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ihni · 6 months

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Billy Hargrove has been dead for little over two months when Steve opens the door to find him on the doorstep, dirty and pale and shaking. He stares at Steve with wide eyes – bluer than Steve remembers – before he collapses into a heap of dirty limbs halfway across the threshold. Steve pulls him inside, disposes of him in the couch in the living room, and naturally proceeds to freak the fuck out.

After some processing, he decides that he must be experiencing a very vivid dream – and honestly, it’s a welcome change after the usual nightmares – and since it’s merely a dream, he opens a bottle of his dad’s best whiskey, because where’s the harm, right?

An hour later finds Steve sitting on the floor with his back to an armchair, predictably drunk and watching Billy sleep. Or possibly being unconscious. It doesn’t really matter which, since it’s only a dream.

Turns out, though, that it’s not a dream – or if it is, it’s a damn weird one. Because Billy wakes up, and when he looks around the room and spots Steve there, he starts to cry, which. Is not something that Steve’s brain could ever dream up, alcohol-soaked or not. And Billy feels solid enough under Steve’s hand, when he awkwardly pats the other boy’s shaking shoulders.

The events that have taken place are eventually revealed, but make no sense to either of them. Apparently Billy woke up somewhere dark and cramped (the coffin, he doesn’t say, but Steve hears it anyway), promptly panicked, and … broke out, somehow. Dug himself out from the rain-soaked earth, and stumbled along the roads until he saw a house he recognized. Which was Steve’s house.

It’s impossible, Steve knows. Billy has been dead for months. Steve saw him die – had first row seats to the sight of him getting impaled by a monster made out of meat and bones – and coming back from the dead after all that is simply not possible. Yet here Billy is, sitting on the floor of Steve’s living room, not a mark on him.

(Literally. There are no marks, no scars. Just smooth skin where they both know he was speared through.)

They spend the rest of the night slowly making their way through Steve’s dad’s expensive whiskey.

In the morning, Billy says, voice hoarse; “I need you to drive me to California.”

Steve thinks of asking why. Thinks of Max, thinks of Billy’s parents, thinks of telling the Party or the police or at least some adult who would possibly know what to do. What he says, though, is “Okay.” The world swims, and he adds, belatedly, “Tomorrow, though. I’m too drunk to drive now.”

A snort is the last thing he hears before he falls asleep where he’s sitting.

~~~

Half the next day is spent nursing hangovers and realizing that nope, last night wasn’t a dream or an alcohol-induced hallucination. The other half is spent making preparations for the trip.

Now when Steve is sober, he revisits the idea to simply tell someone. Billy being back is a miracle, and there are people mourning him, people who has missed him –

Billy shuts that down hard and fast. “No one is mourning me here,” he says, voice gravel-rough. “If they act like they do, it’s because they’re feeling guilty. There’s nothing left for me here.” He licks his lips, and his next words are a whisper. “I never wanted to come here in the first place.”

And, like. If he really thinks about it, Steve realizes that they wouldn’t be able to keep Billy being back a secret if he stayed in Hawkins. And if they tell Max, or Billy’s family, then word would spread. The government would no doubt hear of it. There would be a high probability of Billy being taken in for tests, experimentation, whatever else.

He doesn’t deserve that, Steve thinks as he watches Billy emerge from the shower wearing borrowed clothes. Because Billy died saving them. Sacrificed himself for them, even when they’d done so little to try to save him. This? Driving Billy to California? It’s the least Steve can do for him.

~~~

They get on the road the next day. Steve has taken time off work blaming the death of an elderly aunt and a rare family gathering, and been as vague as he can get away with concerning how long he’ll be away. Early in the morning, they put their bags – Billy’s is a borrowed one, containing only Steve’s things since he has nothing of his own and understandably didn’t want to keep the clothes he had on when he was buried – in the trunk of the car, and get in.

Steve is driving. When they pass the “Leaving Hawkins” sign, Billy lets out an audible sigh and slumps down in his seat. Steve glances over at him, and Billy explains without being prompted; “I always hated this town. I can’t believe they fucking buried me here.”

His incredulousness over the fact draws a snort out of Steve.

~~~

It’s strange, how easy it is to get used to having Billy Hargrove next to him while in a confined space. Stranger yet, how well they get along considering their history. And even more strange, how different Billy seems now, when they’ve left Hawkins behind them.

Or perhaps it’s not strange at all – at least not in comparison to all the other weird stuff they’ve both seen and somehow lived through. In the great scheme of things, one young man coming back from the dead and wanting to go back home doesn’t even make the top ten list of weird shit.

Billy is surprisingly funny, and witty, and smart – and it is dazzling without the sharp edges. It takes Steve a while to recognize what is missing, and when he does, it makes him watch Billy with new eyes. Because Billy doesn’t seem to exist behind a layer of anger anymore. The tension is gone. The further they get from Hawkins, the easier Billy seems to breathe.

The change is remarkable. Makes Steve think that he probably never knew who Billy really was, before this.

He finds himself thinking that he is looking forward to getting to know the real Billy.

~~~

They take turns driving. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they sit in companionable silence, and sometimes whoever’s in the passenger seat naps while the other drives. They stop at gas stations to stock up on gas and snacks, and at diners for food. That first night, they drive straight through, but the next night they stop at a motel for some proper sleep in a bed.

They share a room, but lie in separate beds. They talk for hours in the dark before falling asleep.

“I never wanted to be buried underground,” Billy says, when they’re both on the edge of sleep. “They knew that.”

“What did you want, then?” Steve asks, never having considered an alternative.

“I wanted to get back to the ocean,” Billy says. “Have my ashes spread over the surface of the water and become one with the waves again.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say to that. That he’s sorry that even Billy’s own family didn’t respect his final wishes? That it sucks that they buried his body in the dirt of a town he hated, leaving him to rot there forever when he never even wanted to come there in the first place?

“’One with the waves’ … That sounds beautiful,” he decides on. And then, as an aside, “I’ve never even seen the ocean.”

