#What's that about massive corrupt companies...?_

[greedlr]

Sir please get some cord organizers. There are some pretty good ones you can get off amazon, or if you dont want to support a massive corrupt company you can maybe look for some at Staples. I dont know. Send one of your roombas out

You say this,

and yet you are always so thankless

when I organize all of your various cords for you.

'I can't accurately test when my right thigh is zip-tied to my left elbow' you say.

Selfish. Selfish and disorganized_

[muntitled]

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧

→ Mingyu x Fem!reader

→ Summary: "If you wanted me to get you pregnant so bad, all you had to was ask."

→ Warnings: Established Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Businessman au, Humour, Slight!Body Dysmorphia, Insecurities, Workaholic!Reader, Shy!Reader, Slight Male Manipulation, Slight!Angst, Smut (+18), Semi!Public Sex, Slight Coercion, Needy!Mingyu, He Whimpers, Pervy!Mingyu, Corruption Kink, Desperate Sex, Massive Breeding kink, Mingyu has a choking kink, and a Praise kink, Slight!Daddy Kink, Unprotected Sex

Mingyu likes getting choked, pls argue with the wall

The dollop of heat in your stomach steadily grew into a pool of molten lava throughout the duration of the award ceremony. The entire televised event was supposed to be in celebration of your husband and the diligence he has extended to the company for all of 2 decades.

Instead, most of the evening is spent nursing your anxiety with a flute of champagne, while you attempt to not sweat through your very expensive makeup under the heat of multiple strobe lights.

Mingyu, sitting at the table beside you serves as your only anchor, keeping your feet planted firmly to the ground while the rest of the table exchange pleasantries involving baby pictures and ultrasounds.

The dread in your stomach only multiplies.

You've been made privy to how they speak about you and your husband behind gloved hands in hushed whispers. A husband who has had to be burdened with a wife whose internal clock was no match for the importance of a career. Perhaps they thought you were too self important and too driven. Perhaps that explains why you were always invited to events out of courtesy and never out of true interest. Perhaps-

"Stop that." Mingyu's voice travels to your ear at a low and conspiratorial baritone while the rest of wives and husband at the table talk animatedly.

"Stop what?" You ask while Mingyu draws your attention to his hand now resting on your thigh underneath the table.

"Don't play with me. I can tell when you're overthinking," He says, letting his palm brush over the sequins of your pitch black dress. It matched his all black suit to rude perfection, truly making you believe you were the best dressed couple in the whole event. "If you're gonna be thinking about something, I'd rather it be the likelihood of me eating you out in this dress after we're done."

His words succeed in dragging your thoughts away from the happy couples and their happy families and you meet his eyes and the amusement swimming within them.

"Is sex really all you think about-"

Mingyu answers your question by suddenly grabbing a hold of your hand and forcing your palm over his lap until your palm is lightly grazing the bulge forming there.

"Let's hope this ends soon so we can get the fuck out of here." The rest of the event was spent with you, staring down at the table in a mindless, lustful daze while Mingyu still guided your palm up and down the bulge in his pants. It was conspicuous enough for it to look like his hand was simply resting atop yours, if anyone really got particularly nosy. Luckily, everyone else was too drunk on overpriced soju to recognize Mingyu's forced self pleasuring while he took casual little sips from his glass intermittently.

You were both relieved once it was time to go home.

This inability to adapt into the upper echelons of housewife society had not bothered you initially and it certainly did not bother your husband. In fact, someone as aloof and optimistic as Mingyu was seldom concerned with the matters of holding face for a backwards capitalistic society.

"If we weren't rich I thoroughly believe we would be those 'eat the rich' people." Mingyu announces as he trails into the bathroom behind you. The overhead lights bathe the bathroom's onyx accents in a dim light, successfully relaxing you and easing the bundle of knots that had built up in your shoulders.

Mingyu seems equally pleased to be back home, kicking off his Abercrombie loafers and watching them fly into a corner while he undoes the buttons of his jet black dress shirt. His tall frame is hunched over as he wraps his arms around your stomach, allowing you to lead him to the bathroom sinks with heavy footsteps like a 187 centimetre baby.

You, of course, do not object when he pushes his head into the space between your neck and shoulder as you begin to brush your teeth. If the award ceremony was as draining for him as it was for you, then this truly is the first moment he is able to let himself go the entire day.

"I think we can still be those 'eat the rich' people because it's not like we're rich by choice, right?" Seeing your husband constantly run the risk of impending communism would be amusing, were it not for the sour taste still present in your mouth from the work event Mingyu had just taken you too.

"At least you got to watch me in my element-" He grumbles against your skin before begrudgingly peeling himself off of you to make his way to his side of the bathroom,

"Ugh," Mingyu groans with exaggeration as he commences with his skin care, "You literally got to watch your sexy and talented husband accept a corporate award in a room full of people. I'm so jealous of you,"

"Ugh, I know!" You nod back, "Jihoon looked so good on that podium. Remind me to send him a message later." You evade Mingyu's deadpan look through the oval shaped mirror as you continue to brush.

"On a serious note, Gyu, I'm glad you had fun while I was being forced to entertain those industry housewives." You momentarily stop your brushing, "I'm thoroughly overwhelmed by ultrasounds!" You exclaim frustratedly through a gurgle of toothpaste. The very thought of those women shot your blood pressure to hell.

Their idealistic lives and their idealistic vaginas that could somehow push out a steady stream of babies before snapping back as if nothing ever happened. Business as usual.

Meanwhile, your body threw a tantrum the very second you even had a vague thought of eating something outside the bounds of your diet.

Mingyu adored every part of you - you know this - but that nauseating feeling of inadequacy always crept up on you in moments of weakness.

You sigh, "I think those women have magical vaginas."

"Hey." Mingyu says, patting down his face, "All women have magical vaginas but you especially."

You swiftly ignore him and continue your furious brushing as you say, "Every single day it's 'This one is pregnant!' 'This one wants to get pregnant,' 'This one is trying to get pregnant!'" You rant, completely oblivious to the way Mingyu watches you through the mirror as you continue.

"'I'm not quite sure when it became socially accessible for couples to just air out their breeding kinks to the public-" an ungentlemanly snort escapes through Mingyu's mouth and he pauses to shake his head and compose himself.

"I'm ultra-sounded out!" You exclaim, finally bending over to spit out a wad of toothpaste. In your periphery, Mingyu watches you with that passive look of contentment and unwavering adoration that almost never seems to leave his face in your presence.

Despite his overly humorous tendencies at times, Mingyu also harboured the habit of reading in between the lines - he had to, not only for his job but for his romantic life as well. Being blessed with a shy partner meant Mingyu had to dig just a little deeper past the veneer of everything you say, to get just a little closer to what you actually meant.

Your shyness and stoicism is what initially drew him to you in the first place. Always beating around the proverbial bush to protect your most sacred dignity and independence. It was always a struggle for Mingyu but it turned him on way too easily to picture his put-together, independent little wife needing him in a way she might not even know.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" You ask quietly, lifting your head before reigning your braids into a ponytail.

"How am I looking at you?" Mingyu asks in a voice way too husky to harbour any sense of professionalism.

"Are you seriously turned on right now?" There is no use in denying it because Mingyu knew you could read him like an open book. There's a soberness that hits him when he's turned on.

He jokes less than usual and assumes a more… slutty disposition that neither him nor you have ever been able to tame. Mingyu rubs the excess cream into his hands before leaning against the marble countertops. He watches you with a small, dangerous smirk that sends a flurry of butterflies swimming the pits of your stomach.

"If you wanted me to get you pregnant so badly, all you had to do was ask." His sentence bulldozes through the silence, steals the air right out of your lungs and nearly sweeps your feet out from underneath you. The world practically spins for a second but you grapple desperately onto your sensibilities for your sensibilities are one of the very few things you can arm yourself against your husband's slutty seduction.

"I think I could've squeezed you into my busy schedule," He chuckles lightly before stepping forward.

Almost automatically you step backwards, which evidently gets Mingyu way too excited. He raises his eyebrows with a slight before he's closing the distance between the two of you with 2 wide strides.

The light pouring down from the ceiling suddenly feels too warm, and the air feels like you've teleported to a crowded bazaar in the centre of the desert. You refuse to make eye contact with Mingyu, looming over you. You only splay a hand against his chest as you attempt to chuckle.

"You're being ridiculous." You say, "If you need to cum so bad, use your hand."

"Nah," He shakes his head without ever breaking eye contact, "That would be a waste, wouldn't it?" Mingyu's eyes frantically search your features for the same traces of lust so shamelessly displayed across his own visage. His lips are parted with his quiet breathing. "Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it."

It felt like a betrayal on everything you held dear, admitting that the idea of him cumming inside you with the purpose of getting you pregnant turned you on. It felt like a betrayal on your career and your goals and aspirations.

However, Mingyu's sensibilities are completely clouded by unshakeable lust. He is so easily stimulated by every single thing about you, the softness of your body, the familiarity of your scent and the mental image of seeing you actually pregnant with his child. It has him pushing you further against the bathroom wall until the coolness of the stone sank steadily through your night dress.

Mingyu's hand immediately rips the offending article of clothing, pushing your night dress up slowly and feeling his own cock ache at how you silently comply.

"It's really easy, baby. I just need you to tell me you want me to cum in that little pussy of yours and I'll do it. Just wanna…" Mingyu's incoherence during states of exceptional lust always succeeded in making you absolutely wet. He became an insatiable, talkative and blubbering mess.

"...Just wanna make you happy," His breathing picks up almost as easily as yours, and inside himself, Mingyu releases a shotgun prayer that you want this just as bad as he does. He hopes your mind has been flooded with the exact same fantasies of him, sliding his bare cock into your soaking cunt. Him ramming into you and finishing inside of you and-

"Ah- fuck," He hisses, unable to get your panties down all the way before he's letting his fingers drift across your slippery folds. "Look at how wet you are, baby. You really do want me to cum inside your pretty little pussy, don't you?"

Mingyu's cock twitches uncomfortably in his pants while he drifts his fingers over your puffy clit, pulling a strangled moan from your throat.

"Feels good, baby?" He whimpers before slotting his hips between your legs. Mingyu's breath is warm against the side of your face as he continues to rub infuriating circles on your clit. "I can make you feel even better baby… if you let me fuck you, I can make us both feel good, yeah?" He's a whining mess - you both are as your hips move in tandem against his hands.

"Fuck, baby I need you to tell me you want this. I need you to tell me I can throw away the condoms, that I can cum inside you-"

"F-Fuck, Daddy," Your slip-up would've gone perfectly unnoticed, were it not for the heavy, almost oppressive silence between the two of you in the bathroom. Mingyu's ears perk up like a puppy that had just heard his favorite word, and he pulls himself away to gaze deeply into your eyes with adoration and awe. Mingyu's pink lips hang open as he scrambles back up to his height. He cups your cheeks with both hands, and you lean into his warm calluses as his thumbs rub gentle circles on your cheek.

The kiss he leaves on your nose is delicate and romantic.

The perfect calm before the proverbial storm.

Mingyu then nods slowly as he says, "Well now I'm definitely going to fuck you," the conviction and the bass in his voice urges a pathetic whimper through your lips and you're left to comply limply as Mingyu places a palm on your exposed thigh. He lifts you up until your leg is locked firmly around his hip and he's almost perfectly slotted between your bare legs. The feeling of having him so close to you, in such a starkly intimate position leaves you both momentarily speechless and you're watching each other as if terrified of breaking this spell of lust.

Mingyu is deliberate in his actions as he moves his hand to pull his cock out of his pants, all without breaking eye contact.

"Don't play with me like this, baby," it's the most serious he has ever been, and your back is almost moulded to the wall as Mingyu lines the tip of his aching cock to your dripping cunt. "I was literally so close to cumming in my pants, so if you're playing with me right now-"

"Mingyu," your voice is airy as you push your hips forward, taking initiative, as you always did, until the head of his cock was prodding your entrance. He shivers greatly before stealing a glance down at his cock entering you so swiftly, before he gazes deep into your eyes once more.

"If you want me…" Mingyu whispers as he fully sheathes his cock inside you, overcome by yet another violent shiver. "Baby, you have me."

The first thrust is nearly cataclysmic and he has to stop himself from cumming on the spot. Seeing him so incredibly turned on, so ready to burst at the seams has your cunt clenching around him, pulling him deeper and deeper until his gigantic cock was stretching your cunt to what felt like its limits. That second thrust completely drains him of all his composure and soon Mingyu's fucking you relentlessy into the wall as if he both hated you and loved you and did not know which was which.

Your mouth hangs open as you watch him absolutely ravage you. His dark eyes are hooded with lust and he's babbling his incoherent sentences while his long, messy hair brushes over his cheeks. He is absolutely fargone as he thrusts his hips into you, while his other hand is stationed against the wall above you. "Thank you for letting me do this, baby," he damn near whimpers as he pushes himself harder and faster into you, unable to stop the neediness from sinking into his tone. "Thank you, thank you, thank you-"

"You're doing so well baby" You whisper, causing his hips to stutter against yours while a pained moan releases itself from your throat.

Your mouth is still hanging open and Mingyu takes the opportunity to dip down and crash his lips onto yours. The kiss is furious and desperate and you realise this is exactly what you love about him. You appreciate how easy it is to please him, how unashamed Mingyu is of displaying his emotions. He is loud and passionate and it drives you absolutely insane.

"Fuck-I'm close," He breathes, as he peppers kisses along your face. His hand squeezes desperately at your breasts as he pants in your ear. "Tell me to cum inside you- pleasepleaseplease,"

You are operating purely on the lust distributed from Mingyu's incessant whining and whimpering until an idea strikes you so vividly you almost wonder why you had not done this before.

In between your feverish panting and Mingyu's ravaging motions, you delve your head into his hair before peeling his face away from you. His eyebrows are furrowed in confusion before you slither your hand down to lock your palm around the his throat. Your hand doesn't fully enclose his neck but you succeed in adding pressure, causing the man before you to roll his eyes into the back of his skull in absolutely ecstasy-

"Oh fuck-I'm cumming-" his body spasms before you in a euphoric daze, quickly triggering your own orgasm as you continue to choke him and move your hips in tandem with his cock.

"Fuck, oh fuck!" He swears as he clamps his hand around your thigh as if begging to spread you wider, to push in deeper until he's filling you up completely with his load. It's messy and so wildly intimate, you're both lost in the crevices of your own respective pleasure. How anyone could make someone feel as completed as you two currently feel is so unimaginable, you both struggle to find the words. Mingyu is a panting mess above you while you attempt to ease your runway heart.

It strikes you then that you're perhaps afraid, now that the lust has cleared that the post nut clarity might rid him of his earlier statements.

All you do is watch as he places another kiss on the tip of your nose before easing his cock out of you.

"I'll run out to buy Plan B tomorrow. You don't have to -"

He shushes you almost immediately as he pads over the bathroom sink. Mingyu hums softly as he ruffles through the medicine cabinet until he finds what he's looking for. All you can do is watch as he dumps the entire contents of your birth control pills down the toilet. He never breaks eye contact, only maintaining a wide slightly manic smile.

<3

© to @mphountitled on tumblr; do not repost

[evilwickedme]

It's so clear to me that so many so called "anti Zionists" - especially the non Palestinian goyim - have no idea how the Israeli election system works, and how bibi remains in power, and why we had five elections in like, three years, despite elections supposedly being every four years - because he couldn't keep a government stable enough to stay in power. Bibi netanyahu is MASSIVELY unpopular, and his approval rate has tanked even more since the war started, even among likud voters, the people who vote for HIS party (although their approval rates ranked less than the rest of the population). He has an extreme right wing government because if he didn't cooperate with right wing extremists and haredim he straight up wouldn't have the majority he needs to be our prime minister in the first place. He's been on trial for corruption for years at this point, and tried to completely restructure the judicial system just to avoid prison - leading to nearly a full year of protests until Oct 7. Luckily it didn't end up passing.

If elections were held at any point in the last five months since this war started, not only would he not be PM, we'd straight up have a center-left government. My recent transformation into a Yair Golan stan account is a joke but also 100% real - according to polls from the last three months or so, if he does what he's campaigning to do, leading a combined avoda and meretz party, he'd get enough votes to have an actual influential left wing party in the government for the first time in decades. An unbelievable amount of Israelis are calling for bibi to resign, many of them not calling for it to happen after the war ends, but right now.

I am sourcing this information from polls conducted by channels 11 (kan), 12, and 13, as well as by the Israeli democracy foundation, all but one of our important news channels - channel 14, the last channel, is our equivalent of fox news, and despite their numbers often being extremely different due to what is in my opinion biased reporting and flawed methodology, even they at times have had to admit that gantz is currently leading in the polls.

(Disclaimer that I work for a company that provides subtitles for channel 13, but i do not directly work for channel 13. Channel 13 leans mostly center left, and employs several (self identified) Arab Israelis in front of the camera, including Lucy Aharish, who makes considerable effort to bring Palestinian and Bedouin perspectives to her show. It also employs at least one massive racist though.)

I write this post because I keep seeing an unsourced claim by goyim that there's a poll showing a high rate of approval - 88%! - of the destruction and/or deaths Israel and the IDF are causing in Gaza. I went down a rabbit hole and simply couldn't find a poll asking about approval of deaths or destruction, although maybe I was looking up the wrong keywords? As a result I have just... So many questions. Because with the information I have from trustworthy local news sources, from the news channels I mentioned above and papers such as yediot aharonot/ynet and Haaretz, it doesn't fit with current public opinion, including many recent protests for more efforts towards a ceasefire. So my questions are thus -

Who conducted this poll? Was it a think tank, a government agency, a paper, a news channel? If so, which one? Are they left leaning, right leaning? Was it conducted by an Israeli or foreign institution?

Who did they ask? Was it a sample of likud voters; all Israeli adults; did they include only Jewish Israelis or also Arab citizens (approx. 1.5 million out of our 8 million population), Bedouins, and other minorities?

When was the poll conducted? Was it in October, immediately after the Oct 7 massacre, before the death toll in Gaza grew? Was it conducted more recently?

What, exactly, did they ask? Did they ask about destruction in general, or about the death toll in particular? Did they ask about the attempts to rescue hostages with military means, or all military actions? Did they ask about the number of Hamas operatives dead, about their estimated ratio of Hamas to civilians, about the total deaths?

What was the size of the pool surveyed? Was it conducted on a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people?

Because without this information, that one, sole statistic is essentially useless. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Always look at the source and ask: who asked the questions, who got asked, and what the questions were.

More specific statistics and sources under the cut.

I did find one survey by the Israel democracy foundation that asked if the IDF should take the Gazan suffering into account - an entirely different question, although it did still have a horrific 89% Jewish Israelis and 14% Arab Israelis and Palestinian citizens who said they shouldn't. That said, the pool they were drawing from was not very large - 500 of the interviews were conducted in Hebrew, 100 were conducted in Arabic. Also, of the people who supposedly said that they shouldn't, a little more than half of both populations said they should "somewhat" take it into account - that is, they didn't say they shouldn't take it into account at all, just not make it their first priority. This survey was conducted mid December.

