#hell channel network

[nyalisa-landale]

guy in the novice network complaining about the game "forcing him to look like a girl", we teach him about the aesthetician and glamour and glamour plates, people coming into the conversation rag on his insistence on looking "masculine", eventually i decide to look him up on the lodestone to see what he's working with, and i see

lalafell

............okay, my dude. sure. you picked the second-least "manly" option, but you do you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[hkthatgffan]

I really did not wanna talk about this stupid topic, but with so many people falling for it, I figured I should; THE DIRECT ARTICLE ABOUT A GRAVITY FALLS REVIVAL IS A FUCKING LIE!! Lemme explain below why!!

Ever since this article by The Direct was published, way too many people are thinking Gravity Falls is really coming back and the usual season 3 belief is spreading yet again. And of course, YouTubers who should know better made videos on it and other "journalists" are spreading this lie. Here's the real facts! The executive in the article NEVER alluded to a revival. All they said is that Alex is publishing a book (The Book of Bill) and there's some shorts being made. All this article is basing its claim on is the phrase, "Never say Never!" Alex has had a deal with Netflix since 2018. Under that deal, he cannot make new cartoons for other networks, including Disney and Gravity Falls. He can voice on non Netflix shows and help in small ways like he did on TOH, but he cannot make a new show outside Netflix.

The shorts they are alluding to are confirmed to be likely stuff like the Broken Karaoke series on Disney Channel's YouTube page or theme song takeover stuff. Disney TVA News, while not 100% the most reliable source, has suggested that as the case and given Alex was at DTVA in April recording something per an Instagram story he made, it makes the most sense. What's more, there is a rumoured short being made for The Book of Bill which this could be meaning. Notice how it has no indication of a revival? Alex Hirsch has said he has ideas for GF stories, but they are more book centric. Heck, in me and Hana's interview alone he alluded to Stan and Ford stories he'd wanna do if given the chance to make another graphic novel. That is all!

And speaking of Alex…he's not said shit on this! He's not tweeted about it or liked any tweet about it. And Alex has said in the past to not believe anyone claiming Gravity Falls is coming back unless he says so himself on Twitter. So, take a guess what I did? I messaged him!! I was in talks with Alex recently for another video I'm making later in the future and asked him about this article during it. Without leaking our DM's, Alex said straight up, this article is all "just talk!" It's clickbait! Alex Hirsch confirmed it is clickbait!!

Direct is lying to you and so is anyone else saying this is real or that Gravity Falls is coming back! It just isn't. The only person who you should believe about this stuff is Alex Hirsch himself and he clearly has said it's not. And even supposing Direct is telling the truth about this executive saying something is possible, it's just gonna be book or small shorts stuff…NOT a season 3 or reboot, or revival or spin off series. I know that stuff is pretty popular to talk about, hell, I'd kill for a Gravity Falls prequel story myself. But it's not happening.

But with that said, I hope this post helped you better understand what is up. This article is a sham and a joke to the field of journalism. Do your damn job and tell the truth instead of making clickbait shit that will get you ad revenue! People who write articles like this are a joke and I feel bad for anyone who falls for their BS! These articles will never stop being made, so it's up to you all to be smart and not fall for them.

Remember, if Alex Hirsch doesn't say anything about it, it's not legit!!

Stay informed properly out there! New videos coming soon :)

[thisisnotthenerd]

picture this: you're a busy working mom whose husband died on the job under mysterious circumstances, leaving you alone to raise your young son in a town with none of your family or support network, at a job that will never pay enough, no matter how much good work you do. your son at once idolizes his father and resents him for leaving, and has channeled all of his energy into solving mysteries without regard for his health or well-being.

you watch him get bullied, watch him get into fights constantly as he searches for his missing babysitter and the other missing girls in town. he wears a nickname given to him by a bully with pride and tries so hard to impress his friends. you see him build up a group of friends, only for them to go to jail. after your apartment is attacked, you go with him to prom to take down his evil vice principal, who killed your husband on an impulse. you devour the dragon who killed your husband and it tastes like hollow victory, like revenge for the man you can't bring back.

the next year, your son goes on spring break with his friends after he gets accosted by an entity that used to work with your husband and some kind of mirror entity that leaves shards in your apartment. you don't hear much from him on the trip until you see a pit fiend choke him out and kill him, on a livestream. your son gives up his worldly possessions for the sake of defeating an entity that was raised for the sake of the status of an elven family.

your son comes back from spring break with the name of an eldritch entity tattooed on his chest and tells you his father died because the being he used to work with put a target on his back. your son met his dead father in heaven after he went to hell as a litigator for his friend. your son has been threatened with death for existing and come back.

that summer, the eldritch entity is summoned out of your son's body, and he spends the entire summer tracking down a cult and sealing the entity once more. you've left your (thankless) job to become a public defender for people like you, getting nothing for years of work, of doing your duty to bring home a little more for your son, and they won't give you your pension.

your son works himself to the bone for his friends, knowing he can't go to a good school unless he somehow ensures they all succeed. he does everything: perfect grades, every extracurricular, running the student government campaign for his friend, and he's still tracking down another missing girl. he gets dominate monster cast on him by the principal despite doing nothing wrong.

you chat with him in the car, driving to school, and he can't afford a moment of rest. people have been killed following the leads he's tracking, he warns you of the danger of following up and yet he still aims to find the clues.

and you wonder, is this all i've shown him? stretching yourself thin, never more than a moment's rest, and yet others don't appreciate it? after spending your lives in this town, and you're still goblins, still punished for the crime of existence, having to work twice as hard for half the credit.

they call him "the ball".

every day sklonda gukgak wakes up.

[ruruvxz]

hello! new reader here. i think hanni would write romantic love songs!

“My Dearest Clementine”

Hanni Pham x fem!reader

↳ synopsis: You and your overachieving (ex)girlfriend broke up, but little did you know, she still hasn't gotten over her little clementine. And what's better than food to get into a woman's heart? A good serenade.

↳ cw: foul mouth reader, reader once again is lowkey so mean, breakup, established relationship, comfort, fluff

↳ word count: 2.1k

a/n: omg my first ever anon, im tweaking out, but i agree she definitely would make/cover love songs about reader. and she’d put her whole heart into the performances too… she’s such a cutie pie nfgagggghhhhhh fun fact this was originally a jihyo fic but then i thought really hard, and decided on not making it about her. oh and this is song is clementine by grant perez heheheheh

Skimming through the channels, you really couldn't help but be so agitated by everyone broadcasting this god-awful music show. "God, do these people only watch one thing, and why does it have to be music shows of all things?" You huffed to yourself, whilst aggressively mashing the poor remote. To be honest you'd be the first one to admit that you did enjoy all the award shows and music festivals. Hell, you've even been to your fair share, but do all these channels have to screen the same thing?

It's been the same MAMA award show on almost every channel, even networks that talked about important news, couldn't help but talk about it. Almost as if there wasn't anything else of importance to speak about, making your blood boil even more at the thought.

However, your visceral hatred for music programs wasn't always like this, well, not before at least. You used to adore watching the latest performances, always admiring the work put into performing on stage. It came to the point where you'd buy tickets for venues near your apartment. Despite not always recognizing everyone performing, you'd always sit through every performance, all the while waiting for that one special person to take the stage. Embarrassingly your true intentions were to go watch your then-girlfriend, Hanni, and cheer her on from the sidelines.

That was before, and now, the one who you called your one true love, had just recently shattered your heart into pieces because of work.

All the memories of her loving presence came back flooding into your mind, like how she'd escape practice using Minji's help just to find herself wrapped around your arms. Everything was just too much, the fact she would leave you to save face just enraged you further. "Argh! I am not about to reopen old wounds! Leave me alone you— minx!" You yelled at the screen, before throwing profanity after profanity, like some madwoman trying to stop the voices in her head. At this point, your neighbors were on the verge of sending a wellness check to the apartment.

Your rage was at a tipping point when you saw her gorgeous face popping up on the screen. You held up the remote, ready to shatter the poor television by projectile throwing the remote at the screen. It wasn't until your phone started vibrating erratically that snapped you out of your female rage. Holding your hand out and snatching the phone from the coffee table, you put the speaker to your ear.

"Yeah? Who is this?" You asked curiously, taking a mental note of how the caller's number looked eerily familiar, summing it up to being a coworker.

"Hey, I know we aren't close, but my friend needs a favor." The woman on the other side spoke with a soft and soothing voice, it sounded familiar, though the loud sounds of chanting made it hard to decipher who was on the other end. Thinking for a moment, you took your gaze out from the phone and to the television screen, biting your teeth as you saw New Jeans without Hanni nor Danielle. Sighing in relief you didn't have to see your stunningly aggravating ex-girlfriend.

Still reminiscing about all the times she's carefully and delicately peeled various fruits for you to eat without you even asking. You started to drift off thinking of ways to get her back, before snapping out of your pitiful daydreams, just to respond to the woman on the phone. "Uhm, not to sound round or anything, but who is this? I mean I'd love to do you a favor but—" You rightfully questioned, since this was just such a perplexing thing to ask someone, especially since you had no memory of them.

"Listen I’m…a friend of a friend...?" She spoke unsurely.

"Look, I'm really busy at the moment, I've got a maximum of 30 seconds before the next song starts..." The woman spoke, while you sat there still trying to puzzle together who she was. "It's just, my friend REALLY—" she exasperated the 'really' as much as her voice could. "Wants you to watch the MAMA performance today."

"What... I'm sorry, with all due respect, that's such an odd demand. I must emphasize that I don't know you, and you're not making the effort to state who you are." You commanded at the mic before the call closed, the woman on the other end not wanting to argue with you.

Before you could interrogate me further, the speakers connected to the television erupted loudly with my nose, the screams and praises abundantly clear. And of all the songs it could blast powerfully loud, it was "How Sweet" by NewJeans, but all that you could notice was Danielle throwing the phone to one of the staff before her muscle memory pushed through. (And that Hanni, who was previously sitting perfectly fine with the other members wasn't going to perform the song with them.)

As quickly as you comprehend the song was playing, you put down the volume to a bearable state. Admittedly you still felt a bit creeped out by that call, but then again compared to the phone calls and letters you received from crazed lovers, it wasn't the worst thing you've gotten.

Suddenly a sinister realization hit you, other than working, you didn't do much during your day off, only thing mildly interesting happening today on my day off was this fuck ass show. And if that caller's so-called "friend" wanted you to watch the performances, you'd do just that. So that's how you decided that you'd spend your precious time letting out your toxic rage on these performances in the comfort of your own home.

The time flew so quickly, and most if not all the artists were so enjoyable, but then, the performance you had dreaded the most was about to happen. However, a part of you was quite ecstatic to watch that dreadfully alluring woman fail miserably on stage. (But be honest, Hanni never does, she always looks perfect doing what she loves, not the mention how elegant she sounds when she sings.)

"God Hanni, even till this day you're insufferable. Fuck." You screeched, as the painfully beautiful memories of her flooded your brain, while all you could do was continue to shove chips into my mouth, eating them up with a bittersweet rage. But with your prior knowledge, before the performance started, the artists were given about a 10-minute break to get all the equipment and stage ready. So you were left with your heart racing inside your chest.

After a dreadful wait, you watched as the dim lights began to slowly light the stage with a warm spotlight, and the LED backboard displayed a beautiful orange orchard. It took you aback since Hanni’s most recent solo tracks never mentioned anything about flowers or fruits. You hated to admit that no matter what you still supported her career to the bitter end of your relationship, so every little detail about her was engraved into your mind. But oh hell, if it's a mess up, even better for you right?

"Ah, hello everybody. I hope you've been enjoying the performances today. Everyone is so good!—" Hanni spoke, the crowd roared at her words, and the camera flashed to her coworkers smiling proudly at her words.

"I understand everyone wants my more recent solo songs, but I wanted to showcase a new song. I made it about someone close to me." She continued, while even more mental anguish bubbled up inside your head by how she spoke so softly about the song, and how you assumed she moved on so quickly.

"I hope you all will enjoy this performance." That was the last thing she said before the backtrack began to play. It was a gentle stroke of a guitar before the other members of the band continued to play to the rhythm. The song continued as you leaned closer into the TV, using your remote to turn up the music playing from the speakers.

“Color it gray...” She sang, your heart thumping out of your chest, your mind drifting to the moments leading to your eventual fallout.

“Until I forget you

Like I never met you” The memory of her pleading you to forget about whatever connection you both shared because she didn’t want to drag your career down. Her tears still linger in your mind.

“My dearest, my dearest Clementine” She continued, looking back at the first time she ever spoke so dearly about you, using ‘Clementine’ as a term of endearment because you both cringed at the thought of calling each other ‘baby’ or anything of that sort.

“Color it gray

Until I forget you

Like I never met you”

“My dearest Clementine”

“Throw it away

But close enough to you” Her voice strained by her sorrow.

“Cause although I hate you

I will still fall in love, my Clementine”

“Every time, always”

“No matter how hard I try”

“My Clementine, every time”

You're always on my mind” She ended, fixing her gaze to the camera, looking longingly, as if she was looking at something— no someone through the screen.

You watched in disbelief as she closed up her performance, and walked off the stage, still wearing the matching dragonfruit and orange necklace you bought together. It was a few minutes sitting in utter bewilderment before getting a call on your cellphone. All you could do is weakly pick it up, while still being in complete shock at what you just watched, and without checking the contact you forced yourself to speak up, "Uh..." with a very long pause, you resumed "Hello."

"Clementine!" The voice on the other line spoke loudly, there was no other person who called me that sickening nickname other than the one and only Hanni Pham.

"I thought I blocked you!" You shouted defensively at your phone trying to get this woman to hang up.

"Yeah! But you never blocked Danielle since she never really messaged you, haha!"

"Just leave me alone you freak!" You argued loudly, "I'm hanging up on you Han—" Before you could press, block caller, you heard her scream from the other side.

"No wait!"

"You saw my performance right?"

"Uhm... I wouldn't say I didn't." You awkwardly admitted, still trying to avoid answering her questions.

You sat in awkward silence for a while before she spoke again, "Please, I know you— we weren't the most mature people, but please give me one more chance. I know I shouldn't be asking you on the phone…” You hear a faint sigh before Hanni carries on with her whole speech. “but I don't know any other way to contact you without you running in the opposite direction."

Rolling your eyes behind the phone, you took in a deep breath and analyzed the situation before making a very calm, calculated response. "No! Die in a ditch, Hanni! You dumped me! Then made a song with my nickname and aired it out to everyone!"

"No! No! No wait! Please! Clementine! That's the only way to get through to you! Please Y/N, I wouldn't be begging like this for anyone else."

"Ugh... fine! We'll talk about this later once you're done with work alright? Besides you shouldn't be stressed during award shows, it shows."

"Really?!" She questioned, a bit shocked that you would even give her the time of day.

"Yeah, whatever, don't overwork yourself."

"Thank you so much, I promise I won't, thanks for caring so much, even with everything I’ve done."

"Yeah yeah, you know my place, I'll cook something up, and bring you comfortable clothes, because I'm going to give you a piece of my mind."

"I should've expected that, don't worry, we'll talk, I promise, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say— and I promise I won’t make any more stupid decisions."

"Sure."

"I never break my promises clementine."

"Just— go back to work, Hanni! You're pissing me off, your sweet talk won't work on me this time, I'm gonna beat your ass no matter what."

"It was worth the try." She laughed before hanging up the phone, you swore you were gonna kill her when she came back home. But for now, you forced yourself off the couch and prepared everything for her arrival, after all, she never broke her promises.

[minus-plus-zer0]

The Bakusquad Gaming Group - Ch. 1 - Introduction

| Masterlist | The Bakusquad Gaming Group Masterlist | | Next | ♡ Genre: Fluff, little crack ♡ Pairing: Gamer!Bakugou x Gamer!Reader ♡ Tags: Crossover (MHA x multiple franchises), gaming AU, Quirkless AU, aged up ♡ Summary: You're a pink and girly Let's Player who recently rose to fame. Eventually, your brand grows enough to attract the attention of the (in)famous Bakusquad. Their leader, Bakugou Katsuki, has especially taken a liking to you. This story follows your daily lives together as part of the Bakusquad.

You made waves in the gaming community as an up and coming Let's Player. Your pink and cutesy aesthetic could only be matched by the cozy games you played, with the occasional Dark Souls and DOOM Eternal mixed in.

Your following grew over time but you needed to network to continue your brand growth. Although your channel currently rode high on your DOOM Eternal Let's Plays, you noticed that a popular gaming group called the "Bakusquad" made themselves known by playing Animal Crossing, and you wanted in.

You actually recognized their leader, Bakugou Katsuki (aka his username "Dynamight"), as somebody who attended your old university. But you two never interacted and you never saw him in-person. He wasn't the type of guy who would collaborate with anyone, and even his own group had a hard time getting a hold of him. This could be his and your chance to break further into the multiplayer scene.

But how would you contact him? Emailing him felt too formal for a guy who regularly shirked formalities, and he blocked whoever slid into his DM's, plus he wasn't exactly friendly in-person on the off-chance you ever got to see him face-to-face.

But after watching some of his videos, you knew the best way to get his attention was through force.

You publicly challenged him on social media to a 1v1 fight in an old fighting game that you secretly knew the ins and outs of. You purposefully chose this one since it didn't look like anything you, a girly gamer, would be interested in. You tagged him and then you called upon your followers to get his attention, but it didn't take long before he was sliding into your DMs, mad as all hell.

"What the fuck was that?" was his first text. "You seriously challenging me?"

You didn't reply. You just screenshotted his DM, posted it onto social media, and tagged him again.

Your only words in your post were, "I'm dead serious. <3"

"Oh it is on." That was Bakugou's last DM to you.

Even though it wasn't his idea, Bakugou personally led the organization of the event from here on out. He shot you multiple curt texts of the time of the event, the rules, and instructions on the technical aspects of getting you both into an online call. He even gave you his phone number so that you could communicate faster. Now that caught you off-guard.

While you rested in the privacy of your own bedroom, you dialed his number. You felt the intense urge to tease him for even giving you his contact info. Before he could get a word in, you were already on his ass.

"Do you give everybody your phone number?" you asked.

"Huh? What, hell no! This is an important event as part of both our channels so I had to--"

"You sound so much stuffier in real life, oh my gosh."

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING FLUFFY?"

"...I said stuffy, Bakugou."

"WHATEVER OKAY! That's not the freaking point! I just wanted to make sure your online connection was good enough for this old as fuck game. Why did you pick this shit anyways?!"

You could just imagine him in his house, getting all angry over a phone call. You found it highly amusing, mainly because you knew it wasn't that serious.

