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vitalverstappen · 2 months ago

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Man's Best Wingman - C. Leclerc

summary: they say dogs are a man’s best friend, but a certain dachshund may be man’s best wingman

pairing: Charles Leclerc x veterinarian!reader

warnings: none ( i mean use of y/n if you count that)

word count: 2.6k

It was no surprise that Charles Leclerc adored animals, specifically dogs. So, when word spread like wildfire around Monaco that he had adopted Leo, it was only a matter of time before the duo showed up in your clinic.

You had heard about Leo from the gossip mill - Charles had been spotted walking the dog around the streets of Monte Carlo, and the photos of the two of them quickly made the rounds on social media. The sight of the Formula 1 driver, usually so composed and intense, walking around with an adorable dachshund puppy had the whole city cooing with affection.

You had been working as a vet for a few years now, as one of the only ones in Monaco, so you were no stranger to having a celebrity walk through your doors. In fact, you had Alex Albon walking through your doors practically every month with the zoo he had. But hearing your techs swoon at the fact Charles was in your clinic, made you question how big this guy really was.

“Y/n, Leo Leclerc is in room four for you. He’s here for his routine exam. So far everything looks good,” one of your techs said.

“I bet Charles looks even better,” another one called, overhearing the conversation.

Your eyes rolled, but you couldn’t help but chuckle at their remarks. “Focus on Leo, not Charles,” you teased, though you knew their excitement was understandable.

Taking a deep breath to prepare yourself, you grabbed your stethoscope and walked toward room four. You were a professional, after all, and your job was to make sure Leo was in tip-top shape, not to let the celebrity connection distract you.

As you knocked lightly on the door, you heard a soft voice call from the other side. “Come in!”

You opened the door to find Charles sitting on the exam table, with Leo happily bouncing around at his feet. The little dachshund’s tail wagged furiously as soon as he spotted you, making a beeline for you as though he’d known you for ages.

“Hey there, Leo,” you said, crouching down to meet the enthusiastic puppy. You pet him for a second before standing back up. “I’m Dr. Y/L/N, but you can call me Y/N. I’ll be your primary veterinarian.”

Leo’s little tail wagged even harder at the mention of his name, and you couldn’t help but to smile at the sight. His big brown eyes stared up at you, full of trust and excitement.

“It’s nice to meet you, Y/N,” Charles said as he got off of the exam table. His smile was easy, and you noticed how much more approachable he looked when he wasn’t in his racing suit. “I’m glad to see you’re the one handling Leo today.”

You nodded, doing your best to focus on the task at hand, though your heart was pounding into your throat. “He’s a cutie. And I’ve heard a lot about him from the clinic’s gossip mill. Seems like you two are quite the duo.”

Charles chuckled lightly, glancing down at Leo, who was now sitting patiently at his feet, as if sensing the shift in attention. “Yeah, Leo’s been a good distraction for me. Definitely makes my life a bit more fun, and I think he’s a great companion for my downtime.”

You turned to Leo, picking him up and placing him on the exam table, where Charles once sat. “He’s got a lot of energy for a little guy. Looks like he’s been keeping you on your toes.”

Charles shrugged, the slightest hint of amusement in his expression. “He definitely does, but I love having him around. Plus, he’s a great way to relax after a stressful weekend, just walking him around and enjoying the quieter side of things.”

“Sounds perfect,” you replied, settling your stethoscope into place. “Let’s make sure everything is going well with him. I’ll just start with a quick check-up, get his vitals and make sure he’s healthy.”

You focused on Leo, quickly going through the routine exam. His heart rate was normal, his coat was shiny and healthy, and his eyes were bright. After a quick examination, you looked up at Charles. “He’s in great shape, Charles. No issues at all. He’s a happy, healthy little guy.”

Charles sighed in relief, his smile widening. “I’m glad to hear that. I was worried I might be doing something wrong.”

“Not at all,” you assured him, chuckling. “You’re doing everything right. It’s clear you care about him a lot.”

You scooped Leo into your arms and informed Charles you would be taking Leo into the back room to give him his shots. What you didn’t mention was that it was also an opportunity for all of the techs to fawn over the puppy.

Once you brought Leo back into the exam room, Charles' eyes lit up, though you were unsure if it was at you, or the dog. You gave him a few instructions for Leo’s next few weeks, including a reminder to keep up with his vaccinations. “He’s good to go! Just a few follow-ups, but nothing to worry about.”

You bid goodbye to the driver as you guided him up to the receptionist's desk. There, you gave instructions on the next exam date.

Charles had the day of the exam circled on his calendar the minute he got home. Sure, he wanted to be a good dog dad and pay attention to Leo’s appointments, but he also couldn’t wait to see you again.

Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that since Leo had done so well, the follow up appointments that had been scheduled were only with the techs, not with you. He went through with the appointments, but in the back of his mind, he had to find a way to see you again. And thankfully, Leo gave him plenty of excuses.

It all started when Leo ate a blade of grass.

Now, Charles knew that eating grass wasn’t going to kill his dog, but he was worried it might make him a little sick… and he wanted to see you again.

So, he scheduled an appointment.

As soon as you saw Charles and Leo’s names on the schedule, a smile tugged at the corner of your lips. You tried to shake it off, you were just doing your job, but there was something about seeing him that made you feel a little lighter.

As the time drew nearer, you found yourself making sure everything was in order, the clinic bustling with its usual activity. Your techs were curious no doubt - they’d fawned over the duo when they took care of the dog’s follow up appointments, and definitely talked about the “celebrity dog dad” a little more than they probably should’ve.

“Y/n, Charles and Leo are in room three for you. He mentioned Leo had eaten some grass earlier today, but so far, everything seems normal,” your tech informed you

You walked towards the exam room, preparing yourself to see the driver and his dog again. As you entered, you saw Charles sitting on the chair this time, gently scratching behind Leo’s ears. The little dachshund’s tail was wagging, and he immediately perked up when he saw you, jumping down from Charles’ lap.

“Hey, Leo,” you greeted, crouching down to pet the excited pup. “What’s all this fuss about grass, huh?”

Charles looked up from his phone and smiled when he saw you. “Hey, Y/N. Yeah, Leo decided to sample some grass this morning, and now I’m just a little paranoid.”

You chuckled, standing up to meet his gaze. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Dogs eat grass all the time. Most of the time, it’s harmless. But let’s take a quick look just to be sure.”

You began your routine examination of Leo, checking his belly, feeling for any signs of discomfort, and listening to his heart. Leo seemed perfectly fine, happily squirming and wagging his tail as you worked.

“See?” you said, glancing up at Charles. “He seems to be in good spirits. No signs of anything bothering him.”

Charles let out a relieved sigh, but there was still a hint of concern in his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve just been overthinking it. But I’m still getting used to being a dog dad, you know?”

You smiled warmly, meeting his gaze. “Like I said at our first appointment, you’re going great, Charles. Leo’s in good hands.”

He looked at you with a soft smile, and for a moment, there was a brief pause in the conversation. It was like neither of you wanted to break the moment, but eventually, Charles cleared his throat and stood up.

“Thanks again, Y/N. Seriously,” he said, giving you an appreciative look. “I’m glad I came in today, even if it was just for a little blade of grass.”

“It’s no problem at all,” you replied, trying to keep your composure. “Take care of Leo, and we’ll see you for the next check-up.”

But you saw him much sooner than the next check-up.

Only a few weeks after the grass related appointment, your receptionist came into the back area, where you and your techs were prepping for surgery. You had a busy day ahead of you, with having back to back appointments all day, and the only break you got was your thirty minutes of lunch.

“Mr. Leclerc is on the phone,” your receptionist began, causing a bunch of oooo’s from your staff. “He said that Leo stubbed his toe and wanted to see if you had availability for today.”

You paused for a moment, wiping your hands on your scrubs as you turned toward your receptionist. “Leo stubbed his toe?” you asked, trying to suppress a smile. You could hear the excitement in your staff’s whispers behind you, but you didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing how much Charles’ calls were starting to feel like little breaks from the clinic chaos.

“Yeah, that’s what he said,” your receptionist replied, her tone amused. “Should I tell him to hold on or that you’re in surgery?”

You quickly ran through your schedule in your head. It was packed, but a stubbed toe? You could squeeze that in. You didn’t want to seem like you were too eager, but you couldn’t help but feel a little excitement at the thought of seeing Charles again.

“I can take a shorter lunch,” you said, giving your receptionist a quick nod. “Schedule him for the last twenty minutes of that half hour.”

Your receptionist raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything as she turned to make the call. As soon as the door closed behind her, your techs immediately leaned in, their eyes sparking with curiosity.

“You know you two aren’t fooling anyone, right?” one of them teased. “You’re excited to see Charles again.

“And he’s got to be wanting to see you if he’s making an appointment over a stubbed toe,” another one chimed in.

You rolled your eyes, trying to stifle a grin. ‘It’s just a stubbed toe,” you replied, but your voice betrayed you, laced with a hint of amusement. “He’s just a concerned dog dad. Nothing more.”

Your techs exchanged knowing glances, clearly not buying it.

“Uh-huh,” one of them smirked. “A ‘concerned dog dad’ who keeps calling in for the tiniest little thing. Sure.”

“Maybe you should get him a frequent flyer card,” another suggested, grinning.

You shook your head, trying to ignore the warmth growing in your cheeks. “Focus, guys. You have things to do, remember?”

