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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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

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

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gremlingottoosilly · 6 months

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Married!reader who's husband's abandoned them and skipped town after borrowing money from Mafia!König

You thought your husband’s love for you was more than his love for money - and you were deadly wrong. Poor, abandoned little thing you are - Konig almost feels pity for you, with the way you were still clinging to her hope that he will come back for you and together, you’ll go about your merry way…of course, life sucks and it’s not what is happening here. Of course, your loser of a husband never knew that the biggest asset he could ever introduce to then debt collectors is his smoking hot beauty of a wife - and you never thought that he will actually abandon you here. Now, standing in your small kitchen, still wearing your adorable pink apron and ring held on a gunpoint by the most notorious cutthroats of the city, you know better. Horangi is the most ell known hitman of KorTac, and he knows the tastes of his boss more than anyone else - maybe, this is why you weren’t just held for ransom in hopes that your husband will come back, but was pushed deeper, held as a pretty toy for the boss. Not that you knew this at the moment.

Konig introduces you to a very few options. You can refuse to be his little bird, throw away all of his good will intentions and be a little bitch - so he wouldn’t feel too bad about killing you. Or, preferably, you can ask him to be soft with you, you can plead him for forgiveness for you and your husband - and he will take you as collateral instead of just fucking and killing you afterwards. You’re a good girl, so, of course, you plead him to be gentle. God, he just doers the sight of you on your knees, your house dress is making the scene look all the more domestic and, dare he say, adorable. He can’t help himself - he kisses you, kisses you like there is no tomorrow, and he is acting like it’s no big deal, either. He gets you up on his lap and this is your earned placed from now on - even when he is busy with meetings and talking to very, very evil people, he will keep you with him as if little lucky charm. Grasping your thigh and laying with the soft flesh every time you wince at the blood or a rude word being thrown around the room. You’re from a good family, after all, you aren’t used to the harsh ways of this business. Good girls are hiding their faces in their husband’s chests as their husband kill the traitors with a soft, tiny promise of doing the same with you if you to ever disobey him. But you’re a smart cookie, so you try your best to forget that this is even happening. You put a smile on your face and act all lovingly and gentle even with his crooks and thugs - they all adore you, always knowing the difference between common whores that boss occasionally has, and you, his prettiest girl.

You would sit beside him in clubs, too - he drags you out with him, mostly to turn down the girls who are chasing him like little fireflies, and also because he wants to have you available for a quick fuck while he is being served drinks. He wants all of you with him on a silver platter - even if for the first few times you are together, he had to press his gun against your temple and threaten to pull the trigger if you won’t be his good girl. You learned to suck him off just right while he is discussing the fate of your husband with you. You learn to just nod to whatever torture he is proposing to your poor hubby and smile when he pets your head and says that he will keep you with him - not just as a collateral anymore, but as a girl that rightfully belongs to him. You don’t want to be referred to as his girl - it there is really isn’t much of a choice. You’re other his girl, receiving expensive gifts and money for just being with him, or you are a wife of a man who has a debt to him - so, you’re a liability, a hostage, a prisoner. At least now, you can pretend to be an actual wife instead of, well…whatever you are, really. Konig bought you a ring and talks about the wedding, but you know it’s just a bluff. You hope it’s just a bluff.

#cod #konig x reader #yandere konig #konig #cod x reader #yandere cod #mafia!konig

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the-inner-musings-of-a-worm · 5 months

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aaron minyard doesn’t hate neil josten because he’s annoying or because he’s his brothers boyfriend.

no, aaron minyard hates neil josten because one day, neil will be asked to kill his brother and andrew would hand him the gun without hesitation.

it starts when neil joins the team. sure, things were rough before, but this kid showing up out of nowhere and trying to fix them rubbed salt in the wound. he sees how neil interests andrew, how his brother keeps giving the liar his yeses and his deals and promises. it doesn’t sink in until baltimore, until andrew breaks his deal and chokes out kevin. watching andrew kneel in front of neil (nathaniel), a broken boy made from butchers and glass, that’s when fear starts to claw into his heart. he interrogated neil at the cabin, and the whole time there’s a whisper in his head saying “just how far will andrew go”

aaron watched andrew fight his way into being his own person after a childhood of tragedy upon tragedy. he was there when nicky adopted them, when andrew explored his agency and rebuilt himself from the ground up. and then he watched as andrew found neil and piece by damning piece built his life around him. they’d deny being codependent but there is no more andrew minyard and neil josten there is only andrewandneil.