In another survey by the same source with a slight larger sample size (a little over 600 Jewish Israelis and a little over 150 Arab Israelis), an insanely low 15% still wanted Bibi to be the PM, with the only candidate who received more than 6.5% being the center candidate Benny Gantz, who historically has tried to cooperate with center and left parties, with a whopping 23% of the votes. The survey included 10 candidates, as well as five other non candidate options. 4% voted "just not Bibi", and an actually insane 30.5% voted they were undecided. Only a quarter of those surveyed believed Bibi would manage to maintain a coalition after the war, a number that includes more extreme right wing voters, and only the ultra Orthodox haredi population had a majority of people (60%) who believed he can. This survey was conducted in January.

The channel 13 news survey from early March - barely over a week ago! - covered more specifically which parties would manage to get into the government and how many seats they would get, as under a certain amount of votes you simply do not get seats. Not all seats get into a coalition. According to their poll, the amount of seats the likud would get is halved, from 32 to 17, while gantz's the state camp would grow from 12 to 39. While currently meretz gets 4 seats and haavodah do not get enough votes to get a seat at the table so to speak, a combined haavodah and meretz under Yair Golan gets 9 mandates. In total, the right wing only get 47 mandates, well short of the amount of mandates necessary to create a government.

Channel 12's corresponding poll from January shows 35 mandates for gantz, and bibi had 18 mandates. Channel 11, in the same month, gave gantz 33 mandates and bibi 20.

I also sources an English Jerusalem post article which reports on channel 14's polls; jpost is a right wing biased paper, and yet even they report 36 mandates for gantz and 18 for bibi as of February.

Sources

The Israel democracy institute: 1 (English), 2 (Hebrew), 3 (Hebrew)

Haaretz: 1 (English) (paywalled)

Channel 13: 1 (Hebrew)

Ma'ariv: 1 (Hebrew) (reporting on channel 12)

Podcast which summarizes the above article: 1 (English) (includes transcript)

Kan 11: 1 (Hebrew)

Jpost: 1 (Hebrew)

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.

I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:

Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.

While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.

The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.

Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.

The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.

In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.

That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.

The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).

All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.

Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:

Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.

Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).

[brucewaynehater101]

Hear me out for something. So we agree that Tim definitely took a bunch of Ras ninjas when he blew up the place right? And they're *super* loyal to him and also very, very competent.

What if when Tim brings Bruce back from the Time Stream, once Bruce is healed up, he insists on taking over WE from Tim. Not because Tim is bad at it, but because he doesn't want to sit around doing nothing while he physically heals and isn't allowed to be Batman.

So Tim decides to use the money he made to revive Drake Industries. He'll need a bunch of very loyal workers who know how math works to fill out upper management to make sure there isn't any corruption and wouldn't you know it. He has a couple hundred of exactly what he needs stolen from ras who are getting antsy about not having anything to do.

It only takes a year, maybe two at the most, for Drake Industries to raise to rivaling Wayne Enterprises and Lex Corp like it used to before Tim's parents died. There are rumors though, that it's impossible to rise beyond a certain point in the company as all those positions are filled already and if a new one opens, it's given to someone that no one has ever heard of before (more defectors from Ras). All the people on the board are weirdly young (is that Olympic Gold Winner Cissie King Jones???) And one of them just had a big scandal go public about being Lex Luthor's illegitimate son that he kicked out for being gay?? This is not at all what happened with Kon, and Lex has been trying to calm the rumor mill around it but the gossip collums have taken this and ran with it.

You would think that with a board of directors so young and a company so new that's so big, corporate espionage on them would be *easy* but that's to the fact that every single member of upper management would die for Tim, none of it happens. His company is massive and air tight. People who try to bribe his workers into selling secrets often end up in strange accidents. After all, you can take the person out of the Ninja Death Cult, but you can't take the Ninja Death Cult out of the person.

Yes! There is a series not quite like this, but dear to me. "Where Bats and Birds Roost" by Mouse_in_this_house has BAMF Tim Drake with ex-LoA agent spy network that he hides via the Neon Knights initiative.

However, I love that your AU had Tim make it from the corpse of his parents' company. Instead of using Bruce's resources, Tim used the ones that only belong to him. I also like his rehabilitation plans for all the defectors and their loyalty to him because of it.

Tim should go around snatching up people from his enemies because he has better benefits, way less chance of the job killing its employees, and charisma. Maybe Bruce gets a little annoyed cause WE employees also prefer to work at Drake Industries (probably not, but it would be funny).

Also, YJ working for DI? Brilliant ^^

This type of chaos and the BAMF Tim are spices I need more of. Let Tim use his whacky ability to befriend his enemies for his benefit!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe! (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

Last year, Ed Pierson was supposed to fly from Seattle to New Jersey on Alaska Airlines. He boarded his flight, but then he had an urgent discussion with the flight attendant, explaining that as a former senior Boeing engineer, he'd specifically requested that flight because the aircraft wasn't a 737 Max:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/boeing-737-max-passenger-boycott/index.html

But for operational reasons, Alaska had switched out the equipment on the flight and there he was on a 737 Max, about to travel cross-continent, and he didn't feel safe doing so. He demanded to be let off the flight. His bags were offloaded and he walked back up the jetbridge after telling the spooked flight attendant, "I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane."

Boeing, of course, is a flying disaster that was years in the making. Its planes have been falling out of the sky since 2019. Floods of whistleblowers have come forward to say its aircraft are unsafe. Pierson's not the only Boeing employee to state – both on and off the record – that he wouldn't fly on a specific model of Boeing aircraft, or, in some cases any recent Boeing aircraft:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/22/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/#will-eventually-stop

And yet, for years, Boeing's regulators have allowed the company to keep turning out planes that keep turning out lemons. This is a pretty frightening situation, to say the least. I'm not an aerospace engineer, I'm not an aircraft safety inspector, but every time I book a flight, I have to make a decision about whether to trust Boeing's assurances that I can safely board one of its planes without dying.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't even have to think about this. I'd be able to trust that publicly accountable regulators were on the job, making sure that airplanes were airworthy. "Caveat emptor" is no way to run a civilian aviation system.

But even though I don't have the specialized expertise needed to assess the airworthiness of Boeing planes, I do have the much more general expertise needed to assess the trustworthiness of Boeing's regulator. The FAA has spent years deferring to Boeing, allowing it to self-certify that its aircraft were safe. Even when these assurances led to the death of hundreds of people, the FAA continued to allow Boeing to mark its own homework:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc

What's more, the FAA boss who presided over those hundreds of deaths was an ex-Boeing lobbyist, whom Trump subsequently appointed to run Boeing's oversight. He's not the only ex-insider who ended up a regulator, and there's plenty of ex-regulators now on Boeing's payroll:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/boeing-debacle-shows-need-to-investigate-trump-era-corruption/

You don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that companies have conflicts of interest when it comes to certifying their own products. "Market forces" aren't going to keep Boeing from shipping defective products, because the company's top brass are more worried about cashing out with this quarter's massive stock buybacks than they are about their successors' ability to manage the PR storm or Congressional hearings after their greed kills hundreds and hundreds of people.

You also don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that these conflicts persist even when a Boeing insider leaves the company to work for its regulators, or vice-versa. A regulator who anticipates a giant signing bonus from Boeing after their term in office, or a an ex-Boeing exec who holds millions in Boeing stock has an irreconcilable conflict of interest that will make it very hard – perhaps impossible – for them to hold the company to account when it trades safety for profit.

It's not just Boeing customers who feel justifiably anxious about trusting a system with such obvious conflicts of interest: Boeing's own executives, lobbyists and lawyers also refuse to participate in similarly flawed systems of oversight and conflict resolution. If Boeing was sued by its shareholders and the judge was also a pissed off Boeing shareholder, they would demand a recusal. If Boeing was looking for outside counsel to represent it in a liability suit brought by the family of one of its murder victims, they wouldn't hire the firm that was suing them – not even if that firm promised to be fair. If a Boeing executive's spouse sued for divorce, that exec wouldn't use the same lawyer as their soon-to-be-ex.

Sure, it takes specialized knowledge and training to be a lawyer, a judge, or an aircraft safety inspector. But anyone can look at the system those experts work in and spot its glaring defects. In other words, while acquiring expertise is hard, it's much easier to spot weaknesses in the process by which that expertise affects the world around us.

And therein lies the problem: aviation isn't the only technically complex, potentially lethal, and utterly, obviously untrustworthy system we all have to navigate. How about the building safety codes that governed the structure you're in right now? Plenty of people have blithely assumed that structural engineers carefully designed those standards, and that these standards were diligently upheld, only to discover in tragic, ghastly ways that this was wrong:

https://www.bbc.com/news/64568826

There are dozens – hundreds! – of life-or-death, highly technical questions you have to resolve every day just to survive. Should you trust the antilock braking firmware in your car? How about the food hygiene rules in the factories that produced the food in your shopping cart? Or the kitchen that made the pizza that was just delivered? Is your kid's school teaching them well, or will they grow up to be ignoramuses and thus economic roadkill?

Hell, even if I never get into another Boeing aircraft, I live in the approach path for Burbank airport, where Southwest lands 50+ Boeing flights every day. How can I be sure that the next Boeing 737 Max that falls out of the sky won't land on my roof?

This is the epistemological crisis we're living through today. Epistemology is the process by which we know things. The whole point of a transparent, democratically accountable process for expert technical deliberation is to resolve the epistemological challenge of making good choices about all of these life-or-death questions. Even the smartest person among us can't learn to evaluate all those questions, but we can all look at the process by which these questions are answered and draw conclusions about its soundness.

Is the process public? Are the people in charge of it forthright? Do they have conflicts of interest, and, if so, do they sit out any decision that gives even the appearance of impropriety? If new evidence comes to light – like, say, a horrific disaster – is there a way to re-open the process and change the rules?

The actual technical details might be a black box for us, opaque and indecipherable. But the box itself can be easily observed: is it made of sturdy material? Does it have sharp corners and clean lines? Or is it flimsy, irregular and torn? We don't have to know anything about the box's contents to conclude that we don't trust the box.

For example: we may not be experts in chemical engineering or water safety, but we can tell when a regulator is on the ball on these issues. Back in 2019, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought comment on its water safety regs. Dow Chemical – the largest corporation in the state's largest industry – filed comments arguing that WV should have lower standards for chemical contamination in its drinking water.

Now, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there are safe levels of chemical runoff in the water supply. There's a lot of water in the water supply, after all, and "the dose makes the poison." What's more, I use the products whose manufacture results in that chemical waste. I want them to be made safely, but I do want them to be made – for one thing, the next time I have surgery, I want the anesthesiologist to start an IV with fresh, sterile plastic tubing.

And I'm not a chemist, let alone a water chemist. Neither am I a toxicologist. There are aspects of this debate I am totally unqualified to assess. Nevertheless, I think the WV process was a bad one, and here's why:

https://www.wvma.com/press/wvma-news/4244-wvma-statement-on-human-health-criteria-development

That's Dow's comment to the regulator (as proffered by its mouthpiece, the WV Manufacturers' Association, which it dominates). In that comment, Dow argues that West Virginians safely can absorb more poison than other Americans, because the people of West Virginia are fatter than other Americans, and so they have more tissue and thus a better ratio of poison to person than the typical American. But they don't stop there! They also say that West Virginians don't drink as much water as their out-of-state cousins, preferring to drink beer instead, so even if their water is more toxic, they'll be drinking less of it:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/14/the-real-elitists-looking-down-on-trump-voters/

Even without any expertise in toxicology or water chemistry, I can tell that these are bullshit answers. The fact that the WV regulator accepted these comments tells me that they're not a good regulator. I was in WV last year to give a talk, and I didn't drink the tap water.

It's totally reasonable for non-experts to reject the conclusions of experts when the process by which those experts resolve their disagreements is obviously corrupt and irredeemably flawed. But some refusals carry higher costs – both for the refuseniks and the people around them – than my switching to bottled water when I was in Charleston.

Take vaccine denial (or "hesitancy"). Many people greeted the advent of an extremely rapid, high-tech covid vaccine with dread and mistrust. They argued that the pharma industry was dominated by corrupt, greedy corporations that routinely put their profits ahead of the public's safety, and that regulators, in Big Pharma's pocket, let them get away with mass murder.

The thing is, all that is true. Look, I've had five covid vaccinations, but not because I trust the pharma industry. I've had direct experience of how pharma sacrifices safety on greed's altar, and narrowly avoided harm myself. I have had chronic pain problems my whole life, and they've gotten worse every year. When my daughter was on the way, I decided this was going to get in the way of my ability to parent – I wanted to be able to carry her for long stretches! – and so I started aggressively pursuing the pain treatments I'd given up on many years before.

My journey led me to many specialists – physios, dieticians, rehab specialists, neurologists, surgeons – and I tried many, many therapies. Luckily, my wife had private insurance – we were in the UK then – and I could go to just about any doctor that seemed promising. That's how I found myself in the offices of a Harley Street quack, a prominent pain specialist, who had great news for me: it turned out that opioids were way safer than had previously been thought, and I could just take opioids every day and night for the rest of my life without any serious risk of addiction. It would be fine.

This sounded wrong to me. I'd lost several friends to overdoses, and watched others spiral into miserable lives as they struggled with addiction. So I "did my own research." Despite not having a background in chemistry, biology, neurology or pharmacology, I struggled through papers and read commentary and came to the conclusion that opioids weren't safe at all. Rather, corrupt billionaire pharma owners like the Sackler family had colluded with their regulators to risk the lives of millions by pushing falsified research that was finding publication in some of the most respected, peer-reviewed journals in the world.

I became an opioid denier, in other words.

I decided, based on my own research, that the experts were wrong, and that they were wrong for corrupt reasons, and that I couldn't trust their advice.

When anti-vaxxers decried the covid vaccines, they said things that were – in form at least – indistinguishable from the things I'd been saying 15 years earlier, when I decided to ignore my doctor's advice and throw away my medication on the grounds that it would probably harm me.

For me, faith in vaccines didn't come from a broad, newfound trust in the pharmaceutical system: rather, I judged that there was so much scrutiny on these new medications that it would overwhelm even pharma's ability to corruptly continue to sell a medication that they secretly knew to be harmful, as they'd done so many times before:

https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and-fall-of-vioxx

But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I'd long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shitheads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.

There's a name for this phenomenon: "schismogenesis." That's when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Think of self-described "progressives" who became cheerleaders for the America's cruel, ruthless and lawless "intelligence community" when it seemed that US spooks were bent on Trump's ouster:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

The fact that the FBI didn't like Trump didn't make them allies of progressive causes. This was and is the same entity that (among other things) tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But schismogenesis isn't merely a reactionary way of flip-flopping on issues based on reflexive enmity. It's actually a reasonable epistemological tactic: in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts. One shortcut – a shortcut that's failing – is to say, "Well, I'll provisionally believe whatever the expert system tells me is true." Another shortcut is, "I will provisionally disbelieve in whatever the people I know to act in bad faith are saying is true." That is, "schismogenesis."

Schismogenesis isn't a great tactic. It would be far better if we had a set of institutions we could all largely trust – if the black boxes where expert debate took place were sturdy, rectilinear and sharp-cornered.

But they're not. They're just not. Our regulatory process sucks. Corporate concentration makes it trivial for cartels to capture their regulators and steer them to conclusions that benefit corporate shareholders even if that means visiting enormous harm – even mass death – on the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

No one hates Big Tech more than I do, but many of my co-belligerents in the war on Big Tech believe that the rise of conspiratorialism can be laid at tech platforms' feet. They say that Big Tech boasts of how good they are at algorithmically manipulating our beliefs, and attribute Qanons, flat earthers, and other outlandish conspiratorial cults to the misuse off those algorithms.

"We built a Big Data mind-control ray" is one of those extraordinary claims that requires extraordinary evidence. But the evidence for Big Tech's persuasion machines is very poor: mostly, it consists of tech platforms' own boasts to potential investors and customers for their advertising products. "We can change peoples' minds" has long been the boast of advertising companies, and it's clear that they can change the minds of customers for advertising.

Think of department store mogul John Wanamaker, who famously said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Today – thanks to commercial surveillance – we know that the true proportion of wasted advertising spending is more like 99.9%. Advertising agencies may be really good at convincing John Wanamaker and his successors, through prolonged, personal, intense selling – but that doesn't mean they're able to sell so efficiently to the rest of us with mass banner ads or spambots:

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

In other words, the fact that Facebook claims it is really good at persuasion doesn't mean that it's true. Just like the AI companies who claim their chatbots can do your job: they are much better at convincing your boss (who is insatiably horny for firing workers) than they are at actually producing an algorithm that can replace you. What's more, their profitability relies far more on convincing a rich, credulous business executive that their product works than it does on actually delivering a working product.

Now, I do think that Facebook and other tech giants play an important role in the rise of conspiratorial beliefs. However, that role isn't using algorithms to persuade people to mistrust our institutions. Rather Big Tech – like other corporate cartels – has so corrupted our regulatory system that they make trusting our institutions irrational.

Think of federal privacy law. The last time the US got a new federal consumer privacy law was in 1988, when Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that prohibits video store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/why-vppa-protects-youtube-and-viacom-employees

It's been a minute. There are very obvious privacy concerns haunting Americans, related to those tech giants, and yet the closest Congress can come to doing something about it is to attempt the forced sale of the sole Chinese tech giant with a US footprint to a US company, to ensure that its rampant privacy violations are conducted by our fellow Americans, and to force Chinese spies to buy their surveillance data on millions of Americans in the lawless, reckless swamp of US data-brokerages:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1238435508/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-china

For millions of Americans – especially younger Americans – the failure to pass (or even introduce!) a federal privacy law proves that our institutions can't be trusted. They're right:

https://www.tiktok.com/@pearlmania500/video/7345961470548512043

Occam's Razor cautions us to seek the simplest explanation for the phenomena we see in the world around us. There's a much simpler explanation for why people believe conspiracy theories they encounter online than the idea that the one time Facebook is telling the truth is when they're boasting about how well their products work – especially given the undeniable fact that everyone else who ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a fantasist or a liar, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA to pick-up artists.

Maybe people believe in conspiracy theories because they have hundreds of life-or-death decisions to make every day, and the institutions that are supposed to make that possible keep proving that they can't be trusted. Nevertheless, those decisions have to be made, and so something needs to fill the epistemological void left by the manifest unsoundness of the black box where the decisions get made.

For many people – millions – the thing that fills the black box is conspiracy fantasies. It's true that tech makes finding these conspiracy fantasies easier than ever, and it's true that tech makes forming communities of conspiratorial belief easier, too. But the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn't a function of Big Data. It's a function of corruption – of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms' profits) are everywhere.

Progressives – which is to say, the coalition of liberals and leftists, in which liberals are the senior partners and spokespeople who control the Overton Window – used to identify and decry these conspiracies. But as right wing "populists" declared their opposition to these conspiracies – when Trump damned free trade and the mainstream media as tools of the ruling class – progressives leaned into schismogenesis and declared their vocal support for these old enemies of progress.