"It's a childhood favorite of mine," you pouted, crossing your legs on the bed. "It's very near and dear to my heart. You don't like it?"

He sighed. "If you're so fucking dead set on it, then I'm not exactly gonna back down now, am I? I just wanted to make sure this all works perfectly."

"It'll be fiiiiine, Bakugou." You hugged a video game plushie from your bed real tight. "Gee, I didn't realize you cared so much."

"It's my job! Of course I give a shit. I'll make sure this event doesn't flop 'cause of this damn fossil of a game."

"It's not gonna flop!"

Then day of the event came soon, and both of your fanbases were pretty hyped. The game itself wasn't the only interesting part. No, people were more interested in your clashing personalities.

Since you arrived on the gaming scene, people had jokingly made edits comparing your content to what "Dynamight" had to offer. Your brands were like night and day in difference. They knew from your first post tagging Bakugou that your ensuing interactions were going to be... intriguing, to say the least.

The stream started, with two of the Bakusquad members Kaminari Denki (aka "Chargebolt") and Jirou Kyoka (aka "Earphone Jack") helping with the technical side of things, as well as moderation of your chats. Kaminari oversaw Bakugou's chat, while Jirou oversaw yours. Needless to say, this caused numerous arguments between Bakugou and Kaminari. At least you and Jirou got along well enough despite your difference in aesthetics and Jirou's frustrations with the technical issues.

The first match would be starting soon. For the first three rounds, your arena would be a barren field with a galaxy backdrop. Bakugou specifically chose the plainest arena to best show off your skills and nothing else. You and Bakugou were on an online call together, streamed live to both of your audiences.

"You fucking ready for this, princess?" he asked.

"Only if you're ready for me, prince."

You saw Bakugou smirk wider at your comment through his rarely used onscreen camera. It made you feel in some way you couldn't describe.

Your character was a real firecracker on the field, despite their delicate and sweet-looking appearance. You caught Bakugou's fire-based barbarian character off-guard several times, punishing him every time he thought he could attack you recklessly.

Bakugou let out a stream of expletives, with many new swear words being created on the spot. He caught you laughing and he said, "Don't laugh at me, dammit! I'm not fucking done!"

He attacked viciously but he also learned not to throw his character around willy-nilly. Still, he wasn't a match for you and he couldn't get enough hits in before you threw him off the stage entirely. He tried to leap back up to grab the stage's ledge, but you spiked him straight down. His character died from falling offscreen.

Both your fanbases were going nuts at Bakugou's amateur playstyle. This was the first time he'd been taken off-guard in a fighting game. And it was worse knowing that you were beating him down like a professional MMA fighter beats down a sickly old grandpa on his deathbed. Bakugou was beyond livid, but instead of his earlier rampant boisterous rage, he was now silent and focused and seething.

"Somebody's a little pissed," you crooned into your microphone, your hands gripping your controller as you awaited his character to respawn. "Oh come on, Bakugou, it's not that serious..."

"You won't be saying that when I beat you," he said.

The second round was much worse for you. Bakugou grew much more defensive, and your offensive game was not nearly good enough to avoid retaliatory punishment from his character. You kicked him, he countered you and punched back, sending you flying off the stage to the point where you couldn't leap high enough to reach the arena. Your character fell to their death, somewhere into the beautiful galaxy backdrop.

Bakugou shot a stupidly handsome self-satisfied grin at his camera, and you knew for a fact that it was meant for you.

You sent him a well-trained, super sweet pageant smile that told him, "You are so fucking dead I swear to fucking god once I am done here your character will regret the day he was ever fucking born." Hopefully he got the message.

This was your last round of your first match, and there was no chance in hell you were going to throw the fight away that easily. You glanced at Bakugou's screen to gauge his reaction but he was glancing away from his game, and you wondered if he was looking at you.

The final round started and your characters traded blows like old archnemeses. Your character dashed quick as lightning, but you couldn't get any clean hits on Bakugou's character at all. Bakugou's character hit way, way harder and you struggled to remain on stage every time he sent you flying.

You had to admit, you were impressed. He was literally beating you at your own game. Still, you had dealt enough damage to his character little-by-little that you could tell he was getting nervous.

His barbarian character punched yours so hard he sent you flying, again. You were floating back towards the stage while he awaited you at the ledge.

"Almost fucking done here," he said, his voice almost a growl.

"You gotta tone down that ego of yours," you said, with a smile.

His character swiped at yours but you countered hard, your pink magic shooting him right backwards. Then, your character grabbed him, threw him over the ledge, and kicked him straight into the offscreen abyss.

You shrieked and cheered, bursting into a little happy dance. The chat was going wild seeing Dynamight perform poorly in a fighting game, for the first time. You looked at Bakugou's screen and he wasn't even mad. His back was slumped against his chair and his hand stroked his face, obscuring his true expression. But he was staring at your character's victory animation onscreen very seriously, like he couldn't believe it.

"Holy crap!" Kaminari's voice chimed into the call. "What a match! That's a great way to introduce yourself to someone! I can't believe you two have never collaborated before, we really gotta do this again sometimes because I have never, and I mean never, seen somebody kick Bakugou's ass like that."

"Shut it, Dunce Face."

"Aw come on! The night's still young! How about we play a few more rounds?"

Your eyes flickered to Bakugou's screen, then to your camera. "One more round, Bakugou?"

Bakugou exhaled through his nose. Then, he addressed his camera, his face morphing into a deadly smirk.

"This stream isn't ending until I beat you."

The stream didn't end for hours.

Bakugou had basically challenged you on your home turf, which was the biggest mistake of his life. You won most of the matches, and although Bakugou did win some, he could only go home happy if he won all of them. And as an unofficial referee, Kaminari would only consider it Bakugou's win if Bakugou won at least a majority of the matches, but Bakugou couldn't manage that either.

You had so much fun that night. You not only fought Bakugou but you also occasionally let Jirou and Kaminari get in on the matches. Other Bakusquad members also poked their head into the streams and joined in at certain points. Even though you had never met these people before, it felt like you were already fast friends.

You already felt incredibly comfortable around Bakugou, maybe even more so than the others. Once the stream ended, the rest of the Bakusquad congratulated you on the good stream but said their quick goodbyes as it was getting late. However, Bakugou stayed up and switched you two to a facetime video call through your computers.

Your heart raced upon seeing him but your face didn't give away any fear. This was very sudden, but you didn't mind witnessing what Bakugou was like in private. A strange feeling bubbled up within you. Meanwhile, Bakugou slumped back in his chair, his head propped up by one fist as he took your appearance in.

"So?" you said, looking playful and coy. "Guess it's not that bad of a game after all. Your viewers were higher with me around."

"Don't get cocky," he said. "Yours were higher than I've ever seen on your channel too."

"My channel?" You spun lightly left and right on your gaming chair. "I didn't realize you were a fan."

Bakugou lips turned up somewhat. "It's obvious that I'd fucking watch your videos before I collaborated with you. Duh. But... I've actually been watching your shit for a while now."

You knew that anybody who gamed with you would likely watch your content, so this wasn't surprising. But for some reason, hearing Bakugou say it put you on the spot, unlike how you indifferent you felt with past gaming partners. Bakugou could've watched any of your videos, even the cringy anime dating sims you played two weeks ago. At least you never played anything inappropriate on your channel...

"So you are a fan," you said, cheekily.

"So fucking what." He looked so irritated by your comment, but you only found his pissy face to be cute. "Yes, I'm a fucking fan. I've been a fan since you fucking started. Happy?"

"Wait, really?" You stopped spinning in your gaming chair. He looked like he regretted saying those words. "Oh my gosh, I would've never guessed if you hadn't told me! Do you put on my videos just to hear my voice? Do you buy all my merch? Do you want some of my gamer girl bath water--"

"Will you stop that?!" His face was a furious shade of red. You wanted to screenshot it so bad but he'd catch you red-handed. "I just said I'm a fucking fan, I didn't say I was delusional."

"You didn't need to," you said with a smile. You pointed at his face on the screen. "It's written all over."

"WHAT?!"

You burst into laughter. He could only stare dumbfounded at his monitor. He grumbled about how you were oh so impossible to deal with, but that didn't wipe the smile off your face.

"Really though, I'm glad..." you said, as your giggles faded away. "I'm always grateful for my fans, Bakubestie."

"Oh you've got nicknames for me now?"

"You're the one that called me 'princess'."

"You don't need to comment on everything I do, alright?" His face was burning brighter again. "Enough about me and all my supposed funny flaws you wanna point out. I wanna talk about you. You a fan of me or what?"

He tried to look cool while saying that. But by the way he leaned on his desk, closer to your screen, you could tell he was really interested in your answer. You backed away from your desk a bit, because his close presence embarrassed you.

"Of course I'm a fan," you said. "Who wouldn't be a fan of 'Dynamight'?"

His face cracked a handsome and cocky grin. "'Course you are." His voice possibly lowered an octave when saying that. "Since you're such a big fan of me, and I'm such a big fan of you, how about we partner up more often?"

He looked confident, but you could see his heart beating fast through his tight shirt.

That made you more confident in turn.

"Yes please, Dynamight."

[milqueandsugar]

🌼☕` Date Night `☕🌼

Gen / Fluff

Includes / Carmilla , Vox , Velvette

| CARMILLA CARMINE |

Prefers at home or private dates, she's a woman hated and revered for her work, she's not going to ever put you in a dangerous situation for being with her at the wrong time

Very, very romantic, old school style

Pulls your chair out for you, opens doors for you, brings you flowers whenever she visits

Reciprocate these gestures? She's puddy in your hands

She keeps any flowers you bring her by pressing or drying them, I imagine her as someone who has a small memory box somewhere, mostly built around her daughters, and now you too

As much as she loves doing things for you she likes doing things with you even more, especially if she can include her daughters

Cooking together, trying out painting or pottery, hell you could be doing the dishes and she'd be all warm and fuzzy with love

For important dates, anniversaries, birthdays, or just when she's feeling extra she'll rent out a restaurant or theater for the two of you

Extravagant enough to suit her adoration for you, but private enough she can relax enough with you to actually enjoy the date

| VOX |

There are two dates with Vox, work dates which devolve into either sex or cuddles

Or very public dramatic dates

Im talking matching outfits, paparazzi present, multiple body guards

He loves both equally if he's honest which he isn't, he complains about how behind on work he is while rubbing your back or playing with your hair in bed

Your more extravagant outings are usually work related, like going to parties for networking, wearing velvettes new line or eating at a restaurant one of the Vees recently bought

During your extravagant dates is one of the few times you don't talk about work, paparazzis near by, can't spill any secrets can we?

Happily recalls the massacre of the lowest earners that month while separating your crab meat from the shell for you

Also extra affectionate when in public, he's a proud man, he's proud of you and he's proud to be with you

Arm around your shoulders, holding your hand, hand on the small of your back, always near by

God forbid someone try something, especially when you have a live audience

You'd be surprised how creative someone can get with violence after so long, impressed too if the viscera didn't ruin your new shoes

Don't worry, he'll treat you to a shopping spree afterwards, only cause he loves you soo much

| VELVETTE |

She loooooooves to be spoiled

You treat her as the princess she is everyday however, and dates are the times she puts all her effort into you

She's hand makes custom outfits for the two of you, even if your date only consists of skin care

She likes going out, she's not someone who can stand doing nothing and needs to be somewhere new doing something new all the time

You usually go to spas or shopping spree, on her card of course!

Lots of photos, making collages on Hellstagram, cute couple Voxtoks and Twitter threads talking about how hot you are

You can usually tell when she's about to pull you out of work for a date by how many thirst edits of you she's saving or liking at a time

Your seriously wondering if she's commissioning them cause WHY IS THERE SO MANY

Talking shit your entire date, not about you obvi but she has to fill you in on the office tea, mostly at Vox and Valentinos expense

What is said at the massage table STAYS at the massage table

On the rare occasion you guys stay in for a date you order enough food for ten and binge watch the latest shows or drama channels on Vtube

She even let's you do her makeup I'd you ask her particularly nicely, do it well enough and she'll even wear it out

Her favorite dates of course are the ones where you two get messy at one of valentinos clubs but that's between her and Voxs ten million cameras

She asks for the tape later.

[gallusrostromegalus]

The Rubicon, Part 3: Allegory Of The Cave

AKA, the Force-Sensitive-teenager-that-didn't-go-to-the-Jedi-I wrote-flash-fic-of-on-someone-else's-post-and-kept-going-Whoops-AU

Part 1

Part 2

---

The galaxy has had many brilliant philosophers, among them is Platocca, the Wookiee scholar wrote an allegory of prisoners trapped in a cave, shown shadows of objects, people and animals are projected onto the wall by their captors, as a metaphor for the limits of the senses, and how the shadow of a Rancor is not the same thing as a Rancor itself.

-

Her disappearance does not go unnoticed- it’s hard to miss when the chateau of a locally prominent political family explodes hard enough to cause a major power outage and the body of their ‘reclusive’ daughter is nowhere to be found.  A search is organized, and the scent-akks trace her footsteps out of the house and into the desert but lose the trail at the river, like how a vulpire evades the hunt.

The search expands- her holo is circulated on the local planetary networks, The family is interviewed and they, tearful, plead for her safe return. Her little sister’s tears and begging that it won’t Lifeday without her play particularly well. It gets picked up by the regional channels and soon there is a galaxy wide search for the Missing Girl.  

Everyone loves to be a Hero. 

The desert is searched by police flyover and volunteer foot teams.  Hundreds scour the bare rocks for clues. Someone treks a full hundred miles into the labyrinthine canyons in search of her.

Everyone loves a Mystery.

Interviews are conducted with the family, with her mentors, with her caretakers and doctors. People try to reconstruct the final day before she vanished, someone publishes her school essays and more photos are found- of a shy child, cringing in the back of the Science Bowl team, or trying to hide behind a tree in a family reunion photo.

Everyone loves a scandal.

Ten is not that young an age to enter politics in the Galaxy far, far away, especially not for the now-heir to a prominent local political family and the little sister’s announcement that she’s running for the local civic council wouldn’t be terribly noteworthy, save that it’s done at a rally to raise funds for missing children all over the planet in her missing sister’s memory. By that afternoon, medical records are leaked- seven major psychiatric institutions in under five years, involuntary commitments, ‘experimental’ treatments for an ‘undiagnosed’ disorder- she hurt her siblings, it’s said, she was mentally deficient and home alone- abandoned, when the home “mysteriously” exploded and she vanished without a trace. 

Tongues wag, and eventually agree that, best case scenario,  it’s a family capitalizing on the tragedy to further their political ambitions But best case scenarios are rare in the Galaxy Far, Far away, and the idea that a family might try to get rid of a troublesome daughter before launching the career of another isn’t even a terribly implausible scenario. 

Regardless of the situation, the Sister continues to poll well. Or, perhaps, because of it. Everyone loves to think they’re in on a conspiracy, and if this family is ruthless enough to kill a daughter, well, imagine what they’ll do to the opposition?

-

She first becomes aware of all this at a funeral.

She had gone back to the oxbow to bathe- having worked out podes that are durable enough for the desert and dexterous enough for her needs, and a steady, efficient gait to traverse the vastness of her new home, she was now experimenting with skin, and while the latest thick midnight-violet mammalian hide performed admirably in terms of thermal regulation and protection against the spines every plant and half the animals here had, it had a tendency to get oily and she thought a nice roll in the sand and soak might be in order. 

Instead, the far side of the oxbow was crowded with people, all dressed in mourning white and carrying candles.  A pyre was set up on the far bank, and a small, closed coffin sat atop it. 

Oh hell. A child’s funeral.  Who died?  Not one of my classmates? or- no, no there are Sis and The Baby, thank fuck. Mom and Dad too. Front row.  Hell of a crowd too. And reporters? Yeah, those are definitely holocorders, for the news. She squinted at the logos on the vans parked just up from the riverbank, having to switch spectra and focal distance a few times before the characters became clear. Big networks!  We don’t have anyone that famous, do we? Which unfortunate bastard are you all the way out here for?

She stalked closer, using the harsh angle of the setting sun as cover, long ears cocked to listen.  Voices sang monotonously through the traditional funeral dirge, her mother blotting at her cheek with a handkerchief. As the assembled tried and largely failed to reach the final note, The local temple priest lowered the funeral torch, lit the pyre, arthritically climbed both stairs to the podium, and tapped the mic. 

“Blessings upon us all, on this sad occasion.” He bowed his head. “We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of one who was taken from us too soon.”  he gestured to the holo broadcast in front of the pyre.  She had to shuffle through the underbrush, until she could make out the flickering image against the flame. A girl, about her age, in fancy dress, grimacing as politely as she could.

Poor thing. Looks wretched even in the best holo her family could find. Would we have been friends, this girl and I? Maybe I knew her-

 She squinted at the holo, something about it familiar- Gods, they’d even had the same awful bob haircut and itchy, itchy tule dress she’d been subjected to-

Wait.Is. Is that ME?

“She struggled in life, but was beloved by all who knew her-”

What.

“-She was a champion member of the Science Bowl Team-”

They kicked me off the team for ‘cheating’! It wasn’t my fault I knew the questions before they were asked!

“-and her artworks still adorn the walls of our school.”

WHERE? I got told that they were ‘Too Scary’ and ‘Not School Appropriate’!  

“She was always unparalleled in character- you could not find a more, sometimes brutally, honest person, and she clung unfailingly to her personal ethics.”

Oh? Oh, that’s what we’re calling it? Because last month in front of the shrinks you called me ‘tactless and prone to blurting things out’ and said I ‘rigidly conformed to arbitrary standards to the point of insanity’!  She seethed, a low rumble of disgust.

“We are all aware of her unfortunate medical history-”

Oh. Oh no.

“-but we can take some solace in the fact that she does not suffer anymore.”

Her mother took this chance to bawl theatrically. 

There are no words in all the tongues of the galaxy-

“While ultimately unsuccessful, the efforts to find her- hundreds, if not thousands of volunteer search parties, all across the galaxy as this tragedy has brought us all together in ways I no longer thought possible.  She is now one with the Nature she loved so much, and at peace.  May this pyre symbolize the light she briefly brought into our lives, and let us reflect on our memories of her.”  

The Priest stepped back and the line of mourners stepped forward- classmates, muttering about brief conversations in the hall, except a Longtime Bully, who gushed enthusiastically about how funny she was, with her weird turns of phrase and the way she-

She almost retched at the way her Bully imitated the way her hands would twitch when she was frightened, giggling. 

Then her mother stepped up.