neil makes a deal with the mafia and aaron wants to scream, shake the man and ask him where his brother fits into all this.

but he knows.

he knows that one day, neil josten won’t be a professional exy player anymore. he knows that the man will grow old and slower, and one day he won’t have a paycheck to send to the moriyamas. they’ll consider him a liability, show up at his home (the one he shares with andrew)

and when neil josten will fall, so will andrew minyard.

his brother claims he is an independent person but he is lying

aaron is terrified, because he knows there is no corner of hell that neil josten could not lead his brother to.

neil josten is andrew minyards death sentence, and aaron is the only one who can see it. he cares too much about his brother not to.

#aaron sees it as andrew giving away his life for love #he loves katelyn but he doesn’t understand that intensity where he has to tie his mortality to hers #aftg #all for the game #neil josten #andrew minyard #aaron minyard #aaron thinks that neil josten is the most selfish person to take his brother away like this #no he’s not biased…

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darklordofthesimp · 2 years

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Six Words (Simon 'Ghost' Riley x Reader)

Summary: After a mission goes wrong, you're tasked with keeping an injured Ghost safe from swarming insurgents. When you almost fail to save him, you realize your feelings towards him makes you a liability. Ghost disagrees.

Prompt: #61 "I don't know how to love you" From my prompt list here.

A/N: I need prompts, my head is empty with nothing but Konig and Ghost SOS.

Category: Angst - Hurt/Comfort

Warnings: Swearing - Gun Violence - Themes of War

Missions were the hardest part.

The gunfire over comms, the callouts and the target indications. Every now and then you’d wince at the wounded cries of your colleagues, it was always the younger ones who screamed.

And although it was eery, you were glad to hear them. If they were crying it meant they were alive.

It was the silence that you were afraid of.

“Sunshine, this is Bravo-6. How copy?”

You blinked, flicking your gaze from your rifle’s scope. Car horns blared from the bustling city beneath you, unaware of the conflict happening 40 stories high.

“Bravo-6, this is Sunshine. Loud and clear, over.”

If Price was raising you, it meant that the fight would soon be moving into your arcs of fire. You settled in behind your rifle, resting your cheek against the stock. You’d already accounted for the distance and thankfully the wind was steady enough that adjusting your weapon sight hadn’t been difficult to calculate.

“Sunshine, you’ll have company soon, 42nd floor. Clear them out.”

“Copy that, Bravo-6.”

The windows had already been blown out, providing you the clearance to take your shots, so you waited, watching the elevator and stairs with your finger curled lightly against the trigger. However, when someone had finally come busting through the door, you hadn’t expected it to be Ghost.

Jesus. Ripping your finger off the trigger, your heart raced, its panicked beating echoing in your ears like a church bell.

You hissed a curse beneath your breath, what the fuck was he doing in the red zone? Bravo team was meant to herd them onto the 42nd floor so you could clear the board, not pay a house call with them.

“Ghost, what the fuck are you doing?” You snapped into your headset.

You watched him throw himself over a bench on the far side of floor, tucking his body behind it for cover. He turned his head to the window, presumably to where he knew you were nested.

“Shit’s gone sideways, change of plans. I’ll distract them, you shoot ‘em.” His voice was ragged and rougher than usual. Small groans were woven into his words and as you looked at him a little longer, you realized that he was pressing a hand to his stomach.

Ghost had been shot.

Your heart dropped.

“Incoming!” He shouted, twisting his body to face the bench rather than away from it.

You hissed, moving your sights to where they should have been- at the doors. Instantly, you realized there were too many of them, he hadn’t cut down as many as he should have and now it was a race against the clock. Kill them before they killed Ghost.

You got to work, falling into a frenzied rhythm. Spot and shoot, spot and shoot. You forced yourself to not check on your teammate huddled into the corner, to not see if he’d been turned to minced meat.

One by one, they fell. And one by one, anxiety had begun to claw its way through your chest. You had a sniper rifle, not an LMG, it was near impossible to clear this many people before they’d be able to reach him.