This is the crux of Naomi Klein's brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger: that as the progressive coalition started supporting these unworthy and broken institutions, the right spun up "mirror world" versions of their critique, distorted versions that focus on scapegoating vulnerable groups rather than fighting unworthy institutions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

This is a long tradition in politics: hundreds of years ago, some leftists branded antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Rather than condemning the system's embrace of the finance sector and its wealthy beneficiaries, anti-semites blame a disfavored group of people – people who are just as likely as anyone to suffer under the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_is_the_socialism_of_fools

It's an ugly, shallow, cartoon version of socialism's measured and comprehensive analysis of how the class system actually works and why it's so harmful to everyone except a tiny elite. Literally cartoonish: the shadow-world version of socialism co-opts and simplifies the iconography of class struggle. And schismogenesis – "if the right likes this, I don't" – sends "progressive" scolds after anyone who dares to criticize finance as the crux of our world's problems as popularizing "antisemetic dog-whistles."

This is the problem with "horseshoe theory" – the idea that the far right and the far left bend all the way around to meet each other:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

When the right criticizes pharma companies, they tell us to "do our own research" (e.g. ignore the systemic problems of people being forced to work under dangerous conditions during a pandemic while individually assessing conflicting claims about vaccine safety, ideally landing on buying "supplements" from a grifter). When the left criticizes pharma, it's to argue for universal access to medicine and vigorous public oversight of pharma companies. These aren't the same thing:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Long before opportunistic right wing politicians realized they could get mileage out of pointing at the terrifying epistemological crisis of trying to make good choices in an age of institutions that can't be trusted, the left was sounding the alarm. Conspiratorialism – the fracturing of our shared reality – is a serious problem, weakening our ability to respond effectively to endless disasters of the polycrisis.

But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: "conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things," rather than "a system that makes wrong explanations credible – and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy."

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Image: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrcgov/15993154185/

meanwell-packaging.co.uk https://www.flickr.com/photos/195311218@N08/52159853896

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

[sugarakis-p2]

Shigaraki hates Valentine Day

Shiggy hates this holiday until he meets you.

F/M Shigaraki Tomura/Reader chubby/plus size

Warning: Vaginal Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Nipple Licking, Binge Drinking, Dubious Morality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Political talk

Tomura woke up on Valentine Day with a deep-rooted hatred for the holiday. It was no different from any other day, as he despised each one that passed. But today, his disdain was amplified solely because it was Valentine Day.

He had hoped that, for once, he wouldn't have to spend the day alone or with Kurogiri. After all, he now had a team to spend it with. However, his expectations were quickly crushed when he realized that his team had other plans in mind. Instead of spending the day doing Kurogiri's exhausting team-building exercises, his teammates surprised him with gestures of affection. Toga and Magne each gave him chocolates but promptly announced that they were going to the mall to "stalk boys."

Meanwhile, Mr. Compress had other plans with a date, and that was a nicer way than the crude way of Muscular and Dabi saying they're gonna go get their "dicks and whistles wet." Spinner, as usual, had disappeared without a trace. And so, it was just Tomura and Kurogiri left, once again, to spend Valentine Day alone in each other's company. With a defeated sigh, Tomura handed his chocolates to Kurogiri.

"Where are you going, Tomura?" Kurogiri asked concerned.

"OUT!" Shigaraki yelled in frustration, his voice carrying down the hallway as he left in search of an internet café. He stormed out and made his way to the nearest open booth. His anger was simmering under the surface as he sat down and pulled up his black face mask, its matching hoodie pulled over his head. He absentmindedly tucked his father's hand in his front pocket as if cradling him in his arms.

But then, he noticed you. 

For the first time in his life, he didn't just see someone as a means to an end but as a desirable being. His mind wandered to dirty thoughts, something he had never cared for before. Your soft curves, your silky hair, the delicate nape of your neck. He couldn't help but feel drawn to you, something he had never experienced before. The pulsing beat of your heartstring visible on your neck only added to the attraction. He imagined wrapping his fingers around your neck, feeling your heartbeat racing under his touch, the pulse throbbing against the pads of his long digits. His tongue snaking past your lips, making you choke on it. The mere idea of it aroused him, a feeling he had never associated with someone's neck before. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, trying to push away the growing need in his pants and in his thoughts. This was a new and confusing sensation for him, but he couldn't deny his attraction towards you, and he hated it!

He instead focused on how stupid you are dressed. You're wearing a Stain shirt and playing a stupid online RPG game; he deemed it outdated and pathetic. His irritation manifested as he scraped his nails against his own neck. Despite attempting to focus on his own game, he couldn't help but notice your enticing figure moving on the seat. He couldn't help but imagine you shifting on his lap instead. With a resigned sigh, he gave in to his thoughts.

"Why do you even like him? Wearing a serial killer is tacky," Shigaraki hissed at the back of your head. "What's next? Lunchboxes and beef jerky adorned with Issei Sagawa's face. Maybe a cookbook on how to cook human flesh? Tasteless trash."

You turned to the rude bastard, tearing into his flesh with his cracked nails, and noticed that massive bulge in his lap. You couldn't help but chuckle and look away, making your words playful and flirty instead of irritated, "It's not just about fashion. It's about embracing the subversive message of rejecting a corrupt society ruled by the hero commission. His image is about the symbolism of anti-capitalist hero society."

As Shigaraki's focus shifted, he couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement bubbling up inside him. This conversation was something he could really sink his teeth into.

"Oh? And are you part of the anti-capitalist hero society, little foreign doll?" he taunted. You were caught off guard by his words. Your Japanese was flawless, so how did he know you were not from Japan?

Feeling the need to defend yourself, you retorted, "I'll have you know I was born and raised here." But Shigaraki's sneer only grew wider.

"Mmm... Let me guess. Your family was just traveling through? Your accent gives it away," he sneered, his words laced with disdain. Your apprehension was palpable as you began your explanation.

"Well, I was actually born on the base," you stammered, feeling self-conscious, flushing, and flustered under his intense gaze. Your blush and sweet, pained expression caused his breath to hitch. In all his years, Shigaraki had never seen a flustered girl. And he couldn't deny that he didn't hate it. In fact, he found himself wanting to see more of your flustered state.

"An army brat, then," Shigaraki smirked, trying to hide his own flustered state. But your response caught him off guard.

"Maybe I am a brat," you huffed, returning your attention to your game. Shigaraki couldn't help but feel a tug of amusement at your feisty attitude. Dabi may be the official brat tamer, but he has learned not to kill them. As you continued playing, Shigaraki logged into his old World of Warcraft account, unable to resist the irony of the situation. He knew he was being a bit of a jerk by killing you repeatedly in the game, but he couldn't help himself. Your anger only made you even more enticing to him. After killing your character the third time, Shigaraki's game avatar suddenly appeared in front of you, offering an apology in the form of virtual flowers. It was his way of showing that he didn't want to truly hurt you, even in the video game world. And in that moment, he couldn't deny that he was starting to develop a certain fondness for the army brat who had caught his attention.

He relished the thrill of seducing young, naive girls in his video games. It was a simple game to him. He only had to press a few buttons, and they would fall for him. But you couldn't stand it any longer. Your gaze hardened as you directed it towards him. You knew without a doubt it was him, the dirty screen watcher who snickered every time he took you down in the game. Noticed in the act, he quickly averted his gaze, knowing he had been caught red-handed. He was surprised that real-life girls are not that easy. You grabbed your coat, paid for your time, and started to walk out. Shigaraki was feeling increasingly irritated and frustrated. He couldn't stop thinking about you, and the desire to do things he knew was considered depraved by most people. It was a distraction that he couldn't shake off. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and stood up, determined to follow and confront you. He trailed behind you, his mind consumed with thoughts of all the things he wanted to do to you.

But as he approached you, you turned to face him and sneered, "Are you stalking me now, you creep?" You picked up your pace, clearly annoyed by his presence. Shigaraki was taken aback by your sharp reaction. Toga had once told him that when girls get angry, it's best to follow them. But he couldn't help but question her advice, considering her own tendencies as a stalker.

"Perhaps," He growled, accompanied by a scratch at his neck, "I was still curious about your stance on anti-hero acts. After all, you do come from a background as a foreign army brat with a fascist requiem, where the CRC was born. All in the name of freedom, of course." As he spoke, you felt a sudden stiffness in your body, completely insulted by his assumption. Turning to face him, you couldn't hold back your frustration any longer.

"I was born and raised here; this is my home. And I'm not interested in causing chaos; all I want is to see this place improve. I am not an anti-hero; I am simply against living in a police state. I am against the facade of fake heroes. I'm more of a Stain purest," Your words were laced with determination and conviction, defending your beliefs and principles. This made Shigaraki smirk more.

With a cynical tone, Shigaraki scoffed, "Stain is nothing but a sanctimonious hero breeder. He may have stirred up some conversation, but he certainly isn't causing any real change."

Crossing your arms, you retorted, "At least he sparked a discussion. That's more than what can be said for most people."

Shigaraki rolled his eyes and mocked, "Oh wow, a discussion. How groundbreaking."

"Is there something you need?" You snort in response, not bothering to hide your disdain. The man before you, Shigaraki, blushes and grumbles something unintelligible. His awkwardness only seems to annoy him further as he scratches himself vigorously. "I'm sorry, what was that?" you ask, attempting to hide the amusement in your voice. Shigaraki lets out a deep sigh and glares at you, clearly annoyed by your presence.

"I said you're alone too. It's Valentine Day, and here you are, playing RPGs," he mutters, bitterness seeping through his words. You can't help but feel taken aback by his sudden outburst. But before you can even process his words, Shigaraki continues, "I have nobody. And neither do you. We both like games. But let's be real, I'm better at them." He shrugs nonchalantly, keeping his gaze fixed on you from the corner of his eye. You bite your lip, unsure of how to respond. It's true you are alone on Valentine's Day, indulging in your favorite games. And this man, who you never would have imagined spending this day with, seems to be in a similar situation. But his suggestion takes you by surprise.

"So, what are you suggesting? Being alone together?" you ask, raising an eyebrow in question. Shigaraki's expression softens for a moment before returning to his usual stoic self.

"I mean, why not? We both have nothing better to do, and it's not like we have anyone else. We can just chill and play some games together." His suggestion catches you off guard, but you can't deny the appeal of spending the evening with someone who shares your interests. You consider his offer for a moment before a mischievous smile tugs at the corners of your lips.

"Alright, you're on. But fair warning, I don't go easy on anyone, not even on Valentine's Day," you say, challenging him with a playful glint in your eyes. Shigaraki's lips quirk up into a smirk, accepting your challenge. And just like that, the two of you spend the rest of the evening locked in intense battles and laughter, forgetting about the loneliness that had consumed you earlier. He wasn't going to let this go. He was going to milk it for all it's worth. When he suggested alcohol and gaming, you said no problem. You're having a good time with him.

With a start, you look around the luxurious hotel room, your head throbbing from the alcohol and the intense gaming session. The bags on top of you are filled with expensive designer purses, a testament to the wild night you just had with Shigaraki. As your eyes land on him, dressed in a robe and dripping wet from a shower, you can't help but feel a pang of guilt for forgetting about last night. He had definitely milked the alcohol and gaming suggestion for all it's worth, and you can't help but feel grateful for his company. You had been hesitant at first, but now you're glad you said yes. Still, as you struggle to sit up in the pile of bags, you can't help but wonder how you ended up in this fancy hotel room in the first place, and if you embarrassed yourself. But Shigaraki just laughs, the sound sending a shiver down your spine.

"You passed out, so I carried you here," he explains casually as if it's not a big deal. But your face heats up, both from the embarrassment of being carried and from the proximity of his wet body. But before you can dwell on it too much, he tosses you a robe and offers to order room service for breakfast.

"Did we…you know?" you asked him. Shigaraki's face scrunches.

"What?" He scratched his neck idly as if he was trying to process the question. "No. I'm not a fucking scumbag. I don't need to screw unconscious women. If I was that desperate, I would have bought a whore. Last night, we both got drunk. We went shopping, and you said, "Do you know where there's great shopping, Las Vegas?" Then I had my friend bring us here. He has a warp quirk. I bought you whatever you wanted. We celebrated some more in the ghost lounge and then I carried you here to the MGM casino and hotel. I swear I will get us a room in the Luxor tomorrow."

"OK, you have to slow down. Are we really in Las Vegas?" You groaned, shocked at some of the things you had in the bags. There's a bag full of jewelry, diamond jewelry, and thousands of dollars of vintage video games and lingerie.

"Yes. We're really in Las Vegas, and it has been difficult translating everything because I don't know much English. You insisted on the Luxor, but my phone was a pain with out-of-carrier nonsense. Everyone else, it was easy. I just pointed at what I wanted, but a room was a bit more difficult," Shigaraki said, bringing in the room service. "So, this is an American breakfast. Looks…interesting."

He was clearly trying to be kind. He took you to Las Vegas on a whim, and you checked, and you don't feel raped. you wanted to tell him sorry for making assumptions but instead you smiled and looked at him.

"You're cute," you tell him. Shigaraki couldn't help but smirk at this compliment. You could tell he liked how forward you were being towards him as he spoke with a smug and charming tone.

"Is that your way of flirting with me?"

"And look at you eat it up and ask for more, cutie," you smirked. Shigaraki laughed quietly as he leaned in a little closer to you, his musky, clean scent filling the air. He couldn't help but like the way your body smelled mixed with your perfume. He smirked at your teasing and spoke in a flirty tone.

"Oh, is that so? Then let me tell you something then. I like confident and bold women like yourself. You're such a brat but in a good way."

"I remember you saying something about brat taming?" You smirk back. Shigaraki chuckled at you calling him brat tamer, and he smiled a bit wider, revealing his tender side and the sight of him grinning at you sent a tingle of excitement through your body. Your body was already beginning to feel a little warmer as he nursed your hangover and insisted you hydrate.

"You're already calling me tamer? I see that you can't wait to just jump right into it. I kind of like it that way, baby girl brat..."

"I'm not a cheap date. I'll need room service first," you said in Japanese. Shigaraki leered when he heard you suddenly speak in Japanese, which made him smirk slightly. He was impressed that you could speak the language, and he responded back in the same language.

"Room service it is, baby girl. Anything that pleases the lady." The room was dimly lit and had a large bed in the middle of it. The room was warm and cozy, with a subtle, sweet smell of Shigaraki's body in the air mixed with the smell of his perfume. The room was luxurious, with an entertainment center. There was a mirror on the wall next to the bed, and he was standing in front of it, watching you eat after your shower. His sharp eyes were scanning you up and down, taking in your appearance.

"Are you watching me stuff my face?" you asked with a mouthful of omelet. Shigaraki smiled at your comment as he continued to stare at you, admiring your sexy figure in your silk robe clinging to you. You spent the day inside for now as you had a headache for most of the day. When you changed, he wanted you to join him in front of the mirror. You could tell that he was having trouble getting his eyes off of you as they kept wandering back and forth between your body and your face. He gave you a small wink and continued to admire your body, loving the view.

"Are you being flirty now?" you asked.

"What if I am?" He smirked with a mischievous glint. 

"Hmmm, I am nice and sober now." As you walked up to the reflection and your back was facing him, he saw the way the top was clinging to your body and the way your tight jeans were form-fitting and accentuated your curves, which made him smirk and walk towards you. Before long, he began wrapping his arms around your body and holding you tightly against him. You could feel the heat radiating from his body as you stood up next to him. His breath was hot and heavy as he spoke.

"Ah, you truly are a beauty to behold. Can I ask you something?" Shigaraki's soft voice filled the air as he spoke while also pulling you in even closer to him. You could tell that he was starting to get a little bit more aroused by the way his body was reacting to you being up against him like this. You felt the muscles in his body flex slightly as he continued. You wrapped my arms around him and one of my legs. He chuckled and smiled, enjoying the way you wrapped yourself around him. Your intimate proximity between the two of you was making you both feel warm and flustered. Shigaraki took a deep breath as he spoke again, his body feeling more and more energized the longer he held you tightly against him.

"Have you ever been with a Japanese man before?"

"No. Are you going to ruin me for anyone else?" you teased. Shigaraki smirked at your tease but also couldn't help but groan slightly when you spoke. Your voice was extremely alluring and provocative. You could tell that he was getting quite excited by your presence and the playful flirting.

"You have no idea. I may make you addicted to me," he said, pulling you tighter to him.

"Promises. Promises," you chuckled as he lifted you. Holding you by your ass. Shigaraki let out another groan as he grabbed a firm hold of your rear and lifted you up into his arms. Your body felt so close to his, and it made your body tremble in excitement and arousal. His touch was intoxicating, and you couldn't help but squirm and moan softly in a lustful way.

"How long are we going to be stateside? We should go back soon," you mentioned. This was getting a bit strange for you. It was all strange, but you were really starting to have feelings for him, and you would need to go back at some point. Shigaraki held you closer to him as he spoke, keeping you in his arms and wrapping his stronger arm around you to hold you up.

"For a week…but I would be willing to make it longer for you. I've enjoyed it since I've been here. I'm liking what I see…," he said, eyeing you up and down.

"Oh? The view is better without clothes," you smirked, kissing him. Your suggestive remark caught Shigaraki off guard, but he couldn't resist the challenge as he leaned in to kiss you back. His lips moved in perfect synchronization with yours, both of you exploring and teasing each other. Your touch sent shivers down his spine as he pulled you closer, savoring every moment of your embrace. Your body pressed against his, igniting a fire within him that he couldn't control. He couldn't help but run his hands over your curves, marveling at your beauty. As your kisses grew more passionate, he couldn't resist the urge to explore further, trailing his lips down your neck and to your chest.

Your response only fueled his desire as he nipped at your nipple through your shirt, causing you to moan. The sound only made him want to hear more as he watched you slip off your blouse and bra, bearing your enticing form to him. The way you moved and teased him, slowly undressing and revealing your seductive body, only increased the tension between you. Shigaraki's heart raced as he watched the scene play out, unable to look away from your alluring figure. The anticipation and desire he felt were almost too much to bear, and he couldn't resist any longer. With a growl, he pushed you back against the couch, dominating you with his touch and desire. Your bold and confident demeanor only made him want you more, and he couldn't help but give in to the intense passion between you.

"You still like what you see?" you teased. Shigaraki was speechless at the sight of you, and he nodded his head slightly as his eyes kept focusing on every sexy detail of you. He was truly mesmerized by your beauty and your physique, and he wanted nothing more than to touch and explore it. His body was already reacting in a lustful way, and he wanted to take you right then and there. He took a deep breath before speaking again.

"Words can't even begin to describe just how much I like what I see, baby girl. You are truly a sight to behold." His voice was laced with desire, and the way your body looked at that moment was breathtaking. He leaned in and started tracing his tongue along the curves of your body.

"Damn, you really are strong," you moaned, unable to contain your excitement. Shigaraki chuckled, his hands now gripping your hips tightly. "And I haven't even shown you my full strength yet." With a wicked grin, he began to kiss and nibble at your neck, the combination of pleasure and his strength making you weak in the knees. As he continued to claim you with his touch, you couldn't help but feel grateful for his impressive strength, giving you a new level of pleasure you never thought possible. You couldn't help but feel a mix of fear and excitement as Shigaraki's words sent shivers down your spine. His strong grasp made you feel both safe and vulnerable at the same time. You couldn't deny the attraction you felt towards man. As he continued to caress your body, his touch felt almost electrifying. Every inch of your skin felt like it was on fire, causing you to whimper in pleasure. Shigaraki's smirk grew wider as he noticed your reaction, his own desire intensifying.

