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thefanficmonster · 3 years

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Stargazing

Ethan Winters x Mia Winters (Resident Evil Biohazard)

Warnings: Swearing

Genre: Romance, Fluff

Summary: A year after the events that took place at the Bakers’ residence and the three years of Mia being missing, the Winters spouses have finally been healed enough to start getting back into a regular lively rhythm, nevertheless haunted by the nightmare they lived through.

Requested by Anon. Hi dear! Sorry you’ve had to wait so long for your request but here it finally is! They deserved so much better and I’ll never stop saying that! Sorry for the brief rant, still, hope you enjoy the read! Love, Vy ❤

Holding Ethan’s hand tightly, Mia follows his instructions to keep her gaze down at the ground and avoid looking up as much as possible. She’s been having a hard time containing the smile on her face, biting her bottom lip a lot to prevent it from showing. Same as she’s had a hard time keeping quiet with her guessing games of where Ethan’s taking her. The man’s unbreakable though, never once was he tempted to let her in on what he’s planned.

It’s been a year since the Baker incident and all the couple has done is switch from one coping mechanism to another. They got stuck in a sort of therapy-work-therapy cycle where they threw themselves in their work and periodically went to their psychiatric appointments, never daring to nudge the topic at home amongst themselves. It was enough that the whole night has remained as a dark cloud hanging over their heads, addressing it has simply been to painful so they’ve steered clear of the topic the best they could.

However, an important thing to note about this coping cycle they created is that it drove all the other mechanics in their lives and their relationship to become routinely and mechanic as well. There was little to no feeling in all they did - not that they ever did much together except have dinner and sometimes breakfast, both of them fully indulged in their work the rest of the day. Work became their therapy eventually, leaving little time for one another and for fixing what’s been broken between them. This conclusion bothered them both to no end but neither wanted to address it out of fear of disturbing the other.

Luckily, Ethan didn’t feel the need to bring it up before taking action.

“Here we are!“ He announces eventually, causing Mia to snap her head upwards without a second to spare, curious eyes doing the best they can to take in the dark surroundings.

Surprisingly enough, she doesn’t have any problem with the dark. What happened back in Louisiana didn’t give her a phobia of the dark or of ships as her therapist initially thought she’d develop. However, she’s got a huge fear of bugs and insects now - especially mosquitos. Count on her husband carrying anti bug spray wherever they go - now is no exception.

As her eyes slowly adjust to the darkness of their surroundings, it doesn’t take her a while to realize they’re in an open yet secluded field. She’s not the slightest bit surprised by where he’s taken her, in fact, she recognizes it immediately. It’s the spot of their first official date.

“Who knew going to that dorm party would be the best thing I’d do in my life.“ He mumbles under his breath, admiring the sparkles in her eyes as she takes in the beautiful field bit by bit, letting the reel of memories play back, taking her all the way back to that first year of college, that fateful night when they met, followed by the night they came to this field.

“Who knew overcoming my fear of heights at an early age would’ve helped me find the man I’d eventually marry.“ She replies, turning to look at him, their gazes locking in place, both of them no reminiscing on those events they hadn’t recalled in a very long time.

2006

The humidity doesn’t suggest that the summer months have already ended. In fact, the air is still as unbreathable as it was in July and August, making the students who have to return to their studies super conflicted, longing for those beach days with little to no responsibilities. Given that no one is ready for the school year to start, the professors included, the first few weeks of college have been rather stress-free for Ethan. Well, that is if you don’t include the agony of moving into college as a freshman from an entirely different state.

Why he chose to go to college in Texas is a question he still doesn’t have a proper answer to. It was an impulsive, basically overnight decision, one that rattled his parents to no end when he announced it. However, having his own income and savings for college purposes, they couldn’t really do much in stopping him but they didn’t support him either. They kept trying to change his mind until the very last day but alas he stood his ground and now here he is, in his college dorm, trying to read a book while there’s a raging party going on just two floors above. The music is so loud though that is sounds more like it’s taking place in his closet instead.

His roommate went up to help set the party up, only putting mild effort into getting his Cali-boy roommate to tag along and join the shenanigans which Ethan appreciated. Parties have never really been his scene so he knew he would’ve kept refusing no matter how much he tried getting him up there.

Finding the read hopeless due to the distractions, Ethan ditches the book and lays back on his bed staring at the ceiling, feeling like a fish out of water, ready to suffocate any minute. The AC in the dorm is faulty so it’s not serving its purpose properly, leaving the air at the same temperature as it would be had the device not been turned on at all. He’s stranded on things to do, feeling awfully caged in this new environment without any proper entertainment, going even as far as to second-guess if his parents were maybe right all along.

Fortunately for him, just then, his roommate bursts in, humming along to the song that’s currently being played at the party, never missing a tune even in his clearly intoxicated state.

“Hey Winters, aren’t you Californians supposed to know of a good time? You’re disappointing me right now.“ Jared slurs, laughing a bit as he leans against the wall to keep himself to his feet.

Ethan can’t help but scoff, “Thought I’d be a party animal? Sorry for the letdown.”

Jared laughs, shaking his head, “Come on, Cali. You have two semesters to be sulking around, it’s too early to start. Listen, one beer and thirty minutes, that’s all I’m asking you for. If you like it you can stick around. If not, feel free to leave. Just please give it a shot. How else are you supposed to make friends?”

Ethan stops to contemplate for a second, weighing his options. Jared takes this as a hopeful sign, seeing as how his offer wasn’t immediately turned down as it was the first time. Finally, the blond sighs in defeat: “Ok, but thirty minutes only.“ He says as he slides off the bed, briefly looking at himself in the mirror and deeming his appearance decent enough for a dorm party. As a very new student, he’d like to make a good first impression on his classmates but given that they’re all probably wasted, he’s not stressing too much over his looks at the moment.

