#and then later being ceos of rivaling tech companies

[corntort]

Its like shared custody except indra has most of the custody by nature of arm and host stuff so they have to put up with each other

But also consider Hammond and indra used to kiss (and/or have a connection pre-av2's events that eventually fizzled out)

NODS NODS FOR SURE. also i am considering this heavily

#rambles #ask #anonymous #indra av #damu av #hammond av #amashilama av #going to college and studying the same thing and growing close through the hell that is the 20s when shit is so confusing still but youre #'an adult' so you 'SHOULD' be handling it fine (you are not) #and then later being ceos of rivaling tech companies #like that'd be crazy. that's crazy i mean neurodivergent

[momotorin]

momos recent post has me thinking… gp ceo momo x ceo sana being like rivals in their industry and hate fucking each other

like sana invites momo over to a huge party she’s hosting in celebration for winning a big award for their company that momo IS PISSED she didn’t get and sana is soooo petty while telling her about how proud she is in her team

so momo ofc being momo brings sana to some bathroom, no one noticing the hostesses sudden leave because hello there are so many people there and momo fucking the shit out of sana while muffling her moans w her hand ;((

i want them both sooooo bad

you're so right for this omg....

stocks!

gp!ceo!momo x ceo!sana

MEN DNI!!

it's the 27th annual kansai tech gala, and the biggest names in japanese and worldwide technologies were in attendance. one of which, minatozaki sana— the president of minatozaki industries, an established technology provider under a new ruling.

speculations say that the minatozaki empire has a new challenger: hirai tech, a start up in kyoto, owned by the hirais and anchored by the ceo— hirai momo.

sana doesn't really understand the weight of the governor's award, since she has a couple of it on the desk alongside national awards that the company has been winning in the past years.

momo, as an aspirant in the tech and business, looks at the award as something significant and a first for her company. if she wins, it'll be something monumental for her as finally, she could bring something at the family dinner table.

with pride and name up on the gamble for the gala tonight, sana can't miss the way that momo's eyes glisten in awe knowing recent tech inventions from other companies.

she should hate her, but why does she need to look that damn attractive with the coat and dress set she's wearing. damn.

as the night deepens, the gala brings out each event, which doesn't really pique sana's interest that much.

what intrigues her was the way momo held her martini.

"lonely night, superstar?" sana greets, teasing the woman as she sits by her side.

"hello, minatozaki," momo feigns a smile. "what brings you here?"

"wanted a breather from all the talk," sana sighed, signaling the bartender to get tequila. "why haven't you been around?"

"dunno, really didn't feel it with everyone," momo shifts her attention to the laughing men at her table. "it's awful and they smell like my dad."

sana laughs, finding momo genuinely adorable at this moment.

"saw that you haven't looked around too," momo mentions, taking another sip from her drink. "what's up with you, minatozaki?"

"didn't feel like it, either," sana chuckles. "can't really fit in with the chatter."

it's always going to be 'oh! the new minatozaki!' and 'oh! the hirai... is that the youngest, with the startup? not doing pretty well, i see..'. comments from these men who talk like their mouth is on their ass.

to say the least, it's suffocating. momo, as much as she hates being in the same room with minatozaki sana, wanted to stay in this bubble of tequila and martini side by side.

sana smiles at her, "you know, you're not so bad yourself."

"why do you say so?" momo chuckled at sana's randomness.

"i mean, this event is limited to tech pioneers only, like look... japan's finest are here," sana teases. "so being here is great already."

"well, that's a good point," momo just sighs. "but you know damn well why i'm here, right?"

"i know that very well, sweetheart," sana, in her head, flusters at the little slip. "but i bet it's me again this year, don't you think so too?"

turns out, she was right.

although momo's sales in record were reaching highs, and her startup gaining Invertors by the day, she still wasn't chosen by the judges at the kansai tech gala.

it was quite the disappointment.

later in the same week, momo accepts an invitation from her assistant to go to minatozaki sana's party with one thing in mind: hatred.

but blame the heavens for making sana much more attractive than any individual to walk on planet earth.

it was a real, full house, with a dj and smashing drinks type of party. momo, alongside her other executives, get drunk on free drinks. momo's head was fucking spinning and she's getting crazy at the fact that she hasn't seen sana yet.

the music stops for a moment, and sana, in all her dramatic glory, enters the stage with a cocktail in hand.

"hope you're having a nice night, everyone!" she was beaming, momo seeing her in that sparkling dress was like the second coming of christ. she can't believe she's saying those words in her head, but momo is already going crazy at the fact that she couldn't even hold sana. "this party," sana sighs, getting herself in a more comfortable position as she stands at the middle of the stage. "we need to have fun and reward ourselves because once again we've won! thank you everyone, thank you to my co-executives, the board, the managers, the staff, and everyone who makes our company great— this night is for you so, enjoy!"

sana gives out a toast to everyone in attendance, and momo just stares at her. not of ill intent, but with some want that only sana can satisfy.

and fuck, the way that dress fitted on sana made momo's stomach churn.

"hey, having a nice night too?" sana greets, teasing her again by tapping her shoulder. "you're smashed, aren't you?"

"probably?" momo says, half drunk and half conscious. "congratulations on the.. everything."

"aw, thanks," sana nudges at her. "glad you're not mad."

"you know what?" momo's tone suddenly deepens as she dismisses the glass off of her hand. "maybe i am mad. i'm mad at the way that you won and you just party. meanwhile, i have other things to worry about because i built my own ground without my parents and now they're shaming me because i didn't get your useless award," momo chuckled lowly, her disappointment in herself, her parents, and everyone was so evident that it broke sana. "so yeah! maybe we do have a problem!"

and fuck, the way momo raises her voice made sana almost wet her dress. she can't deny it, the woman is fucking hot.

"mo-"

before sana even continues her sentence, she gets dragged by the wrist by momo to the club's spacious bathroom, and now, she's pinned against the door, with momo's hands on the sides of her waist, and their breaths just an inch away.

"god," momo smirks, seeing sana's flustered state. "what would they think if they saw you like this, hm?"

"momo, ple-"

"what?" momo teases, running her hands along the exposed back of sana's dress. "look at you," she says, dragging them carefully to make sana look at herself in the mirror. "you wanted this, didn't you?"

"fuck," sana mutters under her breath. "yes, you don't know how much." sana doesn't know what she's talking about anymore. what matters is that she feels momo's hands trail to clasp her hand, interlocking it with hers as she faced momo's eyes.

momo's breath stilled as she kisses sana, hands tightening on her waist to pull her closer and raise her to the marble countertop.

it's all so intoxicating, all so overwhelming; momo doesn't know if she's drunk or she just wants to get drunk on sana and her undeniably delectable vanilla perfume.

"hmm," momo hums, feeling sana arch her back as she leaves marks on her collarbone. "i should've done this during that award night."

"y-you should've," sana stutters as momo slips off the almost non existent strap of her dress from her shoulders, revealing her supple breasts. "oh, fuck, baby." she moans, throwing her head back as momo kneads her other breast and her lips sucks on her nipple.

momo continues to hum, playing with sana's tits to tease her more. sana was so sensitive under momo's touch and that amused her.

"shit," momo sighs as she parts her lips away from sana's breast, seeing sana's blushed out form. "ah, i'm so hard," she laughs, pulling her pants down to reveal her boxers, her 10 inch cock printing on the fabric. sana licks her lips. "want it?"

"yes," sana fidgets with her fingers, but momo took her hand to palm on her length. momo's breath staggered as sana removed her boxers, her hardness springing to her clothed lower stomach. "hmm, so hard for me," sana began to wrap her hand around momo's length, feeling the girth of it, the veins, and momo's budding precum. she swipes her finger above momo's tip, and momo shudders. sana places her finger to her tongue, tasting momo. "you're fucking delicious, baby."

"don-"

"shh," sana says, just pulling momo closer by a kiss as she removes the rest of her dress, revealing her black lace panties. she guided momo's hand above her wetness. "feel how ready i am for you."

momo feels the wet cloth on her hands, and hooks her fingers to remove it from sana. "fuck, you're so wet," momo spreads sana's soaked pussy lips. "you dreamt of this, didn't you?" she kisses sana once more as she slides her length along her wetness, feeling it spread on her cock.

"i-inside please," sana pleads, her arms wrapping around momo's shoulder as momo inserts her length inside her hole. "fuck!" she screamed, feeling momo sink inside of her. "you're going to break me."

"fuck," momo says, pulling her length out of her pussy. "so fucking tight," momo enters again, burying her cock to the deepest part of her walls as sana moaned loudly. "going to fucking break you."

momo held sana by the waist, her thrusts gradually speeding as she felt sana tighten her pussy walls around her. sana was full on screaming that she was sure people could hear them.

"so loud," momo stops for a while as she flips sana over the counter, her ass now facing her as they see each other in the big mirror of the bathroom. "you're so fucked out already," momo teases, holding sana's hair up to relieve her a little. "should i stop, sweetheart?"

"no, fuck," sana sighs, pulling momo closer by tapping her thighs. "fuck me more."

"hmm," momo chuckled lowly, putting her length inside sana's wetness once more. "fuck." she thrusts, feeling sana pulse her walls against her cock. "are you g'nna cum, baby?"

"yes!" sana shouts, and momo pulls on the makeshift ponytail she made for her, making sana arch her back. sana continued to let out screams, as momo pounded her cock inside of her, hitting every spot she hasn't even known before. "fuck, fuck," sana moans, her grip on the marble was tight because of the pleasure. "more!"

"fuck yeah, baby," momo says, pulling sana up for her to be held by the waist. "you're going to make a mess on my cock, hm?" she whispered on sana's ear as she continued to thrust. "look at your pretty face," she says, making sana look at the mirror. fuck. it was so hot; momo's cock going in and out of her, her smudged lipstick, her messy hair, the marks... sana thinks she's never been better. "shit, you're getting tighter, baby? you like that?"

sana just hums, biting her lip down to at least suppress some of her moans because she knows that she has been so fucking loud. it was useless still.

there was a slam from the door, "sana? you there?"

"shit," momo immediately puts her hand on sana's mouth to muffle her moans as she continues to thrust inside of her. "keep quiet, pretty." momo whispered as her other hand made its way to part her pussy and rub her clit. sana screams on momo's hand.

"no," momo loudly answers, her cock still buried inside of sana's tight pussy. "she's not here!"

the person shouts from the outside, "oh, okay."

momo thrusted faster, with the thrill of knowing that someone was outside. sana's grip on the counter was so tight, and her pussy was literally closing up on momo's length.

"you'll like it even when someone catches us, don't you?" momo teases, whispering again as her fingers rub tight circles on her clit, urging her to cum. "fuck, cum."

sana screams on her hand, her cream spreading on momo's cock as momo continues to thrust inside of her, chasing her own high.

"mmgh," sana moans in the sensitivity as momo removes her hand to put on her waist, thrusting inside her pulsing pussy further. "shit- ah," sana reached out for momo's hand, holding it tight for some sort of support. "i'm fucking sensitive, baby, st-"

momo slaps sana's ass, a red mark leaving on her as she trusted, "i don't fucking care," momo growls, her cock already so wet and soaked with sana's juices. "i need to cum inside of you."

"fuck, yes please!" sana screamed as momo's thrusts stuttered, now focusing on hitting her g-spot. sana comes once more, and momo's cock pulsed, white ropes of cum shooting inside of her.

"haah," momo sighs, holding sana close as she feels sana lose balance. she removes her length away from sana's pussy, so wet and trickling with both of their bodily juices. she held sana once more, helping her to get on the marble countertop, making her sit. "wait, fuck," she said, getting a couple of tissues from the tissue box and helping sana clean up their mess. "we made a mess."

"thanks," sana stares at momo, who was cleaning up the inside of her thighs and slipping her panties back on. "you're not as bad as i think you would."

"you really thought that i suck at fucking?" momo laughs, also cleaning her soaked dick before tucking it away inside her boxers.

"you look like a loser, can't help to think that you fuck like one too," sana teases, kissing momo's cheek. "what about... taking this to my place?"

"good offer, champ," momo chuckles, helping sana zip up her dress once more and fix her hair. "but you've got a night to finish."

"oh shit," sana curses at the realization. "how long were we out?"

"like," momo looks down at her watch. "i dunno, 45 minutes? someone was finding you by the door a little while ago."

"ah, alright, they probably wouldn't mind..." sana chuckles, her arms wrapping around momo's shoulders as they kiss once more. "see you next time, loser."

"sure," momo laughs. "g'nna fuck you 'till you break, next time, baby."

#twice #twice smut #momo smut #sana smut #momo imagines #sana imagines

[304blur]

secretary from hell!

pairing: yandere!assistant!geto suguru x fem!ceo!reader

warning(s): possessive suguru, he's two faced, manipulative, mentions of drugging and drug addiction, and reader's mature but naïve, suguru pretends to be a warm and caring figure, misogynistic ex secretary of reader's dad, geto is his age (28) and reader is 25

plot: after your father, the ex-ceo of takamitsu tech passed, you took over the company as ceo. finding out how the business world works is stressful, but geto suguru would help you through all that.

"i simply cannot accept that a sheltered, uneducated heir would take over this company, let alone a spoiled woman who doesn't know how business works."

after your father passed, the entire company was in your hands. it was a struggle, after all, he passed away so suddenly, and the company's partners and investors despised the idea of a woman being a ceo of one of the largest company in japan, and your father was considered a business genius, he saved this company from bankruptcy, and created a steady flow of profit. he was a successful businessman, and you were expected to live up to him. and for you, living up to the genius that was your father, was impossible. but it didn't hurt to try. but right now, your optimism is at rock bottom. your father's secretary, mr. nakamura, is insulting you. he's quite the misogynistic old geezer, and his head is stuck in the past. you rub your temples, as your head is starting to ache, due to how loud the guy is.

"women are completely incapable of understanding business, because they're not suited for a leading role where a man is supposed to be at. you should step down, right now, and let your younger brother do the man's work."

you suddenly stand up, angered by his comments.

"my brother is still in middle school, mr. nakamura. you must understand he is not capable of taking over, and your remarks are simply unforgivable, as your employer, i'm utterly disappointed by your behavior, and i'm sure my father, who might be watching right above us right now, probably is disappointed too, since he trusted you with his work, and now you're outright insulting his daughter. if you dislike me so much, i suggest you leave this building, right now."

you slam your desk, pointing to the exit of your office. mr. nakamura decided to leave your office, with a gloomy face. you sat back down, sighing. being a capable independent woman sure isn't easy. a few days later, mr. nakamura sent his resignation papers through an employee he was close with. you approved his resignation, and let him go, and now you need a proper assistant, to welcome a new chapter in your life. you let everyone and their mothers know that you were looking for an assistant who can understand the business world and its' complex systems. only one person applied, and that is, your middle school ex boyfriend, and currently the heir of geto innovations, your company's rival. well, not anymore. his father was arrested for tax evasion, and abuse of his position as ceo. geto innovations is doomed, and the heir, and the company's only hope, has come to apply as a secretary of their rival company. he fidgets with his suit, and he had his hair slicked back, he's sporting a bright smile, with dark circles under his eyes.

"suguru, quite a surprise.. why are you here?"

you look at him with one eyebrow raised. you knew him to be a smart guy. you dated for 2 months in middle school, and you didn't do anything crazy, just holding hands, going on dates. but suguru broke up with you, after getting reprimanded by his parents. he lights up, and replies.

"you still remember my name? so you must miss me!"

suguru chuckles, lifting a hand to his chin. you snicker at him, showing him his application papers, and waved it around.

"your name's on this paper, by the way. but i didn't forget your name, just your face."

you sighed, you didn't have a choice but to accept him, since you don't have any more time to look for someone else, and since suguru might be able to help you. you looked around your desk, and let out a little 'aha!' when you found your special little 'approved' stamp. you gently tap the stamp on the surface of suguru's application paper, and his face seemed to glow with happiness.

"you start tomorrow, good luck, suguru."

you smiled, and he was dismissed from the office. the day ended, and tomorrow is a new day, with a new secretary. you rode in your car, the city lights gleaming and glowing, the light of the vibrant and eye-catching signs and giant tvs with ads reflect onto the road, giving the usually black asphalt some color. you arrive to your family's estate, your maids greet you at the door, some asking how your day went, some informing you about your brother. you walked upstairs, the head maid notified you that she ran a bath for you already. you open the door to your brother's room, to find him studying. it's 11pm, he shouldn't be up this late. you pull the earbuds out of his ear to scold him.

"hey, mr. shuuya (ln), don't work too hard or i'll cut off your allowance. go to bed."

he just glared at you, and took back his earbud from your hands. he replied, with his mechanical pencil pointed against his cheek.

"you're saying that like you didn't stay up till 4am when you studied?"

after further observation, you saw that he's studying modern japanese. and majority of his mock quiz answers were right. as expected of your intelligent little brother. you were also guilty of staying up to study, but this little guy takes it a step further. he studied his weekends away, staying up from saturday to sunday. you ruffle his hair, and prepared to leave his room, you peeked your head through the gap of his door, and yelled.

"i mean it when i say i'm cutting off your allowance."

"good morning!"

suguru brought over a cup of coffee, the kind of coffee you liked. he knew the basics of how to manage a large corporation, and he was willing to show you the ropes, an odd decision, because he was even insisting he would share his father's advice for a successful business. he was reliable, cheerful, and warm. even your other employees seemed to like him. it didn't take you long to adjust to his personality, since he's so charismatic, and alluring. he was kind enough to take on most of your work, to let you rest, and drink your coffee. you sipped on the liquid gold that we humans call coffee, you looked over to suguru's office that was connected to yours, and he raised his head, to give you a little smile. god, he was just so charming to you. strangely, the coffee wasn't working, you were typing away at your computer, and your eyes were glued to the monitor. you looked at your watch, and realized it was 7pm. you peeked at suguru's office, and noticed he was getting ready to leave. he brightened onced he met your eyes.

"ah, (yn)! i was about to go over there and tell you that we're supposed to leave now."

he smiled, as he guided you to the elevator, stopping to let you in first. what a gentleman.. you arrived at the ground floor, and just before you were about to say goodbye to him when your ride arrived, he took your hand, and placed a kiss upon it.

"See you tomorrow."

he closed the car door, and waved you goodbye. your face turned red immediately, his eyes squinting into crescent moons. you really need some good sleep tonight. it doesn't matter if you're taking, like, 30 melatonin gummies, as long as you pass out and not think about him all night. you pass by shuuya's room, too distracted by what happened earlier. you flop onto your bed, still wearing working clothes. you stare at your window, the peacefulness of your neighborhood, and the A/C blasting to immediately sleep, and float off to dreamland, your sleeping situation strangely and completely contrasting your prediction from a few minutes ago. you were sound asleep. hours pass by, the morning rays softly grace your face, feeling that tingly and warm sensation on your skin, you wake up. you took a while to adjust your vision, and you realized your room was a mess. you were pretty organized, and you usually wouldn't leave the room like this, and shuuya wouldn't even attempt to go in your room, since he already knows there isn't anything interesting in there. you shrug it off, maybe you forgot to clean, or something. it was dark when you got in last night, that's why you only noticed this morning. you looked at your wall clock, and realized, it was 8am, you were about 2 hours late to work. you decided to go with the outfit you wore yesterday, you hurridly brushed your hair, deodorant, and perfume, to hide the smell you're going to develop later in the day. you open the door, and the maids greet you with a smile, but you rushed passed all of them, and you exited your estate, you looked at your driver, polishing up the car.

"mr. kikuchi! i'm so sorry to keep you waiting, oh my gosh. please take me to the company building, and take the quickest route there."

"i shall get you there at once, ma'am."

he opened the car door for you, and he got in the driver's seat, driving off to your destination. you immediately text suguru, and he replied just as quickly as you texted him.

'i'm so sorry for being late, please text me back immediately, i'm on my way there already.'

'don't fret. i'm fine! do get here within 30 minutes or you'll be late for a meeting.'

you sighed, and you arrived at the building safe and sound. you thanked your driver, and immediately headed up to your office. once you got to your designated floor, you saw suguru, preparing coffee for you. you greeted him with a good morning, and a sigh. he handed you the coffee, and you smiled a little at the cup.

"you might need this. you sounded like you slept in. happens to the best of us."

he pat your shoulder, to reassure you. you drank the cup, and looked around, with his hand, still on your shoulder. you noticed a pill pack near the coffee machine, you moved closer, suguru's hand slipping away. you read the label of the pack. 'temazepam'. is this a type of sleeping pill? you grabbed the pack, and showed it to suguru.

"is this yours?"

you looked at the back of the packaging, and you were right, it was a kind of sleeping pill. he answered with a smile.

"yes, i have trouble sleeping, and my doctor prescribed this for me. i usually forget to take them while i'm at home, so i put it over there, so i can take them before i return home. it doesn't kick in quick, so i thought taking them before i head back would be a good idea. "

you put the pack down and you apologised for your intrusion for something you shouldn't have pulled out of him.

"oh, sorry, i shouldn't have touched that topic for you."

"it's fine! it's probably public information at this point, i mean, look at these."

he points at the dark circles under his eyes, a sign of staying up late. he laughs, and tells you that you should prepare for the meeting. you nod, and you decided to fix your hair up more.

it's been about 3 weeks ever since suguru applied to be your secretary. his way of working, and the way he sees people, has been really helpful for you, and you've been securing lots of great business deals, thanks to his advice. geto innovations, has been dissolved, due to unpaid debt, the heir's rebellious behaviour and the absence of its' ceo. his father is still in jail, nothing has gone well for suguru in these past weeks, yet why is he still smiling? you didn't really wanna dig too deep, so you abandoned the idea of asking him if he was okay. though, you did find yourself being late to work often. you couldn't count how many times you had to apologise to suguru for the same reason every morning. you even tried to stay up late to complete some work you weren't doing while at work, since, well, suguru shoulders everything for you at this point, insisting you let him do everything, since you must be burnt out. he has been a big help to you, pampering you, and all. you never told him about the secret paperworks you were doing late at night, since he'd insist that he'll do it for you. you decided to listen to him, since he's so stubborn. his diligence was admirable, and he did his work so well. you sat in your office chair, all slumped and tired. suguru noticed, and got up from his own chair, and approached you. he walked behind you, playing with your hair, and braiding it.

"please leave everything to me. i'll take care of you, and your beloved inherited business. just focus on me, and your health, (yn)."

he strokes your head gently, as you lean on the backrest of your chair, your face looking right up at his. a warm moment, his eyes melt the borders of your heart, and you felt so comfortable around him. you reach for his hand, which was about to stroke your head once more, and lowered it, to your cheek.

"i hope you'll continue to do your best, suguru."

he swipes the stray pieces of your hair aside, your forehead in view. he plants a light and loving kiss on it.

"i will try. no, i will, i will continue to assist you in any way possible."

you tried reaching for his face, but..

as you try and stroke his cheek, his face seemed to wash away, his entire head turning into fragments, looking like sand being swept away by water. your entire environment being enveloped by darkness, you wake up from a seemingly long dream. you get up, realizing that free and lovely dream you had, was of the past. you're in your room, but it's doesn't seem to be in your estate. it has no windows, like how yours did. only a digital screen, simulating windows and the outside world. the door opens, and the love of your life enters the bunker-like room. you tremble, and get off your bed, gripping at his sweatpants, like a zombie. you were dressed in a light, flowy white dress, but the beauty of the dress clashes with your unhealthy appearance. your face looked like you stayed up a hundred days, and your figure was dangerously skinny. suguru bent down, to be at your level, petting your head like he did in your dream, and your past.

"it's me, sweetheart."

"please, please.. give me, the t-thing you gave me last time, suguru, i-i need it, so bad, i can't even d-describe how much i need it, i-i don't want the temazepam anymore.."

he tucked a stray piece of hair behind your ear.

"of course, i'll give it to you, but first, let's get ready for our very fun playtime, hm?"

he carried you, bridal style, to your bed, he sat you down, and grabbed a hairbrush from your vanity, braiding your hair, like in the dream, he hums a familiar tune, as he gently styles your hair.

that's right. he drugged every single drink you had with temazepam. a popular benzodiazepine. a drug prescribed for insomnia, sleeping disorders and for treatment of muscle spasms and disorders that cause seizures, like epilepsy and the like. it is also a central nervous system depressant, which makes it a popular drug, well, to misuse. the longer an individual takes the said drug, they develop dependence, or in other words, an addiction. it also develops tolerance to the drug, and in your case, temazepam isn't enough to satisfy you anymore. satoru gave you something else, after he realized that temazepam doesn't work anymore. this time he injected something in you, he never told you what it was, but as long as it gave you that amazing feeling of being relieved of your suffering, you didn't care. you loved suguru for knowing what you wanted, and you continued to, even though you doubt what he says sometimes, you know that he's a good and smart man, and that you can always rely on him, that's all you needed, and he knows you'll always be by his side. he is your secretary after all. and he'll always be your secretary, in life, until death. until purgatory separates you two, sending him to hell, and you, the girl he's always seen as an angel on earth, to heaven.

#jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsu kaisen #geto suguru #suguru x reader #geto x reader #fanfic #yandere #halloween #happy halloween

[arinele]

Silmarillion Modern Business/CEO AU

Inspired by @doodle-pops own CEO AU

Finwe is CEO of TIRION, a very successful tech company. Finwe founded and owned TIRION for many years, but was mysteriously murdered in his home by an unknown assailant. His company then dissolved into chaos as his son and step son fought over control. Both sides had large followings, and as a result, the company was split in two. A legal battle ensued, and Judge Namo declared that Feanor, as Finwe’s only blood relation, would be allowed to keep the name TIRION, but would be forced to give up half of the profits to his step brother Fingolfin and his new company Hithlum Enterprises.

Fingolfin is the CEO of Hithlum Enterprises. Fingon is his #2, and eventually takes over after Fingolfin dies.