They held up their hands in mock surrender, but you could still feel their eyes on you as you turned back to finish prepping for the day.

When the status of Leo’s appointment changed to “arrived” on your computer, it took everything in you to remain calm and composed. The butterflies in your stomach only grew as you heard Leo’s excited barks from down the hall.

Once your techs informed you that the Leclercs were ready to see you, you made your way to the exam room, trying to keep yourself steady with every step. When you opened the door, Charles was sitting there, looking as relaxed as ever, with Leo perched on his lap.

“Hey there, you,” you greeted Leo first, just like you always did. “I heard you got a stubbed toe this time around.”

Charles chuckled, giving you a sheepish look. “I know, it’s ridiculous. But he seemed to be limping a little, and I didn’t want to take any chances.”

You nodded, appreciating his concern for his dog. “It’s never ridiculous to take care of our furry friends,” you said, your eyes briefly meeting his. There was a warmth in his gaze, and for a moment, the world seemed to slow down.

You got Leo up on the exam table, gently checking his paws and making sure everything looked good. As you worked, you noticed Charles’ gaze lingering on you - though this time, it felt different. His smile was softer, more intentional, and there was something in his eyes that made your heart skip a beat.

Finally, after checking Leo’s paw, you turned to Charles. “Good news. It’s just a little sore, probably from the way he landed. No major damage.”

Charles visibly relaxed, his tension easing as he gave a small sigh of relief. “I’m glad to hear that.”

As you gave Leo a few gentle pats and wrote down the instructions for recovery, you could feel Charles’ eyes on you again. There was a quiet moment between you two, one that made the air feel just a little thicker, like there was more unsaid than spoken.

“Thank you for always being so patient with me, and with Leo, and I appreciate you squeezing us in at the last minute,” Charles said, standing up to walk toward the door. He paused for a beat, then glanced back at you with a small but meaningful smile. “Would I be able to squeeze into your schedule again sometime, for coffee or drinks?”

You felt your heart flutter as the words hung in the air. It was the question you’d been waiting for, yet the reality of it still made your breath catch in your throat. For a second, you just looked at him, the familiar warmth in his smile making your pulse quicken.

You tried to play it cool, but you couldn’t hide the slight blush creeping onto your cheeks. “I think I could make some time for you,” you said, your voice soft but sure. “I’m not usually this free, but for you? I’ll make an exception.”

Charles’s smile widened, and you could see a spark of relief in his eyes. He stepped back into the room, the distance between you narrowing as he moved closer. “Tomorrow? After work?” he asked, his tone a little more tentative, as if waiting for your confirmation.

You nodded, your heart racing a little faster now. “Tomorrow works. Let’s say, six?”

He gave a small, excited nod, clearly trying to contain his enthusiasm. “Perfect. I’ll pick you up. I’ll make sure not to keep you waiting.”

You both stood there for a moment, the air thick with anticipation, before he gave a final smile and turned to leave. “See you tomorrow, Y/N.”

As he exited the room, Leo wagged his tail, clearly eager to follow. You watched him walk out, a mixture of excitement and nervousness bubbling up inside you. You leaned against the exam room table for a second, trying to catch your breath, before shaking yourself out of the daze. You still had a job to do, but you couldn’t help but smile to yourself as the thought of tomorrow played over in your mind.

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cybergoth1 · 9 days ago

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﹟— ❛❛cause when you know you know. part 1.

☆﹟— paring: fem!reader x dick grayson.

☆﹟— summary: you've always had dick grayson's heart in your hands, since you were just sixteen.

☆﹟— warnings/tags: dick grayson x fem!reader. reader is an awkward dork. fluffy. dick is yearning. spiderwoman!reader. best friends to lovers (?). these two mfs are the same person in different fonts. reader is a mix of tom holland’s spiderman and the comics. rip uncle ben. the amazing divider was made by @bernardsbendystraws, thank you!. some spiderman: homecoming lore. ☆﹟— MASTERLIST. NEXT.

WAYNE GALAS WERE ALWAYS THE SAME — stiff, over decorated affairs where assholes shook hands and smiled fake smiles over champagne. At sixteen, Dick Grayson knew the routine like the back of his hand. He also knew how to blend into the background when he wasn’t in the mood to charm the crowds. It was from that vantage point, leaning casually against a marble pillar, that he first noticed you.

You stood a few steps behind Tony Stark, looking wildly out of place among Gotham’s elite. Wrapped in a simple blue dress that couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be fancy or modest, you shifted your weight awkwardly from foot to foot, clutching a small purse like it might save you from drowning in a sea of tuxedos and designer gowns.

Dick’s lips quirked into a small smile. Adorable.

Tony Stark, of course, was in full showman mode, gesturing animatedly as he spoke with Bruce Wayne. The two billionaires were discussing the latest partnership between Stark Industries and Wayne Enterprises — a massive clean energy project meant to transform both Gotham and New York. The media was already drooling over it.

"…game-changer for the East Coast, Bruce," Tony was saying, his voice easily cutting over the soft hum of the orchestra. "Your tech, my tech — it’s like peanut butter and genius. Together, unstoppable."

Bruce nodded, ever the composed businessman. "It sounds promising. If we can get the logistics right."

"And we will," Tony said with his usual effortless confidence. Then, spotting Dick nearby — or maybe just looking for an excuse to brag — he turned slightly and gestured toward you.

"And speaking of genius," he said, "I’d like you to meet my brilliant intern. Absolute prodigy. I’m basically babysitting her before someone smarter steals her."

You blinked, startled by the sudden attention, and gave Bruce a stiff little wave, your fingers curling awkwardly halfway through. Dick had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

Bruce, gentleman as ever, extended his hand. "It’s a pleasure to meet you."

You hurried forward, shaking his hand a little too quickly. "Um — thank you, Mr. Wayne. It’s, uh, an honor to be here."

Tony clapped a hand on your shoulder, nearly knocking you off balance. "Kid’s working on tech that’ll make arc reactors look like antique junk. Don’t let the nerves fool you — she’s the real deal."

Bruce raised an eyebrow, intrigued. "Is that so? I’d love to hear more about your work sometime."

You flushed bright red, mumbling something about polymer synthesis and energy conductivity — something brilliant that Dick couldn’t entirely follow, but he caught enough to be impressed. And amused. You were so obviously genuine — completely different from the polished, self-important guests around you.

Bruce must’ve picked up on your nerves too. With a small, reassuring smile, he glanced to the side.

"Allow me to introduce my son," he said, motioning to Dick. "Dick Grayson."

At the mention of his name, Dick pushed off the pillar and approached with an easy, charming smile — the kind that made Gotham’s elite swoon. But the second your eyes met, you visibly froze like you weren’t sure whether to shake his hand, run away, or throw up.

"H-hi," you said, voice quick, bright — and unmistakably thick with a Queens accent. "It’s, uh, real nice to meetcha."

Dick grinned wider, immediately charmed. "Pleasure’s mine," he said, reaching out.

You hesitated for a beat, then took his hand. Your grip was surprisingly firm, even if your face was screaming pure panic.

Tony almost chuckled. "She’s from Queens," he explained. "You know — where people actually say what they mean and don’t take an hour to do it."

You gave an embarrassed little shrug. You looked like you want to throw up.

That earned a real laugh from Dick, warm and easy. You smiled too — a real smile this time, the kind that crinkled your eyes and hit him somewhere he hadn’t expected. Bruce’s phone buzzed discreetly in his pocket. He glanced at the screen, then gave a small, apologetic nod. "If you’ll excuse me," he said. "Duty calls."

He slipped away, leaving you, Tony, and Dick standing awkwardly together by the marble column.

Tony, never missing a beat, gave Dick a mock-serious look. "Why don’t you two go mingle? God knows she needs more friends."

You groaned under your breath. "Oh my god, Mr. Stark, please don’t."

Dick just laughed again. He fell easily into step beside you as Tony wandered off to schmooze with some politicians. You walked stiffly at first, hyperaware of every move you made in the ridiculously fancy heels Stark had bullied you into wearing.

"So," Dick said, shooting you a grin as he offered you a glass of sparkling water from a passing tray, "Queens, huh? That explains the accent."

You accepted the drink with a sheepish smile. "Yeah. Born and raised. It’s pretty different from all this… you know, money and marble columns."

Dick laughed. "Trust me, you’re not missing much. All it means is you get invited to boring parties like this one."

You laughed too — a real, snorting laugh that made a couple of nearby socialites glance over disapprovingly. You barely noticed.

"So, what’s it like working for Iron man?" Dick asked, tilting his head in that way that made his hair fall a little into his eyes. He probably practiced looking that effortlessly cool in the mirror.

You shrugged, taking a sip of your drink. "Kinda like babysitting a genius toddler with unlimited money and no fear of death."

Dick barked a short laugh. "Sounds about right."

You hesitated, then added, "But seriously? He’s been good to me. Not a lotta people would take a chance on some random kid from Queens."

Dick raised an eyebrow, interested. "Random? C’mon, Stark made it sound like you were about to solve the energy crisis or something."

You snorted again, feeling a little more at ease. "I mean, maybe. Eventually. If I don’t blow up a lab first."

He grinned at that, the easy kind of grin that made you feel like you could tell him anything. So, without really thinking, you shrugged and said, "Plus, I kinda get it. I grew up pretty rough, y’know? Not a lotta money. Lost my folks when I was little."