Following Jared up to the floor of the party, he’s immediately handed a beer which he accepts with little hesitation. His roommate goes around introducing him to a few people before he disappears with some girl he claims has been his on-again-off-again girlfriend since sophomore year of high school - Sarah. Ethan, of course, doesn’t stop him despite hating the ide of finding himself stuck alone in a crowd of people he’s seeing for the first time in his life. Still, he sticks to the deal: thirty minutes and a beer...ok, two beers, but they’ve done nothing to make him enjoy this party.

So, off he goes to search for Jared to tell him he’s leaving. Thinking he saw the dark haired girl he went off with going up the stairs to the roof, he quickly follows.

Little does he know, that’s not the dark haired girl he’s looking for. That’s Mia

Mia, the rowdy, outgoing Texas tomboy who, unlike Ethan, thoroughly enjoys going to parties and having a good time with her friends and a few drinks. However, even a party animal such as herself sometimes needs to take a breather especially when people are smoking cigarettes as though they’re inhaling air and she’s never tried a cigarette in her life and is actually quite against the idea. She found this rooftop to be her prefect hideaway whenever she felt like her surroundings would suffocate her. Students were strictly instructed that climbing up there would earn them a penalty but that didn’t bother her in the slightest - She’s been frequenting the roof already and it’s been barely a week of her fresh start in college. Luckily, she got over her fear of heights at the tender age of twelve so this journey to quite a high point doesn’t pose as much stress as it would’ve about a decade ago.

As she lies on the floor, looking up at the starry night sky above, she nearly jumps out of her skin when another voice calls out to her presumably though it’s not using the correct name.

“Hey, um, S-Sarah? Have you seen Jared?“

Mia turns her head as she sits up, one eyebrow raised as she takes a good look at the silhouette which this voice belongs to. It’s pretty dark so even if she knew him, she wouldn’t be able to recognize him but judging by the voice, this is not someone she’s familiar with. And judging by the accent, this guy is not from around here.

“I’m not Sarah, but if you’re looking for Jared Letterwood, I can guarantee he’s in Sarah’s dorm.“ Mia chuckles, “I’d know. Sarah’s my roommate.“

Ethan cringes at the thought, “Yikes, you’ve got it rough. I mean, Jared’s my roommate but so far I haven’t had to leave the dorm for him to...you know. Hope I never have to.” Suddenly, an idea strikes him, “Wait, where are you gonna sleep tonight?”

She laughs, lying back down with her arms folded behind her head, “Right here.” She drags out the words as she adjusts her position a little, eyes fluttering closed. “Stargazing helps me fall asleep. The whole ambience up here is just...perfect, you know. Jared and Sarah are really doing me a favor.”

Ethan can’t help but scoff, “Call me crazy, but I’ve never stargazed in my life. I don’t know, never really saw the whole appeal. Sure, it’s cool to see in a movie or whatever, but it’s got no real purpose in real life. Not that I’m trying to bash your hobby or anything...”

Before the clueless blond could finish his statement, Mia’s already snapped up in a sitting position, giving him a narrow-eyed glare he can’t really see in the darkness. Her hand taps the spot next to her, “Don’t knock until you try it, Cali boy. Come’ere, see what you’re missing out on.”

Though reluctant, Ethan takes a few steps forward, stopping for a second to ask: “Wait, how’d you know I’m Californian?” Regardless of his confusion, he sits his ass down as he was told, awkwardly laying down so that there’s half a foot or less between their bodies so he doesn’t accidentally touch her and run the risk of freaking her out.

“I know a lot of things, Cali. Unfortunately, your name isn’t one of them. That being said, either you tell me it, or I’ll have to keep calling you Cali.“ She says teasingly.

“Ethan. My name’s Ethan.“ He says through a sigh, unable to contain the smile that spreads across his face.

A smile mimicking his appears on her face as well, “Nice to meet you, Ethan. The name’s Mia.“

Needless to say, the following morning Ethan woke up still on the roof, and surprisingly and terrifyingly enough, with the girl he barely met the night prior in his arms. Under the light of the newly rising day he could examine her features better, taking in her absolute beauty, her pale features contrasting her dark as the night hair. She’s still asleep so he can’t see her eyes but he has no doubt they are as beautiful as she is. Everything about her looks so delicate yet sharp simultaneously. And he’s simply in awe.

To avoid any awkwardness in case she wakes up, he falls back asleep, not even trying to remove his arms from around her body, silently hoping she won’t kick his ass for it. The next time he wakes up, an undecided amount of time later, he’s alone on the rooftop. Alone with a note that says: ‘Did you like it? If yes, I got a better stargazing spot to show ya. You know where to find me

~ M‘

“And boy, was I missing out on something.“ Ethan whispers, gently running his fingers through his wife’s hair as they lay in that same field she was referring to in her note to him, gazing up at the stars, limbs intertwined, bodies completely collided.

“Told ya. Stargazing is incredible, ain’t it?“ Mia replies, snuggling closer though that’s simply impossible.

Her husband chuckles, his chest rumbling with the noise, “That’s not really what I meant.”

Her brows furrow but she doesn’t look at him, “Oh? Then what did you mean?”

With a content sigh, he replies, “I was missing out on having you in my arms, falling asleep and waking up by your side.“ He says, his lips planting a gentle kiss at the top of her head that has her melting in his embrace.

Mia’s not the romantic nor cheesy half of this relationship, quite the opposite, but she feels emotions to a way deeper level than Ethan would imagine her feeling. So, thankful to the darkness, Mia allows her eyes to gloss over with emotional tears as she rises up to collide her lips with his in a soft and tender kiss.

“I missed you so much, Mia.“ Ethan whispers when they pull away, foreheads resting against each other.

“I promise to never make you miss me again, baby.“ She replies in a tone as hushed as his. As though they are both afraid someone would overhear this vow of theirs and try to force them to break it.