Melkor is the CEO of Angband, and is the main rival of the Finwians.

Feanor is the CEO of TIRION. When things started to heat up at work between him and Fingolfin (while Finwe was still alive) he eventually decided leave TIRION and founded his own company, Formenos. Though he later went back to TIRION after Finwe’s death and gave ownership of Formenos to Curufin. Curufin passes Formenos to Celebrimbor, who renames it RING.

Maedhros is CEO of TIRION after Feanor dies.

Nerdanel is famous sculpter obviously.

Finarfin is a doctor or something and Earwen is a marine biologist. They don’t involve themselves in their family’s bs.

Anairë owns a law firm. Turgon takes over after Finwe dies and she retires. Idril takes over after him.

Finrod is a social media influencer who owns a fashion line.

Galadriel moves to an entirely different state and was the assistant to Melian, a governor. Or maybe a senator? Eventually becomes the president or something lol.

Maglor is a musician of some kind. He’s a starving artist until his family’s drama gets him attention. Eventually adopts two kids.

Celegorm works for the National Parks or something. Maybe a vet?

Caranthir got tired of his family’s bs and made his own company way before Finwe died. He’s incredibly successful. The King of Business. Everyone in his family calls him if they have a problem with their businesses. Has made billions off of his investments alone. Probably found a loophole to get out of paying his taxes. Will help you find it too because fuck the government. Is somehow the richest person in his entire extended family.

Aegnor tried out for the swim team because a girl he was interested in said she thought Michael Phelps was hot. Ends up being insanely good at it and competes at an Olympic level. Fucks Michael Phelps.

Aredhel is a world champion Olympic archer. She likes to volunteer at Celegorm’s work every once in a while. Was in an abusive relationship as a teenager and had Maeglin when she was pretty young.

Argon is a famous basketball player. (He’s TALL)

Amrod was killed in a house fire by one of Melkor’s men in retaliation for something that Feanor did. Amras was left horribly burnt, but survived. He worked odd jobs throughout his life, but never stayed at one for too long. He never truly recovered from his brother’s loss.

Gil-Galad is Maedhros and Fingon’s son. He ends up inheriting both of his father’s companies and as a result, the companies merge back together after many long years apart.

#silmarillion #tolkien #maedhros #maglor #caranthir #feanor #celegorm #feanorians #curufin #finarfin #the silmarillion #fingon #ambarussa #fingolfin #amrod #amras #Galadriel #nerdanel #argon #Aegnor #angrod #gil galad #Aredhel #Maeglin #Turgon #Finrod #melkor #house of finwe #my writing #the silm

[youraverageaemondsimp]

i have this headcanon now of bipoc reader being a former child actress who once starred in several disney channel shows. years later, she meets aemond again because he is starring in her fantasy romance book and that was when the two hit it off. she is inspired by bridgit mendler, the former disney child star, who gave up acting and music to become a doctor, lawyer and engineer. and yes. bridgit mendler has a doctorate and is a doctor at the same time. yeah, so she side hustled as an actress and singer to fund her college degrees. she is so impressive and one hell of an intelligent queen!

aemond and reader met once when they were starring in a disney show.

the two of them were just besties, initially, because they were a bit too young.

however, aemond could remember the day when she stood up for him against the strong boys and aegon who were picking on him, leading him to become incredibly touched.

of course, after the loss of his eye, she stood by him and was urged by alicent to keep quiet to protect herself.

nevertheless, aemond became incredibly touched by her actions and grew to have feelings for her.

but, alas, she was dating someone else, leading him to become incredibly upset.

nevertheless, he chose to love her from afar.

he tried to give signals to her that he liked her romantically but, of course, she was too dense to notice.

both of them had study sessions together and he was quite impressed by her wit. they rival each other, academically speaking.

while aemond gradually chose roles where it demands intimate scenes from him to be seen as a true actor, reader chose to star in christmas movies and shows for children in order to fund her college degrees.

the last film she starred in was a christmas movie before fully quitting acting and music to pursue a career in both classical piano, voice, anthropology, law and tech. so, yeah, doctor, lawyer, engineer, piano and singing.

oh yeah. like bridgit mendler, she pursued both her masters and doctorate at the same time. don't ask me how bridgit mendler does it without going crazy. maybe, she time travels? who knows!

the guy she dated with ended up cheating on her but she was like, "meh!"

she was too busy with all that shit, anyways.

years later, when her novels became NYT #1 bestsellers and being turned into shows, that was when she met aemond again.

aemond, at this time, has won a few acting awards and is seen as the most desirable man of King's Landing.

reader, by now, is a CEO of a startup tech company.

what greeted aemond was an incredibly accomplished, beautiful and intelligent young woman.

he became more and more enchanted when he heard her sing and play the pieces for her fantasy books. it was clear that she has matured, both as a person and an artist.

that was when sparks began to fly between them.

initially, she was quite wary of aemond flirting with her because, at the end of the day, the two of them were colleagues.

but, finally, she couldn't hold it in anymore and the two of them started dating.

they kept their relationships under wraps because she wants to be seen as an accomplished individual, not as aemond's gf or wife.

so, you can bet that when the two of them revealed their relationship, the public was completely gobsmacked at the fact that aemond chose someone who is so accomplished to be his bride because they thought that he'll choose an actress or a model. not someone like her.

most of the messages were incredibly supportive from both the cast and public. but, of course, there were a few racist ones.

as for the bipoc women out there, they could not help but feel incredibly inspired by her, that you can be bipoc, proud of your heritage, successful, accomplished, beautiful and incredibly desired.

months later, the two of them were married in a private ceremony.

Wait bridgit mendler is an engineer too? I only ever saw the news of her having a JD in law and a phD in anthropology(? Im not sure) But tbh she is an icon highkey, I loved her from good luck charlie it's insane 😭😭 I couldn't imagine the pressure oof!!

Like she's so girlboss I love her actually 💞💞

BUT LIKE BACK TO THE HCS AT HAND

Reader was so strong for going through that omg, I'm glad she's found him, she's such a nice inspiration for others omg what a queen 💘

Reader really pulled bridgit mendler

#asks #; mae answers

[mariacallous]

In April, Elon Musk told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he was starting a project to compete with ChatGPT and build “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”

Today, Musk unveiled that new artificial intelligence venture. It’s called xAI. The company’s spare landing page repeats that goal of understanding the universe and lists 11 AI researchers—seemingly all men—who have made significant contributions to the field of AI in recent years and worked at companies including Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI.

The crew is an “all-star founding team,” according to Linxi “Jim” Fan, an AI researcher at Nvidia. “I’m really impressed by the talent density—read too many papers by them to count,” he writes in a LinkedIn post.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1679164661869182976

One of the company’s cofounders, Greg Wang, said in a tweet that xAI aims to take AI to the next level by developing a mathematical “‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks,” the machine learning technology that has dominated AI for the past decade. “This AI will enable everyone to understand our mathematical universe in ways unimaginable before,” he wrote.

Like many other new AI projects, Musk’s is motivated by concern and perhaps some FOMO over the rapid rise of ChatGPT. He has talked of xAI as a response to the bot, which he has suggested has political biases, and criticized its creator, startup OpenAI, for being secretive and too cozy with its backer Microsoft. Musk’s ill feeling is perhaps compounded by the fact that he cofounded OpenAI in 2015, but three years later severed ties with what was then a nonprofit, after reportedly failing to take full control. (The company became a for-profit venture in 2019.) And Musk has recently joined those warning that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity and entrench the power of giants like Microsoft and Google.  Musk is no stranger to making bold bets, but what little has been revealed of xAI’s goals sounds a little odd. ChatGPT and its rivals such as Google’s Bard are built on deep learning, and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has said wholly new ideas are needed to push beyond existing systems. Researching the fundamentals of the technology could help find them. But much of the recent progress in AI has come from making existing systems bigger and throwing more compute power and data at them. And the sweeping changes AI is expected to deliver in tech and other industries over the next few years will come from deploying that mostly-mature technology. At this stage, xAI seems likely to lack the cloud computing power needed to match OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. And its relatively small team of AI researchers does not look world-beating compared to the hundreds that each of those established firms can deploy on AI projects. The only person involved who has a history of working on AI risks is xAI’s sole named advisor, Dan Hendrycks, who is director of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and coordinated a recent public statement from tech leaders about the existential threat AI may pose.

Although his supposedly giant-killing AI project is starting small, Musk does, of course, have some significant resources to draw on. The new company will work closely with Twitter and Tesla, according to the xAI website. Twitter’s data from conversations on the platform is well suited to training large language models like that behind ChatGPT, and Tesla now designs its own specialized AI chips and has significant experience building large computing clusters for AI, which could be used to boost xAI’s cloud computing power. Tesla is also building a humanoid robot, a project that could be helped by, and be helpful to, xAI in future.

But perhaps at this early stage, xAI’s reality-bending rhetoric is primarily about attracting talent. AI expertise has never been in greater demand. The most pressing problem for a new entrant, even one backed by Musk’s reputation and deep pockets, is to show it can attract the researchers needed to eventually become competitive.

The huge goals Musk has set for himself—challenging existing AI giants and protecting humanity from harmful AI—make his tiny new AI company look even smaller. Many AI researchers who are also concerned about the trajectory of AI seem to view the problem as one that requires greater transparency and collaboration, rather than a lone genius with a small band of all-stars.

[felixbowery]

STATS

name: felix bowery age: twenty-four occupation: creator, founder & CEO of BlueStar position: bottom // switch (slight dominant / bossy lean, but doesn't mind "playing submissive") top kinks: pain play, choking, bondage, rimming, cum facials, power play, daddy kink face claim: brandon flynn

BIOGRAPHY

Being different was never easy, especially growing up that way, and Felix knew he was different in multiple ways, for however long he could even remember. Whenever the other kids would invite him to play house, he wasn't interested unless he could be married to the Dad. During Spin the Bottle, he'd get excited when it would land on the cute boy from down the street, and ignore the confused and freaked out looks when he french kissed him. After gym class, he wasn't able to hide how he checked out the other guys, and getting to suck several of them off later was absolutely worth being punched and called a fag by them the next day. Overall though, being gay wasn't what made Felix truly feel different. What separated him from others more than anything was the way he'd get straight As with no effort. How he'd easily debate his teachers and be miles ahead of all his fellow students. How he sent in one of the first programs he'D coded under a false name and was promised a full scholarship at one of the country's top tech universities - at age fourteen.

Being gifted with a way-above-average IQ and a talent for programming that he'd honed from the day he first got hands on a computer, Felix struggled to find people to bond with for most of his adolescence. He couldn't find much common ground with kids his age, most of whom were intellectually not nearly as developed as himself - yet it also seemed difficult to be respected by those older than him, especially within the field he was most interested in. The tech scene had seen plenty of teenage wannabes, nerds and amateur hackers claiming to be the next big thing on the horizon, and nobody was all too impressed with Felix's plans at first. He was ambitious, even a bit cocky at times as he never seemed to agree with any of the many voices who doubted he could do what he set out to do. Realistically, he possibly should not have been so sure he was going to be successful; Felix knew, however, that his skills were outstanding, and the quality of his code unmatched by anything out there that could've rivaled the app he was planning to launch.

The summer after his high school graduation, Felix began launching BlueStar - at first, an app targeted at gay men who could easily trade and rate each other's pictures. A simple idea on paper, though the quality of the application and its features soon skyrocketed the app to one of the most successful in its field. The chat functionalities, the AI that made for matching algorithms with a near-zero failure rate, and a frequent addition of more experimental (and increasingly adult-rated) features helped the app's popularity and market value explode, all while most people were quite unaware of the creator's identity at this point. Despite his start-up's market share starkly increasing, Felix found that most in the scene still struggled to take him seriously once he revealed himself as the face behind BlueStar; not only were people expecting an entire company to be behind an app of this quality, but a barely-legal teenage kid developing what soon was one of the lead gay social apps felt unreal to many.

Over time, Felix indeed turned his one-man operation into a full-on business, hiring a team of marketing experts, financial advisors, graphic designers - even other developers, though he was highly critical of their work from day one. After a while, even his most skeptical competitors had to admit the young startup was a legit force in the market, and despite his young age, Felix Bowery was starting to be recognized as the tech prodigy he'd proven himself to be. Still, there would always be gossip, he realized; some even had a kernel of truth to it. His most bitter rivals would claim that Felix's way to success had been enabled by wealthy men who acted as benefactors - sugar daddies, in essence. It wasn't a rumor he ever felt a need to address or deny - and in fact, there had been several investors who he'd engaged in sexual relations with in exchange for their money. He saw no issue in using his assets to his advantage; why limit that approach to just his intelligence, when he had youth and beauty on his side? Felix knew that 'sex sells' was not just a phrase, and the app embraced that more and more as well, adding features to explicitly trade and rate other users' nudes, or offer escort services via the application.

It was a duplicity that some might not have expected from him, but two sides of his personality that Felix both embraced. Yes, he was highly intelligent, his mind very structured and analytical - in some ways, he probably was a bit of a nerd. But that didn't mean he wasn't intrigued by sex. Getting kinky and letting go of all inhibition was his favorite pastime, and he'd always been an avid user of his own app. However, his curiosity was peaked one day despite having seen and witnessed quite a bit already. Unexpectedly, he received an invitation to visit the Haus of Perses - an island paradise that felt somewhat like his own app had broken out of the digital space and manifested in the analog world. A place full of hot men, full of sin and indulgence. Clearly he wasn't going to miss out on that.

#( stats ) #( biography )

[burnnouts]

Quick Bio: Tony Stark is the heir and CEO of Stark Industries, an internationally renowned and cutting edge tech company that his father founded after WWII. Though his father's company made weapons for the military, pitching Stark Industries as a "patriotic" American company, Tony has reinvented the business to instead focus on medical technology and vowed never to work for the military or U.S. government again. As the superhero "Iron Man," he secretly flies around the world, destroying bombs and guns and returning stolen resources commonly used in the tech industry.

Note: Tony is a canon character from the Marvel Comic Universe (616) and the majority of my characterization comes from the Disney XD Show Avengers Assemble and the novel Iron Man: Extremis by Marie Javins

Extended bio under cut:

TWs: child abuse, alcoholism, car crash, torture, war

Anthony "Tony" Stark was born to founder and CEO of Stark Industries, Howard Stark, and his wife, Maria. Publically, Howard was a weapons manufacturer known for his contributions to the super soldier program, which produced Captain America, and his work on the Manhattan Project during WWII. He also founded S.H.I.E.L.D., an international intelligence and peace keeping agency. To the world, Howard was a patriotic industrialist, but to his family, he was as a drunk prone to bursts of anger and verbal and physical abuse. As the years stripped away the last of the charming man she'd married, Tony's mother became deeply depressed and rarely left her room, though prior to her her self-isolation from society, she founded the Maria Stark Charity Foundation which helped to fund women's shelters and youth centers.

As a child, Tony quickly showed signs of genius and at the age of five began to create machines which provided order in his chaotic household. At six, his father began to force Tony into consuming large quantaties of alcohol, beginning an addiction that would continue for the rest of his life. He left home at seven to attend boarding school, and at fifteen, Tony went to MIT, graduating two years later at the top of his class with a double major in Physics and Engineering. He would eventually earn seven doctorates.

At seventeen, Tony fell for a twenty-two year old woman who convinced him to give her the access codes to Stark Industries. Her family, a rival of Howard's, later released all of the same products, and the woman broke up with Tony once he'd served his purpose. He was sent to Europe for further schooling, where again, he met a woman whose parents rivaled his own; though they attempted to run away together, their family's tracked them down. Her family, HYDRA agents, attempted to kill Tony before he escaped. A few years later, Tony's parents died in an assassination disguised as a car accident.

After inheriting Stark Industries, Tony changed the company from soley a weapons manufacturing firm to a beacon of technological futures, including state-of-the-art medical tech, in hopes that one day they could create more things that saved lives than took them. He also bought the car company that made the vehicle his parents had died in and fixed their faulty break systems. Tony not only continued but expanded his mother's charity efforts.

During a weapon's demonstration in Afghanistan, Tony's convoy was attacked with his own weapons, and he was taken hostage by the Ten Rings organization. He would have died from shrapnel drilling into his chest if he had not been saved by fellow prisoner, Ho Yinsen. Yinsen performed open heart surgery on Tony in the cave where both were being kept, and instilled a battery-powered magnet in his chest that kept the shrapnel at bay. When their kidnappers attempted to torture Tony into making them a missile, he and Yinsen instead built the Iron Man armor with which he escaped the cave. Yinsen, however, sacrificed himself in the attack, wishing to be reuinted with his late family.

Once back in America, Tony immediately shut down all weapons manufacturing at Stark Industries, after seeing first hand that he was part of an industry with no accountability. What he had been raised to believe was patriotism was indeed violent imperialism, and his weapons had been used to terrorize people all over the world, whether it be by the hands of terrorists or American soldiers. Tony continued to update the Iron Man armor and eventually used it to remove as many of his weapons as he could throughout the world. Eventually, Obadiah, his father's business partner, learned what Tony was doing and attacked with a suit of his own, revealing that he had been the one order the hit on Tony in the first place. The two fought, and Obadiah was killed.

About six months after Iron Man was created, Tony was approached by Nick Fury, the new director of his father's organization, SHIELD, who claimed he was building a team of super powered individuals. Because of his deteriorating mental helath, Tony was not immediately cleared to join, but when a Norse god, Loki, took over New York City with an alien army, Tony and several other super-powered individuals were brought in to save the day. Tony earned the trust of his team by flying a nuke into an alien wormhole, a journey he barely survived.

After their successful save of the city, the Avengers decided to continue fighting forces of evil, and Tony set up their headquarters in the top few floors of his company's New York building.

Hoping to keep his super hero identity and famous persona separate, Tony operated for many years in secret, claiming Iron Man to be his body guard until one day he rushed in front of a car to save a dog and was photographed without his mask.

#tonybio

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to design an anti-monopoly interop system

A historical accident made Massachusetts a lab for studying how tech can serve monopolies, and the moves, countermoves and counter-countermoves show how businesses, tinkerers, governments and the public can liberate themselves from seemingly all-powerful monopolists.

It all starts with Right to Repair. Companies love to monopolize the repair of their products. If the only place to get your broken stuff fixed is at its manufacturer’s authorized depots, the manufacturer can move all kinds of value from your side of the deal to their own. Like, they can force you to buy their original parts, rather than cheaper replacements. They can charge you uncompetitive rates for repairs, based not on the cost of labor and parts, but on how much they think you’ll pay before you just buy something else. Best of all, a repair monopoly lets manufacturers decide when your stuff is “beyond repair,” whereupon they can offer you a generous “trade-in rebate” if you buy a new gadget.

(No coincidence that Apple leads the anti-repair movement; CEO Tim Cook warned his shareholders that the biggest threat to the business was people fixing their phones rather than replacing them.)

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

But monopolizing repair is hard. Even if a manufacturer refuses to supply repair manuals, companies like iFixit will step in, do teardowns of your products, and make their own documentation. If you gouge on replacement parts, companies will reverse-engineer the parts and make their own alternatives. These factors keep businesses honest: if they abuse their customers, they create a market for rivals who’ll treat their customers better.

But American innovation is alive and well in the anti-repair sector. Canny corporate lawyers have devised clever ways to abuse copyright and trademark to fight independent repair. Like, if you etch a minute company logo into all the parts in your gadgets, you can use trademark to fight refurbishment and re-importation of parts harvested from scrapped items.

Even more powerful is DRM. Thanks to Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making tools to bypass a “copyright access control” is a felony. Software is copyrighted, so if your product has a chip in it, you can wrap it in a thin layer of “access controls” (DRM). Anyone makes a tool to bypass that DRM — say, to extract diagnostic information or activate a new part — commits a felony.

A company that puts cheap microcontrollers into its gadgets can make it a literal crime to reconfigure your own property so that it serves you, rather than the company’s shareholders. The falling price of chips (notwithstanding our current supply-chain blip) encouraged manufacturers to deploy this strategy to monopolize all repair.

The automotive sector was an early adopter of these dirty tricks. Car companies hate independent mechanics and third-party parts companies and have waged war on them for decades. By adding DRM to our cars, the auto makers found a way to block third-party parts, and to prevent independent mechanics from interpreting diagnostic messages.

By 2012, the people of Massachusetts had had enough. They put a question on the state ballot that year and 75% of Bay Staters voted for a Right to Repair rule that required Big Car to supply independent mechanics with the information needed to interpret the diagnostics that traveled over their cars’ wired network (the “CAN bus”).

But the car makers weren’t going to give up on the dream of making indie mechanics extinct. They shifted their diagnostic messages from the CAN bus to the cars’ wireless networks, which were not covered by the Right to Repair law.

Eight years later, in 2020, Bay Staters once again put a Right to Repair question on the ballot. The car makers pulled out all the stops to fight it, including a surreal scare-ad campaign that claimed that allowing independent repair would lead to women being stalked and murdered:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

Despite these ads, 76% of voters cast ballots in favor of an expanded Right to Repair rule that would cover the wireless networks.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

The car makers went to court to fight this (naturally), but that was just the start of their fuckery. Manufacturers like Subaru and Kia found a truly disgusting way to punish the people of Massachusetts for having the audacity to demand the right to choose their own mechanics: they are disabling advanced features on cars sold in MA:

https://www.wired.com/story/fight-right-repair-cars-turns-ugly/

If you buy your Subaru or Kia in Boston, you lose the ability to remote-start your engine on cold mornings. Your car won’t send you oil-change reminders or tire-pressure warnings. You lose access to emergency assistance services (I was a happy Kia owner — until I read this).

This is just more of the fuckery that started in 2012, when car makers shifted their diagnostics to the wireless network. It’s a winning strategy. If car makers can maintain a legal barrier to repair, they can force independent mechanics out of business and scare investors away from parts manufacturers. Do it long enough and the car makers won’t need to fight right to repair, because there won’t be any indie fix-it shops left — all the mechanics will have changed careers or taken jobs with the big auto-makers.

All of this is an object lesson in the limits of interoperability in fighting monopoly. Interop — the power to plug a new product or service into an existing one — is a powerful anti-monopoly tool.

To understand why, you have to first grasp the fatal flaw in the arguments in favor of tech monopolies. Antitrust law (theoretically) bans companies from trying to secure monopolies, but if a company just happens to get a monopoly by being the best at what it does, antitrust says we should leave it alone.

So Big Tech’s apologists like to claim that tech is a “natural monopoly” — a “winner-take-all” market that inevitably results in a single company dominating each tech subindustry. They attribute this natural monopoly to “network effects” — that’s when a product gets better as it adds customers. You probably joined Facebook because your friends were there, and once you joined up, you became a reason for more people to join. That’s “network effects.”

Tech companies definitely enjoy network effects, but that’s not the whole story. You see, digital technology is configurable in a way that other technologies are not. At a fundamental level, every computer we know how to build can run every program we know how to write. The inescapable universality of technology means that we can’t just think about network effects; we also have to think about “switching costs.”

Switching costs are another idea from economics: switching costs are (unsurprisingly) the costs you have to bear when you switch from one product to another. Switch from Facebook, lose the ability to talk to the customers and communities and friends you leave behind. Switch from iOS, lose your apps and media. Switch from HP, throw away all the ink you’ve bought on your subscription plan (and maybe pay a fee to cancel the subscription).

All of these switching costs may seem technological, but they’re actually legal. The universality of computers means that you could absolutely switch from iOS to Android and keep running your apps in a virtual machine. There’s no technical reason you can’t install modified HP printer software that lets you use third-party ink. There’s no technical reason you can’t leave Facebook but continue to participate in the messaging and groups you left behind:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The reason you can’t do these things is that it’s illegal. The reverse-engineering, scraping and other guerrilla tactics you need to accomplish these things without the manufacturers’ cooperation put you at risk of prosecution under cybersecurity, copyright, trademark and other laws.

The antitrust reform movement has cottoned onto this and there is a groundswell of support to force the tech companies to open up their platforms to competitors. In the USA, there’s the ACCESS Act:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/new-access-act-good-start-heres-how-make-sure-it-delivers

In the EU, there’s the Digital Markets Act:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/eus-digital-markets-act-there-lot-room-improvement

And in Massachusetts, there are Right to Repair laws.

Like I said, Massachusetts is the lab where these ideas are playing out. They’ve been at it for a decade. We should study the monopolists’ countermoves in Massachusetts because they are a playbook that will be used by other monopolists if we pass, say, the ACCESS Act.

Back in 2012, Big Car was forced to open up its wired network, so it moved all the useful network traffic to its wireless net. If the ACCESS Act forces Facebook to expose an API so third parties can interoperate with it, we should expect Facebook to pull a similar stunt.

They could claim that they are “refactoring their data-structures” to provide security, or innovative features, and feign remorse and surprise that this move means that the API is no longer useful for interoperators who supply ex-Facebook users with access to their friends and communities.

And yeah, we could go to court to fight them, or we could pass another law to try to prevent this kind of fuckery, but in the meantime, the fate that befell Massachusetts mechanics awaits interoperators. Neither small co-ops, nor tinkerers’ hobby-projects, nor startups will be able retain users, programmers or funding for their federate refuge from Facebook if it can’t hook up to Facebook. As Facebook ties up enforcement action in court or Congress, these projects and businesses will fail. When (if?) we force Facebook to stop cheating, the pool of interoperators will be much smaller. And like the car-makers, Facebook can create a fuckery stockpile, and roll out a new tactic every time an old one is banned.