You said it so casually — like you were talking about the weather — that it took a second for Dick to process.

His smile softened, the cocky edge fading just a little. "Yeah?" he said, voice a little lower now, a little more real. "Me too."

You blinked, surprised. "Wait, really?"

He nodded, tapping two fingers against his chest lightly. "Orphan club. Lifetime membership."

You gave him a crooked smile. "Guess that makes us, like, trauma buddies or something."

Dick chuckled, but there was a warmth in his eyes now that hadn’t been there before. "Guess so. But hey," he added, nudging your shoulder lightly, "at least you’re smart enough to build your way outta Queens."

You shrugged again, feeling your face heat. "Yeah, well. You’re the one who looks like he belongs in a magazine."

Dick gave you a mock-offended gasp. "Are you saying I’m just a pretty face?"

You bit your lip, trying not to laugh. "I’m just sayin’, you definitely got the rich kid smile down."

He laughed, full and bright, and for a second it felt like the two of you were the only ones in the whole stupid, glittering ballroom.

SIX MONTHS PASSED WITHOUT you or him even noticing. Long-distance friendships were supposed to fade, or at least get awkward. Yours didn’t. Despite being hundreds of miles apart — you in New York, Dick in Gotham — you and him texted, called, and memed at each other like your lives depended on it. Some nights you stayed up until 3 AM talking about everything and nothing at the same time. School drama. Terrible cafeteria food. The best ways to take down a guy twice your size when you were stuck in a tight suit.

It didn’t take long before the truth slipped out.

You were Spiderwoman. He was Robin.

The discovery was a complete accident — a FaceTime call cut short when you had to swing off mid-conversation to stop a robbery, your phone falling out of your pocket mid-swing, the screen still open as Dick watched wide-eyed.

You expected him to freak out.

Instead, he just texted:

"dude... that's so sick. also ur form was trash lol. we’re training next time ur in gotham."

When Homecoming season rolled around, you weren’t even planning on going. Crowded dances weren’t really your thing. But then Tony Stark, with his usual flair for the dramatic, said something like, “Kid, you gotta have at least one normal high school experience before you get arrested by the feds or something,” and signed you up himself.

The only problem?

You didn’t have a date.

Which is why, two weeks later, you stood frozen on the sidewalk outside Midtown Tech, wearing a dress that you had panic-ordered online, while Dick freaking Grayson leaned casually against a rented black car looking like he’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine.

Sleek suit. Easy smile. Blue eyes that sparkled when they landed on you.

You gawked. He whistled low under his breath.

"You clean up nice, Queens," he said, offering you his arm.

You shoved his shoulder lightly, face burning. "You’re literally Bruce Wayne’s kid. You clean up by existing."

Still, you took his arm.

Inside the gym — decorated with cheap streamers and a truly tragic DJ — heads turned immediately. Whispers broke out like wildfire.

"Wait… is that Bruce Wayne’s son?"

"He’s so hot in person. I just saw an article about The Flying Graysons-"

"Eww, isn’t that weird ass chick from the Decathlon Team?"

Enhanced earring. Sometimes you hate that. You spotted Ned across the room near the snack table, eyes wide as saucers. He threw you the most aggressive thumbs-up you had ever seen.

You nearly burst out laughing.

Dick, of course, noticed everything — the stares, the whispers — and just tightened his hold on your arm, leaning down to murmur in your ear: "They’re just jealous they didn’t think of asking you first."

You rolled your eyes, grinning. "Shut up, Gotham."

"You love me," he teased, winking.

You tried to play it cool.

Tried to act like your heart wasn’t punching itself in the face.

Instead, you just said, "Whatever, rich boy. Let’s dance before I regret this."

And somehow, with Dick’s hand wrapped around yours and the gym lights flickering overhead, you realized you were having the best night of your life — cheap decorations, judgmental classmates, bad punch and all. No crimes, no tight suits, just the arms of your best friend around you.

SOME YEARS LATER...

NEW YORK CITY SMELLED LIKE hot dog stands, wet pavement, and cheap coffee. It was comforting, in a weird way — grounding, like an old song you never forgot the words to. It smelled like home.

You had just finished your doctorate at Empire State University — biophysics, the degree that had nearly broken you with sleepless nights and endless labs. Four years of undergrad, another six buried under papers and research grants, all while swinging through the city rooftops under a different name.

You were proud, sure. But pride didn’t pay rent, which meant you were still picking up gigs at the Daily Bugle, still hustling freelance science writing jobs, still showing up at FEAST with boxes of canned goods, just trying to help where you could.

You huffed, adjusting the box in your arms as you kicked open the back door. Aunt May had been working at FEAST full-time now ever since she retired, and somehow, you always found yourself drawn back here too. Helping people — it was kind of your thing. Always had been.

What you didn’t expect was to walk into the kitchen and see him—

Leaning casually against the counter like he owned the place, grinning like he hadn’t just crossed two state lines without so much as a warning.

"Hey, trouble."

You blinked, nearly dropping the box.

"Dick?!"

He flashed that damn movie-star smile at you — the one that should’ve come with a warning label. "Miss me?"

"What the hell are you doing here?" you cried, laughing as you dropped the box on the table and practically launched yourself at him.

Dick caught you without hesitation, his arms wrapping around you in a warm, easy hug. You hadn’t realized how much you needed it until right now. Twelve years. Twelve years of growing up side-by-side, saving cities, teasing each other over coms, late-night phone calls just to vent about patrol. And yet somehow, seeing him in person after a few months apart hit you harder than you expected.

You pulled back. "You idiot! You’re supposed to call before you show up in my city."

"What, and ruin the surprise?" he teased, ruffling your hair — which earned him a murderous glare from you. "Besides, I figured Aunt May could use some extra hands around here."

May appeared in the doorway at that exact moment, wiping her hands on her apron. Her face lit up when she saw Dick. "Richard, honey! It’s so good to see you!"

"Richard," you snickered under your breath, watching Dick grimace in horror as May pulled him into a hug.

"She’s the only one allowed to call me that," he grumbled as he shot you a look over May’s shoulder.

You grinned. God, you’d missed him.

There was a way Dick fit into your life that no one else could replicate — like he was the missing piece to a puzzle you hadn’t even realized was incomplete. Maybe it was the history. Maybe it was the fact that you understood each other in ways that no one else ever could — the grief, the pressure, the guilt that came from trying to save people and knowing it would never be enough.

Maybe it was just him.

Because somewhere along the line, Dick Grayson had gone from Gotham’s golden boy to Nightwing — the heart of Blüdhaven, the hero everyone loved. He wasn’t just a sidekick anymore. He was the blueprint.

Kids in Blüdhaven wore Nightwing shirts and told stories about how he’d saved their dad or helped their aunt or dropped off Christmas gifts at the shelters. He was the hero people wanted to be — not just because he was good with his fists, but because he never stopped believing the world could be better.

You were proud of him in a way you couldn’t even put into words.

And looking at him now — a little older, a little more worn around the edges, but still him — you realized how much he still made you feel like you weren’t alone in any of it. He was your best friend and your family.

You saw May kissing his left cheek before going back to the main room, it was time to serve lunch.

"So," he began, leaning against the counter with that casual drawl he used when he was trying way too hard to sound chill, "how’s your thing with MJ going?"

His tone was careful — soft — like he knew exactly how much of a train wreck your love life had been lately. How you always ended up back at square one: alone.

You shrugged, shooting him a half-hearted smile.

"Eh. How’s your thing with Babs going?"

You tossed the question back at him without missing a beat, raising your brows pointedly.

Dick mirrored your shrug, lips twitching.

"Eh."

There was a brief pause — the kind only two people who knew each other too well could slip into without it feeling awkward — and then you smirked.

"Well, there’s your problem. You’re into gingers."

He snorted. "You’re into gingers."

You pointed at him like you just cracked the code of the universe.

"Exactly. That’s why we both have commitment issues. Everyone knows gingers are secretly evil."

Dick barked a laugh, shaking his head.

"Evil and dangerously attractive. It’s a lose-lose."

"Honestly," you sighed dramatically, "it’s not our fault we keep getting attached to soulless, beautiful monsters."

He grinned wide, that stupidly charming Nightwing grin.

"Soulless monsters — sounds like half the people we fight too."

"At least fighting bad guys doesn’t leave me crying into a tub of ice cream at two a.m."

Dick’s eyes twinkled with mischief.

"I guess you forgot your little friend Felicia Hardy in this sentence."

You gasped, smacking his arm — not hard enough to hurt, but enough to make your point.

"That was one time and she tricked me!"

"Uh-huh," Dick said, smirking as he rubbed his arm dramatically. "And then she ghosted you and stole your watch. And your wallet".

You groaned.

"I told you that in confidence, you traitor."

He grinned even wider, clearly enjoying himself.

"You’re lucky I’m your best friend and not, you know, selling these stories to the tabloids."

You gave him a half-hearted glare before letting out a snort.

"Yeah, because Nightwing Reveals Spiderwoman Got Played by Cat Thief would really earn you some credibility."

Dick shrugged, unbothered. "Might finally knock me off GQ’s ‘Sexiest Heroes Alive’ list. Honestly, it’s getting exhausting."

You laughed, the sound bursting out of you before you could stop it. God, you missed this. The easy rhythm of you and Dick — how he could drag you out of any dark place with just a few dumb jokes and a mischievous glint in his eye.