“That’s impossible.“ He says with a soft chuckle, “I always miss you at least a little.“

Mia hums in response, “Well, right now, you don’t have to miss me at all. I’m all yours. You’re the only thing on my mind, Mr. Winters.“

Even in the dark, she sees the grin that lights up his face, “As you are the only thing on mine, Mrs. Winters.” With that, their lips reestablish their contact, this time maintaining it longer, making it more passionate than before.

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katehuntington · 4 years

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Title: Changes - part one (prologue) Word count: ±1750 words Summary “Changes”: Huntress Zoë Sullivan (OFC) crosses paths and swords with the Winchesters, when the brothers stumble on a case that she’s already working. When complications arise, they are forced to work as a team. Summary part one: Disaster hits the Sullivans, devastating loss ripping the seemingly perfect family apart. The oldest daughter, Abigail, fights to survive the demon attack, all while trying to save her possessed sister. Episode warnings: Dark! NSFW, 18+ only! Angst, gore, violence, character death. Description of blood, injury and medical procedures. Demon possession, supernatural creatures/entities. Smut, swearing, alcohol use/addiction. Kidnapping, mentions of torture and murder, illegal/criminal practices. Mentions of nightmares and flashbacks. Music: Child In Time - Deep Purple Author’s note: The maiden voyage of Supernatural: The Sullivan Series, and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. There are quite a few people I want to thank. @coffee-obsessed-writer, @girl-with-a-fandom-fettish, @winchest09, thank you for helping me with this story and for taking it to a higher level. Everyone who encouraged me to go for it, you are awesome!

Supernatural: the Sullivan Series Masterlist 01x01 “Changes” Masterlist

Los Angeles, California July 21st, 2001

Screams. Horrific, tormenting screams. The kind that causes blood to run cold and hair on the back of the neck to stand up. Desperate cries for help, coming from a broken soul, barely a woman, but certainly not a child anymore, especially not after today. But it isn’t just the pained voice that echoes through the mansion in Brentwood, on the west side of the City of Angels. There are no angels here. On the contrary: the sounds mixing with the anguished voice, is one that comes from the deepest foundations of Hell. “Abi! Where are you?!” The call-out is gut-wrenching, and Abigail Sullivan presses her mouth closed firmly, biting on her bottom lip in order not to answer her little sister. She has her back against the French doors between the dining room and the kitchen, a line of salt on the marble floor connecting the frames. The voice doesn’t sound like Zoë’s. She’s speaking in tongues, pure evil tainting her speech. The battle inside her own body is one she’s destined to lose, but man, she is putting up one hell of a fight. Demon possession is usually pretty straight forward. Black smoke, black eyes, and the host is all but a marionette. It’s rare that someone is able to break through the solid concrete walls that captivate them, but apparently Zoë is giving the bastard some serious competition. Abigail sniffles. That’s my girl.

Trying to calm herself, the older sister leans her head back against the polished wood, listening to the raging demon. She has to fix this. She has to find a way to expel that thing. This family has lost enough.

Determined, Abigail moves towards the kitchen cabinets, opening them and looking for anything that could be useful. She clears the storage area under the double sink and pulls up the lid over a secret compartment, exposing a 9mm, several knives, and jars that contain ingredients for basic spell work. Among the items is a flask of Holy water, which she shoves down the front pocket of her jeans. She doesn’t bother to take the handgun or the weapons; she would rather die than have to shoot her own flesh and blood. A bullet or a knife wouldn’t do a demon harm anyway, so instead, she takes a frying pan. It won’t kill anyone, but at least it will slow the son of a bitch down.

“Oh, Abi…” Abigail freezes. The trace of Zoë that was audible a minute ago is gone now. It’s the demon who is taunting her, its voice amused, almost singing. “We used to play this game all the time when we were little, remember?” the dark voice muses. “You are not my sister, you sick fucker!” she barks back, as she approaches the doors. “Oh, c’mon. Don’t be cruel; humor me,” the demon tsks. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Abigail takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, listening to the sounds in the other room as she leans against the door again. Her heart is beating out of her chest, as if it seems to realize it might stop moments from now. The thing is waiting, and it will rip her apart once it gets the chance. She has to get to the office; it’s her only chance for survival. Dad’s journal and address book might be a way of sending out an S.O.S. signal. There’s a devil’s trap under the circular carpet at the entrance too. If she can capture the demon, they might live another day. Both her and Zo. With her weapon in her left hand and Holy water in her right, the older Sullivan sister swallows thickly, fearing for her life. The brave young woman takes another second to collect herself. and prepare for what is on the other side. Senses heightened, she waits for the footsteps to pass. 3… 2… 1…

With a fierce kick, Abigail slams the French door into the intruder’s face, giving herself a small window to make a break for the rotating stairway. With panicked breath, she conquers three risers with each stride, pulling herself up by the guard rail. She almost makes it to the second floor, before a force that defies physics pulls her from her feet and smashes her into the wall. Plaster crumbles on top of her when she hits the ground halfway down the staircase, a jolt of pain cutting through her hip when she lands on the edge of one of the steps.

Biting down a cry, she pulls herself together while retrieving the Holy water from her pocket, frantically screwing off the cap. Just in time, because the demon that has nested in her little sister’s body, towers over her, a chilling laugh that is anything but human erupting from Zoë’s throat. Blood has smudged her summer dress, dark red sprayed across her chest and neck. The expression distorts the twenty-one year old’s gentle features beyond recognition and her eyes fade to black. “Hello, sis,” the demon coos. Abigail’s lip twitches angrily, opposite of the pain in her teary eyes. “Get out of her, you fucking bastard!”

She throws the contents of the silver flask into the demon’s face, exposed skin sizzling when it comes in contact with the fluid. It staggers back, hands going for its face as it screeches in agony. Abigail knows this might be the only opportunity she will get and doesn’t waste a second. As fast as her feet can carry her, she gets up, ignoring the ache in her side, and hastens up the stairs. This time she does make it to the corridor, dashing towards the office at the far end. She is flanked by walls painted in crimson handprints, puddles of blood staining the polished wooden floors. As she passes the master bedroom, she doesn’t glance inside, not wanting to carve even deeper scars into her heart, but the image of the massacre pushes its way to the foreground anyway. She can’t afford to slow down, though, because she can feel the temperature of the warm Californian home drop at least twenty degrees in a matter of seconds.