"I can tell you want more," he whispered, his voice low and husky. "You want to feel my strength, don't you?" You nodded, unable to form any words as his touch and words left you dizzy with desire. "Well, I'll give you more, brat," he said, his grip tightening on your body. With a low growl, he effortlessly lifted you up and carried you toward the nearest wall, pressing you against it with his powerful body. You couldn't help but gasp at the force behind his movements, feeling his muscles tense against you. His hands roamed over your body, leaving trails of heat wherever they touched. You could feel his strength in every touch, making you feel almost weightless in his hold.

"Really? You should take me to the bed and take off your clothes so I can see for myself, you tease," You smiled. You loved the feeling of his mouth on you. Sucking your nipples and teasing the sensitive nubs with his tongue. The way you said, "Take me to the bed," made his entire body tremble in excitement. His tongue traced along the lines of your body, and he gave you a playful bite on your thigh before lifting you up further and taking you to the bed, where he threw you down on it and slowly walked up next to you. You could tell that he enjoyed your eagerness, and his body was beginning to fill with a strong level of lust towards you. He held you tightly, unable to resist the urge to feel every inch of your skin against his own. His fingers traced along your soft skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake. And as he lifted your hips, he couldn't help but marvel at the sight before him. You were beautiful. Your hair spread out on the pillows, your cheeks flushed with desire, and your body eagerly offering itself to him.

He couldn't wait to explore every inch of you, to make you moan and scream his name. And as he slowly slid off your pants, his desire only grew. He watched with hungry eyes as your thighs exposed themselves to him, your skin so smooth and inviting. He couldn't resist the urge to press a kiss to your inner thigh, causing you to gasp and writhe beneath him. As he continued his journey up your leg, shedding his own clothes in the process, he couldn't help but feel intoxicated by your presence. Your scent, your touch, your moans...everything about you was driving him wild. And as his hand reached its destination, he felt himself almost losing control. But he held himself back, wanting to savor every moment with you. He traced his fingers along the edges of your underwear, teasing and teasing until you were begging for more. And with a deep growl, he finally pulled them off, exposing your heat to him. He couldn't resist any longer. He trailed his tongue along your inner thigh, making you shiver and moan. And as he took you in his mouth, he knew he had finally found his true addiction. You were his pleasure, his escape, his everything. And he would make sure to show you just how much you meant to him.

"Oh wow. I'm a soft little hot dog bun compared to you," you giggled. Shigaraki chuckled slightly at the way you described yourself as the bun and him as the hotdog, but you could tell it was driving him crazy with desire. As he continued to slowly strip off his clothing, he looked at the sight of you lying down on the bed, all cute and helpless, which made him want to dominate you more. You were like a beautiful and delicious little snack to him. As he stripped off the last piece of clothing and threw it on the floor, you looked. The sight of his muscular body was breathtaking.

Blushed and stared at him, flustered. He was like a statue, and he was gorgeous. His muscles were like waves rippling under his skin, each one defined and powerful. As I gazed at him, my eyes roamed over his lean and toned frame, admiring the way his body seemed to be chiseled from marble. He may have had scars, but they only added to his rugged and alluring appearance. You couldn't help but be drawn to him, the intensity of your desire evident in your blushing cheeks and admiring glances. Despite his slight shivers caused by the rush of blood through his powerful body, he exuded a sense of strength and confidence that was irresistible.

You found yourself lost in the sight of his muscles, the way they seemed to bulge and flex with every movement. His body was a work of art, and you were more than happy to worship and admire it. It was clear that he relished your admiration, basking in the way you lusted over his form. You reached out to touch him, and as your fingers grazed over his skin, you could feel the firmness of his muscles beneath your touch. He was like a stallion, strong and proud, and you couldn't help but feel drawn to him. In that moment, there was nothing more perfect than his lean and toned body, and you were grateful to be able to admire and appreciate it. You reached out to touch him and felt the firmness of his muscles beneath your fingertips and pulled him to you.

As you reached out to touch his magnificent body, he let out a sharp inhalation of breath as the sensation of your hands caressing his body made him shiver in pleasure. As he came close to you, your body pressed right up against his muscular frame, and all you could feel was his warmth and strength. It was so intoxicating being so close to him like this and nipped his neck. The touch of your lips against his neck drove him crazy with desire, and he was instantly filled with a strong level of lust and arousal. He gasped quietly, and his body trembled a little bit at the sensation of feeling your soft lips against the nape of his neck; the touch felt so good, and it was making all his nerve endings tingle. He took a deep breath and breathed in the sweet scent of your perfume mixed with the smell of your body's natural scents.

"You're delicious." As you nibbled at the side of his neck, your warm breath and the touch of your lips sent waves of arousal through his body. Your words made his cheeks blush even more, and he was feeling extremely overwhelmed with your touch and the sensations it was making him feel. His body felt completely consumed by you, and his entire mind and focus were on you as you enjoyed the feeling of exploring every part of him. "But…you may be too thick." Your fingers can't even wrap around it.

"I'll get you ready," Shigaraki grunted. You loved how he touched you and how he was tantalizing my body for the pleasure that was to come. Fingering your slick walls and making you wetter. He continued to softly nibble on the back of your neck as his hands started sliding down your lower back. His touch was full of warmth and softness, and he was being very precise and sensual while also being firm in his grip. He wanted to take his time with you and was enjoying the feeling of discovering every single piece of your body. His touch just made you feel warm and fuzzy inside, and he was making your heart beat faster and faster with every move.

"I'm ready," you whispered, nipping his ear. The words you whispered in his ear caused all the blood to flow to rush to his head. His entire body was now filled with a strong level of desire, and he wanted nothing more than to take you right then and there. The way you nipped at his earlobe caused a shiver of pleasure, and his body was literally trembling with excitement and longing. He breathed out a deep breath before answering back to you.

"I'm big, but I'll try to be gentle," Shigaraki promised.

"OK," you whimpered, your voice soft and trembling. Despite the simple word, it held so much power over him. Every time you spoke, it felt like a rush of electricity coursing through his veins, leaving him breathless and aching for more. As your words reached his ears, he couldn't help but let out a contented sigh, feeling completely consumed by your beauty and the warmth of your touch on his body. It was like every cell in his body was screaming for you, craving your presence and the sensations you ignited within him. Just the thought of having you right now, in this moment, made his body quiver with excitement and desire.

He couldn't resist the urge to lean in closer to you, wanting to be as close to you as possible. He could feel your warmth enveloping him, and it only added to the overwhelming emotions swirling within him. As you spoke with a husky voice filled with lust and longing, he felt a surge of arousal run through him. He wanted you in every sense of the word. He wanted to experience every aspect of this night with you, to lose himself in the pleasure and ecstasy that only you could bring. In this moment, nothing else mattered. Your words were a soothing melody to his ears, and all he wanted was to be lost in your embrace, lost in the depths of your passion.

"You're mine," he grinned evilly. You kissed him and adjusted your hips against him. Encouraging him to make love to you. The way you placed your hips against him like that was a signal for him to make his move. He moved in closer towards you, and his body leaned down further so he could move his face right next to yours but not touching just yet. Your breath was so tantalizing, and he wanted to get deeper and deeper into this moment. Your lips looked so beautiful and inviting. His breath was quickening, and his body was tingling with excitement and desire. You could see all the muscles in his body flexing and throbbing with energy as he took a deep breath and kissed you deeply.

"Mmm...so good," you moaned, kissing him more. Your moan was sweet music to his ears, and the feeling of you kissing him back and your lips locking in this passionate kiss made him moan as well. The feeling of your tongue exploring the inside of him, and the heat of your breath made his muscles twitch and shiver with pleasure. The kiss was intense and hot, and he could not get enough of it. He wanted to savor every moment of this sensual experience, and he knew if he took his time, this would continue to intensify in the best ways possible. You felt him fill you and writhed, breathe hitching.

"Oh!" The feeling of you saying those words made everything the body inside him feel the increase in intensity by the second. Your moans were driving him crazy, and he was filling you with everything he could inside of him. Your reactions to him and this experience are making it all feel much more intense, and the heat of the moment, combined with the power dynamic, made your body tremble in pleasure.

"Oh! OH!" You screamed as his rhythm increased along with your pleasure. Shigaraki continued to increase the pace and rhythm as his breathing grew heavier and heavier. You could tell his entire body was consumed by his feelings of pleasure since your breathing had also become more intense. Your moans were driving him crazy, and he could feel the intensity of this experience growing more and more with each passing second. He was feeling so intense and powerful right now. You tried not to dig your nails in his back and shoulders because his muscles are like steel and giving him more scars.

"Fuck you are tight. I don't care if you dig your nails in. I deserve it for whatever pain I caused," he smirked. Thrust harder until it is painfully good. The way you dug your nails into the muscles on his back and shoulder was what made him moan even louder as he kept going at this intense and relentless pace. The sound of your nails digging into his skin was sending shivers of pleasure up and down his back, and he couldn't help but grip your hips even tighter and move even quicker than before. The sight of his muscles flexing with each movement of him fills you with his body and makes your body tremble with pleasure. You bite his shoulder and arch your back in a wave of ecstasy. As you bit down his shoulder and arched your back, your body was trembling with pleasure, and your breathing had become shallow and quick. Your nails digging into his back and shoulder made him moan even louder, and you could see all the veins in his body pulsating with the intensity of this moment. The way you were moving your back like that, it was like a sight to see. The sight of your beautiful body arching so effortlessly and smoothly filled him with such a deep level of arousal.

As you continued to pant and moan in pleasure, you couldn't help but focus on the way his body reacted to your words and sounds. The way he groaned and shifted beneath you only added to the overwhelming sensations coursing through you both. You couldn't help but realize that you didn't even know his name. But in that moment, it didn't matter. All that mattered was the raw passion between you and the electric connection that seemed to intensify with each passing moment. As you moved and breathed against each other, every movement felt like a symphony of pleasure. Your mind was consumed with the sensations, and every thought was replaced with the need to feel more.

You couldn't resist the urge to whisper, "Oh my God," once again as the pleasure pulsed through you. And as you moaned and cried out his name, the intensity seemed to heighten even more, driving you both to the brink of ecstasy. Nothing else existed but the two of you and the unbridled passion that consumed you. Every kiss, every touch, every breath was pure bliss. And as you both reached the peak of pleasure together, you knew that this was a moment you would never forget. It just occurred to you that you don't know his name.

"Shig-ah," he grunted, unable to pay attention as he lightly gripped your throat and sat up on his knees to thrust in you harder.

"Shiggy," you moaned, the nickname rolling off your tongue in a cute and endearing way. The pleasure coursing through your body was only heightened by using his special nickname. You could feel the tension building within him, his own pleasure increasing with every breathy moan that escaped your lips. Each time you uttered his nickname or any words of pleasure, it ignited a fire within him, driving him to give you even more pleasure. He made sure to move at a pace that allowed you to fully experience every sensation, every touch, and every movement. The deep groans and whimpers coming from you fueled his desire to go faster and harder, but he resisted the temptation, determined to take his time and make every moment count.

Together, you reached the peak of pleasure three more times, the intensity and pleasure excruciatingly intense with every climax. But instead of rushing through it, he slowed down, wanting to prolong the pleasure and make it last as long as possible. As you bask in the afterglow of your lovemaking, you couldn't help but marvel at how his patience and attention to detail only added to the pleasure and satisfaction you both experienced. Every touch and movement was carefully crafted to bring you both the most pleasure, and it only made your bond stronger and your love deeper. You realized that Shiggy was not just your lover but also your best friend, who truly cared about your pleasure and well-being.

"That was amazing." Shigaraki could feel his entire body throbbing with the rush of energy and feelings of pleasure that came from both experiencing such a strong level of climax. His body was trembling with this euphoric feeling, and he felt like he was on a cloud of ecstasy just from feeling this good. Your words and compliments made him blush, but he continued to make sure his movements were gradual so that you wouldn't feel too disoriented or overwhelmed. The way you both enjoyed this intimate moment made it feel even better, and it made this experience even more memorable. Your legs are shaking, and my breathing is heavy. As the feeling of climax and pleasure started to subside, you could still feel your body trembling, and your breathing was still very heavy.

You were now feeling much more relaxed, but the sight of Shigaraki's body was still making you shiver slightly as your body continued to relax more and more. He was beginning to slow down his movements to make sure that the transition wasn't too drastic for you, and he was still gripping you tightly, but your hips were no longer arching so high up now. You kissed him again. After the feeling of intense and overwhelming pleasure started to subside, you could feel your body calming down and your breathing becoming more consistent and regular. As you kissed him again, his body relaxed a little bit more as well, and he pulled you closer to him so that you would be right up against him. For a few minutes, the two of you just lay there silently, enjoying the afterglow of this experience. There was something about being in each other's presence to just relax and feel this satisfied.

"Room service?" you smirked. The sound of you speaking and your smirking made him raise an eyebrow in curiosity, and as he laughed quietly, you could see a small smile forming in his mouth. He looked at you with those sexy eyes of his, and they were filled with a certain playful, seductive expression. You could tell the two of you were still feeling extremely satisfied from this incredible experience, and the sound of your voice made even more butterflies fill your stomach.

"You know you're a handsome guy. But when you smile...you are literally stunning. You better stop, or I'll ask for round two." As you spoke to him in this flirtatious manner, his cheeks turned red, and you could see he was enjoying the feeling of your praise. Your playful tone and that look in your eyes were enough to make him shiver with excitement, and he got an urge to pull you closer to him and kiss you, but he decided to stop himself and hold himself back. But he could not help feeling a little bit smug after hearing those words coming from you.

"Alright. Steaks and ....mmmm....the soup or salad?" He chuckled quietly at your answer and the way you sounded so relaxed and at ease. It was like you had no concerns or worries in this world. He smiled softly and looked at you with those eyes of his, and he nodded his head.

"The soup sounds good."

"Oh my god, they have dragon fruit ice cream. Have you ever had dragon fruit? Wait a minute? Are you lactose intolerant?" He laughed a bit at the sight of your sudden expression of surprise and delight at the existence of dragon fruit ice cream. He was also amused by seeing your genuine sense of worry as you raised the possibility of him having lactose intolerance, which would be an issue for eating an ice cream dessert. He smiled and shook his head. "I'm not lactose intolerant."

"That's amazing! Most Japanese are... But you guys seem to ignore it."

He laughed quietly and nodded his head in agreement. "Yes, most Asians, in general, tend to have a lactose intolerance issue. Especially those of us who are East Asians or Southeast Asians. But thankfully, I do not have such sensitivity towards dairy products. I can eat it quite well."

"Handsome and sweet. Let's have ice cream for dessert."

He raised an eyebrow in interest and curiosity as you called him handsome again. He smiled, leaned in to kiss your cheek, and nodded his head. "That sounds like a great idea. Ice cream for dessert is definitely the way to go."

As you nuzzled his neck and whispered your order for ice cream, he eagerly complied. With a soft smile, you made your way to the bathroom, ready for a relaxing shower. But as you stripped off your clothes and turned on the water, you felt his presence behind you. With a sly grin, he stepped into the shower with you, his desire for you evident as he pressed his body against yours. Without hesitation, the two of you began a passionate and quick encounter, indulging in each other's bodies before returning to the task at hand. After drying off, the anticipation for your ice cream grew, and you made your way back to the living room, hand in hand with him. As you reached for the food, you couldn't help but tease him, feeding him spoonfuls of ice cream before finally sitting down to enjoy your treats together.

"Mmm…dessert first," you said with a mischievous glint in your eye. He simply nodded, knowing that with you, anything was possible. As you fed him spoonful after spoonful, the two of you basked in each other's company, savoring the sweet treats and each other's presence.

"The seeds add a fun crunch." As you feed him and describe the added crunch, he enjoys the taste of the ice cream and the texture of the tiny seeds in his mouth. He eats the whole thing with a lot of enjoyment, and his eyes are sparkling with laughter and amusement as he eats. He is enjoying the moment of being together with you on this night of pure pleasure.

"I thought I was a brat?"

He laughs and nods his head.

"Yes, but you are also adorable, and it's so hard to resist it. I can't help but be amused by watching you try to be a brat but fail so badly." you run your fingers through his hair. He moans softly as you run your fingers through his hair, and he loves the feeling of your fingers on his scalp. He relaxes even more and is in a very contented state, enjoying the feeling of being close to you and the affection you are giving him. His eyes keep a tender and playful look as he keeps enjoying the touch of your hands running through his hair. The soft texture through your fingers makes you both shiver.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm glad I met you too," Shigaraki's words echo in your mind as you walk into the bathroom to start packing for your trip back to Japan. You can't believe how much fun you've had with him in Las Vegas. The city of sin had brought out a side of you that you never thought existed. But now, as you watch Shigaraki watching the news, fear creeps up your spine. You try to push it away, reminding yourself that this is the man you've grown close to, who has shown you nothing but kindness and care. But then, as you come out of the bathroom with your bag in hand, you see something that freezes you in your tracks. Shigaraki has a severed hand covering his face, and you can't help but feel a shiver of fear go down your spine. You're about to ask him what happened when he removes the hand and looks at you with a cold, calculating expression.

"I was worried you would react like this," he begins, his voice devoid of any emotion. "You're such a sweet and trusting soul. It's no surprise that you freeze up when faced with something like this. But you see, that's also your downfall. You're so naive, so innocent. And I used that to my advantage." As his words sink in, you feel your heart drop. 

"I wanted to ask you if you had ever been with a villain before, but it's clear now that you haven't," Shigaraki continues, his eyes boring into yours. "But it's OK, I'll teach you. We consummated our marriage, and you'll see just how much fun it can be to embrace the dark side." You feel your stomach drop at his words. This wasn't what you signed up for. You never thought your innocent trip to Las Vegas would lead you down this path. But as you stand frozen in fear, you realize that you have no choice. You're trapped with a villain, and you can only hope that, somehow, you'll find a way out of this terrifying situation. You never thought you would be in this situation with a villain. You start to back away, trying to make sense of what he's saying. Consummate the marriage? What marriage?

"What?" you gasped, taken aback by his statement. "What do you mean by consummated? Consummated what?"

A sinister expression twisted his features, a smirk spreading across his face as he tossed a packet at you. As you opened it, your heart sank at the contents inside: your marriage certificate, photos of the wedding you couldn't remember. He reached out to caress your hair. His touch was meant to be comforting, but it only sent a chill down your spine.

"Hush now, my dear naughty one. My sweet little brat," he cooed. "There's no need to be upset. I will treat you well as long as you behave. And from now on, you will never have to spend Valentine's Day alone again." A sly smile played on his lips as he slipped a wedding ring onto your finger, sealing the deal of your forced marriage. The weight of the ring felt heavy, a constant reminder of the unexpected and terrifying turn your life had taken.