“We.  We knew She was special, from the very day she was born-”

YEAH YOU SURE FUCKIN’ DID, DIDN’T YOU? She seethed, claws digging into the sand and tail thrashing. WAITING AT THE DOOR FOR ME, YOU SAID.  BUT NO-  NOT, YOU KNEW HOW TO RAISE ME BEST, YOU LOVED ME TOO MUCH TO GIVE ME AWAY, YOU SAID-

She crumpled, flattening against the ground and sobbing, strained hisses as her mother carried on, trying to hold back the tide of emotion before the Pyre exploded or something.  She stared at the hologram instead. The girl depicted  is a stranger- no really when the hell did Mom even TAKE that??  Fucking. Dress. When was the last time I even wore that thing? Gods, last Lifeday? No, I was back inside for that. It was…  Really? Really? You chose a picture two years out of date? 

She remembered the dress well. An awful thing made of tulle that didn’t itch so much as actually shred her skin where it wasn’t dangerously compressing her lungs and intestines.  She’d been ‘allowed’ home for the holiday, a probation for Good Behavior and the muscles around her mouths ached at the memory of the practiced smile she held for weeks, lest her Mother change her mind about letting her attend the party. She’d made it a full three months before her hand slipped doing the dishes and even though the cut on her hand was small it was just one thing too many and the smile cracked and she ended up throwing the offending knife across the kitchen in a panic.

She looked down at her ‘hand’ now, the scar still there despite the changes. Some landmarks were stubborn like that- she still had the freckles and that one mole, and the scar from attempting to ride a swoop and crashing into the shrubbery instead. Others vanished from her body and her memory without a trace with the shape-change. 

…Not that a more current image would really be more accurate but fucking really? That’s the one you picked?  I guess I should be glad you miss me at all, but-

Her tail thrashes, chewing on this emotion and the air around her. Her mother is bent over the podium, sobbing. Her grief seems genuine, really.  These are ugly, snotty sobs and the air around her cracks and splinters like bone in the Force. 

And yet.

…DID she have more current holos of me? I was usually the one holding the camera, but. No, not from last Lifeday, I was inside.  Not from Sis’ birthday, I was in the kitchen all day. Not on the Baby’s nameday either, all the holos are from inside that packed fire hazard of a temple and i refused to go in. Unless she took something between when my last camp ended and before they left for the mountains on the ‘normal vacation, for once’...

That really is the last Holo you have of me isn’t it?

And it’s not even me, just your favorite role I played.

Her father pulls her mother away from the podium, and she latches onto The Baby, cradling him close. The Priest shambles up to the podium again, and starts the final prayers. For peace, for a happy afterlife. The mourners got up and filed by the pyre, setting their candles around it before shuffling past the family, offering their condolences. 

They lay hands upon her parents, and shake the hand of her sister, wishing her luck with her campaign. 

She watched them file by, shrinking and retreating back, cowering in- in what? Fear? Anger? Grief? Disgust? She clawed at her face, unable to run, unable to stay.

Eventually, the neighbors collect Sis and The Baby, and her parents stay, waiting with the priest for the pyre to blow out, as per tradition. Her father stares off into the distance, mother clutched to his side. 

“You. You’ve done this before, right?”  he eventually stammers, turning to the priest.

“Fifty years of funerals.” the priest nods. 

“And. And children?”  He asks.

“Some of them, yes.” the priest sighed. “Children are always the hardest.”

Her father stared into the flames.

“Is. Is it wrong to feel… Relieved?” 

Her mother wails again. 

“I, I just… I keep thinking I hear her, around the house or out in the yard and I keep thinking she’s not really dead but- but it’s dread. I dread having to be on guard all the time or take her to another doctor or suffer another tantrum. I- I loved her, like any parent would but- but-”

“- We couldn’t live with her.”  Her mother sighed. “Not really.“

The priest nodded slowly. “It’s not uncommon to feel relieved that our loved ones are no longer suffering. Or to feel some relief from being free of burden of care, even as we mourn.” he tried, over-optimistically.

“It’s not something you say to a child but. Oh gods. Oh gods what a nightmare.” Her mother sobbed.

“Her spirit may yet be with us!” the Priest pleaded. 

“Body and Spirit, Holy Father.”

They all looked up.

She stood on the sandy bank of the river, the thin nervous girl from earlier this summer. She held her arms out, silently asking for a hug.

Her father shrieked, and stepped back, her mother cowering behind him. The priest held his own arms up defensively.

Ah. So that’s how it is. 

“Relieved? That’s how you feel? The nightmare is over?”  Voice high and tight as she grimaced at them, smiling like a primate baring its teeth before an eye-gouging, face-eating assault. “You know what? I can’t blame you. I have to say, this last month? I’ve been pretty relieved too.  No white-knucke social events.  No more being abandoned so Sis and The Baby can grow up ‘normal’.  No more ‘treatments’- you know the last one involved electrodes, right? Of course you did. You signed the wavier!”

Her mother opened her mouth, but choked on whatever it was she was going to say.

“But the biggest thing?  No more pretending.  No more playing the sweet, stupid girl for you to pity and be pitied for. No more pretending I’m the crazy one here.  No more being something I’m not.”  She grinned, and began to change again, skin darkening to midnight again, stretching her spine out until she tipped forward, forelegs splashing in the water and making them jump. She stretched to the height and shape that felt comfortable, A deeper shadow of limbs and muscle and teeth and too many eyes, tapetum lucidum glittering above them in the last of the Pyre-light. 

Her mother gagged, her father stared, frozen except for the tears, and the priest crumpled back in revulsion.

“I really can’t blame you.” She rumbled, stereophonic now. “-But I won’t let you delude yourselves. I might be free of you, but you’ll never be free of what you did to me.”  She grinned mouths full of teeth at them, before turning and walking into he river, vanishing below the surface with a flick of her tail.

Her mother’s screams echoed in faintly through the water as she made her way downriver. There was a spaceport there, and nothing for her here.

---

Now, Platocca rather famously got in a brawl with another Philosopher named Ogg who posited that while the shadow of the thing is not the thing itself, if there's a moving shadow shaped like a Rancor, it's being cast by SOMETHING, and there are better things to do than standing around philosophizing about it.  Like finding out what's casting the shadow from a safe distance, on account of the downright-likely chance that the thing casting the Rancor-shaped shadow is, in fact, a Rancor.  You Pedantic Twit.

-

It doesn’t take long for the carrion beasts to come around.

The scandal embroils the galaxy, and the gruesome details of the child’s history are the gossip of the day.  

Some can sniff between the lines, and take notice- if it was any of the more common ailments, something would have worked by now. The details of the ‘explosion’ hit the insurance market- no point of ignition- indeed, no fire at all, like someone had swung a wrecking ball out from inside the home in all directions at once. And they dig a little bit and compare her birth date to the public logs of Jedi deployments and make an educated guess or five. 

The only vehicle available for rent was an ugly yellow cargo vehicle, but a make and model with an extremely reliable engine and good mileage, which he decided was a decent tradeoff for its abhorrent color. Alas, to rent! He's already in hot water with the Bounty Hunter’s Guild for ‘retroactively purchasing’ a vehicle the last time he was chasing a mark and while the work was undignified, being a Sith didn’t pay like it used to.

He can hear her miles before he sees her.  A low, rumbling thrum in the force, sort of crunchy and guttural, but not unpleasant. He stops the speeder in the blazing white light of late afternoon and cocks his montrals, the physical sensation helping him mentally triangulate the noise. It’s constant, steady drone, like she’s meditating.  Or asleep.  Either way, a sensible thing to be doing in this disgusting heat.  Maybe she does have promise.

The bounty hunter’s guild membership is a convenient source of income, but more than that, it’s an excuse to stick his nose into whatever business the Force demands.  Need to get into a secure building? It’s fine to put his boot through a window, he’s after a mark!  Need to make some dubious contacts to keep himself appraised of the movements of his fellow force-users?  People are much more willing to wag tongues about criminal gossip for some coin than snoop on the Sith, but the relevant details are the same.

And now, when he was trekking into the desert after a teenager- he’s just doing some public service, and certainly not looking for an enraged force-user to take as an apprentice!  Besides, if she wasn’t up to snuff, he could always turn her in for the money. 

He drives on deeper into the thrum, and eventually spots her location- a grove of massive cacti in a small, depressed ditch.  If there is water anywhere out here, its in there.  Honestly, did nobody know how to conduct a search these days?

About 100 feet front he grove, he stops, and listens.  The thrum is much louder now, but he can’t pick out a specific point of origin inside the grove, which is… peculiar. He hopped down and instantly, the thrum ceased.

“Oh, so you do have some wits about you!”  he laughed, strolling closer, hands up and saber tucked behind him, hidden by his coat. “Hey, hey- no reason to panic, I’m just a… well, you and I- we’d be kin, after a fashion.”

No response.  No scuttling through the underbrush, no tension from nerves. Cool as a cumcuber fruit, watching him.

“Well, maybe not Kin. I’ve heard all about the bastards that you got stuck with for a family. Most of the galaxy has now!” He shrugged, stepping into the shade of the outermost cacti and squinting into the grove. “They didn’t understand, did they?  The connection, the POWER that flows through you- it scared them!  And honestly, I can’t blame them, if half of what I’ve read about how you blew up a house is true, why, you’d give some of the elders of my sect a run for their money.”

He can feel her gaze on him, taking in every minute movement. No particular direction, almost as though she were circling him. Good, good!  She wouldn’t have lasted long if she was completely without talent, of course.  Still, let her circle.  Let her come to me. 

“My parents never understood either.” He sighed, strolling deeper into the grove. “Always insisting that I was breaking things on purpose, that I was being cruel by telling the truth-  but why shouldn’t I?  They always said ‘Honesty Is The Best Policy’!”  He laughed.

“But my Master?  He understood. He understood how big and cruel the galaxy can be, especially for people like us. And it’s not wrong for us to defend ourselves!  I’ve got just as much right to exist as a vrelt or a tooka!  They can’t make people understand growling, so it’s not wrong for them to bite! So what if I had to resort to force when they couldn’t be made to understand?”  He laughed, stopping near the center of the grove.  It wasn’t that easy to hide in- the cacti didn’t branch much, and the scub wasn’t that dense. She has to be using the shadows, or keeping her nerve to stay perfectly still and pass herself off as a rock.

“..I suppose it’s fair for you to be cautious.”  he nodded, reaching into the pockets of his coat. “I mean, the galaxy is full of hucksters and con-artists that think they know what’s best.  I won’t pretend that I do, but I know what it’s like to suffer for having a connection like we do.  And well, like how I was taken in, I should return the favor to those in need.”  He pulled out a bottle of clean water- still cold even!- and a protein bar. 

“Here, a token of my goodwill!” he said, tossing them into the scrub. “I’ll be in the speeder when you’re ready to talk.”  he waved, strolling back towards the rental.

“...You have The Force too?”  She asked. 

He stopped, and couldn’t help grinning a bit. He squinted at where he thought the sound had come from, but only found a plain cactus, and no sign of the frail little girl from the posters.

“That’s right!” He nodded. “That’s how I knew where to find you- belongs like us, we’re all connected.”  He explained, tapping his forehead and sitting down on the ground, lekku dragging a bit on the dirt.  The circling sensation was back, but he definitely had her interest now. He expanded his perceptions- ah, there it was- she wouldn’t know how to shield yet, of course and he could feel the head-tilting sensation of confusion.

“...Do some people have more Force than others?”  she asked, on his other side now. 

“Yep!”  He laughed. “Good trick, throwing your voice like that!  But yes, there’s a huge variation in the capacity people like us have in the force.  Don’t worry-  it took me years of training to get like this, but with practice-”

A sharp chortle of amusement rang through the grove. 

“...What’s so funny?”  He asked. 

“Years Of Training, you say?”  She snickered, and he felt the scales on the back of his neck prickle. He could feel her, close, and moving now, stalking and coiling like a carnivore, but he still didn’t know WHERE-

He was suddenly struck with a vision of himself- sitting, lanky and small, laughably small from her perspective. All the weapons on his person were highlighted, including a dark red throb of the Kyber Crystal in his saber, along with the ache in his back and knees, and the tinnitus in his left montral and his name and his master’s name and- and-

“SHIT!”  he snarled, instantly on his feet and glaring up at the tops of the Cacti, lightsaber thrumming in his hand. “Rude little bitch, aren’t you?  Sneaking into people’s heads without their permission!” he scolded.

Another amused chuckle. “Better a bitch than a braggart.”  she gave the impression of a shrug. “Because I know exactly where and what you are, but you-”

He felt something around his ankles. Midnight violet tendrils, like stalks of mycelium sprouted from the ground and wrapped around his legs. He flipped the saber around in his hand, plunging it into the ground-

“-Don’t even know where to look.”  She finished and suddenly the cacti all fell inwards on top of him, as the tendrils yanked down, and he was pulled under the sand, choking and flailing.

He could see her now and-

Oh.

Oh FORCE.

She felt like she’d been all around him because she HAD. She was the cacti and the root system that spanned the grove and dug deep into the underground river system, and hell, even the river itself. Any resemblance to a humanoid form was gone, she was now a companion shadow to the environment around her, a branching form more like a plant or subterranean fungus than anything else.

You were right of course, to head to the only source of water.  She conceded, and he felt his skull figuratively pop open like a pocket filing wallet, and the midnight tendrils rifle through his memories with a vague disinterest. But you didn’t know that most of a river is underground, did you?  I don’t think any rational search party would have guessed how I’ve been traveling, really-

So, a Sith with a day job? That’s… He felt the mycelium of her body wince in the soil around him as he began to choke on the sand. Pretty embarrassing, actually.  But, you’re right, money makes the galaxy go ‘round…  memories of The Guild application process, how he’d modified his ID card, His Master back on Korriban, the disciplines of the order, assembling his lightsaber-

His lightsaber!  

He swung through the dirt and she flinched away from the blade.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’m going to leave.”  she laughed, a mouth forming and unforming from the mycelium ad hoc, and she withdrew from around him.  He clawed furiously, reaching up with the force, pulling himself awkwardly up out of the soil, spitting and howling curses as he tried to untangle himself from the roots and the pile of toppled cacti over him-

“So long, and thanks for all the snacks!”  She called and he turned-

…to see the yellow rental speeder flooring it into the distance.

He patted his coat and realized that the speeder keys, his wallet, and lightsaber were all missing. 

Oh.

Oh fuck. 

She was too far to reach now, but he could still feel the crystal in his lightsaber, calling out to them.  It’s fine, all I have to do was trust in the force and follow the crystal-  She doesn’t know what its capable of-

-

She set cruise control at just under the speed that made the cheap speeder shudder like it was about to fall apart, and leaned back in the driver’s seat, taking a swig from the water bottle and unscrewed the bottom of the lightsaber.

It was a simple enough device really- a small rechargeable battery that fed energy into the crystal, which was focused through a series of lenses and a magnetic field to create a looping blade of plasma.  Basically a more refined version of a Plasma Chainsaw, with a magic rock for a laser. 

The magic rock pulsed.

She blinked at it. 

It was a pretty thing, the color of really expensive rubies or fresh blood, and sparkled more than either. Not with sunlight. With… Potential.

There was a lot of power in her, and this would let her focus it, to carve the world around her as she saw fit, to conquer all that tormented her-  Visions danced, of her on a throne, the dismembered bodies of the doctors and orderlies and her mother at her feet-

“Nah.” She laughed, tossing it over her shoulder and out of the speeder. “I don’t want conquest or to cut throats or whatever.”

“I mean, I do.” She admitted. “I absolutely did fantasize about killing her, more than a few times, just to shut her up.  But that’d just leave Sis and The Baby without a parent that genuinely cares for them, and they never did a thing to me.” She shrugged. “It’s a nice fantasy, but it’s not what I want.”

Then what? The natural question followed. I really do have unlimited potential. What Do I Want?

She stared at the shimmering horizon in silence for a while, not so much thinking as listening.

“I want.” She started and paused. “I want to be happy.”

“It’s been a relief, to be away from all the doctors and eggshells, and to be the shapes I want.” She nodded. “But that’s not quite the same as happy.”

“It’s boring too.” She added. “Cacti are all fine and good, but hardly good conversationalists. I want-”  

“I’m lonely.  And sad, and scared about a lot of stuff.” She admitted, and the truth sat uncomfortably on her breast, but it was better than where it had been sitting inside her, aching, before. 

“I want a friend.”

She paused, having picked up a thread in the force.  A thin one, feeling like only the finest spun fiber, barely tying her to-

She saw the Apprentice from the documentary again, babbling excitedly about learning about how to conduct diplomacy and the the ins and outs of negotiation, and all the people she was going to meet, and the places she’d see and-

“She looks like she’d be fun to talk with.”  She mused.

----

Philosopher Ogg got thrown through a window for arguing with Platocca, but was really the ultimate winner because centuries later, when an excitable and somewhat high-strung Jedi Apprentice got up from her afternoon meditations and saw her shadow finish stretching a full two seconds after she did, she did not write it off as a trick of the light or still being groggy from a meditation session that had accidentally turned into an unplanned nap. 

She also, in a demonstration of what an early start learning  self-control in an emotionally supportive environment could do for someone, did not immediately panic.

“Alright.” She said, watching her shadow where it stood obediently against the wall in the reflection of the window. “Next we have Saber Practice, and then Rhetoric and then it’s dinner,” She listed off to nobody in particular. The ‘Royal’ We’ they used to call it. Very handy when you couldn’t specify exactly who or what you were talking to. 

She walked down the hall, watching her shadow in reflections and when it skipped ahead of her as she turned down the halls, keeping a close eye on when it actually met up with her feet as she walked. It was close, within the margin of error between the complex shadows cast by the architecture of the temple and the shadows of other Jedi but…

When she finally stopped at her place in the lineup to do katas, she could swear she heard herself take another step.

“You seem distracted today, young one.” The saber master frowned as she missed her thrust for the third time that day.

“I-  yes, sorry master.” she bowed her head. “It’s going to sound bizarre, but- I don’t know.  Does my shadow look weird?”

The master stared at her blankly for a second, then turned his attention to her shadow, which lay on the floor beside her in the expected fashion.

“...No.”  He spoke slowly, running his chin with concern. “But that’s my perspective.  How does it look to you?”

“Like it’s- lagging? Not quite doing what I am-  I stretch, but it stretches for longer. I walk, and it does too, but with a different gait. It’s not much but- I suppose it could be a problem with my peripheral vision? I have been having a lot of migraines lately.”