"But come on now, sexiest hero alive," you teased, nudging him lightly with your elbow. "Why are you truly in New York?"

Your face ached from how much you’d been smiling. It was almost enough to make you forget the three broken ribs healing under your shirt and the nasty wound stitched up on your left thigh. Almost.

Dick just shrugged, the corner of his mouth tugging up into a half-smile.

"Nothing at all," he said lightly. "Just missed you."

You squinted at him, unconvinced.

"Missed me enough to leave your city to crumble without Nightwing?"

"Don’t be dramatic," he said, rolling his eyes fondly. "Tim’s covering me this weekend. Blüdhaven’s in good hands."

You studied him again — really studied him — noticing how his bright blue eyes suddenly dipped away from yours, shyness creeping into his expression. Dick sighed, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, like he was bracing himself.

"It’s May fourth," he said quietly.

You froze for a beat. Of course.

You didn’t need him to say anything else. You knew exactly what that date meant.

Uncle Ben’s death anniversary.

You were so burried into your Spiderwoman's stuff last night that you forgot all about Ben, you didn't even noticed how sad May was this morning. A lump formed in your throat. The pain was still there, buried deep. It always was. Even with all the miles between you and that night, the guilt, the regret — it never quite left. You thought you had it under control, thought you had it buried in the same corner where you stashed all your unresolved issues. But not today. Not with Dick here, looking at you like that.

You were about to say something, anything, to push the conversation somewhere else. But Dick stepped closer, the usual teasing smirk gone. His gaze softened, his voice quiet, steady.

"You still blame yourself, don’t you?"

The question hit harder than you’d expected, like he’d plucked the thought right from your mind. You met his eyes for the first time since he’d dropped that bomb. The guilt, all of it, was there — clear and raw. You didn’t need to say a word.

He sighed, stepping closer, until his body was just a breath away from yours. His hand brushed against your arm, the touch warm, gentle.

"Hey," he murmured, his voice low and comforting. "You can’t save everyone. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that."

You almost laughed at how ridiculous it sounded coming from him. Dick Grayson — Nightwing, a hero, a Titan — was the one who saved people, who did the impossible. He was the one who made sure no one fell through the cracks. He was everybody's safety net.

"I’m not like you," you whispered. The words sounded bitter in your mouth. "I’m not like him. I could’ve done more, should’ve done more. I—"

"Stop," Dick interrupted, his voice firm but caring. "You did everything you could. But you can’t do it all, especially not alone."

You looked up at him, his blue eyes meeting yours, soft with understanding. There was no judgment in his gaze — only the kind of acceptance that made your chest tighten. He’d seen your worst moments. And somehow, even in those, he still cared.

He was always there, wasn’t he? Even when it felt like the whole world was crashing down around you, he was the constant you could rely on. He didn’t need to say a word — he just was.

"I’m sorry," you muttered, shaking your head. "I should’ve been better, Dick. He deserved better. He would be alive—"

Dick’s hand moved to your shoulder, his grip solid, like he was holding you together in a way no one else could.

"You don’t have to carry that on your own," he said quietly. "And you don’t have to keep punishing yourself, either. Ben wouldn’t want that."

You clenched your jaw, trying to swallow the lump in your throat. But the dam was breaking. Slowly, painfully, the tears you didn’t realize were there started to well up. And Dick — always, always there — pulled you into his arms without hesitation.

"Hey," he whispered into your hair, his voice soothing, "You’re not alone. I’m here, alright? And so is May. We’re all here."

You clung to him for a second longer than you probably should’ve, your hands gripping the back of his shirt like it was a lifeline. Maybe it was. You hadn’t realized how badly you needed this. You squeezed your eyes shut, pressing your forehead into his shoulder, trying to swallow the emotion threatening to spill over.

Eventually, you pulled back, just a little, blinking away the tears. Your chest felt lighter, like the weight of the years had shifted just a little.

"Thanks," you said, voice thick. "I really needed that."

Dick’s thumb brushed carefully along your jaw, grounding you. You stared up at him, the breath catching in your chest, and for a long moment, he just looked at you — like he was memorizing you, seeing every crack, every bruise, and not turning away.

Then, without a word, he leaned in and pressed a soft, steady kiss to your forehead. Just like many others he gave you in these past twelve years. He lingered there, letting the touch say all the things neither of you could voice out loud.

When he finally pulled back, he dropped another kiss, featherlight, to the tip of your nose — the smallest, softest thing — and it broke something inside you in the best way. It wasn’t romantic, not in the big, sweeping way movies liked to show. It was better. It was pure, steady, real. The kind of love that had nothing to prove and nowhere to go. It just was.

You closed your eyes for a second, breathing him in — the faint smell of his cologne, the leather of his jacket, the clean sweat of someone who lived moving, fighting, surviving. When you opened your eyes again, he was still there, hands steady, smile small and genuine.

"You’re such an ugly crier, Webs," Dick said, voice full of teasing warmth as he wiped your cheeks with his thumbs. "Is that snot? Seriously?"

You let out a wet, broken laugh. "Fuck off — my uncle died, you asshole."

"I know, I know," he said, his grin tugging at the corner of his mouth even as his eyes stayed soft, careful. He cupped your face between his hands like you were something fragile and precious, his thumbs brushing away the tears and — yeah, maybe a little snot too. "You’re allowed to cry. Even if you do it… extremely unattractively."

You hiccupped a miserable sound and buried your face in his shoulder. Dick just laughed under his breath and tucked you closer, like he could shield you from the whole damn world if you let him.

"You’re the worst," you muttered thickly into his neck.

For a minute, you just breathed together. No words. No expectations. Then you heard the familiar shuffle of footsteps and Aunt May’s voice coming from the kitchen doorway.

"Well, isn’t this the cutest thing I’ve seen all week."

You jerked upright, immediately wiping your face. Dick just threw an arm lazily around your shoulders, pulling you into his side like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Hey, May," he said brightly, like you weren’t two seconds away from crumbling.

Aunt May just smiled knowingly, walking over to kiss your temple and then ruffle Dick’s hair, making him squawk in protest. "Always good to see you, honey. But next time, you know, call first".

"Yes, ma’am," he grumbled, fixing his hair like some offended cat.

"Come on, you two," she said, already turning back toward the kitchen. "There’s leftovers from dinner. You can eat and then help me serving lunch. We have new people here needing help and Miles is really anxious about meeting your friend".

Ah, Miles. He's a great kid and hero. Dick's probably gonna like him. Dick squeezed your shoulder gently. "Race you to the table, ugly crier."

You elbowed him hard in the ribs, but you were laughing. Really laughing. Later that day, standing in front of Uncle Ben’s grave, the city felt quieter and worst than usual. Maybe it was just the way your heart was beating — slow, heavy, a little cracked around the edges. You stared at the headstone until the words blurred, the lump in your throat too thick to swallow.

Without a word, Dick stepped closer and pulled you against his side, wrapping an arm around your shoulders. His fingers found yours easily, lacing them together like they belonged there, like they always had. He squeezed your hand and then, without any hesitation, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

It was so soft it made your eyes sting all over again.

You leaned into him, letting his strength anchor you, feeling his heartbeat steady against your side. The sun dipped lower, the air turning cooler, but neither of you moved. You could always hear his heartbeat, even when he wasn't in the same room as you. Nice part of having powers. You have the sound memorized in your head.

Dick didn’t rush you. He didn’t tell you it was time to go, or that you had to be strong, or that Ben was in a better place. He just stayed — solid and silent and sure — holding you. He spent the whole evening there with you, never once letting go of your hand. May was in front of you, mourning in her own way. In silence.

When the city lights finally started to blink on in the distance, you turned your face into his shoulder and whispered, voice cracking, "Thank you."

Dick just squeezed your hand tighter, pressing another kiss to your hairline.

"Always, Webs," he murmured against your hair. "Always." like they belonged there, like they always had.

©cybergoth1, 2025

#dc x y/n #dick grayson x reader #dc imagine #nightwing x reader #dick grayson x y/n #dick grayson #dc x reader #spider person #reader is spiderwoman #fem!reader #dc comics #dick grayson x female!reader #dick grayson x you

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misctf · 9 months ago

Text

Trouble at the Bachelor Party

“Dude! This is sick!”

“Bro, you’re telling me.” Liam replied, as him and his two friends explored the penthouse.

It was fully decked out. A massive flatscreen in the living room, a fully stocked bar, a beautiful view of the beach. It was everything Liam could’ve wanted. Initially, when his soon to be father-in-law offered his penthouse for the bachelor party, Liam was shocked. Mr. Reynolds often used phrases like “irresponsible”, “waste of time”, and “not good enough for my daughter” when talking about Liam. And he wasn’t afraid to let Liam know too.

“Dude! There’s a flatscreen in each bedroom too!” Chris shouted from down the hall, “Fuck, you were right. This guy’s loaded!”

It was true. Liam was marrying the heiress of a massive tech company. And Mr. Reynonds was certainly loaded. But despite his reassurances that he loved Susie, not their money, the older man viewed him suspiciously. Liam came from a pretty humble background and the world of upper class living wasn’t something he was used to. But perhaps letting them use his penthouse was Mr. Reynolds’s way of showing acceptance.

“Okay boys.” Liam said, “We have a few days here. Let’s make ‘em count.” He tossed Jeremy and Chris each a beer. After a quick toast to what was going to be the most incredible bachelor party on Earth, they downed their beers.