Steve can hear the smile in Billy’s voice when he speaks next. “You’re going to love it. It’s … everything.”

~~~

They get closer – to California, and to each other – and the closer they get, the less urgency Steve feels to get to their destination. Because what will happen when they get there? Steve can’t just leave Billy there without a means to support himself. Without a home, without a car, without money – without someone to take care of him. Steve can’t help it – he worries.

And then he looks at Billy’s smiling face next to him, and feels his worries being washed away.

He still finds himself taking the scenic route more often than not. Insisting on taking detours to see the sights. Claiming he’s too tired to drive unless he takes a break.

Billy smiles as if he knows what Steve is doing, but he doesn’t make a comment. Doesn’t complain. Seems to enjoy this little bubble they’re in together, in Steve’s car with the world passing them by outside.

It’s strange. But it’s nice, too. Steve kind of doesn’t want it to end.

~~~

The last night, they stop at a motel an hour or two from their destination. They could have kept on driving, but none of them seemed to want to. So they get a room, as usual. Steve pays, as usual. There are two beds, as usual.

Yet, when it’s time to sleep, Billy forgoes his own bed and goes to stand by Steve’s. There’s a question in the air between them, unasked.

Steve answers by peeling back the comforter in invitation. His mouth is dry and his heart is beating like a drum in his chest as Billy climbs in next to him.

They don’t speak much, that night. But they kiss. And they hold each other.

“I never wanted to come to Hawkins,” Billy whispers between kisses. “And I hated it there. But I met you, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.”