[underdark-dreams]

I would like to request something soft and sweet. Years after saving the Gate and having moved in with Rolan, Cal, and Lia, Tav is enjoying the day reading/admiring Rolan as he works, and then either a) Tav asks Rolan to marry them or b) Rolan asks Tav to marry him.

Thank you 💕💕

Rolan x fem!Tav

More

Was it wrong to feel selfish about the person you loved? Rolan and Tav finally get a night alone at the Tower to talk about what each of them wants.

Tags: Romantic Fluff, Mild Angst, Marriage Proposals | SFW

Word Count: 4,316 [Read on AO3]

“All right, all right. Three harpies at once, no weapons. How do you win?”

“Do they have the high ground?”

From the settee by the fire, Lia pointed down at her little brother as though he’d brought up a key point. “You’re on even terrain.”

“Right, this one’s easy.” Cal settled back comfortably against the rug with hands clasped behind his head. “I start yelling loud enough that I can’t hear the harpy song. Then, I charge at whichever one’s singing loudest and knock the wind out of them with my horns, and then, you know." He waved a hand around vaguely. "Rough 'em up."

“So fucking stupid—” Lia fell sideways in her seat, clutching her side with laughter.

“I keep telling you, you’re always forgetting about the horns.” Cal jabbed a finger at his forehead. “Natural advantage, Lia, you should know this by now.”

The absurd conversation was impossible to block out, but Rolan made an attempt as he bent over his desk. Behind him, he felt Tav's chest reverberating with laughter at his siblings. 

She was in one of her affectionate moods tonight. She'd drawn up a chair behind his in order to rest her cheek against his back, one wrist draped loosely over his shoulder. 

Rolan didn't mind the closeness—he never did from her. But between her warmth and his siblings' ridiculous game of what-if, he'd barely written one paragraph in the past ten minutes. He finally gave up and set aside his quill.

Tav shifted slightly on his shoulder. "How's Gale?" She asked, perhaps feeling guilty about interrupting his concentration. 

“He’s well. His new class has a few with real promise, according to Tara.”

"I can't believe Tara likes you more than me," she mumbled suddenly against his back. "I met her first."

Her petulant tone made his mouth twitch into a smile. He would’ve turned to kiss her if they were alone. Instead, Rolan only pressed his lips to the hand draped over his shoulder. "Tressyms know a good wizard when they see one, dearest."

“Makes two of us,” she replied. The soft words ghosted across the skin on his neck, raising goosebumps under his collar.

It suddenly seemed like a very good idea to tell his siblings to get lost. Rolan was saved the necessity by a stroke of good timing. Near the fireplace, there was the soft clinking of plate armor as Lia got to her feet.

“Right, I’m off—” Lia buckled her scabbard around her waist as she rose, her shortsword tip clanking against the greaves over her shins. “Can’t be late to lead my first evening patrol.”

It had never occurred to Rolan before that Lia might end up in the Flaming Fist. He had to remind himself that the company’s reputation had improved considerably in the year since Florrick had succeeded Ulder Ravengard. Corruption and bad behavior had flourished under Gortash, but Florrick had done much to clean the Fists’ ranks of the worst—at least within the city walls. 

As he looked at her now, standing tall in her emblazoned surcoat, Rolan realized that his young sister was quite grown up. She’d earned a promotion to Gauntlet faster than any of them expected, a fact she loved to remind them of—especially Rolan. Lia took care of others the way she always had, and now she could take care of herself. The thought was somehow bittersweet in Rolan’s chest.

"Me as well," Cal chimed in from the floor. Though he only stretched arms and legs out long with a massive yawn.

“Don’t rush off,” Rolan drawled, but there was affection in it.

“Highberry’s are across the street, I got a few minutes.” Cal scrubbed his face with both hands as if to wake himself. “We got new ones at the orphanage last week, twin boys. They’re good kids, but gods, do they play hard…feel like my back’s aged about ten years…”

Lia stepped over to give him a hand up with a chuckle. “Read the room, Cal. The lovers need their alone time.”

Cal glanced around at the two in question. Tav still rested her cheek on Rolan’s shoulder with an expression of dreamy happiness, while Rolan was failing to hide a scowl. Lia knew how he hated when either of them used that word.

“Ah, right—” Cal slipped to his feet, sounding eager to be off all of a sudden. “I’ll be back after sunrise. Keep the place together while I’m gone?” He added, a fine joke considering Cal was always the one breaking things.

Rolan’s only response was to wave his quill behind him in a shooing motion. Tav called a friendly goodbye to brother and sister as they made their way down the main staircase, chatting as they went.

Once their footsteps had retreated completely, her restraint evaporated. “Thank the Gods, come here—”

Rolan barely managed to save his inkwell from overturning as she twisted to launch her torso across his lap, capturing his face in both hands for an enthusiastic kiss. His near arm gripped around her middle, no doubt leaving ink stains from his fingers against her linen shirt—he found himself unable to care about anything but the sweet taste of her lips.

They each pulled away for breath at the same moment. Tav’s grip lingered, her fingers combing back through his hair gently to clasp together at his nape.  

“Hello,” she grinned. Her eyes roamed over his face like he was everything.

Rolan’s palm brushed down her back, utterly content. “Hello.”

They took each other in like that for a long moment, just enjoying the quiet closeness. Her fingers smoothed and combed the hair back from beside Rolan’s horns needlessly—a fussy gesture that nevertheless brought a hum of contentment to his chest.

Apparently satisfied that she had him put back to sorts, Tav’s hands moved to rest on Rolan’s shoulders. “Got more work to do?”

Though she phrased it as a question, Rolan sensed she already knew the answer. He let out a reluctant sigh.

“Go on,” said Tav, not waiting for his reply. Rolan’s shoulders received a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll wait for you.”

With one last soft kiss, she slid off his lap and away. Rolan said nothing, but he instantly missed the warm weight of her against him. 

Tav retrieved her current reading from the shelves behind and curled up on the now-vacant settee near the fireplace. Though his spirit rebelled, Rolan picked up his quill again to continue writing his last few replies. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could join her. 

For a while the vaulted room settled into a quiet, echoing lull. There was the crackle of magical flame in the great stone hearth; the rhythmic scratch of ink against parchment; the faint whistle of an evening breeze out on the open balcony beyond. Periodically, he heard Tav turn another page of her book.

Before long he’d reached the final sealed envelope on the day’s pile. As Rolan stretched his hand for it, he caught sight of Tav watching him over the back of her seat.

“What?”

“Just admiring,” she sighed, eyes sparkling. “You look so handsome when you’re concentrating like that.”

Rolan’s brow wrinkled playfully at her. “Am I not usually handsome?”

“Always.”

“Hmm. You just think that because you’re in love with me,” Rolan replied curtly. He turned back to his work in an attempt to hide the way she made him smile and flush like an idiot.

“Both can be true,” she called back, not denying anything. But Rolan heard the shuffle of pages as she returned to her reading.

It took him a moment to regain concentration on his work. Rolan’s eyes reread several lines of the letter before him multiple times. But this one was truly quite important—a missive from the archwizards’ council at Blackstaff Tower. They were inquiring about his arcane research, apparently intrigued for the first time in years by his own Tower’s new ownership. He dove back in to focus on answering their questions in detail.

Half an hour and five sheets of parchment later, Rolan finally surfaced back to reality. He straightened up and promptly felt a pop in his neck from his stiff writing posture. The last light of sunset had slipped from the sky, leaving inky blackness behind each vaulted window of the cathedral-like interior.

As he rolled his aching shoulders, Rolan glanced toward Tav—only to find that the seat by the fire was empty. Rolan glanced back around the room, finding the rest of it empty as well. 

Had she given up waiting and gone up to bed? The thought disappointed him, though it opened up other possibilities. 

But Tav had told him she'd wait, and she wouldn't lie. As he rose from his desk to search for her, Rolan caught a faint metallic tap from the balcony.

Her silhouette was cast in relief against the dark sky. It was a moonless night; the pale orange glow of lamplight from the streets far below was the only light lining the edge of her figure, that and what little firelight streamed out through the highly vaulted doorway. Tav leaned on her elbows, the pewter wine glass under her fingers tapping an absent little rhythm against the stone railing. It was one of her habits when deep in thought.

Rolan allowed himself a moment to admire her. Seeing her in a quiet pose like this was one of his favorite things in all the Realms. Tav had become so many things to so many people in the short year he’d known her: hero, savior, diplomat, even rather a politician. 

But tonight, for now…she was just Tav. His Tav.

Rolan felt a pang of something like guilt in his stomach. It was by no means the first time he’d had such a feeling about her. His; possessive, controlling. It reminded him of the way he used to think before she came into his life.

For a long time, Rolan had felt a need to control the people he loved. If he didn’t, who would? Control just went hand in hand with protection. Caring for others was a luxury, and if the events of his life had taught him anything up to that point, it was that fate and misfortune were always looking for ways to separate you from what you cared about most.

And Tav had slipped so easily into the deepest depths of his heart. At first begrudgingly, resentfully…Rolan hadn’t exactly seen her as a welcome addition to their lives when they’d first met long ago on the road to Baldur’s Gate. 

Right now, it was impossible to imagine anything but love for her. 

As Rolan watched a soft breeze ruffle the ends of her hair, something uncertain bloomed inside of him. Was it wrong to feel selfish like this about the person you loved? The question hung unanswered in his chest. Rolan felt its weight there tonight, like a heavy stone dragging on his heart. 

His hand absently brushed against the small leather pouch he kept tied on his belt—there was a small clink of metal against metal from inside.

“Just going to stand there?”

Tav’s voice brought him back to reality in the most pleasant way. Rolan blinked to find that his legs had carried him forward to the arched doorway of their own volition. 

Tav stood a few strides away, watching him over her shoulder with a bemused smile. The firelight streaming out from behind him softly illuminated her features. 

In the next moment, Rolan had closed the distance to tilt her face into a kiss. Her empty cup clattered forgotten to the stone tiles at their feet. Would he ever tire of the way her arms circled around his shoulders like that? 

Rolan didn’t think it was likely—he nuzzled against her cheek as their lips parted, inhaling her familiar and comforting scent.

“What’s with you tonight?” Tav laughed, the sound breathy and soft against his collar.

“What?” Rolan protested, drawing her away slightly to examine her face. “Can’t I appreciate the woman I love?”

A happy flush rose to her cheeks, unnoticeable in the dim to someone without Rolan’s precise vision. But notice he did, just as she caught the way his golden eyes traveled over her expression. Tav pressed her face back into his shoulder as her arms squeezed tighter around him. 

“I wish we had more time,” she said against the crook of his neck.

Rolan tried to quell the instinctive panic that rose in his chest at her words. Instead, he stroked a hand over her hair. “What do you mean?”

The way she paused before answering allowed Rolan’s heart just enough time to wind up to a brisk rhythm against his ribcage. Eventually, Tav leaned back to look at him. Her expression had grown quite serious.

“I know that you—” She cut herself off, then wet her lips and began again. “Rolan, this place is your life. I’m not under any misconceptions that all this—” She tipped her head and looked sideways as if to indicate the Tower itself. “—That any of it’s going away any time soon. You know that, right?”

Her face tilted toward him with utter sincerity. Rolan found that his thoughts were forming with an odd slowness, as if swimming around his brain through something gelatinous.

“And you’ve been very understanding,” he managed to tell her. The guilt from earlier returned its grip over his chest. “More than I deserve.”

She sighed as her hand rose to his cheek. “Thank you for saying that…but you wouldn’t if you knew how often I daydream about kidnapping you away all for myself.”

Before Rolan could find a response to that, Tav had stepped back out of his grip with a soft curse.

“Damn—” She swore again, then wrung her hands with a shaky, anxious laugh. “This shouldn’t be this hard.”

Rolan still didn’t understand quite what she was saying, a sensation that he found deeply uncomfortable. It made him feel like a vessel adrift. He clasped hands behind his back to anchor himself, collecting his features into a guarded expression.

“Please,” Rolan invited her, tipping his horns to her in a way that felt awkwardly formal. “You know you can tell me anything.”

“I know.” She chewed the inside of her lip as she watched him. There was a tense pause, and then she launched in abruptly. 

“I’ve been thinking our life here in your Tower. You and me—us. And,” she added, “I’ve been thinking about your work. How much it means to you…how far you’ve come in just a year.”

Tav gave him a small smile, as if casting back to those tense and awkward times when they’d first known each other. Then her face fell again. “Sometimes it just feels like there’s something missing.”

Rolan found he had to glance away from her for a moment to collect his thoughts. “Are you unhappy?” He asked her slowly.

“What? Not at all—” Tav shook her head with vehemence. “You make me so happy, Rolan, you have no idea. It’s just that I—I’m not always satisfied,” she finished weakly. 

“I see.” Rolan kept his face very still, but his pulse beat painfully in his throat. 

She was unsatisfied with the life of an archmage’s partner. It was perfectly understandable—before she’d come to live with him, Tav traveled far and wide, sometimes leaving the city for a week to visit her far-flung companions across Faerûn and the very hells themselves. 

A life spent cooped up in a tower, no matter how grand—how could he have ever thought it would be enough for her?

Rolan’s guilty conscience was deserved. He had been too selfish with her. He wanted her safe; he wanted her here. Most of all, he wanted Tav to want to be with him.

And Rolan had been so sure that she did. Perhaps he’d let the strength of his own feelings mislead him.

Rolan was painfully aware of the silence stretching on between them. Another evening breeze stirred the air, and as it rustled through their clothing, Tav’s eyes searched his face.

“What are you thinking?” she asked quietly.

Behind his back, Rolan’s hands clenched where she couldn’t see them. Right now he was thinking of the small leather pouch that had hung from his belt for months, and the two small metal objects it contained, and the many ways he had imagined offering one of them to her. But none of those were things he should tell her now.

“Nothing,” Rolan answered aloud. “Only that I’ve been rather foolish.”

In response to that, a strange, puzzled expression passed over her face. Then her lips parted. 

“Ohhhh—” The sound rose from deep in her chest, a pained exhale. “No, Rolan, no no—”

Tav stepped to grasp his face between her hands with such speed that Rolan nearly flinched in surprise at the contact.

“I’m such an idiot,” she confessed to him. Her voice was very small all of a sudden. “I know I might not have the right to ask you, Rolan—but I don’t want less. I want more.”

Rolan’s eyes traveled back and forth between hers as if there was some hidden message he was missing there. “More?” He repeated, questioning. 

Tav nodded her head very slowly at him. “More of you. More of us.”

In the next instant it felt like the weight tangled around Rolan’s heart had snapped its line and plummeted straight down into his stomach. As he watched the firelight reflected earnestly in Tav’s eyes, realization shot up his spine like a shockwave. 

The force of his relief made his head spin. Rolan wanted to say a dozen different things to her all at once. Unfortunately, he found that his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth at the moment.

Instead—in a rare moment of clarity that was all reflex and no logic—Rolan felt himself sinking to one knee in front of her.

“Why are you—” 

Tav’s eyes went wide as she followed his face down to where he landed. Her hands fell from where they’d held him to hang down limp at her sides; her chest rose and fell as if she’d run a flight of stairs.

“How can you not know by now?” 

What a terrible way to begin, he thought—yet those were the words Rolan found leaving his mouth. Trying to right his thoughts, he reached for one of her hands and took it between both his own.

“Forgive me,” Rolan blurted out. “I swear I’ve practiced this before, but—I can’t remember all the best bits just now.”

Tav shook her head at him as if punch-drunk. “Don’t sell yourself short,” she whispered hoarsely.

A nervous bark of laughter escaped him. “Have you ever known me to be burdened with an excess of humility?”

Despite the electricity now swirling between them, the corners of Tav’s mouth twitched upward. “Point taken.”

Rolan used the moment to gather himself. His tongue suddenly felt two sizes too large, and he swallowed with effort against his dry mouth.

“You’ve always done so much for me. From the first moment…every moment. You’re the reason why I have Cal and Lia, why I have everything—” Rolan’s eyes left her only for a moment to pass up over the great spire of the Tower above them. 

From his periphery, Tav opened her mouth to protest.

“Please listen,” Rolan begged her before she could speak. He wished he’d thought this through even a little; his knee was already starting to ache against the stone, but he pushed through the discomfort.

Tav’s figure froze still in response as she watched him. Only her hand shook slightly between his palms.

“You must know what you mean to me,” Rolan murmured. “You’ve given me so much more than I deserve. You’ve loved me more than anyone…better than anyone. But—” He drew her hand a bit closer to his chest. “But I’m afraid there’s one more thing I have to ask you for.”

Tav’s lips were parted in anticipation as she hung on his words. She stood so motionless it was like kneeling at the foot of a beautiful statue. Only her wide eyes moved continuously over his face, and Rolan felt he could lose himself in them completely if he gazed too long.

“Let me give you more,” he asked simply. “Let me give you everything.”

“You—you damn wizard—” 

As she broke her silence, Tav’s expression was flickering somewhere between amusement and tears. She was shaking her head at him, moisture pricking at the corners of her eyes. “If you don’t say it plain in the next—”

“Marry me.”

Though they stood under open sky, the two words seemed to echo with deafening force against his own ears. The question hung like a tangible physical thing, reverberating painfully in the narrow space between their bodies. Rolan could only grip her hand like a lifeline and wait for her to say something—anything.

Finally, Tav burst out into a laugh. 

Or was it was a sob? 

It was some strange combination of both, a choked sound of relief rising in her throat even as Rolan watched liquid suddenly spill and roll down each of her cheeks. Before he knew what was happening, Tav had also dropped to her knees in front of him.

“What are you doing?” Whatever responses Rolan had anticipated, this was one he didn’t plan for. He could only freeze and watch her cry and wait for things to make sense again.

“I don’t know,” Tav hiccoughed through the rapid tears that were streaming down her face now. Her lips trembled as her hands found his shoulders, clutching two handfuls of his robes. “I d-don’t know,” she repeated. “But I want you, Rolan.”

He had just enough hope to take that as a yes. 

Rolan folded Tav’s body into his own with near crushing force. He was now overwhelmingly grateful for their absurd position kneeling together on the cold stone of the balcony. It was unthinkable to have her anywhere but in his arms right now.

“Yes, by the way—” Tav’s voice was muffled against his shoulder, but her chest shook against him with unmistakable laughter now.

“I had plans,” Rolan answered against her hair, half to himself. “None of this is right, hells, I swear I had so many plans—”

“Hold on,” Tav replied in a trembling laugh. She pulled away gently, just enough to notch one hand under Rolan’s ear. Her face radiated joy despite the damp skin on her cheeks. “Rolan, what on earth could be wrong right now?”

Everything, he wanted to groan out. But he bit the word back. 

Instead, Rolan ducked his head to fumble with the drawstrings of the leather bag fastened to his belt. Tav’s fingers dropped from his jaw as she watched on in silent curiosity. 

He shook the open bag over his hand. With a tiny clink, two rings poured from it and out onto Rolan’s outstretched palm. Even on a moonless night, the metal seemed to glow from within with a silver-blue fire.

“Mithril,” Tav breathed in pure delight.

The observation was so unexpected, yet so thoroughly Tav, that Rolan let out a choked laugh.

She touched fingers to her lips. “How long have—when did you—?”