“Hm.” He nodded. “Well. I do not see any evidence of your shadow behaving in any abnormal way, but you should tell your master and perhaps make an appointment with the ophthalmologist.  I promise to tell you if I do see anything out of the ordinary, though.”  He smiled gently.

“Thank you master.” She nodded, shoulders drooping a bit. It was, most likely, a trick of the light or her eyes, but it was nice to have an additional perspective. 

Her next thrust landed perfectly. 

-

Her shadow was largely out of her line of sight during rhetoric, mostly cast under the desk behind her, and it was easier to focus, but there was the nagging sensation that the usually-empty seat beside her was occupied with someone who kept fidgeting and straining to hear the lecture. 

“You okay?”  her friend asked, taking her hand as they left class together. “You seem really tense.”

“I don’t know.” the apprentice sighed. “I think I might have a problem with my peripheral vision.  I keep seeing my shadow flicker or think there’s someone standing-”  She stuck out her free arm  and waved it in the air beside her.

“Ick.” Nodded her friend. “Yeah, that’d drive me right up the wall. Hopefully you only need glasses or something?”

“Ugh, glasses.” the Apprentice rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure which would drive me crazier- having to clean the lenses constantly just to be able to see or actually being haunted!”

They laughed, and walked together toward the cafeteria.

“So your master’s away?”  her friend asked grabbing trays for both of them.

“Yeah, Mirial, so you understand why the council sent an all-male contingent to the negotiations there.”  She nodded, grabbing a pair of allpes fruits. “He’s actually probably back by now but messaged me earlier that he’d been up for three days straight so to finish classes as normal and go see friends if I wanted because he’s going to have the mental faculties of a sofa for a few hours once he lands.”

“Oh nooooo-” her friend giggled. “You don’t worry about him?”

The Apprentice shrugged. “I mean, a bit? But this is pretty normal for him- he’s like a loth-cat, slinks away and hides when he’s not well, but he’ll call if he’s in real trouble. Still, I think I’ll finish dinner here and go back to our rooms, I’ve got so much reading to catch up on-”

It was good to talk and catch up on all the gossip for an hour- She’d been one of the first of her class to be picked for an apprenticeship and as much fun as her new freedoms and responsibilities really were, she sometimes missed the camaraderie of the creche. There were the expected interrogations about off-planet missions and OH FORCE THE PADDWORK and learning one-on-one and the splitting of responsibilities between master and apprentice. 

“It’s pretty normal that you don’t go on all the missions early on, I know.” She sighed. “But I did miss him this week.  The rooms are too quiet without him taking random calls or doing the dishes at weird hours, you know?”

“Yeah, it’s weird not having you snoring at night.” her crechmate  nodded, grinning.

“I DO NOT SNORE”!” she yelped, mock-threatening to throw the spare piece of fruit at him. 

“We’re kidding!  You whistle a bit, at most.” he friend patted her shoulder affectionately. “Besides, if you get really lonely, you’ve got your little peripheral vision fairy for company!”

The Apprentice rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help a surreptitious glance at her shadow.

“Your WHAT?”  her crechemate asked.

“I think I’ve got something wrong with my peripheral vision, and it’s faking me out into thinking my shadow is misbehaving or I’m being followed by some sort of sprite that hates rhetoric class.” She shrugged, waving at her shadow, and it waved along with her. “It only gets more boring- tomorrow is Economics, so you should go haunt someone more exciting.” She told it.

“UUUUGH that sounds so annoying!”  her crechmate groaned.

“I don’t know- I suppose it’s not so annoying if I think of it as an invisible friend or something.” The apprentice laughed, and her comm beeped.

>I have returned safely to the bosom of the temple once more.  Wretched migraine, grab me a snack? XD

She snorted and showed her friends the message.

“He texts like such an old fart!”  her friend giggled. “I thought he was like, really young?”

“He’s only a decade older than me, so practically a kid for a Knight, but damn good at it.” She nodded. “He’s Accumulated Great Wisdom For His Years!”  she said in her best esoteric philosopher voice. “So he’s the galaxy’s youngest old fart.”

Her friends cackled as she got up, pocketing the fruit and a few snack bars for him, before waving her goodbyes.

He was curled in bed with a pillow over his head to block the light and noise when she came in, but rolled over and reached out towards her anyway.  Her shadow stretched all the way across the room and onto the wall his bed was pushed against in the slice of yellow-orange light cast through the doorway, like the spectre had already joined her master. 

“Hello Master.”  She smiled, sitting on the bed beside him and pressing a juice pouch into his hand. “I missed you.”

“-and I you.” he replied, slowly sitting up and squinting at the pouch an inch from his face. “Melloon!  You remembered my favorite flavor!” he beamed. 

“You’ll read with less headache with your glasses.” She sighed, handing the small device to him and watching as he unfolded them and blinked, large dark eyes now appearing twice as large through the prescription lenses.  “...How did you know you needed glasses?”  She asked as he fiddled with the straw, trying to puncture the pouch.

“Couldn’t see shit.” He grunted. “Well, actually, it was when I couldn’t distinguish the letters on the board back in my very first formal classes. I’ve had them longer than I’ve been able to read.”  he said, taking a long sip. “...Why?”

“I’ve- all day my shadow’s looked weird.”

He paused, face still scrunched in discomfort. “...shadows in general, or your shadow specifically?”

“-” She opened her mouth to reply, but stopped. “-just mine, actually.  And I thought I could hear someone walking behind me, and all rhetoric class I had the impression someone was sitting next to me-”

Her master was suddenly sitting all the way upright, staring at her with rapt attention.  She winced.

“It’s alright.” he soothed, hand on her shoulder. “But please, tell me everything.”

She sighed, slowly recounting- the way her shadow seemed to lag or not quite match her, the ongoing headaches, the sensation that “-I don’t know, like someone’s standing beside me? I mean, I absolutely could be working myself up over nothing-”

“If it’s bothering you this much, it’s not nothing.” her master nodded, still watching her face. “Even if it’s just a flicker brought on by growing pains, it’s not nothing. What was the first lesson you were ever taught?”

“...Trust your instincts?” She tried,

“Trust your instincts.” He nodded, smiling gently. “...Without looking at your shadow-  do you have an impression of what this… companion looks like? Are they tall, short? A sapient being? Or maybe an animal?”

“They’re uh…” She unfocused her eyes, concentrating on the sensation of the person that had been beside her all day. “-They’re… A girl, like me, my age- not me though, she’s… thinner. A little frail maybe? Skittish- no, that’s not right.  Like she’s hanging back.  Not sure when to come into the conversation kind of awkwardness?  And thirsty. Like, dehydrated.”

“Alright.” Her master nodded. His voice had shifted, like he’d sat up more and closer to her. “Anything else?  Do you know what she looks like?  Has she said anything?”

“No.” The Apprentice shook her head. “Quiet. Listening, but not having an easy time of it.  Keeps fidgeting. She-  she has a shape, but it keeps changing. Like- sometimes people don’t know who they are, like they have blurry edges around their sense of self?  She’s got really sharp edges of what is and is not her, but those edges are always moving.  The eyes are the same though. Intense focus, and an eyeshine, like an animal.”  She started to tremble at the feeling of that terrible gaze fixed on her.

Her master shifted his weight, gently wrapping his arm around her and pulling her to lean into his shoulder. 

“...I’ve seen her before.”  the Apprentice realized. “I don’t know where but. I remember those eyes, staring right through me.  Something-  something terrible happened…”

“I’m sorry.” a voice whispered. 

Her head snapped up, staring at the shadow on the wall on the other side of the bed- it had changed- still the same size as her, but they sure as hell weren’t the same species and a pair of holes in the shadow, in the shape and location of her eyes, still staring.  The shadow flinched and the Apprentice’s heart race, but, gazes locked, neither could move.

Visions- the brilliant night sky of the desert, electrodes on her temples, a map tracing the route of a subterranean river, a wound (and the knowledge she’d caused it), the furious screaming of a bounty hunter who had meant her some malice- arced across their connection like lighting.  And visions from her mind- The flowers carved and painted into the bunk bed posts at her creche, the buzz of a training saber, the warp of her Master’s prescription glasses, the weight of his arm across her back- arced back.

“You!” She gasped.  “You’re the girl who- who-” She gasped, tears flowing but she refused to blink, if she blinked she’d be gone-

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!!!”  She yelped and whimpered, unable to pull back from their connection, fear and despair and-

“It’s alright.” her Master’s voice settled over them like a thick blanket, and he reached out, touching the shadow’s shoulder, fingers curling around it as she seemed to peel off the wall, in three dimensions now, and became her own being, still a shadowy echo, but herself and not the Apprentice’s shadow. “It’s all alright.”

He pulled her closer, translucent form still trembling, until the Apprentice couldn’t hold it back and blinked, throwing herself at the other girl, wrapping her arms around her strange not-doppelganger, and sobbing- “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have-  that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair-”

The shadow screamed, hugging her back and clinging to both of them, smoke-like fingers digging into her robes and hair. 

“By The Force.”  her master whispered. “Oh no, oh dear-” He stroked their backs as the girls cried in his lap.  The shadow girl began to flicker, and his apprentice grabbed at her, trying to keep her with them.

“I- I can’t stay- please- please!”  She wailed.

“We will find you.”  The Master promised, voice heavy with the seriousness of his pledge. “I don’t care how far we have to go or how long it takes, we will find you.” he promised, clutching the girls close in an embrace, the shadow-girl trying to cling to him hard enough that her fingers drew blood on the side of his face and across the back of his apprentice’s neck, before she succumbed to whatever was pulling her away from them.

The apprentice continued to sob as their connection faded, her Master still holding her.

“...I need to speak to the council about this, and fast.” he spoke, voice still grave. “That- If she was doing what I think she was, he is an immensely powerful force-user.”  He swallowed hard, hands trembling. “-A very dangerous thing to be in this galaxy, especially alone.  She could fall prey to all sorts with ill intentions…”

-

She woke up, screaming and clawing at the cheap third-class cabin mattress pad, sobbing, and could only lay there for a second, whimpering and pawing at the blanket that a moment ago had been a robe-

“So uh.” a voice spoke up from the other side of the cabin, pausing to clear his throat. 

She looked up realizing she’d gone from a plausibly-normal-but-uncommon humanoid to something three times her regular size with horns, long thrashing tail and covered in spines in her sleep. Pressed firmly to the far wall was the tiny cabin’s other occupant, a man that was actually probably not that old, but looked like he had gone through the garburator of life without the sink running, judging by scars covering his torso and his cautious but strangely calm demeanor as he slowly stood up from where he’d been taking cover behind his mattress, which was now covered with spines.

“-Do you usually sleep-shapeshift?”  he asked. “Because if that’s the case we’re gonna need to ask the steward for a lot more bedding.”

“...I was having a nightmare.” She croaked awkwardly, slowly collapsing back to her previous humanoid shape.

He nodded slowly, shaking the spines out of his mattress as they shrank along with her and setting it back on his bunk, opposite hers.

“Not to be entirely self-interested, but that’s an unusual talent you have there, and something I would find immensely helpful in my line of work.” he said, studying her with interest. “Ever considered getting into crime?”

[redvexillum]

A/N: I didn't anticipate writing a Vox x Reader story (much less a raunchy, BDSM theme smut). But, I needed to get this idea out of my head so I can focus on my request and my other stories. So, here we are. Also, I've noticed there is a distressingly low number of PURE Vox x Reader stories, so I wanted to contribute to the database.

Though, I apologize if my version of Vox is lacking in any way. I have made many creative liberties with my head canon version of him.

Inspired by this post/conversation with the lovely miss @redfoxwritesstuff

07.09.24 - Now that I know where I'm going with this story, I have changed the title from [Short Fuse] to Signal.

SUMMARY: You royally pissed someone off because you were receiving anonymous hate emails for the past fifteen years. How incredibly petty and...entertaining. At first, you decided to ignore them but as their hate comments got increasingly creative, the more you couldn't help but add oil to the burning, passionate flame of their hatred towards you.

Until one day, the mysterious anonymous hater (probably) accidentally revealed themselves to be the one and only TV demon, an Overlord and CEO of everything technological and modern.

WARNING/TAGS: f!reader, toxic relationship, enemies to f*ck buddies to something indescribable, dom/sub undertone, sub!Vox, dom!reader, reader is a responsible dom, Vox takes a lot of L's but he secretly enjoys it, dual POV, Vox tries to be hip but ends up being a boomer, Reader is sexually liberal and confident, Vox is the brattiest sub you will ever find, kind of fluff if your squint

“Hello, my Sexy Peeps! How are you doing on this hellish day?” A melodious burst of laughter chimed from Vox’s phone. He took a dramatic sip from his coffee, savouring the rich, dark brew, and settled into his plush armchair, preparing to lose himself in her latest video.  

“Today, I thought I’d mix things up a bit due to a very popular request!” She continued and leaned forward in front of the camera, giving Vox a generous view of her cleavage. He approved her outfit choice for today, a tight-fitting cyan blue tank top with a plunging v-neckline.  

But aside from her attire, he was interested by her supposedly “new” content. He didn’t know she took requests from her viewers. Intrigued, he arched an eyebrow, setting his cup down on the side table and leaning his face closer to his phone.  

The newest online sensation on VoxTube was about to begin. This girl had seemingly materialized out of nowhere, drawing tens of thousands of views and subscribers to her channel. Her retention rates were astoundingly high for content so banal and ordinary. Initially, Vox had suspected his network had been hacked.  

He still couldn’t quite grasp how in seven layers of Hell she had managed to manipulate the algorithm with her simple videos. All she did was try the newest foods around the Pentagram and review random merchandise in a phenomenon called “unboxing.” 

His gaze inevitably wandered to the deep trench of cleavage she prominently displayed. He scoffed. He’d seen better. After all, his partner controlled the porn industry in Hell.  

Yet, that didn’t stop him from pausing her video sometimes, openly staring at her chest for a few seconds… or minutes…or maybe he may have saved a couple (several) screenshots of her video and her photos from her Sinstagram account. Perhaps he might have even saved some of her more salacious-looking photos on his internal hard drive for private viewing. 

All for research, of course.  

“Now, I know there’s this series – the longest-running series in all of Hell…” she trailed off, her plump, pretty lips curling into a mischievous smirk.  

Vox straightened in his chair, feeling the first flutter of excitement in his chest. Could it be? Was she going to mention his most prized project, “Yeah, I Fucked Your Sister, So What?!” for free?  

Excitement surged within him, a giddy thrill that this lame, greenhorn, no-name nobody was about to mention his series to her 2.5 million (and growing) viewers.  

“Guys, guys, guys,” she laughed, raising her perfectly manicured hands in the air as if in surrender. “I watched the first season and wow–” 

Vox pressed his thighs together, waiting with bated breath for what he hoped would be a glowing review. Perhaps he should contact her, reach out, sponsor her like all the tiny, insignificant, worthless, businesses were doing.  

“I gotta tell you,” She shrugged, raised her immaculate trimmed brow, and with a hearty guffaw, said, “it’s pretty mid.” 

Disbelief washed over him as he stared at the screen. Instinctively, Vox paused the video, staring at the freeze-frame image of her with a large smile dancing across her lips.  

Mid? Mid? What the fuck did mid even mean? 

Scrutinizing the word in his mind, he thought maybe she had given his series an average score. Average. He could work with average. But judging from the comments filled with those annoying crying laughing emojis and agreement that it was bad, he realized it was another piece of slang from this decade that he somehow missed.  

Power surged through his head as his mind dove into the database, and he opened his trusty Urban Hell Dictionary. 

The definition of Mid was… 

Below average. 

Not good. 

Mediocre.  

Boring.  

“WHHHHAT?” He roared, his voice glitching in between the long-drawn-out word. Springing up from his chair, he picked up his mug before hurling it against the polished floor. It shattered into a cascade of jagged pieces, their sharp lines reminiscent of crooked, mocking smiles. The hot coffee splashed onto the hem of his pants, its sudden heat mirroring the fury rising within him.  

Memories surged through him, back to when he was alive, back when they cancelled him for not being innovative enough, for not being entertaining enough, for being… 

Being…. 

Boring.  

His eyes twitched, electricity crackled and jolted up in arcs across the surface of his head before fizzling out at the points of the antennas from his hat.  

He should kill her. Get Val to make her disappear or force her into working at his porn studio. How dare she call the fruits of his labour…b-bo-… He seethed, unable to even say the damn, blasted word.  

Vox thought of a thousand ways to torment her, relishing the idea of making her cry with her below-average, not good, mediocre, BORING looking face. Anger surged, boiled, in his veins, and he did what he knew was the best course of action when faced with this unprecedented insult.  

After all, with VoxTek, he had an image to keep of being on the side of the lowly Sinners. He chuckled, forced, but chuckled, nonetheless. It would smear his good image to go after some small, nobody of a Sinner. After all, he was an Overlord and the CEO of the largest corporation in all the five fucking points of the Pentagram.  

She was going to get so cancelled.  

That he would make sure of.  

Humming a random, jaunty little tune, you shut off the ring light and closed your laptop. Stretching your back, you sighed in satisfaction as your bones gave a gratifying crack. You giggled at some comments from your review of the popular series, “Yeah, I Fucked Your Sister, So What?!”  

There were passionate defences claiming the series was a work of art, which was far-reaching at best. It was mildly entertaining enough to watch while you painted your nails. Seriously, the show looked like it was produced for the audience in the 1950s.  

You were the first influencer to give a poor rating to the TV series, and being first meant more controversy, more views, and more money from sponsorships as you rose to the trending list once again.  

Damn, gaming the system was the best. Truly, Hell was way behind its time compared to what people did for views back when you were alive.  

Following your routine, you washed away the makeup, changed from your tight-fitting clothes into a loose T-shirt and sweatpants, and laid on your king-sized bed that was far too big for one person. Staring up at the ceiling, you were surrounded by the void of your loneliness.  

You should…go out and fuck someone.  

Preferably, someone related to the entertainment industry. All that juicy gossip about your newest fling always raked in views and clicks.  

But the idea fizzled and died as you thought about having to play the submissive role, feeding their giant egos to compensate for their shit-sized cocks. You considered visiting the BDSM club, but influential people were rarely found out in the open in those shops. There was probably a private club that you weren’t invited to…yet.  

Vain.

Empty.

Nothing.  

It didn’t change much, did it? Whether you were alive or damned.  

Everything about your life was the same.  

Sitting up, you grabbed your phone and started to scroll through Voxazon, frivolously spending thousands of Hell bucks on useless crap.  

Retail therapy.  

The tried-and-true method to stave off depression and apathy.  