________________

“Lookin’ good.” Liam chuckled as he inspected himself in the mirror, “Can’t believe you’re actually getting hitched.” He flexed his bicep, “Sorry ladies, I’m off the market. Oof, I’ll have to practice that line a bit.” He grinned.

Leaving the bathroom, he found Jeremy sipping a beer on the couch. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of blue swim trunks. His dark brown hair was well styled, and his face clean shaven. He had that boy-next- door look that caused the ladies to swoon.

“Yo Jeremy, what’s up?”

“Not much, just texting Sarah.” He replied, “I forgot to let her know I got here safe and she’s pissed.”

“Oh shit dude.” Liam patted his friend on the back, “I feel for you.” Sarah could be scary when she was angry, but otherwise she was a solid 10. Liam looked forward to the day Jeremy proposed.

“All good.” Jeremy sighed, “Where the fuck is Chris?” Liam shrugged, “He kept me up all fucking night. Fucker must’ve been horny. I’ve never heard anyone moan so loud in my life.”

“Not even Sarah?” Jeremy didn’t seem amused.

“Seriously, we need to get him a girlfriend or something.”

Liam chuckled, “I guess I slept through it.”

“Lucky you.” The door to Chris's room suddenly opened and both men turned.

“Hey boys, sorry to keep you waiting!” The sing songy voice threw them both off, and Liam’s jaw dropped when he saw Chris. His muscles were proudly on display as always. But it was the tight speedo showing off his impressive bulge that shocked him, “Oh, is something wrong?” His voice carried a breathy sultriness, which was unusual for their bro.

“Dude, I’m not one to judge, but don’t you think that’s a bit risqué?” Jeremy asked, raising an eyebrow, “What would Jesus say?” It was well known Chris was religious. In fact, Liam and Chris had met at their college’s church.

Chris shrugged and ran a hand through his curly light brown hair, “Oh this? You like?” He grinned and did a quick pose, “Come on boys, we’re burning daylight!” He said, sauntering towards the door.

________________

The walk to the beach was uncomfortable. Chris walked ahead of his two buddies at an unusually fast pace, his firm ass jiggling with each step. Liam didn’t even know where to begin. What the fuck had gotten into Chris? Usually they’d have to drag him to parties and give him pep talks to boost his confidence. But now? He was certainly turning heads.

“Wait, guys! Did you see that?” Chris asked, turning to his friends and waving excitedly, “That guy over there was totally checking me out!”

“Um, so what?” Jeremy asked, “Why do you care?”

“Do you think I should go after him? He was totally cute. And that ass- just wow.” Liam and Jeremy’s eyes widened, “What?”

“Are you gay?” Liam asked bluntly.

Chris placed a hand to his chin and shrugged, “Like totally! Since like forever probably.”

“Makes sense.” Jeremy said, “Repressed religious guys. It’s a thing.” But Liam was still having a somewhat hard time believing it. Was all their prior bro talk really a lie?

“Oh! He’s getting away!” Chris whined, “I’ll catch up with you later!” He blew them each a kiss and briskly walked over to the man from earlier, leaving Liam shook.

________________

Hours went by without hearing from Chris, and Liam’s mood tanked. Jeremy tried to cheer him up back at the penthouse. Beers and the big game on a flatscreen. Should’ve been perfect. But it wasn’t. Liam knew that Chris being gay shouldn’t matter. Good for him, right?

“Oh my god, that was incredible.” Chris said, gasping as he entered the penthouse, “How are my two besties doing?”

“Would’ve liked you around.” Liam replied, “It’s my bachelor party after all.”

Chris dramatically placed a hand to his sweaty chest, “Sue me for having fun!” His voice cracked and he headed towards his room, “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my room.”

Liam didn’t reply. Sure, Chris is gay. Fine. But acting like a stereotypically fruity drama queen? That didn’t make sense to him. He turned to Jeremy.

“Look, its late and I’m tired. The game sucks anyway.” He said, “I’m off to bed.”

“Same bro. Gotta be up early for our tee time anyway.”

They went to their respective bedrooms. Once there, Jeremy sighed. He hated seeing his friend like this, but what could he do? Talk to Chris maybe? He'd try to salvage this party. But when he finally got comfortable in bed, the TV suddenly turned on. He was greeted by static.

“Weird.” He mumbled. He tried to turn it off with the remote, but failed. Sighing, he got out of bed to turn it off. But as he got closer, he could hear a voice. It was soft, but forceful.

“You are a gay slut. You like to fuck men.”

Jeremy raised an eyebrow, “What the fuck?” He whispered. But the voice only got louder.

“You are a gay slut. Your dick only gets hard for men.” Jeremy felt woozy as the voice reverberated in his head.

“No, I’m straight... I like...” He moaned loudly as the voice drowned out his thoughts. At this point, the screen was flashing various scenes of gay porn and Jeremy’s dick started to swell, “No... fuck...” He breathed out, “I-I... ughhh.” He tried to imagine tits and his nights with Sarah. But these thoughts were instead swapped out with images of juicy, jiggling bubble butts and twerking men.

“You are a dominant top. You only fuck men.”

“I-I’m a gay slut?” Jeremy questioned, “I only like to fuck men?” That didn't sound right. Right? He never...

"You are a dominant top. Twinks are lucky to ride your dick."

His eyes became half lidded and vacant as the words carved his new reality.

“I’m a dominant top. Twinks are lucky to ride this cock." He said confidently, "I am a gay slut.”

Soon, the room filled with his pleasure-filled moans, his new reality taking hold over him.

________________

When Liam entered the living room the next morning, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Jeremy was aggressively caressing Chris’s face, as the two made out on the couch with their erect dicks on full display.

“What the fuck?” Liam gasped as the two men turned towards him.

“Oh Liam! Good morning!” Chris sang, ending his kiss with Jeremy.

“Fuck, just who we were waiting for.” Jeremy commented in a lower, more gravelly voice, “We have something for you.”

“No, this is fucked. What the fuck?” Liam fumed, “What about Sarah? What were you thinking?”

Jeremy shrugged, “I only like fucking men.”

Liam shook his head, “No way, fuck that.” He replied, taking a step back.

“Oh goodness, you’re upset!” Chris whined, “No Liam baby, its okay. Here, watch this.”

Before Liam could say anything, Chris turned on the TV. Static filled his field of vision. But then he heard it. Faint at first, but present nonetheless.

“You are a gay slut.” It said, and Liam grabbed his head.

“What the fuck?” He cursed, stumbling slightly.

The voice was echoing from within his head. Desperately, he moved towards the TV, wanting to shut it off. But Jeremy grabbed his arm firmly and forced him to sit between them. Liam tried to fight back, to get away from his two friends, but he felt so disoriented. The voice continued.

“You are a gay slut. You like taking cock.” It said.

Liam yelped as a needle entered his skin. He looked down to see Chris dump the contents of a syringe into his arm.

“Wh-what was that?” Liam slurred.

“Don’t worry, cutie. Just listen to the voice.” He giggled.

Liam groaned as the voice got louder and louder, “You are a gay slut. A slutty bottom. You love taking cock.”

Liam looked down and watched as his body hair started to disappear. Gone was his light dusting of chest and belly hairs, leaving him smooth. At the same time, the scruff framing his face vanished. He looked over to Jeremy, who smirked at this new development.

“Oh look at that! It’s totally working!” Chris giggled.

“No shit. Reynolds must’ve given us the good stuff.” Jeremy remarked, slowly massaging his cock.

“The good stuff?” Liam slurred, his voice cracking, “Like, what are you talking about?”

“Good because I was getting bored.” Chris sighed, “I mean, Jeremy baby, you’re an expert kisser, but like, I need a hole.” Jeremy nodded in agreement.

“A hole?” Liam whispered.

He let out a pained moan as his body temperature suddenly spiked. Sweat poured from him as his musculature dwindled away. His hard earned muscles atrophied before his terrified eyes. His bulging biceps and triceps became thin and lean, while his juicy pecs rapidly deflated. In a matter of minutes, years of workouts and optimal dieting were undone, leaving Liam slim and fragile.

“Wow, he’s so light now.” Jeremy chuckled as he man-handled his friend onto his lap. Liam yelped at the sensation of Jeremy’s erect cock grinding against his hole.

“Oh and he’s gotten shorter too! What a cutie.” Chris cooed.

“Ah, ass is still bony though.” Jeremy commented, giving it a firm squeeze.

But Liam barely registered any of this. Instead, his thoughts were filled with the words echoing from the TV. His eyes became half-lidded at this point and his resistance was fading.

“You’re just a bottom, a hole to be used by other men. You are a gay slut.” The words continued, “You like being used by other men. Your only pleasure is from getting fucked.”

“I-I’m straight... I like... I like tits.” He knew his voice sounds more feminine somehow and he cringed, “I’m a straight man.” Jeremy and Chris smirked, “I-I...” images of men getting fucked in all kinds of positions flashed on the TV, “Ohhhh I... I... I’m a...” Liam’s handsome face lost its masculine edge and his hair became lighter in color. At the same time, his cock started to shrink. Inch after inch lost as it retracted back, “Noooooo.... not my cock...” He moaned, tears now stinging at his eyes. His manhood, his masculinity. It was being stolen from him. And he was unable to stop it.

“Your only pleasure comes from your ass.”