But remember computers are intrinsically universal. Even if manufacturers don’t cooperate with interop, we can still make new services and products that plug into their existing ones. We can do it with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — a suite of tactics we call Adversarial Interoperability or Competitive Compatibility (AKA “comcom”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

These tactics have a long and honorable history, and have been a part of every tech giant’s own growth. That’s given Big Tech companies a deep and urgent appreciation of how effective these tactics are at overthrowing dominant firms. First, you make a name for yourself by selling cheap ink that works with a monopolist’s printers, then you leverage that name-brand recognition to go into the printer business! Unsurprisingly Big Tech now hates comcom, claiming that when they used guerrilla tactics, it was part of the legitimate progress of the industry, but when others do it to them, that’s piracy, hacking — digital terrorism!

Imagine if comcom had been in the mix back in 2012, when the automakers broke Massachusetts right to repair by shifting service messages to their cars’ wireless networks. If breaking DRM was legally permissible, Bay Staters wouldn’t have had to wait eight years for a new ballot initiative. Instead, a couple of smart MIT kids could have hacked those wireless service messages, designed a decoder for them, manufactured a gadget with a $3 bill of materials, and sold it for $50 to every independent mechanic in Massachusetts (and the US, and the world!). They could have raised capital to do this, promising a subscription revenue stream that would cover updates that kept the gadget current with new models of cars and new scrambling schemes.

The auto-makers could fight back, but they’d be at a serious disadvantage. If they pushed updates to their cars (or revised the systems on new cars coming off the line), they would have to ensure that their authorized service centers were current. The added complexity would piss off the mechanics paying for the companies’ stamp of legitimacy, and their customers. The harder the auto-makers fought, the more mechanics would give up on being authorized and buy the indie diagnostic gadget instead — and the more drivers would switch to indie mechanics.

Meanwhile, our MIT kids could expand into ancillary services — like a price-comparison tool to help indie mechanics source cheap third-party or refurbished parts, or third-party warranties for drivers, or… Well, you get the picture.

If auto-makers knew that committing a fuckery would immediately spark this kind of comcom guerrilla warfare, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t commit the fuckery. Large companies hate competition, but they hate uncertainty even more. Providing a standard interface for interoperators may not be their preferred outcome, but at least it’s orderly and predictable. Comcom represents an unquantifiable risk to large businesses whose shareholders get really angry when unexpected things happen.

So in theory, just the threat of comcom might dampen manufacturers’ fuckery inclinations. But who knows? Some of these companies might decide to roll the dice, driven by spite or hubris. When that happens, it’s MIT kids to the rescue, and a market for cheap guerrilla comcom gadgets that keep the independent sector going while lawmakers and regulators go through the slow, plodding business of fixing the law.

This isn’t just a theory, it’s one with an evidentiary basis. This is how previous compatibility wars actually played out. Back in the early 2000s, Microsoft was kicking Apple’s ass by undermaintaining Office for the Mac. Windows Office docs and Mac office docs were only barely compatible, and many was the time when opening a Windows Excel or Word file on a Mac would permanently corrupt it.

I was a CIO back then, overseeing heterogeneous Mac/Windows networks, and we actually started giving our Mac-using designers a second Windows computer so that they could reliably share Office docs with their Windows-using peers. In some cases, we just bought Window versions of Quark and Photoshop and got rid of the designers’ Macs.

Apple didn’t solve this problem by convincing Microsoft to fix its Mac products. Instead, Apple reverse-engineered the Windows Office file-formats and created iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) a Mac productivity suite that could seamlessly read and write those files.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

That was the moment when Microsoft finally stopped fighting standardization of its Office formats, and started cooperating with the project of moving them to a universal, XML-based successor (docx, xlsx, pptx). Why not? All the obfuscation they had thrown into Office represented a major engineering headache. Maybe the cruft was worth it if it helped Windows kill off the Mac, but once Apple committed the resources to untangle Office’s spaghetti code, all the benefits to Microsoft disappeared.

Today, the comcom tactics that saved Apple are largely off the table, thanks to all the legal restrictions that have been bought and erected by tech giants, including Apple. Like, if you try to make a runtime for iOS apps, Apple will 100% sue you:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-15/apple-seeks-to-shut-down-corellium-s-perfect-replicas-of-ios

Corellium, the company that built that iOS runtime, squeaked out a very narrow victory. A broader version of their product — aimed at a mass market, not just security researchers — would have a much harder struggle in court.

Comcom and mandatory standards are complementary. Mandatory standards provide new interoperators with a reliable, low-cost way to build new products and services. Comcom keeps tech giants’ cheating impulses in check, and also offers interoperators a fallback position when an exec decides to cheat anyway.

We can get mandatory standards through a law: pass the ACCESS Act or DMA. But comcom is harder to revive. Ideally, we could reform all the laws that block comcom — patent, copyright, cybersecurity, contract, etc — to protect interoperability. But that’s a lot of slow lawmaking, and there’s no guarantee that the high-priced corporate lawyers who figured out how to twist those laws to block comcom won’t come up with more gambits.

Another possibility is to pass an “interoperators’ defense” — something like an Anti-SLAPP law, where an interoperator accused of an offense under any statute could use a streamlined court process to show that they’re engaged in legitimate interop — improving competition, security, privacy, accessibility, usability, etc.

We could use the ongoing antitrust cases against the tech giants to appoint “special masters” — independent overseers who’d have to bless any legal action taken by the company against a competitor, only after verifying that it wasn’t a pretext for blocking interop.

We could use government procurement rules: if you want to sell a car to the government, you have to promise not to sue rivals that make it possible for independent mechanics to fix that car, even if they bypass your DRM. A similar rule could require, say, Google to promise not to attack rivals who made interoperable ed-tech that plugged into Google Classroom.

All of these would leave the companies with the legal right to fight actual bad actors — companies that stole user data or enabled fraud. Even more important, though, is the long-overdue creation of a federal privacy law in the US. That way, we could have a single standard that applied to both Big Tech platforms and the scrappy interoperators that offer liberation from their walled gardens:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

After all, even companies that claim to stick up for their users’ privacy — like Microsoft and Apple — are highly selective about when that privacy is worth defending. So long as the switching costs are high enough, those companies can be relied upon to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of their users’ privacy:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The antitrust world has really started to think hard about the power of interop to smash monopolies in rapid and durable ways. An excellent new Yale Law Journal paper from Herbert Hovenkamp, the dean of American antitrust legal scholarship, delves into the legal basis for an interop remedy:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3639142

I’m really hoping that as the idea of interop spreads through antitrust circles, that these game-theoretical analsyses of the ways that different kinds of interop interact with each other to create durable anti-monopoly measures enters the discourse.

ETA: This paper, “Equitable Interoperability: the ‘Super Tool’ of Digital Platform Governance,” by Yale’s Fiona Scott Morton also reflects current thinking from antitrust scholars on interop:

https://tobin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20Papers/Digital%20Regulation%20Project%20-%20Equitable%20Interoperability%20-%20Discussion%20Paper%20No%204.pdf

Image: elPadawan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/elpadawan/10738209824/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

[disneyat34]

Big Hero 6 at 35

A review by Adam D. Jaspering

Big Hero 6 is the story of Hiro Hamada. Hiro is a 13 year-old prodigy with a particular aptitude for engineering, design, and computer programming. When he uncovers a nefarious plot happening in his own city, he takes it upon himself to stop it. He recruits several colleagues to assist, using their skills, discoveries and inventions to create a team of superheroes. Together, they set out to save lives and uncover the truth.

One of the key focal points of the movie occurs early on. Hiro invents a series of microbots, capable of moving, organizing, and creating mechanisms and mobile structures. The invention is so well-received, he earns the attention of two individuals. The first, Robert Callaghan, a professor at the local university. The second, Alistair Krei, CEO of a major tech industry.

Krei promises Hiro a fortune for his invention, setting him on a pathway to prosperity. Unburdened from financial obligations, he’s free to pursue science as he desires. Callaghan promises Hiro a pathway to enlightenment and fulfillment, through education. He insists pursuing science as a virtue, one that shouldn’t be compromised through corporate interests.

This decision of Hiro’s is only a minor plot point of the film. It introduces two authority figures who influence his actions later. But the ethical dilemmas of who owns scientific discoveries and innovations (and who profits) are never again alluded to. Which is ironic, as it’s a near perfect reflection on how Big Hero 6 came to fruition.

Bob Iger became CEO of Disney in 2005. This was an era when media markets were becoming more competitive and overcrowded. Advancements in technology made accessing and creating entertainment simple. The entertainment industry had more content than ever before. Audience attention was being divided, and advertisers were being choosy. The entertainment industry already had a finite source of income. It was now being divided into smaller and smaller slices.

As a result, companies were conglomerating. Strategic buy-outs could create an umbrella that served many organizations. Larger corporations had the wealth and resources to distribute and market content. Smaller creators and mid-tier companies had copyrighted works and creators. For a price, these mid-tier companies could survive in an inhospitable environment.

However, this also meant creators had to serve the whims of their corporate overlords. Artistic visions were sacrificed or censored for marketability. Worse still, it wasn’t uncommon for the buyouts to result in creators outright losing ownership of their creations. But lets focus on the platonic ideal of such a business model, not the capitalist nightmare it typically is.

Iger oversaw many acquisitions during his tenure as CEO. In 2006, he finalized the purchase of Pixar. In 2012, he purchased Lucasfilm, giving Disney the rights to Star Wars. In 2018, Disney acquired rival studio 20th Century Fox. They owned the company name, studios, and back catalog. The purchase of Fox also gave Disney Fox's stock portfolio. Disney now owned a majority stake in both National Geographic Global Networks and the streaming service Hulu.

Arguably, the most influential acquisition of Iger’s tenure was Marvel Entertainment in 2011. Founded in 1939, Marvel (then known as Timely Publications) has been one of America’s largest comic book publishers. Their characters and stories helped define the modern superhero archetype. Their influence on American culture has been indisputable.

Prior to Disney’s purchase, Marvel’s explorations into film had been hit-and-miss. Marvel was very protective of their trademarks, and offered little creative freedom to studios. Characters and stories were oversimplified to tell rudimentary interpretations of legacy characters. In addition, CGI technology was underdeveloped, but still expensive. Budgets were enormous, and often not worth the price tag.

Making a superhero movie in the late 20th and early 21st century was still a gamble. It was impossible to tell which movies would be successes, and which would fall apart during development. As such, Marvel hedged their bets and worked with many different studios. 20th Century Fox, Sony, Paramount, Columbia, Artisan Entertainment, and New Line Cinema all produced Marvel films. Ironically, Marvel never worked with Disney in this era.

It was 2008′s Iron Man that made Marvel a dominant force in film. Iron Man was the first Marvel film to be produced by Marvel Studios themselves. The paltry sums they earned from licensing their characters were now irrelevant. They could make millions from their own studio. The question was, for how long? Superhero films were still risky ventures. A few financial gambits would risk the entire company.

In 2007, Marvel’s total assets were roughly $700 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Corporation offered to acquire Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. The deal was too good to pass up. 

This is in stark contrast to the original point. Whereas Hiro passed on Krei’s offer of fortune and glory, Marvel readily took the hefty payday. Big Hero 6 treats ownership of ideas as invaluable. Something more important than money. It’s a virtue that defines Hiro’s character as a good guy. Behind the scenes, the exact opposite was happening. Disney was championing one viewpoint in their films, but hawking an incompatible alternative on the corporate level.

To date, Disney has earned over $18 billion from Marvel properties. Nearly every branch of the Disney empire has utilized the Marvel library. Disney Animation was no exemption.

Choosing Big Hero 6 was the end-result of a one-way road. Disney Animation had to select a property that was family-friendly. It had to be visually stylish and suited to animation. It had to feature upstanding characters. It had work as a standalone feature. It had to be a property Disney wouldn’t want for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

They chose Big Hero 6, an obscure Marvel property that ran for only eight issues; the first three in 1998, the final five in 2008. The Big Hero 6 comic was a spin-off of the X-Men series, set in Tokyo. The team consisted of shapeshifting robots, ex-convicts, and a giant kaiju. Their villains were literal monsters. One of these villains was a ghost, comprised of the souls who died in the 1945 nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a very strange comic, and has not been especially well-remembered.

Like any Disney adaptation, there were massive rewrites, overhauls, and bowdlerization. The movie was almost completely stripped of any connection to its source material. The characters were rewritten, keeping only their names and original superpowers. If not their original versions exactly, a closely resembling variant.

The movie begins with a sweeping panorama of the city. No longer set in Tokyo, Big Hero 6 offers an interesting compromise. The film is set in a mash-up version of both Tokyo and San Francisco. “San Fransokyo” features the hilly cityscape of San Francisco, as well as the city’s iconic bay, cable cars, and Painted Lady houses. But its designed with a Japanese flair. Around the city are pagodas, the advertisements and intersections of Shibuya, Japanese lanterns, and Kanji signage all around. The most iconic element of the merger is the Golden Gate Bridge, now comprised of Shinto arches. 

It’s a very interesting, unique and engaging setting. The movie takes lots of opportunities to show off its setting. Long montages, establishing shots, many chase scenes set outdoors. The filmmakers went to great effort to create San Fransokyo, and they wanted their audience to see every facet. It doesn’t completely ruin the film’s pacing, but it becomes obvious it’s a primary focus. At what point does a film’s immersive setting swallow a film whole?

Hiro begins the film rather aimless and restless. A genius by all accounts, he graduated high school before turning 13. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, he’s resorted to building fighting robots, hustling underground robot war tournaments. Partially for a quick payday, partially for a sense of achievement. 

It’s the gentle guidance of his brother Tadashi that leads Hiro to enrolling at the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology. The question is, if Hiro was fast-tracked to graduation, why did he never consider higher education until today? Wouldn’t everyone in his immediate sphere be working with Hiro to form a plan? 

Nobody would allow a child to graduate five years early arbitrarily. They would have to have a definite purpose and ambition. A goal that they are demonstrably ready to pursue, which redundant schooling would impede. Instead, Hiro gets to sit around the house, bored and detached. The movie deliberately created its own plot hole so it could immediately solve its own plot hole. Hiro needs to be not enrolled in college so the movie can show him enrolling in college.

This opening plot thread has a purpose of intent. A rather noble one, actually. Disney uses Big Hero 6 as a deliberate recruiting device, encouraging its audience to consider a STEM-focused education. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is shown as productive and beneficial to society. It’s depicted as fun and fulfilling. It’s shown to be accessible to all people of all backgrounds. 

Tadashi is classmates with three of the six members of the upcoming Big Hero 6 superhero team. Hiro is introduced to them, their works, and their methods. In the original Big Hero 6 comics, these characters were all Japanese. On film, they receive a makeover to represent a wider demographic. This is by intention, furthering the film’s emphasis that STEM education should be available to all.

Advanced education has the unfortunate tendency to favor specific demographics over others. Certain children and teenagers may be discouraged from pursuing a college career path because of numerous factors, institutionalized or personal. If not outright discourage, they’re nudged into disciplines which they may not have a passion or desire for.

Big Hero 6 does its best to undo some of this damage. Tadashi’s classmates represent three different races, but also three different personalities one doesn’t normally associate with the word “scientist.” 

Honey Lemon specializes in chemicals and their reactions. She’s a girl with long blonde hair, constantly dressed in skirts and platform heels. She has a strong affinity for the color pink. She’s excitable, chipper, and never apologizes for it. Honey Lemon demonstrates you can be a scientist while still being a girly-girl.

Go Go is developing practical applications for electromagnets. She’s a tough-as-nails punk, commanding respect with her attitude and appearance. She wears a leather jacket, and has a purple streak in her hair. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, she’s fiercely independent, and always says what’s on her mind. Go Go proves you can be a scientist and a cool badass at the same time.

Wasabi is developing a laser induced plasma fields. He’s a protocol-obsessed neat freak who values order and organization. He’s also built like a linebacker. He’s got pectoral muscles that make him the size of a car. He proves scientists aren’t all pale, scrawny weenies. In all, these three characters show there’s no right way for a scientist to look or act. Anyone can be a scientist.

Or rather, that’s what Disney wanted to say. They took Wasabi’s character one step too far. He looks every bit the jock, but doesn’t act like it. Either in an attempt to soften his edges or flesh out his personality, Wasabi is a gentle giant. It’s not that his body type is misleading; he does possess a physical might, aptly demonstrated during the film’s fight scenes. It’s simply not an accurate reflection of his character. This has the unfortunate implication of stating that the college environment requires a certain level of decorum and obedience. You can be strong and muscular and be a scientist, but you have to toe the line and hide those personality flaws. 

Joining these three is Fred. Fred is not enrolled at the university, but a campus employee. He performs as the college mascot. Fred likes to spend his free time at the lab, watching the various developments and experiments. He thinks they’re interesting, and he’s made friends with the students there. He also has an affinity for comic books, eternally nudging the characters into the film’s superhero genre mold.

Because Fred has an abundance of free time and an interest in science, one has to wonder why he himself isn’t enrolled. He comes from an upper-class upbringing, so tuition’s not an issue. Perhaps he failed his entrance exam, or his high school grades were too poor. Fred has a childish immaturity about him, but nothing that truly depicts him as an incapable idiot, unworthy of an education. He has every single attribute of being a science major except actually being a science major.

Hiro immediately takes a liking to these four, but the film glosses over the necessary follow-through. These are Tadashi’s friends; he’s spent time with them, developing their friendship over the years. Hiro adopts them as his own by association. They appear in montages and such, but the development apparently happens all off camera. For a film based on the premise of a team, the film fast-forwards through all the necessary teambuilding. They meet Hiro, and they’re all instantly friends.

Which is why Hiro organizing them into a superhero team seems strange and off-putting. After Tadashi’s death, Hiro becomes sullen and withdrawn. Tadashi’s old friends do their best to support Hiro in his troubles, but can’t seem to reach him. Instead, he sneaks around in privacy, trespassing in warehouses and investigating the wharfs at night.

Then its revealed that someone is actively trying to kill, or at the very least terrorize Hiro. They’ve stolen Hiro’s microbots, sending a legion of the machines after him. They’re trying to ram him off the road. They’re dropping shipping crates on him. They’re hurling chunks of concrete at his head.

Hiro not only gets his acquaintances involved in this chaos, he asks them to stay involved. He asks them to give up their safety and security to indulge the madness of a kid they barely know. He asks them to put on silly costumes and repurpose their academic life’s work into dangerous weaponry. At a certain point, one expects them to politely but firmly remind Hiro that they like him, but they were really only friends with his brother.

The sixth and final member of Big Hero 6 is Baymax. Baymax is a robot designed by Tadashi prior to his death. The purpose of Baymax was to be an all-in-one medical tool. He can diagnose, treat, and comfort any number of medical conditions, from injuries to illness.

Baymax isn’t the first robot designed by Disney Animation, but he is the best. The struggle of creating an artificial lifeform onscreen is to make them look obviously robotic, but not intimidating or awkward. This means keeping the character deliberately mechanical and metal. This typically results in them looking very stereotypically robotic; uninspired and forgettable.

As the boundaries of the script indicate, Baymax needs to be both a nurturing healthcare provider and a capable crime fighter adept in combat. Two drastically different contrasting points. 

Disney succeeds by creating a unique robot. Yes, Baymax has the internal gears, pistons and shafts of any automaton. No, you cannot see them. Nor does he have the classic metallic housing one associates with robots. Instead, Baymax is equally robotic and artificial, but less overtly mechanical. Baymax sports a polyvinyl exterior, inflated like a balloon. This gives Baymax a definite mechanical presence, but also makes him approachable and, for lack of a better word, huggable.

But how does Baymax fight crime? As the movie displays early on, Baymax is essentially a walking blimp. He’s big, he’s awkward, he’s slow, and he’s prone to springing leaks. Not the most adept fighting physique.

The answer has been present for the whole movie: Innovation and application make the world a better place. Honey Lemon fits a portable chemical distillery inside a computerized purse. She can conjure up any number of chemicals in ball form, causing powerful explosions and other inhibiting reactions. Go Go adapts her electromagnetic wheel and axle design into a roller suit. This gives her great foot speed and agility. She can also fire the wheels as projectiles. Wasabi affixes his plasma lasers to a pair of gauntlets. He has powerful punches that can slice through steel and stone. Fred emulates his favorite monster movies. He gets a full-body costume that sports a giant flamethrower.

And Hiro... Well, Hiro is there too. He has a costume, he's present for every fight, but he has no skills. The filmmakers gave him no unique ability or weapon. The closest he has are magnetic couplings he uses to ride on the back of Baymax while flying. He’s the leader of the group, so his superpower is being the generic everyman.

As for Baymax, he gets body armor, a close-quarter combat software upgrade, rocket fists, and a jetpack. This puts him on even grounds with the rest of the team. He doesn’t want to fight, but he does want to protect the rest of his team.

Baymax's autonomy is questionable. At times, he feels like a fully-sentient being. He can think, converse, and make decisions for himself. Other times, he seems full-on automaton. He has a program, he follows the program, and the only way he changes is if his program changes.

Of course, his programming is open to interpretation. Baymax is designed to diagnose and treat medical ailments. When he incorporates psychological care to his roster, his concept of "therapy" is broad. Baymax goes on a long string of errands under the logic that doing so will improve Hiro’s mental health. One thing leads to another, and the medical marshmallow is soon learning Muay Thai techniques. Baymax is either designed very well to learn such a wide range of skills, or designed very poorly to have such exploitable loopholes.

Baymax is one film's strongest elements. He has a unique style and a refreshing presence seldom seen in animation. He has a very laconic approach to everything. He’s calm, unflappable, and unemotive. He states his opinions and observations very matter-of-factly. He is a robot, after all.

But this isn't the only asset Baymax brings to the film. There's an extended sequence where Baymax's batteries wind down. With his processors impeded, he has the mentality and mobility of a drunk. Watching someone stumble around is funny. Watching a stoic individual turn loose and stumble around is hilarious.

There are also balloon noises. In an extended gag, Baymax receives a few puncture wounds, leaving holes in his skin for air to escape. Why does a polyvinyl robot make the same noises as an ordinary rubber balloon? Who knows. It’s a gag. A long, extended gag. A gag that, if handled improperly, could be an annoying exercise in tedium. But that's exactly the point. The gag goes on so long, it goes from funny, to not funny, all the way back to funny again. It's a risky maneuver, but the movie pulls it off with precision.

Every Marvel movie since Disney's acquisition has used humor and action in tandem. Its one of the strongest contributing factors to the MCU's success. It’s also an essential skill to maintain for a movie like Big Hero 6.

Consider the thematic elements presented in the film: Personal trauma, depression and withdrawal, intense action scenes, killer robots, moments of peril and doom, and adults attacking children. Superhero media has been popular with children since its inception. So much so, it’s easy to forget how violent and mature the genre can be. Big Hero 6 is a kids' movie, but definitely for the older kids, 8 and up. For younger audiences, the kind Disney usually courts, the movie is rather inaccessible. 

This limited demographic window hurts the plot structure. In the beginning, every story beat serves the same purpose: get Hiro to organize a superhero team. Tadashi convinces Hiro to attend university because there he will find the resources to become a superhero. Hiro meets his future teammates and sees their skills so they can become superheroes. Hiro reprograms Baymax so Baymax can become a superhero.

After this, the film prioritizes creating a reasonable villain. After all, superheroes can’t exist if there’s no evil to fight. But a villain can’t just declare their intentions and jump into the world. They’d be arrested. So the villain is a mystery, identified only by his Kabuki mask. His name is a mystery, his face is a mystery, his plans are a mystery, and his reasons are a mystery. They're hidden from the public, hidden from the heroes, and hidden from the viewers.

The problem is, hiding the villain’s identity doesn't have the desired narrative effect. The film sets up Krei as a potential villain. He’s mildly adversarial and suspicious. If he was the villain, he would simply be the villain. It would be obvious, and there’d be no point hiding his identity. We all would have reached that conclusion upon his introduction.

Instead, the big reveal is treated as a twist. Our villain is actually Callaghan, the kindhearted, paternal figure. He has a secret traumatic backstory and a thirst for revenge. Callaghan, the character who the movie insisted was important, but lacked any real goals or influence. The character who was nice to the heroes, but quite bitter and hostile towards others. The character who's been suspiciously absent since the first act.

There are only ten characters in this movie, and six are constantly fighting the masked man. Unless Hiro’s Aunt Cass is somehow the villain, there’s only one logical conclusion who the villain is. This mystery element doesn’t serve the film nearly as well as the filmmakers assume it does. It’s the same sort of plot you’d find in any episode of Scooby-Doo, complete with the identity-revealing mask-pull.

Krei’s reckless and cavalier attitude once sabotaged Callaghan's experiments. Callaghan has never recovered from the failure. Hiro’s microbots gave Callaghan the long-awaited opportunity for revenge. This mirrors Hiro’s storyline. Tadashi died in a fire, a horrifying death which Hiro himself has not fully processed. Both Hiro and Callaghan blame others, both want justice, and both succumb to their own rage.

Since we're on the subject, let’s consider Tadashi's death. Him dying may be a required plot element, but Disney chose an incredibly stupid means of death. Tadashi goes out in a literal blaze of glory. The supposed genius runs into a burning building with the intention of saving Callaghan, trapped inside. He does so despite not knowing where Callaghan is, or having any way to protect them both from the inferno. We’re supposed to applaud his bravery instead of his brashness. If we don’t, the movie can’t use his noble death as a motivator. It's an overly-pious suicide mission to emphasize his selflessness. Tadashi deserved a better death scene.

Big Hero 6 is the second Disney film in a row to use depression and grief as a major theme. Hiro's trauma from the death of his brother is an essential element of the film. Disney doesn't sugarcoat the grief. Hiro doesn't get over it or move on. It devastates him until he finds an outlet to process it. He blames Callaghan for Tadashi’s death. He nearly kills Callaghan in an act of blind rage. 

While everyone helps Hiro back to reality, it’s Baymax who really reaches him. The entire reason he’s enabled Hiro in this superhero ambition is because he assumed it would help him. But Hiro hasn’t grown or healed at all. He’s only turned his grief into blame into wrath.