You were ready for that dopamine hit as you read through the reviews of the latest dildo models, your lips pulling into a sly smirk at all the new features of VoxTek’s newest sex toy.  

A chime resounded from your phone – a notification from your personal email. Your brows raised as the sender was from anonymous666@hellmail.com 

Confused, you opened the email, wincing at the possibility of infecting your device with a virus. But that thought quickly vanished as you read the email’s content.  

Subject: (no subject)  Dear Bitch,   Retract that fucking review about “Yeah, I Fucked Your Sister, So What?!” from your video today, or you will regret it.   Furthermore, you have a “mid” face, and so are your boobs. Your boobs are super fucking mid. You probably get MORE views if you actually covered your boobs because that’s how MID they are.   And all your videos are MID. Especially the one you posted on July 7, 20XX, where you reviewed the Hellover drink. The one where you wore that shitty neon green tank top, which, by the way, is also fucking MID.   Anyway, this is my FIRST and LAST warning.   Fuck you.   P.S. Seriously. Fuck you.

Your eyes slowly blinked, once, twice, before a hearty, genuine laugh erupted from you. Oh my God. Did this prick actually hack your account to get your personal email to send such a shitty, lame-ass message? 

Breaths coming out in short, uneven huffs, you rolled over on your bed from side to side, clutching your stomach. Tears formed in the corners of your eyes from laughing so hard. You hadn’t laughed this genuinely since you fell to Hell.  

As your eyes traced over the words of their message, you laughed out loud again. It looked like you had a butt-hurt superfan.  

Humming, you rolled over onto your stomach and kicked your feet idly as you stared at the message. “Thanks for the laugh, virgin prick,” you whispered, planting a loud smooch on your cellphone screen. “Annnnd, delete!” Your index finger daintily tapped the trash can icon.  

Now, back to the task at hand. You debated between getting the glittery pink dildo or the two prong dildo. Tilting your head, you decided you deserved a treat, so you ordered both. 

As you were purchasing more random crap, your eyes glazed over, your mind fervently thinking of what to say for your next season review for that TV series. Just then, an annoying ad popped up – of course, from VoxTek – promoting their shitty Cobra vibrator. Seriously, you tried it, and it did nothing for you.  

An idea rapidly formed, growing until you jumped out of bed and ran to your laptop. No one had truly (and honestly) reviewed some of VoxTek’s terrible sex toys yet. In fact, you noticed that every single review for their sex toy line had glowing five-star ratings.  

Now, some of their toys were outstanding, making you come so hard until you were sobbing, soaking your underwear from your release. But that was one out of every five toys you purchased. Like all massive corporations, VoxTek was clearly buying reviews, giving themselves perfect scores.  

Perhaps it was time to change that. 

Your review of the series and the anonymous hate message were soon quickly forgotten. This was your chance to shake things up, to give the unfiltered, raw truth that your viewers craved.  

With a determined glint in your eyes, you started drafting your next video script. This was going to be huge, bigger than Jerry’s dick from last week, that was for sure.  

NEXT ->

💠 MASTERLIST 💠

[canmom]

Animation Night 185: Scavengers Reign

So...

In distant 2016, Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner directed a short film titled Scavengers at Titmouse for the 'Toonami' block on American TV channel Adult Swim. The largely wordless short depicts a pretty classic scifi premise - a spacecraft stranded on a lush alien world, the survivors of the crash surviving by interacting with the strange alien lifeforms - with a spectacular amount of style and imagination.

It's an absolute riot of squishy, surreal spec bio: a montage of scenes of extremely weird bugs and little guys being cut up and stuck together and fed to each other for mysterious but somehow logical-feeling reasons. It all feels terribly French in style to my eye - a style that is realist but with simplified faces, impassive expressions, a psychic trip at the end, a trust that we can follow a surreal and wordless story. We could also think of the work of Busifan. Whatever the comparison, this short had a vibe you rarely encounter Stateside.

You can watch it here:

Nearly a decade later, this show was followed up with a whole series, animated once again by the madlads at Titmouse.

Scavengers Reign drastically expands on the premise of the original short into a 12 episode series, fleshing out the characters and their weird telepathic world as another ship full of crashed survivors attempt to link up with their crewmates, only to be pulled further and further into the strange ecosystem they now inhabit.

Rave reviews on all fronts, so naturally it got cancelled on its original network Max... but was picked up again by Netflix, with the possibility of a second season dangled in front of us if it debuts hard enough. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanna see more of in American animation (or hell, animation in general), so tonight on Animation Night, we'll be taking a a sojourn to the strange planet of Vesta.

For some reason half the gif picker is just hands touching stuff...

Aaand I will have to elaborate more later, since we're already pretty late! If you're interested - whether a first watch or to watch again with friends - come tune in to twitch.tv/canmom !

[sluttywonwoo]

instead of you [part thirty-four] || l.mh

pairing: [best friend’s brother] lee minho x college!reader ft. han jisung

summary: you didn’t expect to spend your summer pretending to be your best friend’s girlfriend- then again, you didn’t expect to fall for your best friend’s brother, either. 

warnings: swearing, angst, smut (mdni ; 18+)

word count: 3.8k

a/n: revamped my tom holland series from my main blog ( @wazzupmrstark ) to try and motivate myself to finish it!!

additional smut warnings: protected sex, public(ish) sex

“Were you able to get some rest?” Jisung asked, hand in yours as you walked through the airport together. 

“Not much,” you admitted. 

“Thankfully, I don’t think we’re doing anything today. We can just crash when we get to the hotel.”

“Okay.”

Jet lag was hitting you particularly hard. Oahu was a whole eighteen hours behind Bali, meaning you were technically in yesterday. Everyone else seemed to be handling it fine but maybe that was because they hadn’t ruined their relationship with their best friend by sleeping with his brother. 

It was midday and already hot as hell. You waited outside with the Hans while Dom filled out the paperwork for rental cars. He called Minho inside to sign a waiver that allowed him to be the driver of the other car. Minho was the only one of the four of you who was old enough to legally drive a rental car and he rubbed it in the rest of your faces with a shake of the keys once he rejoined your group. 

 “Follow us to the resort,” Dom instructed Minho. “I’ll send you the address in case you lose us.”

You climbed into the backseat with Jisung and slumped over on his shoulder. You tried to stay awake as Minho drove through the island but your eyelids were feeling heavy and the winding mountain roads weren’t helping. 

“Are we not staying in Honolulu?” you asked, watching the road signs zoom past. 

“We’ll take a day trip over there but my parents wanted to stay at Ko’Olina again because they liked it so much last time,” Jisung explained. 

“Right, I forgot that you guys have been here before.” 

“I try not to think about it.”

Your time in Hawai’i was being split between two islands: Oahu and Kauai. In Oahu, you were staying in separate hotel rooms, and in Kauai, everyone was sharing a condo again. 

It was nice to be able to have your own space but it also meant that there really wasn’t a way to avoid Jisung. You were kind of stuck with him. At least he was speaking to you again. He’d had some time to cool down so he wasn’t as angry but you could tell that he didn’t particularly want to spend time with you either. 

You were stuck at a crossroads in that respect. You weren’t sure how to mend things with him but you knew you wanted to. You just weren’t sure if he felt the same way. He had been pretty clear the night that he found out about you and Minho that he wanted nothing to do with you outside of your already agreed-upon deal. But that had been in the heat of the moment. You had tried extinguishing any flicker of hope that threatened to engulf you in order to protect yourself from being hurt again, but it was getting harder and harder to do the more time you spent with him. 

Sometimes it felt like nothing had changed. There were fleeting moments shared between just the two of you when there was no one around to pretend for that made you think your friendship might still be salvageable. But they never lasted long. They were lapses in Jisung’s judgment, when he would accidentally let his guard down, acting like you were still those kids you had been back at school, like you were still his favorite person. 

He ordered room service for the two of you and you ate in relative silence. When the tension became unbearable you turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, ultimately deciding on some show playing on The Food Network. Perfect vacation television. It was a rerun of Chopped. You could tell it was a rerun from the dated fashion choices and technology- not because you were an avid fan or anything, though you had seen your fair share of episodes by being best friends with a culinary student. Whenever you watched it together Jisung liked to play a game where he would invent his own dishes with the ingredients the contestants were given. 

“What would you make with that?” you asked, nodding at the screen, trying to lighten the mood.

He took a moment to think, mulling over the assortment of items in his mind. “Probably a salad of some kind since it’s the appetizer round. It’s a cop-out but I could make a dressing with that peanut brittle.”

You hummed in acknowledgment. “Knowing you, it would probably still taste good.”

“You have too much faith in me.”

“Or I just know you.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

-

Later that night, after you had both showered, you tried bringing up your conversation from the other day but Jisung shut you down entirely. 

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he mumbled, tossing one of the extra pillows from the bed onto the armchair a little harder than necessary. 

“But-”

“I’m just not ready yet,” he cut you off. “I... don’t want to say anything else I don’t mean. And I’m not ready to forgive you yet.”

There it was again, that stupid spark of hope struck like a match against the side of your heart. 

You nodded in understanding, biting your lip to keep from showing just how disappointed you were. 

It was a strange mix of emotions, hope and disappointment. They were complete opposites but somehow you were feeling them simultaneously. 

“O-okay,” you said shakily, watching as he climbed into bed. 

You moved to do the same even though it felt painfully awkward, how were you supposed to just go to bed after that? How did people in relationships do it? How did people just roll over and fall asleep like nothing had happened after an argument? 

As soon as you reached to pull the sheets back, fingertips brushing the fabric, your phone vibrated next to you on the bedside table. 

You glanced at the screen and saw that it was a message from Minho. He was asking you to meet him downstairs. It wasn’t that late but it was already dark and it had been a long day. What could he possibly want?

Jisung must have noticed the look on your face because he sighed and muttered “go” at you without meeting your eyes. 

“I, uh, I’ll be back. Later.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

You made sure to grab a room key on the way out and then hurried down the hall to the elevator, pressing the down button over and over again until it finally arrived at your floor. 

Minho was waiting for you in the lobby like he said he would be, leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed impatiently. To your surprise, he smiled when he saw you. 

“What’s so important you couldn’t tell me over text?” you demanded in annoyance. 

Minho’s grin faltered but didn’t fall. He just eyed you with an air of amusement. “Who said I had something to tell you?”

“Why else would you make me come down here?”

He raised an arm, dangling the key to the rental car he had driven earlier that day. “Wanna get out of here?”

-

“Where are we going?” you asked. 

“Do you trust me?”

“Not particularly.”

Minho placed his hand over his heart and winced. “You wound me.”

“Just tell me where you’re taking me!”

“But that ruins the surprise!” he argued. 

“The surprise? It’s like eleven p.m. and I’m tired! Why are you dragging me out at this hour? Jisung’s already annoyed that I came down here to meet you in the first place.”

“How does he know?”

“Who else would text me at this hour?”

“Fair point. But are you just going to stand there and interrogate me all night or are we doing this?”

You huffed in frustration. “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is!”

“Come on!”

Minho grabbed your hand before you could argue any further and dragged you out through the lobby into the parking lot. 

“So now you’re kidnapping me?” you exclaimed, tripping over your own feet.

Minho chuckled but still shot you a look of warning. “Keep your voice down! People are going to think you’re serious.”

“Yes, sir,” you deadpanned. 

“Stop trying to turn me on in public, you already have an unfair advantage.”

You weren’t sure how serious he was but you rolled your eyes anyway. You also didn’t know what he meant by the second part but you didn’t ask about that either. 

He didn’t let go of your hand until you reached the car. And even then, it seemed like he was hesitant to release you from his grasp, fingers lingering on your palm like he was afraid you’d run away the second he set you free.

But you climbed into the passenger seat and buckled your seatbelt without a second thought. A series of poor decisions had already led you here. What was a couple more?

Mostly, your curiosity is what drove you to get in the car with him. You figured you didn’t have much to lose at this point. You hadn’t spoken more than a couple of words to Minho in the last few days. You had assumed he’d want nothing to do with you after you fucked up his relationship with his brother-- then again, maybe he didn’t want anything to do with you and was only driving you somewhere where he could chew you out without anyone overhearing. Hell, maybe he was taking you out to a pier where he could push you in the water so that your body would never be found. 

No, he's too famous for that. He’d never get away with it. 

You were silent as Minho put the car in gear and backed out of the lot. As soon as he turned onto the main road he rolled the windows down, glancing over at you to make sure it didn’t bother you. 

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

You watched him mess with the radio dial until a signal from a local station was picked up. Once he found something, he adjusted the volume so that you could hear the music over the sound of the rushing wind, and then he reached across the center console, hand outstretched. The gesture caught you off guard, and you were unsure whether or not you should take it. You figured it would be more awkward if you left him hanging so you looked away and slipped your fingers between his, relaxing into the familiar feeling. 

The roads were mostly empty. Everything was already closed for the night. Eventually, Minho merged onto the highway, heading east. 

“Do you know where you’re going?” you asked twenty minutes later when he still hadn’t taken an exit. You were beginning to suspect that he didn’t really have anyplace in particular in mind, that he was just taking you for a late night drive, which would have been fine. You liked long drives too. But he had made it all seem so mysterious and the anticipation was killing you. 

“Of course I do, how dare you doubt me!”

“It’s just that you don’t have a GPS on or anything!”

“I’ve been here before,” he reminded you.

“Yeah, one time three years ago.”

“That’s all I need,” he assured you. “And if you pay attention to the road signs you don’t even need to memorize the route.”

“You sound like my dad,” you mumbled. 

“Your dad must be a very talented navigator,” Minho said decisively, complimenting himself.

You rolled your eyes. “Yeah, but he didn’t fail his driver’s test- what was it, four times?”

“Low blow,” he chided and shook his head. 

“You needed to be humbled.”

Comfortable silence resumed between the two of you as Minho continued driving. He got off the highway a few miles later and wove through town before finally turning onto a rocky uphill path. The radio signal weakened almost immediately, static interrupting the music that had been playing. He turned the volume down out of instinct.

“Remind me, do you get carsick?” Minho asked suddenly, like it was an afterthought that had just occurred to him. 

“Um, sometimes? Why do you ask?”

“These roads are winding,” he explained, “they might make you nauseous. Just try to look straight ahead. Don’t look at your phone.”

“I haven’t looked at my phone this entire time!”

“Well don’t start now.”

You braced yourself for the twists and turns of the road but it was difficult to anticipate where they would be with how dark it was. The headlights of the car were the only source of light on the gravel road, everything else surrounded by shadows and silhouettes of trees.

Finally, just when you were starting to feel a little lightheaded, Minho pulled into a little lot on the side of the road. 

“Are we here?” you asked, squinting in the darkness to try and make anything out.

“Yup,” Minho answered with a smile.

He turned off the car, letting the headlights dim.

“Come on!”

“We’re getting out?” you exclaimed. 

“Would you just trust me?” 

Sighing, you kicked open the passenger side door and climbed out of the car. Minho rounded the back to meet you on your side, blanket in hand. 

“Where are we?”

“Listen.”

You closed your eyes and did as you were told, waiting for any sort of clue as to where you were. In the distance, you could hear waves crashing against the shore. The salt in the air and the sound of breeze rustling through palm fronds only confirmed what you already knew. 

“You took me to the beach?”

“Follow me.”

Minho took your hand and led you along the sandy path down to the shore. You toed off your shoes and held them in your free hand as you walked. The place was practically empty. The only other signs of life were the flames from a bonfire about half a mile down the beach.  

Minho used the flashlight on his phone so you could see where you were going, keeping you steady when you tripped over your own feet in the uneven sand. 

“Careful there,” he chuckled. 

He picked a spot that wasn’t too far from the path, something that put a little more distance between you and the bonfire. 

“Is this okay?”

“Seems as good a place as any,” you said and shrugged. 

Minho laid out the blanket and motioned for you to sit on it. The sand underneath the fabric was cool, having long lost hold of the heat from the sun. It molded to the shape of your body as you chose a comfortable position. 

You could feel Minho’s presence beside you but neither of you moved closer to the other. You figured he hadn’t brought you all the way out here to sit in silence, but you didn’t want to be the one to prompt the conversation. He was the one who was so insistent on coming, he could make the first move. 

He did, after several more moments. You waited patiently, allowing him to collect his thoughts. His eyebrows were knit together, eyes downcast, as if he were having an internal argument with himself. Then, his expression softened and he met your gaze, any trace of conflict seemingly absolved.

“You look really pretty.”

You scoffed. “You can’t even see me that well.”

“Speak for yourself, I can see you perfectly.”

“It’s dark out!”

“We have the moonlight.”

“Barely.”

“I think you need to get your eyes checked,” Minho teased. 

“Did you bring me out here just to make fun of me?”

“Yeah, are you not having a good time?” Minho asked. “Do I need to up my game?”

You rolled your eyes but didn’t grant him a response, instead pulling your knees to your chest so that you could rest your chin on them. 

“Do you like it? Here, I mean?”

You nodded. “It’s nice. Quiet.”

“Mhm.”

“But why this beach? I mean, we’re on an island, the whole place is beach, but you drove me all the way out here.”

“It’s usually pretty empty, especially at night.”

“And you know that because... you’ve taken lots of girls out here?”

“If you count my mum, then yes,” he said sarcastically. “I don’t exactly frequent the island of O’ahu.” 

“So you’re saying that if you did, you’d bring girls here all of the time?”

“Oh, totally. It’s how I’d seal the deal, like all the assholes in the movies.”

“By telling them they’re the first one you’ve ever brought here?”

“Exactly. But you know I’m telling you the truth because you already slept with me.”

You shoved him with a scoff, a little harder than you intended, making Minho fall back onto the blanket. 

“Hey! What was that for?”

“You know exactly what that was for.”

He grinned sheepishly and then stretched out the arm that was closest to you. “C’mon, then. Join me.”

You shifted a bit, moving further down on the quilt so that when you laid back Minho’s arm would slot perfectly under your neck. You curled up to him, slinging your own arm across his stomach. The rhythm of his breathing along with the sounds of the waves breaking against the shore was soothing. It was the most relaxed you’d felt in a long time. You were halfway to sleep when you felt Minho murmur something into your hair. 

“What?’ you asked groggily, blinking your eyes open. 

“The stars, look.”

You repositioned yourself a bit so that you could stare straight up at the sky to see what he was talking about, gasping quietly when you did.

It wasn’t as impressive as the night skies on the boat had been, you were much closer to civilization now, but it was still better than anything you’d ever gotten to see back home. It was as if the sky was dripping with diamonds, stars hanging out of reach like they were on display at a store far out of your budget. 

“It’s gorgeous.”

“I thought you might like it,” Minho mused, “I’m glad the clouds cleared so you could see them.”