The next morning, they wake up in each other’s arms.

~~~

“I’ll show you my home,” Billy says when they get back in the car after breakfast. Steve is back behind the wheel, because he wants a reason to keep his eyes on the road. If he watches Billy too much, he’ll do something stupid – like turn the car around and go back to Hawkins with Billy still in it, or perhaps decide not to go back to Hawkins at all, himself. Just, stay here with Billy, for a while longer.

It’s a fantasy that hurts, so he pushes it down. Concentrates on following Billy’s directions, and drive through a city bigger than one he’s ever been in.

(When he first spots the glittering blue between buildings, he gasps. So does Billy.)

They drive through the city, then out of it. Along a winding road with fewer and fewer buildings around, the ocean vast and terrifyingly endless to their right. Eventually Billy directs them down a gravel road that doesn’t have a sign and looks like it might lead onto private property. Steve would worry, would perhaps protest, if it wasn’t for the longing on Billy’s face.

They have to walk the last bit, Billy says. They get out of the car. It’s hours before noon, but it’s already warm. Steve’s in just a T-shirt, and for a second he his face to the sun to feel the warmth of it on his skin – before turning to Billy only to see him turned to the sun, too. Like a flower in bloom.

He looks golden, in this light.

After a short walk down a steep incline, they end up on a little beach. A tiny one, empty, with rocky outcrops on either side which makes it seem like they’re the only people on earth. The sand is fine and pale under their feet, the water lapping at the edges of it and then stretching out in front of them until it meets the horizon, far far away.

It’s beautiful. But it’s not exactly a house. And didn’t Billy say he’d show Steve his home?

“Mom used to take me here when I was a kid,” Billy says, kicking off his shoes. Steve does the same, and pulls off his socks as well. “We used to come here all the time.” Billy holds out his hand with a smile, and Steve takes it. They make their way to the water. “She’d watch me play in the water for hours, sitting on a towel, just listening to the waves and the seagulls.” The first step into the water is a shock – it’s cold, but not freezing. It almost feels alive. Steve takes a tentative step after Billy, bolstered by Billy’s widening smile. “I think taking me here was the most peaceful she ever got to be. It was for me, at least. The best times of my childhood.”

They stand there in the surf, feet in the water and holding hands, when Billy turns to Steve. His eyes are shining with unshed tears and his smile is wobbly as he places his hands on either sides of Steve’s face and leans in for the softest of kisses; their lips just barely brushing against each other.

“Thank you,” he says, and Steve’s heart skips a beat because it sounds like goodbye, “for not letting me stay buried in Indiana.”

He backs up a step. Brushes a tear from Steve’s cheek – that he hadn’t realized had fallen – and turns towards the endless sea. Takes a deep breath and starts walking.

Steve wants to reach out to stop him, wills himself to to say something, but he can’t. Somehow, he knows that this is where they were heading from the start. This is why they had to go here.

As Steve watches, Billy … dissolves. Like in a movie. One moment he is solid, and the next he’s … not. He turns to dust in front of Steve’s eyes, fine dust that glitters like gold in a sudden ray of sunlight. It – he – is spread out over the water, is carried over the clear surface by the gentle breeze.

Instead of being trapped in the ground inland, he becomes one with the waves again.

#harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #sorry guys #canonical character death #got a scene stuck in my head and had to get it out #look at me keeping around the 2K mark!

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cakelitter · 14 days

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Eternally Loved

Yandere/Corrupt! Leon x Fem! Reader

warnings: dead dove do not eat, daddy kink, oral (f receive), p in v

summary: He needs to protect you, to keep you his. You’re too brittle for anyone else, they wouldn’t know what to do with you. Only he deserves you, he is the only one that knows how to handle you. Yes, yes, only him.

words: 3.3k

a/n: this idea has been in my head for a while now and I had to get it out of my system. Enjoy!! <33

Leon never thought he’d end up like this… actually he did. Orphan since the ripe age of seven, spent the rest of his upbringing in the shitty foster care system, started police academy which surprisingly wasn’t that bad compared to some situations he was in. And just when he thought things are starting to look up for him after he graduated, he finds himself in the virus outbreak in Raccoon City.

Out of the many cities and towns he could’ve chosen to work in, he chose Raccoon city. Not even assigned or forced; for once in his life, he had the privilege of choosing what to do, and look what that got him.

After barely making it out alive, he goes back to what’s familiar. Getting forced to do shit he never signed up for. Working as an agent for the government, the right hand of the president of the United States of America, what a fucking honor.

It’s like he’s allergic to happiness, sentenced to a life of misery since the day he was dragged into this world. He’s in his late thirties now, living alone, eating alone, drinking alone, sleeping, crying, smiling, fighting, all alone.

Sherry visits from time to time, and that’s the only occasion where he feels like he’s not fighting the urge to jump off a cliff. It’s a once-a-year sort of occasion though, but that’s good enough for him. Christmas for Leon is the day that Sherry visits, the only thing he looks forwards to each year.

Claire visits too, but mostly to make sure he isn’t dead, taking his medication and going to therapy. He swears he does, even though he doesn’t. All the therapists he tried always look at him, overwhelmed on what to tackle first. Taking him apart and dissecting his brain like he’s some sort of lab rat.

He knew that not getting help was going to catch up to him someday. Although he expected it to backfire on him, like a bullet to the head or giving up on fighting whatever bioweapon he’s facing, letting it end his suffering before he does it himself. Instead, you’re now passed out in the backseat of his car.

He was having a bad day, well, every day is a bad day when you’re Leon Kennedy. Driving slowly back to his place, and you just so happened to be walking out of your college campus. Backpack on your back, your eyes glued to your phone, you’re not even paying attention to your surroundings.

How irresponsible.

You’re a sweet thing, really. So young and full of life, enough to brighten up his dark and dingy days, he can sense it. You look loved, pampered and cared for, something he lacked. He’s sure that you have enough love inside of you to share it with him, life hasn’t robbed you of your youthful smile and bright eyes. How funny would it be if he just… took you.

Apparently to him it was fucking hilarious cause, next thing you know he parked his car and is making his way to you. Kidnapping you was fairly easy; you were already walking on an empty street when he made up his mind to borrow you for a bit. You fought back, trying to free yourself from is hold. A for effort, but it wasn’t enough for him to let you go.

A few empty threats while putting you in the back of his car were enough to shut you up, so fucking gullible. Cried your heart out as he drove, honestly you were kind of an ugly crier, plus you were making him feel bad so it’s starting to get on his nerves.

Eventually though, you pass out from hyperventilating. Very dramatic, like he could’ve done worse. He has a pistol attached to his hip at all time and didn’t even pull it out once to scare you. Fine he was kidnapping you, but gently, so can’t you be grateful for that?

That was five months ago, and since then you’ve gotten better. At first, you’d repulse every time he came closer to you, tears rapidly brimming in your eyes, pleading whispers asking him not to hurt you. He wasn’t going to in the first place, he wanted someone to soothe the aching loneliness in his heart, that’s why you’re here.

There is a difference between a pathetic unloved loser, and a psychopath. He never hurt you, not even once, ever since that fateful day when he laid his eyes on you.

He did have to scare you a few times though, but again all empty threats; like he’s going to hurt your family if you think about screaming or even considering escaping. Shit he sees in movies.

Again, first time kidnapping someone, he’s a little nervous. Funnily enough, he didn’t even know your name back then, let alone your parents’ name. But it got the job done of keeping you in line.