With her fingers still clamped around the handle of the frying pan, she swings on pure gut, her hunter instincts - which she buried not so long ago - kicking in. The flat surface of the pan hits her demon-infested sister square across the jaw, breaking the skin, and for a moment Abigail feels guilty for hurting her sibling. Drastic measures; it’s all about survival now. Not daring to look over her shoulder, Abigail rushes into her father’s office, able to tell by the sound of firm footsteps that she’s mere inches from getting tackled. The demon is right on her tail, but when the dark entity is about to cross the room, it runs into an invisible barrier. Confused and frustrated, the creature tries again, without result. Then it scoffs, the mimic so different from Zoë’s. “Let me guess.” The demon tilts its head, staring down the other Sullivan sister. “There’s a trap underneath this ugly rug, isn’t there?” “Good luck getting out of that one,” Abigail returns, a trace of victory pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Oh, I don’t need to,” the demon chuckles, as it begins to stroll along the edge of the cage. “Seems like the only way out is through this door behind me.” Trying to mask the shake in her limbs from anxiety, Abigail sits down in her dad’s leather office chair, rolling closer to the desk. “We’re on the second floor. I’ve done bigger drops.” “I bet you did. You’re quite the hunter, aren’t ya? You’ve sent many of my kind back to the basement.” Bitter, the demon narrows its eyes, glaring at her. “I’m one of the best,” Abigail counters, before she pulls out a drawer and takes out a black leather journal. “Are you?” the evil creature questions. “Are you really going to leave poor little Zo all alone?”

The older Sullivan sister tries to ignore the words, but she feels the sharp sting anyway. Focusing on the task at hand, she leafs through the notes in search of a number. “She’s awake in here, y’know?” Abigail stops. “She’s crying hysterically, begging you not to abandon her,” the demon elaborates, clearly enjoying the sight of the hunter crumbling. “Begging me not to rip you to shreds and decorate the chandeliers with your intestines.” “Shut the fuck up,” Zoë’s sister warns, snapping her fiery eyes at the creature. But the demon doesn’t yield. It has both ladies right where it wants them. “Let’s face facts here: you’re as trapped as I am. You’re not gonna leave your only family. And you don’t have what it takes to exorcise me. Not without killing her.” “Maybe I don’t,” Abigail agrees, picking up the phone on the desk. “But I can call the cavalry.”

Her finger has stopped at two initials, scribbled down on one of the first pages by her Dad. He never wrote down hunters’ names, not wanting to expose them, should the book fall into the wrong hands. Several numbers of old burner phones are crossed out, but the last one isn’t. It’s the number Abigail dials. Without giving the demon the satisfaction of witnessing her despair, she prays for the call to go through. The phone rings three times, four times, causing her to swallow apprehensively. Goddamnit, pick up the phone. “Hello?” A sigh of relief slips from her lips. “It’s Abi. I need you to drop everything and get to L.A. as fast as possible.” “What’s going on?” “It’s my sister, Zo, she’s–”

She glances over the desk, watching the person in question staring back. For a second, Zoë seems to be fine: smiling eyes, bright and full of life. Like nothing happened, like their lives are exactly the way they were an hour ago: carefree, peaceful, optimistic. No tears on their faces, no blood on their hands. But then her Zoë’s mouth pulls into a smirk, a smirk that isn’t hers. Her baby sister laughs then, the sound of several dark voices erupting from her throat. Her brown eyes flick to black and little Zo is gone. Goosebumps run up Abigail’s arm and settles in the back of her neck, tears threatening to come down her cheeks. Abigail tries to compose herself, making sure the words will come out steady when she speaks again. But watching the definition of evil taking full advantage of the person who occupies such a huge space in her heart, is crippling. Acknowledging her family will never be the same again causes her voice to waver. “She’s possessed, John.”

Thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you, but if you do want to give me some extra love, you are free to reblog my work or buy me coffee (Link in bio at the top of the page)

Read chapter two here!

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stolethekey · 4 years

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if we make it past december (everything’s gonna be all right)

for @capcountdownchristmas!

read on ao3

December has rapidly become Steve’s least favorite month.

December is the start of winter. It means wind, snow that somehow finds a way to soak even the most bundled-up person’s socks, and a bone-chilling cold that bites at the very foundation of humanity’s collective soul.

At least, that’s what Steve’s Californian first-grade teacher used to say.

He didn’t mind it so much as a kid, back when he could bundle up with his mom in front of the fireplace and they could bask in its warmth, finding comfort in blankets and hot chocolate and each other. It was fine, back then – but then Sarah Rogers died right before Thanksgiving, which meant Steve’s first Christmas as a legal adult was spent alone, staring incessantly into the flames while he stubbornly refused to admit that he maybe should’ve taken Bucky up on his offer to spend the night at his house.

It was, somewhat literally, all downhill from there.

Bucky fell off a train in the Alps, surrounded by snow so bright it hurt to look at. Steve watched him fall, then promptly nose-dived a plane into the ocean and spent the better part of a century frozen in a block of ice.

Suffice it to say: he’s had enough cold for a lifetime. And December brings nothing but cold and people celebrating a holiday he hasn’t found joy in in seventy years.

So it’s only natural, really, that his first December out of the ice is spent in relative restlessness. It’s natural that, when Fury sends out a volunteer request for a stakeout that starts December 10th that features an “indefinite length of time – could go into Christmas”, Steve jumps off of his couch and heads directly to Stark Tower.

He fully expects to be the only one there, but as he turns the corner and steps through the door he sees a certain redhead perched on Fury’s desk, leafing through a stack of papers.

It’s hard to say who looks more surprised as they take in each other’s presence.