“It’s nice here even without the stars,” you assured him. “Though, they’re definitely a highlight.”

Minho turned his head to look at you, smiling. Your eyes had adjusted slightly, allowing you to see the details of his face. 

You weren’t sure who leaned in first, but the next thing you knew you were kissing him. Minho cupped your face with both hands and pressed his tongue against the seam of your lips, silently begging you to open your mouth. You did, gasping when he got impatient and nipped at your bottom lip.  

You took the initiative this time and rolled on top of him, working your hands under his t-shirt to feel him up. 

“Missed this,” Minho sighed, “missed you.”

“It’s only been like three days!” 

“Way too long, if you ask me.”

You rolled your eyes but let the comments fuel your ego anyway.

He matched your pace and dropped his hands from your face to let them roam your body. It didn’t take long for them to find your tits, fingers brushing over your nipples underneath the fabric of your shirt. You rolled your hips against his, already able to feel that he was half hard through his sweats.

Minho groaned and broke away from kissing you to catch his breath, tilting his head back and swallowing hard. His hips stuttered underneath you, encouraging you to keep going. You took over and began kissing your way down his neck. 

“Do you have a condom?” you asked breathlessly

You knew you were acting desperate but it’s because you were desperate. You were aching for him and your panties were beginning to feel uncomfortably sticky. 

“Are you sure?” Minho asked, not answering your question. 

“Yes, fuck, where are they?”

He propped himself up on his elbows and nodded down at his pocket. “I still have a few in my wallet.”

You sat up a little and brought one of your hands down to his pants, brushing your palm over his erection before fumbling for his wallet in his pocket. 

“You’re a menace,” he hissed as he kicked his head back. 

“Don’t act like you don’t love it.”

You retrieved a condom and slid the wallet back into his pocket, tearing the foil wrapper open while you tried to get his pants off at the same time. 

“Need help?”

“No, I got it,” you muttered.

You were able to get Minho’s pants down far enough to get his dick out and put the condom on him before pushing your own pajama shorts and panties to the side so you could ride him without having to take them all the way off. 

“Wait, I haven’t even fingered you or anything,” Minho interjected, putting a hand on your stomach to stop you from lowering yourself onto him. “It’ll hurt.”

“We don’t really have a lot of time,” you argued back, “I’m really wet already. You don’t need to.”

“Bullshit,” he countered in disbelief. 

You were starting to get annoyed. Why wouldn’t he just fuck you like you wanted? You could tell Minho was getting frustrated as well, confused as to why you were rushing into it.

“At least let me rub your clit a little first?” he pleaded. 

You wanted to tell him that it really was fine, that you’d just need a couple of extra seconds to adjust to his size, but he was already running a thumb over your pussy, feeling around for the spot that would make your knees buckle.  

“F-fuck,” you whispered when he found it, arching just slightly to press yourself into him further.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Minho asked, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. 

You couldn’t even deny it. “Yes.”

“Still gotta be quiet, though,” he reminded you, “don’t want to let those folks down the way know what we’re up to, huh?”

You nodded in agreement even though you had completely forgotten about the people having a bonfire on the beach. They were likely too far away to see the two of you in the dark, but you knew sound carried so you would still have to be careful. 

“Can you put it in now? Just want to feel you.” You threw in a pout at the end just for good measure, hoping that would be enough to get you what you wanted. 

Minho nodded and put a hand on either of your hips to help you. You sighed in relief as you sank down on him, finally feeling full. You were able to take him all at once but you did need more time to adjust to having him inside of you, to which Minho cockily mouthed I told you so at you.

Once the discomfort ebbed away you leaned down and pressed your chest to his, resting your head against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around you instinctively as you started rocking yourself on his cock, trembling at just how deep he could get at this angle. 

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” you mumbled. 

He carded a hand through your hair and cocked his head to the side. “What, having sex on the beach?”

“Mhm.”

“It’s a first for me too,” Minho admitted. 

“Better make it memorable then, right?”

lmk what you think i always appreciate feedback!!

[nyalisa-landale]

I said that I thought it would have been better if the devs had implemented one full race (probably hrothgar since as far as I remember that was the one they had intended to add for shb) and then added the other one an expansion or two later, instead of half-implementing both of them at the same time and patching them up over what looks to be two expansions

and some other person starts Fervently Defending The Dev Team as if I had said "man idk why they didn't just add in two fully completed races when they had only originally intended to add one, its not like it's hard or something" which is extremely emphatically not what I said!!!!!! we aren't even disagreeing!!!!!! I am not your straw man stop arguing with me!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ayeforscotland]

Welcome!

Hello, I'm AyeforScotland and I've been here for too long. AyeforScotland started off as a Scottish politics blog campaigning for Scottish independence but has since evolved into whatever the hell this is. The fight for Scottish independence continues - I love answering asks about it. And naturally I also discuss wider UK and International politics as well.

Politics FAQ

However, it can't all be doom and gloom - and I suppose I'm kinda 'creative' too so AyeforScotland naturally grew arms and legs and I'll list all the other stuff I do down below👇👇👇

As modest as I try to be, I'm particular proud of the community surrounding this blog and in my discord (YOU SHOULD JOIN). These are people like you who are reading this now who have educated me on a variety of topics over the past decade - and I'm still learning from them daily. I've also ran some amazing 24 hour hour charity streams for a range of charities across Scotland and the UK. So far those charities are the TIE Campaign, The Equality Network, Endometriosis UK, Galop, War Child & Cats Protection. I also co-host @theayesphere podcast every week with the wonderful @thebibliosphere. We chat about everything from politics to entertainment media, and do deep dives on games, TV and films!

Commissions

I regularly get messages asking to read, review and advise on Scottish dialogue as well as lend my voice to various projects. Commissions are open on Ko-Fi for this type of work. Just get in touch with your project and we'll get sorted.

Click here for all links

Discord - The home of the community - Filled with amazing people

Twitch - I play a variety of games on Twitch, I enjoy everything but like to focus on narrative, indie experiences. I also run community interaction games which are always a great laugh. Ko-Fi - My Ko-fi is for people who would like to support me in all the various bits and pieces I do to inform and entertain. It is hugely appreciated and often straight-up reinvested into providing more for you all. YouTube - I have a YouTube Channel I try to make content for when I can. I want to do more but time has been against me recently but there's some video essays I'm very proud of. There's also a separate AyeforScotlandVODs channel for my Twitch streams.

TikTok - Tends to be me ranting about politics or funny Twitch Highlights Twitter - The dying platform - Tumblr is far superior but you can support me as a creator there if you like. There's a few other links but I don't want this post to take forever. If you need anything or have any questions, my asks and DMs are open. Yours for Scotland, Aye

[ankle-beez]

[ID: A tweet by @thecartoonnews that reads, "Before 'THE OWL HOUSE' was picked up by Disney Channel, Dana Terrace pitched #TheOwlHouse to Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, but they were rejected by both networks."]

Rejected by cn and nick, then approved by disney who put the show through excruciating amounts of executive meddling, and then canceled it because of brand shit. Absolute hell on earth

[spookyspecterino]

Back to You Again

Tangerine x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Injury, mention of blood, mention of death/fear of death, arguing/bickering, swearing. Serious idiots in love who have a little trouble expressing their feelings and choose the wrong time to do it.

You've been gone a little while. A few months to be specific. Why? Tangerine can only guess, but he's not happy about it.

Requested by @nocturnest. I'm so sorry this took so long. I started it thinking it was going to be short and then 7K words flew out. 😬Anyway, thanks for your request. It's been a long time since I wrote anything seriously and this was really good for me. Hope you enjoy!

“Laser cutter. Three auto-rifles. Two handguns. Three boxes of ammo each.”

Check.

The binoculars are heavy duty, and the metal texture grates your fingers as you pull them up to peer through the lenses into the next building over. A high-rise that had at least 30 floors. All windowed at least, which made this a little easier on you.

“In through the fifth-floor service area. Through the employee hallway to the service elevator.”

A map of the building laid next to you on the gravel roof. It hadn’t been easy to get your hands on it, but it was worth it for a building as secure as this. No security measure had been overlooked by this man and as paranoid as he seemed it went a long way to his credibility.

“In and out through the service elevator. 20 mins tops. Oh, the jammer.”

A handheld device that you’d paid top dollar for. Yes, it has duct tape holding pieces of it together, and the screen was a repurposed old Gameboy front, but it is the best your back-channel dealer could provide.

How did anyone do anything without a handler these days?

The jammer would save you the trouble (if things turned sideways) of dealing with reinforcements. It flickers to life by flipping a switch smoldered to its side. The thing really does look like a piece of garbage.

Several frequencies and networks flashed across the screen, all of them belonging to the building you were surveying. Scrolling through, only a few needed to be shut down, too many and it would raise alarms.

Wifi was the last to be turned off and then you would really need to book it inside.

Everything planned out to a T. Entrance and exits mapped. Back-up plans (and back-up plans to those back-up plans) in place. Extra weapons and ammo in case you had to go out guns blazing. This should be no problem.

“Office-penthouse on the top floor. Computer terminal on the desk, west side.”

Get to the computer, get the files, destroy everything. If you happened to kill the son of a bitch, well, that was a bonus.

You sigh and rub your face, trying to work out the stress lines that seemed to make a permanent home between your brows. “Now I just need to stop talking to myself.”

It was an unfortunate habit you’d picked up in the last few months of working alone. Usually, you had… no. This was no time to think of them, or of him. You have to focus. After this is done, you can go back and apologize, even grovel if you have to.

But now is the time for focus.

In the middle of repeating this mantra, one you’ve been repeating for the last month, you happen to look up at the street. Not for any real reason, nothing had drawn your attention. Nothing was amiss in your perfect plan.

Except two very familiar faces walking down the sidewalk.

Lemon and Tangerine.

Clad in their typical attire. Snazzy suits, dress shoes, and ties.

Your stomach does several things. First it flips at the sight of Tangerine as he saunters with his hands in his pockets, then it sinks and twists into painful knots.

“No, no, no!”

They can’t be here! Anywhere but here!

The two walked casually down the sidewalk, as if they were taking a nice midday stroll. No rifles, no car, nothing. Either they were ballsy as hell…or wildly misinformed about this building and the man inside.

Something in you hoped, prayed, they would pass the building. That they were going somewhere else.

They took a sharp turn to cross the street—toward the building entrance—and your breath turned ragged, your blood chilled. At the same time, your mind was churning with practicality, cold and calculated ideas. Some nasty part of you that had gotten you this far in such a dangerous career, that had nestled in you a long time ago and only now resurfaced in the months of being alone.

You could just walk away; they have their job, and they’re professionals. They can handle themselves.

You could go in after and clean up without ever being seen. Easy. The plan you made could still work, Tangerine and Lemon would be a perfect distraction.

But you were already moving. Lega working on their own and putting you into motion. Fingers tapping off the Wi-Fi signal on the jammer while you slung your duffle bag over your shoulder.

This was not the plan, you argued with yourself as you flew down the back stairs. You’ll get yourself killed being this reckless and impulsive. What happened to in and out in 20 mins?

With every point you made the other side of your mind made a counterpoint.

They’re underprepared. They’re misinformed. They don’t have the firepower to walk in the front door, hell, they don’t have enough bullets to make it to the second floor.

“God damn it!” You yelled, taking the stairs down two at a time. Your voice echoed off the walls in the cramped stairwell. The rifles in your duffle bag clattered and banged together.

They’d be killed. Tangerine and Lemon would be killed. You couldn’t let that happen.

. . .

“I say we take a hostage and negotiate our way up.”

“Yeah, sure, Lemon.”

“This guy’s what, a tech billionaire, or something?”

“Probably.”

“Ok, so he’s a nerd. Easy job.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lemon shoots his brother a less than happy look. Tangerine is staring off into space with a slight frown, hands shoved deep in his pockets as he hunches over a little. Which wasn’t new, he’d been doing that a lot lately. A reflection of his dour mood.

Lemon rolls his eyes. “Oh, mate. Come on. We’re on a job.”

Tangerine shrugs, frowning harder. “I’m fuckin’ aware of that, Lemon.”

“Then stop with your sulking! What have I told you?”

“No—” Tangerine waves a hand, “—you don’t need to say it again—”

“Just send her a letter or something. She’d love it.”

Tangerine groans, he’s starting to get a headache now as they near the target building. “As I’ve said before, I attached letters on the flowers I sent.”

Lemon opens his mouth, but Tangerine cuts him off. “And I sent more than one bouquet. For fuck’s sake, her house probably looks like a tropical rainforest by now.”

“What about—”

“I’ve sent her presents. Jewelry. Perfume. A new phone in case hers was broken. Fuckin’ hell I even had her porch repainted.”

“And she didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing.”

Lemon hesitates. “Did you say you’re sorry?”

Now Tangerine was about to lose it. His eye twitched, not that his brother could see it. “Sorry for what? She’s the one that up and disappeared without a word.”

“I still think you should say it. Just to cover your bases.”

“I’m not apologizing. We were all perfect and you know that. She was happy as a clam and if something was wrong, she would have told me.”

“Then why’d she—”

“You’re really getting on my fucking nerves, Lemon.”

They were across the street from the main entrance now. Two glass doors with golden handles reflected the brothers. In sync they both took a sharp turn toward them. Through the glass they didn’t see anyone else in the lobby and there was a long, chest high counter with a clerk along the far back wall.

Neither of them blinked at how empty the lobby was. Their client had said this target was some kind of informant, but that was about it. They’d paid half up front and sent them on their merry way.

Tangerine yanked open the glass door, holding it for Lemon. He was beyond pissed and just wanted this to be over with. Despite his complaints he was still mulling over what his brother said. Should he apologize, even though he had done nothing wrong? He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, and he had thought back on all the times you’d been with them, working a job or not.

He’d been happy, he thought you were happy too.

The white floor tiles of the lobby were so shiny they could check their reflections in them. The whole place was upstanding and flaunted wealth. On both sides of the spacious lobby were two silver elevators. The clerk, a lady in her mid-thirties, looked up at them as they walked in. She picked up a phone and turned away as she spoke.

It took them 10 seconds to reach the desk, and, in that time, Lemon had pulled out his gun.

He pointed it at her now. “Hang up the phone.”

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. Not the usual response someone has when a gun is pointed at them, but she slowly hangs up.

“Come out from behind the desk, slowly.”

There’s a moment when she does nothing. Then, “No.”

Tangerine blinks, then pulls out his own gun. “Did you really just say no? Listen lady—”

She leans forward over the desk, leering. “Turn around and get the fuck out.”

Lemon shoots into the wall slightly to her left. She doesn’t even flinch at the sound. “I will fucking shoot you. Get out. From behind. The desk.”

She leans back. “Cute gun.”

Tangerine starts to get a sinking feeling. He turns to Lemon, about to say they should take a walk (maybe find a back entrance to this place instead) when the woman pulls out .22 Uzi from somewhere in the desk. They only catch a glimpse of the muzzle before they start shooting wildly and ducking.

Lemon takes a shot to the chest with a grunt. Tangerine hears the bullets whizzing past him and shattering glass.

The desk clerk turns disappearing behind an employee door seamlessly built into the wall.

They crouch down next to the desk. Tangerine’s head pounds, as it usually does when a job gets out of control.

“You alright?” He reloads his gun, watching his brother carefully.

Lemon checks himself over, patting his chest and stomach. “Yeah, all good, the vest caught it. This is fucked what do we do—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish as both elevators open and squads of heavily armored men pour out. They all have automatic rifles and black Kevlar vests.

“Behind the desk!” Tangerine shouts, pulling Lemon up.

They jump over just as the bullets start flying. Glass shatters, wood splinters, tiles crack. It’s utter chaos and Tangerine and Lemon can only sit behind cover.

“I think we might be fucked!” Lemon shouts, checking his gun.

Tangerine grits his teeth, mind racing. “The client didn’t mention this level of security! I’m going to wring their fucking neck!”

“We’re outmatched!”

“No question, Lemon! Thanks for pointing that out!” Tangerine can feel his brother’s rising anxiety as he shifts his weight from foot to foot.

 “What do we do?!”

“We hope to God this is all of them and try our best to make it out of here!”

“You’re saying—”

Tangerine fires blindly from behind the desk. “Yes, we bail on this job and break our client’s fucking legs!”

The onslaught never seems to end. These assholes are top security and they’re trained well. Their shots chip away at the desk piece by piece, Tangerine and Lemon can feel the bullets violently embed themselves in the wood against their backs.

Tangerine glances at the employee door, there’s no handle and no way to pry it open. He figures there’s a remote control that opens it somewhere from behind. He tries to remain calm, think of a way out that isn’t behind at least 10 guys with rifles.

What would you do in this situation? His heart feels like it’s been pierced with a lance as he thinks of you. Obviously, you would never be caught in a situation like this. You were careful, practical, methodical in the way you planned out jobs.

He wished you were here with him.

Instinctually, his hand reaches into his pocket, grabbing his phone. Lemon watches him with something close to sympathy on his face.

Your number is on speed dial. Tangerine presses a button and holds it up to his ear.

It goes straight to voicemail.

The automated answering machine has become very familiar to him these last few months. Were you checking his voicemails? He’d left you enough to fill up your mailbox, he was sure of it.

“Please leave a message after the tone.”

He hopes you can hear him over the sound of gunshots.

“Yeah, look. Lemon and I, we’re in a bit of a pickle. I was really hoping you would answer this time ‘cause we need help. Since you didn’t, I just wanted to say that you’re a real prick for leaving us the way you did. And you haven’t said a single thank you or anything for all the gifts I’ve sent. Poor Lemon has been wondering where you went off to.” He pauses. This wasn’t the way he wanted to start this message, but every other attempt at getting your attention has failed.

“You know how I feel, I’ve made that pretty clear. But right now, I’m just pissed. Nothing has worked, so I’m going to break into your house and wait for you to come home.”

Lemon gives him a startled look, shakes his head from side to side.

Tangerine frowns. “Don’t take that the wrong—Alright, I won’t break into your house, but I will wait on your doorstep. Every day, I’ll be there until I see you.”

Lemon is still frowning, but Tangerine ignores him.

“This is all because…Well, I…” He struggles, throat turning dry and closing around the words he wants to say. Instead of continuing, he hangs up.

Sitting back against the desk he exhales. The gunfire has stopped to an occasional patter here and there.

Lemon runs a hand through his hair. “Bruv, what the fuck was that?”

“A last-ditch effort at getting some backup.”

They fell into silence; the lobby was eerily quiet. They knew the security team was just waiting for them to come out from behind the desk. The air crackled with energy.