“Fuck! Fucking shoot, Sunshine!” Ghost roared through your comms. Your breath was unsteady now. One after the other they fell and one after the other they pushed towards the little bench Simon Riley was hiding behind.

You said nothing, unable to talk, unable to think, only able to shoot and shoot and shoot.

“I’m getting overrun here!”

You pushed your scope to view Ghost. There were four of them on him already and so many more pushing ahead. Your heart dropped as the sounds of your shots became hollower, the tell-tale signs of sound echoing through your mag, you were coming up on empty.

Then there was a dull click where there should have been a ‘bang’.

“Reloading!” You shrieked, dumping the mag and scrambling for a fresh one from your body armour. All the while you watched Ghost fight on the back foot, offense became defence and fluidity became manic.

He was going to die.

And it would be your fault.

“Covering!”

You held your breath.

Soap slid through the doorway, shooting before he’d even had a good look at the scene before him. He knew there was too many of them, he’d heard the radio chatter and he’d heard your panic.

You could have cried at the sight of him.

You finished reloading, repositioning yourself with a newfound hope fuelling your body. Between the three of you, the rest of the insurgents had been light work to clear out. It was a massacre, a sight that would traumatize most with bodies piling along the floor.

But all you could think of was Simon.

You heard his groans as Soap helped him to his feet, muttering comfort beneath his breath the way only Soap could. “Come on, LT. You’re pretty banged up, let’s get you home.”

As the adrenaline began to seep from your body, leaving you shaking and quiet, your mind began to spiral.

Nights spent on the roof, revelling in each other’s company but not saying a word. The short tit for tat banter that you’d fallen into. The drunken nights you’d sought each other out, to chase the nightmares with touches neither of you would remember in the morning.

You’d almost let him die.

Ghost straightened as best as he could, leaning against Soap as the Sergeant held him up. They both came to a stop by the window near the exit, the battered soldier pausing to gaze out across the buildings. And although you knew he couldn’t actually see you, it felt like he was looking straight at you.

“You did good, Sunshine.”

The words were genuine, almost soft if it weren’t the ragged breathing from his injury.

You bit your lip.

When you didn’t respond, the pair continued on, disappearing into the elevator and leaving you to suffer with your thoughts.

_______

The cold, night air always helped to clear your head.

You were sat on the rooftop, legs dangling off the edge of the building as though it were just a normal bench. Your chest rested against the railing; your arms folded over the top of it.

Your mind was a mess.

How had that mission gone so wrong, so fast? Logically, there wasn’t much more that you could have done. You were on the trigger constantly, a body dropped every two to three seconds, a good enough pace when you were constantly switching targets.

But you weren’t fast enough.

“You’re not gonna jump, are you?”

Your body jolted, gripping the railing tight with a gasp so you didn’t fall right off the edge. Ghost stood beside you, clad in a pair of soft black trousers and a hoodie that was drawn over his head. You swallowed your anxiety when he lowered himself to sit beside you.

You’d seen him without that jumper plenty of times, twisting against each other in the dark with alcohol on your tongues. But seeing him with it, seeing him look like any other man preparing for bed, made your heart soften.

“No.” You rasped, answering his quiet joke.

You both fell into silence, but it wasn’t comfortable like it usually was, at least not on your end. You were stressed, the tension rising in your chest to suffocate you. You forced your eyes to remain on the horizon, observing what you could under the moonlight.

There was a nudge by your hand and you glanced down. The man held out a cigarette and a lighter and you forced yourself not to look at the unlit one hanging from his mouth. It was an unwritten rule, when he rolled the mask above his lips to smoke, you would avert your gaze.

You took the cigarette with a sigh and a soft ‘thank you’, perching it between your lips. You lit the smoke, drawing the first drag to keep it alight and Ghost softly took the lighter from you.

“Didn’t know you were out of hospital,” you said, taking another draw. You blinked away the head-spin from the nicotine, feeling the stress melt from your shoulders.

“If you’d known you wouldn’t be up here,” he said simply. You clenched your jaw, hoping he wouldn’t push the subject. You could feel his gaze burning into the side of your face, watching for any tell-tale sign to say that he was right.

But you just took another drag.

“You’re avoiding me,” Ghost finally said outright.