“I – um, hi,” he stutters, trying not to appear intimidated by his two companions. “I just – I’m here for that stakeout assignment?”

“Oh,” Natasha says, her eyebrows raised slightly. “Wow. Really? You know it’s probably going into Christmas, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I mean, I knew that was a possibility. That actually – um, that actually kind of makes it more appealing to me.”

She tilts her head slightly, a curious, searching look in her eyes. Steve shifts uncomfortably, well aware of her uncanny ability to read people.

“There’s always an assignment near Christmas,” Fury says from behind the desk, and Steve looks at him, grateful for the excuse to look somewhere else. “But Agent Romanoff is the only one who ever takes it on. The volunteer request is simply a formality – most people know they aren’t expected to take it.”

“Well, I guess I never got the memo.”

Natasha studies him. “Most people have Christmas plans.”

“I don’t,” he says shortly. Then, in an attempt to appear more amicable, he follows it up quickly with, “But now that I’m here, you can take this year off. Spend some time doing your own Christmas thing.”

She shrugs. “I don’t have a Christmas thing.”

“Great,” says Fury, with an air of general impatience. “Then you can do it together.”

The assignment is fairly simple – a routine stakeout at a surprisingly nice campsite. Their target is a Ukrainian mobster whose drop-house is apparently a cabin at the edge of the campsite, and as the two of them trudge into a neighboring cabin and drop their bags on the floor, Steve casts a cursory glance out the window.

“That cabin looks completely empty,” he mutters.

“I know,” Natasha says, carrying a few grocery bags into the kitchen. “It is. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have to be here for as long as we probably will be.”

“So we just – what, we just wait until someone shows up?”

She glances at him. “Never been on a stakeout before, huh?”

“Well, not like this,” he says, almost defensively. “Not that I’m complaining, but you’d think they’d have a more precise time period for the drop.”

“I thought you wanted it to go long.”

“I do, I’m just making a general comment on the inefficiency of it all.”

Natasha rolls her eyes, and Steve feels inexplicably as if he has disappointed her.

“Why do you always do these assignments, anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense for people to rotate by year, or something?”

She shrugs. “Like I said, everyone else makes plans for the holidays. They have people to reunite with, friends to spend time with, family to see. I don’t.”

“You have friends. Clint’s your friend.”

She gives a short laugh. “Clint always has plans.”

“With whom?”

Her eyes narrow slightly as she looks up at him, a familiar guarded expression on her face. “People who aren’t me.”

“Right,” Steve says uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

Natasha sighs as she places the last loaf of bread on the counter and shoves the empty grocery bags into a cabinet. “It’s okay. He invites me every year, but it’s not – I don’t want to intrude on his time with them. We spend most of the year together, anyway. Plus, American Christmas really doesn’t mean that much to me. So I don’t mind taking on a little extra work while everyone else is celebrating.”

“Right,” Steve says again. “That makes sense.”

“What about you? Why did the great Captain America decide to spend his December holed away in a cabin, waiting for a mobster to stop by?”

He hesitates, but as he meets her eyes he can tell that she’s already figured him out. She knows why he’s here – she’s simply giving him a chance to tell her himself, to set the parameters for the rest of their conversations here.

He doesn’t know her, not really, but for some reason he knows that she’ll respect his boundaries. That if he decides to bluff and make up some excuse about spending his holidays doing good for the world, she’ll shrug, say “fair enough,” and won’t bring it up again.

She knows exactly why he wanted to work– he sees that. He also sees that she’s perfectly okay with however he wants to play it. It’s a strangely comforting realization, if a little unexpected, and maybe that’s why he makes the choice that he does.

“I don’t like Decembers,” he says, toying with the hem of his jacket. “My mom died in the fall, and that winter had some of the hardest months of my life. Plus, Bucky died in the snow, I was in a block of ice for a couple decades – ”

“And Christmas isn’t exactly joyful when you’re alone,” she supplies softly.

Maybe she’s guessed even more than he thought.

“I wanted a distraction.”

“A distraction,” Natasha repeats, a small smile toying at her lips. “I think we can handle that.”

They do their job, of course – the drop-house is always being watched. But their cabin’s location makes it fairly easy to ensure that their target is under constant surveillance, and there is plenty of free time to be had, given that their mobster friend chooses to never show his face.

The days are filled with board games and gentle music, thanks largely to Natasha. Steve notices fairly quickly that she has a striking intuition for his emotions – when he wants to be left alone, she’s nowhere to be seen, but when he starts to get restless, Settlers of Catan appears under his nose before his thoughts even have a chance to start spiraling.

She’s good at small talk, he learns. Good at filling the silence with words that would be trivial were it not for their ability to keep an ever-approaching despair at bay.

He hasn’t had this type of companionship in…well, decades, and he’s surprised that it doesn’t make him more uncomfortable. They barely know each other, after all, and it should be unsettling that she can read him as easily as she does.

For some odd reason, it’s not.

She accommodates him as easily as anyone ever has, providing him with companionship when he needs it and leaving him alone when he doesn’t, and the next few weeks pass in surprising comfort.

The days aren’t happy, exactly, but they’re not entirely full of pain, either. And that’s an improvement.

“Hey,” Natasha says one evening, sprawled across the floor in front of the fireplace. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“It’s Christmas Eve.”

Steve pauses, looking up from his copy of Crime and Punishment. “Huh.”

She hesitates, then flips over onto her back to look at him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you really believe in God?”

His brow furrows slightly in confusion. “What?”

“It’s just – Christmas is a religious holiday, you know, so I just got to thinking about it, and back when we first met, on that jet, you said that there was ‘only one god.”

He chews his lip slowly, letting the book drop into his lap. “I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “I guess I was always taught to as a kid, and I’ve never really thought about it. But I’d like to believe that there’s something or someone out there that’s watching over us, at least.”

She hums.

“Do you?”

She gives a hollow laugh. “I don’t know that it matters. The gods have never cared for people like me.”

