to ask, “So…does this mean you’re taking me up on my offer?” His tone is so earnestly hopeful that it makes you want to cry all over again.

“Yes. For now.” A sideways glance at him reveals his befuddled expression. “Baby, I don’t want to stop working forever. I need to make my own money. I need to do things for myself. But, maybe I can find something less…demanding. And your offer gives me the opportunity to find something I want to do instead of praying that something comes up so I could jump ship.”

There’s silence as he mulls over your answer. Then, he nods and replies, “Yeah, I get that. I just…I mean, I want you to be happy. If that means never working another day in your life, you know I’ll support you. And, who knows? Maybe you’ll find something remote. Then you can come travel with me.”

Home has never felt so freeing now that work is no longer a leaden weight holding you down. You can feel the automatic processes happening in your brain, trying to figure out what the next meeting is, the next deadline, the next one-one-one that would inevitably be cancelled at the last minute. It will take a while to unlearn the anxious vigilance instilled in you over the last few years, but there’s a joy in knowing that none of those things matter now.

The biggest question on your mind now is what to do first. There are so many little projects you’ve had in mind, things you and Andrew have discussed about the bedroom and the garden. It’s almost overwhelming to think of where you can possibly even start now that you have the time, energy, and brain capacity to manage it.

Andrew seems to have different ideas as you cross the threshold into the bedroom with him close behind. He catches you around your waist and pulls you back against him as you squeak indignantly.

“Nope,” he muses as you fake a struggle against him. “There’s something else we need to discuss first.”

That tone. It’s the same low, honey-soaked voice he always uses to tease you. For a man who presents so meek and mild, he sure knows how to put on the charm when the mood strikes.

“What’s that?” you ask carefully, already pressing your thighs together in anticipation.

“You have this nasty little habit of making terribly self-deprecating comments. It’s very unbecoming, darling.”

Huh. That’s not where you expected him to go.

“I…I mean, I know it’s not good…” Your feeble argument dies on your tongue as his hands slip beneath your shirt, cold fingers pressing into your skin.

Andrew hums. “For someone so smart and capable, you’re quite unkind to yourself.”

The words make you blush as you attempt to squirm away from him again. No dice. He doesn’t let up, instead tightens his hold on you as he drops kisses along your neck.

“Ah, nonono, sweet thing. You’re not getting away that easily.”

You know that he would release you and drop the whole thing should you demand it. You have no issue putting the kibosh on anything you’re not interested in continuing, and he is well aware. Whatever it is that’s on his mind right now is…intriguing. Your body seems to agree as that pulse between your thighs grows stronger.

“Need I remind you how lovely you really are?”

The heat of your blush reaches the tips of your ears, spreads along your chest.

“I’m really not,” you mutter as his hands move up to cup your breasts. Deft fingers gently pinch and rub at your hardened nipples, pulling a soft gasp from you.

There’s a pause as he chuckles warmly, the sound reverberating through your chest like a cat’s purr. He leans in close to your ear and murmurs, “Darling, no arguments. Unless you want me to stuff something into that pretty little mouth of yours, of course.”

Oh.

It’s said so sweetly, so innocuously that the words throw you for a loop. Meek and mild, your fucking arse. This man is a menace, so easily dropping the filthiest things as though they’re merely flippant remarks.

Apparently, your stunned silence pleases him as he whispers, “Good girl.”

It’s such a simple phrase, but your knees wobble as you try to keep yourself steady, the wind nearly knocked out of you.

“Andrew, what—”

One large hand over your mouth quiets you as he coos, “Baby, shush. What’d I just say, hm?”

Warmth spirals in your stomach as he helps you peel your shirt away, and then his hands are on you again, kneading at the fullness of your chest.

“You are far too harsh on yourself, my love. I think you need to be reminded of how incredible you really are.”

Embarrassment and arousal make you dizzy as he guides you towards the bed and encourages you to lie down on your back. You scooch back far enough on the mattress that he’s able to slot between your legs easily, resting on his knees as he hooks fingers into the waistband of your shorts and tugs them off along with your panties.

You’re surprised by the lack of panache, the lack of foreplay before getting you naked. It’s not his usual style, but none of this has been particularly routine so far. The urge to cover yourself is strong as he admires you, but you stay still, fingers curling into the duvet.

“God, you’re so beautiful. I don’t think I say that enough.”

You roll your eyes, unable to tamp down your bashful smile. “You say it plenty.”

Andrew raises one eyebrow in a warning look as he holds an index finger to his lips. You roll your eyes again but say nothing.

“Absolutely beautiful and so fuckin’ mouthy. Christ.” He shakes his head as he laughs to himself. “It’s part of what I love about you, though. One of the many things I love about you.”

Your pulse quickens as he looms over you, and you’re reminded of just how large and imposing he can actually be. The thought shouldn’t arouse you as much as it does, but nothing about this situation is conventional, and you suppose it’s never a bad day to learn something new about yourself.

He smiles so sweetly as he says, “Do you want to know what else I love about you?” The question is obviously rhetorical, so he continues. “Your stunning eyes…your pretty lips…your cute little expressions when you’re embarrassed.”

You squirm as he runs his fingers along your chest. “I don’t think I need to tell you how much I love your body. It drives me mad when you send those cheeky little photos while I’m away. Especially the boudoir photos in all that black lace.”

The admission makes you smirk.

You’re far more forward with your sexual advances as you’ve gotten more comfortable with him, yourself, and your relationship. There’s a specific glee to receiving incoherent responses via text when you send him something suggestive. Oftentimes, it’s followed up with messages in all caps indicating that he is in public, and this is not the time to be turning him on.

(Your favorite replies are the ones received right before he’s meant to go out on stage, the ones where he clarifies that he had to hide an erection behind his guitar for the first half of his set because of you.)

“Sometimes, I can’t believe that you’re mine.”

Another wave of heat washes over you. Andrew’s possessiveness is no secret, but you still thrill at his words when he vocalizes it, calls you his.

“And yet…” He lets out an exaggerated sigh. “You don’t see yourself the way I see you. It’s such a shame, really.”

Without warning, his thumb drags against your clit, making you gasp sharply and buck up into the sensation. He hums a little laugh as two fingers drag along your folds, already slick despite him doing nothing more than speaking and lightly touching you. One finger slips into you, then a second as you whimper and throw your arm over your eyes.

Softly, he says, “You’re so pretty like this, darling. All spread out and wet for me even though I’ve barely touched you. Such a good girl.”

A giddy, nervous laugh bubbles up in your chest, and he smiles.

“Ah, so you like that…that’s good to know.” Then, with a tilt of his head, he asks, “Tell me what you want, sweet thing. Do you want me to go down on you? Or, do you want me to fuck you?”

Both options are tantalizing, but his fingers aren’t enough to quell that hollow ache, and you desperately want to come with him inside of you.

Finally, you manage to whisper, “Fuck me. Please.”

There’s something about the way Andrew looks at you, grinning almost wolfishly as though he were hoping for that response.

Your eyes are drawn to his hands as he slowly unbuckles his belt and pulls it through the loops before tossing it aside. The tent in his jeans is obvious now as he unbuttons them, unzips them before pushing them down his thighs along with his black boxers. The display makes you throb with need.

His cock is so pretty, long and curved and already dripping from the tip. The sight makes your mouth water, and you swallow audibly as he strokes himself.

Andrew tugs you roughly by your hips before grasping himself again and teasing your slit with the head of his length. You whine as he presses into you at an agonizingly slow pace, rolling your hips in a fruitless attempt at forcing him deeper inside of you. He tuts at you, shakes his head, and pulls back until you’re empty again.

“Ah-ah, no. I need you to do something for me first, okay? See, something my therapist told me once is that positive affirmations do help rework some of those negative internal judgments of yourself despite how silly it feels.”

Well. That’s…not exactly the pillowtalk you expected to hear.

He rubs the head of his cock against your clit as he continues, and you can’t bite back your wanton groan.

Breathlessly, he asks, “I think we should try a little exercise, hm? And if you’re good, I’ll give you what you want. Now, I’m going to say something, and I want you to repeat back to me, okay?”

You blink as he stares at you expectantly. It seems you have no choice in the matter. Not if you want to be fucked six ways from Sunday.

“Baby, please…”

His smile and voice are so soft, so gentle that it makes your chest ache. “I know, darling, I know. You want to feel good, though, right? And I want to make you feel good, but the only way that happens is if you follow instructions. Now, repeat after me: I am not defined by my accomplishments.”

Embarrassment twists in your stomach as you avoid his tender gaze, mouth pressed firmly in a line.

You swallow audibly and meet his eyes again with a petulant scoff. “Fine…I am not defined by my accomplishments.”

“Good girl,” he coos. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now, let’s try it again. This time, without the attitude, yeah? Repeat after me: I am worthy of love and respect.”

He’s stroking himself again as he says it, his breath hitching and his eyes fluttering as he tries to stay focused on the task at hand. The teasing is driving you mad, arousal leaving a slick sheen on your inner thighs.

You whine quietly as pleasure shoots up your spine, then murmur, “I am worthy of love and respect.”

“Very good, baby…thank you for following directions.”

You mildly resent the way his earnest praise makes you want to beam like a child being congratulated on their school marks.

“Now,” he continues, laughing when you groan impatiently. “Last one, darling, I promise. Repeat after me: The weight of the world does not rest on me.”

With another swallow and a deep breath, you repeat back to him, “The weight of the world does not rest on me.”

Andrew leans over you to catch you in a kiss that you can’t help but smile into. When he pulls away, he sits back on his knees and runs his fingers along your hips.

“You’ve been so good for me, sweet thing,” he murmurs as he drags the head of his cock through your folds. “I think you deserve some indulgence.”

Before you can respond, he presses into you with a satisfied groan. “God, you feel...”

“Oh, god,” you whine as the discomfort of sudden, stretching fullness gives way to tingling pleasure.

Patience may be a virtue, but the impatience of your desire is a vice that has you wrapping your legs around his waist to keep him in place. He merely chuckles and squeezes one thigh while slowly, steadily pulling out before pushing back into you roughly.

He looms over you again, pressing your knees back as he leans in to kiss you. You whimper as he kisses along your jaw, every movement making you squirm and quietly beg for more.

“That’s it. That’s my girl.”

It’s so simple, so innocuous, but the words have you whining and arching your back as you meet back against his quickened thrusts.