Your heart stuttered in your chest and you made an effort not to crush the cigarette between your fingers.

“I almost got you killed.”

The officer’s breath came out in a short huff, the equivalent of a laugh for the sullen character. “Don’t flatter yourself. We fucked up; you were on clean up.”

Your heart was racing now, but you knew what the problem was. You knew why you were beating yourself up over something that wasn’t really your fault. It was childish and it was immature and one day it might just get you both killed.

You’d become a liability. It was your duty to inform him.

“I’m going to apply for a transfer out of the 141.” Your sentence rang like the toll of a church bell, echoing between you. You couldn’t believe you’d finally said it but you’d known for a while.

“What?” Ghost shifted beside you, twisting his body to stare at you front on.

“I’m going to get someone killed-“

“Is this about today?” Ghost questioned and you risked a glance at him. His lips were curled in disbelief and he flicked the cigarette off the roof. He dragged his mask back over his mouth, but his eyes still flashed with incredulity. “Get the fuck over it, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It’s about you, Simon!” You snapped.

Ghost fell silent.

“I’m fucking compromised,” you stood to your feet, flinging your cigarette over the railing. The soldier followed in suit, towering over you instantly. “I can’t be in a situation like that again- what if I’d have failed? I couldn’t fucking breathe, I couldn’t think-“

His hand came to rest against your shoulder and your words guttered to a stop.

You peered up at him in surprise, meeting that dark gaze. For the longest time, you’d always thought Simon had dark eyes, the blackest you’d seen. The breath left your body when, on closer inspection, you realized they were fucking blue.

For a long moment neither of you said nothing, silenced by the sudden display of affection. There was no end goal, no reason for him to be touching you. No high to be chasing, no bullet to push you out of the way of.

He was trying to comfort you.

He took a sharp breath. “I know.”

You blinked at him, opening your mouth then closing it again. He’d understood. He knew what you were saying, he’d known all along because Simon had been fighting the same thoughts.

When his fingers tightened against your shoulder, your lip trembled.

You wanted to hold him. You wanted to see him.

You knew that you could do neither.

“I don’t know how to love you,” you whispered, “I don’t know how to feel like this and work with you. Watch you get shot at. Be the one to make sure you don’t die.”

Simon shrugged, his gaze never leaving your face, taking in your features as though committing it to memory. He had no words of affection to give you but you could feel it in the way his thumb rubbed against your skin ever so softly, a ghost of his touch.

“You’re smarter than me, Sunshine. You can figure it out too.” His words were careful, and you blinked up at him from where you’d hung your head.

You can figure it out too.

When he pulled his hand from your shoulder, you felt the cold of his absence. But his words had set a fire in your chest that kept you burning.

Six words from Simon Riley were enough to set your world ablaze.

#simon ghost riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley #simon riley x reader #mw2 x reader #cod mw2 ghost #cod mw2 x reader #cod mw2 #call of duty mw2 #ghost x reader #cod x reader #call of duty x reader

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perpetual-fandom-brainrot · 10 months

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Some CoD Hybrid Reader Drabbles

Hybrid reader stuff, if it's not your taste I recommend clicking off and finding something better to read (*cough cough* Temporary Relocation *cough cough*)

TW: Descriptions of violence and gore

Other than that mostly just fluff

I've gone down a rabbit hole (two kinds) and I can't help but think about some concepts I want to see interacting with this trope like...

If reader was a bunny hybrid, separated from their fluffle so just aimlessly wandering around. Used to having other bunny hybrids around to help with grooming/cleaning so you don't entirely know how to do that, either, at least not effectively. I imagine you wouldn't be found by the 141 while they're on duty, but rather one of them (or their family members) would find you while on leave. They'd take you in and take care of you, and start noticing just how good of a fight or flight system you have. Maybe with some good training, you'd make a good soldier...

If reader was a dog/wolf hybrid, kidnapped owned by some of the not necessarily best people in the world since only being a pup. In fact, these people end up being wrapped up in activities that the 141 ends up sticking their noses- and barrels- into. As they're stalking around the building where you're kept, making sure all of the targets are taken care of, they train their guns on you for a moment. It's when you back up quietly, whimpering with a raw and dehydrated throat, that they realize you aren't a threat. They unlock your prison kennel and tell you to move it before you're definitely a liability (whoever dictates this choice gets mega whooping from their higher-ups later). When they run into you again on the way out, finishing ripping out the esophagus of another target who would've otherwise interfered with exfil, that you're offered a position as a soldier. And you accept.