Hiro realizes his mistakes. No amount of violence will fix his problems, and it won’t provide any catharsis. The only way to get over Tadashi's death is to honor his legacy. For Hiro to live his best possible life. To honor the values they shared. He later uses this revelation against Callaghan. It's a last-ditch attempt to keep his brother’s mentor from becoming irredeemable.

A noble theme for the movie to embrace, but maybe not from Hiro’s lips. He himself was ready to kill Callaghan in the previous scene. Hiro clearly learned the error of his ways, but the short distance between these two moments is not long enough to demonstrate his growth. He literally learned this lesson eight minutes ago. He sounds like a hypocrite, projecting his own faults. 

The final act of healing is closure. Hiro needs to accept Tadashi is gone, but his own life needs to continue. He cannot cling to the past. A harsh lesson that gets reinforced in a bad way.

When circumstances are dire, Baymax realizes the only way Hiro can live is if Baymax sacrifices himself. Not just a good friend in his own right, Baymax is the last link Hiro has to his brother. Losing him would be like losing Tadashi for a second time.

And Hiro accepts that. Life is full of ups and downs. People will come and go. Their lives may be short, but their legacies will endure. All we can do is live the best possible life to honor their memory.

Baymax’s death is as genuine and heartfelt as any Disney death, but it’s a fake-out. We forget that Baymax is a robot. He’s a mechanical body with a computer chip brain. Baymax gets a death scene, but can’t actually die. Hiro literally rebuilds him in the film’s epilogue. It speaks volumes to the film’s immersion that any drama or emotion can be mined from this scene.

So often in Disney’s history, the studio has revisited plot points and trends from previous movies. Usually, it's an attempt to replicate success while minimizing efforts. This results in sloppy craftsmanship and second-rate imitations. Big Hero 6 does the inverse, revisiting failed experiments. 

Hercules was Disney’s first attempt at a superhero film. The studio didn't fully understand the structure or significance of the genre. Big Hero 6 improves on it, showing a depth and awareness beyond ‘Punch the bad guys until your problems go away.’ 

Meet the Robinsons tried to demonstrate the importance of innovation and progress. But the movie had nothing more to say beyond showing how great it would be to live in a funhouse. Big Hero 6 demonstrates the methodology of invention and discovery. They’re facets of life. Science and progress are a blank canvas. Powerful if used properly, and exploitable if mistreated. 

Brother Bear tried to display the futility of revenge, prompted by a brother’s death. Big Hero 6 goes beyond, showing us that healing involves closure and acceptance. You don’t have to upend or restructure your life to cope with loss. You just have to keep living.

Big Hero 6 even integrates a rock song into a montage, something Treasure Planet tried with awkward results. 

 As a result, Big Hero 6 is as a well-made piece of superhero fiction despite faltering in elements beyond its genre. It fudges a lot of storytelling beats, getting characters where they need to be and justifying how they act when they get there. Anything is acceptable as long as it leads to superhero stuff.

And that was always the point. Disney Animation wanted to make a superhero movie. They wanted to make a Marvel superhero movie. That’s exactly what they made, even integrating a Stan Lee cameo. They wanted nothing more and nothing less.

There was no need to fix the problems seen in other Marvel movies, or even acknowledge them. Marvel was a popular brand, and massively successful. Big Hero 6 is a movie about science. But Disney's ironic conclusion was, there’s no point in experimenting if something already works.

Beauty and the Beast Fantasia The Lion King Frozen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Cinderella Alice in Wonderland Sleeping Beauty Mulan Tangled The Little Mermaid Aladdin Lilo & Stitch The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh Pinocchio The Jungle Book Robin Hood The Sword in the Stone Bambi The Emperor’s New Groove The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Princess and the Frog The Great Mouse Detective Big Hero 6 101 Dalmatians Bolt The Three Caballeros Lady and the Tramp The Rescuers Down Under Atlantis: The Lost Empire Wreck-It Ralph The Fox and the Hound Fantasia 2000 Peter Pan Dumbo Hercules Meet the Robinsons Brother Bear The Black Cauldron Melody Time Oliver & Company Treasure Planet Tarzan The Rescuers Pocahontas Saludos Amigos The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad Winnie the Pooh The Aristocats Dinosaur Fun and Fancy Free Make Mine Music Home on the Range Chicken Little

#Big Hero 6 #Big Hero Six #walt disney #Disney #Walt Disney Animation Studios #disney studios #Disney Canon #marvel #Film Criticism #film analysis #movie review

[tottymatsuno]

Equal Footing Chapter 3: New Job Aspirations and Team Building? - Todomatsu mini arc

⦁ Author: Roro (halfeviltotty)

⦁ Fandom: Osomatsu-san

⦁ Pairing: Todomatsu x reader

⦁ Category: office/coworkers au

⦁ Rating: t

⦁ Summary: totty gets his feelings hurt and wants revenge

⦁ Word count: small

⦁ Warnings: alcohol ig

⦁ Commentary: this is the 5th time ive tried to upload this lol

When your precious, adorable and most importantly capable prince Todomatsu found an excellent opportunity to get on the ground floor of an up and coming start up you were more than impressed. Of course you would be, it's not everyday that such a fortunate line of events would take place.

By the time the audit notice reached Todomatsu's floor he had already begun his last remaining weeks at Akatsuka Trading. A company wide email was sent reassuring that this was routine. It was not.

The company would go down very publicly a year later for the upper management being apart of a corrupt embezzlement system, and when the president wanted to take a bigger cut the shareholders practically ousted him in all but name.

That didn't affect Todomatsu though! He was a mid leveled employee, only in charge of one floor of part timers. It also did not affect you in your parallel position, which Todomatsu is grateful for. Especially since Todomatsu would lead you out of the fire a year prior to the actual scandal.

So when Todomatsu found out you too were called for a follow up interview for Executive Branch Manager, the friendly competition was back on! The cutesy rival texts with stickers you sent made Todomatsu's heart clench, how can his usually professional girlfriend be so damn cute?!

After the interview process Todomatsu took you out for drinks to celebrate and mostly playfully brag that he'll get the job. After all, he sold himself high, he has more relevant skills and experience! This isn't true by any stretch of the definition, but Todomatsu loves teasing you. You joked along, poking fun at him and the night ended with sloppy kisses.

Todomatsu was actually surprised, and frankly a little disappointed that he landed the job instead of you. You were made his direct deputy manager, which was still a very prestigious job...but it was clear sexism played a role in that decision.

When you smiled at him at the orientation, shaking his hand to congratulate him and told him you looked forward to working with Todomatsu once more... He actually felt, what's the word? Bad? Pity? For someone else? In a completely unselfish way too. It was strange, usually Todomatsu loves to get ahead in life, and doesn't care on whose or how badly he has to step on someone's back to climb to the top.

Right now Todomatsu watches you mingle at the welcoming party in the corner of his eyes. He's searching for a hint of insincerity or unhappiness because surely you can't be okay with this. If he finds it your Totty will quit on the spot and formally recommend you for his position.

"Ne, Matsuno! Your cup's empty, c'mon you gotta let loose." Todomatsu's forced smile remind him to keep in check, God he hates these disrespectful pseudo cool tech nerds. There used to be such a thing as deference for your elders, but he realizes that doesn't matter if the CEO is a twenty four year old who is pretending to have confidence.

Todomatsu laughs nervously, really hating the fact he can't even use his youth as an excuse as to why he has to be the suckup here. Argh, why couldn't he stay 21 forever?

"Anything you say, Shacho-san."

Todomatsu plays the kiss up subordinate to a T, especially since it's a bit easier to stroke the ego of another insecure young guy.

"Since you're older than me it sounds weird to hear you call me by such dry honorifics, so let's drop 'em. Call me something cool, like Boss!"

Todomatsu's laughter is good natured and fake, "That might be uncomfortable for me since you're so accomplished already. It would be better to just call you by Nakamura-san instead." Nakamura-san laughs back before taking another shot.

"So what's the deal with Namae? Is she seeing anyone?" Todomatsu chokes on his freshly refilled drink, "Wh-why would you ask me that?"

Keep it cool, Totty. The CEO doesn't know that's your girlfriend! If Todomatsu goes about this right to navigate the political bombs, this might work out to his advantage. It'd be easy to be lovey-dovey at work if he plays his cards correctly, plus let any other rivals know you are taken.

Todomatsu's uncomfortable smile turns sour as Nakamura-san explains, "I heard gay guys know all of the office gossip. If there's any juicy stories about Namae, I wanna hear them!"

Todomatsu is shocked, the expression must've read clear as day on his face before he consciously adjusts it to something less outraged. First of all, Todomatsu is bi! With a preference for cute girls! Guys are a once every blue moon porn category and only when he's really really drunk and really horny! Secondly, Todomatsu's your boyfriend!!

"Oh, sorry? I didn't realize you weren't out, but don't worry I'm a chill dude so as long as you don't hit on me it's cool. I can hook you up with some numbers of the guys in the app department though." Nakamura, whom Todomatsu's now respects as much as a stray dogshit on the sidewalk says.

Todomatsu stares at him with open disgust.

"Thank you, but that's not necessary. I'm seeing someone at the moment." Think of this jobs benefits, Totty! Think of the amazing condo he will buy, the car, the high end foods!

Nakamura laughs, "So anyways Namae? She's got one of those serious vibes, but I bet she's a real freak, right? How many guys did she get with at your last job?"

Todomatsu frowns before refilling his glass. "She's serious alright, and a prude. You're wasting your time if you want to go after her, she's married to her job. She hasn't had a boyfriend in a long time, so give up." Todomatsu hopes this turns Nakamura off.

One glance at you wholly is all Todomatsu can afford right now. If Todomatsu gets a good look at you, he might try to start swinging punches. When Totty was Nakamura's age the idea of going after an older woman was out of the question! Where does he get such a huge ego from?! Maybe Todomatsu underestimated him... To be fair, Todomatsu is only five years older but things were different back then.

"If I talk to her for a week do you think she'll let me knock the cobwebs out down there? Namae seems like fun time plus I wanna see if it's cute to make her cry a little." A condo, a car, status, power, high end foods, maybe one of those uggo-cute designer rat dogs! Todomatsu repeats this mantra before just grabbing the sake bottle and drinking from it. Those are Todomatsu's cobwebs, and he's already knocked them out!

One of Todomatsu's last coherent thoughts is a revenge plot. How dare Nakamura ask that question about Totty's future wife! Maybe! If you'll have him, his future wife! At the very least, future ex girlfriend! Todomatsu will get you to follow him to the next job after this, it should be easy too. Even if you don't, he could probably just get you to be his sugar baby. Todomatsu would love to just spoil you all day long anyways so it wouldn't matter. And because Todomatsu is a deeply malicious and cruel person, he has one choice which is the only way to retaliate from such disrespect at his two favorite people is to hit Nakamura where it hurts.

Todomatsu is going to fuck you in that stupid office on every corner of Todomatsu's desk. In as many positions as he can learn, as many times as Totty can get away with it and if stupid ass Nakamura just so happens to come in as Todomatsu is dick deep he'll give his shitty boss the middle finger right as you scream out Todomatsu's name!

Next thing Todomatsu knows is he is being drunkenly helped out by you, with you apologizing on his behalf. You're so nice and you smell good and are soft. Your shoulder is so good, you're so strong, y/n-chan.

You giggle a little as you help Todomatsu into the taxi to take him back to his apartment. He in his massive inebriation has been complimenting you nonsensically, finally though the sound of your sweet laughter is too much. Todomatsu tries to initiate the world's wettest kiss ever, when you keep him at a responsible distance, "Totty, you're too drunk! Stooopp, you can't!" You're not taking him seriously at all, slapping at his wandering hands in the back of the cab.

Todomatsu manages to slur out he really wants you and when you struggle to get him home to his apartment Todomatsu begins to undress himself and attempt to kiss your neck at the same time. You let him try, fail, and fall in that order through the door. "Be a good boy, Totty." You warn, Todomatsu tries to tell you he doesn't want to right now. Todomatsu wants to be bad for once, he's sick of being a good boy. Instead you help him up once more, and he's placed on the couch.

"Head?" That almost sounded like a verbal request. You laugh louder at him before

leaving to get water and pain medication. Todomatsu refuses to take it, but you promise him a reward. Of course he wants the reward, but once he swallow the last gulp of water Todomatsu finally passes out.

#ososan #todomatsu x reader #todomatsu x si #roros fics #multichapter ososan fic #equal footing fic #equal footing ch3

[ultfreakme]

Fugou Keiji x Great Pretender fic idea~

Haru gets wind of a case regarding a horse-racing betting from Yumoto and he starts investigating on his own, Daisuke hops on it because the people running it seem suspicious as fuck and the two somehow figure out it’s Cynthia, Laurent and Gang. 

Daisuke has been trying to get a competitor of the Kambe Conglomerate down for a while and notices that the CEO/Owner of this company is heavily invested in horse race betting and he gets a lot of his money from shady shit. New mission: take down Competitor+Cynthia and her team.

Laurent notices that the Kambe siblings have somehow found their fake-ass betting pool thingamajig and taken interest. Laurent knows they probably figured it out but after hearing from Edamura about the Kambes’  ‘unlimited’ bank account, they make a side mission of trying to swindle him.

Idk, shit gets wild, Kambe’s competitor goes down but Daisuke covertly fucks with the plan so our beloved swindlers get away.

In all this, Haru and Edamura somehow get to know e/o and Edamura is scared of Haru because he has a keen eye and is very close to catching them in the act, but also admires him because of his sense of justice. Haru doesn’t know Edamura’s a swindler(at first, but he figures it out later) and actually ends up really liking him and they each complain to e/o about their weirdo partners. 

Daisuke and Laurent hate each other for sure, they talk to each other in riddles and literally no one knows wtf they’re on about. Daisuke doesn’t agree with what Laurent does, but finds a rival in him and it’s sort of like they’ve met each other’s match? 

Cynthia and Suzue are best friends, we-have-matching-bracelets kinda getting along but it’s basically all pretend. Still, it’s like w/ Daisuke and Laurent, they find that they like each other, but disagree on the ways in which one should bring down bad people. Abbie and Suzue respect one another a lot and Suzue shows off her tech and all the vehicles she built and let’s Abbie test everything out(Abbie goes off and is very close to using the weapons to end the world). 

It ends with Cynthia and Gang getting only about half the money they intended and they escape with the skin of their teeth. Daisuke and Haru are reprimanded for meddling in such a huge case but they’re pardoned since they got that CEO person.

Heading back home, Haru sees Edamura(Edamura doesn’t notice Haru) and is about to apprehend him but let’s the idea go(hopefully during the course of FKBU, he starts seeing the world in grey rather than Black and White).

Thus begins an ongoing rivalry. 

Featuring:

-Daisuke and Laurent conversing in French while Edamura and Haru glare at them -”This is my partner” leading to misunderstandings about being a couple. -Suzue and Abbie car chase scene(idk who’s chasing who but pls i need this) -Laurent bitching about Daisuke. Daisuke bitching about Laurent. - Laurent attempting to figure out just how much money’s in Kambes’ bank account and not even getting close to the bottom.

#fugou keiji #great pretender #fkbu #laurent x edamura #daisuke x haru #daiharu #cynthia #abbie #suzue and cynthia form a Mean Girl squad #fic idea #crossover

[psychovigilantewrites]

Chapter 13 - Alone Again

Word Count: 15,835

TW:  mentions of child r*pe, mentions of p*dophilia, mentions of self-harm, mentions of trauma, unconsensual biting, unprotected sex, mentions of mental breakdown.

A/N: Hey guys! I felt very bad for updating so slowly, so here it is early! Happy Valentine’s! Special thanks to those who has sent me fanart and kofis!! I appreciate them all, honestly, it’s really amazing. 

Masterlist

Kofi

The ding of his phone woke Jason up from sleep. Even during the grogginess of slowly regaining consciousness, Jason knew who it was.

He blinked his eyes a few times to get used to waking up, and cleared his dry throat. He laid there in bed for a few moments, staring at the tin roof of the safe house he was so proud of. He wondered whether the text would be business or pleasure.

He liked it when you were there with him at night.

But you were too fucking stubborn, and was still hesitating to continue seeing him. It had been a month since the first time you joined him, and since then you went out with him a couple more times, only to investigate the elite pedophile ring that plagued Jason’s mind ever since he found out that it existed, and that Bruce had kept it from him.

Your dilemma meant that you weren’t with him all the time and got upset every time he killed someone.

Jason wasn’t a patient person, but the two of you still texted and called. Discussions, or banter. It was as if you were his friend.

As if everything wasn’t as fucked up as it was.

And however hard he tried to separate his feelings from his goals, to keep you at a distance, to wall himself off, he had obviously failed.

Because now he was smiling to himself at the thought of waking up to your texts.

He had freaked out at first, confused as to why he had started to hate you less and less over time, but now he realised that it didn’t matter how he felt anymore.

As long as he could snatch you away from Bruce.

The fact that you made him feel like he wasn’t alone anymore was only a bonus.

***

To say that it was troublesome to have Dick around would be an understatement.

He had originally mentioned that he was only going to stay for a week, but one week became two, and a month later, he. Was. Still. Fucking. Here.

The fact that you were living under the same roof as Batman meant that you were almost constantly on your feet, but now Nightwing was added to the equation, it felt suffocating.

At least Bruce didn’t like to poke into your personal life as much. Dick Grayson on the other hand, loved to play the doting older brother. You weren’t fooled, though. You knew he was still suspicious of you, and was using his caring nature to his advantage, touching the line between concern and straight up paranoia.

You sighed out loud.

Michelle Myers turned her head to glare at you. You stuck up your middle finger to her, earning an audible gasp.

Shit, you hadn’t meant to do that. You forgot where you were for a second.

School was one of the ways to escape the prying and ever analytical eyes of your older brother, and a way to run from the feelings of growing distance you felt between you and your family.

It was all Jason’s fault.

You had let him get into your head ever since he told you that Bruce had kept a disgustingly huge and important piece of information regarding Gotham’s elite society- the society that you were a part of.

You felt as though there was an invisible line that separated you and Bruce now.

It wasn’t a nice feeling.

“What the hell was that?” Michelle came up to your desk as you were packing to leave.

“I’m sorry?” you feigned innocence.

“You bitch!” she hissed, “You know what you did!”

“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” Rob interjected.

“I have no idea?” you lied.

“Michelle?” Rob turned to her.

“She- she- she showed me the middle finger!” Michelle fumed.

“What?” Robert asked, “No way. That’s not something she would do. Would you?”

He turned to you.

You wondered if his parents were part of this human trafficking ring. You wondered if Michelle’s parents were.

“Of course not!” you defended yourself, “That would be unbecoming of me!”

“Michelle, it’s not nice to make up stories,” Rob rolled his eyes.

Rob’s father was the CEO of Gotham’s number one cybersecurity company, his mother inherited generations worth of wealth. Her lineage meant that she had an iron grip on Gotham and was often Bruce’s rival when it came to influence. If she were a man and didn’t take her husband’s surname, Bruce would probably have lost to her on countless occasions. The possibility of one or both of them secretly running an organized crime was high.

“I’m not!” Michelle snapped, “I’m telling the truth.”

Michelle’s mother was Gotham’s famous socialite in the 80s, her father a nobleman from England. Both very rich, but Mrs. Myers was new rich, and Mr. Myers wasn’t born and raised in Gotham. The chances were there, but probably not as high.

“Even if you were, and she did show you the middle finger, what’s the big deal? Stop being so uptight, Michelle,” Rob scolded her.

Michelle looked like she was about to pop a vein in her temple.

“Thanks Rob,” you said, “But really, it’s okay. I think Michelle might have made an honest mistake, that’s all. I’m sorry too, Michelle. Maybe I was brushing my hair aside and might have accidentally made a vulgar gesture.”

“There,” Rob smiled warmly at you, “Just a mistake. You going back now?”

“Yes, I think Alfred should be here already,” you nodded, “I’ll see you guys next week?”

“Good luck studying!” Rob wished you, “Though mocks would probably be a breeze for you.”

“I doubt it, but thank you Rob,” you made your way to leave. You turned your head to Michelle and gave her a knowing wink you knew would make her lose her mind, and walked away.

“Dick?” you called out to your older brother, who was attracting a lot of attention on the sidewalk. He had parallel parked his car on the side, and was leaning against it with his sunglasses on. He waved at you once he saw you approach him.

“What are you doing here?” you asked.

“Picking you up,” he shrugged.

“Where’s Alfred?”

“Home,” he simply said.

“And why did you come to pick me up?”

“Because why not?” he grinned, opening the passenger door for you to enter.

You narrowed your eyes at him and entered the car.

Dick had always made you feel comfortable, and you naturally felt at ease when you were with him, but lately, it was different.

You felt stiff, alert, and on guard when Dick was around because it felt like he was just waiting silently for you to fuck up, to let something slip. You hated it.

You hated how your family felt so far away from you because you had betrayed them.

“Hey, Dick?” you asked after five minutes of unusual silence.

“What’s up?”

“What does Bruce do when he’s on patrol alone?” you brought up.

Did Dick know about this elite pedophile ring? Was Dick keeping secrets from you as well?

“He patrols, I guess?” Dick answered.

“No, I meant during the nights when he tells me that he doesn’t need me around,” you explained, “What does he do then?”

You saw Dick frown.

“I don’t know,” he stated.

“Did he ever do that to you? Tell you he doesn’t need you and go off alone?” you probed.

“All the time,” he sighed.

“And you never found out what he was doing?”

“I- well- look, what’s this about?” Dick turned the question back at you, “Did something happen? Did you find something?”

“What am I supposed to find?” you interrogated.

“I don’t know!” he answered exasperatedly, “Sure, I wondered a lot back then, but that’s- that’s just how he is! He keeps secrets and leaves us out of a lot of things. Like Jason being alive for fuck’s sake. If he can keep something like that a secret for so long, God knows what he’s up to when he’s alone.”

“Didn’t you ever stop to question it?” you argued.

“Didn’t you?” Dick retaliated, “All these years as Robin, why are you only bringing this up now?”

You fell silent.

“Did something happen?” he repeated again.

“Nothing happened,” you insisted, looking at the cars zooming by outside the passenger window.

Silence again. And then-

“Jason used to question it all the time,” Dick sighed, calming down. “Even followed Bruce out. That was hilarious. Imaging trying to tail Batman.”

“He asked the right questions, then,” you grumbled.

“He did,” Dick admitted, “Didn’t get him anywhere, though.”

“Except six feet under,” you muttered bitterly.

Dick never replied to that.

***

“We still don’t know her identity, she pops in and out seemingly randomly, has mediocre tech, mediocre skills… I don’t know, Bruce. What kind of purpose does Jason have for her?” Dick stated.

You tried not to clench your jaw upon hearing that.

The three of you were in the Cave, discussing your next step for tracking Red Hood down. Bruce had suggested going after V instead and hoped that she would lead you to him. You were treading dangerous waters, and remained silent most of the time.

“The fact that she has still remained elusive shows some form of skill,” Bruce argued.

It was hard not to defend your alter-alter-ego. But, you were relieved. You had tried your best to ensure they wouldn’t suspect you, even changing your fighting style to something you weren’t too familiar with.

“Still doesn’t explain why she’s with him,” Dick shrugged, “Nothing on the traffic cams?”

Your heart skipped a beat.

You had also made sure to avoid all cameras, even parking and changing blocks away before meeting with Jason. Jason, on the other hand, drove the same fucking car, or the same fucking bike, though he frequently changed plate numbers.

Still, this was Batman and Nightwing you were talking about.

“Only one thing,” Batman replied, before pulling up a security camera footage.

Fuck.

“This was taken along Jackson Avenue in Old Gotham,” Bruce continued and played the footage.

It showed a very low quality pixelated video of you wearing a black hoodie and a black cap covering your head. You had a surgical mask on to blend in better with the crowd instead of a black mask that would automatically made you suspicious. Your face was unidentifiable.

You walked into an alleyway and never came back out.

“How are you sure this is her?” Dick asked, “She wasn’t seen in Old Gotham.”

“Height and body type are a match,” Bruce justified, “That backpack could be carrying her weapons and clothes.”

You hid that backpack in an unused dumbwaiter of a guestroom all the way on the other wing of the manor that Alfred did not bother to dust.

“Or it could be carrying textbooks,” Dick scoffed.

“There is also this-”

Bruce pulled up another traffic footage. It was of you in the same clothes, with Jason next to you on a nearly empty sidewalk with shops already closed. Jason was also wearing a hoodie that covered his head, and the camera was far away. The two of you were walking away from the camera.

“This was three hours later on Schnappe Avenue, three blocks away from Caprice, where they were last seen together a week ago.”

You had followed Jason to Caprice, a bar that hosted many criminals, and was owned by the Italian mob. Red Who was simply there to take his profits and ask a few questions regarding their connections to certain politicians in Gotham.

Rendezvous with Jason was complicated, as you both had to protect your identities. You would leave the manor two hours early, park somewhere very far away, then walk or take a taxi to a location maybe 3 kilometres away from where you would meet Jason, duck into a dark alley to change into your gear, and then grappled to where Jason parked. From there, the two of you would grapple to your location. Once you were done, you would go to his car where you stashed your bag. You would then reverse your steps and go home.

That night however, Jason, the fucking dickhead, got hungry and insisted that you followed him to a diner, which was why the both of you were in casual clothes walking together in the streets. Good thing that by fucking sheer luck, no security cameras picked you up at the restaurant.

“There were no cameras to follow them after that,” Bruce grit, “They must have strategically chosen the route.”

No, Jason was just hungry.

Dick remained silent, so you turned to look at him. You frowned at his expression. Dick’s eyes were glassy and soft.

“Is- is that really him?” he whispered.

“High possibility. It’s too coincidental to dismiss.”