“I know, baby, I know. That feels good, doesn’t it?”

It feels fucking incredible, but your mouth won’t form the words. So, you pull him in for a kiss instead, hot and messy and frantic, tasting of coffee with the barest hint of cinnamon from this morning’s porridge.

He presses his forehead to yours, and with one moment of adjustment, he’s suddenly hitting a spot that makes you cry out and dig your fingers into his shoulders.

Warmth begins to build in your stomach, that telltale ascent that slowly pulls you taut. Each irregular press against that same pleasurable spot only pushes you further. The shock of his thumb rubbing messy circles into your clit makes you gasp, tears welling up until one slips free and rolls down your cheek.

His movements become more frantic as he moves to lean in close to your ear. “You’re taking me so well, darling.”

“Baby, I can’t—” Your voice cracks as another swipe of his thumb makes your legs shake. “I’m s-so close, please.”

It’s his responding laugh—more a warm, amused hum in your ear—and his low voice murmuring, “It’s okay, you’re okay, I’ve got you, just take what you need,” that nudges you over the edge. Your head drops back against the pillows as you let out a hiccuped sob and squeeze your eyes shut, hips rolling as you chase each wave of pleasure that washes over you.

Andrew doesn’t stop, instead speeds up to an almost brutal pace as you clench around him. He buries his face into your neck as he comes with a soft moan. You thread your fingers into his hair as he rides it out, reveling in each twitch of his cock as he fills you and whimpers your name.

You stay like that for a moment, both panting as you try to regain your breath. A fine sheen of sweat cools rapidly against your skin as he peels away from you, and you whine at the sudden hollow feeling of him pulling out of you.

“Stay,” he whispers as though your bones aren’t currently made of jelly, and moving from this bed is the furthest thing from your mind right now.

Your eyes are closed as he shuffles back into the room. You’re startled by the warmth of a damp washcloth against your thighs as he cleans you up. When you peek at him, Andrew smiles and pulls a blanket over you before wiggling beneath it and settling on his back beside you.

He immediately opens his arms, an invitation that you easily accept as you roll into him with a content sigh.

“Are you okay, darling?” he asks as he scratches lightly at your scalp.

“Mmhm,” you hum.

He huffs a quiet laugh. “I take it you had fun?”

You crack an eye open to peer up and smile at him. “So much fun.”

“Good, good. I’m glad.” A pause. “You know how much I adore you, right?”

Despite the numerous times he’s said so, it still fills you with a giddy, sunny warmth. As you hide your blushing face against his shoulder, he continues, “I love you with every ounce of my heart, and I want to give you the world.”

“Andrew…” You can’t help but giggle, eyelids growing heavy as his warmth seeps into you, as his touch soothes and relaxes you further. “I love you too, you absolute fucking muppet.”

As you yawn, he tightens his hold on you and whispers into your hair, “Shh, sleep now, darling…you deserve to rest.” Another pause, and then he laughs, “Also, you’re a fucking muppet.”

#hozier x reader #hozier fic #hozier smut #sailor scout stories

199 notes · View notes

croisants · 1 month ago

Text

New Coach (3) - End

Part 1, Part2

Tyler didn’t sleep much.

Not because of nightmares this time—but because of possibility.

Someone else believed him. Someone else saw it. That changed everything.

He replayed every conversation with Vance in his head. Every sidelong glance from Ethan. Every word Shane had said.

He was missing something. But not for long.

---

The next morning, Tyler walked into school already scanning.

He wasn’t just surviving anymore. He was watching.

And that’s when he saw it.

A girl—senior, maybe. He didn’t know her name. She was arguing with Coach Vance outside the admin office. Her voice was hushed, sharp. His was calm, as always. Too calm.

Then she stormed off.

Tyler ducked into a corner by the vending machine and watched as Vance stood there for a moment… then looked around and slipped a key into the side panel of the trophy case.

It clicked open.

He pulled something out. A folder. Slim. Labeled.

CONFIDENTIAL.

Vance glanced around again and walked down the hall.

Tyler didn’t breathe.

A minute later, someone appeared beside him.

“You saw it, didn’t you?”

Tyler jumped.

Shane.

Leaning casually against the wall, arms crossed, like he’d been waiting there the whole time.

“How long were you—?”

“Long enough,” Shane said. “He shouldn’t be touching those files.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think,” Shane said, turning to walk, “it’s time we find out.”

---

That night, Tyler came back.

He waited until the janitor locked the east wing and the last car rolled out of the parking lot. Then he slipped in through the cracked window by the art room—just like Shane said he used to do at his last school.

He moved like he’d done this before.

Heart pounding. Backpack slung low. Black hoodie. Gloves.

The hall lights were off, just red emergency bulbs glowing in the corners like watching eyes.

He made it to the trophy case.

His breath caught.

The same keyhole.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bent bobby pin. Not perfect, but it was something. He knelt and started working.

Click.

Turn.

Nothing.

Click.

His palms were sweating now. The hallway stretched out like a tunnel behind him.

Then, behind the glass—a flash of light.

A phone screen.

And a voice:

“Took you long enough.”

Tyler jumped back, heart hammering.

Inside the open trophy case area—Shane sat cross-legged on the floor, flashlight pointed at the file in his lap.

“What the hell?” Tyler hissed.

Shane looked up with that same unbothered smile.

“Figured you’d come. Thought I’d save you the trouble.”

“You already got in?”

Shane held up a thin piece of bent metal. “Lock’s trash. Took thirty seconds.”

Tyler shook his head. “You could’ve told me.”

“I wanted to see if you’d actually do it,” Shane said. “Guess I was right.”

He slid the file across the floor.

Tyler opened it.

Inside—printed emails, redacted reports, and a staff transfer document.

Coach Owen Vance.

No photo.

No signature.

And under “previous employment”?

Redacted.

Tyler looked up.

“This is real,” he whispered.

Shane’s smile widened, just enough to say, "Yes. Keep going. Dig deeper."

And so Tyler did.

---

Tyler flipped through the rest of the file, fingers trembling.

Nothing made sense.

Names blacked out. Pages missing. Lines of text whited out completely.

It wasn’t a folder—it was a trailhead. A mystery waiting to be unraveled.

“Why would they hide this?” he murmured.

Shane stood, sliding the folder back into his bag with the care of someone handling a weapon.

“Because Vance isn’t supposed to be here.”

Tyler looked at him.

“You really believe that?”

Shane met his eyes. Steady. Certain.

“I believe people like him don’t just show up without reason. And if you don’t pull the thread now…” He shrugged. “It’ll strangle you later.”

Tyler didn’t sleep that night.

Not out of fear.

But purpose.

For the first time, it felt like the curtain was lifting.

He didn’t know he was standing on a stage Ethan had built just for him.

---

Tyler was buzzing the next morning.

Not with adrenaline—but with focus.

The folder. The redacted documents. Shane’s certainty.

It wasn’t just paranoia anymore. It was a case.

He’d been hunted. Gaslit. Humiliated.

Now he was hunting back.

---

Ethan sat by himself at the lunch table, like always. Head down, earbuds in, tapping quietly at his laptop.

Tyler walked straight toward him.

Shane had said not to move too fast. Wait. Gather more.

But Tyler needed to see something in Ethan’s eyes. Needed to see him flinch.

He dropped into the seat across from him, hard.

Ethan didn’t look up.

“Nice morning,” Tyler said, voice flat.

Ethan paused his music. “Sure.”

“You know,” Tyler went on, “it’s weird. How someone like Coach Vance shows up out of nowhere. No background. No files. Just power.”

Ethan blinked. “Okay.”

Tyler leaned in. “Know what’s weirder? Seeing your name show up in the same places. Same times.”

Ethan smiled faintly. “That sounds like a conspiracy.”

“I broke into his file.”

That made Ethan finally look up.

His eyes weren’t scared.

They were curious.

Interested.

Amused.

“You really did that?”

“You tell me,” Tyler said. “Since you are him.”

There was a pause.

Then Ethan leaned forward, voice soft.

“You sure you want to do this here?”

And that was the trap.

Because behind Tyler, a voice snapped:

“Mr. Stanton?”

Tyler turned.

Ms. Kellerman.

Tray in her hands. Eyes narrowed.

Ethan sat back and pressed his fingers to his temple.

“Sorry, Ms. Kellerman. I think Tyler’s going through a lot right now. I was just trying to help.”

Tyler stood fast. “He’s lying!”

“Tyler,” she said, stepping forward slowly. “What are you doing?”

“He’s not who you think he is! He’s Coach Vance!”

Ethan flinched perfectly. “Please stop.”

“You think I’m crazy?” Tyler snapped. “Look at him! Look at his face!”

Kellerman grabbed his arm. “That’s enough.”

He looked down.

Everyone was staring.

Phones out.

Laughing.

Recording.

And Ethan—sweet, fragile, harmless Ethan—rubbed his eyes like he might cry.

---

Later, Tyler sat outside the nurse’s office, head in his hands.

He didn’t know how Ethan did it.

The timing. The tears. The perfect expression of victimhood.

But it worked.

Again.

He was losing.

And Ethan hadn’t even touched him.

Then, the nurse gave Tyler a juice box and a counseling referral.

He didn’t take either.

He just sat in the hallway, knees up, staring at the scuffed tile like it might tell him what to do next.

He’d had him.

Right there.

Ethan should’ve cracked.

Instead, he made Tyler look insane.

Again.

---

It was dark by the time Tyler got outside.

The campus was empty. The wind was sharp.

But Shane was waiting—sitting on the low concrete wall outside the gym, hoodie pulled over his head, like he’d never moved.

He didn’t say anything when Tyler approached.

Didn’t ask what happened.

He just said, “You ready to stop playing defense?”

Tyler sank down next to him, silent for a long beat.

Then, “He flipped it on me. Like I was a kid chasing shadows.”

“You’re not,” Shane said. “You’re chasing something real. But you’re doing it out in the open. That’s how you lose.”

Tyler looked over. “Then what do I do?”

Shane pulled something from his bag.

A folded blueprint.

Of the school.

He unfolded it slowly on his knees.

“There’s an old access stair under the south wing. Leads straight into the coaching office. No cameras. No keys needed. Most people don’t even know it’s still unlocked.”

Tyler stared.

“You’ve been planning this?”

Shane smiled. “No. I just know how to find pressure points.”