Now he does know your name, it’s pretty just like you, it suits you. But he doesn’t use it, calling you pet names is better, helps him live the fucked-up fantasy of the two of you being in love. His sweet baby, always waiting for him back home.

Truthfully, he treats you fairly well for someone who kidnapped you. Asking what you want to eat, making effort to learn your interests and hobbies, even buying you small gifts that you might like from time to time.

And after a few weeks, you started accepting him. Asking him questions about himself, snuggling up next to him while watching a movie, and begging him not to leave for work. As much as he appreciates the fact that you actually care for him now, he’s aware that this is all a trauma response. Stockholm syndrome is a blessing in this particular situation; as long as a part of you has accepted him and loved him, is all he’s asking for.

You’re a curious little thing, questioning him about his past, present and future, what’s his job and why he sometimes disappears for days. He should get pissed, and put you in your place, but you’re too cute to cry so he answers vaguely. Besides, it’s nice to have someone be interested in learning about you, feels like ages since he experienced that.

All you know about him is his name, just his first name, that he saves the world in order to protect you, and that he would never hurt you; and that’s exactly all he wants you to know. You feel like a chance for him to start from scratch, a breath of fresh air, totally and utterly clueless on what kind of shit he sees and has seen outside the walls of his apartment.

He has noticed however, how you seem to get dumber and dumber by the day. Well, no shit you’ve been spending majority of the past five months alone staring at the different walls facing you. Your past life becoming noting more than just a distant memory, fading away with each second.

Now all of your focus and knowledge is about Leon, Leon, Leon, Leon. The man you once feared becoming the axis of your world, he can even consider himself your hero with the way you’re treating him.

The name Leon however is a name you’re not allowed to say out loud, just like he uses pet names to address you, you are expected to do the same. Leon is dead now, Leon is the man that kidnapped you. Daddy however, keeps you safe from this scary world.

You’re not allowed to go outside because people will try to hurt you, so you should always be with daddy. You’re not allowed to have your family come over, because they will try to take you away from daddy. You’re not allowed to dwell on the life you once lived, because that makes daddy upset, you would never want to make daddy upset right?

Daddy always knows best, so you should always listen to him. Is the foundation he used to build his castle, no, empire in that pretty head of yours.

Truth be told, Leon has been obsessing over you as well. Kidnapping you at first was just to fill the gaping hole in his heart. But now if you get even a tiny papercut, he goes crazy.

Managed to slither into his tattered heart and grew your ivy all over it. His life has been better since you were yanked into it.

“Thank you, daddy.”

“Please daddy.”

“Love you, Daddy.”

Fuck, he can hear your voice when you’re not even there.

The eerie quietness of his apartment is now gone, replaced with the sound of the TV in the living room, with you sitting on the couch in his shirt. His bed is no longer cold and empty, your body is there to warm it up, your scent making it feel more comforting.

He needs to protect you, to keep you his. You’re too brittle for anyone else, they wouldn’t know what to do with you. Only he deserves you, he is the only one that knows how to handle you. Yes, yes, only him.

You begged him to let you out just once, promising you’d never try to run away. He honestly forgot that was something he needed to worry about. You’d never run away, even if you wanted to. Fucked you up so bad, your entire sense of self, morality, and survival instincts in shambles.

Was going to say no, and remind you of the rules. But you asked so politely and have been such a good girl lately. Surely you deserve a reward other than his cock.

And so, he takes you to the park, your eyes looking around like you have never seen trees before. Everything is going fine, you’re behaving, and he’s relaxing. Deciding to buy the two of you ice cream, he leaves you for not more than two minutes to buy it at the nearby stand.

That’s when a guy that seems about your age, starts talking to you. Discomfort and fear are written all over your face.

“Rule number 17, no talking to anyone besides daddy.” Is what he can assume you mind keeps repeating, your lips are sealed, biting on them, not letting a word leave your mouth and praying that he leaves you alone.

As soon as you spot Leon looking over at you, he can see you start to tremble in fear.

That person is trying to take you away from him, everyone tries to take things he loves away from him. No no, not you, anything but you. He’s definitely going to hurt you, what if he has a knife? What if he recognizes you from the missing person’s report your family posted all over town.

Such an idiotic move by the way, if anyone did find you, they would never give you up.

The day didn’t end the way he hoped, he dragged you back home after shooing away the guy that was talking to you, his fists clenched so hard, they’re almost cramping. Blinded by rage, he threw a whole fit once you made it back home. Throwing items across the room, yelling and screaming at you; he couldn’t even recognize himself at this point.

It wasn’t your fault, you didn’t break any of the rules, and he knows that. This is simply his paranoia acting up, it’s his issues acting up.

You start having a panic attack, hyperventilating and crying. Seeing you like this causes a switch to flip in his head. And so, he approaches you slowly, wrapping you in his arms, one of his hands rubbing your back gently and planting soft kisses on the crown of your head.

“I’m sorry, baby. Daddy’s here, daddy would never hurt you.” Whispering into your hair. “You know I love you right? My sweet angel, always such a good girl f’me”

Breathing starts to become more regular, and you stop sobbing, hugging him back and seeking comfort from the same person that you should hate with a burning passion. Taking in a deep breath, he holds you, patting your hair and humming a tune.

“Did I scare you, baby?” he asks after a little while. “Yeah…”

He’s disappointed in himself; thought he left that behavior back in the past, when he didn’t know how to deal with you. “You know I didn’t mean that right? I just care for you, that guy could’ve been dangerous, sweetheart.”

Your head nods against his chest, your arms tightening around him. “How about you let daddy take care of you baby? How does that sound?” you nod again, causing his lips to curl up into a smile.

Pulling away, he grabs your chin and tilts it up. Your watery eyes lock with his, some tears still wetting your cheeks. “My pretty girl.”

Bending down, he kisses one of your wet cheeks, caressing it with his thumb. Chapped lips then drop down to yours, kissing them gingerly. It starts off as sweet, then he amps up the fierceness of it. You moan into his mouth, hand grabbing his shirt in your fist, holding him in place.

Flattered by your eagerness, he continues. Cornering you against the dining table, hands making their ways to your hips, easily lifting you up and setting you back down. His lips wrap around your bottom lip, kissing and tugging on it with a delicate bite.

He grabs your arms that are desperately clinging onto his chest, and holds them in a firm grip as his lips move to your neck. Littering your neck with hickeys and love bites, one of his favorite activities.

It’s a shame that they go away though, but that’s just another excuse to give you more. Purple flowers blossoming on your neck when his lips detach from the skin. He can smell the scent of his shampoo in your hair, drives him crazy all the time.

Your eyes close, breathy moans escaping those doll lips of yours. If kissing you to death could kill you, you’d be long gone by now. Lips dripping with maple, and sweet like honey; only a matter of time before he gets cavities.

One of his hands pushes you lightly to lie down on the surface beneath you, hands travelling up your plush thighs. He spreads you out, hiking your pink dress up, exposing your soaked panties. The sight making blood rush to his cock.

Dropping down to his knees, he marvels at the sight in front of him, urging him to lick his lips as his mouth feels dry. Hooking his finger into the gusset of your panties, he swiftly pulls them off, watching as your wet cunt glistens with need.