If reader was a cat hybrid who spent their time wandering streets, taking bites of abandoned food and finishing drinks long forgotten in order to survive, only for that very town to be the one Ghost and Soap arrive in while fleeing from Graves. You're crouched behind a dumpster when Graves is rounding up the cops, and even though you're bringing claws to a gunfight you can't stand to see him acting as judge, jury, and executioner. You find a Shadow nearby, not expecting anyone in their previous path to still be alive, and silently get their weapons off of them. You wait for your moment, using your intricate knowledge of the alleyways and buildings and rooftops to stay undetected, taking out the Shadows around Graves. You take an angle at Graves himself, jumping from a rooftop and landing on his shoulders, pulling his hair until he's stumbling backwards and you both fall into the fountain. You grab a beer bottle off of it and bash it directly over his head, making sure it shatters and knocks him unconscious. You scurry off, disappearing into the night before Soap has a chance to get down and speak to you, or even process what he just watched.

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multific · 9 months

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His Strength

Deckard Shaw x Reader

Warnings: kidnapping, torture, injury

Summary: Emotions run high when you think you are about to die.

Deckard was panicking.

He was fumbling around, trying to finally open the door to this damned trap.

He promised you he would protect you.

He promised you will never get into the crossfire.

And now, he broke his promises.

They found you and took you from him.

He knew he was supposed to be better. He shouldn't have formed an attachment. He shouldn't have fallen in love. He shouldn't have, but he did.

He fell in love with your whitty attitude and smile. He loved you deeply. And now, he will have to watch as you die because of him.

They knew how to hurt him, they knew where to stab so Shaw would break.

They took you.

They hurt you.

And now, they will kill you. and he can't do anything.

No matter how hard he pushed on the door, it wouldn't open.

He could hear the noises behind it.

You didn't beg or cry.

A loud bang could be heard.

A shot.

And silence fell.

Then, Deckard reached his lowest, he slid to the floor. Pure rage took the place of the panic as Deckard watched his hands.

Revenge.

They killed you, so he will avenge you.

But then, he heard your voice.

"Deckard," his head snapped up at the door. "Come get me." you said and Deckard snapped.

He stood up, and kicked. Kicked and kicked again.

The metal door fell to the floor.

He saw you, tied to a chair, surrounded by men with guns and knives.

Deckard had tunnel vision.

And he had one mission in mind, getting you.

Just as you asked.

You closed your eyes and waited.

You knew it was only a matter of minutes for Deckard to get you out of here.

And it was.

You soon heard his voice calling for you, asking if you were okay, and while you did have some injuries, mostly, you were okay.

Especially when he took you into his arms.

He took you to the doctor who patched you up.

Then, he took you home, showered you, and got you into bed.

You slept knowing he was right there.

Deckard couldn't sleep.

His mind was running wild.

But deep down he knew, his enemies were all wrong.

You weren't a liability, you weren't his weakness.

You were his strength.

Taglist: @fleursirvart @greenarrowhead @thisismysecrethappyplace @sincerelyfan @theoneanna @aestheticsandmarvel @rororo06 @castellandiangelo @destynelseclipsa @spilledinkindumpster@capsiclesdoll @puknow @alwayshave-faith @alex12948 @lxdyred @imagines-by-a-typical-fangirl @anonymoussherlockandmarvelgeek @praline357 @trshngyn @avengers-r-us @violet-19999 @top1bbgloak @manduse @jacalineiscomingforyou @mandoloriancookie @noname2246

~Masterlist~

ˇAO3ˇ

/YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO TRANSLATE OR REUPLOAD ANY OF MY WORKS TO THIS OR OTHER PLATFORMS/

#deckard shaw #deckard shaw x reader #deckard shaw x you #x reader #fanfiction #x female reader #fast and furious imagines #fast and furious imagine #the fast and furious #fast and furious #fast and furious fanfiction #fast and furious fanfic #deckard shaw imagine #deckard shaw imagines #fast and furious x reader #fast and furious x you #the fast and the furious

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lazyneonrabbitt · 7 months

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Daisy chains

Gif by @daryl-dixon-daydreams

Daryl Dixon x Reader

Daryl gets separated after the prison attack. He comes across a home for him and his kid to hole up in. Your home.