Lemon checked his pockets. “I’ve got two clips left, you?”

“One and a half.”

The look they share conveys their doubts, their dread. An unspoken conversation passes between them.

Tangerine puts it in the back of his mind. “I’ll run out first, then you go a few seconds later.”

“No way, we go at the same time.”

He shakes his head but arguing only puts off the inevitable.

“Go to the opposite side of the desk.”

They split, crouching behind opposite corners. There was no way either of them would be able to make it two steps without taking 10 rounds to the chest. The image of you stays in Tangerine’s mind. He just wished he could see you again. Whatever comes next, afterlife or not, he hoped you—or some form of you—would be in it.

Tangerine gives Lemon one last look, finds that his brother is watching him, and gives him a somber nod. He holds his gun up, takes a deep breath, gets ready to run…

He’s out from behind the desk, gritting his teeth and firing in a flash.

He hits one, another to his left falls from Lemon’s bullets. His legs are shaky, he can feel them trembling.

Rifles take aim.

Tangerine opens his mouth to urge Lemon on.

And a grenade goes off.

The loud bang startles him, his ears ring and a second later he’s shrouded in white, smokey fog. Tangerine stops, confused, looking around to try and find Lemon. But a strong hand yanks him and drags him back. He stumbles, scattering empty bullet shells along the ground, and falls onto the tile.

He’s back behind the desk. Lemon falls next to him.

A pair of legs stands between the brothers. Next to them lies a green duffle bag. Empty rifle shells fall to the ground. Tangerine didn’t even realize guns were firing. He followed the legs up in one long sweep of his eyes.

. . .

A million and one things were going through your mind as you fired an automatic rifle at the security team in the lobby. The biggest thing was holding back every fiber of your damn being from screaming at Tangerine and Lemon for being so foolish.

If you had been a breath later, a second too late, these idiots would be laying in a pile of their own blood on the floor. That thought definitely won’t haunt you for a few months.

The other thing you were concentrating on was ignoring the way Tangerine was staring at you right now. He’s not hurt—you kept repeating, over and over again. He’s ok.

The security team was scattering for cover, but finding little, making your job easy as the last of the smoke cleared. They hadn’t been expecting someone to come in from behind and you’d shot a few in the back before throwing the smoke grenade. Only a few were left now.

They seemed to get over their surprise and began firing back, opening the elevators, and using the inside cabins for cover. Keeping the doors open would stop them from being sent back up for more goons to come through. That was good.

You duck down behind the desk. They were still staring at you.

“Yes! Hello!” You stubbornly gritted out while staring into the wood.

Tangerine’s mouth opened and closed many times, but no words came out. That didn’t mean Lemon wasn’t able to say anything.

“Did you get his message?” He was grinning like some kind of fool.

“Message? Which one?”

Was he talking about the hundreds of messages—texts, voicemails, and letters—Tangerine had been sending on a weekly basis? Yes, you’d gotten them. Read every single one. It had been hard enough sleeping normally, after all that you hadn’t been able to sleep at all. The guilt was overwhelming.

Lemon’s eyes dart to his brother. You did the same and regretted it immediately.

Tangerine’s eyes were practically bulging from his head. His mustache twitched.

Oh, he’s pissed.

You quickly look away and clear your throat. “Are you on a job?”

“Yeah, a shit one. We were just trying to bail.”

“Can’t blame you. What happened, bad intel?”

Tangerine’s voice resembled a growl, it grated against your ear, but it wasn’t entirely unwelcome. “Understatement of the century, love.”

Love. Love. Love.

Lemon wipes his forehead. “What’re you doing here?”

“I have my own problems with your target.” You turn to Lemon but feel Tangerine’s eyes burning a hole in your back. “I was about to sneak in when I saw you two walking down the street.” You check your gun, then rummage through the duffle bag for another clip.

“A massive coincidence then?” Lemon was holding back a smile, eyes darting to Tangerine occasionally. It was as if they weren’t just about to die only five minutes ago.

“If you two still want to bail, that’s fine with me. I’ll give you a window after taking the rest out. I’m going to push on.”

Tangerine spins you around by the shoulder to face him. “Are you fucking mental?”

You’re very close together. The determination it takes not to just lean in and…

Speaking slow, you’re focusing your words and hoping it gets through to him. “Your target has info on me that could get people hurt and ruin my reputation. I need to wipe his computer.”

For all his credit, Tangerine takes you seriously in that moment, even as he looks like he might commit murder. He looks to Lemon—they do that ‘sibling conversation’ without words that they’re so good at.

“We’ll stick around to help.”

“You sure?”

Something in him ignites. There’s a fire behind his eyes. “Fuck yes, we’re sure.”

He’s giving mixed signals now. Is he angry? Probably. But apparently not angry enough to leave you on a job alone.

“Alright…” You say, slowly backing away.

You search through the duffle bag, cold objects graze your fingers, you can identify them each by touch. The laser cutter has a rubber handle. “Lemon—" You toss it to him. “—Cut a hole in the employee door. Tangerine—” You grab another rifle, placing it into his hands. “—Help me take out the last of the guys.”

He takes the rifle and for a moment your hands touch. You expect him to flinch away, or recoil, but he lingers there for a moment. His golden rings gleam—of course he wore them, he never leaves them behind—and catch your eyes until he takes the gun from you.

Fucking confusing.

It had been months, but the three of you worked together like no time had passed at all. Tangerine falling in sync with you, watching your back. Working in tandem, the few remaining riflemen dropped like flies.

“Doors open!” Lemon shouted tapping you and Tangerine’s shoulder.

The three of you waste no time dashing into the small service hallway. Tangerine grabbed the duffle bag and slung it over his shoulder. You were just about to pick it up, but he gave you a look.

There wasn’t as much polish to this part of the building, the lighting was dimmer, and it lacked the white tiles, replaced by a steely gray metal flooring instead. The hallway was long and narrow, its walls matched the floor in color.

“This should lead to an employee elevator. That will take us to the top office.” You panted, oddly exhilarated.

Lemon was looking down the hallway as he crouched. “Watch out for the desk clerk, she went this way.”

“Still can’t believe you both just walked in the front door…”

“We don’t all have your sense of planning, darling.” Tangerine huffed, hiking the bag higher on his shoulder.

“Did you have any sense of planning?”

“Lemon had a plan.”

You turn halfway back to face him. “You—Tangerine!”

He fixes you with an odd look. “What?”

“Lemon doesn’t even read the briefs! And you let him make the plan?” You shoot an apologetic look to Lemon. “No offense, you’re really great in every other area.”

He gives you a half smile. “I appreciate that.”

Tangerine grinds his teeth. “In my defense, the intel in the brief was already bad.” He steps closer, into your personal space. “And you always come up with the plans.”

You don’t shy away from him, in fact, you inch closer. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to make them, but you should know better—”

Lemon sighs, long and loud. “Can you two please focus? We’re in the middle of a dangerous situation here.”

It took a moment for you and Tangerine to resume, the closeness was intimate. Electricity crackles in the air between you.

You both say ‘Fine’ at the same time, like stubborn teenagers. The tension hadn’t settled one bit.

If Tangerine needed to be ignored for the remainder of this mission, then ok. That’s fine. No problem. That doesn’t bother you one bit. Nope.

The three of you empty the duffle bag of its contents, splitting the ammo and giving Lemon the pump action shotgun. That shotgun was your Hail Mary in case shit hit the fan—which, by your definition, it had.

You three were your own personal attack squad now, armed to the teeth.

The employee lift was at the end of the twisting hallway, metallic doors shining like a beacon. The panel to call it only had the arrow pointing up, a one-way lift. You’d poured over the maps late into the night leading up to your personal mission, often with a glass of wine, and it had struck you as odd that it only offered a one way up.

You jab at the button, and the little golden light is stark against the greys around it. Tangerine stands just behind you; you can hear his breath over your shoulder.

“Why’s it only one way?” he asks, hushed and tense.

“I asked the same question.” You responded turning a little to look at him. “I thought it might be security measures.”

“Doesn’t really make sense though, does it? It lets people like us up.” Tangerine zeroes in on your frown. “What is it?”

“There might be internal controls from the top office. This guy doesn’t fuck around with security.”

“Who is this guy anyway?” Lemon sniffs, casting a look back down the hallway.

“An asshole that likes snooping into people’s personal business.”

The brothers trade looks.

“He also works in satellite tech, undercover ops, information gathering.”

There’s a gentle bump into your shoulder. “He’s been snooping into your business, has he?”

How long is this elevator going to take?

“He has.”

“Did he try to blackmail you?”

“Yes.”

“What did he find?”

The elevator dings and the sleek metal doors slide open. The inside is full of ominous red and gold hues. The luxuriousness of it gives you the impression that the boss of the building takes it regularly.

Instead of answering, you step inside and forcefully hit the button for the top floor. Tangerine watches you carefully, studying you. Somehow, he looks like a kicked puppy, yet holding the rifle he takes on a much more sinister tone. He still looks dashing as hell in his suit though. You can see the little gold chain of his necklace around his broad neck.

Focus, focus, focus!

His mustache twitches a bit as he catches you staring. And to top that off, he stands in front of you, very closely in front. Either trying to shield you or irritate you. Possibly both.

He’s wearing the cologne you got him as a present almost a year ago.

“If there’s in house security for this lift, we should be prepared.” You shift a little to see Lemon over Tangerine’s shoulder.

“What do you suggest?”

“They know we’re coming, so we have to be fast. Their access to elevators has been blocked. All remaining security teams will need to take the stairs. This elevator opens to another employee hallway that we’ll have to exit in order to reach the office. That’s assuming—”

The elevator stutters, something above you screeches in the elevator shaft, and the panel lights flicker. All three of you stumble as it comes to an abrupt stop and the dim emergency lights switch on. They coat the interior in a faint red light, turning it into a nightmare scenario.

 You groan. “That’s assuming they don’t just turn the elevator off. Fuck.”

Lemon places the shotgun on the floor and motions to Tangerine. Together they pry the paneling off to reveal the switchboard underneath. Lemon fusses with the wiring, using a knife to cut through some and connect it to others.

Sparks fly, flashing in the dim light. Your anxiety ramps. Trapped in an elevator was not on your list of things you wanted to deal with today.

While Lemon fussed with wires, Tangerine turned back to you. “Relax.”

“Excuse me?”

“Try to stay calm, we’ll be out in a second or two.”

Your blood boiled hot. “Don’t tell me to be calm.”

Tangerine smiles at you. “I know you hate elevators.”

“They’re fine, I just particularly hate being trapped in them.”

“Just relax, I’ve got you.”

“That doesn’t help at all!”

More sparks and flickering lights and the elevator doors open an inch. Tangerine has the audacity to smirk in that moment and he touches your chin briefly. His eyes gleam in the dim light.

If you all lived, you were going to kill him.

The twins work wordlessly to pry the elevator doors open. It takes a tremendous effort and both of them are sweaty and breathing hard at the end, but there’s enough space for a person to climb through. Except, you’re going to have to jump down into the office below. Half the elevator is blocked.

“Well, good news is…” Lemon says, scratching his head, “we can get out. And if the elevator can only fall downward.”

“The elevator only goes up, Lemon.” You choke out.

“Oh. Right…well, best get a move on then.”

“I’ll go first.” Tangerine volunteers.

On instinct you reach for him. He sees the slight movement before you hold yourself back.

As if it was easy, he’s crouching down, squeezing through the doors, and jumping into the office below. All with his gun in his hand. Meanwhile, your heart is doing summersaults in your throat.

He holds his hands up, beckoning you. “Come on. You’ve done harder things than this.”

You force yourself to move, crouching down and inching toward the opening. You toss him your rifle. “Like when?”

“Like when you jumped between rooftops in Venezuela.”

“I wasn’t thinking when I did that! And in hindsight, it was fucking stupid of me.”

He laughs. “I’ve got you. Come on.”

You squeeze through the doors, imagining the elevator crashing down, the doors snapping shut, something—anything drastic, and then throw yourself at Tangerine. He catches you with practiced ease and holds you close to him.

He says something you don’t catch over the sound of your trembling breaths. There’s a pat on your shoulder, Lemon is out.

Regaining yourself, you move away from Tangerine and straighten your clothes. His brow furrows, mustache tilts down. Maybe it was your imagination, but did his fingers grip your clothes? A silent plea for you to stay?

You do your best to ignore it. “Let’s go. Did anyone catch what floor we stopped on?”

“37th.” Lemon says, handing over your gun.

“Two floors short.”

“You think they’re waiting for us?”

“I’d bet money on it. Be careful, both of you. I don’t want to see any heroics.”

Tangerine’s eyes follow you as you move to the front and lead them through the hallway at a jogging pace. The single door at the end is much like the one you entered on the first-floor lobby. There’s a control panel for it to the side. As you run up to it, you press your ear to the other side.

No noise.

Your hand hovers over the button. With one last look behind you at the twins you give them a nod, then press it. The door clicks open a fraction, and everything goes to shit.

They were waiting for you on the other side of the door and the gunfire started up immediately. Your vision was blocked immediately, and you were pushed and tugged out by a strong hand—the world was a blur of loud shots, ringing ears, and scrambling. Grey cubicles shoulder-height tall were set up along the floor, which made spotting the enemy incredibly hard. All the fighting was done in the tight walkways between the office spaces.

Your shirt had blood on it, but you had no bullet wounds. Tangerine sat beside you, holding an arm. He’d been shot in his right arm.

“I said no heroics!” You practically shrieked.

Lemon was firing between cubicles, and from the sound of it, he was holding his own.

“What was I supposed to do, love?” Tangerine pants through the pain.

“You’re supposed to let me handle it!” You’re shouting as you pull out some gauze. The bullet went straight through his upper arm. He’d need stitches but, overall, he would be ok. You poke and prod gently as he hisses with each touch.

His teeth are gritted as he grunts out, “You wanted to get shot?”

“I’d take a bullet for you, happily. You know that.”

“I feel the same way, which is what I was doing.”

“I still don’t want you to!”

“I don’t want you to, either!”

Something bounces off your back. It’s a stapler. Both you and Tangerine stare at it for a moment, confused.

“Oi! You two! Get over yourselves and actually talk about your feelings for once!”

You whip around to stare daggers at Lemon. “Did you just throw a stapler at me?!”

He’s taking cover behind a grey cubicle not too far away. “Yeah, I did! I’m sick of you two avoiding an actual conversation. Talk—it—out!”

Tangerine sits up, pushing against your hands on his chest in your weak attempt to keep him down. “You’ve lost your mind, mate!”

“Thomas would say to express your feelings, that bottling them up is bad for you! So, express them!”

“Is it really necessary—” You pick up your rifle and fire blindly down the walkway, “—to do this now? We’re a little busy!”

“It’s now or never, I know you two! Once all this stops, you’ll avoid it!”

Tangerine looks perplexed, like he’s really considering it, and you try not to look at him again. “Fuck this job!” You shout, before rolling into the walkway and opening fire.

The two or three men that hadn’t been behind cover are caught by surprise and the bullets chew through the walls of the cubicles. A deadly silence permeates the office floor, only the ringing in your ears remains.

Another shot rings out and you feel like your shoulder’s been ripped from the socket.

You’re thrown back onto the ground. It must have been a heavy round, your left arm is completely numb, do you even have an arm left?

There’s shouting and more gunshots, the grey office walls and floor merge into one as the room spins. You’re getting pulled off the ground, someone is prodding your arm. Absentmindedly, you swat at whoever is doing it.

“Listen, hey, open your eyes!”

Tangerine…

You obey. He’s inches in front of your face, brows furrowed, a vein in his forehead sticks out.

“I’m fine.” You cough out. “Just fell down, is all.”

“You’ve been shot!”

“Oh.”

He struggles, he looks like he has more to say, but stays silent. You swat at Lemon who’s wrapping your arm—or shoulder, more accurately. “I’m fine, let’s keep going.”

“You’re not fine.” Lemon grunts, pushing your hand away. “It was a .308 round. You’ll be lucky if you have any bones left in your shoulder.”

“Why’d you do that?!” Tangerine is shouting, running his hand through his hair. You both match now, he’s bandaged up on his left arm too.

“Do what?” You ask through gritted teeth as Lemon tightens the bandage.

“Run out like an absolute lunatic?”

“I told you I’d take a bullet for you.”

His eyes bug out. “You threw yourself into the line of fire!”

“All in a day’s work. Now, can we get back to it?” You don’t wait for a response, instead pushing yourself to your feet. Your left arm hangs to the side, limp and numb. A dull throb pulses through your side.

Tangerine watches you. “We need to have a serious discussion when this is over, love.”

You huff out a breath, swaying slightly. “Noted.”

The three of you push on in tense silence. Tangerine makes sure you’re behind him while the rest of the floors leading to the main penthouse office are cleared. He’s acting so stubborn, blocking you at every turn, holding you back with a gentle, yet unyielding hand. The vein in his forehead never goes away.

Finally, the double doors leading to the office are before you. Platinum gold, of course, with carved handles. This guy’s style was beginning to get obnoxious.

Lemon kicks open the doors with as much anger and prejudice as you feel (yet can’t muster at the moment). Instead of what you were expecting, the target stands alone behind his desk. He smirks, giving off a Wall Street investor impression with his pressed suit and perfectly cut hair.

He spreads his arms wide. “I really should have known you three would be together for this.”

“Shut up, wanker.” Tangerine shouts, pointing his gun.

The target opens his mouth to say more, but Tangerine doesn’t let him. He empties the clip into the man’s chest.

The target dies with a startled look on his face, falling back over his desk.

You move past Tangerine, fighting his hands that grip at your clothing. “Thank God for that.”

The computer is easily hacked, the files you’re after are on the desktop. Maybe the dead man was looking to bargain—or gloat. You glance at his dead, glazed over eyes.

Bastard.

Tangerine paces, looking at you often. His job is done, the confirmation is sent to the client through Lemon’s phone.

Your files are downloaded onto an encrypted flash drive, and you rip the wiring out of the computer’s back, smashing the server tower. Mission accomplished.

“I guess now that you have what you need, you’ll disappear again.” Tangerine is glaring at you, chewing his lip. His bandage is bloody.

The flood gates open.

“I needed these files!” You shout, worsening the headache you already have.

Tangerine shouts back, taking a step closer. “I would have understood if you had just told me!”

“I couldn’t have told you!”

“Why not?”

“Because—well—I didn’t—It doesn’t matter now!”

“So, you disappear for months, without a word, for something you won’t even tell me about?!”

“I didn’t want to involve you! I wanted to get this done myself!”