He blows some air onto your core, causing your knees to quiver and your breath to hitch. Looking down at him, your brows furrow in irritation as he sits and does nothing.

“Daddy, please…” God, that whining, how he loves it.

“Let daddy enjoy the view for a bit, sweetheart.” Knowing you can’t argue back, you rest your head back on the table. He notices that you’re obeying, and rewards you with his thumb running up your slit before circling your clit.

Slick begins to drip even more from your aching cunt, while your hips squirm trying to get as much friction as possible. Removing his finger, he leans closer and flattens his tongue against your pussy savoring your taste.

Rough hands wrap under your thighs then rest on your hip, pulling you to the edge of the surface. He presses his face fully against your wet heat, feverishly sucking and licking your sensitive bundle of nerves, before pushing his tongue into your hole, nose bumping against your clit.

Groaning at the taste, he eats you like a man starved. You on the other hand, in pure bliss. Eyes closed, mouth open, letting those adorable sighs and moans slip through your lips. Chanting daddy over and over like he isn’t between your thighs.

Your hands claw at anything and everything you can reach, settling on your breast, giving it a light squeeze making Leon’s heart ache with jealousy. Pulling his mouth away, he gathers spit in his mouth before letting it drip down onto your cunt.

Thighs begin to squirm at the feeling of the warm fluid dripping from your clit and down to your entrance. “Fuck, so fucking sexy.”

Dropping back down, he connects his mouth back between the apex of your thighs. Eating you out with determination, passion, and like his life depends on it. Pulling the hood of the clit back and sucking, making your hips jolt in pleasure.

“Prettiest girl, got the prettiest dolly pussy. Can’t wait to fuck this tight hole full of my cum.” You’re so into this, it’s adorable, he’s practically drowning down here.

Only a few seconds later, you come undone on his tongue. Legs shaking, eyes rolling to the back of your head. He moves back, stubble completely drenched and swollen pink lips. His dick throbs with need, as he roughly palms it through his jeans.

Standing back up, he begins to unbuckle his belt, the sound of the jingling snapping your out of wherever that orgasm sent you off to. Pulling out his thick cock, he gives it a few strokes, watching as precum gathers on the head of the tip.

He sucks in a breath of air, and looks back over at you. Eyes on his dick like it’s the first time seeing it, like he doesn’t dick you down every night till your fast asleep.

“Can daddy fuck this pretty little pussy baby?” he says, slapping the sticky tip against your mound, watching the invisible strings connect the two surfaces with lust and desire. You nod, biting your lip and gawking at what he’s doing.

“Of course he can, this slutty cunt can never say no to dick now can she?” he chuckles lowly. “Always so fucking needy and wet.”

Wasting no time, he slots himself between your folds and thrusts all the way in. You let out a yelp while he moans at the stretch. All of your thinking skills being replaced by thoughts of his dick, and it’s very evident on your face.

He grins, watching you through hooded eyes. “Pull that dress down a bit sweetheart, let me see those tits.”

You comply, pulling the material covering your breasts down, leaving you top naked in the absence of your bra. His calloused fingers twinge the stiff peaks as his hips begin to move.

He’s so deep in you, you can feel his dick in your throat, not like that’s an unfamiliar feeling anyways. He starts off relatively slow, to compensate for the way he plunged into you. But that tenderness quickly vaporizes as he begins to slam into you, the sound of skin slapping and the smell of sex filling the room.

The way your tits bounce with each thrust, the way you keep licking those lips, and the way you keep sucking him in are not doing you any favors of making him give up the idea of pouncing on you like a dog.

Holding back his moans is getting nearly impossible with your velvety walls squeezing his cock; each time his skin grazes your swollen clit. In attempts of shutting the two of you up, he crashes his lips against yours in a messy kiss.

His hand sneaking into the space between the two of you and stimulating your abused clit. And in return, you wrap your legs around his torso.

All it takes is a few rough circles on your pudgy bundle of nerves and a few strokes on the sweet spot inside your walls for you to be cuming yet again. This time however dragging him along with you. He lets out a broken moan as your walls milk every drop of cum out his balls, making him see stars.

Thrusting into you a few more times. He notices the sight of the familiar white ring surrounding the base of his cock before pulling out with a nasty slick sound.

He moves towards your sprawled out body, and wraps his arms around you in a tight embrace. Kissing your jaw, and rubbing the small beads of sweat on your forehead.

“Daddy’s Girl.”

divider by: @/cisneroto

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togglesbloggle · 1 year

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Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?

Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.

Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.

We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.

So what changed?

I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.

As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!

To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.

In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.

Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.

The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.

For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.

Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.

That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.

#I am not an economics #so if somebody wants to grade my accuracy here #that would be welcome #this is the situation as I understand it but my models are hazy

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @[email protected] says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

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

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

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/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

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aluraveil · 1 year

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♡ Poly relationship with Yandere Fyodor, Nikolai, and Sigma!! ♡

If you were the darling of 3 of the 5 members of the Decay of Angels, it would be pretty bad luck for you.

All 3 of them are very possessive of you just like any other yandere. All 3 of them aren't very strict with you, the only rule is that escaping isn't allowed. Fyodor, Nikolai, and Sigma all know that there's no escaping from them with their vast connections and excellent combat skills plus the thousands of people under their command. They're confident that even if you somehow manage to escape, they can easily bring you back. If somehow they still can't find you, they might even pay a visit to Fitzgerald and "borrow" his Eyes of God.

Fyodor is the scariest one out of the trio. Unlike Nikolai, he doesn't necessarily give off a very friendly vibe. Fyodor gives off a don't-piss-me-off-or-you-will-regret-it vibe. It looks like Fyodor is always staring at you and judging you secretly with his challenging and cold gaze.

Fyodor often likes testing you, such as leaving the front door unlocked or even giving you an opportunity to escape. The first time you took the opportunity you were immediately caught and dragged back. Fyodor was dissapointed with you and you certainly didn't want to see him angry.

Fyodor sometimes even flirts with you just to mess with you and to see your reaction. It makes him laugh whenever he sees you blushing or getting nervous.

Fyodor can be pretty sweet with you sometimes and he loves giving you gifts! For your birthday he got you cake and flowers which made you happy. Fyodor glanced in awe at you as you happily ate cake without a care in the world.

Fyodor often calls you his Myshka (little mouse) as a nickname for you. It's only right for him because he's the leader of the Rats of the House of the Dead.

One time you even went with him into the underground base and you saw him typing away with a huge computer setup. Whenever you're at the base, Fyodor wants you to be in the same room. Under different circumstances, he would let you roam around but the underground tunnels were easy to get lost in and he wants to be able to have you at arms length.