Daryl was running.

Running from walkers, from anything or anyone that could hear them.

Him and his daughter.

His selfish act of hiding a personal stash of formula and other necessary items to care for his toddler who fussed against his chest as he made his way through the area. She slowly starting to pick up volume as the fussing became full on crying and he had to start running to keep away from the dead she unknowingly lured.

"Shh, please. Yer wakin' the dead with yer cryin'." His hand held the back of her head and rubbed soothing circles on her skin, jogging to keep a rocking motion going as he moved on.

In his frantic search he spotted a house at the edge of the forest and decided it was the best option they had.

Circling the home he found the back door unlocked and locked it behind him, barricading it to the best of his ability.

Click.

The unmistakable sound of a gun right behind his head made him stop dead in his tracks, carefully raising his hands and thus letting go of his daughter's head.

Fhe loss of contact had her starting to sniffle and cry again and all Daryl could do was slowly turn around to reveal the two of them.

"Was runnin' from walkers." One of Daryl's hands lowered back to stroke his child's head while keeping the other one up. "She'd been cryin', drew 'em in."

You lowered your gun and clicked the safety back on. "You can feed her here." You weren't happy with other people being in your home, but sending away someone with such a young child wasn't okay in your books. "What can you provide in return?" You walked back into the hall and waved for him to follow. In the kitchen you showed him your stash and handed him a jar for his kid. "You can have this if you can promise me to provide."

Daryl agreed immediately. He knew he could hunt as soon as he figured out if he could trust you with his kid. Most people would kill him and her for being a liability. A redneck and a toddler weren't high on the list of saught after party members.

"After she eats, lay down with her. You two clearly went through hell." You kept a close eye on them for the remainder of the day, needing to know if the man was planning anything besides hiding but up til sundown he still hadn't shown any signs of hostility.

You watched as he put her to sleep and sat back down to rest. "You never introduced yourselves. What do I call you?" You leaned forward so you could speak quietly as to not wake the sleeping toddler.

"M'Daryl. Lil' one's Daisy." You exchanged introductions and both felt okay enough around each other to sleep.

Daryl stuck around inside the house for two days, watching you like a hawk whenever you interacted with Daisy.

"Hey." He found you on the couch with Daisy asleep next to you after having eaten. "Ya good to watch 'er while I hunt? Try'na be back before dark."

If anyone watched the scene from afar they'd assume the two were a couple.

You were surprisingly comfortable with having others around these days, and Daryl was beyond happy he found someone to help with Daisy. He was happy to hunt for you, he was good at it and he'd be proving his worth.

Daryl kept his word and came back before dark with a small deer and to say you were excited was an understatement. You were probably the world's worst hunter so seeing Daryl come back with a week's worth of meat was a huge turn on.

Or maybe you were just deprived. Daryl didn't seem like someone who'd let you jump his bones for any and all reason so you just had to ignore the feelings for as long as needed.

Ignoring lasted for two weeks.

The three of you were living together so comfortably. You brought back way more than needed on your runs and Daryl made sure the area was secure and you always had meat for somewhat balanced meals.

As time passed Daryl started to get the need to find his old group. See if there were survivors he could reunite with but he didn't know how to ask you for a portion of your supplies. You had already been so kind to let him stay and offer the two of them so much. He also felt weird about leaving you here. Separating Daisy from someone she clearly bonded with hurt him too.

Any idea of leaving just felt wrong, unless you'd all leave.

You started to notice him being distant, fidgety all the time so you sat down with him one evening.

"What's eating you, Daryl?"

He glanced up from cleaning his knives only to grumble at you, not answering at all.

"Come on. It's clear you've got something on your mind. Tell me, please?"

With a huff he put his items away and slumped back against the couch. "S'mah group. Gotta find 'em. Dun wanna leave ya alone."

"I'll come." It was an easy decision, really. You helped watching Daisy and he knew the woods well enough to travel through them. "I've got no one, you got them. It'd be good for us all if we found your friends."