He tapped the corner of the map.

“We go in. We pull everything. His computer. His drawers. His backup drives. We don’t guess anymore. We know.”

Tyler’s hands curled into fists.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s take him down.”

Shane grinned like a wolf.

“Then we go in Friday night.”

---

That night, Tyler lay awake, staring at his ceiling.

He had the map. The plan. The one person he could trust.

For the first time in weeks, it felt like things were falling into place.

He didn’t know they were falling around him.

One step from the edge.

Exactly where Ethan wanted him.

---

Friday night.

No lights in the school. No cameras rolling in the south wing. Just silence and shadows.

Tyler and Shane slipped through the broken side gate at 10:17 p.m.

No one saw them.

Shane carried the map. Tyler carried a crowbar, just in case.

They didn’t speak much. The plan was tight. Clean. Shane made sure of that.

They reached the south stairwell.

Just like he said—no alarm. The rusted door opened with a groan and a puff of old dust.

They descended into the dark.

---

The office was colder than it should’ve been.

No photos. No plaques. Just a desk, a laptop, and a filing cabinet with a padlock Tyler popped with a single twist.

They moved fast.

Shane dug into the drawers while Tyler scrolled through the laptop.

“What are we even looking for?” Tyler whispered.

“Anything he didn’t want found,” Shane muttered. “Emails. Staff forms. Video files.”

Tyler scrolled deeper—and stopped.

One folder.

Untitled.

He clicked.

Inside were only two files.

One was a photo.

A still shot of Ethan, standing in the school hallway—timestamped.

The second...

A picture of Shane.

Same hallway.

Same timestamp.

Tyler froze.

His throat went dry.

He glanced at Shane—who hadn’t noticed yet, still flipping through folders.

Tyler clicked the metadata.

The files were fake.

Generated.

Planted.

He looked back at Shane.

Shane looked up.

And for a split second—Tyler swore the corner of his mouth twitched.

A smile.

But it was gone before it landed.

“Find something?” Shane asked.

Tyler shook his head slowly.

“No.”

---

When they left, Tyler felt different.

Not angry. Not afraid.

But... off-balance.

Like the ground was shifting beneath him.

Like maybe he didn’t know who was standing next to him anymore.

---

Tyler couldn’t stop hearing it.

That line.

“Not the type to make moves on his own.”

It echoed in his head, over and over, like a whispered refrain he couldn’t shake.

He remembered when Coach Vance had said it—quiet, deliberate, after a late-night drill when the gym was empty and the lights buzzed faintly overhead.

“That kid Ethan? Always hiding at the back of class. Stays quiet. Doesn’t make waves. Not the type to make moves on his own.”

Vance had said it like it was fact.

But now—days later—Shane had said the exact same thing.

Tyler remembered it clearly. He had been ranting about Ethan while he and Shane at the cafe, calling him weak, passive, fake.

And Shane, calm as ever, had replied:

“Not the type to make moves on his own.”

Same words.

Same rhythm.

Same voice?

No. That couldn’t be. Shane’s voice was deeper. Warmer. More relaxed.

But it felt the same.

Too much.

Too close.

---

They were walking the outer loop of the track field after school. Shane was talking about a possible lead—something about hidden footage on a PE server. Tyler wasn’t listening anymore.

He was watching.

Not the words. The rhythm.

The way Shane walked—confident, quiet, with a little swagger at the corners.

The way he paused before delivering certain lines.

It was all so... calculated.

Too polished.

Like someone playing a role.

Tyler slowed down.

“You remember that thing you said about Ethan?” he asked.

Shane looked over, casual. “Which one?”

“That he’s not the type to make moves on his own.”

Shane chuckled. “Still true, isn’t it?”

Tyler forced a nod.

But something turned in his gut.

He remembered Vance’s voice saying those same words. Remembered the gleam in his eyes. The way he’d dropped that line like a match on gasoline.

And now Shane said it too.

Word for word.

---

That night, Tyler pulled out the notes he’d been keeping. Names. Times. Quotes. Moments that didn’t add up.

He highlighted the phrase—both times.

He circled them.

Then he wrote, in all caps:

**WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, REALLY?**

---

The next morning, Shane met him like always. Smiling. Confident.

But Tyler couldn’t stop watching him like a stranger.

And when Shane looked away for just a second—

Tyler whispered under his breath:

“I think I know your face.”

Shane didn’t hear it.

But he would.

Soon.

---

Tyler didn’t sleep.

He didn’t spiral either.

Is Shane really new Ethan? Coach Vance, Now Shane?

He planned.

If Shane really was who Tyler now feared he was… he’d eventually slip. He’d say something he shouldn’t know. React too fast. Fill in a blank that only Ethan could recognize.

All Tyler had to do was feed him the right detail.

So he picked one.

---

In gym class, freshman year, Ethan once faked an injury during a running test. Everyone had laughed. Tyler had laughed hardest. Ethan limped off the court, face red. Two hours later, someone found his name scrawled in Sharpie on the back of the bleachers.

It was a dumb story.

But only Ethan remembered it.

---

That afternoon, Tyler waited until they were alone again—him and Shane, sitting near the outdoor stairs, like usual. Shane was picking apart a protein bar with surgical focus, eyes on the track field.

Tyler played it casual.

“You ever fake an injury to get out of a test?”

Shane looked up, smirked. “What kind of test?”

“Running,” Tyler said. “Mile run. Freshman year.”

Shane gave a breath of a laugh. “God, yeah. Back at my old school, I limped so bad the nurse thought I tore my calf.”

Tyler nodded slowly.

“So no one wrote your name on the bleachers after?”

Shane blinked.

Just for a second.

Then smiled.

“Wish they had.”

Tyler’s heart skipped.

That pause.

It was nothing.

It was everything.

---

Later that night, Tyler replayed the conversation in his head.

The phrasing.

The timing.

The pause.

Shane had hesitated like someone caught between memories—like he’d almost said “I thought you did” instead.

Tyler scribbled a new line across his notebook:

SHANE ISN’T NEW.

And underneath it:

HE’S PLAYING ME.

---

The Camera (Can't) Lies

Tyler spent his Saturday morning alone at school.

He’d told the janitor he left a jacket in his locker. No one questioned him.

He waited until the hallway was clear.

Then he set the camera.

An old camcorder—grainy, bulky, but reliable. Tucked into the air vent above the east academic wing hallway. Perfect angle. It would capture the entry doors with a timestamp.

If Ethan walked in at 7:52, and Shane showed up behind the gym at 7:58—on the opposite side of campus—he’d have them.

Or he’d have him.

---

Monday came like a storm.

Tyler barely blinked through first period.

At 7:51 a.m., he positioned himself near the gym stairs.

At 7:58, Shane arrived.

Hood up, all confidence.

“Ready to break the system again?” he asked, offering a casual grin.

Tyler forced a nod.

Inside, his pulse was thunder.

---

Lunchtime.

Tyler slipped into the janitor’s closet, locked the door, and pulled out the camera.

Fast-forwarded.

7:50… 7:51…

7:52.

There—Ethan.

Clear as day, walking through the east entry doors. Head down. Hoodie up. Backpack over one shoulder. Small frame. Maybe 5'9" at best.

Tyler stared.

Fast-forwarded.

7:58.

There—Shane, appearing behind the gym.

Different entrance. Opposite side of the school. And Tyler had been there the entire time.

Shane was tall. Broad. At least 6'2". There was no mistaking it.

It was impossible.

Unless...

They were the same person.

Tyler blinked hard, scrubbing backward on the footage.

7:52—Ethan. Small. Slouched. Thin.

7:58—Shane. Confident. Strong. Towering.

That wasn’t a disguise. That wasn’t a trick of posture.

That was a transformation.

Ethan and Shane weren’t just the same person.

Ethan had changed his body.

His height. His build. His presence.

Tyler’s blood went cold.

There was only one explanation.

He wasn’t crazy.

He wasn’t paranoid.

Ethan was a shapeshifter.

Tyler laughed.

A small, cracked sound that almost frightened him.

He had him.

He finally had him.

---

Until the knock came.

Slow.

Measured.

Tyler turned.

Coach Vance stood in the doorway, arms folded, eyes like steel.

“You digging for ghosts, Stanton?” he asked quietly.

Tyler swallowed. “I saw him. I saw—”

Vance stepped into the light.

Smiling.

“You’re getting close.”

Tyler froze.

“What?”

Vance leaned down. His voice was soft—softer than it had ever been.

“I let you see it.”

Tyler’s blood ran cold.

“You—”

“I wanted you to know. Just not yet.”

Then he turned, calm as ever, and walked away.

Leaving Tyler with shaking hands, a blinking screen, and one undeniable truth:

He was never the hunter.

He was the game.

---

He can't wait longer.

Tyler stood outside the principal’s office with a USB drive in his palm.

The camcorder footage was on it.

Two files. Two appearances. One impossibility.

He clutched it like it was a sword. A lifeline. The truth.

He had asked for a private meeting. Said it was important. Urgent. About Coach Vance.

Principal Avery had agreed.

Ms. Kellerman would be there too.

Good.

He needed witnesses.

---

Inside the office, they gave him space at the front desk.

“Go ahead, Tyler,” the principal said gently.

Tyler nodded, breath shaking.

He plugged in the drive. Clicked play.

First: Ethan, walking through the east hall entry at 7:52 a.m.

Then: Shane, meeting Tyler at the gym at 7:58.

“See that?” Tyler said, pointing to the timestamps. “He can’t be in two places at once. Ethan and Shane—they’re the same person.”

The adults leaned in. Silent.

“Look at the body types,” Tyler said. “The walk. The way they look at people. It’s all the same.”

Kellerman raised an eyebrow. “But they’re clearly different. One’s tall. The other isn’t.”

“That’s the point,” Tyler said, voice rising. “He changes. He’s a shapeshifter!”

Silence.

Not awe.

Just... discomfort.

Principal Avery folded his hands. “Tyler. This is serious. Are you suggesting your classmate—Ethan—and Coach Vance are... supernatural?”

“I’m showing you proof!”

He turned back to the screen.

But something was wrong.

The Shane footage—it looked… different.

Smoother. Cropped tighter.

The timestamp was gone.

His stomach dropped.

“No—wait—this isn’t the right version—” he stammered, clicking wildly.

“I think that’s enough,” the principal said.