“Wow,” Dick breathed, “He looks- he looks different.”

Ah, it was Dick’s first time seeing new Jason without his helmet on.

“Yes,” Bruce nodded stiffly.

“How different?” you spoke up for the first time.

You were curious.

“Well, he’s much bigger,” Dick chuckled, “And taller. Good for him. He always complained about his height. Used to bet with me that he’d grow taller. Can’t see his face, though. He used to whine about how I was stealing all the girls too. Pretty sure he had a crush on Barbara.”

Dick gave a sad smile, and you saw Bruce had turned to face away.

“Anyway,” Dick cleared his throat, “How do you suggest we go about this V girl?”

“Uh,” you started, “Why not interrogate the guy they were meeting?”

Fat chance Elio Bianchi would spill anything with what Red Hood threatened him with.

“Already did last week,” Bruce answered.

You didn’t patrol last week. Bruce suddenly extended your “grounding”, but you suspected that he wanted to keep you away from Jason.

“And?”

“Refuses to speak. Red Hood must have something on him.”

Yes, the age, location, and photos of all three of his daughters.

“So what next?” you wondered.

“We wait for his next move,” Bruce sighed, “He doesn’t seem to be doing anything too rash lately since making Elena Ciobanu shoot Victor Ibenescu. He is waiting for something.”

“Or maybe he’s finally got control?” you suggested, “Over everyone? I mean- the reason why he did all those violent things were all gang-related, wasn’t it? Maybe now he’s made his point, so everyone is following his rules?”

“Maybe,” Bruce hummed, “But this wasn’t about taking control. Now we know who he is and what his motives are.”

“He did kidnap you,” Dick added, “It’s more likely that he’s planning to do something like that again.”

“Which is why,” Bruce continued, “I don’t think you should be out with us for now.”

“Oh, come on, Bruce,” you complained, “You already grounded me for an extra week!”

“It’s not about punishment. It’s about keeping you safe.”

“I wasn’t even in uniform the last time he kidnapped me!” you debated, “I’m the safest with you.”

“In the event that we do find him, I would need to talk to him,” Bruce insisted, “Having you there might trigger something in him. It’s best if you stayed away.”

“Dick!” you turned to your older brother for help.

“Sorry kid, but I’m with him on this one,” he gave you an apologetic look.

“He could kidnap me in the middle of the day!” you ranted, “He could blow up the school, the train, hell, even the library again!”

Both Dick and Bruce frowned.

“Again?” Dick repeated.

Fuck.

Fuck.

“Yeah, I already lost one library, he could very well just find out where I am and blow it up or something,” you covered.

Bruce remained silent, just looking at you with intensity. You tried your absolute best not to recoil, not to give away that your heart was beating so violently against your chest that you could hear it in your ears.

“How important is your exam?” Bruce spoke.

“It’s my mocks, Bruce,” you grumbled, “Scholarships are waiting for mocks results. I’m not letting a delusional psycho with daddy issues get in the way of my future, no matter who he is.”

You intentionally aimed those words at the both of them. Jason was Bruce’s son, and Dick’s brother, and you wanted them to feel it.

“Then you’re only to go to and from school,” Bruce directed, “No staying back, either, and Alfred will wait outside the whole time.”

“Seriously?” you pinched the bridge of your nose, “Fine! Fine. I just- I just wanted to test myself. Whatever.”

“Test yourself?” Dick asked.

You looked at Dick straight in the eye and said, “I wanted to see if I could face him after he kidnapped and sexually assaulted me.”

With that, you stormed off after manipulating the people closest to you to make sure you throw them off of any suspicions of you.

You locked yourself in your room and collapsed on the bed with a frustrated huff. You took out your phone to send Jason a text.

You: What are you doing tonight?

Five minutes later, your phone dinged.

Sexy Hunk From Library: Usual. You coming? You: You have any leads? Sexy Hunk From Library: Possibly.

You stared at your phone, assessing the risks if you were to go out with him that night. Then, your phone dinged again.

Sexy Hunk From Library: Kill time with me?

The corners of your lips twitched upwards.

You: Miss me that much?

You saw that he was typing, then stopped, then typed again. Until finally-

Sexy Hunk From Library: Are you coming or not?

It was funny how you could still chuckle to yourself despite how fucked you were. You were fucked because you betrayed your family, you were fucked because your family was suspicious of you, and you were fucked because for the past couple weeks of occasionally seeing and texting him, you realised that you had begun to like him more and more.

The dangerous and violent parts of him still made you wary, but despite all that, you couldn’t help but want to be by his side. It confused the hell out of you, because sometimes he didn’t act like how you would expect him to act at all.

Sometimes he was actually nice.

For instance, he had treated you to that burger when he insisted that you went with him to the diner.

Or the time when he argued with you over pineapple on pizza, as if you were friends who didn’t hate each other.

And even when you almost got punched in the face by a massive brute who had been dealing to kids. The punch never landed because Red Hood stopped him, beat him half to death, and then shot him in the kneecaps, before turning to you and asking if you were okay.

You thought that was sort of nice of him.

Fuck, you wanted to see him.

You texted him back.

You: Time and location?

***

Jason waited impatiently for you to arrive.

He was tapping his fingers rapidly against the steering wheel. Somehow he felt like he was going to be sick.

Despite the gentle drizzle that fell against the glass windows and the cold wind blowing outside, Jason felt hot and stuffy.

He looked at his reflection in the rear view mirror, coming into contact with his tired, sunken, blue eyes. He tried to fix his hair, combing it to the side with his fingers then groaning before ruffling it up again.

Fuck, what was he doing?

He spent the next minute trying and failing to fix his hair, that he didn’t notice you approached the vehicle until your rapped your knuckles against the window. He jumped at the sudden sound, earning a raised eyebrow from you. He unlocked the door and you climbed inside.

“You’re late,” he grumbled, aware of his hoarse voice. It was the first time he had spoken to anyone in two days.

“Only by five minutes,” you pouted.

“Late is late,” he snapped.

“You’re okay with killing people, but will bitch if I’m slightly late?” you scoffed.

“Just be on time next time,” he grit.

“Fine, I’m sorry I’m late,” you rolled your eyes. “Now can we get to it?”

Jason gave you a glare, his jaw clenching in frustration. He took a few moments to calm down.

“You know Maria and Joseph Powers?”

“Of the Powers Group?” you frowned, “Powers Hotel? Sure, I know them.”

“I have reason to believe that they’re one of the people involved in this child trafficking business,” Jason revealed.

“W-what?” you gasped, “Do you have evidence?”

“Some,” Jason replied, “They’ve been investigated before. I guess Batman played a part in that, but everything seems to have been dropped. Document trails, eye witness statements, physical evidence- all disappeared.”

He saw that you were struggling to keep up, mouth gaping and eyes wide.

“What’s wrong?” he frowned, “Get a hold of yourself.”

“Bruce knew?” you whispered.

“What doesn’t he know?” Jason scoffed.

“I sat on the same fucking table as them last Christmas ball,” you growled, “I went to their kid’s fifth birthday party. Bruce shook hands and smiled at them and then invited them over for drinks.”

Jason resisted a smirk. He finally got you to understand. Your arms were crossed, and your face in a scowl, obviously pissed.

Bruce probably did all of that to keep them close so he could keep an eye on them, maybe even find some more details. But Jason wasn’t going to tell you that.

You still had a lot to learn, but Jason was willing to be the one to teach you.

“Where will he be tonight?” he asked.

“I… I’m not too sure,” you said quietly.

Jason raised an eyebrow at you.

“What’s this? He didn’t tell his beloved Robin his plans? Again?”

You remained silent, looking straight ahead.

“I was wondering about that,” he continued, “Friday night and you’re here with me instead. Something happened?”

This time, Jason waited patiently for you to respond, enjoying the way you were obviously uncomfortable with his interrogation.

“He…” you started slowly, “He won’t let me out with him.”

“You got into trouble again?” he smirked.

“No, it’s because of you,” you shot him a sharp glare.

If only looks could kill.

“He knows you have it out for me, so for my safety,” you spat, “He won’t let me out.”

Jason blinked at you once, twice, then let out a booming laugh.

“Oh, man. Oh, sweetheart,” he pretended to wipe away tears, “Look at you, all angry at me.”

He reached across towards you and booped you on the nose. You swatted his hand away violently.

Jason loved teasing you. It made his heart all warm.

You were looking away again, and had the mask covering half your face, but even in the dark alley, he could make out your long lashes, clumped together because of the rain, and the way your shiny hair framed your face, also damp.

Your smell was intoxicating, filling his car with a pleasant scent of vanilla and strawberries. The longer Jason spent time with you, the more he felt himself getting pulled deeper and deeper in-

“He’s investigating me,” you interrupted his trance. “Well, not me specifically, but V. He’s got footage of us walking to that stupid diner-”

You paused to shoot daggers at him.

“-good thing I kept the hoodie and mask on, and thank the fucking stars that there were no cameras after that leading to to the diner. We can’t be reckless like that again, Jason.”

Jason rolled his eyes at your lecture

“So now what? You gonna kill the Powers’? How did you find out about them anyway?” you asked.

“Through the Ibenescu problem,” he explained, “Whenever they trafficked girls, I’ve always found a few kids. Always not more than ten at a time. Didn’t add up. All this while I’ve made sure there were no kids involved, be it local or foreign. And after going to each and every single fucking brothel and threatening every single pimp in Gotham-”

Jaon let out a tired sigh at the memory of going all over Gotham to turn over every rock, paying and threatening people for information. He allowed sex work as long as they kept to his standards, and as long as they weren’t trafficked. He made sure all the girls were well taken care of, and he made it very clear as to what would happen to the pimps if they weren’t.

The girls all loved him.

“- no sign of kids. Which meant that Gotham was being used as a proxy and they were being transported outside of Gotham, or there were other powers at play. So I dug in deeper. Hacked into GCPD records, looked at the political scandals and allegations that got dropped and was never brought to court. The Powers and some others came up a few times, but not too heavy. Tax evasion and stuff like that. Until I hacked into the FBI.”

“The FBI?” you gasped.

He smirked to himself. You were paying careful attention. It made him feel like he was some sort of mentor.

“It’s really not that difficult when you know people,” he scoffed, “Anyway, the Powers’ were originally under investigation for money laundering because the Powers’ Group Executive Accountant, who mysteriously died of a suicide, reported large sums of money that didn’t belong there. Then they got an external auditor, who is also deceased, reported inconsistencies with signatures and accounts.”

Jason reached to the back seats of his car and passed you a thick file that contained the FBI investigation.

“After that, they checked emails. Nothing. Then they wiretapped them, and recorded conversations regarding child sex trafficking from all over the world, for other politicians and rich pigs in this goddamned country- whose names are redacted in the files. However, they didn’t keep the audio evidence. Everything’s been terminated.”

“Wait, this can’t be right,” you frowned, flipping through the pages. “This case is almost twenty years old and… dropped? In 2012!”

“Exactly,” Jason grit.

“How long have you been investigating this?”

“Over the last two months.”

“So you already knew the Powers’ were involved,” you looked at him in suspicion, “Why haven’t you killed them yet?”

Ah, you caught on quick. Not bad.

“Because of tonight, sweetheart,” he answered, “I wiretapped them myself. There’s a shipment tonight, and one of the Powers’ need to confirm it half an hour before docking, or else they won’t dock, and it’ll be a bitch to track down again.”

“Then this is great,” your eyes widen, “We catch them red handed at the docks, take photos, spread them online, make it go viral. They won’t be able to cover it up when there’s a public outcry.”

Jason started chuckling.

“What?” you demanded.

“Look through the files. Do you see any pictures? Videos?”

You frowned.

“Do you really think they would be stupid enough to physically be there, where the authorities can, and I quote, catch them red handed?”

You shook your head slowly.

“Even if they were there, pictures can be easily faked these days. Hell, even videos. Audios, easiest of the two. They would just claim that someone was slandering them, then move on. If the feds don’t want to charge them, do you really think the cops could? And what happens if they were brought to court anyway? They can easily pay off judges and jurors.”

Jason liked this. Educating you.

Just face it, baby girl,” he added, “The system is fucked. Batman’s been trying for over a decade, and the Powers’ are still having Christmas balls.”

You let out a sad sigh.

“Let’s just get to the docks, then.”

Jason put on his mask and helmet, and drove away.

***

You were sick and tired of Dixon Docks, but criminals just couldn’t stop choosing that location for smuggling. There was also Port Adams, but the port was located near Blackgate Isle, so the marine security was tighter.

Any normal city, a place like Dixon Docks would have much tighter security after countless cases of illegal smuggling, but this was Gotham.

The security that GCPD put out on patrol with what little resources they could spare were easily bribed. The dock security company themselves were probably owned and bought over by a crime lord, not unlike the one beside you right now.

“They’re here,” Jason pointed out. The both of you were on the rooftop of a warehouse on the docks.

You squinted in the distance and saw a ship coming nearer. You missed Batman’s tech whenever you went out with Jason. Your lack of state of the art domino mask made it harder to see faraway objects and in the dark.

The docks were quiet, except for the sound of the water currents and sea breeze, and the twenty or so hired guns grumbling about the weather. You theorized that this operation was usually similar in the past, where it went smoothly without much obstacles, judging from the lack of hired security. Jason also mentioned that the kids were usually brought in along with older trafficked victims from other operations to help cover up, but since his harsh crackdown on human trafficking, they were forced to operate alone.

You waited until the industrial ship dock amongst the other unoccupied ships, and then heard some voices yelling in the distance. From the ship came out 4 girls and 3 boys in tattered clothes, malnourished and with frightful eyes. Their ages ranged from about 12-15 years old.

Accompanying them were three armed men, shoving the children to walk faster. Your blood started boiling at the sight.

“This should be easy,”Jason stretched, getting ready to make a move.

“We shouldn’t underestimate them,” you advised, “We should think of a strategy to-”

Jason leapt from the age of the rooftop without warning.

“Wait! Red Hood! Fuck!” you whispered angrily, and followed suit.

Red Hood ran ahead of you with inhuman speed towards the children, guns out and firing at the men.

You heard the children scream, the men shouting, and more guns firing.

It all happened so fast, that by the time you reached there, Red Hood was standing tall and proud over more than a dozen dead bodies.

“What the fuck?!” you shoved Red Hood as hard as you could. He didn’t budge. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“What?”

“You opened fire when there are children right in the middle of everything!” you yelled.

“I’ve got an excellent aim and I caught them off guard,” he defended, “They couldn’t even respond on time.”

“The kids could have caught a stray bullet, you fucking dickhead!” you shoved him again.

This time, he growled at you and gripped your wrists tight, pulling you harshly to him.

“If you do that again, I’ll make sure you regret it,” he threatened you with a low voice that sounded even more hostile through the voice scrambler.

You wanted to say more, but then you heard a cry from one of the children. You wrenched your hand away from his grip and walked towards them.

They were kneeling on the ground, gripping each other tight by the clothes and arms. They were Asian. You guessed maybe South or South East.

“Hey,” you gently called out, slowly kneeling to their level. They recoiled at your approach.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,” you said, putting your arms up in surrender to convince them. “See? No guns.”

Their expressions didn’t change. You were just another threat to them.

“Don’t any of you speak English?” Red Hood grunted.

You glared at him.

“What? It’d help,” he shrugged.

“Even if they did, do you really think they’d speak to you?” you snapped.

You turned to them again, and despite the risk, pulled down your mask and hoped that there weren’t any cameras nearby.

“Hey, we’re here to help okay?” you maintained a slow, low voice.

Two girls then looked at each other, and one of them spoke up.

“I- I can speak English,” she said in a shaky voice.

“That’s great,” you smiled sweetly, “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Magdeline,” she whispered.

“Nice to meet you, Magdeline. I’m V,” you pointed at Jason, “And that grumpy tomato head there is Red Hood.”

You saw Magdeline and two others share a smile. They must have understood you.

“We’re not going to hurt you, okay? We just want to help.”

“Are you going to take us home?” another girl squeaked.

“No,” you winced, “But, we’re going to take you to the police, and they will help, okay?”

They nodded, wiping tears from their eyes.

“So what we’re going to do is that we’re going to call-”

You stopped mid sentence.

Suddenly, you felt a chill down your spine, as if someone dropped an ice cube down your shirt. The hairs on the back of your neck stood up, and you hurriedly put on your mask again.

“What’s wrong?” Red Hood sensed. You stood up straight, your heart beating fast.

“We need to go,” you told him, hearing the blood rush to your ears, your eyes darting quick to every shadow, to detect any movements from the darkness.

“What?”

“He’s here,” you whispered.

Red Hood looked at you for a moment, and then-

“Fuck. Come on.”

“Please don’t leave us,” Magdeline fisted your clothes, “Please.”

She looked like she was going to cry again.

“It’s okay,” you told her, “Someone’s here to help you.”

“No! Please! I want you!” she wailed.

“Shh,” you tried to calm her down.

“V, we don’t have time,” Red Hood growled.

“He’s a hero,” you ignored him, “He may look big and scary at first, but he’s a hero, okay? I promise.”

She continued to wail. You forced her off you and stepped back.

At the corner of your eye, you saw a shadow in the sky, and felt your heart drop to your stomach.

So this is what it felt like to be hunted by Batman.

“Come on,” you told Red Hood, and the two of you ran in the direction of Jason’s car, swerving between shipment containers for more cover.

Then, in the distance, you heard a loud familiar boom.

“JASON!”

The man in question who was running ahead of you started chuckling, then raided two middle fingers up in the air.

You looked behind you, but Batman was nowhere to be seen. Not in the sky, not on the roofs, not on the shipment containers, not even in the shadows.

Perhaps he saw the children and stopped-

You ran into Red Hood’s hard back. He had come to a sudden stop.

Fuck.

You peeked from behind him, and was relieved when you only saw Nightwing standing about ten feet away from you.

“Jason,” he called out, “Hey, buddy.”

“Quit your Golden Boy act, Grayson,” Red Hood snarled, “You’re almost as guilty as he is.”

He took out a handgun and aimed it at Nightwing.

“Come on, Jay,” Nightwing tried, “You’re not gonna shoot me.”

“You wanna bet?” he growled and cocked it.

You remained behind Jason for cover in fear of being recognized. Half your face was covered and you were wearing contact lenses that hid your true eye color, but you couldn’t be too careful.

“Who’s your friend, Jason?” you felt Dick’s eyes on you, “We can helo her too.”

Jason responded with a dark chuckle.

“Hey, sweetheart, what’s your name?” Nightwing stepped closer in your direction.

“Stay the fuck away from her,” Jason fumed.

Dick stopped in his tracks and raised his arms back up in surrender.

“Okay,” he nodded slowly, “It’s fine. Let’s just talk.”

***

Jason felt a punch in his gut when he saw his older brother appear in front of him.

Grayson had aged slightly, his hair longer, face more defined. It was guilt that Jason was feeling. Grayson had always been there for him. Training him, teaching him, giving him advise on girls and on being a teen.

Yet, even at that time, he had felt immense anger towards him, jealous that he was constantly in Grayson’s shadow no matter how hard he tried to be his own man.

And now? Grayson didn’t do jackshit to Joker either, the person who took the life of his supposed younger brother whom he said he always loved and cared for. No, Grayson was the same as everyone else.

Once Jason was out of the picture, they all gladly moved on and replaced him with you.

So fuck talking.

“No,” Jason tried as hard as he could to not let the tightness he felt in his chest affect him. “Move. I won’t repeat it again.”

“We miss you, Jason,” Dick pleaded, “You have no idea how happy I was when I found out you were alive.”

His throat was constricting, his breath shallow. No, Grayson was lying.

“Alfred spent the whole night crying,” Dick chuckled.

Stop it. Don’t talk about Alfred.

He felt his eyes stinging with tears.

“He was saying that he couldn’t wait to make your favourite-”

BANG!

“Fuck!” Dick screamed out in pain, collapsing to his knees and clutching his left thigh.

Jason heard you gasp behind him, and he grabbed you by the wrist and pulled you to run with him to his car.

“You shot him,” you quietly whispered.

Jason was speeding away, the docks long behind him.

“He’s had a lot worse,” he grunted at you.

“You didn’t have to shoot him.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he snapped, “Would you rather he caught the both of us? Unveil your identity? Show him how you were with me all along?”

“We could have taken him down together,” you muttered.

Jason let out a bark of laughter.

“You’re fucking stupid if you think the both of us can take down Grayson with just hand-to-hand,” he sneered, “Even if we could, let’s waste time and wait for Batman to catch up, right? Was that what you wanted?”

You remained silent.

“Didn’t think so.”

Jason gripped the steering wheel tight while he drove to the rendezvous point, selected carefully based on the absence of cameras in the area.

“I need to get back quick before they do,” you spoke up, “With Dick injured, they’re probably rushing back as well.”

“How do you plan on sneaking back in?” Jason asked out of curiosity.

“I deactivated the motion sensors.”

Jason frowned. Interesting.

“And I rented a motorbike a while back specifically for this. I park it outside the gate, hide it in some bushes so I don’t need to make noise opening and closing the gates every time I go in or out,” you explained, “I either play music in my room or play recorded noises of me doing things.”

“You’ve truly mastered the art of sneaking out now,” Jason teased, a small hint of pride swelling in his chest.

He made a turn into the same alleyway as before and switched off his engine.

“I need to go,” you moved to leave.

Without thinking, as if on reflex, Jason reached out and grabbed you by the wrists. You looked at him in question, an eyebrow raised, waiting for him to say something.

Jason looked back at you, the nauseous feeling returning again.

“Nothing,” he let go of you, “Sorry.”

You hesitated, as if you wanted to say something. In the end you nodded stiffly and left.

Jason took off his helmet and let out the breath he didn’t realise he was holding. He leaned forward to rest his forehead on the steering wheel, coming to terms with the realisation that the nausea he felt was actually butterflies.

***

You tripped over your chair as you were climbing into your room from the window, causing some things on your desk to fall to the floor with a loud thud.

“Fuck,” you whispered to yourself.

You hurriedly took off your shoes and changed into your pyjamas, kicking the backpack full of your gear under your bed to be hidden in your secret place later. You ruffled your hair and then looked into your mirror, realising that you hadn’t taken off your contact lenses yet.

You heard footsteps approaching.

“Fuck, fuck, ow!” you accidentally poked yourself in the eye.

The moment you put in the last contact lens in its case, you heard a knock on your door.

“It’s me.”

You took a deep breath to calm yourself down, then went to open the door.

“Yeah?”

Bruce looked at you with serious, tired eyes, still in his Batsuit sans the cowl.

“Dick got shot,” he stated.

“W-what?” you widened your eyes in shock, just as practiced. “Is he okay?”

You rushed out the room and hurried to the Manor’s infirmary where all of you went if there was a serious accident besides scrapes and cuts. Rushing out in panic would cover any body language that could reveal anything.

“He’s fine,” Bruce followed you from behind, “Lost a bit of blood, that’s all.”

You opened the doors to the infirmary to see Dick in a t-shirt and boxers on a bed, hooked to an IV bag. His left thigh was already bandaged. Alfred was adjusting the flow of the IV.

“Dick!” you rushed to his side, “What happened?”

“I’m fine,” he rolled his eyes, “I’ve had worse.”

“What happened?” you repeated, sitting on the side of the bed.

Dick exchanged a look with Bruce.

“We were patrolling near the docks, then we heard gunshots,” Dick explained, “Turns out it was… Red Hood.”

“He… shot you?” you whispered.

“Yeah,” he groaned, “I really didn’t think he would.”

“You have to stop thinking that this is the Jason you used to know,” you scolded, and then turned to Bruce with angry eyes, “Both of you. Don’t you think your judgement’s been clouded? That’s why it’s better if I’m with you. I never knew him, I’d be more objective and-”

“No,” Bruce said sternly, “End of discussion.”

You scowled. “What was he doing there anyway?”

Dick glanced at Bruce again.

“Weapons exchange,” Bruce answered, “He was hijacking a weapons exchange.”

If you weren’t there, you would have believed Bruce without a doubt. You clenched your jaw, making sure you don’t reveal anything.

“Why did he shoot at you?” you turned to Dick.

“He was probably being protective,” he said.

“Protective?”

“Yeah, the girl was there,” Dick recounted, “You should have seen him with her. It was like he was protecting her from me. His body language, stance and everything made it seem like she was precious cargo.”

You frowned.

“If I had to guess, she’s probably someone he cares about,” Dick smiled softly. “I’m sort of happy, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s… going through a lot,” Dick went on, “I’m glad there’s someone with him.”

Your mouth was dry. You turned and saw that Bruce was long gone.

“You don’t think she’s his prisoner or something?” you tried, “Maybe she’s being blackmailed or forced into staying with him.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he shook his head, “She looked like she was depending on him to protect her.”

Your left eye twitched in annoyance.

“Really,” you grit.

“Yeah, I mean,” Dick elaborated, “She looked scared. I guess I can’t blame her. It’s Batman.”

You remained silent to recollect your thoughts. Then-

“What are you going to do once you catch him?” you pursed your lips.

“Help him,” Dick replied like it was the most obvious thing.

“What if he doesn’t want help?” you pressed on, “Are you going to lock him away?”

“Only as a last resort,” Dick said, “But maybe being with family will make him see sense. Hopefully.”

“I guess you and Batman defy your own system too, huh?” you scoffed, standing up.

“What do you mean?”

“If Red Hood wasn’t Jason,” you argued, “If he was just some random guy who wanted to take matters in his own hands using violence and murder, you and Bruce would just lock him up either in Arkham or Blackgate depending on whether or not he pleads insanity. But because you know Jason personally…”

“You’re saying we should just lock him up instead of helping?” Dick asked perplexed.

“No, I’m just saying it’s kind of hypocritical that just because you know him, you’re giving him an out that you wouldn’t give anyone else,” you shrugged.