Liam moaned again and this time his ass started to fill with jiggly fat. He could feel the extra padding build upon itself, his slim cheeks turning into mounds of soft flesh. And as Jeremy squeezed his ass again, pleasure filled his slim frame.

“Much better.” Jeremy remarked, his fingers massaging Liam’s hole, “Fuck, this is gonna feel so good.”

“Mhmm.” Chris replied, grabbing his own fistful of Liam’s juicy ass.

“Ohhhhhhhh yesssssss.” Liam slurred.

“So, what are you?” Jeremy asked.

“I-I’m...” Part of him didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to acknowledge it. But as his lips plumped up into gorgeous cock suckers, and Jeremy’s teasing fingers penetrated him deeper, Liam was drowning in too much pleasure to care, “I...I...” The voice was so loud. It egged him on, beckoned him to admit his new truth. He wanted- no needed- to be like the men on the screen. To be fucked and used by other men. Who was he kidding? He knew what he was, “I’m like a total gay slut! I love cock.” He turned his head to look at Jeremy, then Chris, “Please daddies, use me! I need your cocks!” He begged.

And his new lovers were happy to oblige.

________________

In the afterglow of sex, the three men sat panting heavily on the couch. Liam was curled up between his two lovers, still rubbing their dicks. Despite draining them each multiple times over, he needed more. But his horny thoughts were interrupted by a video call. He grabbed his phone and smiled.

“Hey Mr. Reynolds!” Liam slurred, “Like, we love your penthouse.”

Mr. Reynolds grinned, “I can tell.” His eyes sparkled with satisfaction, “Look at you Liam. My god. You turned out better than expected. The boys at the lab earned their salaries with this one.” Liam nodded along, not really understanding the implication, “How do you feel?”

“Like a total gay slut.” He grinned, “And I love it, like so much, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Well I’m glad to hear.” he chuckled, “And are your friends treating you well?” Liam adjusted the phone so the older man could see his two lovers, who were both fast asleep, “Well looks like you have two very satisfied customers.”

Liam grinned, “Like totally.” A sense of satisfaction filling him, “Oh! Like, can you let Susie know the wedding is off? I’m like, so sorry.”

“Of course, it would be my pleasure. She’ll understand.” Mr. Reynolds replied- mission accomplished, “Now, get back to your party. Enjoy the penthouse for as long as you want.”

Liam’s eyes lit up, “OMG thank you!” The call ended, “Did you hear that?” Liam asked, his two lovers stirring awake.

And so their party continued- and it would for days. Their lives forever changed, and them none the wiser to it. But if their pleasure filled moans were anything to judge by, they certainly weren’t complaining.

#male tf #male transformation #mental change #straight to gay #personality tf #twink tf #gay hypnosis

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endthisdream · 9 months ago

Text

bkdk

it’s all for izuku; the reason he marches forward, pushes himself to the limit.

—

the last eight years has kacchan working hard to get that tech for izu. when i think about it, i swoon at how romantic it is.

#bkdk #bakudeku #ktdk #katsudeku

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prettychaos1409 · 8 months ago

Text

If Tech had a decent hairline, he’d be too powerful 😂

You guys it’s actually crazy how calming S1 feels haha and I know there r still stakes and stressful moments but they feel so small compared to what’s to come 😓😭😂

Also to quote my uncle as we watched a few more episodes tn ‘Man, Tech is cool but it’s a shame the genius has to get the receding hairline. Why couldn’t the Kaminoan's cut him a break?'

#everyone would swoon #star wars #the bad batch #tbb tech #sw tbb

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lovelyyandereaddictionpoint · 3 months ago

Text

Yandere Ex Step “Kids” x Reader

Where the man you're dating and soon to marry have their reservations about you. Considering you're closer to their age and their father has millions in his name...

Thinking about the Step-family in question being adults; well established and acting on their own from their aging father

Unknowingly letting him fall prey to you

Walking Temptation with a hunger for deep pockets and a smile innocent enough to make anyone swoon

It’s a shock when the next time they see their dad for the holidays he’s got you on his arm

Just a little bit older than them (half his age) and with a giant engagement ring on your finger

“You like it? Your dad got it for me when we were in Dubai!”

“Uh Dad can I have a word? Alone?”

Taniya, his eldest is the hardest to grill you

Being incredibly open with her suspicions about you

And she’s the most vigilant when it comes to reprimanding her father for spoiling you

“Dad think about it (Y/n) doesn’t need another sports car! You’ve already gotten them two!”

In no uncertain terms, you’re sure Taniya hates your guts

If the way all the restaurants your future husband has worked with for some reason can’t serve you has anything to say about it, that’s likely the case

But you don’t mind!

That way you can take your man to the best place to get croquettes

Yeah it’s sketchy but that’s what his bodyguards are for

The second worst is his youngest, Titan

Classic attention-hungry influencer son who thinks pranks on you are going viral because everyone enjoys your misery as much as he does

“Your misery” is the curious tilt of your head when you find the leather seats of your range rover decorated with glitter

Doesn’t really bother you though, so you’ll show off your new interior to all your new followers on socials

Wonder where they came from

Finally the middle son Tariq always forgotten but not quite estranged doesn’t seem to dislike you too much

After all, he did start coming around the villa more since you’ve moved in

“Oh hey (Y/n) I heard those flowers my dad got you went missing, it just so happens to work out that I brought you some.”

“Those are my favorites! How did you know?”

“Lucky guess. Anyway, I heard you got the latest VR tech, want to show me how it works?”

For a while you fall into a cycle with your fiance and his family

Eventually tying the knot in a luxurious venue in front of hundreds of masked billionaires

Of course, all your older husband’s kids decide to be civil

And all is well…until it isn’t

All too soon are the siblings gathered again when their father dies two weeks later

It’s all so sudden

With heavy hearts, their knowledge of his decline makes it better for the siblings to take on the funeral preparations

Begrudgingly Taniya takes it upon herself to try getting the funds from you, coming to the Villa prepared to argue

Instead, she’s met with one of her father’s most loyal bodyguards

Woefully opening the door

“(Y/n) has been too distraught to leave their bed since the…last hospital visit.”

“What?”

She would have expected someone like you to have been jumping for joy

Having tied the knot with a man who’d pay for any tuition you might’ve needed paid Taniya doubts it she expected you’d be as bubbly as others in your…profession

But instead of partying you were glued to the giant California bed clutching an old shirt of his

For once Taniya feels bad for you

“Uh hey (Y/n) I was wondering if you maybe wanted to come to the first meeting with the mortuary staff. We’re looking to pick a coffin and–”

Instead of something snarky or even an agreement, you throw a black card in her direction and pull the covers over your head

Barely smothering the crying sounds

“You know what? Maybe it might be best if I stay back here..with you.”

It’s all too easy for her to lend her shoulder as you wail about your late husband–her father

Its awkward for awhile and then it’s not

She weirdly looks forward to pulling your tear-stricken face into her chest she wore the v-neck for a reason while you discuss the funeral arrangements

Purposely making her meetings online so she can rub your back off screen

Finding that the lingering security guard–your unofficial butler is getting more and more on her nerves

Taniya doesn’t even realize she’s gotten this bad until she’s hoping the chandelier will fall on her brothers when they eventually show up

“Wow. You two are here. In-person…why didn’t you call?”

“I don’t need your permission to see (Y/n)! But you know I would’ve come sooner if my company wasn’t dealing with a major crisis by some mysterious corporate giant!”

“Don’t look at me, I told you working for a shady company would get you no where.”

“I cannot with you right now–”

“I also came-!”

“Shut up Titan.” “Please Titan we’re talking.”

Titan isn’t all that worried about his old man being dead except his allowance stopped

And technically he shouldn’t be staying in the Villa anymore…but his followers are asking questions

“And in here we have the–whoa crying widow alert!”

“W-what?!”

He gets a lot of hate for that one

And while his siblings circle around you like vultures he’s finding it hard to insincerely apologize so that you can do a follow-up apology video with him

He’s following you around so much and observing all your little quirks

he worries it might be important when ‘apologizing’ so maybe he should record it…

Thus begins his long and greatly popular series of getting to know my dead dad’s spouse

He records as much as he can–what you eat, how you talk, how you whisper promises to the pictures of his dad you put up

It weirdly makes him question everything

It also has him posting to a new platform…a more hidden one

“Alright, guys! I actually got into their closet without issue we’ve just got to hope they won’t need to come in here anymore. OMG They’re back! I wonder what they’ll do…next. Uhm…sorry chat but I’m going to shut off the camera for awhile….I think this is just for me.”

Unlike Taniya who will hesitate, thinking of her father while cuddling up to you Titan does not think

Because after his copious amounts of stalking streaming with you

He's decided you will be his inheritance from dad

Clearly the old man wasn’t strong enough to handle you

So Titan would be the hero to sweep such a camera worthy beauty off their feet

Tariq doesn’t hesitate either

he’s gotten over that the day he met you

Sure he misses his dad a lot less than he expected+ but he does miss the privacy he used to have with you

“Hey (Y/n) do you want to go out for a ride like we used to do.”

“Oh Tariq I’d love to but I already told Titan we’d do a muckbang with him.”

“And after that, we’re going to film our feet ASMR!”

“Titan I said I’d need to think about that–”

“What?! You already said no to the hot-tub stream, how much more of a Karen can you be?!”

“Okay okay, but I’d rather it not be live.”