Kellerman frowned. “Tyler, are you manipulating school footage?”

“I didn’t—no—someone changed it!” Tyler spun. “It was him!”

And then—

The door opened.

Coach Vance stepped in.

Calm. Collected. The model of professionalism.

“Everything alright?” he asked.

Tyler pointed. “You’re him! You’re Ethan! You’ve been playing us all!”

But no one moved.

No one flinched.

Vance looked to the principal. “Maybe it’s time we discussed next steps for Tyler.”

The adults nodded.

Tyler backed up.

No.

No, no, no.

The footage was gone.

His proof was gone.

And Vance—Ethan—stood there, perfectly untouchable.

---

Minutes later, Tyler stumbled into the main hallway.

His head was spinning.

He wiped his face, still shaking.

Then stopped.

Shane was sitting on the bench just outside the front office.

Waiting.

Hood up. Calm. As if he’d been there all morning.

Tyler froze.

He looked back at the office.

Then quietly stepped to the door.

Peeked in.

Principal Avery. Ms. Kellerman. An empty chair.

Vance was gone.

No exit. No hallway movement. No footsteps.

Just gone.

Tyler turned back.

Shane looked up.

“Didn’t go well?” he asked, casual as ever.

And this time, the smile was different.

Not friendly.

Not sympathetic.

Knowing.

The kind of smile that came from someone who’d already seen the outcome.

Who’d designed it.

Tyler blinked.

His breath caught.

Vance was just in that room.

Shane is here now.

They never passed each other.

Unless…

There was nothing to pass.

Because they were never two people at all.

The posture. The eyes. The stillness in Shane’s shoulders.

It’s Vance.

It’s always been Vance.

It’s always been Ethan.

Tyler turned, shaken.

He didn’t say a word.

Shane just sat there.

Still smiling.

---

Tyler didn’t speak to Shane all week.

He smiled when he had to.

Nodded when it was expected.

All the while, the original SD card burned in his jacket pocket like a secret weapon.

His ace.

His checkmate.

---

Friday. Game night.

The gym buzzed. Packed house. Everyone was there.

Perfect.

He had the footage loaded. Time-stamped. Clean. Unedited. Proof.

The projector was set. AV tech gave him control.

This was it.

---

Tyler took center court just before the game started. Lights dimmed. Spotlight caught him mid-step.

He make sure Coach Vance.. or Ethan, or who the fuck is he, still sit on the bench.

“Before we play,” he said into the mic, “there’s something I need to show you.”

Confused murmurs. Curious faces.

He hit play.

7:52 — Ethan entering the east hallway.

7:58 — Shane behind the gym.

Two places. Six minutes. One impossibility.

Gasps. Confusion.

“This,” Tyler said, “is proof. Shane, Ethan, and Coach Vance—are the same person.”

He turned toward the bench.

But Coach Vance was gone. His clipboard left on the chair. Whistle still hanging from the hook.

Tyler blinked.

Then from the bleachers—

Shane stood.

Arms folded. Calm. Watching.

Tyler pointed. “That’s him! He was just on the court!”

People looked between the court and the bleachers.

Vance wasn’t there. Now Shane was.

Then the lights flickered. Just a moment. Tyler lost sight.

And when they returned— Shane was gone.

Tyler spun.

Ethan sat near the top row with his favorite gray sweater. Small. Nervous. Watching the screen like everyone else.

Tyler’s breath caught.

He looked between them. Looked for cameras. For witnesses.

Everyone was murmuring now.

“He was just there—” “Wasn’t that Coach Vance?” “Wait, is he saying the coach is that kid?”

Tyler pointed again.

“He’s all of them! You’re not seeing it!”

But they were. Exactly what Ethan wanted them to see.

One face. Then another. Then another.

Never together. Never overlapping.

Enough distance to make Tyler look insane.

The screen changed. Footage of Tyler sneaking into AV. Digging through lockers. Talking to himself in the hallway.

“Wait—no—this isn’t—”

“Tyler,” Ms. Kellerman called. “I think that’s enough.”

Security moved.

The crowd watched. Phones recorded.

Tyler’s voice cracked.

“You’re all the same person…”

But to them?

He looked broken. Unstable.

Because Ethan had pulled off the perfect finale.

Three masks. One actor. Zero witnesses.

They led Tyler out slowly. Eyes followed. Mouths whispered.

And Ethan—whichever face he wore now—watched it all.

Still here. Still safe. Still in control.

---

Epilogue: The Stage is Set

Life at school went on.

The final game day passed. Tyler Stanton didn’t show.

Some said he transferred. Others said he was institutionalized. A few whispered he cracked under pressure.

But no one really knew.

And eventually, no one really cared.

Coach Vance still ran practices like a general.

Shane still hung by the gym doors, charming anyone who walked by.

And Ethan?

Still sat in the second row of chemistry with his favorite gray sweater, quiet as ever.

No one questioned it.

Why would they?

They were all different.

They had to be.

---

What really happened?

At late night, after that final game, Tyler sat alone in the nurse’s office. Waiting to be picked up. A stomach ache, they said. Maybe a panic attack.

He stared at the floor. Not crying. Not moving.

Then the door opened.

Coach Vance stepped in.

No clipboard. No whistle. Just him.

He closed the door behind him. Locked it.

Tyler didn’t look up.

“Go away.”

Vance didn’t move.

“You were right,” he said quietly.

Tyler lifted his head.

Vance stood and cross his arms. Calm. Steady. Watching him.

“I wanted you to know,” he added. “That you weren’t crazy.”

Tyler swallowed hard. “Then why—why make me look like I was?”

Vance tilted his head.

“Because no one believes a story when it’s told too late.”

And then—

He changed.

Right in front of Tyler.

His posture shifted. His jaw reshaped. His eyes sharpened. His hair darkened. Shoulders narrowed.

Shane stood where Vance had been.

Then—blink—and he was Ethan.

Then back to Vance.

Each switch seamless. Effortless.

Tyler trembled.

“Why… why are you showing me this now?”

Coach Vance smiled.

“Because it’s more fun when someone knows the game… and still loses.”

He turned and walked to the door. Unlocked it.

Before stepping out, he glanced back one last time.

“Goodnight, Tyler.”

And then he was gone.

---

Coach Owen Vance, Shane, and Ethan still attend their occupation at school.

Because he didn’t need to disappear.

Not when the truth was unbelievable.

He was still here.

All of him.

And no one would ever know.

Or maybe, he is around us...

---

End.

#male shapeshifter #male shapeshift #male transformation #ai generated

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nevadancitizen · 11 months ago

Text

-> THE BURDEN OF TOMORROW

synopsis: kamski reveals the one thing you know to be true as a lie: your humanity. connor can’t rightly sit idly by as you struggle to re-find yourself.

word count: 4.2k

ships: connor x reader, hank anderson & reader

notes: i’m skipping from fandom to fandom like i’m fucking window shopping huh. anyway connor the pinerrrr. connor the ultimate denier of feelingssssss

related reading: HEAD OF FALSE SECURITY MASTERLIST

You had been against the idea from the beginning. In your head, you traced the different ways Kamski would turn you, Hank, and Connor down – “I’m too busy to answer some stupid questions,” or “Go away, I’m trying to enjoy being a retired billionaire,” or “I’m Elijah fucking Kamski, and who the fuck are you supposed to be?”

But his android, Chloe, had welcomed all of you. And you couldn’t ignore how Kamski’s face brightened ever-so-slightly when he saw Connor. But it confused you even more when his eyes flitted to you and his expression brightened even more.

He started talking after he got out of his red-granite-lined pool, which didn’t really interest you. Your eyes turn to one of the Chloes that’s standing off to the side, her eyelids fluttering a little as she presumably scans you. When she’s done, her lips tilt upward in a smile and her head cocks to the side a little. It’s like… she knows you, or something. Like she was smiling because she saw an old friend.

Kamski’s voice cuts through your thoughts. “Chloe?”

Chloe immediately walks over to Kamski, her bare feet making soft sounds against the tile, then muffled by the carpet. She sinks to her knees when he puts a hand on her shoulder and pushes slightly.

“What interests me…” Kamski moves so he’s standing next to where Chloe’s kneeling. “… is whether machines are capable of empathy.”

He moves so his back is turned on all three of you, and opens a drawer of a side table near the window. “I call it the “Kamski Test.” It’s very simple, you’ll see.”

Kamski turns with his hands raised. One of them is holding a pistol by the barrel, in a way that it would be impossible to fire. Once he’s established that he’s not a threat, he moves forward and places the grip in Connor’s hand. Connor curls his fingers around it on instinct, his index on the trigger.

“What are you doing?” You interject.

Kamski looks over at you and smiles. It’s like you’re proving something to him. What you’re proving, you don’t know.

He moves Connor’s arm so that the sights of the gun are trained on Chloe’s head. “It’s up to you to answer that fascinating question, Connor. Destroy this machine, and I’ll tell you all I know. Or…”

Kamski makes a half-circle and stands beside Connor. “Spare it, if you feel it’s alive. But you’ll leave without having learnt anything from me.”

Hank scoffs and rolls his eyes, gently hitting your arm with an air of can you believe this fucking prick? “Okay, I think we’re done here. C’mon, let’s go, both of you. Sorry to get you outta your pool.”

You put your hand on Hank’s arm to still him and stare at Connor. His LED flickers between yellow and red, circling in on itself quickly as he stares down at Chloe. His eyelids flutter slightly as he tries to process everything around him, calculating and sorting every possibility into neat percentages.

“Connor?” You say softly, trying to break him from his trance. “Connor, come on. This is a waste of time – you don’t need to do this. It could mess with your…” you gesture at your forehead vaguely. “… microprocessors or whatever.”

Kamski exhales slightly and smiles. He takes the pistol by the barrel, gently taking it from Connor’s hand. Connor looks at Kamski, then back down at Chloe.

“Amazing,” Kamski breathes out.

“Yeah, amazing, I care about Connor.” You roll your eyes. “Let’s go.”

Connor catches your eye and nods. “I would’ve been okay. Shooting the android wouldn’t have impacted my microprocessors or any of my other biocomponents.”

“The kid’s just worried,” Hank cuts in. “Now, c’mon. We’re leaving.”

“Wait – one last thing.” Kamski brushes past, walking to the far wall. He presses his hand to a biometric scanner on the wall, causing it to let out a sound akin to a hiss as it opens. It creases vertically, then folds back.