This other time you were walking with Fyodor when he was giving out instructions to some of his underlings. You remember when you met some guy named Ivan and he gave off a pretty weird vibe.. you also heard from Pushkin that he was a "total nut case"..

Nikolai is the chillest one out of the trio. He's funny and he shows you tons of magic tricks. You could even fall for him if he wasn't a terrible person plus him being one of your captors.

Nikolai is pretty entertaining and there's never a dull moment with him. You entertain his silly theatrics and he always knows when to make you laugh. Nik's always messing with you by using that stupid coat ability of his. One time, he even grabbed your leg as a joke and he started tickling it. You bursted out laughing both from it being funny but it lowkey creeped you out. Especially with the look he gave you where he grinned really widely and started lifting his eyebrows up and down in a way.

One time, you tried escaping from Nikolai by running into a store and he contacted Fyodor and Sigma letting them know of the instance. Next thing you know, Fyodor and Sigma are laughing their asses off behind a computer screen on the security cameras at the way Nikolai messes with you by having random objects fall on top of you. You're scared shitless when Nikolai decides to drop a random mouse on you..

This other time Nikolai had wanted to show you something during one of his missions that he dragged you along too. Nikolai was recording some video in a meeting room with government officials. You couldn't help but laugh your ass off when Nikolai messed up during the recording session especially since it was live.

"Oh no! An on-air-oopsy! Quick stop the camera, I can't go on any longer!"

You couldn't help but feel bad for the "tiger boy" (as Nikolai referred to him as) when he got hit by a pole as a result of Nikolai's ability..

Sigma is the most lenient one of the trio. For instance, he grants you more freedom than the other trio members and he forgives you a lot more if you make a mistake and you're sincerely sorry about it.

Sigma often has you sit on his lap while he's busy at his desk at the Sky Casino. Whenever Sigma is busy with other things besides paper work, he'll even give you some money and let you roam around the casino.

You have fun playing with the machines and Sigma might even rig one of them to have you win the jackpot. He might even be watching you through the camera and smile at how happy you look when you win.

You're gonna be pretty confused when you see random explosions plus some weird people claiming themselves to be "Hunting Dogs".. especially when you head back to Sigma's office and see a random hole in the wall with Sigma panicking. Who knows what was even going on? Being around the Decay of Angels had its fair share of strange experiences so you weren't surprised when weird things happened in the Sky Casino..

Should you be worried when you spot a pink haired girl who could magically age herself up?..

Hm.

Nah.

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ailithnight · 2 years

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So! Giving my reblogs to this amazing art by @providencehq their own post so I can keep adding on to this fic at my own leisure.

Please don't ask to be tagged. I'm relegated to mobile and simply cannot keep up with a taglist. All additions will be going in the reblogs on this post, though. So feel free to come back here periodically to see if I've added more.

I'm currently up to 3 chunks with 1 more in planning.

So, without further ado:

Caught and Content

Daniel James Fenton had died at 14.

And every day since then he has counted as a blessing. Especially the good ones, but even the bad ones. The terrible ones. The days so horrid that Danny wouldn’t wish them on the worst beings in the universe. Danny treasured them still. Because every breath, every too slow heart beat, even the ones that pulsed with terror and exhaustion and agony, every one was a miracle. A moment of life that Daniel James Fenton wasn’t meant to have any more.

Borrowed time.

That’s what it was.

Danny had been living on borrowed time since he was 14. And he had long since made peace with the fact that his borrowed time would some day run out.

He’s 20 now. 6 whole years he wasn’t meant to live but did anyway.

A few more months and Danny would be 21, old enough to buy his first alcoholic drink. But even if he lived that long now, he wouldn’t get the chance. The GIW would ensure that. Tuck had celebrated his 21st a couple months ago, and Sam a few months before him. Danny would never get to celebrate his with them.

But that was okay. As said, Danny had long since made peace with the uncertain nature of his borrowed time. He didn’t need to go out to a bar with his friends and celebrate that he had survived 21 whole years. It would have been a lie anyway.

Daniel James Fenton had died when he was 14.

He was in the Watchtower now. Power suppression cuffs and collar making his already battered body feel even more weak and achy. Batman was staring at him. Superman and Wonder Woman seemed to be telling him things. Or asking. Interrogating. Danny paid them no mind. No answer he’d given them before seemed to satisfy. And he already knew what would come next.

These were government sanctioned heros. They were bound to the law. And the law said Danny must be turned over to the GIW. And since Danny had already escaped them and his parents once, he doubted they’d be keen to lock him up again. Research be damned, Phantom was too dangerous to be left alive. Or whatever facsimile of alive Danny existed in right now. Daniel James Fenton had died when he was 14.

So Danny ignored the government sanctioned superheros. He didn’t let his mind wander to tomorrows he’d never have. He had made peace with his death. So now he took every moment left of his breathing beating blessing to turn his gaze out the large Watchtower window.

Nothing else mattered as Danny beheld, breathed in, drowned in the last he’d ever see of the infinite beauty of the cosmos. He let himself relax, smile, and relish in the miracle of being here, of being allowed to see it one last time. And up so close, too.

And when the heros grew tired of Danny’s distraction. When they led him to a new room without any windows to peer out of. Danny stayed relaxed. Stayed smiling. He closed his eyes and waited for his borrowed time to run out. Even as Batman stared and Superman and Wonder Woman interrogated and the power suppression devices drained him of excess energy and he’s pretty sure the GIW were on their way to arrange his execution; he was contented.

Danny was not afraid. He was happy. At peace. Why would he be scared? After all, Daniel James Fenton had died at 14. Every moment since has been a blessing he has been grateful to have.

Because

Daniel James Fenton had died at 14.

#DP x DC #my writing #Caught and Content

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rodgermalcolmmitchell · 2 years

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The liars, fakers and fear-mongers lurk among us

Liars, fakers, and fear-mongers lurk among us. They masquerade as prudent economics advisors. They tell you to take their snake oil linament to cure your . . . whatever. That brings us to one of America’s most prominent snake oil sales groups, the CRFB (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget). They have been selling the same nonsense for many years. Their president even has testified before…

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#debt/gdp ratio #monetary sovereignty #U.S. government never borrows

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probablyasocialecologist · 11 months

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Israel has thus fully embraced the “war on terror” and richly profited from it. One of the most successful though bloody counterinsurgency battles of the early twenty-first century was the Sri Lankan government’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers militant group. Israel played a key, though largely unpublicized, part in Colombo’s successful campaign in a civil war that killed and disappeared more than 200,000 people, mostly Tamils, over a quarter-century that ended in 2009. Israel sold Kfir fighter jets and trained the Special Task Force, a brutal unit of the Sri Lankan police. Sri Lanka borrowed the Israeli playbook during the last stages of the civil war and ignored calls by NGOs, human rights organizations, and foreign governments to cease violence. The military stopped when the Tamil Tigers were completely decimated and Velupillai Prabhakaran, its leader, killed. Israel also helped generations of Sinhalese politicians build and maintain Sinhalese enclaves in the north and east of Sri Lanka, areas where most Tamils live. The aim was to create buffer zones around Tamil-majority areas and establish an unofficial occupation of Tamil territory. These plans continued after 2009 and Sinhala colonization has never stopped. These ideas were directly taken from Israel’s presence in the West Bank, where Palestinian sovereignty is denied with numerous fortified Jewish colonies. Israel signed a US$50 million deal with Sri Lanka in 2021 to upgrade the country’s Kfir jets.

Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

#sri lanka #tamil tigers #israel #war on terror #The Palestine Laboratory

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ayeforscotland · 1 year

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Genuine curiousity from an American who was discussing Scotland's independence with a coworker: my coworker said Scotland will never become independent because of the country's lack of money, and the financial reliance from England. Just curious on your take on that, since I'm pro independence, and I love to learn more about what an independent Scotland would look like.

I'd be interested to know whether your coworker has done any research on the topic or whether it's just a guess. The only report on Scotland's finance that's published each year is GERS (Government Expenditure & Revenue Scotland) and it utilises some accounting trickery that proportionally applies the borrowing that the UK takes to Scotland's expenditure. It isn't representative of an independent Scotland's finances. There's independent countries out there with a lot less resources, industries and people. I know we'd be alright.

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bats-and-birds-24 · 22 days

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Daughter of a Dark Angel:

Disappointment.

It was the first thing he felt when he first held his daughter.

Primarch Guilliman and Lion' El Johnson had just recently agreed to allow the astartes to reproduce, so that it would be easier to get neophytes who were compatible with their Primarch's geneseed.

Even if they weren't compatible, or were girls, they would have an iron will of an astartes, and would bolster the Imperium's numbers against Chaos.

Yet, most marines still preferred to have a strong son, one who will one day join their ranks as a battle brother. So when his assigned partner passed away, delivering only a tiny, premature girl, his hopes for an heir were dashed.

He could not simply be assigned another concubine right after one had just died, that would be callous. As dictated by the Codex Astartes. Not that he believed in any of it, he held no love for his now deceased partner. He only wanted a son.

He sighed. With her dead, the burden of raising the infant fell on him. As though he didn't have enough to worry about. This was also deemed necessary by the Codex, to encourage a 'parental bond'. He tutted in annoyance, he was an astartes, he was beyond such baseline emotions.

At first, he only cared for her out of duty, but as she grew older, he began to see her potential. Her mind was quick, even for a child sired by a space marine. She grasped concepts that would have been beyond most children her age.

If only she had been born male, he lamented.

One day his little daughter came up to him when he was on break and asked him what her job in the Imperium would be. He managed to give her a vague answer which seemed to satisfy her for the time being.

However, the question still lingered in his mind. What would she do, now that she was here? She had a quick mind, and once her body's development catches up to that of a normal child, maybe she could join the Sisters of Battle.

He mind balked at the thought, his daughter ending up as one of those shrill harpies worshipping a man who never wanted to be a god revulsed him. She deserved better than that.

He then thought of the mechanicus. This too, disgusted him. They too worshipped a god, their omnissiah. And the thought of having to witness his little girl cutting of pieces of her own flesh, only to replace them with sterile metal made him want to vomit.

Any other options such as being a serf, or a remembrancer were so laughably beneath her station as a child of an astartes that he didn't even bother thinking about them.

He grumbled in dissatisfaction as he glanced over at the little cot his daughter slept in.

There were no good roles for women in this Imperium, the best life he could provide for a woman of her standing was marrying her off to a wealthy planetary governer, or beneath that, a fellow astartes. If she proved her mettle in political affairs, she could then join the ranks of the Inquisitors.

Satisfied in his decision for her future he drifted off to sleep.

The next few years were filled with stacks of books he had borrowed from the ship's library and papers that he personally corrected as he attended to his daughter's education.

As she became a young woman, almost in the blink of an eye, (he chided himself, normal baselines aged faster than enhanced transhumans, he cannot forget that) the proposals started to roll in.

Most were from fellow battle brothers looking for a concubine. They were Dark Angels, so they didn't think to ask the girl herself, asking her father would be good enough.

He went through, and declined them at an astonishing speed. Most were too old for his little girl, and the younger ones were too brash. The last thing he wanted was for his daughter to be left a widow as her reckless husband ran straight to his death.

Until that message came.

A new planetary governer had been selected, and after going through his child's credentials, they had decided that she would make the perfect wife and First Lady of the planet.

It was a great honor that she had been selected.

That was what he told himself as he met the man who was to become his son in law. He was childish, naive, and handsy towards her. He disliked him immediately. But he grit his teeth as he repeated the mantra in his head; 'it is a great honor'.

He stoically saw her off to her planet. He remembered as she continued to wave at him even after their ship had left the ground.

He remembered when he only returned to her side decades later, him having only gained a few scars, while his child looked as though she was on death's doorstep.

This was why he didn't want a daughter, he wouldn't be able to stay by her side, he would lose her too soon. He despaired at the short amount of time he still had left with her.

The two talked of her life, how the bastard he had married her off to, was an irresponsible and cruel leader. Going so far as to try to get rid of her, so that he could replace her with his mistress.

By the time the mess had been dealt with, she had lost three of her fingers on her right hand, only the thumb and pinky finger still being intact.

He raged at the injustice, if only he could've gotten his hands on that imbecile, he would have been nothing more than a fine red mist by the time he finished.

Nevertheless, she had proved her mettle, and became the planetary governor in his stead.

This led to a huge quality of life improvement for the citizens.

Resources that had originally been extracted by a constantly abused, destitute workforce were replaced by a respectable, dutiful, healthy population renowned for their inventions and craftsmanship.

She had built schools and hospitals, and homes and libraries. She had taken a backwater people and turned them into proud, productive members of the Imperium.

By the end of her story, she had only one request to make of him;

"Hold my hand while I sleep, just for tonight Da'."

She made him pinky promise, as though she were a child again. Her wrinkled hand with three stubs, contrasting his own strong, muscled one.

She passed away that night.

When he returned to his quarters the next day, the mask cracked. He wept in despair at the loss of his Daughter.

Why didn't he love her more? Why did he have to marry her away to that scum? Why was he ever disappointed in having such a brilliant woman as his child?

When he came back to attend her funeral, he saw that the entire planet was in mourning. She had changed the lives of everyone around her.

He listened to the stories of baselines as they regaled him with tales of her selflessness and valor.

By the end of the event, he had no more tears to shed, his anger at himself and at the injustices of her life had dissipated. There was only one emotion left.

Pride.

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

So this whole story was written because I couldn't get the thought of a Dark Angel having to come to terms with having a Daughter instead of a son in the astartes can take concubines au we had going on a while back.

@kit-williams @moodymisty @mothiir @the-raven-lady @bispecsual

#warhammer 30k #warhammer40k #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #dark angel #space marines #adeptus astartes