“Duh, I may not ever want to post it.”

Tariq is so tired of everyone else realizing just how much you’re not like any gold-digger he’s ever known

In fact, you’re so bad at it that he doubts you were ever a gold digger in the first place

“Hey Tariq the lawyer had a question about the life insurance money, should I just write you a check or do I keep it? I’m so confused.”

“Wow uh, that’s a lot.”

“Yeah, but your dad always told me what to do with this kind of stuff. So what do I do?”

“Uhh, how about we open our own bank account and put it there!”

“Oooh like a married couple’s bank account?”

“Yeah just like marriage. It’s a little too early to ask right?”

Nonetheless, all three siblings are beginning to realize just how ‘bad’ of a gold digger you are

And they’re more than eager to show you the right way…as long as you change your allegiance to them.

Rules | Kofi | Masterlist

#yandere x reader #yandere x you #lovelyyandereaddictionpoint #yanderexrea #yandere #yanderes #yanderes x reader #yandere male x reader #yandere female x reader #yandere male oc #yandere male #yandere community #soft yandere #yandere writing #yanderecore

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

Text

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

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

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

637 notes · View notes

littlemissmanga · 2 years ago

Note

"If I were to date someone, I would want them to have your features. Your eyes, your smile... ideally, someone who looks like you," he confessed, puffing his chest out in an attempt to appear more confident. “Precisely you.”

This is the real, actual, factual way Tech expresses his interest in someone. Always. And no, I'm not taking feedback on that.

It is at once confident and unsure and yet still entirely sweet and just perfectly Tech.

On my knees BEGGING you to please do a first kiss on the cheek/lips with all of clone force 99 with a female reader? I looove your work!! Thank you in advance and no worries if you don’t fancy doing this! I know a lot of people have already done this 😊

First Kisses

All Bad Batch Boys X F!Reader

warnings: first kiss on both cheek and lips. Some spontaneous kisses. Mutual pining and fluff. Female reader.

authors note: genuinely surprised I’ve not done this one yet! Enjoy anon. And thanks for the kind words.

Echo

On the cheek:

"Where is it?" you sighed in annoyance, rummaging through your belongings, turning the Marauder upside down and looking through every crook and nanny.

Cid had sent you back to the ship to retrieve a small trinket, literally the size of a pebble and one you all retrieved on a mission and the blame naturally fell on you for your occasional indulgence in things that didn't belong to you.

"Need some help?" Echo's voice broke through the frustration as he approached from behind. Glancing back, still on the floor, you offered a sheepish smile.

"Would you mind?"

"I wouldn't have asked if I did," he chuckled, his eyes gleaming. Could he be any more handsome?

Offering a silent expression of gratitude, you turned away to conceal the blush creeping onto your cheeks and resumed your search. It isn’t long until you heard a murmur of exclamation and Echo returning to you.

Rising to your feet, dusting off your knees from the floor's embrace of dirt, you brushed your hands against your thighs as Echo approached. "Please tell me you found it.”

To your delight, Echo revealed the small trinket nestled between his fingers.

"Found it," he smirked. His smile had a peculiar effect on you, making your knees momentarily weak.

"Echo," you sighed in relief, grateful that the mission hadn't been in vain, "I can’t thank you enough. Good to know this mission wasn’t for nothing.”

Accepting the trinket from him, you suddenly realized the proximity between you and Echo. "What would you do without me?" he quipped, his words laced with humor and yet tinged with sincerity.

Unable to resist the surge of emotions within you, you offered him a heartfelt smile, getting lost in the depths of his eyes. Without thinking, your hand found its way to his shoulder, and you leaned up to place a tender, lingering kiss on his cheek—a gesture that held a quiet intensity. "Thanks again," you murmured softly, observing his widened eyes for a fleeting reaction before turning away and making your way back to the parlor.

"Uh, y-you're welcome," Echo stammered, his response a mixture of surprise and confusion.

On the lips:

There was an undeniable tension between you and Echo after that brief kiss on his cheek. He initially thought it was a friendly gesture, but as he laid in his bunk and thought of the memory, he believed that the intensity in your eyes told a different story.

Days later, Echo mustered the courage to approach you when you were alone. Standing behind you, he hesitated, unsure of how to start the conversation.

Sensing his presence, you turned to face him. "Hey, are you okay?"

He paused for a moment, reminding himself that he had the nerve to ask why you had kissed him. Slowly, he spoke up. "I don't know... it just felt right," you shrugged casually, rocking back and forth on balls of your feet. "I would do it again."

A warm chuckle escaped Echo's lips, his eyes shining. "Ever thought about kissing me somewhere else?" His question was bold, and your wide eyes and growing smile hinted at a shared desire for perhaps a proper kiss.

You tilted your head, taking a small step closer. "Possibly. And you?" you asked, your voice filled with playful curiosity.

"More often than not," he replied, his voice lowering as his hand reached to cup your cheek. Simultaneously, you leaned in, your lips meeting in a soft and passionate first kiss. It surpassed all expectations, and in that moment, you knew there was something special between the two of you.

Hunter

On the cheek:

Hunter had always been your hero, coming to your rescue time and time again and today was no exception.

As the ground shook and buildings crumbled around you, Hunter swiftly grabbed hold of you, shielding you from harm. He held you so tightly that it felt like your ribs might crack, but you were grateful to be safe in his embrace rather than under a lot of debris.

After the terrifying ordeal had passed and the dust began to settle, both of you let out relieved sighs. "That was too close," he commented, surveying the area, but he hadn't released his hold on you just yet.

"Way too close," you agreed, suddenly aware of how intimately close he was and how many times he had saved you from danger. In that moment, you couldn't resist showing your gratitude. Gently, you lifted his helmet, revealing the exposed skin of his cheek. With tenderness, you leaned in and planted a soft kiss on his tattooed cheek. You were certain you heard him inhale sharply at the contact, but you quickly replaced his helmet before you could confirm his reaction. "Thanks for saving me. Again."

You gently pulled away from his grasp, setting off to resume the mission. You couldn't quite read his expression, but it seemed to be one of shock.

On the lips:

Barely a minute, perhaps even less than thirty seconds, passed before your lips met in a kiss. You heard a thud behind you, and as you turned, you saw Hunter dropping his helmet to the ground, making a beeline straight for you.

Without hesitation, he encircled his arms around your waist, pulling you back to him, and your lips found each other in a fervent union. It was a kiss filled with urgency, desire, and a longing that had been brewing for far too long.

"I couldn't go another day without kissing you," he rasped against your lips, his fingers digging into your waist as you melted into his embrace.

“What took you so long?” You grin agaisnt his smile.

Wrecker

On the cheek:

"Uh, Wrecker! I need some help!" It had been a few days since the Aggrocrabs wreaked havoc on the ship during our time on that tropical island. With Tech nursing a femur injury, he had entrusted you with the task of inspecting the external damage on top of the Marauder. However, as you climbed up, jotting down notes on any visible issues, your heart sank when you heard a clang. You turned to see that the ladder you had used to ascend was nowhere in sight.

In the distance, you spotted Wrecker lounging around, taking a much-needed break. There was a twinge of guilt for interrupting him, but you had to find a way down somehow.

At the sound of your plea for help, Wrecker quickly made his way over, chuckling as he observed your predicament. "Need help getting down, pretty girl?"

You suppressed the smile that threatened to spread across your face, trying not to melt at his charming flirtations. But deep down, you couldn't deny that you enjoyed it.

"Please. I think the ladder fell over there," you nodded, pointing in the direction where you last saw it. However, Wrecker made no move to retrieve it. Instead, he suggested that you should jump, assuring that he would catch you. Wide-eyed, you shook my head in disbelief. "No way! What if you drop me?"

"Would I ever? Seriously?" He let out a hearty laugh, assuming a position as if he was ready to catch your falling body. And despite the protests, he refused to back down.

So, fueled by determination, you braced myself for an uncomfortable landing and reluctantly took the leap of faith. Just as he promised, he caught you in his arms.

"See? I told ya that you'd be fine," he smirked, holding you in a bridal-style embrace. Though relieved that he caught you, you couldn't help but laugh, feeling a rush of emotions at the closeness between you both.

Without thinking, you leaned in and planted a gentle kiss on the scarred skin of his cheek. His eyes widened, and he began to stammer, unable to form coherent words. "Thanks for catching me," you whisper happily, hopping down from his arms, leaving a speechless Wrecker in your wake.

On the lips:

"Hey, would you like to go for a walk with me?" With confidence in your stride, a gentle smile on your face, and a glimmer of anticipation in your eyes, you approached Wrecker who was sat on his bunk.

"Yeah, sure," he grinned, rising from to his towering stance without hesitation.

Together, you embarked on quite a leisurely stroll through a quaint village, on Pabu, engaging in light conversation. It was evident that both of you wanted to address the unspoken tension between you, this kiss to be more forward, but a sudden wave of nervousness washed over you. You had harbored feelings for Wrecker for quite some time, and you desperately hoped that you had correctly interpreted the connection between you both. After all, he wasn’t exactly shy about hiding his feelings either.

Sensing your distraction, Wrecker tenderly took your hand in his, bringing you to a gentle stop. You turned to look up at him, and he tilted his head, his gaze filled with shyness. Despite his nerves, he reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear. "I haven't been able to stop thinking about the other day when you kissed me," he murmured softly, his eyes fixed on you.