“We don’t just know him, he’s family,” Dick reminded you, “We don’t abandon family.”

You remained silent.

“Look,” Dick sighed and looked at you sympathetically, “I know what he did to you was wrong, and trust me, Bruce will make sure he atones for that. I’m not suggesting that he automatically come back and live here, especially because, well, you won’t be okay with it. Which is fine. You don’t have to put up with him. And we’re not making up excuses for him either. Like I said, Bruce was… very upset when he found out what happened to you. And that’s putting it lightly.”

You tried not to roll your eyes. You really didn’t care much about all of that. You had since then voluntarily asked him to do more to you than just suck hickies on your neck.

“But, this isn’t Jason,” Dick went on, “I mean, yes it is, but, he’s not rational. He’s angry and lashing out, and needs help. I’m not siding with him for what he did to you and we’re not dismissing it. I just wanted you to know that.”

“Yeah, I know,” you smiled, “Get some rest. Text me if you need anything.”

At least Jason’s sense of righteousness was simple and straightforward. You harmed innocents? You get his gun. There weren’t loopholes and justifications and complicated principles.

Plain and simple eye for an eye.

You turned to leave, unsatisfied with the lies and hypocrisy.

*** From the first crack of lightning you saw in the dark sky, you should have used it as a warning to stay home that Saturday night. But somehow you couldn’t help but go out to see Jason, knowing what he was planning to do.

You could have been in your bed, studying for your mocks with a mug of warm green tea in your hands and a plate of cookies on your desk, but instead, you were clutching the leather of Red Hood’s jacket, slippery and glistening from the downpour as he zoomed on his motorbike, you seated behind him.

Unlike the Robin uniform, though it wasn’t waterproof, the clothing you wore on nights with Jason was not state of the art. At least your Robin uniform didn’t get heavy when wet, and at least it wasn’t as absorbent. The rain made the zylon even heavier, making it difficult for you to move around.

The sound of rain pounding hard on your helmet was almost as loud as the wind. Jason didn’t care that the ground was slippery, he was still going recklessly as fast as he usually would.

He made a sharp turn into a lonely, dark road, with nothing but trees surrounding it. The road was going uphill, away from the city centre. You were approaching a mansion- modern style with glass walls.

Right before the trees cleared up, Red Hood swerved the bike into the bushes without warning, and then stopped once the both of you were deep enough within the cover of the trees. He cut off the engine, and you hurriedly climbed off.

Red Hood followed suit then, and you tried your best to not let your eyes linger on the way the water trickled down his chest, past the the red bat symbol, and down again, dipping into his-

“Fucking Gotham,” he grunted, voice crackling through the scrambler.

“At least you have a jacket,” you grit, teeth clenched as to not let them clatter.

He turned to look at you for a moment, and then started removing his leather jacket.

“N-no, it’s fine,” you refused, “It’s too big and it’ll be hard for me to move in. It’ll just be a hazard.”

Inside, your heart fluttered at the rare display of kindness.

“Whatever,” he shrugged it back on. “You remember the plan?”

“Plan?” you scoffed, “You mean sneak in, look for the master bedroom, then kill the Powers’?“

“You’re not going to stop me, are you?” he came closer to you, “If you’re going to mess it up, I’d rather tie you to the tree.”

“My, Red Hood,” you smirked, knowing that he couldn’t see it underneath your mask, “I didn’t know you were so kinky.”

“I’m serious,” he growled, “If you try to stop me, I will make you pay for it.”

“Whatever, let’s just get inside,” you turned away, “I’m fucking freezing.”

It would have been tough for anyone to sneak past all the security, cameras, bypassing alarm systems and into the mansion. But you and Red Hood weren’t just anyone. Both being trained by Batman, plus whatever it was that Jason gained over the years he wasn’t with Batman, it was only trickier than average.

Once you were in, you had to admit that you always thought the Powers’ had good taste. The interior was minimalistic, with furniture that were all neutral tones that went with the glass walls and with marble tops of exquisite design placement. You glanced at the exit to the backyard, which was a glass sliding door that spanned all the way from the ceiling to the floor.

It had only been one year since you were last there for their daughter’s birthday, ignorant of what was going on.

What the hell were you doing there?

“Split up,” Red Hood whispered from behind you, “Look for the master bedroom. Let me know when you find it.”

He gripped your hand and forced an earpiece in it.

Both you and Jason went up the marble staircase and stopped at the top. The hallway stretched from one end to the other, nothing in the way but a few potted plants.

He went right, and you took it as an instruction to go left.

Fuck, what were you doing? Were you going to stop him?

But the Powers’ deserved it. There was no other way, or else Bruce would have done something already.

Still, were you just going to stand by and watch while he murdered people?

You peeked into the first room, and saw that the bed with pink sheets was occupied by a small figure, wrapped in the covers like a cute little burrito.

Carrie Powers. Sleeping soundly while her parents were about to be killed.

Oh, God.

But how could they do this? Traffick other children when they had one of their own?

“Down the hall, first door on the left,” Jason’s hushed voice appeared in your ear.

Fuck, you had to stop him.

You closed the door quietly, and went to the room Jason had mentioned. It was opened by a crack, and you pushed it softly.

The view you saw made your heart skip a beat.

Red Hood had taken off his jacket and dumped it on the white setee in the middle of the very large master bedroom. He was standing by the super king sized bed, pointing an oddly shaped dagger at Maria Powers, who was fast asleep.

The power he so obviously exerted as he was standing over her, muscles taut with anticipation, contemplating which angle was best to slit her throat- it made your breath hitch.

“What do you think, V?” he said out loud, “How should I do it?”

His voice stirred the Powers awake, but before they could react, he grabbed Maria by the neck and lifted her so she sat upright, immediately pressing the knife against her cheek.

“Any of you scream, I’ll carve a smile into her face,” Red Hood threatened.

Joseph Powers, who finally snapped out of his groggy state, scrambled to his feet.

“W-what? Who are you?” he panicked, “What do you want?”

“No sudden movements,” Red Hood ordered, “I’m thinking whether or not I should make this quick and easy, or have some fun first.”

“We have money,” Joseph started, “Please. We’ll give you anything. Just don’t hurt us.”

“Oh, it’s not money I want,” Red Hood said cooly, “No. I want names.”

“What? What names?” Joseph asked, perplexed.

“Names of every politician, judge, CEO, or beat cop who is in on this little operation of yours.”

“I- I don’t understand,” the man stammered, “I think you’ve got it all wrong. We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh?” Jason played along, “Maybe I’ll give you a little reminder.”

Red Hood snapped his head towards you, his red helmet glowing ominously in the dark.

“Bring the girl.” Despite being soaking wet in a weather that would usually make your bones clatter, hearing Red Hood say those words in a calm voice made a chill run down your spine for the first time that night

“No,” Maria whimpered, but silenced herself when her captor tightened his grip.

“What?” you gasped.

“The kid,” he growled, “Bring her here.”

“We’re not involving the kid,” you stood your ground.

“V,” he warned, “Don’t make me repeat myself. You better-”

“Mommy?” you heard a small squeak at the door and turned to see little Carrie, with her big chocolate eyes wearing her purple butterfly print pyjamas.

“Carrie, go back to your room,” Joseph ordered, “Please. She’s innocent.”

“And the kids you have kidnapped, shipped, and raped aren’t?” Red Hood fumed.

You saw the microsecond momentary realisation in both the Powers’ eyes, before they tried to cover it up again.

“Daddy? Mommy?” Carrie called in a shaky voice, “What’s going on?”

“Go back to your room, Carrie!”

“Carrie, do you want to help mommy?” Red Hood drawled.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Come closer, Carrie,” Red Hood persuaded.

“Red Hood,” you protested.

“If you’re not going to help, then shut the fuck up,” he snarled.

Carrie entered the room but stood quietly behind you.

Her father looked at you with desperation in his eyes, “Please help us.”

“You’re filth to me,” you snapped at him, enjoying the way he cringed.

Joseph was usually a proud man, handsome for his age, with a fit body and perfect salt and pepper hair. The man you saw then was pathetic. DIsgusting,

Filth.

“But I won’t hurt your kid,” you added.

You expected to see relief printed on his face, and clenched your jaw when you didn’t.

“I can’t promise he wouldn’t, though,” you nodded at Red Hood, feeling like shit for using his daughter as leverage, “So you’d better give us names.”

Joseph looked like his brain was about to explode, his eyes quickly darting back and forth from his wife, to his kid, to you. He was running his hands through his hair in obvious distress.

“You don’t understand,” he admitted, “If we give you names, we’re as good as dead.”

“Joseph!” Maria yelled.

She was furious at him- and you thought at first it would be because he wouldn’t compromise to save her. After observing the way he took a small step back and the way she was holding him by the eyes, you realised that she was warning him not to confess.

She was obviously the one calling the shots.

“If you don’t give us names, you’re good as dead,” Red Hood told him, “Or would you rather me convince you in other ways?”

He nodded at Carrie. You felt a little protective of her, standing up straighter to defend her from Red Hood.

Joseph and Maria ignored the threat and was looking at each other intensely, trying their best to communicate without words.

Then, Joseph calmed down. He straightened up into the proud man you always saw him to be, a smirk playing on his arrogant features.

“I’m sorry, but this is business,” he sneered, “And we swore our clients’ secrecy.”

Red Hood paused.

Then-

“We’ll see about that.”

He grabbed a fistful of Maria’s cropped blond hair and pulled her to the dressing table. You heard that Carrie had started to sob behind you.

“Put your right hand flat on the table,” he demanded.

“Red Hood-” you tried.

“Now!” he barked.

She raised her shaking hand and rested it on the table hesitantly.

The first thing you heard was Maria’s cry- muffled by Red Hood’s large gloved hand- before you registered what had happened.

In an instant, Red Hood had cut off her pinky finger, and then raised the dagger, which you now saw had a blade that was wavy from the bottom to the tip, glistening a sticky, sickly dark red.

“Mommy!” Carrie screamed.

With all the commotion, you wondered why the security still hadn’t heard you yet. Then you realised that the glass walls were probably shatter and bullet proof, making it thick enough to be almost sound proof.

That shook Joseph slightly, his smirk had been wiped off clean and his forehead had beads of sweat.

“I can do this another nine times,” Red Hood snarled.

You had to stop this before it went too far. Slowly, you approached him.

“Red Hood,” you cautioned, “Let’s continue this another time, when the kid isn’t around.”

“Stay out of my way,” he turned to you.

“Let’s think rationally here,” you went closer, trying to speak over Maria’s wails, “There’s no way we have the time to torture for information when there’s a dozen armed men outside who might notice that something is off.”

“That’s why you’re here,” he scoffed, “So you can deal with them.”

“Do you really want to deal with them in front of the girl?” you tried again, “She’s five. She shouldn’t have to go through this.”

“They were going to wait a few years before selling her off anyway,” he seethed, “I’m doing her a favor.”

“No!” Joseph denied, “Not her. Never her.”

“How sweet.” Red Hood hissed sarcastically.

“Red Hood, come on,” you persuaded, “We can pick this up again another time.”

“And what?” he yelled, “Wait for them to run to the other side of the world? Where I have to hunt them down all over again? I do not have the time or the patience to- what the fuck did you just do?!”

Red Hood shouted at Joseph, who had moved quickly to the bedside table. His eyes widened in panic, and so did yours when you saw he had pressed a button on the underside of the table.

“Fuck!” Red Hood swore, “This is your fucking fault!”

He brandished the blade at you. “Fine,” he pulled Maria up again, “Looks like playtime’s over.”

Without warning, you saw him raise the dagger to Maria’s neck, and as if in slow motion, you just looked on by as he carved a big red smile across her throat.

The next thing you felt was a gush of warmth spray all over your face and torso. The blood that had gushed out of Maria was like a pulsating fountain of red.

“Maria!” Joseph screamed, “You fucking bastard!”

Red Hood leapt across the bed and pushed the man violently against the glass wall.

“Names!” he growled, taking Joseph’s head and thrusting it against the glass, leaving a smear of dark red.

Yet you were there, just frozen and blinking on the spot as you stared at Maria’s lifeless body on the grey carpeted floor, blood still splashing from her throat in the rhythm of her slowly dying heart.

Everything was red, and smelled like metal, and tasted like metal. Ew, did some get in your mouth? But you were wearing a mask. Why was there so much of it?

Did humans have this much blood in them? It seemed endless. Are we all just bags of blood in the end?

Carrie’s wails snapped you back to reality.

You rushed to her and kneeled down.

“Hey sweetheart, listen to me,” you tried to get through to her, “You have to go hide in that closet over there, okay?”

You picked her up. She was light, her body fragile and weak, and you opened the closet to reveal a walk-in.

You set her down on the floor and tried to comfort her again, “I want you to close your eyes, and close your ears, and then sing a song, okay? Don’t stop singing until the police comes. Can you do that?”

All she did was cry.

Fuck, she wasn’t going to listen to you.

So you just closed the closet door.

Red Hood was still smashing Joseph’s head against the wall. You noticed that he was now missing an ear.

Then you heard footsteps approaching you fast. Lots of them.

You took out your escrima sticks and got ready to fight a dozen armed men while Red Hood tortured Joseph Powers for information.

***

“Did you even get any names?” you monotoned.

The both of you were at the rendezvous, with Red Hood leaning against his beautiful black superbike and you standing awkwardly, holding your arms.

The smell and sight and taste of blood still consumed you. You hoped that the rain would have washed it away, but against all your luck, the moment you escaped the mansion, the rain had stopped.

Red Hood and you left behind a crying kid in the closet, a woman with a slashed throat in a pool of her own blood, a man beaten to death so bloody that he didn’t have any recognizable human features left, five unconscious and seventeen dead men in that house.

Red Hood simply looked away from you and took off his helmet and mask. He looked clean, because even in the midst of everything, he had managed to take his jacket from the settee.

“No?” you smirked, “So all of that for nothing?”

He gave you a glare, cold blue eyes piercing yours.

“Can I just ask you one thing?” you sighed, taking off your mask as well. It was soaked in blood.

“What?”

“Were you really going to hurt the kid?”

You saw his jaw clench.

“I don’t hurt innocents,” he looked away from you again.

You felt a wave of relief alongside your nausea, but however relieved you were, it still didn’t get the image of him slitting a woman’s throat out of your head.

If the circumstances were different, maybe you would have been turned on by that, as fucked up as it was. By the power he exhibited, the precision, the danger - you knew that you had a thing for that.

But he killed her in front of her own daughter, who shouldn’t have had to see that. Hell, who shouldn’t have had to be there in the first place.

It made you question him even more than before.

“Nope, you just traumatize them for the rest of their life,” you scoffed.

In a flash, his hands were around your throat.

“Don’t fucking talk to me that way,” he growled, “I haven’t forgotten how you fucked things up for me.”

“Fucked things up for you?” you repeated.

“You distracted me,” he told you, “And that prick went and sounded the alarm.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for trying to convince you not to murder a mother in front of her daughter!”

“Sweetheart,” he said in a low voice, “You’re playing with fire.”

Jason’s pupils had started to dilate, as if it was a black hole that was eating away at the blue. Your eyes fluttered towards his lips, which were slightly parted.

And then he smirked.

“I guess I have to punish you for disobeying me,” he drawled.

You gulped loudly, trying hard to not let the warmth in your stomach spark for the man in front of you.

“You know,” he whispered, his other hand snaking around your waist and pulling you flushed against his chest, “I’ve always imagined what you would look like covered in blood.”

Oh, fuck.

So did you. You had imagined what he looked like when he was beating a person half to death, how the muscles in his back would ripple with every blow.

You were so fucked up.

“And what do you think?” you bit your lip, squeezing your thighs together.

You were just upset at him a moment ago, and now you were turned on? You pieced together that you had a dangerous coping mechanism.

The fingers that were around your throat were caressing your cheek now, his thumb brushing against your lips.

“Better than I imagined,” he grinned, dipping down to kiss you.

He pushed his wet tongue into your mouth without hesitation, fucking it while he grabbed your ass and squeezed hard, almost painfully. He would bite and nip at your lips before licking them.

“Fuuuck,” he groaned, “You taste like blood.”

You felt him grind on you, though you knew the hardness was from the protective cup he was wearing. You still couldn’t feel much either, due to the soaked body armor.

“Bend over the bike,” he commanded.

“Wait, what?” you gasped.

“You heard me.”

You felt the blood rush to your cheeks as you slowly approached the vehicle. When you were at its side, you glanced behind you. Jason had the most arrogant smirk ever while his arms were crossed.

After taking a deep breath, you tiptoed and winced in embarrassment when you positioned yourself bent over the seat, your ass jutting out.

Warm hands started rubbing your waist, going down to your ass and thighs.

“How do I take this off,” you heard him complain.

Your bottom was only latex tights.

When Jason finally figured it out, he pulled down hard, exposing your ass to the cool air.

“Fuck,” he cursed, his hand roaming to massage it.

“Jason, we’re in public,” you reminded him.

“So?” he responded, “It’s 2am, and it’s Gotham, baby. Public indecency is the least of everyone’s worries.”

You felt him shift behind you, and gasped when you felt a long, wet strip from your clitoris to your hole.

“Taste so good,” he groaned.

His tongue felt good.

He continued to tease you by licking your wet opening but never dipping inside, just making you wet with your own juices and his saliva. But suddenly you felt a sharp, piercing pain on your pussy flesh.

“Fuck!” you screamed and turned to look back at him grinning at you, “Did you just fucking bite me?”

“What did you think I was going to do when I said you needed punishment?”

“I don’t know, spank me or some shit?” you breathed, “Not fucking bite me!”

“Oh, but you would like to be spanked,” he told you, “And that wouldn’t be much of a punishment would it?”

He bit you again, but this time soothed the pain by licking you after.

Still, it didn’t stop the jolts of electricity that stung you every time he did.

“Fuck!” you gasped again, “Stop it- oh, fuck.”

He had slid a finger inside you- you noticed it was ungloved.

And then he started a barrage of confusing sensations, biting and nipping at your pussy to cause you pain, and then licking it away while pumping his finger inside of you to spark pleasure.

It didn’t take you long until you were moaning and panting and fucking sweating in the post-rain weather.

The warmth was building and building as he kept licking and biting and finger fucking you, twisting inside of you and touching your most pleasurable spots. You felt yourself start to tighten around his finger as the now familiar sensation of approaching orgasm started.

And then it was all gone.

Jason removed his finger and stopped licking. You turned around furiously to see him smirking at you with dark hooded eyes.

Oh, now you understood. The punishment wasn’t the biting at all.

He wouldn’t let you come.

You spent the next minute glaring angrily at him, refusing to say a word while he just stared back with intense eyes, breathing almost as heavily as you were.

And then he dove back in.

“Fucking hell,” you moaned as the pleasure built and built and built again.

And then stopped.

You wanted to fucking yell at him, but you weren’t going to give him the satisfaction.

He continued again, this time even harder with the licks and bites, harder with the way he fucked your cunt, even inserting a second finger that drew the most vulgar sound from your lips. You felt yourself building again, but when you expected him to stop, he didn’t.

This time, he kept you going higher and higher, your knees growing weaker, until you reached and were just dangling on the edge of-

And it was all gone.

“Jason!” you yelled, “Come the fuck on!”

You heard him chuckle behind you. And then you felt him grind against your ass, rough and heavy and desperate.

Probably because he was still wearing a protective cup, which meant that he wouldn’t be able to feel much. You wanted him to take his cock out already, so he could start fucking you senseless as you were bent over his bike.

But then, he stopped. And he pulled up your pants to cover you up, even giving you a small smack on the butt.

“What?” you straightened and turned around.

“What?” he pretended to be clueless, even though you saw the obvious lust that was etched on his handsome yet tired face.

“You- I- why don’t- fuck!” you stuttered, squeezing your thighs together. You were so wet that you felt yourself soaking through the tights despite it already being wet from the earlier rain.

“Oh, did you want to come?” he asked innocently, “Sorry, but girls who disobey my orders don’t get what they want.”

“You’re torturing yourself as well,” you grit, and to prove a point grabbed his crotch, earning yourself a hiss from him.

He grabbed your wrists to pull you closer, “We’re in public. Remember?”

Then he took a step back and gave you a shit eating grin.

“Whatever,” you sighed frustratedly, “I’m fucking covered in blood anyway. Fuck, I need to get PEP tomorrow. You should, too.”

“What?” he frowned.

“Post-exposure prophylaxis,” you explained, “We’re covered in blood, Jason, ever heard of HIV?”

He blinked once at you, and then broke into a fit of laughter.

“It’s not funny!” you defended, “It’s just for a just in case!”

“I’m pretty sure Maria fucking Powers does not have HIV,” he teased.

The mention of Maria brought the image to your mind again. The Jason in front of you had a twinkle in his eye, his expression soft after laughing at your logic. It was hard to imagine that under an hour ago, he had slit a woman’s throat.

In front of her own daughter.

Jason must have noticed your expression change, because he became serious again.

“What’s wrong?” he asked softly, concern in his eyes as he held you by the waist.

Was he actually concerned? Or was he still playing mind games with you?

Why would anyone want a dirty whore like you?

And, there it was. Mother was back again.

“Nothing,” you looked away. “I just need to get all this blood off me.”

“We’re done here,” Jason informed you, “You can go back any time.”

“Well,” you started hesitantly, “I don’t think I can go back like this. All this blood- it’s too hard to cover up. My clothes, my shoes, everything is just covered in blood. Why is there so much fucking blood-”

“Hey, hey,” he stopped you, “Calm down. It’s fine. You can come back with me.”

“W-what?” you looked up at him. He seemed so genuine. Was it a trap?

He must have noticed as well, because his face immediately turned into a scowl, “I trust that you won’t tell Batman. After tonight, you’d be fucked along with me if it ever got to him. Take it or leave it, I’m not offering again.”

He let go of you and climbed on his bike, turning on the engine.

He looked back at you, who was still stunned on the spot.

“You coming or what?”

Oh, you were so fucked.

***

Your jaw dropped when you saw the interior of his safe house.

From the outside, it looked just like an abandoned shipment container amongst many other abandoned shipment containers in an abandoned shipping dock. You had expected it to be just a mattress, some pillows, with his weapons dumped messily on the floor.

No, his safe house looked like an actual safe house.

His bed was an actual Queen sized bed with matching bed sheets and pillowcases. His weapons were arranged in a glass cabinet display neatly against the freshly painted cream colored walls- the walls weren’t even the tin walls of the shipment container. He must have added another layer of plywood, with some sort of insulator in between which kept the room warm.

You noticed a beautiful katana resting on its stand. He had a wooden dining table with a fucking oriental tea set on it.

“The shower’s through there,” he pointed at the far corner of the room, which was separated by a wall. “Take off your clothes and just dump it in front of the washing machine.”

A fucking washing machine.

You nodded silently and followed his directions, turning into the corner. His bathroom was simple, yet still elegantly placed with tile flooring.

He had the time to put fucking tiles in his fucking toilet.

The white porcelain of his toilet and sink shined brightly in the warm lights of the bathroom. Next to the toilet was the shower, the segment separated by a curtain. The only thing that was out of placed in his entire makeshift home was the mirror over the sink.

It was cracked. You only saw glimpses of yourself in the pieces that were big enough to catch your reflection- a pair of tired eyes and skin that was covered in dried blood that had long ago oxidized and turned dark brown.

You stripped off your clothes, struggling to peel them off your skin, and then dumped them on the floor in front of the washing machine and stepped into the shower.

You turned it on.

The bastard even had hot running water.

You moaned at the relief and looked down on the floor, watching as the water turned brown, washing away the blood and sweat and filth on your skin. You reached for his shampoo and couldn’t help but giggle at his choice.

It was pomegranate scented with red packaging and labelled Long Term Relationship.

Well, it smelled divine. He had great taste in scents.

Look at you. So desperate to smell like him. Pathetic.

“Him and hundreds of other women, probably,” you muttered.

Once you were done, you stepped on the floor mat and saw a neatly folded towel and clothes on top of the toilet seat. You dried yourself off and put on his t-shirt.

It was too big on you, the sleeves went down to your elbows and the hem went down to your mid-thighs. You saw that he also set aside a pair of shorts, but there was no way you were going to be able to wear that without them sliding down.

You breathed in.

The combination of the shampoo, and the smell of his t-shirt made you smile. It was familiar, but you never really noticed it besides the fabric softener.

Yet, it was unmistakably him. Now all you needed to do was rub gun-powder all over yourself and voila.

You stepped outside to see he had shrugged off his jacket, and was sitting at the dining table, wiping his helmet down with hand sanitizer.

“Shower’s free,” you approached him, passing him your wet towel and his shorts, “Thanks for the shirt, but the shorts are too big.”

His jaw clenched when he looked up at you. You saw the way his eyes darted from your own and down to your body.

He snatched the items from your hand and got up. “Don’t touch anything.”

You heard the shower turn on.

And then you were alone, standing awkwardly in the middle of his safe house.

Everything seemed so normal.

There weren’t many personal things lying around aside from clothes and a few books that he had arranged on a bookshelf, but it didn’t scream ‘Go away’ or ‘Psychopath’. It was simple, homey, warm.

Until you noticed a pinboard that hung in front of his bed.

The nearer you got, you saw familiar faces. Mainly yours.

A blurred photo of you as Robin with Batman. A few articles regarding Batman handing Joker over to the authorities, a couple about Bruce Wayne adopting you following your parents’ deaths, and photocopied police statements about the investigation of your parents.

You frowned.

You knew he had done extensive research on you, you knew that he had shimmied his way into your life and manipulated you for his gain, you knew all that. But seeing everything out in the open made your heart ache.

A whole portion of the board had many of your pictures on it, as well. Stalker photos, as you liked to call it. Zoomed in from far away, candid shots of you in your uniform, swimming, smiling and waving at your classmates, walking in the mall, studying in the library.