He looks at her, staring up at him from her spot on the carpet next to a bowl of popcorn and a glass of mulled wine, and something clicks.

“Maybe not,” he says softly. “But there are people who do.”

Something changes in her expression at his words, and as she holds his gaze a strange feeling starts to form at the bottom of his stomach.

He coughs. “That reminds me – I got you something.”

Her brow furrows as he slips a bookmark into his book and disappears into his bedroom. When he emerges, a wrapped box in his hand, she shakes her head.

“I – um, I didn’t – ”

“I know,” he says, smiling slightly. “You don’t need to.”

“I can’t accept that,” she protests. “Not if I didn’t get you anything.”

He rolls his eyes and tosses the box in her direction. “Open it.” Then, more gently, “Friendship is not transactional.”

A curious expression flits across her face at the word friendship, but she takes the gift without further complaint and slips a finger underneath the wrapping paper.

“Oh,” she breathes as the wrapping paper falls away to reveal a small, black pouch. “Steve – ”

“It’s flameproof, bulletproof, the whole nine yards,” he explains as she flips it over to reveal an hourglass, emblazoned in fiery red. “I have one, too. I keep – I keep the things that mean the most to me in it.

He hesitates. “I just figured – we all have something we really treasure, and nothing in our lives is safe. You can tie that to your belt, stick it in a pocket, it’s a way to keep something with you, you know?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, tracing the hourglass with a finger. “So, if I put something inside, the only way it gets destroyed is if I die, basically. And maybe not even then.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to be that morbid about it, but yes.”

She studies him for a moment, then grins and sits up. “Thank you. Really.”

“Of course.”

Her grin fades into a softer smile as she reaches for her wine, beckoning at him to do the same.

“Look at us. Two loners, doing okay on Christmas Eve.”

“Doing more than okay on Christmas Eve.”

“To us,” she declares, raising her glass. “For making it through December.”

They clink glasses, and as the blend of wine and holiday spices hits his tongue, Steve feels a sense of warmth start to spread over his shoulders.

The stakeout ends almost as quickly as it starts. The mobster shows up on the day after Christmas, they take him down before he even has a chance to draw his gun, and by 4pm on the 27th, the two of them are back at SHIELD headquarters, debriefing complete.

Steve is on his way to the elevator, actually looking forward to returning to his apartment, when he hears someone call his name.

He turns to see Natasha jogging down the hallway toward him, a slip of paper in her hand.

“I have something for you,” she announces, coming to a stop in front of him. “Consider it a late Christmas gift.”

“I told you, you don’t have to – ”

“But I did.”

“Natasha, really – what you did for me this December is more than anyone could ask for.”

The words fall out of his mouth before he really has a chance to think about them, and a blush creeps steadily up the sides of his face as he waits for her to ask what he means.

Instead, her expression softens. “You did it for me, too. Whether you knew it or not.”

He barely has time to process her words before she shoves the folded slip of paper into his hands. “Just take it.”

Steve unfolds the paper to reveal a sequence of numbers, written in black ink. “What’s this?”

“My phone number.”

“I have your phone number.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “You have my work phone number. Which I sometimes do not use, depending on my mood, the time of day, and the general urgency of the incoming message. That’s my personal phone number.”

“I didn’t know you had a personal phone number.”

She winks. “I don’t.”

“Right. Okay.”

The corner of her mouth quirks up. “If you ever need anything – food, a bowling partner, someone to beat you at Catan – just let me know. Seriously. I know what it’s like to be new here – in this world, I mean – and feel like you’re completely alone. So use that.”

“Yeah,” Steve says faintly. “Okay.”

“Also, you should ask out your neighbor.”

Steve blinks. “What?”

Natasha pats his arm, as if to say, don’t worry, you’ll get it someday, and gives him one last smile before turning and jogging back down the hallway.

Steve turns back toward the elevator, a smile making its way onto his face. He looks down at the slip of paper again, and notices a few words scrawled hastily underneath the phone number.

Congrats on making it through the worst month! It only gets better from here :)

Steve steps into the elevator. As the doors start to close, he slips the paper into the small pouch tucked away in his jacket pocket, wondering if she might be right.

#my mcu fics #my fics #steve rogers x natasha romanoff #captain america countdown to christmas #romanogers #capwidow #stevenat

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harritudur · 7 years

Text

rpf . jodie comer/jacob collins-levy . 3 155 words . rating M

note: as I promised, here my Jodie x Jacob smut. I tried to not turn this into a gratuitous smutty fic and so, I decided to add some fluff as well lol :) For @thefairfleming who gave me the courage to write and to post this shit fic (again, i apologize for the typos and my bad english)

Jodie couldn’t remember why she had ever thought it would be a good idea to start in the first place. Sometimes she blamed it on drink, on the nice French Rosé. And then, the annoying voice in the back of her head that sounded a little like her Mum telling her to stop being such a naive fool. She should have been enough of an adult to admit to her mistakes.

The thing was, she couldn’t find it in herself to stop.

Two weeks before, Jodie’s computer began to ring with the sounds of a Skype call from Jacob. Her former co-star whom she hadn’t made the least attempt to contact when she was still in the UK and he, in L.A. -or Australia maybe? They were not been in touch often recently. “Hello, Miss Comer,” he said, and then checked his watch. “It’s almost 7pm in L.A.! What are you doing up at such an ungodly hour?” “Working!” she replied proudly, showing to the camera the recent script she received for a new play in London. “What about you?” “Well, I am keep selling my soul in Hollywood for the sake of my career”. There was a hint of something in his voice that she can’t decipher, and yet it made her nervous. "I heard you were in the US recently and you didn’t even call me?” “Well, I wasn’t technically in the US,” Jodie said, taking a sip of her nocturnal tea. (British habits die hard) “I was in New York.” “East coast superiority problem,” he snorted, and he got this unreadable expression on his face. “How is England?” “Damp. And lovely,” she said, smiling brightly. “I will be there soon. To visit my father’s side of the family. It’s been a while… Can I come visit you at some point as well?” Jodie was slightly taken aback. He’d never asked if he could come visit. They’d been mostly cut off from each other since he’d gone to Los Angeles. “Yeah, Jake. Sure. If you felt like it.” “I will,” he said. “You mark my words, I will.”