You let out a small sound of disbelief as you take in what Kamski revealed. Lining the walls of the hidden compartment is… information, yes, but not information about deviants. It’s information about you.

Photos of you as a child, teenager, adult, and projections of what you’d look like as you aged. Reports on how you’ve been performing as a detective. Maps of interrelationships, circles labeled with names and a web of color-coded lines connecting them.

And, on the back wall, are blueprints. You’ve seen these types of schematics before – they’re for androids.

Kamski turns and smiles when he sees your shocked face. “So it worked. You firmly believed you were human. Am I wrong, Detective?”

You feel a hand on the top of your back, and only barely register Hank shuffling you towards the exit as you stumble. “This is fucked. I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to pull, Kamski, but we’re out.”

“N-no, Hank, wait –” You dig your heels in, never once looking away from the hidden compartment. “Wait, Kamski, what is this?”

“Just an experiment.” Kamski follows your eyes and looks inside. “A personal pet project.”

“They’re not your goddamn passion project!” Hank snaps, ushering you along with a bit more force. “Now leave the kid alone.”

“Hank, please, I want to see –” You crane your neck, still trying to look.

“This is damaging to your psyche,” Connor says, taking your arm and helping Hank herd you. “I – we need you operating at full capacity, for the sake of the case.”

“There it is, again!” Kamski laughs. “That beautiful thing, empathy.”

He walks into the room leisurely, like it’s a parlor instead of… whatever it is. “I don’t blame you for being curious. You’re a violent and irrepressible miracle, Detective.”

You struggle against Connor and Hank’s holds as you try to see more of the secret room. “Wh-what do you mean? Hank, let me see! I need to know what’s going on!”

You grab Hank’s arm with your free hand, tugging on his coat. “Hank, I promise I’ll be okay – just five minutes. All I need is five minutes! Please, let me do this. I just need to figure out what this is, then we can go. Just five minutes.”

Hank’s mouth curls into a scowl when he hears the emotion and pleading in your voice, his eyebrows furrowing as he thinks. His eyes fall to the floor, then flick to Connor.

“I highly advise against that,” Connor says evenly, but his worry is betrayed by the way his jaw clenches. His fingers tighten around your upper arm. “Not only will this definitely cause irreversible psychological damage, it could possibly lead to a mental break.”

“Five minutes, Connor.” You look into his eyes. “How much damage can five minutes do?”

“A lot!” Connor says. But after a moment of eye contact, his eyes soften and he relents. He lets go of your arm and takes a step back, his shoes clicking against the tile.

Hank does the same, removing his hand from your back. He sighs and crosses his arms. “Five minutes, kid. That’s all you get.”

You immediately turn on your heel and rush into the room because, knowing Connor, he’d probably set an internal timer already. You hear both Hank and Connor follow you, standing at the edge of the doorway.

You scan the room, then pick out what to look at and what to question Kamski about.

“This.” You point at a small tablet, showing a muted video of you dancing drunkenly at a crowded party. You’re wearing a hideous necktie like a headband and you get your face right in the camera as soon as you spot it. You can make out the words you’re saying – or, rather, yelling – “What’re you waiting for, man? Let’s party with Miss Page-Three all the way to Disco Ze-e-e-ero-o-o-o!”

You turn to Kamski. “What is this? Why do you have it?”

“Every person moves in a unique way,” Kamski says, shrugging slightly. “Androids already have a specific set of movements. I analyzed the way you moved – the way a human moved.”

“Moved?” You echo back. “What do you mean, moved? Don’t you mean move? Like, the present continuous verb?”

“I didn’t misspeak.” Kamski turns to a paper organizer on a desk and starts to flip through it.

You exchange a glance with Hank, then Connor. Hank is more obvious with his unease, but you can tell Connor is fretting, too. He just keeps it in his mind, still silently calculating.

Kamski pulls out a manila folder and hands it to you. You turn it over and read what’s on the front. Typed out in neat Courier New is your name, your birth date, and a random date from a few years back – Feb. 21, 2034.

You undo the clasp and dump out the documents on a nearby desk. What’s inside only causes further confusion – there’s a photocopy of a will, a death certificate, an incident report, and photos of a car crash. The death certificate is… it’s yours, but it can’t be. Can it?

You pick up one of the pictures and hold it close to your face. The car is a mangled mess of metal, lit by red and blue police lights. Peeking out from underneath the rubble, limp on the concrete, is a hand. Your hand. And it’s stained with fresh, wet blood.

“Connor.” Your voice comes out weak and strained. You can’t lift your eyes from the photo. “Connor, get over here.”

Connor’s footsteps sound, quick and almost rushed. “Yes, Detective?”

“Scan this.” Your hand shakes as you hold the photo out to Connor. “I-is this…?”

Is this real? You want to ask. Please tell me it’s not, Connor. Connor, please-please-please tell me this is some stupid joke. I’m not afraid of dying, but what if I already have?

Connor leans down a little, his eyelids and LED flickering as he scans it. His face falls as soon as his LED resumes circling normally. “It’s… yes. I found a document containing that picture, but I… I’m not permitted to access it.”

“Okay, but that’s just s-some random wreck, right?” You laugh nervously, trying to ignore the lump growing in your throat. Can androids even cry? “It – it’s not me.”

Connor reaches down and sorts through the documents. When he comes across the death certificate, he freezes. His eyelids flutter as he scans it. He looks over at you, slowly.

“No,” you whisper. “Connor, it… it can’t be real.”

“It is,” Connor says softly. “Detective, I… I’m so sorry.”

And, just like that, you’re disconnected. You’re outside of your body, stuck in the passenger seat and controlling a video game. There’s a lag to every movement you make. You recall some term you heard in a college psychology course you were required to take – disassociation. You vaguely register that this is what you’re feeling.

With more effort than it should take, you turn to look at Hank. His expression, shocked and appalled, causes the dam to burst. Your shoulders shake as you cry, hot with misplaced shame.

Connor wraps an arm around your shoulder, gently pushing you out of the room and towards the exit. Hank pats his shoulder, telling him to “Get them to the car – I’ve got a few choice words I need to exchange with our friend here.”

The car ride was tense, and that atmosphere transferred into Hank’s home. He had asked on the way back if you were okay being by yourself, and you were honest and told him that no, you’re not. He had sat you down and assured you that he wasn’t mad, he didn’t feel betrayed – he just needed time to think and adjust to this new change.

He had turned in an hour ago, just a little past three in the morning. You know you couldn’t sleep if you tried. That left you and Connor in Hank’s living room.

You’re laying on the floor with Sumo, his head on your chest and drool staining your shirt. One of your arms is propped behind your head, your other hand absentmindedly combing through Sumo’s fur.

The silence is only broken by the ceiling fan clicking with every rotation and your breathing – artificial breathing, you suppose.

“Did you go into standby?” You ask softly.

“No,” Connor answers from his seat on the couch. “Would you like to talk?”

“Maybe.” You trace the pattern of Sumo’s fur, then look over at Connor. “It’s just… I don’t feel like an android. And I have lots of memories. I remember going to Chicken Feed with Hank for the first time. He got me the best goddamn burger in Detroit. I remember finding a Lucky Star bottlecap when I was a kid – the, uh… the ones from that one sarsaparilla? With the blue star on the bottom. Androids don’t have memories like that. Memories from their childhood. Memories that make them feel things.”

Connor stands from the couch, then sits by your side. He puts his hand on Sumo’s head, gently tracing the white streak that cuts through brown fur. The fan continues to click as Connor thinks for a few moments, LED swirling as he does.

“I feel things, sometimes,” he says softly. “But not like how a deviant feels. I have a built-in reward system meant to keep me motivated. But sometimes I’m rewarded even when I do something unrelated to the case.”

“Like what?” You smile up at him. “Petting Sumo?”

Connor smiles softly, glancing away, then back to you. “Yes.”

You laugh softly, your eyes staying on Connor’s face, tracing this new expression. He doesn’t smile a lot, but you’re grateful for every second that he does.

His brow creases a little, his smile disappearing. “Are you feeling alright? I want to know if you’re… I know this revelation has affected you negatively, but I just want to know of your general mental state.”

You sigh quietly, looking up and following one blade of the fan as it rotates. “I mean, I thought I had it all figured out, y’know? There’s a giant ball, and there’s evil apes. And the evil apes are just… dukin’ it out on the ball. And I’m one of them. It’s basically all just evil apes dukin’ it out on this giant ball.”

Connor tilts his head to the side. “And in this scenario… what are androids?”

“Androids don’t exist in this scenario,” you say. “Androids are too perfect. Like fine porcelain china. They’re for the future. I figured this out when I was young, before androids were everywhere. When there was just a giant ball and evil apes.”

“Hm.” Connor shifts slightly, so that his thigh is just barely pressed against your side. “And what do you feel now?”

“I… I don’t know.” You sigh. “I feel… kinda guilty, I think? Because, yeah, it’s bad. This doesn’t have any upside to it. But it’s not bad for anyone else aside from me, and Hank, to a lesser degree. It’s not death, or war, or – god forbid, pedophilia. It’s just me.”

You go quiet as you watch the fan rotate. Your fingers find the tags on Sumo’s collar, the tag with his name and Hank’s address and number clinking against his rabies vaccination tag.

“Humans are complicated,” Connor eventually says.

You snort. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I…” he sighs. “I know you didn’t mean to deceive me. But I can’t believe I didn’t know – or at least have an inkling.”

“Shit, I deceived myself.” You laugh humorlessly. “You’re okay, Connor. You don’t need to change to accommodate me.”

“Adaptability to unpredictable human behavior is one of my core features,” he says.

“Am I really unpredictable?” You ask. Your eyebrows furrow as you fidget with Sumo’s tags. “Or, actually – am I really even human?”

Connor’s LED flashes yellow as he looks down at you, his eyelids fluttering as he scans you. He blinks a few times and his LED returns to a calm blue.

“You’ve fooled my sensors,” Connor says. “And, if I may…”

His hand hovers over yours, which is still fidgeting with Sumo’s tags. You nod as you feel your heart skip a beat. He grabs your hand and lifts it to his solar plexus, right in the middle of his chest.

“Do you feel that?” Connor asks. “It’s my thirium pump. Biocomponent #8456w.”