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artemisia-black · 8 months

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Wizarding clothing and fashion

This meta/list of HCs has been sitting in my drafts for a while. But here is my meta about wizarding fashions.

1.0 An insular culture with its own unique dress

No shade to people who enjoy seeing and drawing characters in muggle clothing, but I think that the majority of wizards and witches dress in wizarding clothing.

Indeed, the fact that most wizards can’t dress as muggles and are quite conspicuous is mentioned in the first chapter of the series:

“People in cloaks. Mr. Dursley couldn’t bear people who dressed in funny clothes — the getups you saw on young people! He supposed this was some stupid new fashion.” PS

And then becomes a sort of running joke:

“Both were dressed as Muggles, though very inexpertly: The man with the watch wore a tweed suit with thigh-length galoshes; his colleague, a kilt and a poncho” GoF

And in DH it is (partly) how Harry recognises that people are watching Grimmauld Place:

“The lurkers were never the same two days running, although they all seemed to share a dislike for normal clothing. Most of the Londoners who passed them were used to eccentric dressers and took little notice, though occasionally one of them might glance back, wondering why anyone would wear such long cloaks in this heat.” DH

Side note: it is peak Londoner to barely take notice of something odd. And this also implies that robes and cloaks are all year wear and that wizards potentially don’t have seasonal clothing.

Given that wizarding culture is very insular (with its own economy, government, and education system), it would make sense that while it may occasionally borrow trends from the muggle world, wizarding fashion and clothing are unique.

In fact, only the younger generation are seen in muggle dress, with Harry commenting:

“Their children might don Muggle clothing during the holidays, but Mr. and Mrs. Weasley usually wore long robes in varying states of shabbiness.” GoF

2.0 Class and generational differences in dress

The previous quote demonstrates two things: much like in real life, there is generational and class stratification of dress. The condition and quality of wizarding clothing serves as a non-verbal cue about a character's economic status. This disparity is not just a background detail but is frequently brought into focus, such as through Draco Malfoy's derisive comments about Professor Lupin's tattered robes.

“ Malfoy gave Professor Lupin an insolent stare, which took in the patches on his robes and the delapidated suitcase.” PoA

“Look at the state of his robes,” Malfoy would say in a loud whisper as Professor Lupin passed. “He dresses like our old house-elf.” PoA

Even Harry comments on his robes and observes that:

“Professor Lupin looked particularly shabby next to all the other teachers in their best robes”

The patched and frayed nature of both Lupins and Weasley’s robes seem to indicate that robe repairs can’t be done by an individual (or when it is done, it is really visible). Another example of this is when Ron removes the lace from his dress robes and leaves:

“...the edges still looked depressingly frayed as the boys set off downstairs.” GoF

Additionally, in Padfoot returns Sirius’s prison robes still appear tatty despite him having had a haircut and left the country. This indicates that he either can’t obtain new robes or can’t/hasn’t bothered repairing his Azkaban robes.

This is interesting, given that Molly Weasley is able to make jumpers and scarves yet can’t seem to alter robes. While knitting and sewing are separate skills, it seems odd that there aren’t means of repairing robes.

This suggests that robes can only be repaired and bought at official vendors such as Madam Malkins/Gladrags/Twifitt and Tattings.

It is also interesting that both Fred and George buy clothing when they become successful (also a parallel to the real world). They gift their mum:

“….a brand-new midnight blue witch’s hat glittering with what looked like tiny starlike diamonds, and a spectacular golden necklace.” HBP

However, things being ‘frayed’ aren’t always an indication of poverty. Tonks is first introduced wearing an outfit that is a mix of muggle clothing but with something that is distinctly wizarding:

“Tonks stood just behind him…. wearing heavily patched jeans and a bright purple T-shirt bearing the legend THE WEIRD SISTERS.” OoTP

This outfit is heavily reminiscent of Sirius and James in the Elvendork prequel:

“Both were dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with a large golden bird; the emblem, no doubt, of some deafening, tuneless rock band.”

3.0 The underwear question

Something that gets bought up a lot is whether wizards wear underwear.

Harry (who was raised by muggles certainly seems to):

“He was just piling underwear into his cauldron when Ron made a loud noise of disgust behind him.” GoF

And:

“He was shivering now, his teeth chattering horribly, and yet he continued to strip off until at last he stood there in his underwear…” DH

So does Neville (in the UK, Pants means underwear)

“He broke off as Neville entered the dormitory, bringing with him a strong smell of singed material, and began rummaging in his trunk for a fresh pair of pants.”

And infamously, so does Snape:

“Snape was hanging upside down in the air, his robes falling over his head to reveal skinny, pallid legs and a pair of graying underpants.”

Also we get some information about witch’s underwear from Sirius’s very Freudian joke:

“Sirius looked slightly disconcerted for a moment, then said, “I’ll look for him later, I expect I’ll find him upstairs crying his eyes out over my mother’s old bloomers.”

Bloomers are a type of historical, baggy underpants (think boy shorts, but make it victorian).

In conclusion, Archie, who wanted a breeze around his privates, was probably an outlier.

4.0 Materials and accesories

So what is wizarding clothing made of?

For robes and cloaks the materials most mentioned are silk/satin and velvet:

“ She was dressed from head to foot in black satin, and many magnificent opals gleamed at her throat and on her thick fingers.” GoF

Additionally in GoF, we learn that even witches and wizards from other countries wear robes and cloaks:

“Now that they had removed their furs, the Durmstrang students were revealed to be wearing robes of a deep bloodred.”

And

“...Bulgarian minister loudly, who was wearing splendid robes of black velvet trimmed with gold.”

Other materials include Dragon hide which appears to be used to make practical gloves and boots but also fashionable jackets.

“... followed by Fred and George, who were wearing jackets of black dragon skin.” HBP

Additionally, robes can be embroidered:

“ The man’s scowling, slightly brutish face was somehow at odds with his magnificent, sweeping robes, which were embroidered with much gold thread” DH

“Harry glimpsed Slughorn at the head of the Slytherin column, wearing magnificent, long, emerald green robes embroidered with silver” HBP

“Madam Rosmerta scurrying down the dark street toward them on high-heeled, fluffy slippers, wearing a silk dressing gown embroidered with dragons.” HBP

Interestingly, both men and women appear to wear heels:

Dumbledore:

“He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots” PS

Madame Maxine:

“Then Harry saw a shining, high-heeled black shoe emerging from the inside of the carriage..” GoF

Monsiour Delacour:

“However, he looked good-natured. Bouncing toward Mrs. Weasley on high-heeled boots, he kissed her twice on each cheek, leaving her flustered.” DH

Madame Rosmerta:

“ Next he saw another pair of feet, wearing sparkly turquoise high heels,” POA

Furthermore, witches carry handbags:

“Mrs. Weasley now came galloping into view, her handbag swinging wildly” COS

“ She was wearing a thick magenta cloak with a furry purple collar today, and her crocodile-skin handbag was over her arm.” GoF

“Professor Umbridge pulled a small roll of pink parchment out of her handbag” OoTP

“Ron was rummaging through the little witch’s handbag.” DH

5.0 My HCs

When I imagine what male robes look like, I imagine something akin to a Morrcan thobe or an Indian Sherwani.

I imagine robes to be enchanted to move and in my fic Pietas, I describe my OC Aeliana’s robes as follows:

“She smiled slightly, smoothing the front of her dress, which was decorated with embroidered flowers and birds that had been enchanted to flutter their wings.”

I also HC some cultural variance in robes- with certain countries using different cloth or the skin of magical animals that are native to their countries. With hotter countries, having lighter robes and cooling/anti-perspiration charms.

#harry potter

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