You couldn't help but giggle, feeling a tinge of bashfulness at the reminder. "It was just a kiss on the cheek," you replied softly, your heart fluttering as his hand cupped your cheek.

"Yeah, I know, but..." He stumbled over his words, his nervousness palpable. Unable to resist after staring far too long at his plump lips, you stood on your tiptoes and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips, silencing his unfinished sentence. You were fairly certain he was going to ask you for a proper kiss, anyway.

He gasped softly at the unexpected sensation, but before you could pull away, he drew you closer, lifting you up and cradling you in his arms. With a hunger that mirrored your own, he deepened the kiss, savoring the taste of your lips just a little longer.

Tech

On the cheek:

"Tech, what's your type?" The question escaped your lips, fueled by the unspoken feelings you had harbored for him for what felt like an eternity. In the solitude of the cockpit, with only the two of you, you decided to take a chance and see if there was any possibility of him reciprocating your emotions.

"In what sense?" he inquired, engrossed in his data pad, as you swung gently back and forth in the seat beside him.

"In terms of dating," you replied slowly, your voice carrying a hint of vulnerability. You observed a brief widening of his eyes, although he didn't meet your gaze. "Personality, looks..."

Tech adjusted his goggles and tapped his leg nervously. "Those things are subjective. I believe it's essential to get to know someone before making any judgments. While I can appreciate physical appearance, a person's personality carries great weight for me." He responded honestly, stealing a sidelong glance at you to assess your reaction. "Why do you ask?"

You casually shrugged, not fully addressing the question you truly wanted to ask, yet also refraining from pressuring him. "Just curious."

As he observed your growing silence, his heart rate quickened, and he mustered the courage to continue. "If I were to pursue a romantic relationship, someone with a personality… like yours would be cherished the most."

A warm smile graced your lips as you looked down at your lap, feeling a mixture of joy and gratitude in response to Tech's sweet confession. "Thank you, Tech," you whispered softly, tilting your head towards him. To your surprise, you found him already gazing back at you, his own smile playing at the corners of his lips.

Just as Tech was about to reveal his thoughts on looks - in particular- your looks, the cockpit door swung open, and Hunter barged in, seeking your assistance with an urgent matter. Instantly, both you and Tech fell silent, nodding in response to Hunter's request. "Sure, I'll be right there," you quickly assured, rising from your seat and swiftly leaving the cockpit before Tech could utter another word.

Tech let out a sigh, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration at the untimely interruption. Unbeknownst to him, he remained unaware of the soft footsteps that stealthily approached him until he felt a gentle pressure against his cheek.

His eyes widened in awe as you pulled away, leaving him in a state of wonderment. A soft yet flirtatious smile graced your lips, and the realisation sank in— you had just kissed him on the cheek, a gesture he had never received until that very moment and left him rather speechless.

On the lips:

You couldn't help but notice Tech's lingering gaze on you, his eyes darting away whenever you caught him in the act. There was a certain flustered energy about him, especially after the kiss on the cheek that had caught him off guard. But you knew, you could sense the hidden glances and the unspoken attraction.

With a surge of boldness, you made your way towards him, clearing your throat to grab his attention. He looked up, almost too quickly, his hands betraying his nervousness as they fumbled behind his back. "Need anything?" he asked, trying to appear nonchalant.

"Not in particular," you smiled, leaning against the power console. "Just wanted to see how my favorite trooper is doing." The teasing in your voice was unmistakable, and you couldn't help but notice the telltale blush that spread across his cheeks. Yes, he definitely had it bad for you.

"Ah, I see. Well... I was going to pull you aside for a chat anyway," he spoke, and your heart skipped a beat as he hit the button to shut the cockpit door, hoping that this time there would be no interruptions.

"Oh yeah?" you raised an eyebrow, curiosity piqued. "What about?"

He took a step closer, breaking the invisible barrier between you both, and his breath brushed against your face, sending shivers down your spine. "I wanted to tell you what I find attractive in terms of looks, in response to your earlier question about dating."

You knew where this was heading, but you wanted to hear him say it. So, you played along, feigning ignorance. "I'm very interested to know," you hummed, tilting your head to the side, acutely aware of his fingers flexing, longing to touch you.

Your heart swelled at his words, feeling a warmth spread through you. "And what if I told you that I'm looking for the same... someone who looks like you?"

He took another step closer, his hand finding its place on your waist. "Then it would please me greatly," he replied, his voice filled with sincerity.

A soft laugh escaped your lips as the two of you fell into a comfortable silence, locking eyes as if daring each other to make the next move. And to your pleasant surprise, it was Tech who took the plunge.

"Kiss me again," his voice was husky, his lips moist as he licked them in anticipation. "Please."

"I'll give you a real one this time," you whispered, closing the remaining distance between you. His lips eagerly met yours, and in that perfect moment, you both experienced the joy of a genuine first kiss, sealing your shared feelings.

Crosshair

On the cheek:

You find yourself chewing his ear off, rambling about everything and nothing in particular. Crosshair remains hunched over, a toothpick clenched between his teeth, showing minimal interest in your words. Finally, you come to a halt, exhaling deeply and leaning against the wall next to him. You shoot him a glance, feeling a pang of guilt. "Sorry. I guess I was rambling, huh?"

You have a soft spot for Crosshair, despite his intimidating demeanor. Once you get past his brooding exterior, you've discovered a sweeter side to him, hidden beneath the surface. So, the realisation that you may have just annoyed him for the past twenty minutes starts to gnaw at your mind.

"Just a tad," he responds, his voice carrying a hint of dryness.

You mutter a quiet "sorry" and fidget with your fingers, feeling a mix of regret and nervousness. Your tapping catches Crosshair's attention, and he swiftly places his hand over yours, halting your restless movements. His touch is firm yet gentle, and it immediately calms your racing heart.

"I like hearing you talk. So shut up apologising," he says, rolling his eyes. Despite his stern tone, there's a hint of tenderness in his words and the way he touches you.

The brief contact leaves you longing for more, but he pulls away just as quickly, returning to his previous stance. You both sit in silence for a few minutes until a wave of exhaustion washes over you, prompting a yawn and a stretch. "I think I'm going to get some sleep."

He simply nods, still gazing absentmindedly at the ground, his hands clasped together. "I, uh... thanks for listening to me, by the way. Not a lot of people do."

He grunts in response, his way of saying "you're welcome."

Seizing a moment of courage, you lean towards him, placing a soft kiss on his cheek as a gentle gesture of gratitude.

"Good night," you whisper, pulling away and watching as he looks up from the ground, trying to process what just happened, while you walk away. There was a small smile on his lips after you left.

On the lips:

The sound of Crosshair's voice startles you, causing you to turn your gaze towards him as he leans against one of the archways. His intense gaze is fixed on you, and it sends a shiver down your spine.

"Talk to me," he says, his words dripping with silkiness. You feel a mixture of confusion and flustered nerves at his command and sudden presence.

"About what?" you ask, your voice gentle as you tilt your head to the side. But your words falter as he approaches, his tall figure casting a captivating aura.

"Anything. Anything you want to," he replies, his voice low and calm. Suddenly, all your thoughts and words seem to vanish, leaving you speechless. He stands before you, his eyes hooded, staring down at you with an irresistible intensity. "Can't think of anything? How about you tell me why you kissed me on the cheek?" he continues, his voice laced with intrigue.

Your eyes widen, surprised that he would bring up the kiss so soon. You find yourself shrugging and stumbling over your words, unable to form a coherent response. "Funny. I spent a long time wanting to shut you up with a kiss," he starts, and his words make your legs turn to jelly. "And now you won't even say anything."

You lick your lips nervously, your fingers fidgeting in your hands. "So, you want me to talk so you can... kiss me?" you manage to stammer out.

"Yes," he confirms.

"I don't know what you want me to say. I just... I just wanted to kiss—" Before you can finish your sentence, his lips are on yours, fulfilling your unspoken desire. One hand rests on your waist, while the other tugs at your top, drawing you closer. You moan into the kiss, your eyes fluttering closed as his dominant lips dance with yours.

He eventually pulls away, his forehead resting against yours. "I've wanted to do that for a while, sweetheart," he confesses, his voice filled with longing.

Masterlist

Tags: @andyoufollowyourheart @littlefeatherr @kaitou2417 @eyecandyeoz @captxin-rex x @jesseeka @ashotofspotchka @oohyesplease @theroguesully @mustluvecho @ladykatakuri @jambolska-grozdova @arctrooper69 @padawancat97 @rain-on-kamino @either-madness-or-brilliance @staycalmandhugaclone @ko-neko-san @echos-girlfriend @fiveshelmet @dangraccoon @plushymiku-blog @chrissywakingup @kixs-husband @pb-jellybeans @nunanuggets @sleepycreativewriter @tech-aficionado @grizabellasolo @therealnekomari @tech-depression-inventory @brynhildrmimi @greaser-wolf @tinyreadersmur @kaminocasey @marvel-starwars-nerd @ladytano420 @ladyzirkonia @raevulsix @imalovernotahater @the-good-shittt @whore4rex @imperialclaw801 @temple-elder @mysticalgalaxysalad @photogirl894 @fantasyproductions @s1st3r @by-the-primes @the-bad-batch-baroness

#ya got me swooning over here!#tech x reader #echo x reader #wrecker x reader #hunter x reader #crosshair x reader #tbb headcanons #tbb #the bad batch

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