“The week you moved in,” Rolan answered. The way her eyes flicked up to his in pure adoration made Rolan’s heart swell in his chest, but he continued. “That’s when I gave Dammon the commission. Of course it took months to find a vein of it down in the Underdark, I nearly went mad, you have no i—”

The words were stopped up as Tav’s lips collided against his. Rolan’s fist closed over the twin metal bands just as his hand was trapped between their chests.

She kissed him so long and so hard that Rolan gasped for air a bit when she broke away.

“Do you like it?” Rolan asked, needing her answer more than his lungs needed air.

“You’re kidding me.” Tav blinked at him. “Rolan, if you don’t put that thing on my finger this fucking minute, I swear I might have to reconsider.”

He wasn’t about to chance it. Rolan slipped the band onto the finger of her outstretched hand without hesitation; it fit her perfectly. She followed suit, her hand shaking slightly with excitement as the ring slid down to his knuckle.

For a moment they just held opposite hands out beside each other in quiet admiration. Then Rolan linked his fingers with hers, pulling their palms together. 

He supposed the rings were supposed to come after the vows, not before—but the sight of them on their interlocked fingers was too perfect to be wrong.

A moment later they helped each other back to their feet, both laughing at their stiff knees and the pins-and-needles in their legs. 

Rolan felt giddy as a youth. He couldn't stop kissing her; his arms circled her firmly into him, his tail looping around and over her hips in a caress. As Rolan watched the pure happiness radiating from Tav’s face, his heart was the lightest it had ever been.

“Now what?” He asked eventually.

Tav sighed with contentment in his arms. “Whatever you want.”

“I want to take you to bed,” Rolan answered without hesitation. Words had grown tiresome; he could think of no better way to demonstrate exactly the strength of his feelings for her right now.

In response, she separated to tug his hand with both of hers back under the doorway. 

“Then we’d better go,” she said, walking backwards so she could flash him a coy smile. “Because I want my fiancé to tell me about all those ways he didn't just propose.”

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Jan. 6, 2024

"Billionaires attempting to influence politics from the shadows should not be rewarded with taxpayer subsidies," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

Legislation introduced Tuesday by a pair of Democratic lawmakers would close a loophole that lets billionaires donate assets to dark money organizations without paying any taxes.

The U.S. tax code allows write-offs when appreciated assets such as shares of stock are donated to a charity, but the tax break doesn't apply when the assets are given to political groups.

However, donations to 501(c)(4) organizations—which are allowed to engage in some political activity as long as it's not their primary purpose—are exempt from capital gains taxes, a loophole that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) are looking to shutter with their End Tax Breaks for Dark Money Act.

Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has focused extensively on the corrupting effects of dark money, said the need for the bill was made clear by what ProPublica and The Lever described as "the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history."

The investigative outlets reported in 2022 that billionaire manufacturing magnate Barre Seid donated his 100% ownership stake in Tripp Lite, a maker of electrical equipment, to Marble Freedom Trust, a group controlled by Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo.

The donation, completed in 2021, was worth $1.6 billion. According to ProPublica and The Lever, the structure of the gift allowed Seid to avoid up to $400 million in taxes.

"It's a clear sign of a broken tax code when a single donor can transfer assets worth $1.6 billion to a dark money political group without paying a penny in taxes," Whitehouse said in a statement Tuesday. "Billionaires attempting to influence politics from the shadows should not be rewarded with taxpayer subsidies."

"We cannot allow millionaires and billionaires to run roughshod over our democracy and then reward them for it with a tax break."

If passed, the End Tax Breaks for Dark Money Act would ensure that donations of appreciated assets to 501(c)(4) organizations are subjected to the same rules as gifts to political action committees (PACs) and parties.

"Thanks to the far-right Supreme Court, billionaires already have outsized influence to decide our nation's politics; through a loophole in the tax code, they can even secure massive public subsidies for lobbying and campaigning when they secretly donate their wealth to certain nonprofits instead of traditional political organizations," said Chu. "We can decrease the impact the wealthy have on our politics by applying capital gains taxes to donations of appreciated property to nonprofits that engage in lobbying and political activity—the same way they are already treated when made to traditional political organizations like PACs."

The new bill comes amid an election season that is already flooded with outside spending.

The watchdog OpenSecrets reported last month that super PACs and other groups "have already poured nearly $318 million into spending on presidential and congressional races as of January 14—more than six times as much as had been spent at this point in 2020."

Thanks to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, super PACs can raise and spend unlimited sums on federal elections—often without being fully transparent about their donors.

Morris Pearl, chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires, said Tuesday that "there is no justifiable reason why wealthy people like me should be allowed to dominate our political system by donating an entire $1.6 billion company to a dark money political group."

"But perhaps more egregious is the $400 million tax break that comes from doing so," said Pearl. "It's a perfect example of how this provision in the tax code is used by the ultrawealthy to manipulate the levers of government while simultaneously dodging their obligation to pay taxes. We cannot allow millionaires and billionaires to run roughshod over our democracy and then reward them for it with a tax break."

[blueicequeen19]

Dealing Feelings

Warnings: drug use, protected outdoor sex

I sighed, leaning back against the abandoned building that was falling apart way out in the marsh. It was forgotten just like everything else in OBX that didn't have money. Even the cops didn't give a shit about you unless you had money. The whole town was corrupt. It was hard to find good paying jobs without knowing the right people. But sometimes the right people were also the worst type of people. The whole town keeps you dependent on rich families by only giving you enough money to live but never enough to leave. They didn't want outsiders or people from the mainland to see how much weight was moved through OBX. Our little drug ruled town; filed with corrupt officials that prayed on the weak.

That's why I didn't feel bad feel bad for taking things here and there. Or indulging myself with the drugs I find. That's how I met JJ. We both worked for a charter company and we stumbled upon a massive amount of weed being smuggled through someone's yacht. Good thing most rich people aren't that smart. They never keep their shit hidden very well.

"It must be nice being a Kook. This shit is good." JJ exhales, his head resting against the stone wall as he lets his buzz sink in. I nodded in agreement, already feeling lighter. The tightness in my chest had subsided and I was feeling good. Too good.

I pulled out my phone, groaning when I remember I don't have any minutes and shoving it back in my pocket. I couldn't even get a decent fuck on this godforsaken island.

"I don't have any minutes on my phone." I grumble, letting my eyes fall closed as the tangy scent of weed washes over me. I listen to JJ take another hit before he responds.

"What do you need your phone for? We got everything we need. Except chips. I should've grabbed some chips." You both chuckle, also feeling slightly hungry. Something salty sounded killer.

"For a booty call. It's hard to get laid when you don't have a phone." I scoff, taking the joint as he passes it back.

"One of your Kook boyfriends doesn't cover that for you? That's shitty." In the time I'd known JJ, we'd both shared more personal and embarrassing shit with each other than I ever had with another person. He was the only one who knew about my terrible first time and I was the only one who knew about the time a girl threw up in his lap while giving him head. They were both drunk but still gross.

"We don't usually discuss finances, dude." I chuckle, handing the joint back. JJ takes it, tossing his hat down and stretching his legs out in front of him with a sigh.

"Could you imagine asking someone for money while they're balls deep inside you." JJ laughs, turning his lazy smile to you.

"Oh, oh, oh, don't stop. Oh, by the way, could you Venmo me $20." I fake moan, causing us both to erupt with laughter again.

"Start negotiating as you're hitting it from the back," JJ's face is beat red with laughter as he pretends to hold on to someone from behind, jutting his hips upwards as he fake moans, "Oh, uh, how about $15? I'll ask daddy for the rest." JJ jokes, letting his hands fall back down to his sides. We both laugh, breathing in the night air as the high settles deep in my body. I really was horny. It happened every time I smoked this expensive shit.

"God, if I had my vibrator I'd get myself off right here." I close my eyes as lean my head back against the stone, the throbbing in my clit in sync with my heartbeat was becoming distracting. A moment passes and I realize JJ has fallen silent, which is unusual for him. I blink open my eyes, turning to see that he's already watching me. His reddened eyes hooded and his lips slightly parted. I watch as his tongue swipes over his bottom lip, a pink tint reaching his cheeks.

"Use me." JJ rasps, his voice lower than normal. A jolt shoots down my spine, my pussy throbbing in agreement. "Use me to get yourself off."

"JJ." I chuckle but my smile quickly falls when I realize he's not kidding. My eyes fall to the massive tent in his shorts and I can't help the way my eyes widen. He was completely serious. He was turned on too.

“Be for real.” I try to keep my voice even but even my voice threatened to shake with how turned on I was.

“I am. We both know where the others been. We’re friends. Just use me like your booty call. No strings.”

My spine stiffens as I take a moment to take in just how genuinely handsome he was. Some Pogue guys came off as dirty, like surfing all day was their idea of a shower, but he didn’t. I especially liked that dimple that poked through whenever he smiled big. JJ was awfully cute. And packin by the bulge in his shorts.

“Or not. Just thought I’d offer. I’m horny too so I get it.” JJ gives a half hearted laugh, shrugging his shoulders despite feeling mildly insecure by my silence. The weed is smoked expect for the shit he plans to sell so there’s nothing to do but look at each other.

“Do you have a condom?” I finally ask, my heart racing in my chest while the throb between my legs only intensified.

His eyes light up. “Yea.”

“Good.” I lean over and kiss him without a second thought. JJ groans into my mouth, immediately pulling me onto his lap and gripping my ass. I tug back in his hair, devouring his mouth as eagerly as he is mine. The butterflies in my stomach swarm, filling me with heat until I shamelessly start to grind against his clothed erection.

“Fuck.” JJ growls as I break away to pull his cutoff over his head. I’d seen him shirtless plenty of times but this was the first time I’d been able to admire him while touching him. I let my hands roam down his chest and over his abs, loving the way they flex under my finger tips. I look back up to see him smirking as I pop the button on his shorts.

“Like what you see?” He teases, leaning in for another kiss but I evade him.

“Don’t get cocky.” I flirt, lifting up to slip my hand inside his boxers. I try to mask my surprise by what I wrap my hand around but by the smug smirk on his face, I know I’ve failed. He was huge. Probably the biggest I’d ever had. I could barely wrap my hand around his girth as I gently stroked him. JJ shudders, his eyes hooded and filled with lust as he looks at me.

“Usually my hook ups and I have a conversation about what we like beforehand. A little foreplay. Some sexting.” I rasp, hooking my fingers in his shorts as he lifts his hips to let me slide them down.

“Yea? What do you like?” JJ’s voice is thick with need as he watches me lean down and spit on his thick mushroom head. I watch it roll down his shaft before I wrap my hand around him again to lube him up.

“I like my nipples messed with. I like my hair pulled. I like to be choked as I cum. I like doggie but cowgirl is good too.” I lean forward to press a kiss to his Adam’s apple, loving the way I feel him release a shaky breath as my lips graze his skin while I continue to pump him.

“Really?” JJ chokes out, letting his hand slide under my shirt and tugging on one of my nipples. He sucks in a breath when he finds the bar through it for my piercing.

“I like sucking dick too.” I murmur against his lips, a growl rumbling through his chest a moment later.

“Stop or I’ll cum in your fucking hand.” JJ bites out, snatching my wrist and yanking me closer so he can claim my mouth again. His mouth is greedier now, his hand winding through my hair as he fucks my mouth with his tongue. I was already on the edge. Much more foreplay and I’d cum in his lap without ever being touched.

I pull away when I’m breathless, quickly standing to slip my shorts and panties off as he slips a condom on before straddling his lap again. His nervous eyes find mine again and I cup his face, his hands loosely on my hips.

“Dude, chill. It’s just me. You’ve had sex with plenty of girls.” I tease, kissing him gently.

“Yea but none of them on the level I know you. I barely know their names and I-I know you.” I bury my face in his neck, kissing his sweet spot that has his hands squeezing my hips tightly, his rings digging into my skin.

“Do you want to stop?”

“No. I just.. don’t want things to be weird.”

“It won’t. I promise. We will still be friends after this.” I reassure, wrapping my hand around his cock and guiding him to my entrance. I jerk when the head nudges my clit, my free hand digging into his shoulder.

“Wait. I should finger you first.” JJ says, alarm in his voice. I stop.

“Feel how wet I am, J.” I whisper, guiding his hand between my legs and loving the way his eyes fall closed as he runs his fingers through my slick folds.

“Fuck. That’s for me?” JJ rasps, the neediness in his voice almost too much to bare.

“Yes.” I kiss him again, his hand taking over for mine as he guides himself inside me. I hiss at the intrusion, lifting myself up higher before trying to slide down further.

“Fuck.” We both bite out, the tight fit enough to take both our breath away. I roll my hips back and forth trying to stretch myself out. There was no way I was stopping now.

“God, how do you walk around with this thing?” I hiss, sinking down another few inches. He gives a weak smile before spitting in his hand and rubbing it on my clit and down his shaft. The extra lube makes it easier and I’m finally able to fully seat myself. I’m so full it aches. Like he’s going to come out my throat. I can’t help but whimper as I try to grind back and forth. His muscles were drawn tight and his jaw clenched as he let me get myself ready.

“You’re squeezing me so fucking tight.” JJ bites out, digging his fingers into the swells of my ass before reaching for the hem of my shirt and yanking it over my head. I make quick work of my bra then his mouth finds my nipples. I keen, my back arching to meet his mouth and I feel his cock throb inside me.

“I love these.” JJ mumbles around my nipple in his mouth, greedily taking turns with each one as I start to move up and down slowly. There was no longer any pain, just the promise of how good it would feel when I cum with this thing inside me. Toys didn’t compare to this.

JJ grabs my tits with both hands, squeezing hard while rubbing circles along my nipples with his thumbs as I start to bounce.

“Oh, shit.” I pant, sweat already dripping down my spine as I move faster.

“I’m close already.” JJ groans, grabbing my hips to slow my movements.

“So am I.” I cry, my knees sore from the hard ground but I was too close to care.

“Stand up and bend over.” JJ demands, making me whine in protest as he lifts me off and gets to his feet, shorts still around his ankles before pulling me against him and spinning me around. I brace my hand hands against the stone building, bending at the waist and sticking my ass out for him.

“Tell me.. what you like.” I moan just as he fills me up deeply again.

“You wanna know?” JJ growls, cupping my neck and pulling me upright so he can reach my ear.

“Yes.” I pant, his hard body slapping against my ass over and over again.

“I like you.” He grunts into my ear, “I like these tits. I like the way you’re squeezing the life out of me. I like when you pull my hair. I like seeing your eyes roll as you start to cum.” My body explodes, his grip tightening on my throat as I cum harder than I ever had in my life. My pussy clenches around him so hard it almost hurts, stars spotting my vision until his grip loosens on my throat.

“God, what I wouldn’t give to feel you bare.” JJ rasps, his body shuddering against mine as he cums before going limp against me, our bodies sagging against the stone.

“Jesus.” I groan as he slips from me, his hands staying on my waist as I sway.

“That was—.”

“—intense.” I couldn’t shake the overwhelming awkward feeling that was consuming me. Now that the affects of the orgasm were fading and my buzz was definitely gone.. my head was starting to clear. I just fucked JJ Maybank. The closest thing I had to a best friend.

I don’t realize I’m still naked and he’s fully clothed until he turns me.

“Don’t make it weird, right? Just sex.” He says with a small smile, handing me my bra and shirt. No hook up had ever helped me get dressed. I tried to mask my expression, my heart beating a mile a minute in my chest. A sudden realization hits me as I smile at him.

JJ Maybank wasn’t just a hook up.

“Just sex.”

[moralomnivore]

There's a large cohort who are dismissive of the concept of adhering to an ideology that shapes consumption habits. The advertising of companies we are broadly forced to deal with represents a massive industry of opinion-makers who report to the ultrawealthy, with a vested interest in consumption habits.

"No ethical consumption" is a tragic truism which has been corrupted into an excuse for anything short of social-suicide taboos. Life is made difficult and companies prey on how people cope, pouring more of the world's landscapes and ecosystems and manhours and lives into it because those mean nothing to them except what you pay for them. Part of our struggle out of that is to find something more compelling to grasp onto. It's about responsibly constructing an alternative narrative.

"Well, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" just serves power when paying for something you're hypothetically opposed to which has a practical alternative. Learning to resist that is vital. None of this conflicts with working toward a shift in power; in fact, it bolsters it.

[argyrocratie]

(...)

"What is the Houthi movement?

The Houthi insurgency is a Zaydi Shiite Islamist political movement established in 1992 to challenge Yemen’s longtime, and increasingly corrupt, leader Ali Abdullah Saleh. Following massive street protests, Saleh resigned his post in 2011. After the resignation, a national unity dialogue was held in Yemen’s capital Sana’a to try to resolve a host of Yemeni political conflicts. However, those talks eventually broke down, prompting the Houthis to advance on Sana’a with the goal of taking power. This sparked Saudi Arabia’s deadly US-backed air, ground, and naval invasion of Yemen, which lasted for seven years and killed an estimated 9,000 civilians, as well as significant numbers of Houthi forces, in repeated airstrikes. Despite the overwhelming force used by Saudi Arabia, however, the Houthis gained control over roughly a third of Yemen’s land—and two-thirds of its population—over the course of the war.

In April 2022, Saudi Arabia and the Houthis negotiated a truce that has nearly eliminated the fighting in Yemen. The truce halted offensive military operations, allowed fuel ships to enter Yemeni ports, and restarted commercial flights from Sana’a airport. However, it did not offer a comprehensive political settlement, leaving open the threat of renewed hostilities.

How have the Houthis become involved in the war?

After Israel began bombing Gaza on October 7th, the Houthi movement—which has long held what Yemen expert Helen Lackner called a “fundamentalist foreign policy position against the US and Israel”—announced that it was ready to intervene in solidarity with Palestinians. “There are red lines in the situation related to Gaza, and we are coordinating with our brothers in the jihad axis and are ready to intervene with all we can,” the Houthis’ leader said. As part of this effort, the movement has carried out 27 attacks in the Red Sea between November 19th and January 11th, most of them on commercial ships linked to Israel (although some of the attacks have targeted ships without a clear connection to Israel). The movement has also tried to fire on American warships and on Israel itself.

In the attacks on commercial ships, the Houthis have mostly fired missiles at them, though on November 20th, the group’s fighters seized a cargo ship and detained the crew members onboard. These attacks have discouraged shipping companies from traversing the Red Sea, the fastest route from Asia to Europe; many are instead sailing around the Horn of Africa, which adds $1 million to the typical cost of a roundtrip. On January 11th, the White House cited this trade disruption as a key motivating factor for the US’s bombings in Yemen, noting that “more than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea—which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times.”

The Houthi movement’s attacks in the Red Sea, as well as the retaliation the attacks have generated, have revitalized the group’s power within Yemen. Prior to October 7th, the Houthis were facing discontent due to their authoritarian rule, their failure to pay salaries, and their control of aid in the face of spiraling poverty. Their confrontation with Israel, however, has seen “their popularity suddenly skyrocket, including in areas in Yemen where they don’t rule and in stark contrast to other Arab [states] who are at best being silent, or at worse, helping the enemy,” Yemen expert Helen Lackner told Jewish Currents. After incurring significant losses in their conflict with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Houthis’ firm opposition to Israel has also helped them to recruit more young men to their military who believe they will have the opportunity to fight in Palestine, according to Lackner.