Daryl nodded, happy you were on one line and offered to plan their leave, take a few days to prepare and rest up before starting their trek.

Daryl had lived in that house for three only weeks, but still it felt weird to leave it behind. He carried Daisy against his chest and his crossbow slung over his shoulder.

You had food, medication and sleeping supplies strapped to your bag, Daisy's items being in Daryl's luggage. You learned more about Daryl now and also learned from him.

He was an expert huntsman and tracker, leading you from your home to a torn down building that used to house people from the looks of it. You two cleared the needed amount of walkers before settling for the night.

"How do you always seem to know where to go?" You felt so lost out here, but Daryl marched on like he knew the area.

"Been trackin" my whole life. Know wha'm lookin' for."

The next day he quietly talked you through his vision, what he spotten and what it all meant as you moved on with your journey. You were learning and having fun doing so.

While he carried Daisy he let you try out his crossbow which resulted after a week of trying, in your first dinner kill.

That evening you sat close to him as he showed you how to skin small game and roast it over a fire.

You scavenged and hunted on your way, spending every moment together. You were enjoying it and so was he.

When a storm hit you managed to hole up in an old house just in time. It was fhe first night you kissed.

The storm caused the temperature tondrop, and the broken windows caused a lot of wind to gust through the house. You had wrapped Daisy in a bundle of blankets while Daryl worked to get a small fire started. You shared a large blanket, sitting shoulder to shoulder with your legs a tangled mess.

You could feel his gaze on you, quickly looking away each time you tried to catch him but eventually managing and softly laughing, pulljng even closer to him and resting your head on his shoulder. "You can stare, it's okay."

Your hand went to reach for his, making him look down into your eyes. He saw yours flick to his lips and back up and mimicked your gesture, watching you as you leaned closer to him.

"It's okay." Your voice was barely above a whisper, your fingers now intertwined and Daryl still felt comfortable.

With a steadying breath he leaned into you to close the gap, pressing his lips against you in a kiss that warmed you both more than the fire or blankets did.

From that night on you slept in each others' embrace whenever you could.

"Hey," you jogged to catch up with Daryl's strides. "Your group, is Daisy's mom a part of it?"

Daryl scoffed and replied with a stern "No."

"She ain't got no mom." It was clear from his tone he wasn't going to share anything else so you dropped it, falling in with him in silence.

You traveled like that for a while, not speaking unless it was needed until you came across a barn to rest in.

Daisy was tired and all the traveling had her fussing and crying and Daryl couldn't get her to quiet down in his tired, cranky state.

"Let me take her for a bit. You need to rest." Daryl tried to protest but he knew you'd win. He'd always let you win when you had disagreements and honestly he was too tired to even try at this point.

So now you cared for her, managing to make her crying stop and let Daryl sleep while you kept your ears open until you yourself dozed off too.

When you woke up the next morning Daryl was already up and about, keeping Daisy occupied and making sure she ate before you set out again.

Daryl fell into step beside you on a long stretch of road, glancing over at you with Daisy in your arms.

"Her mom.." he sighed deep. "She were a ..a girl, mah brother paid. Thought I needed ta get laid more often." The topic had him anxiously fiddling with the frays on his gloves. "She disappeared fer months. Dumped 'er on mah doorstep an' left."

Oh. You understood now why he never wanted to talk about it. But now you knew the basics you didn't ask further.

You also had to keep your mouth shut before your thoughts escaped.

'I can be her mom, if you let me.'

You weren't sure how he'd respond to those words spoken out loud, even with how close you had gotten over time.

So you kept the words inside, only showing your love for the two of them through actions.

"Ya listnin'?" Daryl stopped and turned to face you, almost having you run into him lost in thought.

Had he been talking to you for long?

You looked up from the road to look at him but all you clould focus on was the giant gate at the far end of the road.

Daryl took your hand in his and took you with him. Within minutes you were standing beside him in awe.

"We're 'ere."

ALEXANDRIA SAFE ZONE

~~☆☆☆~~

A/N: That single dad fic I promised! I hope it's what y'all hoped ♡

#sometimes I write #daryl dixon #daryl dixon x reader #daryl dixon imagine #daryl dixon fanfiction #twd #the walking dead #twd daryl #twd x reader

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theblogs2024 · 11 months

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