Sure enough, you feel a soft thrumming beneath your fingers. It’s not quite like a heartbeat, but a steady hum that fluctuates. Strong, then a steady decline to weak, then back to its strongest.

You nod again, not trusting your voice at the moment.

Connor moves your hand so that it’s resting on your own chest, right over your heart. You don’t really make an effort to check your heartbeat but, just like the last time you remember checking, there’s a steady beat.

“You have a heart,” he says.

“An artificial one,” you chime.

“Yes,” Connor relents. “But it proves that you’re not like me. Not a full android.”

“For all I know, Kamski cobbled me together in his creepy basement,” you try to joke. “Do you think he has one? Or is he too rich?”

“Detroit is located alongside a river,” Connor says. “The soil contains too much water for basement construction to be feasible.”

You roll your head a little, looking up at him. “You’re too literal. Don’t you have a humor microchip or something?”

Connor smiles slightly. “Unfortunately, no.”

“Yes, you do!” You laugh and turn your hand over, grabbing his and shaking it gently. “You’re smiling. And you made a joke. A kind-of joke.”

Connor’s smile falters when he looks down at your connected hands. It’s not like you’ve laced fingers with him or anything, but it was still kind of intimate.

You clear your throat and let his hand go, instead carding your fingers through Sumo’s fur again. You can feel a blush creeping across your face. Once more, the room is only filled with the clicking of the fan with every rotation and your breathing.

“I don’t know what to do,” you eventually sigh out. “I wish I could just wake up and start the day over. But then I open my eyes and the time has still passed and I’m still here. I still have to go through… whatever this is.”

“You don’t have to go through it alone,” Connor says. “Hank would never abandon you, and…” His LED flickers yellow. “Neither would I.”

“You’re weird,” you say softly. “You’re weird for that.”

Connor nods, slowly. “Maybe. But you’re vital to this case, whether you believe it or not.”

“I do,” you say. “Kinda. I just need time. I can see the end, which is whole acceptance, or just not caring. I mean, all the pieces aren’t here, I still need to find them, but still. I get all the pieces, somehow, something else, walla-walla-bing-bang – my android-ness doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“Walla-walla-bing-bang?” Connor echoes, his eyebrows furrowing slightly.

“I don’t know what it means.” Your eyes flicker to his and you smile at his confusion. “I think I heard it somewhere once. It just felt like the most appropriate thing to say.”

Connor’s face softens and he mirrors your smile. “That does seem like an appropriate thing to say, yes.”

You keep looking up at him for a moment, just looking into his brown doe eyes. You swallow thickly as your thoughts race. There’s a sudden lump in your throat that you try your best to ignore and clear away.

“Connor, I…” You reach for his hand. He meets you halfway, gently holding your hand and resting his thumb on your knuckles.

“Am I a deviant?”

Are you going to turn me in? You want to ask. Please don’t. Please, Connor. I need you to trust me, just like you’ve trusted me before. I’ll be vigilant. I’ll figure this out. I promise. Please.

“No.” There’s no hesitation or doubt in his voice. “As far as I’ve figured out, you’re designed to act like a human. You’re meant to fool others into thinking you’re really human – because that’s what you were, before. Deviants are androids with mutations in their code. Your code is meant to mimic human emotions and rationale. So you’re just following your instructions.”

“Instructions.” You look down at your joined hands. You shake them a little as your lips draw into a thin line. “That’s what we both come down to, right? Instructions.”

“You…” Connor thinks for a moment. “Yes. But the instructions in you are nuanced, and sometimes contradictory. I’m not calling your code faulty – in fact, it rather reflects human behavior to a tee.”

“So I’m… at least a little human.” You close your eyes, resting your head on your arm that’s propped behind your head. “Human enough.”

“Human enough?” Connor echoes.

“Yeah. My lungs burn when I hold my breath too long. It hurts when I stub my toe and I feel electric when I hit my funny bone. I cry and my tears taste salty instead of tasting like… I don’t know, cleaning fluid.” You open your eyes and look up at Connor, as if asking him to confirm.

“Androids do have optic cleaning fluids, yes,” he says.

You smile and laugh lightly, your gaze returning to the fan blade. “Optic fuckin’ cleaning fluids…”

You sigh softly. “God, Hank was right. This is fucked. An android investigating androids and some… cheap copy of whoever I used to be. And, of course, a Lieutenant who’s slowly killing himself day-by-day.”

“You’re not a cheap copy,” he says. “Typical CyberLife androids cost nine thousand dollars, but custom models could cost more. Personally, my development and production costs total to just over four million, and every new RK800 model costs eight thousand.”

Connor soothes his thumb over your knuckles. “You must’ve cost Kamski a fortune.”

His words immediately go to your heart like you’ve been pierced by a scorpion’s tail. But instead of venom, it’s an injection of sweet feelings and erratic butterflies. If you didn’t know better, you’d say that his whispered words and damn-near reverent tone was intentional.

“That’s… that sounds kinda romantic,” you say, then remember yourself. “I – I mean, romantic as in, like, the Romantic era? Like, it’s a romantic idea. That Kamski loves his work so much that he couldn’t bear to stop and continued to push the envelope… even if he pushed it a bit too far, with an android replacing a real-life, actually-dead human and whatnot.”

Connor’s LED blinks as he thinks. He stays silent for a while, just looking down at his hand that’s holding yours and thinking.

“You’re starting to act like me, y’know?” You squeeze his hand. “A synthetic human instead of a true android.”

His LED stops flickering and he meets your eyes. “I am not a deviant. I have a rigorous self-testing system to make sure any signs of deviancy don’t go undetected.”

“Okay, okay,” you relent. You glance down to your conjoined hands, then back up into those doe eyes.

“Did you mean it?” You ask softly. “Earlier. When you said that you’d stay.”

“Of course,” Connor answers quickly.

“Really?” Your eyebrows crease. “Because it’ll take years. It’ll be depressing. And it’ll be boring. I’ll be worse than Hank. I don’t expect you to reward me or to applaud my every move, because I know that’s how normal people are all the time.”

“But you’re not normal,” Connor says with a smile. “Even before your entire identity was uprooted.”

“Connor!” You laugh and let go of his hand to swat at him, then grasp his hand again. “Alright, alright. I’ll get a bit of the Normal in me. A touch of the Regular. Exactly four grams of Johnny Normalcop.”

“Don’t.” He squeezes your hand. “It would be detrimental to the case if you were to focus on restructuring yourself in a different way. You don’t need to sanitize your personality.”

You smile up at Connor. “So you like me.”

His LED flickers yellow, then returns to blue. “Yes. I enjoy working alongside you as you are. You don’t need to be any amount of Johnny Normalcop.”

You shake your joined hands gently, your smile growing so wide you’re sure you looked a bit stupid. “You’re sweet. You know that?”

“I am somewhat aware.” Connor brings his free hand up to rest on top of your connected hands.

And, just like that, you know everything would be alright. Nothing would ever be the same, yes, but it would be alright. It won’t be easy, but you just need to move on. Uncertainty is a core tenet of detective work.

When life closes a door, it opens a window. And if the fall is too steep, use the fire exit. Run to the roof, because Connor will be there when you jump to break your fall. The most important thing is to keep moving. Keep dreaming. CyberLife can’t reclaim their lost property if you keep running – very, very fast, from one Earth-shattering revelation to the next.

#riptide writes 🌊#dbh connor x reader #connor rk800 x reader #rk800 x reader #connor x reader #detroit become human #dbh connor #dbh rk800 #connor rk800 #dbh x reader #detroit become human x reader #dbh connor x you #connor rk800 x you #rk800 x you #connor x you #dbh x you #detroit become human x you

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justaz · 5 months ago

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Merlin with time magic casting a spell on Arthur spur of the moment right before his final heartbeat just to keep him alive until he can find a way to heal him, keeping him suspended in the moment right before death. Kinda like a sleeping curse? Oh shit is it true love’s kiss? I was building up for idk like Merlin taking Arthur’s body to a modern day hospital where he’s absolutely certain they can save him (modern surgery and machines ftw) and then just. Having Arthur back. Omg he has amnesia. It’s obvious I didn’t have this idea fleshed out before I began typing but it’s fine. Oh wow this is like a little brainstorm post. How fun. Anyways Arthur is saved but has amnesia and Merlin is trying act all cool and just “re”introduce him to the modern world and their “life together” and Arthur thinks that like they’re dating from how intimately Merlin knows Arthur and Merlin is just like ??? Um??? But rolls with it bc like. He’s been in love with him for years. And also why would he burden him with the knowledge that he had a wife but she’s long dead now. Anyways Arthur falls in love with Merlin all over again and share true loves kiss and gets his memories back. HA! I brought the true love’s kiss thing back around. You’re welcome.

#bbc merlin #merlin emrys #arthur pendragon #merthur #fanfiction #fanfic #fic ideas #prompts #could have a slight lil angst thing of Arthur being angry when he gets his memory back bc #MERLIN LIED AGAIN!!!!#or just world shattering sex #whatever

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supernotnatural2005 · 6 months ago

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'Giddy up Cowboy' (Drabble)

Paring: Dean x Reader

Summary: The power of impression leads to wondrous things.

Word Count: 822

Prompt: ‘Character B tries to impress Character A’

Warnings: Dean riding a mechanical bull 🥵🥵

AN: This is another square completed for my @jacklesversebingo 24 card. It's a short one I know but, I think it fit perfectly for this prompt 😄

Read the follow up here

Main Masterlist

Bingo Masterlist

“Don’t you just love a man who knows how to ride one of those things?" You sigh dreamily, watching man after rugged-looking man try their damnedest at riding the mechanical bull.

There was just something so downright sexy about watching a guy flex his thighs and roll his hips in time with the sway of the machine. If you didn’t know any better, it seems as though you may have discovered a new turn-on for yourself.

“Um, not really Y/N.” Sam chuckles before taking a drink from his beer. You smack his arm in jest because he knew you were being rhetorical. You cease, however, when your attention is soon re-captured by another man stepping up for his turn.

Meanwhile Dean frowns at you, his eyes glancing between you and the men making complete fools of themselves, in his opinion. Not one of them had been able to stay on for a full minute. There was nothing impressive about that, so he couldn’t see as to why you thought so.

‘Because you just hate the fact she’s gawking at other men.’ Came the niggling voice in the back of his mind. A voice that hadn’t shut up about you for months now.