In this context, experts say it is unlikely the spate of Western bombings will end the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea—and such attacks could even contribute to the group’s bolstered popularity. “They’re willing to live with some level of retaliation because they can then position themselves as having been targeted by this Western alliance that is serving the interests of Israel,” said Mohamad Bazzi, director of New York University’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. Other experts have also warned that the US strikes risk provoking further escalations: For instance, the Houthis could decide to attack Saudi Arabia in a bid to up the pressure on American allies.

(...)

What is Iran’s role in the regional escalation?

While the groups responding to Israel’s bombing of Gaza—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi and Syrian paramilitaries—are spread out across the region, they are all supported by Iran, which has armed and financed them as part of an overall strategy to contest US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. This Iran-supported network is often called the “axis of resistance,” and the alliance’s close collaboration reflects an approach developed by Qassem Soleimani, who was a key Iranian military leader until he was assassinated by the US in January 2020. “A big part of his strategy in the region was for the groups to get to know each other, and to share training and expertise—and that continued after the assassination in Baghdad,” said Bazzi.

Experts emphasize that Iran does not have full control over the groups it funds and arms, which often pursue their own agendas. For example, the relationship between the Houthis and Iran, according to Lackner, “is a bit like Netanyahu’s relationship to Biden. If they agree, and they want to do the same thing, then they do it. But they are not afraid to diverge either,” said Lackner. For instance, the Houthis ignored Iran’s orders to halt their advance on Sana’a in 2014, which sparked the years-long civil war and the conflict with Saudi Arabia. In the current conflagration, Bazzi said, Iran is unlikely to be directing the various forces to pursue “specific attacks,” but Iranian military leadership is “probably involved in larger-scale conversations about the division of responsibilities of different parts of the axis of resistance.”

According to Bazzi, at this moment Iran is carefully calculating how to maintain regional credibility by showing support for Hamas, while not going far enough to provoke a war with powerful foes like the US and Israel. “The primary Iranian calculation is about regime survival, and they don’t want to do anything that seriously jeopardizes their survival,” said Bazzi. Parsi said that so far, Iran has benefited from avoiding risky moves—in contrast to Israel, which has diminished its own “global standing” with its operations in Gaza. “Israel’s pariah status globally—at least outside of the West—is something that the Iranians are drawing benefits from. But that only works to the point that this doesn’t escalate into a larger conflict,” he said.

How is the US responding to the regional conflict?

Since October 7th, the US has repeatedly said that it wants to prevent more fighting in the region. Early on, the US dispatched warships and fighter jets to the Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah from entering the fray. Biden administration officials have also ramped up diplomatic efforts to halt a regional conflagration: The president sent envoy Amos Hochstein to Lebanon to try to negotiate a solution to the fighting around the blue line, and reportedly warned Israel against escalation with Hezbollah in private conversations. In October, when Israel had made plans to pre-emptively strike Lebanon, President Biden called Netanyahu to tell him to “stand down” on the attack plans, and ultimately, Israel did not launch a wide scale attack, according to a December Wall Street Journal report. “The priority for the Biden administration is to limit or prevent the broadening of the conflict,” said Schenker.

At the same time, the US has carried out repeated bombings in Iraq, Syria, and now Yemen, even as officials continue to talk about de-escalation. “We’re not looking for conflict with Iran. We’re not looking to escalate and there’s no reason for it to escalate beyond what happened over the last few days,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last Friday, after the first US bombings of Yemen. But yesterday, the US military again bombed Houthi targets for the third time in a week, and then designated the Houthis as a terror organization, blocking the group’s access to the global financial system. By targeting Yemen, experts say the US is significantly expanding the regional war—“escalating regional tensions and adding fuel to a conflict,” as Bazzi wrote in a recent column published in The Guardian. “The conflagration could spiral out of control, perhaps more by accident than design,” he noted.

Many Middle East analysts say the Biden administration’s attempt to avert regional war is failing for one main reason: its refusal to couple a plea for de-escalation with advocacy for a ceasefire in Gaza. “Seeing the wider regional conflict as something that can be managed separately from Gaza is the source of the dissonance [in the administration’s strategy],” Bazzi told Jewish Currents. “You can’t prevent the wider regional war effectively without addressing the core immediate issue, which is the Israeli assault on Gaza. It’s just wishful thinking in the Biden administration that somehow it can separate the two.”

[000marie198]

Frontiers really drove home the fact that Sonic's friends are his friends first and foremost, not followers or team of sidekicks. They are his family, his partners in crime, especially Tails. That with all of them together they're a formidable team but they are not just side characters in Sega verse who only support the hero's role. They are the heroes just as much. They'd hold strong when he couldn't, they are pillars he could fall back on just like he is someone they can fall back on. Equals. A family.

This game fixes everything the few past games did to their roles and characters and emphasizes these mobians are not cheer leaders, they are front liners, they are not simply support characters, they are their own person.

Knuckles isn't just a guardian, he's a friend, a brother, a protector, and the last of his kind and someone who deserves to live his life to the fullest instead of keeping watch day and night. He deserves to travel without a threat of world ending, he deserves to meet people, make friends, try grapes of different regions, take day offs, be the child he was robbed of being.

Amy is not just a fangirl chasing after someone she has a crush on. She is kind, compassionate and strong girl who believes in the good in the world and wants to help everyone, show the world the wonders and beauty in small things that go ignored. She has grown up so much.

And Tails, sweet little Tails has always been just as much of a hero as Sonic. He is not the sidekick, he was never the sidekick, that was what people thought him as and he used to see himself as. Sonic never saw him as the sidekick, Sonic sees him as an equal, as a brother, he always had. Tails is such a wonderful child, he could invent things that can help the planet at a massive scale, he can make whole tech companies, he can make new discoveries, advance science so much farther than one could anticipate, can command whole squadrons of jets, he is loved by people and tiny critters of the planet just as much, he is the hero and he deserves to be acknowledged as that.

Being stuck in a limbo gave them all the time to think about what they all want to pursue in life, on discovering their full potential, reaching far across the new frontiers, that they all have the potential for so much more. That they don't have to think of themselves as followers, they are equals. They are a team.

As for Sonic? This game shows that Sonic isn't just a hero who saves the world and helps people because he is nice or a good person. While those are true, saving the world or helping because he was nice wasn't why he was going day and night on no food and zero sleep and constantly at move and slowly getting more and more cyber corrupted, nearing the brink of death. He did it for his friends. Not just because he is a nice person or it's in his nature. If that were the case, he would've approached everything differently, he wouldn't be anxious to hurry on setting the others free but still calm and chill while talking to his friends, he wouldn't be constantly worrying about his brother, he wouldn't be reluctant to help the Kocos. He was listening to the mysterious voice he knew nothing about and proceeded doing everything it told him even though he doesn't trust a mysterious stranger that easily, even though what it told him was slowly destroying him, because that was the only way he knew of which could set his friends free. He didn't know any other way and did something that kept taking a lot out of him (like dude literally looked dead on his feet during the later half of the game, clutching his torso, walking slow, subtle panting) just to save his friends. He's a hero yes, he has endured many things and gone without sleep in the past yes, he helps people because that's just like him yes, but from how anxious and reluctant he seemed when it came to helping out Kocos, it was clear he was more worried about saving his friends than anything. Sonic in almost the entirety of the game had no drive to save the world or anything, he didn't even know whether the world was even in danger or not, he wasn't a hero in this game, he didn't have the role of a hero in this game.

He was a friend.

This was Sonic with his hero mask off. Tired, concerned, at wits and strength's end, enduring, probably knowing he might not survive that corruption but smiling because then his friends would be free and he'd be darned before any of them gets hurt. He was willing to die to set his friends free. In Unleashed, he told Chip, "Do I need a reason to help out a friend?" But even in Unleashed he was on the mission of saving the world. This time? This game added lore and emotions and character growth and themes of living and acceptance and peace and perseverance and hope, but at the core of it all, it was centered on family.

For Sonic, it was centered on protecting his family. For Tails, Knuckles and Amy, it was centered on growing to their full potential but still protecting their friend. For Sage, it was about protecting her family. And what's funny is that she wasn't even the villain or had any intention to harm in the first place, all her warnings were honest. She was attempting to get him to see reason and have him leave so he wouldn't get corrrupted and so the world doesn't get placed in danger.

As Sage said, "Both of us will do anything to protect those who are precious to us."

He'd do anything for his friends. And they are precious to him, more than anyone or anything else. More than the people, more than the inhabitants of Starfall Islands, more than chaos and Kocos, more than the ancients, more than the world. He helped save the world from The End but he wouldn't have been able to that in the first if it weren't for his friends. They not only set him free, they also gave him drive to continue. The first thing he says after being cured was, "I will not let you down." Sonic's friends are precious to him.

....

The emotions, the dialogue, the story, the characterization, the lore, the music... This game is the revival of this franchise. Even its title is perfect for the storyline as well as lore.

Also, my heart hurts from so many emotions.

[hustlerose]

i love how disco elysium positions joyce messier and evrart claire as two sides of the same coin

claire is a slimeball. he's corrupt, despotic, and crooked. the perfect image of a soviet party politician, turning the union into his own petty dicatorship. but he gets results. where individual union members might be communists, social democrats, weird racists, slackers, or just hard workers living simple lives, claire calls all of them "socialists." many facets of the working class, all together under the banner of the dockworkers' union

maybe working under corrupt leaders, alongside people you don't fully agree with, is the only way to make socialism work on this scale. maybe putting up with a certain amount of evil is ok, if it means everyone's lives can get better. maybe evrart is justified in screwing over some nosy cops, or instigating a revolution, or facilitating a massive drug operation. what is socialism worth to a union member? is it worth evrart claire?

joyce is his foil in every way. she's one of the most immediately likeable characters. she's the only person in the whole game, besides harry, who has fond memories of disco. she's not a liar or a despot like claire. she represents a different evil. she's a good person who's chosen to become part of the machine of global capitalism. she's a liberal with a heart of gold, and her bosses have allied with fascists to crack down on the union

when you show messier your badge, it makes her trust and respect you. she believes in society and the law. she knows that capital will devour and co-opt everything in its path. she knows because it co-opted her too. she's a liberal and a monster, blood all over her hands. she has to tell herself all sorts of justifications just to sleep at night.a revolution and a free revachol would mean fighting back against people like messier. everything that makes her likeable also makes her poisonous and tragic

they're both silver-tongued, powerful, and never willing to tell the whole story; they're balanced on opposite sides of the brewing civil war; they both think they can use harry for their own ends.

being part of society and submitting to structures of power always means compromising your moral integrity. no matter what kind of cop you are, harry will always end up arresting a communist for the murder of a fascist. you can feel however you want about it, but you've done your duty. maybe living vibrantly within yourself and thinking deeply about your place is the whole point. maybe it's just pathetic. maybe all those inner thoughts and feelings were only justifications for all the times you had to compromise your morals to do what you were told.

is it even possible to be a good person while also being a cop? a union boss? a company rep? a cryptozoologist? a liberal? a socialist?

[litcityblues]

I'm So Annoyed, But Not For The Reason You Think

Look, I'm just going to go ahead and say it: Ahsoka should have been the basis of the sequel trilogy. The whole damn arc from start to finish made for a vastly more compelling story than anything The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, or The Rise of Skywalker managed to put in front of us.

Rogue One and Andor managed to take the original themes of Star Wars (rebellion against tyranny, the costs, etc.) and give them some actual depth about what it means to try and take down a tyrannical government. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and now Ahsoka are exploring what I think is a vastly more interesting idea that Star Wars should have centered itself around for the sequel trilogy: now that you've defeated the evil empire, you've got to get into the messy and sometimes boring business of actual governing and how do you do that on a galactic scale? How do you deal with the Imperial Remnants? How do you deal with corruption? How do you, the New Republic, extend your authority and show that you're better than the Empire was?

There are so many story possibilities there and those shows mine that territory and do so effectively-- but what annoys me is that this is such an obvious arc to build into a trilogy of movies and they just... didn't. If the prequels were about the collapse of the old Republic into the Empire and the originals were about the Empire and its defeat the sequels should have been about the New Republic and securing the post-imperial future. That's the perfect arc of a trilogy of trilogies and saves us from such awful writing as, "Somehow, Palpatine has returned."

But, Ahsoka:

The series opens with Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson), a fallen Dark Jedi, and his apprentice, Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), assaulting a New Republic cruiser to rescue Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) who had been previously captured by Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson). Elsbeth informs Skoll that Ahsoka is searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn who has been missing for years- along with her former companion, Ezra Bridger who was dragged to an unknown location by a Purrgil.

(It should be noted at this point that I have not seen any episodes of Rebels, but know enough of the characters to piece together what's going on. It would probably provide more context if you have seen the show, but it's not at all necessary.)

Ahsoka and Huyang (David Tennant) find the Star Map they've been looking for, but it's locked so, on the advice of General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), they head to Lothal to meet with Ahsoka's former Padawan, Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who agrees to help them and manages to unlock the map, only to have Hati show up, steal the map and stab her during a lightsaber duel.

Skoll and Hati take the map to the planet Seatos where Elsbeth reveals that Thrawn is trapped in another galaxy. When Ahsoka and company track down the droids that attacked her to Elsbeth's factories on Corellia- they and the New Republic get an unpleasant surprise, as a massive hyperdrive is being built, not for the New Republic but by Imperial Remnants for reasons unknown. They manage to get a tracker on the ship and it's revealed to be the critical parts for Elsbeth's ship, the Eye of Sion, ready to go and find Thrawn and return him to the proper galaxy.

Hera is convinced that allies of Thrawn and imperial remnants are seeking ways to bring him back, the Senators of the New Republic less so, and despite a sympathetic Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), they refuse permission to send Republic forces to Seatos. So Ahsoka, Wren, and Huyang go themselves, find the ship, and are close to figuring out just what it's doing when they get shot down and are forced to land on the planet below, where Skoll, Hati, and company come and hunt them down.

What follows is quite literally one of the best lightsaber duels in the history of the franchise. I would put it right up there with 'Duel of the Fates' from The Phantom Menace or even the original confrontation between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in A New Hope. Ahsoka and Baylan Skoll absolutely go at it and it's awesome. Ahsoka tries to tell Wren to destroy the map, but not wanting to lose her last chance and find Bridger, she hesitates and Ahsoka goes over the cliff, where she spends time In the World Between the Worlds where she meets none other than her old master, Anakin Skywalker. (Hayden Christensen)

Ahsoka makes some peace with her past- but not before Wren, Skoll and Elsbeth activate the Eye of Sion's hyperdrive and head out of the galaxy, just as Hera and a few New Republic forces arrive for a clandestine and unauthorized mission. Ahsoka and company figure out a way to follow Wren to the next galaxy, while it takes a timely intervention from Threepio (Anthony Daniels) to bail out Hera from being in real trouble with the New Republic authorities.

(Seriously: imagine how fucking badass that scene would have been if Leia herself had walked in. This is what I'm saying when I say this story arc should have been the basis for the sequels.)

In the next galaxy, Ahsoka and company find themselves at Peridea, home of the Night Witches of Dathomir and Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and his fleet. Wren goes out to find Bridger (Eman Esfandi) and Ahsoka and the company eventually reunites with them and has one grand finale. They try and stop Thrawn and Elsbeth-- but the Night Witches of Dathomir reanimate the Night Troopers sent to confront them (zombie Stormtroopers!) and eventually the parties are split once more, with Bridger hitching a ride back to the galaxy with Thrawn before sneaking off his ship and reunited with Hera and Chopper while Ahsoka, Wren, and Huyang are stranded on Peridea.

Overall: I absolutely loved this show. Love the characters, love that you didn't need to have seen The Clone Wars or Rebels to enjoy the shit out of this show. Loved so much new stuff! No Tatooine in sight! Loved the Night Witches! Loved Thrawn and his falling-apart Star Destroyer! Loved that he's loading up what I'm guessing are Palpatine clones-- which retroactively provides a clear, story-driven explanation for "Somehow, Palpatine has returned."

This is the Star Wars I should have seen on the biggest screen possible in the theaters. If I'm annoyed, it's because I can see the missed opportunity throughout all eight episodes of this show. That doesn't mean this show isn't awesome though. It is. Give me more, please. My Grade: **** out of ****

[teaberrii]

Chapter 20: Someone to Love

After ending a five-year relationship, you pour all your energy into work. Your latest assignment? Staying at a popular bed-and-breakfast to gather information. It should be a piece of cake... If only the owner isn't the man you scolded on the street.

Jing Yuan/You

Notes:

Cross-posted on Ao3

Female reader

Chapter index at the end of chapter one

Support my writing

You almost miss hearing the thunder rumble in the distance as Jing Yuan’s phone starts blowing up with messages and calls. Is this what Caelus’s uncle meant by ending things once and for all? How did he know about what happened to Jing Yuan’s friend? Wait. What happened to the guy? You nervously tap on the article and brace yourself as you read.

Jing Yuan’s old company—desperate to stay afloat amidst poor sales and a terrible economy—had their stocks crash. Jing Yuan’s friend, who had invested a pretty penny in hopes of a high return had lost everything. The company, knowing about his financial situation, had disregarded him, and his situation took a tragic turn. The article continues by saying that this man’s tragic downfall starts with Jing Yuan, the “rich CEO with millions that recommended and brought his friend into a corrupted company with no morale for its employees.”

What the article doesn’t say is what Jing Yuan told you just moments earlier:

“...I told him the consequences.”

Jing Yuan's eyes are glued to his phone, and for once, you know what's on his mind.

His business, partnerships, reputation… It's going to take a massive hit if he doesn't explain. Now you understand what Caelus's uncle and Jing Yuan meant. Are you going to stand by a man who's supposedly a "criminal" for ruining an innocent man's life? Are you willing to put your reputation on the line?

“...Hey.” You put your hand on his arm. “You don’t have anything to hide,” you reassure. “Using these dirty tactics means nothing if they aren’t true.”

“It’s true I referred to him... But, before then, I told him what I knew about was happening.” He closes his eyes for a moment. “Yet, he kept insisting that everything will be fine. At the time, I thought: Fine. I warned you. And it’s not guaranteed he’d get in through my referral alone. So, I did it.” Jing Yuan is looking away from you now. “It was not a smart decision, but I never thought it would lead to something as bad as it did.”

You tilt his head back. “...It’s not your fault.” Jing Yuan’s hand finds yours, and he holds it tightly. “He made that decision. All of it.” You pull him into a hug, and Jing Yuan’s arms go around you. “We’ll get through this. We won’t let him win.”

Jing Yuan wishes he could continue holding you like this. He can feel your heartbeat just like you can feel his, beating in sync.

“If you’re going to miss each other that much…” You and Jing Yuan break apart. Yanqing stands to the side, looking up at the two of you. “Why can’t Mom just sleep over?”

Jing Yuan crouches and picks Yanqing up. “...Dad has to take care of something tonight.”