“Like my photography skills?”

You jumped at his voice. He was so silent whenever he approached you. You should have noticed that much earlier on.

“You’re a fucking psychopath,” you shook your head, still looking at the photos, “But I have to say, I didn’t know I looked this good in my uniform.”

“Oh, baby girl, if only you knew,” he chuckled.

“Please, I-”

You finally turned and choked on whatever words you were going to say.

Jason was standing at the foot of his bed behind you with only a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair wet and dripping droplets of water down onto his bare chest, his arms crossed and accentuating even more the size of his biceps. He looked so clean.

So normal.

Well, his hotness was hardly normal, but he didn’t seem like some trigger happy crime lord.

He raised a knowing eyebrow at your expression. You didn’t realise your mouth was open.

“I should burn this fucking place down for what you did to my library,” you shot at him.

“It’s been months, get over it,” he rolled his eyes, and sat on the bed, back resting against propped pillows.

“Aren’t you going to get dressed?”

“Why would I? I’m in my own bed.”

You gulped.

“Bruce- Dick- Everyone-” you stammered, “They’ve probably figured out that I’m not in my room. It’s three thirty in the morning and the music is still playing loudly in my room, I mean, someone has probably knocked and didn’t get an answer so-”

“Your clothes will only be ready in two hours,” Jason interrupted you, “Or would you rather go back home in just my shirt with no bra and panties?”

“I can actually think of an excuse if I did,” you chuckled nervously, “Dick thinks I’ve been sleeping with a guy named Carter.”

“Who’s Carter?” Jason demanded, his expression changing into one that was furious.

“No one,” you quickly explained, “He saw your stupid texts, so I told him your name was Carter and that we were going out.”

He relaxed at your explanation.

Wait a minute.

Was he jealous?

You smiled to yourself, entertaining the possibility.

“And I do actually have a change of clothes in my backpack,” you said, “Which is in your bike.”

“You’re not leaving me with the laundry, princess,” he scoffed, “Stay. Once your clothes are done I’ll even fold them for you.”

“How hospitable,” you snickered.

You stood there awkwardly again, not knowing where you’d be welcomed.

“The bed won’t slit your throat, you know,” he teased, “You can lie down and sleep until you need to go.”

You pursed your lips and played with the edges of the shirt. You knew what was going to happen in that bed.

You went to the opposite side of bed and sat down nervously. You put your feet up and stretched it, just like Jason’s .

The bed was comfy, the pillows fluffy and warm. You could finally feel yourself relaxing into it-

Jason grabbed your waist and pulled you closer to him, your back flushed against his front. And finally, finally you could feel the hardness of his cock pressed against your ass.

“I’ve been hard ever since you came out of the shower,” he breathed into your ear, grinding against you.

You wanted to moan at the feeling of his heavy length on you, you wanted to grind back onto him and turn him on even more, but mother started screaming.

ARE YOU A LADY OR A WHORE?

“Shut up,” you muttered.

“What?” Jason asked.

“Nothing,” you turned to him. “Kiss me.”

He granted your request and gave you a searing kiss.

Rolling in bed with a dirty criminal.

“Shut up!” you screamed.

“What the fuck?” Jason yelled, “I didn’t say anything!” “No,” you shook your head, “Sorry. Not you. I wasn’t talking to you.”

He looked at you suspiciously.

“I- I hear my mother sometimes,” you admitted.

You waited for him to call you crazy, but he never did. Instead, he looked at you seriously.

“Tell me more.”

“Not physically,” you started, “But I imagine what she would have said to me if she were watching me- which is why I never kissed a boy before this. Or masturbated. She stops me from doing anything filthy.”

“Filthy?”

“By her standards,” you elaborated, “Filthy or vulgar or inappropriate, she controls my actions.”

“How long,” he asked.

“Ever since they died,” you sighed.

“But you were fine all those other times,” he inquired, “Why now?”

“It gradually became less and less frequent,” you explained, “Like, when we did those things through video call, I felt comfortable and it just- it felt right. And it stopped completely during my first time with you.”

“So you saying it doesn’t feel right, right now?” he clenched his jaw.

“It’s not you!” you added quickly, “It’s me. No matter how much I want to, I just can’t help it. She’s there.”

“Look, I get it,” he sighed, leaning onto the propped pillows, “Fuck, I get it.”

“You do?” you looked at him with hopeful eyes.

“What? You think getting beaten to a pulp with a crowbar, getting exploded, and having to crawl out of your own grave wouldn’t fuck you up?” he growled, “You’re not special. Get over it.”

Even though he said it in a way that was harsh and definitely not conventional, he basically told you what you needed to hear- that you weren’t the only one that was fucked up, and if there was any comfort at all, it’d be the fact that you were fucked up together.

You smiled when you saw him, his arms crossed, eyebrows stitched together in a frown, his lower lip jutting out in a pout.

“Well, I really wanted to,” you paused, “You know.” Jason looked over to you then. “You said she screams in your ear, right?”

“Yeah?”

He smirked, then came closer to you again, caressing your cheek and tucking a wet strand of hair behind your ear, where he leaned in to whisper.

“Then that just means we need to be louder.”

He gripped your thigh and forced your legs open, cupping your sex with his hands.

He’s defiling you.

“I hated you,” he slipped a finger between your folds and gently ran it up and down, gathering your slick, “But now I just can’t seem to keep on hating you anymore.”

Your heart fluttered at his confession.

He teased your clit, giving only light brushes on it, barely even touching you.

But everyone else will hate you.

“Talk to me, baby,” he instructed, “Tell me you don’t hate me anymore.”

“I-” you panted, “I don’t hate you anymore.”

A filthy man for a filthy girl.

“Mmm, good girl,” he purred, now adding pressure to your clit, making you squirm.

The praise did wonders to you. You felt your cheeks heating up, your heartbeat going faster and faster.

I raised you to act like a lady, not like a bitch in heat.

His other hand slipped underneath the shirt, trailing up from your waist to cup your breast and gave it a squeeze.

You moaned out loud when he started pinching them.

Vulgar sounds will only get you dirty men.

“You’re so fucking sexy, you know that,” he rasped against your skin, hot breath sending goosebumps all over. “I want you to moan for me, beg for me, scream for me.”

“Jason,” you sighed.

He started properly rubbing on your clit now, sending tingles right to your toes. “Fuck, baby. You’re so wet. It makes your pussy look so fucking pretty,” he praised.

At least prostitutes get money when they sleep with other men, and you’re doing this for free.

It was so confusing. On one hand, you had your mother’s voice ringing in your head. On the other, Jason’s dirty, sexy mouth made you think you could actually die from sheer horniness.

He finally slipped a finger inside of you, eliciting a long moan.

You’re going to be loose before you hit-

“Mmm, you like that, baby?” he husked, “You always like it when I put my finger in, don’t you?”

“Yes,” you gasped.

No one will want you after-

“Tell me what you want,” he demanded.

Ruined goods-

“Please,” you whined as you spread your legs further apart.

YOU BELONG IN THE-

“Please what, sweetheart?” he teased.

You could only mewl.

LISTEN HERE-

“Please stop?” he added a second finger, and started pumping in and out excruciatingly slow.

STOP IT-

“Please make me come?” he increased his pace.

HORRIBLE-

“Or just… please? .”

He suddenly switched into a brutally fast pace, causing you to scream.

“Jason! Fuck, Jason please just put your cock inside of me and make me come, fuck!” you begged.

He stopped finger fucking you and chuckled out loud. He was hovering over you, his towel long gone, aligning the tip of his dick at the entrance of your cunt.

“That’s my girl,” he grinned, and then pushed inside in a swift motion.

“Fuck!” you cried.

“So fucking wet for me,” he panted, pounding into you. “So tight.”

“Jason,” you could only say.

He dipped down to push his tongue into your mouth, fucking your mouth the same rhythm he was fucking your pussy. You were in a state of desperation and euphoria, hazy to reality.

The only thing you were hearing at that moment was the wet sound of flesh on flesh and Jason’s loud grunts into your mouth.

The combination of his cock repeatedly pressing onto the spot within you and his tongue in your mouth made your pussy tighten in no time, closer and closer to orgasm.

“You wanna come, baby girl?” he whispered against your lips.

You nodded hysterically.

“Come for me then, come all over my cock,” he commanded, fucking you faster.

The tight coil in your core exploded, and you felt yourself pulsating all over his length which was still moving.

Jason didn’t give you time to rest.

“Get up on your knees and face the wall,” he growled.

You immediately obeyed, afraid that he would start biting you again if you didn’t. Jason pushed aside his pillows and you placed your hands on the headboard.

He took off the oversized shirt and his hands started roaming your body from behind, squeezing your breasts, running them up and down your thighs, all the while he was kissing your back.

He pushed his cock inside you again without warning, and in the post-orgasm sensitivity, you accidentally gave out and collapsed backwards against him.

“Woah there, baby,” he laughed, gripping you tightly by the waist to stabilize you. “I want to make you come again.”

“Please,” you rasped.

“Yeah?” he started moving slowly behind you, “You want to come again, baby?”

You nodded weakly.

“Tell me, baby girl,” he nipped your earlobe, “Tell me.”

“I want you to make me come again.”

“What a fucking good girl,” he licked your ear.

You could only whimper in response.

He hammered his hips into you hard and fast, all the while gripping your tits with one hand and your waist with other, fucking himself up into you.

And because you were so sensitive from the first orgasm, the fact that he was fucking you again soon after meant that you were already fast approaching your second one.

“Hold out for me just a bit more, sweetheart,” he breathed in your neck, “Please?”

That ‘please’ sort of made your heart melt.

“Anything, Jason,” you replied, trying your best to maintain a level head while he fucked you.

“Ah. fuck, baby,” he stuttered, his hips stuttered, his pace stuttered. “Okay, come with me. Come with me, fuck, fuck.”

The heat you felt before started spreading again, and this time you allowed it and let go. You reached behind you to hold Jason’s head, running your hands in his hair and gripped on it tightly for leverage as you came loud and long.

He withdrew from you so fast that it almost hurt, but then you felt warm splashes on your lower back, dripping down to the globes of your ass and to your thighs.

Your whole body gave out, and you fell down on your front, crashing into the soft bed.

You heard Jason chuckle, and then felt him get up. He returned with his towel and wiped your back, and then joined you on the bed next to you.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Better than okay,” you smiled.

“Mother quiet?” he frowned.

“Surprisingly so,” you yawned.

“Good,” he nodded.

The two of you just stared at each other, and soon enough you got lost in his face. His tired eyes, his crooked nose, his scarred skin. He gave you an odd expression. It wasn’t anger, or hate- hell he was hardly frowning.

He just looked… content.

You guess killing someone would take the energy out of you.

***

When Jason stirred awake, the first thing he felt was the warm body next to him.

For the first time in his entire life, he didn’t wake up alone.

He blinked his eyes open, and nearly laughed out loud when he saw your face next to him. You weren’t a graceful sleeper. Your hair was messy, your mouth hanging open with a little drool on dribbling at the corner.

Yet, he couldn’t help thinking about how absolutely gorgeous you looked.

He felt his chest tighten.

He shifted to the side to look at the clock on his bedside table. It was already 6am. Your clothes were long dry already in the dryer.

“Mmm,” he heard your voice, probably waking up because of his movements.

He turned back to you and saw that you were indeed already awake, facing tummy down with his blanket covering you up to your waist so he had a view of your beautiful, smooth back.

“What time is it,” you asked, voice still heavy with sleep.

“Six,” he answered, “Your clothes are probably dry.”

“Fuck,” you swore. He loved it when you swore. “I’m going to get into so much trouble.”

“You’re a teenager with a so-called boyfriend,” he snorted, “Make something up.”

“That’s the plan,” you grinned.

You pulled the covers up to your chest and laid on your back.

“I should go,” you sighed sadly, and then sat up.

“Wait,” he grabbed your arm.

Fuck, what was he doing?

“Don’t go,” he whispered, “Stay.”

“I guess I’m already fucked anyways, right?” you smirked.

“No, I meant-” Jason paused, his words catching in his throat. “Stay with me forever. Leave them.”

He saw the many phases of your thoughts written clearly on your face. You blinked with realisation, stopped yourself from smiling, but finally settled with a deep troubled frown.

Fuck.

“I can’t,” you croaked, “I’m sorry, Jason. I can’t do that.”

He felt like taking the keris and ripping out his heart.

“Fine,” he clipped, “Whatever. You want me to send you back, or what?”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll find my way back,” you got up and walked to the dryer to change into your gear. Jason reached for the shorts that you didn’t wear.

He walked you to the door silently, awkwardly. He had given you your backpack from the compartment in his motorbike.

“Jason,” you suddenly turned to him, the frown still evidently clear, “I can’t do this anymore.”

“What?” he grit, his heart dropping to his stomach.

“This thing with you,” you explained, “I can’t see you again. The next time I see you, I’ll be on Batman’s side.”

He felt like someone was throttling him, squeezing every ounce of sanity he had left out. He felt his nails digging into his palms, fists closed, still refraining from doing something he knew he would regret.

“I’m sorry, Jason,” you said, “I won’t tell them about you. If they find you, it will be completely because of them, not me. Okay?”

He didn’t want to look at you. He didn’t want you to see through him.

“Just go,” he managed to choke.

You pursed your lips and then nodded, turning away from him.

He slammed the door shut, and then rushed to his room.

“FUCK!” he roared, grabbing the bed and flipping it over.

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!”

He went to the dining table and swiped the tea set off, hearing it crash into tiny pieces on his floor before proceeding to flip over the table as well.

“YOU FUCKING BITCH!” he cried, aware that his cheeks were wet with his tears.

He couldn’t breathe.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He crumpled to the floor and picked up a broken piece of china, closing his fists around it and feeling the stinging pain as it cut into his flesh.

He was losing his mind.

He didn’t know what was up, or down, or what was real or wasn’t.

He wanted it to be all just a long, shitty fucking dream.

He wanted to just wake up back in his room in the Manor, fifteen years old, with the sound of Alfred knocking on his door, asking if he was alright.

It was a different kind of pain that he felt as compared to the one Joker had inflicted on him. It was the same hurt, the same stabbing feeling in his chest when he found out that Bruce had replaced him with you.

The same feeling when he found his mother on the floor with foam in her mouth.

In the midst of pulling his hair, and contemplating on whether he should really use the keris to carve his heart out or slit his own throat, he eventually calmed down after an hour of broken sobs and choking on air.

He sat there on his floor, the blood on his hands now sticky and brown, listening to the deafening silence of his room.

He was alone again.

#jason todd x reader #jason todd #red who #jason todd reader imagine #under the red hood #red hood and the outlaws #batman #dc #dick grayson #alfred pennyworth #bruce wayne #nightwing

[kumeko]

Prompt: Geralt/Yennefer & Ciri family fluff

A/N: For @caiabresebun, for @thewitchersecretsanta. Ok. Um. I was going for family fluff, and my sister was watching a lot of Hallmark movies, and thus this monstrous thing came to be with a bit less family fluff than I was planning. I’M SORRY. (I am hoping to add to this later, but uh...)

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There was something relaxing about the gym. Standing in the center of the boxing ring, his gloves strapped tightly to his fists, Geralt closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The whole place had a musty, stagnant smell, the kind of scent that came from being a third-rate gym with third-rate equipment. Places like this were a dime a dozen in the city, entrances tucked away in alleys and after a flight of stairs.

 It was a miracle, honestly, that the place hadn’t closed down yet. It was a pretty small place, barely able to fit in a dozen or two at a time. There was a better Goodlife center around the corner, with proper instructors and amenities. If he was being charitable, he knew he wasn’t the best trainer—he could be hard where others were soft, firm where others bent.

 If it weren’t for the cheap rates, they’d have been in the red years ago. As it was, Geralt didn’t want to question their finances too much. After all, it was only the goodwill of the owner that let him rent the apartment right above the gym. In a city as expensive as New York, he doubted he’d anywhere else as affordable. Especially considering his…uneven employment.

 “Geralt!” A girl called out as she pulled open the door, a bell ringing a few seconds after to belatedly announce her arrival. “I’m home!”

And even if he could find a place to stay, he doubted he’d find one big enough to fit him and his adopted daughter. Geralt opened his eyes, looking over his shoulder as Ciri walked in the room. At thirteen, she was gangly and awkward, all long limbs and flyaway hair. He had maybe a year or two before she grew into her body, and then just mere months before her mind finally caught up and he’d have to deal with whatever teenage tantrums she tossed his way.

 “Good,” Geralt grunted, watching as she plopped her backpack on one of the benches. “You’re late.”

 “Not really!” Ciri protested, pointing at the clock. “It’s only 4:15.”

 “And you normally come back at 4.” Geralt glared at the door, waiting for her irritating babysitter to walk in. When the door remained stubbornly closed, he barked, “Jaskier.”

 “Yeah! Sorry about that.” Jaskier poked his head in through the door and smiled sheepishly. As usual, his brown hair looked like a mouse’s nest, he reeked of cheap perfume, and his clothes looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be punk or rock. Which, to be fair, was exactly how his band sounded like—a confused mishmash of two different sounds.

 For some reason, the ladies loved it.

 Geralt sometimes feared for the future. “What happened?” he asked, already knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.

 “Nothing, nothing!” Jaskier waved the question away with a goofy smile, chuckling in the way he did when he was hiding something. “Just got some ice-cream—”

 “It’s December,” Geralt pointed out flatly.

 “—and took the long way home.” Jaskier winked at Ciri. “Just a little mutual complaining, right?”

 Ciri stared at him for a long minute, then turned to Geralt. “Who’s Yennefer?”

 Geralt stiffened. He hadn’t heard that name in years. He hadn’t expected to hear that name ever again. Immediately, he glared at Jaskier. “You.”

 Jaskier wilted. “You weren’t supposed to ask!” he hissed.

 Ciri snorted, already sounding like a teenager. Sarcasm dripped from her voice as she asked, “Oh, I should just let him stay grumpy forever?”

 “Grumpy?” Geralt clenched his jaw. Part of him wanted to know just what Jaskier said. Another, bigger part of him knew it was his usual brand of nonsense, a mixture of lies, rumours, and a tiny drop of truth. Whatever it was, it was better not to know. Actually, that was almost always the solution when it came to Jaskier.

 “I didn’t say you were grumpy,” Jaskier refuted quickly, scratching his cheek. “More like—”

 “Heartbroken?” Ciri guessed, a sly glint in her eyes and maybe Geralt should start preparing himself now for her teenage years.

 “Yes—no!” Jaskier’s jaw dropped. “Ciri, are you trying to get me killed?”

 “I’m not heartbroken,” Geralt stated, moving past Jaskier’s betrayal for now.

 “He said it’s why you’re grumpy all the time,” Ciri challenged, ignoring Jaskier’s yelps and cries as she revealed their entire conversation. “You miss her.”

 “I don’t miss her.” Geralt smiled wryly at the thought. How could he miss someone who was never there? “It was years ago, Ciri.”

 “It’s been years since my…” Ciri trailed off, her skin paling.

 She didn’t have to finish; he knew what she was about to say.  Crossing the boxing ring, he leaned against the ropes and smiled gently at her. He was never certain of what exactly possessed her grandmother to leave her in his care—knowing the woman, she probably hadn’t wanted to either—but he was glad she did.

 He couldn’t say just how much his life had changed now that Ciri was in it, only that it was for the better. “That’s a different thing,” he replied softly. “Your grandparents loved you very much.”

 She smiled back hesitantly. It had taken her a while to get comfortable enough to talk about her grandparents. They had been practically her parents, raising her since birth. “Yeah.” For a moment, he thought that was the end of that, but she pressed, “And Yennefer?”

 Geralt sighed, running a hand through his hair. Now that it was out, he might as well get it over with. “It was a short thing, just before you came. She wasn’t interested in anything more.”

 Ciri frowned. “That’s it?”

 “That’s it,” he confirmed, shrugging. What else could he tell a child? The connection he’d felt with Yennefer had all been in his head; she’d made it clear enough when she left.

 “Oh.” She sounded disappointed as she picked up her backpack. “I’ll finish my homework.”

 He knew she really meant she wanted to process it all, and he waved her off. “Sure.”

 “And I’ll make my way out—” Jaskier added casually, slinking his way to the door.

 “Jaskier. Ring. Now,” Geralt ordered, his teeth bared as he glared at him.

 -x-

 Yennefer was never certain of what exactly possessed her to join her current company. Well, no, she knew exactly why—her ‘mother’ Trisha worked for their rivals and that was more than a good enough reason to join. Perhaps that was petty, but then again, Yennefer never claimed to be otherwise.

 Pettiness was sometimes the only way you dealt with a woman like Trisha. It was almost impossible to get under her skin. Even all of her years in law school, backstabbing and clawing to the top of her class hadn’t taught Yennefer the right way to twist the knife in her mother’s heart.

 For now, she’d have to make do as the corporate lawyer for a rival business, filing lawsuit after lawsuit and fighting her mother in court.

 “Hey, Yennefer!” Her fellow lawyer, Triss, smiled brightly at her, waving as she entered the hotel lobby. “You’re here early.”

 “Or you’re here late,” she muttered, rolling her eyes. This was precisely what she hated about her workplace. Tech companies as a whole reeked of that sugary ‘we’re all in this together’ attitude, no doubt fostered by their shareholders to trick employees into working free overtime. And the fools ate it up, staying in their offices well past closing because of paltry things like buffet bars and gaming rooms.

 The near-sighted idiots had no idea how much they were being used. It was bad enough the peons were cheerful morons; she didn’t need her fellow lawyers buying into it too.

 Either feigning ignorance or in need of some hearing aids, Triss breezed past her comment like it hadn’t happened. “I didn’t take you for the holiday type.”

 “I’m not,” Yennefer replied flatly. “What gave it away, my black outfit or my black makeup?”

 “Well, that’s true. It’s not very Christmas-y. Or Holiday-y.” She smiled brightly, as though that had been an actual question and not a sarcastic quip. Now Yennefer was certain Triss was faking it. “Or—actually, what do you celebrate?”

 “Nothing.” Yennefer glanced at the champagne in her hands. The second she’d entered the hotel’s ballroom for her company’s ‘Holiday’ party (and oh, they like to say it was ‘Holiday’, even though all of the decorations were so obviously ‘Christmas’. And yet, just like everything else, the fools just ate it all up.), Yennefer had grabbed a glass from a passing waiter. And then another.

 She actually wasn’t certain how many she’d drank so far, but clearly it wasn’t enough if she was still conscious for this conversation.

 “Seems like you celebrate Halloween,” Trisha replied smartly, the closest she’d come to baring her claws so far.

 “And you are a suck up,” Yennefer retorted, already tired of the conversation. “What do you want?”

 “Nothing.” Triss’s smile dropped a notch. Around them, various employees drifted about as they chatted, everyone from the top CEOs to the lower management mingling. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing. Make some small talk.”

 “We see each other every day.” Yennefer glanced around for another waiter. Her drink was almost empty, and she needed another.

 “And you don’t talk about yourself then.” Triss sighed, shaking her head. “Don’t know why I thought it’d be different now.”

 “Me neither.” With a careless wave, Yennefer pivoted and headed to another waiter. Triss sputtered something unintelligible and she hoped it was a curse. It’d make her far more interesting and out of all of the lawyers in her company, she was by far the most attractive.

 A little fire would actually make it interesting to have a fling with her.

 Plucking two glasses from the waiter, Yennefer looked over the rim as she drank, taking in the other employees. It was a small miracle Isetradd had left the company before their holiday party; despite everything that had happened between them, he’d probably make a pass. Depending on how drunk she got, she’d probably say yes. If there was one useful thing about the time of the year, it was that it made it all the easier for her to find some mindless entertainment, to slip in and out of beds without anyone caring.

 Caring.

 For a moment, she thought of a certain silver-haired man and she bit her lip. It had been years. More than that, it had been another petty attack on her mother—sleeping with Tissaia’s temporary bodyguard, was a scandal in the making. Even if only to Tissaia’s eyes.

 She hadn’t expected him to get attached.

 She hadn’t expected herself to be tempted.

 Shaking herself out her thoughts, Yennefer gulped her remaining champagne and headed to the open bar. It had been years; she didn’t understand why he lingered in her thoughts, but this sentimental feeling was a hindrance.

 “Whisky,” she ordered, slipping onto one of the bar stools. “On the rocks.”

 Yennefer was not nearly drunk enough to deal with this tonight.

 -x-

 Geralt could not for the life of him explain exactly how he’d ended up walking through downtown New York with Jaskier in the evening. It was mid-December. It was really cold. It was a weekday.

 “Why am I here?” he asked aloud, glaring at his shorter companion.

 Jaskier grinned, patting him on the back. “Look, I brought up some painful memories, right? Well, what better way to fix that than by helping you make some new, better ones?”

 “That’s a stupid reason.” Geralt turned around. Ciri was definitely not doing her homework right now, probably ordering takeout, and most likely needed his watchful eye.

 “Wait, wait, wait, it’s not!” Jaskier quickly jumped in front of him, pressing his hands on his chest in an extremely futile attempt to get him to stop. They both knew exactly how much Geralt outclassed him in strength, just like they both knew the only reason Geralt had stopped was because he wanted to. “It’s a really good reason.”

 “How?” Geralt knew he’d regret asking this, just like he regretted asking Jaskier anything, really. Somehow, the guy had a silver tongue and a penchant for getting what he wanted, and either Geralt lost time listening to him or ended up agreeing to something he definitely didn’t want.

 Jaskier’s smile grew wider as he gently turned Geralt around and continued to steer him down the street. “Look, you’re still hung up on her—don’t lie to me. I told you she was bad news, you didn’t listen, and this is where it got you. Even Ciri’s worried. You don’t want her to worry, right? You want to show her you’re fine, right?”