To be honest, she wasn’t expecting him to show up. But, Jacob had always been hyperactive, a touch unpredictable and adventurous (she liked to call him Crocodile Dundee on set, just for the tease), so she was only about sixty percent surprised when he called her from Heathrow. “Jodz,” he said, “why aren’t you here to pick me up?” “Probably because you didn’t tell me you were coming! But I’ll come now.” She grabbed her keys and ran out the door before she could even think about what she was doing. Luckily for him, she moved to London the last week –a better decision for her career. “Finally,” Jacob said as she burst through the door at the airport, scrubbing a hand through his hair like he had just woken up from a long nap. “Finally, she shows up.” “Do you have any idea how far Heathrow is from London, Jacob!” Jodie said, trying to ignore the conspicuous lump in her throat and the way her heart rate sped up a little when he stepped forward and gave her a massive bear hug. “Missed you, Jodz,” he whispered in her ear, and suddenly, yup, there they all were, all those crazy feelings that she hadn’t let herself express for all those months she’d co-starred with him. “Missed you too, Jacob,” she said, and now she regretted not calling him while she was in the US.

True to form, he had no interest in actually sitting down for a proper meal, so they managed to navigate the interminable Tube of London for some takeaway Indian food that didn’t look like it would give them food poisoning. They sat on the floor in Jodie’s flat she just rented, cardboard boxes everywhere (and Jacob couldn’t believe how much of an improvement it was over any flat for a comparable -or even more expensive- price in Los Angeles) and chewed down. Just like old times in their trailers.

She brought out from her fridge a bottle of cheap French Rosé and they’d swapped stories about friends, family, one-night stands. He’d let her listen to a few songs on his ipod. She’d teased him about his Californian tan. She’d talked about Glastonbury Festival. He’d regretted to not have been there with her. They’d drunk the bottle dry.

Jodie hadn’t felt much nostalgia or sadness for her many former co-stars, realizing she’d gone off and lost touch with many of them. And more important, she’d had the possibility to meet them in London when she wished to. But now, she was nostalgic and sad -she didn’t know how much she missed him and how much she hated suddenly the Atlantic & the Pacific Oceans (and the Indian one too!). Jodie wasn’t aware that Jacob had been staring at her the whole time as she looked contemplatively in to her rice. “Jodz,” he said, “are you okay?” She exhaled, and looked back up at him. “Yeah, I’m alright. Just… missing the old days, you know?” There was a beat of silence. He smiled wistfully, which was an ability Jodie didn’t believe that people could develop before the age of thirty. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. That’s why I’m here, I suppose.” “So you came all this way to sit on my floor and eat curry with me, and I suppose you’re flying back tomorrow in time for… your family right? Or an audition maybe? An event? Or a romantic dinner with whoever you are hooking up with?” The twinge of bitterness that Jodie heard in her voice was unintended, and she almost apologized to him right there. He laughed, harsh and bitter, like she’d never heard him laugh before. “God, we’ve been out of touch, haven’t we Jodie? No one is waiting for me in my cold cold bed.” “I’m sorry…” and instinctively, she reached out for him and grabbed his hand. Jacob sighed. “I miss you.” “Same, Jake.” “You’ve done an awful good job of hiding it.” “Oh come on,” Jodie said, reeling. “We’ve both been busy. I’ve been doing auditions and some new projects are in the coming. I’m an actress. It’s my job! I could say the same about you.” “I just thought… I just thought we were…” Jacob said, struggling to finish. Never once in her life, she had seen him at such a loss for words. If it weren’t for the emotional gravitas that she suspected the situation deserved, she would have whipped out her phone and taken a video. “Friends?” Jodie supplied, trying her best to be helpful. “Friends?” Jacob practically yelled back at her, his hands shaking. “Oh, sod it.” He got up and made his way towards the door. “Jacob,” she said, popping up and running after him, stopping him just short of her front entranceway, “what the hell?” “Friends, huh Jodie? Right, because I’m going to fly all the way across the goddamn Oceans for someone who I like as a friend. I don’t understand how you could possibly be so thick!” Quieter, he continued, his sharp blue eyes on her. “Did you really just want to be friends this whole time?”

A pause.

“No…” Jodie just managed, and finally, here, she was being perfectly honest; she was addressing the feelings that Jacob gave her, and everything that she missed about the last year and him most of all. “No, I didn’t not want to be just friends, but I felt that our hands were a little tied. There was this whole unspoken rule about not dating your co-star, and I had commitments in the UK and you had your life in Australia and then… then I just wasn’t around anymore, and you deserve more than a girlfriend half a world away, and you deserve to have a great career as well, and… it’s like life just kept getting in the way. Bad timing or whatever it is. But, yeah, the way I dreamed about you or us or… the things I managed to think up… it was just, you know? Just a dream…”

Based on the look Jacob was giving her at this exact second, Jodie could’t decide if he was going to kiss her, or storm out her flat door. But the next thing she knew he is crushing himself against her, arms wrapped around her waist and lips against hers. She felt his tongue prodding her lips, and she opened her mouth to him and mentally fist-pumped, and then shivered when he ran his tongue across hers and gently slipped his fingers under the hem of her t-shirt. The feeling of his fingers on her skin made her mind spin with anticipation. He pulled away, looked at her kind of funny, and said, “Is someone else dropping by tonight?” What? Oh yes, we are in London, she realized, and a Saturday night, and I have friends in the city. “No. No Jake… there’s not anyone coming, if that’s what you’re implying…” “Good,” he whispered, “because I am taking you to bed and we are not leaving there for a while.” “Oh,” Jodie said, and hoped that she wasn’t making too much of a dopey happy face. Then she was the one kissing him. An impulsive action –and she thought that she still had some part of Lizzie in her head when she did it. They had kissed so many times before. But this, this felt different from the working-friendly snogs they had shared in front of the crew ~for the job. The kiss tasted of darkness and the metallic hint of danger and excitement. It tasted new. She’d say that the drink had made her just the slightest bit reckless, but it wasn’t true. Not entirely.