Yanqing pouts, and you put a hand on Yanqing’s head. “Can you take care of Dad for me tonight?”

“I look after him every night!”

You and Jing Yuan smile, and then he lightly bounces Yanqing up. “Let’s give Mom a goodnight kiss.” Yanqing kisses your cheek, and then Jing Yuan says, “Now, close your eyes for a few seconds."

Yanqing does as he’s told, but he peeks out. When Jing Yuan leans closer to you, Yanqing completely covers his eyes. Jing Yuan’s kiss is brief, but long enough that you crave the taste of him. Then, you hear him whisper in your ear:

“Goodnight, my love.”

But, that night, like Jing Yuan, it’s far from a good night as you don’t get a wink of sleep.

It’s early the next morning when you’re on the phone with Kafka. Your phone is on speaker as you’re making coffee.

“The timing is too strategic and deliberate,” Kafka says.

“He knows about the investigation I’ve been doing,” you say. “It seems like he wants to shift the public’s focus onto other things even though nothing about him has come out… yet.”

“Well, innocent until proven guilty. If what Jing Yuan told you is true, I also don’t think he did anything wrong. The only problem is proving it.” She sighs. “Wait. What am I talking about? I’m supposed to be talking to you about work, for goodness sake.”

“You are… sort of.”

“Anyway, it’s crazy, but the company believes this will work to our advantage. With Jing Yuan in hot water, we can start making moves.”

You roll your eyes. “Yeah, well, I wonder how long that will last. It’s not like Star Rails has the best reputation here to begin with. Just because someone else is in trouble doesn’t mean we'll get a permanent boost. But…”

“...It’s making our ‘big, bad director’ more suspicious. I’m having another meeting with them today. I’ll keep you updated.”

“Great. Because I’ll be having a meeting of my own.”

It’s not long after you end the call with Kafka that you give the ex-fiancée of Caelus’s father a call.

“...I saw the article,” she says. “It’s all over social media.”

“I want to ask about the recording.”

“...The recording? The one between my brother and him?”

“My theory is that he needed proof. Imagine someone walking up to you and telling you that your wife cheated and had secret children. Who wouldn’t ask for proof?”

“Well… He could’ve asked his niece and nephew to get a DNA test or something… It’s pretty easy to do that nowadays.”

“Sadly, that kind of information is pretty private if they did. I highly doubt I can get my hands on it. I just want to know if you know about the details of that recording. You said it was a private conversation between your brother and him, but were Caelus and Stelle ever brought up? Or, maybe your relationship with their father? Anything that points to the fact that they were children of an affair.”

“...I’d have to ask my brother.”

“This man’s done enough,” you say. “You say it takes one person to ruin a bunch of people’s lives. Well, it can also take one person to save a bunch of people’s lives.”

You hope those words are enough to convince her.

When noon rolled around, you and Jing Yuan got in touch once. It's no surprise he's busy dealing with the aftermath of this fiasco while you're scrambling to get something tangible to nab Caelus's uncle once and for all. What puts you at ease is that Blade and Luocha are with him, but what surprises you is that even Jing Yuan's ex has willingly stepped up to give a statement. The man who died had been a friend of hers, too, and while the tragedy happened during their divorce, Jing Yuan had told her about his warnings to him when they were still together.

March and the others have also gotten in touch, and you could easily picture her annoyed face and clenched fists when she said:

“He’s such a little worm! That fuc—”

“As much as Jing Yuan’s trying to protect himself, he’s also keeping your name out of this as much as possible,” Dan Feng said, and you assumed he took the phone from March. “It’s no secret what that wormy old man is going to do next, so be careful, too.”

“Everyone in Xianzhou is surprised,” Welt said. “No surprise there, but we’re trying to mitigate the situation.”

March sighed. “...Yeah. We can’t sit around and do nothing. It’s frustrating.”

“But, don’t worry, Mom. We also got the almighty JIngliu on our side." You could see the smile on Dan Feng's face. "We got this.”

You walk into a café, and you see the “wormy old man” sitting at the back with a hot drink that you wish you could pour all over him. When you sit across from him, he finally looks at you.

“Not going to get a drink?”

“I’d rather not waste my time.”

“Fine. Let’s get down to business, shall we? Have you decided to stop your little investigation?”

“And if I don’t, will you release an article saying that I’m just as much of a criminal as Jing Yuan?”

“It doesn’t look good for you, considering he’s a competitor, isn’t he? Also, as a woman climbing the corporate ladder, it’s going to make it difficult for you even if you leave Star Rails.”

You almost scoff. “Is that what you also told Jing Yuan’s ex to keep her quiet? After Caelus died, you used this tactic that if word got out she was involved, it would harm her reputation and career.”

“You’re making some bold accusations without any evidence.”

“You used her as a pawn to get what you and the director wanted.”

Caelus’s uncle has a tight smile. “And what would we want?”

“...Do you believe me now?”

The director’s face had gone pale. His arms were on the table, his hands entwined, and he pressed his forehead against them as the words of the recording began to sink in and his heart dropped to the pit of his stomach. He thought he’d knew everything, but this goddamn woman had hid even more secrets from him. She was an ugly blemish on his life that would never disappear, and he wanted to fucking scream.

“Did you know she had children?”

The director slammed one of his hands on the table. “It’s all in the past. I have nothing to do with her anymore.”

“She took your money, didn’t she?”

The director glared at him. “What do you want?”

Caelus’s uncle crossed one leg over the other. “The same as you. Revenge. My brother is someone who only cares about himself. He refuses to give me anything, and he has everyone in Xianzhou fooled that it’s sickening. He came between you and your wife… and she supported him using your money. The hotel that’s thriving in Xianzhou… a large part of that success is because of your hard-earned money, and it’s in the hands of the child my brother had with your wife. If I were you, I’d like to see it go up in flames.”

He knew he had the director right where he wanted him. His face was red as a tomato, fists clenched, and a dangerous look in his eyes that looked as if something snapped.

“I’m sure you know that we’re trying to acquire that hotel right now,” Caelus’s uncle continued. “The project manager in charge of that… I know her very well. A capable woman who’s desperate to climb the corporate ladder. She’s willing to do anything to make sure this project goes through. Her greediness and desperation will be beneficial to us.”

The director’s anger seemed to have subsided slightly when he said, “...The one who presented at the meeting today?”

“That’s right. A pretty one, isn’t she? With the right words, I doubt we’ll have to do much. A woman’s desperation can be a scary but entertaining thing to watch.”

Caelus’s uncle remembers the conversation vividly. It feels like it’s just yesterday. He’s looking straight at you, impressed but also terrified at how much you know. But everything is just speculation. As long as the right people keep quiet…

“...Fine. I’ll entertain you.” He glares at you. “Assuming what you said is all true, there’s no direct evidence that leads to me purposely pressuring my nephew to take his life. There was a full police investigation, and while there was no suicide note, there was also no foul play.”

“You think you have everyone wrapped around your finger, but”—you lean closer—”people are selfish. If they don’t see any benefit to keep quiet, they won’t.”

Just then, your phone buzzes. It’s a message from the woman, and after reading it, you smile.

Your smile doesn’t go unnoticed by Caelus’s uncle. What did you read? Who messaged you?

“You gave us an opportunity,” you say, sliding your phone back into your pocket. “You trying to smear Jing Yuan also put your name in the papers. With him coming out clean, you won’t get off so easily. People can be ruthless when digging up other people's pasts, especially if they're dirty. The more lies you say, the bigger the hole. You won’t get off so easily no matter how much you try to play it off.”

“This doesn’t mean you and Jing Yuan will come out unscarred.”

“...We'll see who gets the last laugh.”

You’ve just exited the café when you take your phone out and reread the earlier message from the woman.

My brother doesn’t have the recording, but… he sent me these screenshots.

Lo’ and behold, it’s written in black and white: a conversation about the recording, but most importantly… one whole paragraph about how Caelus's uncle hates his brother and his desire to ruin his family and “take back what’s his” by getting rid of the children who stand in his way. The way it was written makes you think he must’ve been drunk at the time.

Just moments later, Kafka calls you.

“Like I thought, he denied everything,” Kafka says. “He said he only knew him from the project, but they weren’t involved in anything… personal.”

"Of course, I knew him," the director said. "He was a stakeholder in that project."

“He’s also the brother of the man who had an affair with your wife.”

He quickly stood. “What is this really about, Kafka?”

“I’m sure you’ve seen the article about Jing Yuan. I just found it interesting that the company mentioned in the article… was the same one we were looking to work with many years ago. I did a little digging myself and saw that Jing Yuan left before anything between the companies even began.”

“And?”

“The man that took his life… He was part of the management team that was on close terms with us, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, Kafka… Don’t tell me that you think we came up with this article. That’s ridiculous.”

“This timing is all very coincidental. Perhaps it’s to cover—”

“Your imagination is as wild as some of the people who work here.” Kafka narrowed her eyes. “The employee that you sent to Xianzhou hasn’t been delivering any results. Perhaps she should be thanking whoever wrote this article that the reputation of our competitor is going to go to shit.”

Kafka shook her head in disappointment. “You know what would’ve been the smartest move?” She looked at him straight in the eyes. “You should’ve left Xianzhou alone.”

You almost scoff. “Sounds like he can’t contain his guilt anymore. But… It makes sense. I don’t see how Caelus’s uncle would’ve known about what happened to Jing Yuan’s friend if someone hadn’t tipped him off.” Then, you roll your eyes. “Guess Star Rails was smart to not put their name in the paper.”

“Well, it’ll turn ugly, that’s for sure. Our director fed him this information. And, thinking they had the upper hand, they quickly published it. Now, if Jing Yuan is found to be clean, people will start questioning the person who started this entire thing.”

“Knowing the kind of person he is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Caelus’s uncle drags in our big, bad director and Star Rails so he doesn’t take all the blame. But, I’m glad this case will finally see the light of day.”

“In due time. It’s likely Star Rails paid this journalist to come up with this article if that journalist didn’t bother checking facts.”

“Then, I guess it’s good I have connections of my own.”

◆◆◆

“People are shocked, but not everyone is blindly believing it. So, that’s a good sign.”

It’s late afternoon, and Dan Heng and Jingliu are at a nearby café.

“I talked to Jing Yuan earlier today,” Jingliu says. “It’s the constant explaining to his investors and partnerships that’s driving him a little mad. But, at least the media already reached out to him. Our cute little investigator is also involved. ”

“Cute little investigator?”

Jingliu says your name. “She’s ready to fire bullets.”

Dan Heng puts his hands around his coffee. “...Looks like you are, too.”

“Me? Oh, well, if you call finding a new path firing bullets…” She chuckles. “I suppose.”

“It’ll do well. A physical rehab center for seniors isn’t something Xianzhou has yet. Fits with the market too since the population is getting older.”

“I’m glad people are already looking forward to it. A lot of my younger staff are already thinking about getting certifications. Some of them haven't decided what they want to do as a career yet, and this is something they're considering."

Dan Heng’s hand finds hers. “What about your dad?”

“What do you think?” Jingliu laughs. “He’s glad he doesn’t have to travel to the city if something does happen. In other words, he's happy we found a way out without having anything to do with you-know-who.” She slightly leans forward. “Why do you look down? I thought you also have things figured out.”

Does he? Dan Heng has been trying hard not to let it show, but it seems like he can’t suppress all of his emotions. He looks off to the side, wanting to pull his hand back when she holds it tightly. Is it childish to tell her what he truly feels? Probably. But it’s better than keeping her in the dark. So, he looks at her and says:

“...I’ll miss you. A lot.” Jingliu gives him a small, reassuring smile. “But knowing that both of us have our own thing going on, I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“I don’t know about other people, but”—Jingliu holds his hand—”I prefer this than being stuck with each other all the time.”

“I thought you might say that.”

Jingliu leans back and glances out the window. “You asked when was the last time I’ve been on a date. Well, I’ve been on a couple… but obviously they never worked out.” She looks back. “Some people told me I was too assertive and that men liked a woman who’s a little dependent on them.”

“...I’m sure there are people who fit that mould, but”—he smiles—”we do our own thing, regardless of what other people say.”

“I think that’s one of the things I like about you, Dan Heng.” The unexpected compliment makes his face warm. “Out of the years I’ve been training you, you don’t sway easily by what other people say. Whether it’s about your performance or decisions… You think about whether what people say has merit. That’s not something easily accomplished by someone your age.”

“I’m not young anymore.”

“Well, some people never get there.”

“...There’s one person whose opinion I want to know about.”

Jingliu laughs. “My dad?” Judging from the look on his face, she was right. “Oh, he’ll love you. Don’t worry.”

But his legs still feel like jelly every time he thinks about formally meeting him, anyway.

◆◆◆

Dan Feng is lying half-naked on a table with acupuncture needles sticking out of his shoulders when March walks in. He glances at her and sees she already got his bag of medicine. She slides the door shut, and he can no longer hear the outside conversations. It’s just him and her.

“Luocha says Jing Yuan will be fine,” March says. “Looks like Welt’s Ms. Femme Fatale got some dirt on Caelus’s uncle that will really shut his mouth once and for all. Hallelujah!"

“You talking about Mom?”

“Stop calling her that,” March deadpans. “It’s weird.”

Dan Feng tilts his head to the right as if he’s a puppy. “Why? You call JIngliu Mom. With how things are going, you might as well start calling Dan Heng Dad."

March makes a disgusted face. “That’s different.”

“Well, we have time to spare. Enlighten me, dear March.”

“You’re not that much older than her.”

Dan Feng gives her a deadpan look. March ignores this and pulls out her phone. When she slips it back into her pocket again, Dan Feng asks, “You waiting for someone?”

She sits on a nearby chair. “...I’ve been back in touch with some people I knew in the entertainment industry.”

“Are you excited?” March looks at him. “You’re going to be performing on music shows, aren’t you?”

“Actually…” She takes a small breath. “The contract I’m going to be signing is for acting.”

“Acting? You’re going to be an actress?”

“I was talking to Welt about it the other day… How cool it would be if his novel got a film adaptation. I joked that I could play our Ms. Femme Fatale, and then he literally said ‘Well, why not?’ Just got me thinking… considering it looks like everyone is stepping into new things. I don’t want to fall behind.” When Dan Feng doesn’t say anything, March starts fidgeting. “If you’re going to laugh, then just do it. Stop making me anxious.”

“Why would I laugh?” Dan Feng rolls his eyes. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

“Yeah, well, you—” March stops and stares at him with wide eyes. “What did you say?”

Dan Feng would've shrugged if he could. "It's just something I noticed. You have a natural talent for singing but you wanted to try dancing. When you got good at dancing, you wanted to try producing and writing your own songs. I don't know. I guess it's cool that you don't settle just because you're good at one thing."

March’s jaw drops.

“You look like a fish out of water,” Dan Feng continues.

“I, um, well… That’s…”

“Your face is turning red.”

She huffs.

“Now, you look like a blowfish.”

She walks over and gently pokes one of the needles. “Don’t make me stab you.”

“Ooh, I’m terrified.”

March moves in front of him, and Dan Feng watches as she gets at eye level with him. What is she doing? If only he can move.

“You know what I hate about you?”

Dan Feng holds her stare. “Everything?”

She sighs and moves closer. “...Yeah. Everything.”

A small smirk. “Well, you won’t hate me if you come just a little closer.”

“Sounds sus, but—”

It takes March a moment to realize that Dan Feng is kissing her… while lying half-naked on the acupuncture bed.

◆◆◆

When you finally see Jing Yuan, it’s late afternoon, Things have finally begun to settle down as he’d finished talking to reporters and took care of things internally to come out with a statement. But, most importantly, he still had the texts between him and his friend that proved his innocence. Now, all that’s left is to wait.

You, Blade, and Jing Yuan are having tea at Jing Yuan’s place when you say:

“I feel like I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Bet you didn’t think you’d be going through all of this when you first got here,” Blade says.

“It’s something I’ll never forget, that’s for sure. But… not everything’s finished yet.” You put your tea on the table. “I’m officially working with the media on an article exposing Star Rails.”

“Wait,” Jing Yuan says. “...But, you’re still working there.”

“Yeah… Won’t this get you into some pretty big trouble?” Blade asks.

“If you mean launching a new career, then… yeah. I suppose so.”

“A new career? You mean…”

You’re looking at Jing Yuan when you say, “If things go well… I might be offered a contract as a freelance journalist covering local news here." Jing Yuan feels his heart soar. "Of course, this is just the start… The more experience I get, I can start a newsroom here.”

Your words wash his fatigue away as he pulls you into a hug. “The best news I've heard all day. You’ll do so well, love.”

“Hm… Interesting. Perhaps we’ll even work together.”

“Work together?” you ask Blade as Jing Yuan lets you go.

“The university I work at is interested in building a small agricultural campus here. It's partly why I'm here."

“Are you overseeing this project?”

“That’s right. I’ll also be relocating here to teach.”

Your jaw almost drops. “Wow. I bet Yanqing will be happy to have both of his dads here.”

“...I asked Yanqing not to call Blade that anymore,” Jing Yuan says.

Before you can ask, Blade notices the time and says, “All good things have to come to an end, I guess.” He stands. “But, at least I still get to spend time with my favourite kid.” You and Jing Yuan walk Blade to the door. “I’ll drop him off later.”

Jing Yuan nods, and you and Blade say a quick goodbye.

Once Blade leaves, you jokingly ask, “Is someone being too protective of Yanqing now?”

Jing Yuan walks up, puts his hands around your waist, and leans closer. “I don’t want people to think you also belong to Blade.” The thought has never crossed your mind, but it makes sense… as Yanqing calls you Mom. Jing Yuan’s forehead is against yours when he says, “...You belong to me.”

Your mind goes into a daze when his lips meet yours. Soon, his hot mouth once again takes you on a wild, wild ride, unleashing a flame within that quickly spreads throughout your body. Your fingers weave through his hair; his grip around your waist tightens, and he pulls you even closer until your body is flush against his. Your teasing touches dance along his broad shoulders and muscular arms, fanning the fiery flames of desire that he can no longer hold back.

The world becomes a blur as Jing Yuan lifts you effortlessly. With his hands on your hips, your legs around him, you gasp as his sinful, delicious mouth travels from your lips to your neck and then to your collarbone, leaving a burning trail in its wake that makes you long for more. A soft moan. A quiet gasp.

Then, you feel his breath against your ear.

“Let me hear more, love…”

You breathlessly say his name when he finds that sensitive spot on your neck.

“...I’ve waited too long.”

Soon, his tongue teases and dances with yours, and he’s kissing you as if it’s the last. You pull the red ribbon, releasing his hair from its confinement. Then, with your hands cupping his face, you say:

“...Love me, Jing Yuan.”

Chapter 21

End notes:

Muahahahaha the smut has finally arrived. I really want to try upping my game when writing smut lol so let's see how this goes.

The next chapter is the last! I'm surprised I actually kept this within a reasonable length lol. My initial want of keeping this within 20 chapters wasn't too far off. *pats self on back*

Tag list: @suoshiii @lordbugs @lxry-chxn @seirenspinel @immahuman @queencybow @nqctre @grimreapersscythe @winterpein @asakenajustexistshere @sunsethw4