 “…is she really that worried?” Geralt muttered, unable to refute it. He wasn’t ‘hung up’ on Yennefer, but he couldn’t deny that he still felt bound to her somehow.

 Jaskier perked up and nodded quickly. “I mean, she wants you to be happy, and you’re kinda mopey and grumpy,” Geralt glared and he hastily amended, “not that it’s a bad thing, we love that part of your, but…you know…it’d be good to know that’s just because you’re you, and not because of some bi—”

 “Where are we going?” Geralt asked, interrupting before Jaskier could go on yet another rant.

 “Every club.” Jaskier gestured at the brightly lit street ahead of them.

 “Every club?” Geralt repeated slowly, not liking the sound of it.

 “Every single one. You’re going home drunk, with someone, or hopefully a combo of the two.” Jaskier pumped his fist, looking determined for once in his life. Why that energy never transferred to his actual work, Geralt never knew.

 “I’m going home tired,” he grumbled, but followed anyway.

 As usual, Jaskier knew every party in town. He had always been the more social one between them, with all the good and bad it came with. For every three people he flirted with, a fourth and fifth were ready to pummel him to death. Deservedly so, Geralt was certain, but if they wanted to kill Jaskier, they’d have to do it out of his sight at least. He needed plausible deniability for when Ciri asked.

 And as expected, Geralt felt very tired by the time they’d hit the fifth one. The parties were as different as can be, from well-dressed elites sipping cocktails to raves better suited for university students, but either way, mostly filled with boring, annoying people that he would rather never see again. Every time Jaskier sensed his patience had hit its limit, he’d drag Geralt off to the next party.

 “How are there so many parties?” Geralt muttered as they entered some ostentatious hotel. The décor was meant to replicate grandeur but felt over-the-top and tacky to him.

 “Christmas!” Jaskier explained, still as cheerful as though it were their first party, and not the nth one. “Every company’s cramming them in this week which is perfect for gate crashers like us.”

 Geralt raised a brow. “Don’t they have security or id?”

 Jaskier shrugged as he led him into the ballroom. “Probably. Now, come on. We’ve been at it all night, and you’re barely buzzed.”

 “You keep dragging us out before I can drink,” Geralt pointed out.

 “No worries here—open bar.” Jaskier grinned, all teeth. “Perfect place to drown your sorrows.”

 “I don’t have any,” he retorted immediately.

 Jaskier shrugged it off. “Sure, sure. You go drink in joy then, and I’m going to take a look at who’s here. See you in ten!”

 Without waiting for a response, he firmly pushed Geralt toward the back and then disappeared. Geralt clicked his teeth but made his way forward. As usual, people stopped and stared at him, though they tried to do it as politely as possible. With his heavy build and long white hair, he knew he was an unusual sight for many.

 “Oh? Look who it is.”

 But not for all. He froze at the familiar sultry voice. Seated at the bar, sipping whisky, was Yennefer. As usual, she looked stunning, her black cocktail dress clinging to her like a second skin. The light flush on her neck and cheeks gave away how drunk she was, though her eyes were as intelligent as ever.

 “Yennefer,” he muttered, reluctantly approaching her. It was only now, only here, that he could privately admit what Jaskier and Ciri had said:

 He was hung up on her.

 He had always been too slow, too simple for the city, and so when he’d gotten caught up in the whirlwind that was Yennefer, he hadn’t realized that what was true for him hadn’t been true for her. That his feelings were only one-sided.

 That to her it was just a game.

 Even this meeting was just another game.

 Yennefer patted the seat next to her. “You should sit.”

 It was like nothing had happened. Steeling himself, he shook his head and stood. “I’ll have a Moscow Mule.”

 The bartender nodded, already pulling out a glass.

 Yennefer wrinkled her nose. “Vodka. Again. You never change, do you?”

 “I try not to,” he muttered, unable to stop himself. She’d always been good at drawing him into a conversation.

 “Still at the…” Yennefer paused, her nose scrunching as she tried to think of the word. “handy-man things?”

 She was definitely drunk. He tried not to care. “Yes.”

��“One-word answers—I told you to fix that.” Yennefer took another sip of her drink. Lifting the glass, she admired the light filtering through the dark brown liquid. “You haven’t learned to talk—business isn’t going to expand that way, you know.”

 “It doesn’t need to.” Geralt shrugged as he got his glass. The ice clinked as he drank. “I’m good.”

 Yennefer snorted. “You mean barely making it.”

 “Everyone’s barely making it, compared to you,” he growled. She always had a way of getting under his skin. “There are other things.”

 “And what do you know of those ‘other’ things?” Yennefer laughed, her red lips curving into a contemptuous smirk. “You’ve hidden in your shell for years.”

 She wasn’t wrong. He’d lived that way for years. Geralt stared at his reflection in his drink. “Not anymore.”

 She raised a perfectly trimmed eyebrow. “So you have changed.”

 “Yeah. And you haven’t.” He was already tired of the conversation. Picking up his glass, he turned to go when a delicate hand wrapped around his tie. He stared at her perfectly manicured nails before she yanked hard, bringing his lips tantalizingly close to hers. “Yennefer,” he breathed, unable to pull back.

 “Why are you still so goddamn attractive?” Yennefer mused. This close, he could smell the alcohol on her breath, and below it the faint scent of her flowery perfume.

 “I…”

 “It’s unfair,” she murmured, so close now her lips brushed his as she spoke. Suddenly, she slumped on his chest and Geralt froze.

 “Huh?” Panicked, he grabbed her shoulders, lifting her head. Her slow breathing, slightly parted lips, and closed eyes explained everything: she was fast asleep.

 “Had a feeling,” sighed the bartender. “She’d drank too much.”

 Geralt looked at him, panicked. “Where should I put her?”

 He shrugged. “You could ask for a room here, if there’s any still available. Either way, when the party’s over, she has to go.”

 Her shoulders were still too small and fragile, and he held her carefully as he quickly scanned the room. If anyone else here knew or cared about her, they didn’t act like it. Almost no one looked at him, too focused on their conversations.

 “Still no friends,” he muttered. “And I’m the one avoiding people?”

 -x-

 Yennefer woke to a pounding head and a parched mouth. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten so hammered last night; it was a company party, after all. She had to keep some decorum.

 Yennefer frowned. Company party. Drinking.

 Just when had she gotten home? How? Actually, now that she thought about it, her bed felt oddly hard and the smell…

 Husky, a bit wild, and—

 She knew that smell.

 Yennefer opened her eyes, staring at the vaguely familiar ceiling. It had been years since she’d slept here and suddenly last night came rushing to her. Geralt had been at the bar. Geralt of all people. Quickly, she patted herself, checking that her clothes were still on. Even though she’d made the stupid mistake of going home with him, she certainly hadn’t made the stupider mistake of sleeping with him.

 There was enough complication in her life without adding him back to the mix. Sitting up, she rubbed her head. As usual, the big lug had deposited her on his bed, no doubt sleeping on the couch or something instead.

 “You’re awake!” Yennefer snapped her head to the door, where a young blonde girl eyed her curiously. The girl bounced on her feet slightly. “You’re Yennefer, right?”

 She raised a brow. This was Geralt’s place, right? “And you’re?”

 “Ciri.” The girl grinned before spinning around. “Geralt! She’s awake!”

 Yennefer groaned and lay back down. Either he was married, widowed, or adopting rugrats all over the place. Either way, she wasn’t ready for any of this. Maybe if she closed her eyes, she could pretend nothing happened.

 Yeah.  That’s what she’d do.

 “Yennefer?”

 She grumpily opened her eyes and saw him at the door.

 Well, at least she’d gotten one thing right yesterday. Damn, he’d aged well.

#geralt #the witcher #yennefer #jaskier #gennefer #yenralt #cirilla fiona elen riannon #geralt of rivia #yennefer of vengerberg #fanfic #WHAT IS THE SHIP NAME GUYS #come on the other one is just single one to remember #and i don't know what to tag for this aside from everything #geralt x yennefer #anyways #i laugh at how I post this before i post my other witcher fic

[mergersacquisitionsadvisory]

What's The Largest Tech Mergers And Acquisitions Advisory In History?

New blockbuster tech deals reshape the landscape so typically that we determined to start out preserving track of essentially the most profitable ones. The list starts with offers of only a couple billion and works its method as much as the largest tech mergers and acquisitions we've seen so far. This merger, which took place in 2000, was price over $180 billion and is the biggest merger and acquisition deal in historical past. As mergers and acquisitions advisory, Vodafone turned the largest cell operator on the earth whereas setting the stage for future offers within the telecom industry. Many Germans were towards this deal as a result of they wanted German businesses to stay key players in the world marketplace. The deal is the second largest of all time for a software company (the most important being IBM’s 2019 acquisition of RedHat) but already looks prefer it has the potential to generate massive synergies for each corporations.

So just two years later, Google flipped Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, while holding on to these patents. As for why Google offered Motorola and why Lenovo purchased it, try this 2014 evaluation from PCMag's Lead Analyst Sascha Segan. The proper expertise and tools can even work to make deals extra profitable. DealRoom’s M&A project management software program and tools goals to assist groups manage their complicated M&A transactions. Overall, it’s onerous to argue which deal in US history is probably the most profitable merger or acquisition because of the truth that generally the total worth and potential of a deal takes years to formulate. If you need to discover the latest listing of mergered firms read this blog post about the place to verify M&A information. The acquisition created the second largest drug company, took three months, and Pfizer obtained control of Lipitor’s earnings, which amounted to over $13 billion.

The deal is supposed to stop the downward spiral and the planning was in place to purchase out the shares however obtained delayed because of regulatory elements. This was the largest purchase out within the historical past of the entertainment industry. Walt Disney Co. acquired well-known 21st Century Fox with $eighty five billion. The intention behind the deal is to turn out to be a significant player in video entertainment on the internet. Disney over the yr centered on an even bigger display to distribute its product, however millennials are watching much less TV and consuming more content from the internet. This noticed the rise of video streaming providers similar to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.

2004 Parcel Direct FedEx Corp. broadens its residential delivery portfolio with the acquisition of Parcel Direct, a leading parcel consolidator. Parcel Direct becomes a subsidiary of FedEx Ground and is renamed FedEx SmartPost. The company offers a proven answer to customers within the quick-growing e-tail and catalog industries looking for a cheap means of transport low-weight, less time-delicate goods to residential prospects. FedEx Corp. expands its retail entry to all the 1,200 Kinko's stores. With the backing of a FORTUNE 100 corporation, Kinko's gains the sources and experience needed to proceed growth of its corporate doc outsourcing business and international operations. FedEx Corp. acquires this less-than-truckload carrier serving the central and japanese U.S. to complement Viking Freight. Rebranded as FedEx Freight in 2002, these firms mix to make FedEx Freight a pacesetter in the regional less-than-truckload delivery business.

This consists of the purchase of Whole Foods, which Amazon bought for $thirteen.7 billion, and is the company’s largest acquisition to date. In order to count for our listing, acquisitions should be no less than a majority stake in the target company (in any other case it’s simply an funding). Naspers’ investment in Tencent and Softbank/Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba are disqualified for this reason. This purchase may need ranked even higher if Booking Holdings’ stock (Priceline even renamed the whole company after this acquisition!) weren’t down ~20% due to COVID-19 fears after we did the analysis. Who would have thought facilitating funds for Beanie Baby trades could possibly be so profitable? The solely acquisition on our record whose value we will precisely measure, eBay spun off PayPal into a stand-alone public company in July 2015.

Salesforce Is Shopping For Office Messaging App Slack For $27 7 Billion In Its Biggest Deal Ever

2012 TATEX FedEx Corp. acquires TATEX, a leading French enterprise-to-business express transportation company, for $55 million. This acquisition offers its FedEx Express enterprise unit access to a nationwide domestic floor community which carries 19 million shipments and produces roughly €150 million in revenues yearly. This acquisition offers its FedEx Express business unit entry to a nationwide domestic ground community with an estimated $70 million in annual revenue and 12.5 million shipments annually.

Furthermore, Coinbase appointed Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO and absorbed the Earn.com group. A 12 months after the acquisition, Coinbase closed down Earn.com to focus completely on Coinbase Earn.

I guess the macro point right here is I assume it is always worth evaluating two related corporations like this, YouTube and Instagram. I suppose in all probability considerably greater hosting and bandwidth prices. Now, DoubleClick is attention-grabbing in that Google bought that in 2008.

Facebook’s largest acquisition has been WhatsApp Messenger, which it bought for $22 billion in 2014. The WhatsApp acquisition is the second largest of the Big Five, following Microsoft’s LinkedIn buy. In an intriguing current flip of events, Apple recently introduced it will acquire the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem enterprise. This $1 billion deal will allow Apple to construct all of its devices in-house, and higher put together the iPhone for the upcoming 5G push. While these tech giants may have had massive aspirations for these exceedingly giant deals, they have mixed success charges. The Big Five tech giants, or “FAAMG”—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google —have a combined market capitalization of over $four trillion.

But the forecast for the total yr of 21% to 22% growth would characterize the corporate's slowest fee of expansion since 2010. Slack is projected to develop 39% this fiscal year, which ends Jan. 31, to $876.three million, according to analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. By buying Slack, a business chat service with over one hundred thirty,000 paid customers, Salesforce is bolstering its portfolio of enterprise functions and filling out its broader software program suite because it seeks new areas of progress. The income streams for esports corporations are additionally extraordinarily varied. Companies like TSM, a hundred Thieves, FaZe Clan and Enthusiast Gaming made 50% or extra of their revenue from outside of esports, having as a substitute expanded into diverse corporations with an equal focus on content material creation and apps. TSM, the world’s most precious esports firm in 2020, has a better valuation than 5 NHL franchises.

Ibm's Blockbuster $34 Billion Deal For Purple Hat

According to company management, Latin America and Africa provide the brewing conglomerate alternatives to increase into quickly-rising regions that should end in increased income and market share. A business taking up another promising business is a typical incidence in the company world. Such acquisitions, also referred to as takeovers, are often executed as part of a company’s development strategy and are made for any number of causes. Martha approached Medtronic’s board and commenced laying out the probabilities of creating an acquisition of a giant medical company that would provide the needed breadth. “The board had began to heat to the thought, but we hadn’t settled on something.” Covidien, he noted, was on the highest of the listing. Salesforce mentioned the Slack buy involves an enterprise value of $27.7 billion, which takes into account shares excellent along with debt and money. The deal values Slack at over 24 occasions estimated revenue for subsequent yr.

Amazon ultimately shut down Quidsi in 2017, citing profitability issues. We have seen a number of the biggest mergers and acquisitions within the last decade within the above record. The yr 2020 has also witnessed a number of adjustments including numerous mergers and acquisitions. The world-renowned company, Unilever has announced mergers and acquisitions advisory its merger from Unilever N.V into Unilever PLC. This will make it one holding company based mostly within the UK. The transaction value of the merger was recorded to be $eighty one billion which has positioned it in our record of Biggest Mergers and Acquisitions of the Decade. Further, the wake of COVID-19 has triggered a lot of disturbance all over the world.

As per the agreement, Heinz will hold 51% of the stake within the freshly shaped company and the rest will go to Kraft. The agreement to form the brand new firm was adopted unanimously by each of them.

Eight of Amazon’s top acquisitions were valued at $500M+, including four deals value $1B+. Annapurna Labs ($370M, 2015), an Israel-primarily based semiconductor startup, was reportedly acquired with cloud computing in mind. Annapurna’s chip expertise was subsequently used to make Amazon’s cloud enterprise, AWS, more cost-effective to run. Kiva Systems ($775M, 2012), a robotic achievement system producer, was the certainly one of Amazon’s most impactful acquisitions to its lengthy-term enterprise — no e-commerce competitor has but been capable of rival Amazon’s warehouse automation. This contract was signed between two Saudi firms within the year 2019. In which Saudi Aramco obtained 70% of the stakes in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation . The remaining shares will stay within the public area to be traded out there.

Walmart's efforts to keep with with Amazon didn't cease at Jet.com. In May 2018, the corporate announced a $sixteen billion deal to take a seventy seven p.c stake in Indian e-commerce company Flipkart. The deal closed in August 2018 to expand Walmart's fight with Amazon to a different one of the world's greatest markets.

Prior to Slack, Salesforce's largest offers had been the $15.three billion purchase of Tableau last 12 months and the $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft in 2018. Alphabet has made a number of daring strikes into the hardware and knowledge science sectors.

The 10 Leaders Reworking Franchise Business 2020

Then IBM blew it out of the water with its $34 billion all-money acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat, taking the title of largest software program M&A deal of all-time within the process. The deal has formally closed as of July 9, 2019, with Red Hat turning into its own unit of the company operating beneath IBM Cloud. Cisco has spent the last a number of years shifting from hardware to software and companies. The enterprise tech big's $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics in 2017 bought the corporate a market-leading stake in the software performance administration and infrastructure monitoring house. Adding some drama to the deal, Cisco scooped up AppDynamics only a day earlier than the corporate was set to go public for round $a hundred million. Apple's 2014 deal to buy Beats is the most costly acquisition within the company's historical past, however it's the most affordable deal on this list. The tech big has made dozens of acquisitions since the late '80s, but just one deal valued at greater than a billion.

My other sub-bullet is, should you're big-sport searching, when you're massive elephant searching, price would not matter, convey a giant gun. You can spend $1.sixty five billion for YouTube and still end up quantity three on the listing.

Technology

Amazon's blockbuster $thirteen.7 billion deal to purchase the nationwide chain of Whole Foods supermarkets gave the corporate an existing brick-and-mortar retail infrastructure to broaden its online purchasing operations. Amazon has since introduced issues like Amazon Prime perks, 30-minute grocery pickups, and a slew of other cross-promotional efforts to turn Whole Foods places into yet another extension of Amazon's e-commerce empire. The tech large closed its $eight.5 billion acquisition of Skype in 2011, and has since integrated the video chat service throughout its enterprise and shopper app portfolio. Microsoft's second-largest deal of the Nadella period solidified the corporate's about-face on open source with a $7.5 billion acquisition of the biggest host of open-supply code on the planet. Microsoft has huge plans for the way to combine the popular code-sharing platform and developer group into its cloud ecosystem, and after closing the deal final 12 months is beginning to make them a reality.

The shares debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2019, by way of a direct itemizing. The stock, which opened at $38.50, has been on a curler coaster since, trading near $17 in March of this yr, before climbing back near $forty in June after which dropping again below $25 in mid-November. The company was initially founded in 2009 as an internet gaming firm call Tiny Speck. It was created by Stewart Butterfield, famous in the tech world for beginning photograph-sharing website Flickr and promoting it to Yahoo. Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners and Social Capital had been among Tiny Speck's early backers.

Quantity & Worth Of M&A Worldwide

In what has now turn out to be the largest tech acquisition of all time, and one of the largest in any industry, hardware maker Dell purchased storage giant EMC for a whopping $sixty seven billion in 2016. But even the Broadcom acquisition appeared paltry in comparison with the daring provide for Qualcomm Inc. Soon after altering its name, Avago (now Broadcom Ltd.) tried to snag Qualcomm with a $121 billion supply — double what Dell paid for EMC and the one largest provide within the tech business, ever. The new entry to the top 10 tech acquisitions list reached a formidable No. 3 spot. With the acquisition, Slack becomes the brand new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. During the time of the acquisition, salesforce stated it’s seeking to “give firms a single supply of fact for his or her enterprise,” by unifying the platforms they use within their present workflows. Saleforce’s desire for Tableau was realized to the tune of a $15.7 billion all-stock acquisition in June 2019, making it the largest purchase in Saleforce’s history and the eighth largest acquisition on our listing.

We estimated the current market cap contribution of that $30 million Bungie Halo pickup in 2000 to be about $eight billion at present. The way we considered that is Pixar is basically good for a film a year. Super, super attention-grabbing though, the one reason that is thus far down on the record is because of all of the complicated EMC Dell stuff (we'll get into once we do this episode sometime). Dell is definitely trading in the public markets at a significantly decrease worth than what their stake in VMware is worth. This rating represents a cut-off date in history, March 2, 2020. It is clearly topic to alter going ahead from each future and previous acquisition performance, as well as fluctuating stock prices.

Eclipsing Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, this is the most important software program acquisition in history. It’s not the largest tech acquisition ever, although, as that title belongs to Dell’s $sixty seven billion buyout of data storage enterprise EMC. We have not talked about that in this episode, this isn't the time and place for it, but the entire prime corporations on this record were able to try this. It's the expansion part of a market, that's when you can create power. If you wait too long, you can enter markets later however you're by no means going to dominate a market until should you until later. Binance has definitely been busy with acquisitions these days with 9 up to now 12 months alone and no less than one more in retailer this yr.

Gaz De France And Suez Merger

We also calculated the annualized return to simply try to adjust for time here slightly bit. Fifteen p.c annualized returns since 1984 is simply unbelievable. That is like Berkshire Hathaway levels of return by an acquisition inside an organization. That same year, the firm suggested Vodafone on the US$130 billion sale of its US group — whose principal asset was its forty five percent stake in Verizon Wireless — to Verizon Communications. The transaction, together with a report US$fifty eight.8 billion in cash, was the biggest M&A deal in more than a decade, and the third-largest in historical past.

These embrace inside issues like cultural integration between the 2 companies or macro-level issues like total financial circumstances and geopolitical points. The $a hundred sixty five billion merger between America Online and Time Warner Inc. is available in at quantity two in our record of greatest acquisitions in history. The merger occurred on the peak of the dotcom era in 2000 when profitable Internet supplier, AOL, made a bid to accumulate mass media conglomerate, Time Warner. At the time, AOL had a massive market share and was seeking to broaden even additional by tapping into Time Warner's dominance in publishing, entertainment, and news. However, not all of Microsoft’s acquisitions have been as successful, similar to its 2014 buy of Nokia’s Devices & Services enterprise for $7.2 billion.

[hedraegon]

𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚐, 𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚑, & 𝚝𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜

(  yamazaki kento.  20.  he/him.  )  everything’s fine,  SETO KAIBA,  you’re in the good place!  do you remember your last days in  YU-GI-OH DM? but don’t worry, your  ( sleek black turtlenecks, holographic artificial intelligence, scaly white dragons ) will fit perfectly with the rest of the good place, so long as you commit to the  ADAPTATIONAL HEROISM despite your tendency to commit to  ( narcissism ) that the architect of the good place said you were. it’ll just be like a fun acting exercise! just play along and everything will continue to be fun. (  addy.  23.  cst.  she/her  )

birthname: [ redacted ] seto ; adopted and later named kaiba seto

family: deceased biological mother & father ; kaiba mokuba (younger brother), gozaburo kaiba (deceased; adoptive father)

occupation: former child genius, ceo of kaibacorp, game industry revolutionizer, duel monsters runner-up champion

gender: cismale

sexuality: lmao fuck if he knows

bio !

after a tragic accident claimed the life of his biological parents, seto & his younger brother were carted off to an orphanage to waste away until the foster care system claimed them like it did countless others. during the few short months the brothers stayed in the orphanage, seto showed extensive smarts that surpassed that of his peers. many began to whisper, calling him a child prodigy, a genius with a startling iq. he began to use this to his advantage and when a famed ceo came to visit, looking for a boy to succeed in his footsteps, seto stepped up. gozaburo kaiba was a notorious megalomaniac with more money than sense. his millions of dollars were dedicated to funding wars that destroyed the lands of millions -- but a man like that came with a fat wallet. at the age of eight, seto knew that this man would prove to be a fit caretaker for himself and more mokuba. to his misofrune, however, gozaburo insisted that he only adopt seto -- which is when the young brunette wagered a challenge. if he outsmarted the ceo in a game of chess, he would have to adopt them both. gozaburo foolishly accepted -- and sure enough, he was bested at his own game. it was supposed to be a joyous occasion, but it soon proved to be the start of a dangerous game.

gozaburo had ill intentions; he had adopted seto to consider him as a suitable vessel for his deceased biological son -- but in order to ensure that he was fit to be a candidate, seto underwent rigorous discipline; this discipline often came in the form of emotional -- and at times, physical -- abuse. the cycle was neverending, but once seto realized what gozaburo’s plans for him were, the cogs were put into motion. no one really knows the reality surrounding his step-father’s death, just that it had been an unfortunate accident. the plane chartered for gozaburo and his closest investors had crashed and with the accident, they were laid to rest, too. the company was passed down to seto and he became the owner of the kaiba legacy. he revamped the business, turning it from a heavy military-based organization into technological innovator revolutionizing the world of gaming. he started amusement parks and created intricate, high-tech equipment that changed the gaming landscape of holograms and virtual reality.

late in high school, he developed a fascination with duel monsters and found himself with formidable rivals. for once, he felt stimulated -- and at the same time, he felt mortified. being beaten in his own domain fueled an almost obsessive desire to best the king of games. his entire life after his last year of highschool became centered around defeating an egyptian pharoah and securing the title for himself. unfortunately, this very passion is what lead to seto’s untimely death when the quantum-pod he had built with his own hands exploded in outer space.

personality !

he is painfully narcissistic and egotistical, to the point where he finds everyone around him to be beneath him; he hardly waits to remind others of this fact and continues to constantly boast his credentials to anyone who listens

he’s ambitious, almost too ambitious; his arrogance causes him to be almost self-defeating, as he rarely considers his own weaknesses bc in his eyes, he has none.

he’s guarded and rarely speaks on his own personal issues; it’s hard to get to know him. he doesn’t speak about his family nor does he ever discuss his past with his adoptive father

he’s got an obsessive personality; he’s obsessed with perfection, with results, with seeming like he’s constantly in control due to the fact that he never had room to make mistakes. it can be destructive in nature.

he also doesn’t believe in magic. this whole thing? a social experiment. or a coma nightmare. one or the other.

#gplaces.intro #( can you feel my heart ) / * hc . #hewo #uwu