“I’m involved now!”

“It was a shitty coincidence you showed up here today, and I’m sorry you got hurt because of this job!”

“I’m not concerned about me!”

“Well, you should be! I care about your safety!”

“And I care about yours!”

In the corner, Lemon shakes his head.

You hold your arm, trying to work some feeling back into it. It throbs and you wish you hadn’t. “I would have come back after this was done.”

“Oh, really?” Tangerine laughs dryly. “How was I to know?”

You groan, throat turning dry. “You’re so impatient! I just needed a little time!”

“You know how often I tried to reach you—?”

“Yes! I heard every message, got every bouquet of flowers—and thank you for my porch, that was really nice.”

Tangerine flounders a little, he still wants to argue, but some of the steam has been let out. “A thank you would have been nice.”

“I’m thanking you now!”

“A whole good that did when I thought you were done with me—” He shoots a look at his brother, “—and Lemon!”

“I’ll say I’m sorry a thousand more times, Tangerine! Is that what you want?”

He turns his back to you, grumbling something.

“I don’t understand why it was such a big deal to you, we’re contractors! We kill people for a living, and you’re freaking out—”

He spins back around. “It’s a big deal because I thought you were hurt.” He stalks closer, you notice his hair has come undone from the neat gel, curls flair out around his neck. “I thought something happened to you!” He’s within arm’s distance now. “It’s a big deal because I love you!”

And then he stops. His eyes go wide, as if he’s just spilled a secret.

Fuck, he did just spill a secret. Maybe you had known, but he’s never said anything. It was always just little guesses here and there, a thought—a feeling—and inclination. Late nights, especially recently, that you spent thinking about it, wondering.

Your mouth falls open in the silence. “I—I…love…” but damned if your mouth just wasn’t getting it out.

Arguing and bickering was so much easier.

But he knows, he can see it in the way your eyes soften, in the way you swallow with a dry throat. In the way your hand reaches to him, and your body leans forward.

“You know…” Lemon says, looking up from his phone, “Most people would kiss at this point. Just a suggestion.”

A quip, a very fitting one, comes to mind and you’re about to tell Lemon just how you’re not normal people, when Tangerine pulls you to him. Your chest presses to his and his lips are on yours in an instant.

Hungry, needy. It’s desperate, an urgent need be close, to be touching. Burning with desire and hot with passion. You give into it.

His mustache scratches at your lips and you pull him into you, threading your fingers through his curly hair, mussing it up even more. His hands grip at your back, pull at your clothes.

Closer. You need to be closer.

Fuck air, the feeling of his lips moving against yours is the only thing you’ll ever need again.

Your arm throbs and the dull pulse shoots up to your chest. You sigh, half in pain and half in pleasure. Unfortunately, Tangerine pulls back. There’s blood on his lips and he looks concerned.

“Wait…” You mumble, trying to pull him back to you. He’s your lifeline now.

“You need a doctor, love.”

“Just a little longer.”

Tangerine chuckles, wrapping an arm around your back. “After you’re patched up. I promise.”

…Bonus…

“You’re going to ‘break into my house and wait for me to come home’?”

Tangerine groans, throwing his head back as you walk into the small office. Private clinics with ‘respectable’ doctors. Gotta love ‘em.

“Love, I didn’t mean it, I was in a life-or-death situation—I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—”

You give a good-natured laugh, sitting next to him. You’d been patched up first, Tangerine was just waiting for some blood work to come back.

Tangling your fingers in his you give his hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m just teasing, Tan. I know.”

“Ok.” He sighs, giving your hand a squeeze back. “Good.”

You ruffle through your pockets to pull out your phone, your arm stings, but the pain medication the doc gave you does wonders. “I thought about it, I think you deserve to know why I was after your target.”

He looks at you with new interest now.

You tilt your screen to show him.

It had pictures of you and Tangerine. Pictures of you sitting together at lunch, laughing. Pictures of you walking down the street together, arm in arm. Pictures of you looking like a couple.

“Oh,” he breathes out, “I see.”

“I was worried you’d be put in danger if these…well, if they got into the wrong hands.”

“Didn’t want our clients to think we were softies either, huh?”

“That too.”

He presses his face into your hair. He hasn’t expressed his feelings for you again, but you’re starting to realize he always had—just through actions instead. A gentle hand on the small of your back. Wrapping an arm around your waist. Leaning down to speak softly into your ear.

These were just as much of an expression as words.

“Will we have to do this every time?” he asks, voice muffled slightly.

“Every time what?”

“It’s only a matter of time before more pictures of us make it into someone’s hands.”

“Oh. That’s a good point.”

He pulls you a little closer. “I’ll be dammed if I have to stop taking you out over that.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to kill whoever tries something like that again.”

“We’ll do it together next time, yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

[mrmeowski]

最愛 || 𝐌𝐘 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐓 [ʙʟ]

╰┈➤ ❝ 𝐘𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞.𝐀𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐱 𝐌.𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 ❞

Alastor Doe never imagined that he would experience the warmth and happiness that love bestows on a person. Nevertheless, he is waiting for someone in his office, playing romantic music on the radio, and even placing flowers on their desk. You were that certain someone. He's not sure why he was so taken by his coworker; was it your kindness or innocence? He does not know. He'll make you his and his only, that much is clear.

The man only wanted this novel experience to endure forever, but faith has other ideas. He met his early end and was consigned to hell. But that doesn't mean it will make him stop loving you.

˚✦𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏✦˚

⋇⊰Darling or Dear⊱⋇

CW: Slightly Suggestive

Word Counter: 2.6k

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The first light of the mid-October 1932 sun gently embraced you, casting a warm afterglow that accompanied the insistent buzz of your alarm. With a soft moan, you reluctantly roused from slumber, your limbs stretching in protest as you reached to silence the persistent sound. Thursday had dawned, and the demands of your role as a radio forecaster awaited.

As you prepared for the day ahead, the lingering traces of dawn painted the sky in hues of amber and rose. Your profession, a radio forecaster, demanded your presence in the early hours, a fact that often left you with a hint of dismay. Yet, even in the quietude of the pre-dawn hours, your partner of seven years in the realm of radio forecasting, Alastor Doe, always stood as a silent harbinger of camaraderie.

Though your work officially commenced at 6 am, your early-bird companion had a penchant for arriving even earlier. It made you ponder just how early the man wakes up for work. No one can be that enthusiastic to attend in such an hour.

You considered your own punctuality commendable, rising at the ungodly hour of 4 am, allowing a mere 30 or sometimes 20 minutes for a hasty stop at a convenience store, snatching a quick bite to consume on the route.

Speaking about your partner, he applied comparatively soon after you did. On the other hand, he achieved nothing less than remarkable success within the station by unexpectedly becoming popular very rapidly. But you ended up getting paired with him nonetheless.

While you might not entirely perceive this connection, the powers that be saw a synergy in your partnership. This harmony transcended the unseen waves that carried your forecasts to eager listeners.

The rhythmic purr of the engine filled the confines of your car as you navigated the pre-dawn streets. The faint glow of the dashboard disrupted the monotony of the drive, and you reached to tune the radio until a voice seized your attention. It was the smooth cadence of a man delivering the latest news on the National News Network.

“Good morning, folks! You’re tuned into NNN, bringing you the latest news and updates from across the city. Today, we have a special announcement regarding a missing person. Mrs. Rebbeca Chanler, a young woman in her early twenties and wife to Mr. Mark Chanler, has been reported missing for approximately four days now.” The words hung in the air, the weight of the announcement settling upon you as you continued driving through the city’s quiet streets.

The newsman's voice carried the undertones of concern as he continued, recounting the last known details of Rebecca's disappearance.

"Rebecca was last seen leaving her apartment in the downtown area around 7:00 PM on Sunday evening. Since then, her whereabouts remain unknown, and her family and friends are deeply concerned for her safety." A frown etched itself onto your face as you listened intently, the broadcast punctuated by the sound of rustling paper on the radio channel.

"If you have any information regarding Rebecca Chanler's disappearance or have seen her recently, please do not hesitate to contact our station at XXX-XXX-XXXX. Your cooperation could be crucial in bringing her—'' Unable to bear the weight of the news, you swiftly switched channels, seeking refuge from the somber reality that gripped the airwaves.

The radio's frequency shifted, ushering in a soft love song that seemed to resonate with the melancholy of the situation. Subconsciously, you began to hum along it.

The woman in the news was more than just a name to you, she was a colleague at your workplace. Although your interactions were minimal, you knew her as a sweet and welcoming soul, someone with a comforting presence in the office. The news of her disappearance weighed heavily on your heart, a tangible sorrow that colored the morning's atmosphere.

Yet, a more unsettling realization began to emerge as you navigated through the urban landscape—a pattern of disappearances, all centered around your coworkers. But perhaps it may have been an eerie coincidence...

The melody of your hum resonated with the music, creating a rhythmic backdrop as you strolled toward the workplace, following the comforting routine of your morning. A nearby pastry shop beckoned, and true to form, you indulged in the delightful temptation of a Chocolate Éclair, reserving it for later enjoyment during the workday.

Upon arrival, familiar faces greeted you with waves, good mornings, and smiles—gestures reciprocated as you made your way through the bustling office. As your desk drew near, a tantalizing aroma of coffee wafted through the air. There stood your partner, holding not one but two cups of coffee, his iconic smile sporting an unusual enthusiasm.

"Mr. Doe?" You queried, brows furrowed in mild confusion.

"You've arrived just in time, my dear. Come have a cup of coffee with me." He invited, placing the second cup on your desk.

A genuine smile crept onto your face at his unexpected gesture.

"Thank you, Mr. Doe," you graciously responded, bowing slightly as you settled into your chair.

He, on the other hand, pulled another chair uncomfortably close to you. The proximity raised an internal eyebrow, for such familiarity was reserved for those with a deeper connection, and your relationship with him was nothing more than professional.

"Alastor would be fine~" He suggested, his words carrying a hint of informality that seemed to break the conventional workplace decorum.

The offer lingered in the air, leaving you momentarily conflicted. Yet, if that was his preference, you assented with a nod.

"Well, thank you, Alastor," you obliged, testing the waters with his given name.

His grin widened, and crimson eyes seemed to gleam with satisfaction.

The resonance of his name on your tongue lingered, prompting an unusual thought in the recesses of his mind. A sensual scenario crept into his mind, wondering how it might sound when you moan out his name in ecstasy. Unfortunately, he wouldn't like to be caught daydreaming in such a setting, so he sets them away for now.

The morning light bathed the office in a gentle glow as his voice cut through the air like velvet draped in honey.

"Lovely morning, is it, my dear?" His words carried an undertone, a subtle tease that stirred a certain allure within you.

"It surely is, Alastor." Unbeknownst to you, he found himself wrestling with sinful desires that had inexplicably infiltrated his mind.

Vivid dreams of indulging in pleasures with you left him bewildered, for he was a man who, until now, held no such yearnings for love or the carnal desires that plagued his thoughts.

You, oblivious to the tumult within his mind, hummed in agreement, sipping your coffee as the morning warmth embraced the office. However, a question continued to linger in the air, unspoken yet palpable. Something had been bothering you, a curiosity that finally found its voice.

"If I may ask..." Your voice broke through the subtle tension, drawing him back to reality. "Why do you always refer to me as 'dear'?" The question hung between you, a thread of inquiry that sought understanding.

A sly grin curved his lips, and his crimson eyes gleamed with a mix of mischief and something deeper.

"I find the term suits you quite well. It carries a certain elegance, don't you think? A touch of warmth between our partnership~" His words, dripping with a peculiar blend of charm and consideration, coiled through the air as he leaned in, that signature grin adorning his features. "Nevertheless,  I will be delighted to call you by any name if it makes you uncomfortable! Just say the word." The offer, delivered with a gentle flourish, hung in the air like a delicate invitation.

Seated with a casual elegance, he crossed one leg over the other, his posture exuding an air of confident nonchalance. A delicate sip of his coffee punctuated the moment, the porcelain cup cradled between his tanned fingers.

Not wanting to be misunderstood, you quickly muttered a response, stumbling over your own words.

"T-That wasn't what I meant!" Clearing your throat, you continued. "I simply want to know." He hummed in response, an enigmatic acknowledgment of your attempt to clarify.

"Do tell me if you have any suggestions." He invited, taking a leisurely sip of his coffee. "Despite how much it's a delight to call you 'dear', I do believe 'darling' would be much more fitting, no?" His words flowed smoothly, carrying a certain playful elegance.

The unexpected suggestion caught you off guard, nearly causing you to spit out your coffee, eliciting a chuckle from him.

"I... I think otherwise," you muttered, and though he hummed in response, a subtle disappointment lingered in his expression.

"Still shy are we?" He teased, and you could feel the warmth of a blush surfacing on your cheeks.

"Y-You want some Chocolate Éclair? I happened to buy two of them." You quickly shifted the tone of the conversation, transitioning from a slightly heated exchange to a sweet offering.

"That would be nice, my dear." His voice lingered on the endearment, his tone laden with a subtle allure that deepened the hue of your blush.

Unbeknownst to the envy-laden glares of certain onlookers, you and him shared a dynamic that danced on the borderline between professional camaraderie and something more. His suggestive remarks and playful tone around you did not go unnoticed, drawing puzzled looks from some and simmering jealousy from others.

One individual, particularly Melissa Heart, observed your interactions from the sidelines, her eyes ablaze with a fiery envy that smoldered beneath the surface. As she watched the exchange between you and the famous radio broadcaster.

As you savored your pastry in peaceful oblivion, his gaze shifted to your coworkers with an intensity that bordered on unsettling. The warmth of his smile faded, replaced by a steely resolve that seemed to pierce through the air with an eerie silence.

His crimson eyes bore into the onlookers with a silent warning, a subtle reminder to mind their own business and refrain from meddling in affairs that did not concern them as they should've in the beginning. The weight of his stare hushed the whispers and quelled the envious glances, prompting a swift return to the mundane tasks of the workplace.

With a final glance, the man's gaze softened as it returned to you and noticed something off. There were a few lingering crumbs adorned your mouth, unnoticed by you. He retrieved his handkerchief, gently wiping away the wayward remnants from your cheek. The unexpected gesture caught you off guard, and you looked up at him, confusion painted on your features.

"Hm?" You were seeking an explanation.

"Wouldn't want you all dirtyed up now, dear!" He teased, pinching your cheeks playfully.

Your response was a light groan, a mixture of amusement and exasperation.

"Alastor!" You protested, giving him a gentle push as you rubbed your cheeks, his laughter echoing in response.

He felt an inexplicable urge to freeze time, to capture this fleeting moment of tranquility.

A desire, raw and primal, pulsed through him as he watched you, his thoughts wandering to forbidden fantasies of whisking you away from it all. In his eyes, you radiate a warmth and purity that he knew he didn't deserve, yet he was drawn to defy the rules, to indulge in the forbidden pleasure of being near you.

His mind toyed with tantalizing possibilities, each one more daring than the last. In this fantasy, there are no rules, no boundaries—just the two of you, lost in a whirlwind of passion and desire.

As the hours slipped by in the company of someone special, time seemed to lose its grip on Alastor. Before he knew it, his and your shift had drawn to a close. While you busied yourself tidying up your desk, he had drifted off to attend to other matters, lost in his thoughts.

Suddenly, a voice disrupted the tranquility of the moment.

"Mr. [Last Name]." Startled, you turned to find Melissa standing behind you, her demeanor cold and unsettling.

"Ms. Heart! Is there something troubling you?" You inquired, your unease growing with each passing moment.

Her silence only added to your discomfort, and when she finally spoke, her words sent a shiver down your spine.

"You shouldn't be near him, Mr. [Last Name]," she stated bluntly, her tone laced with a warning that left you reeling in confusion.

"Pardon? What do you mean by that?" You pressed, your brows furrowing in concern.

Her frown deepened as she crossed her arms, her gaze piercing through you with an intensity that sent a chill down your spine.

"Mr. Doe could be eavesdropping. Take my word or leave it, but I assure you once that man invites you..." She drew close, cornering you to your desk. "You're to be the next on the chopping list," she warned cryptically, her words hanging in the air like an ominous cloud.

With that ominous declaration, she turned to leave, leaving you grasping for answers.

"Wait—Ms. Heart!" You called out, reaching out a hand in a futile attempt to stop her.

But she continued walking away, leaving you with a sense of foreboding and a slew of unanswered questions swirling in your mind. What did she mean by her cryptic warning?

Amidst the peculiar dynamics of your workplace, her odd personality had always been a known entity. Her strong aura and lack of camaraderie with most coworkers were facts you'd come to accept. However, nothing prepared you for the unexpected encounter that left you shaken.

"You seem a bit shaken, my dear! What caused such a thing, hm?" The familiar voice of your partner snapped you out of your reverie.

It was then that you realized you had been standing outside your workplace, lost in thought, the situation affecting you more profoundly than you initially thought.

"N-Nothing... thanks for your concern, Mr. Do—Alastor," you stammered, but he hummed, unconvinced by your feeble attempt at dismissal.

"Aren't we good pals? No need to hide it from me!" With that, his arm snaked around your shoulders, drawing you near. "Tell me, what happened?" His tone shifted, demanding answers, a departure from the usual playful banter.

"I'm just tired, that's all," you replied, hoping to deflect his probing inquiries.

He seemed inclined to press further, but with a moment of consideration, he let it go.

"Then allow me to drive you home!" Before you could interject, he playfully put a finger to your lips. "Ah, about to reject me again? I assure you it's no trouble!" You pushed away his hand, expressing your gratitude but asserting your independence.

"It's alright, I have my own car and you also need to rest early. It has been a busy day, you know?" You added, patting his shoulder.

Despite his usual aversion to physical touch, his demeanor softened under your genuine concern. His once-restrained smile crumbled, revealing a vulnerability that spoke of a connection that transcended the usual barriers he maintained.

"If you say so then. Safe travels, my dear, and have a blessed day," he uttered, his tone carrying a blend of formality and genuine warmth.

Despite the subtle intimacy that lingered in the air, he refrained from sealing the farewell with a kiss.

You looked up at him, a cute smile playing on your lips as you softly spoke.

"You too, Alastor. See you again tomorrow!" With a wave goodbye, you stepped away from his touch, leaving the lingering connection to dissolve in the empty space between you.

As you departed, the weight of loneliness began to settle once more leaving the man with a quiet yearning for your touch and voice. This simply wasn't enough for him. He was beginning to be desperate. He doesn't accept it but he acknowledges these growing desires especially when he has competitors yet to be eradicated.

Perhaps it wouldn't hurt if he tried some drastic ideas...

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