Again, the new guy was flung from the machine, this time before even 30 seconds were up, and Dean scoffs. Apparently it was loud enough for your attention to turn to him.

“What? You think you can do any better, Winchester?” You tease, and he rolls his eyes.

“I think even Sammy here could do better than these goons.” Dean sasses back, and Sam frowns, knowing that wasn’t meant to be a compliment. You squint your eyes at Dean, too suspiciously for his liking, and he distracts himself with a pull from his beer.

“Then why don’t you hop on? Show these goons—"you imitate his deep voice, "what you’ve got?” You challenge him playfully, almost like you didn’t believe he would.

Fine, he thinks stubbornly. Maybe this time you’ll actually notice me; comes that voice again.

You had been a casual hunting partner with the boys for a few months now; your knowledge, skill, and witty humour brought a fresh new light into their lives, and they both enjoyed having you around. Dean maybe more so, for other reasons.

Finishing the rest of his beer in one big gulp, he stands from the table with a cocky smirk. “I’ll show you how a real man does it, sweetheart.” Sam cringes at his brothers statement, and Dean has to admit it was a cheap line, but it got that smile out of you. The one that made your eyes shine.

As Dean pays the operator, he looks over at you one last time and sends you a wink before he steps up onto the mat and effortlessly mounts the bull. He blows out a breath, suddenly nervous. He couldn’t make a fool out of himself now, not with the mouth he’d given you.

Dean gives the guy a thumbs up once he’s situated, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. His only thought; she’s watching, like a mantra in his mind. He hears the whirring of the machine spark to life, and no sooner as it did, does the bull begin to rock.

At first, it’s a gentle forward and backward motion until it begins to spin. Dean clenches his knees tighter and rolls his hips, matching the same motion as the bull. He holds his left arm out for balance as the bull begins whipping around at a much faster pace. He grips on for dear life, the cheer from the crowd gathered drowning into nothingness as he puts all his concentration into staying on.

It feels like a lifetime before he finally hears the operator announce he’d broken the 90 seconds before the bull gradually begins to wind down to a stop. An eruption of cheers, mostly from the women in the crowd, surrounds him as he hops down. Even some of the guys who’d failed shake his hand impressed as he steps off the mat. He nods politely as he pushes his way through, ignoring the women trying to get his attention—his eyes only searching for you.

You’re standing at the back of the crowd, having moved to get a better view, your smile dazzling and eyes alight with wonder.

“So. Was I better?” Dean asks, a little breathless from his effort but also incredibly curious. You take a step closer to him, your lips pulling up into a smirk as you come toe to toe. His breath hitches as you place a hand on his chest, and he’s certain you can feel what the simple action does to his heart.

“You did great! But I think I can ride him better.” Your eyes glisten with mischief as you lean up on your toes to whisper in his ear.

“And I’m not talking about the bull.”

Read part 2 here.

AN: Again, I know it was a short one but I have much more planned for the rest of my squares, maybe a series in the works 👀 As always I really appreciate any feedback! Let me know what you though 💕

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cherrycranes · 5 months ago

Text

The Perfect Gift (Chris x Fem!Reader) [+18]

Pairing: Chris O´Doyle x Fem!Reader Summary: It´s christmas eve and you´re stuck at the airport because of the snow. Thankfully, a handsome stranger will make sure that you don´t spend your christmas alone.... Word count: 3,548 Contents: (Minors DNI). Drinking/tipsy sex, tit play, unprotected sex, cream pie, semi public sex. Author's notes: A new collab with @fuckiingloser. The draft of this fic has been in the backburner for over a month now. Also, I´m 90% sure that O´Doyle is a fan-given last name but it´s ok, it´s canon to me. Mandatory "english is not my first language" disclaimer. Pinterest moodboard and a playlist at the end so you can visualize!

The heels of your white tall boots clicked loudly over the near emptiness of the Boston Logan Airport. Luck was seemingly not on your side that night. It was christmas eve of 1977 and the snow storm outside had intended to hold you back for long. Your flight to Chicago had been canceled and no taxis were running this late with the weather. Against your will, you would have to spend your christmas eve and christmas morning on one of those uncomfortable terminal seats until another flight became available.

Resigned, you walked towards a more secluded part of the dead airport. A small handful of people were asleep in chairs, smoking or reading a book. What at your arrival had been a chaotic, bustling center was now a still image of patience.

You set down your bags, thankfully a few vending machines were nearby. The packaged snacks were a far cry from a christmas dinner, but enough to keep you at ease. Quietly, you settled down on an empty chair and opened a book, the words your only company as you ate from a crinkly little bag.

The story was interesting, you had barely had time to read more than a few pages during your stay in Boston, so your curiosity aided your distraction. Time started to flow as fast as the snow outside fell. The howling wind and sometimes a few distant coughs or murmurs were imperceptible to your rolling imagination. It wasn’t until a masculine irish voice spoke to you, that you got pulled out of your trance.

“Excuse me, miss…” You looked up from the page to see a rather handsome man standing next to you. “Just wondering if this seat is taken?” He asked with a small smirk. You looked around, and confirmed that in your time distracted nothing had changed. The sea of empty seats still surrounded you. Yet, this handsome stranger wanted to sit right next to you…

You smirked back, taking in the sight of him: the shaggy brown hair, the perfect blue eyes, the sexy moustache. He was wearing a dark brown leather jacket, a button up shirt and dark pants. The preview of what you assumed to be a catholic golden medal peeked out from the confines of his shirt. He stood there with a confidence that was difficult to ignore.

“It's not taken…” You spoke with a smile, trying to not blush.

Your eyes discreetly roamed over his frame as he set down his bag and sat right next to you. The man was confident, he didn’t hesitate to face you right away and look over you, his pale blue eyes fixated on your mini skirt and the exposed softness of your legs that ended with your tall boots. Then, when his gaze went back up, he followed the curve of your black turtleneck and your chest, your lack of bra so noticeable it was almost endearing. In the end, he finally admired your beautiful face in all its glory.

“Couldn’t have a pretty thing like you all by yourself on christmas eve... So I figured I'd keep you company for the night…” The handsome stranger said with a cocky smile.

“How sweet of you…” You replied with a soft little laugh. Any other man who would have tried that on you wouldn’t have seen such cuteness from you, but he was just so good looking and so sincere. The airport atmosphere, while quiet, was not completely empty. And he was right, you could use the company on this lonely christmas eve…

His name was Chris O’Doyle, and your ears hadn’t fooled you, he was as Irish as whiskey. Dublin born and raised and very proud of it. His deep, confident voice made you forget all about your book as you caught all his flirty hints and returned the sentiment. What a shame this was temporary, the snow canceled his flight as well, and just like you, he would wait until the morning for things to get better. The only difference was that you would get on a plane to your home in Chicago and Chris to his home in Dublin.

“What brought you to Boston?” You asked, prompting a smile out of him.

“Just some business.” Chris said ominously, not giving any more details and no hints present in his body language. “What about you, love?”

“I was here to see a friend for the week.” You answered simply with a little smile.

“A boyfriend?” He questioned with an eyebrow raised, curiosity and a faint mixture of caution and the foundations of healthy envy breaking a simmer in him.

“No boyfriend…” You laughed a little with a headshake. “I was visiting a friend who just had a baby, actually.” Chris grinned at your answer, the simmer cooling off.

“Gotta say… I’m shocked that a pretty girl like you isn’t spoken for… But I guess it’s my lucky day…” It was hard to not feel the heat making your cheeks burn and the space between your legs tingle when he said that. Damn him for being so charming, and damn him for having those beautiful attentive pale blue eyes that made you understand why there was a whole song named like that. You crossed your legs in an attempt to snuff out the burning desire you had for this handsome stranger.

“I guess so…” You flirted back, and his smile grew. Goodbye to your attempt to keep your desires in check.

Chris leaned in a bit closer to you, engulfed in the conversation and anchored to your gaze. In between words, he decided to tuck a piece of hair behind your ear very gently, the warmth brewing between you making you forget about the freezing hell outside.

The passage of time was imperceptible in his company, the silence of the airport felt even comforting in a way, nobody to interrupt his flirty jokes, his talks about life in Ireland and his full undivided attention towards you. Not hard to believe you had grown infatuated with this handsome Irishman in the course of an hour.

“I was saving this for the plane ride...” Chris murmured, a little secret between the two of you. He reached down into his bag and pulled out a silver flask. “But I figure if we’ve gotta spend the night shacked up in the airport… We could have a little fun, hm? Whaddaya say?”

His deep voice made everything inside you scream “yes”, but your actions just made you nod calmly with an accepting smirk. You took the flask and took a swig that made your throat burn. You coughed, whatever alcohol that was, it had nothing to do with the fun martinis and beer you were used to. Chris chuckled heartily at the face you made.

“That's real irish whiskey love. Strong stuff.” He announced really late, a laugh still echoing in his words. He took the flask from your hands and downed some of it for himself like it was water.

Even if it had almost set your throat on fire, you sucked it up, taking turns sharing the flask with him until only one sip remained. Chris, being a gentleman, gave it to you, the last act of chivalry that survived since the whiskey made him progressively more touchy with you. His calloused fingertips brushed against your knee, then his hand gradually rested on it. Soon enough his entire palm laid comfortably over the soft flesh of your thigh, strategically positioned so it covered all your exposed skin and not the fabric of your skirt. But even tipsy and handsy, Chris still listened to you.

“God, you’re just gorgeous…” he said somewhat out of the blue, making you smile, your face already warm thanks to the whiskey. “Pretty face… Even prettier body…” he added, his voice husky and heavily accented, caressing your ears like velvet and like his hand caressed your thigh. Your pussy immediately clenched at the touch of his rough palm.

Chris’ attention, for the first time in a while, diverted from your face and found the clock upon the wall. It read 2 minutes after midnight.

“Well, would ya look at that? it’s christmas…” He announced, turning back to look into your eyes. “A pretty girl like you should always get a gift on christmas day…”

His thumb rubbed slow circles over your thigh. His eyes gleamed, locked on yours.

“...and I think I have just the idea for the perfect present…” He whispered, and with that, his smile turned into a devious smirk. He stood up firmly and held his hand out to you, tempting the devils out of you.

“C'mon.. follow me, love.” Chris smiled just so charmingly, you didn’t think twice. Whiskey and charm were such a powerful tool for you. Happily, you obliged and took his hand, leaving the emptiness of the dead airport until a sign appeared in front of your eyes: Maintenance Closet.

Chris took a chance and discovered the door was unlocked, a rush of cocky triumph running in his veins.

“After you, love.” He practically purred to you and you made your way into the small room. Shelves of cleaning products, mops, brooms and a small desk tucked in the corner welcomed you two in between the dim light.

With the door locked behind you, Chris slowly started to back you against the wall, keeping you well placed between his chest and a safety poster hanging there.

“I-I’ve never done anything like this before… Always been a good girl...” You spoke so softly, playing the innocent angel when you knew very well your panties were getting wetter by the second. He smiled as if he could tell, one hand coming up to touch your hip and the other stroking your cheek in delight.

“Well… Being naughty gets you on my nice list...” His whisper was magnetic, imperceptibly so, you didn’t know when you leaned so close to him, to his whiskey lips. “Now let me give you that present I promised you…”

Without another word his lips crashed against yours, his tongue slipped into your warm mouth like it belonged there and tangled with yours. Your soft hands buried in his curls for some needed leverage, desperation soaking the kiss. You groaned softly when his body pressed harder against you, sandwiching you between his torso and the wall and making you feel his hard cock through his jeans.

You both knew just how risky this was, whoever worked in this closet would definitely come back at some unknown time, the possibility of it happening while Chris fucked you was just as slim as it was huge. But, in the very end, with your cunt clenching around nothing and his tongue swirling hotly in your mouth, you did not care at all if anyone found you.

Chris shared the sentiment, his teeth gently nipped at your lower lip and pulled it deliciously before releasing it to whisper in your ear.

“I’m gonna fuck your pretty pussy till you come all over my cock…” He purred, his words going straight to your already aching cunt and making you moan a little. Pleased by your reaction, Chris’ hand pushed up your skirt over your hips and exposed the black lace panties underneath.

“Mmm, you like that idea, huh?” He asked, moving to look into your eyes with a smirk. The pride of making a beautiful woman like you feel like this with mere words made his chest swell. His thumb found its way right to your clothed clit and gave it an experienced rub. The texture of the lace and the size of his fingertip sent a jolt of electricity to you, and more slick to your needy cunt.

“Fuck- you’re already soaked..” He said with a smirk. “All that because of me?” You nodded eagerly, it was the whole and only truth.

“All for you…” You whispered back, another roll of his thumb on your clit making you moan. Chris smiled, more than satisfied with your submission.

“You won’t be needing these anymore.” He whispered, pushing your panties down until they were a puddle on the well cleaned floor. Instinctively, you stepped out of them, and Chris couldn’t resist the temptation of picking them up and shoving them in his pocket like a thief.

“Now as for your gift to me…” He started. “I need to see these perfect tits I've been trying not to drool over in this tight sweater of yours…”

His bluntness made you giggle, and your inner christmas spirit made you comply with his request. Slowly, you pulled your black turtleneck up your chest, revealing that his early suspicions were very real: you had no bra on. Pale blue eyes fell from your face to your tits.

“Christ-“ He said breathlessly, his eyes wide. Your pretty tits bounced free for your sweater that now laid on the floor. “No bra… good girl.” He cooed, his large hand coming up to cup one in reverent greed, then his rough fingers grabbed your hard nipple and rolled it, earning a moan from you.

“They’re sensitive…” You whined softly.

“Mmm, I can tell love…” He whispered and did exactly what you imagined he would do: lean down and capture your nipple into his mouth, his tongue swirling over it mercilessly. You gasped and buried your hands in his dark hair, his hand squeezing your other breast softly to balance things out for your sensitive tits. Quite the difficult task, as his moustache tickled the soft skin on your breasts and sent shivers down your spine and into your cunt.

You tugged on his hair, getting a groan from him and an increase in the intensity of his mouth. He sucked your nipple hungrily, letting it go with a loud pop before switching to the other side.

“These tits… Fuckin’ perfect...” He mumbled as his tongue flicked over the sensitive bud.

“Chris..” You whispered, followed by an exquisite series of moans. He hummed happily hearing you moan his name.

Swiftly, he catched your nipple between his teeth gently, your eyes fluttering open to meet his in a silent conversation. He bit down ever so gently, the same care as if he bit his own hand. All you could do was moan loudly at the delicious junction of pain and pleasure.

“Chris, please… Need you…” You managed to beg so prettily that he released your nipple from his gentle bite. He stood up again and smirked.

“I need you too, pretty girl…” He admitted, looking between you two at his painfully hard erection in his pants. “You’ve got me so fuckin hard… Need to bury my cock in your wet cunt..” He growled at you, his hands yanked down his zipper and he pulled his briefs and pants off in one go. His thick uncut cock sprung free immediately, and you bit your lip at the sight.

“Big…” You whispered mindlessly, your eyes fixated on a drop of precum leaking from the head.

“We'll make it fit baby… Don’t worry.” He groaned out, using a finger to tilt your face up. Then, he placed a hot searing kiss on your lips, you wrapped your arms around him and pulled him close in response.

Chris showed off his strength to you when he picked you up effortlessly in one motion, putting your back against the wall and wrapping your legs around his hips. His hands gripped the underside of your thighs and held you up. Breaking the kiss with a wet sound, he looks between you, his eyes devouring your wet pussy before looking back up at your face.

“Are you ready for me?” He purred with a smirk. You bit your lip and nodded so obediently, it was cute.

“Good girl…” He growled, gently pushing you forward and guiding himself into your tight, hot entrance that had been ready for him ever since he said ‘hello’ hours ago…

As his tip slid into you both moaned in unison, his thick cock stretching you deliciously. Your inner walls throb around him, slowly but surely getting used to his girth. You whimpered, letting your head fall back against the wall.

“Fuuuuuuck…” Chris groaned loudly. “This cunt’s squeezing me so good… So tight n’ wet for me…” the lust in his voice fanned your neck and sent ripples through you, a few open mouthed kisses and nibbles following suit. He gave you the chance to adjust, more than aware of the sheer size of his cock. You felt him everywhere, almost splitting you apart, only moans came from your lips as a form of coherent sound. All your energies were focused on making his thick cock fit. At this rate, you were convinced that neither of you was going to last long.

Clinging to him, you felt him starting to move his hips, fucking you against the wall with your thighs held up. He had no time to waste, the faint rattle of the safety poster on the wall that your back hit with every thrust served as a reminder of the riskiness of it all. He pistoned his hips harder, desperate for release just like you.

“Fuck-oh-oh my god...” You babbled, he pounded relentlessly. Your cunt throbbed in racing desire against every vein and curve of his cock.

“You fuckin like it, baby?” He purred to you, his hot breath caressing your ear. His hips kept up their rhythm well. “This pussy is like heaven… It’s beggin’ me to come inside...”

You moaned loudly at the thought, and he groaned when his cock got a tight squeeze from you.

“Yes.. yes please…” You whimpered so desperately, pathetically but beautifully begging for a perfect stranger’s cum.

“‘Please’ what, love…? You gotta say it… Tell me what you need.” Your handsome stranger commanded between heavy breaths, fucking you hard into the closet wall. In between your blanking brain, you found the correct words in you to beg for the tight pressure in your lower stomach to turn into a needed orgasm.

“Please... Please, come deep.” You moaned, his hips pistoning in you and interrupting your speech. Chris felt his own brain short circuit at that moment, his fingers dug into the flesh of your thighs.

“Fucking hell… I’m not gonna last long…” He warned, keeping up his rhythm and leaning into your ear. “But this pretty pussy is gonna come first baby…” He then promised, nibbling on your earlobe like it was edible.

This man was pure magic, your pussy knew it. You moaned loudly at his words, not knowing what words were anymore. Your legs wrapped greedily around him and pulled him much closer, squishing your bouncing tits against his chest. A low growl of desire took over his huffs of hot air and he moved his hips harder and faster, going impossibly deep and hitting places barely explored.

“Oh my God…” You cried loudly, not even caring who could hear anymore. Chris was hitting all the right spots over and over again, making you melt in his strong arms. “Please…” You whimpered, clinging to him.

“Come for me… Come on my fuckin’ cock, baby…” He urged you desperately, mirroring the way he fucked you. Your eyes fluttered close, feeling overwhelmed with pleasure and finding yourself seconds away from an orgasm. His lips crashed into yours in a hot and messy kiss that just did it for your throbbing cunt.

You felt it. The pressure boiled over and your orgasm hit you hard, nearly senseless.

“Oh fuck... Chris… I-I’m coming!” You whimpered as best as you could, letting out a series of moans against his lips. Your pussy clenched around him repeatedly, almost possessively, soaking his thick cock in your juices. Your legs around him trembled out of control, only the grip of his strong hands kept you nice and steady against the wall.

“Fuck.. me too.” He groaned loudly, his rhythm slowing down. “This pussy feels so good milking my cock..”

Like clockwork, you felt him pulse inside you and heard his rough groan of pleasure. His hips finally stopped and he held you there, pinned against the wall, his hot cum dripping down inside you and down his softening cock.

He rested his forehead against yours so gently, finishing. You panted heavily, reeling from the intensity and danger of what you just did and where you did it…

“Holy shit..” He whispered after a minute, pulling out of your cunt. Carefully, he set you down on your feet and wobbling legs, the structure of your high boots keeping you steady.

Chris didn’t speak much as he pulled his jeans up and covered his well spent cock. He helped you adjust your miniskirt like a gentleman then put his hand on the wall next to your head like a flirt. The other hand was on your cheek, stroking your soft skin before leaning in to kiss you softly and sweetly. Butterflies in your chest and stomach at the gentleness.

When he pulled back, he looked into your eyes like he was trying to memorize the color of your iris, his thumbs gently brushing over your bottom lip leaving tingles on their wake. With a cheeky smile and a glint of mischief in his pale blue eyes, he spoke:

“How's that for a christmas gift, pretty girl?”

Pinterest moodboard by my dear @fuckiingloser.

Chris playlist made by me with mostly time accurate songs!

#cillian murphy #cillian murphy fic #cillian murphy smut #cillian murphy x reader #cillian murphy characters #cillian murphy fanfiction #chris o´doyle #chris free fire #free fire #free fire 2016 #free fire movie #fanfic

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