She walked him back through her rented apartment. He stopped her somewhere in the middle of her living room not far away from their abandoned dinner (waste of good Indian food, she thought) and kissed her again, and something about how his hands were once again under her shirt and rubbing against her low back made her knees go conspicuously weak. Jacob took advantage of that and subsequently picked her up and carried her bridal style to her bedroom. She tossed her head back and laughed and was still laughing when he placed her down on her bed. “You literally cannot be serious about anything for more than five minutes,” she said as he climbed over her. “You’re about to be proved very, very wrong,” Jacob said, and Jodie had a snarky response forming in her head that died on her lips as soon as he kissed her again. And suddenly getting his shirt off was very high on her list of priorities. She gave up on the buttons and just ripped it, then mentally reminded herself to help him sew those buttons back on if they ever got out of bed.

He didn’t seem to care, but there he was, bare-chest, on top of her, with his lips on her neck and she moaned embarrassingly loud. She could feel him smiling against her skin, the bastard. She sat up briefly to aid Jacob in getting her shirt off, and her bra, and then he laid her back down and relieved her of her jeans and knickers. Not to be outdone, she started undoing his belt but he pushed her back on the mattress and settled over her, kissing a trail down her body. He slipped off the edge of the bed to kneel, kissed the inside of her thighs, and positioned his face between her legs. He looked up at her and opened his mouth to ask a question. She somehow (because she had no idea on how her brain would actually been working) intuited what he was about to ask.

“God yes,” half-spoken, half-moaned.

About a second later her head was thrown back as she felt pleasure course through her body as his tongue rolled against her clit. This simple motion made her gasp out loud. The sound seemed to please him, and he growled low in his throat before attacking her with tongue and lips and gentle teeth, until Jodie was biting her lips and forcing herself not to wrap her thighs around his head. One, then two fingers entered her and she literally gasped as they curled inside her. She dug her heel in to Jacob’s back accidentally, and as soon as he reached up and replaced her hand on her nipple with his she involuntarily pushed harder in to his back with her heel. That was probably going to leave a little bruise, she thought, but he didn’t seem to stop or mind, even when she threaded her hand in his hair. He started focusing intently on her nub, and next thing she knew she was arching off the bed and coming around his fingers. Pulling them from her body, he climbed up over her on the bed.

Jodie wanted to move, to drag him down on her, to taste his lips once more and herself at the same time, and to return him the favor. But instead she watched him strip as he kept a safe distance between them. A part of her wanted to help, to shorten the torture, and to get rid of that satisfied smirk on his face –yet, another part wanted to enjoy the show, to savor each new glimpse of his skin and to memorize them for her lonely nights. But the impatience that curled in her low belly was hard to tame. Socks and shoes, then the belt and jeans followed, kicked off and the boxers flew somewhere and then he was naked, finally.

“Jodie,” he breathed looking down at her. Fuck! her name sounded so good on his tongue. His voice was broken, his Australian accent more marked, and his eyes were darker than anything she’d ever seen; she just wanted to kiss him absolutely senseless, “…do you have anything?”

Oh, that. How unfair that he should ask her where anything (especially something so infrequently used by her nowadays) was in her post-orgasmic haze. “Ummm,” she said to help, and flailed in the general direction of a cardboard-box by her nightstand. In vain. “One second,” Jacob said, and quickly dashed out of the bedroom, which at once was one of the most hilarious and sexy things that she’d possibly ever seen. She really hoped he didn’t trip over anything because she was not doing first aid on his naked… anything. She heard his suitcase unzip and zip and he came back with a fistful of condoms, swaggering triumphantly. “Bloody Hell,” she said, as he deposited all but one on the nightstand, “You totally planned this whole thing.” “The possibility crossed my mind,” Jacob replied. “Allow me,” Jodie said, with a wicked smile, and pushed him back so he was lying on the bed. She ripped the foil open with her teeth, tossed it aside, and rolled the condom on, never taking her eyes off of him. There was something extremely gratifying about the way that his head lolled back and his mouth fell open. Deciding that she relished the sensation of being in control, she straddled him and sunk on to him as slow as she could possibly manage. “God, Jodz… Jodie,” he sputtered out, “just do it already.” His hands moved to her hips and tightened. “Don’t know why you think this is any easier for me Jacob,” she sputtered out, but put on a veil of crazy confident feminine guile and started rolling her hips very slowly. She bit her lip hard, and looked down at Jacob whose pupils were blown out and just looked absolutely wrecked. His thumb found her clit and started rubbing it gently, and then harder, and then right when she was about to come, thanks Jacob, he rolled them over and started thrusting in to her. It was sinfully good to feel his skin against hers. She wanted everything, wanted to lose herself in the warmth of his skin, the taste of his lips, and to pretend that the world outside her flat didn’t exist. That they weren’t betraying any social convention for coworkers –or acquaintances? –or friends? Really? He was gentle, at first, one hand pressing her right wrist into the mattress, the other wrapped around her hip as he thrusts into her. Again and again and again and then he started to lose some of his control, and the hand around her wrist pushes down harder. It felt so good. They felt so good, fitted so well together and moved so in time with each other. Heat built in her and she could feel the rest of the world fading away into the background, and she wanted to close her eyes because there would be sparks behind her eyelids, but he wouldn’t let her out of his gaze. Just as she didn’t want to stop looking at the blue of his eyes. Jacob pulled almost all the way out of her and thrust into her again, deliberate and slow this time, and Jodie could feel the crest of her climax rising to meet his and she chased it eagerly, rocking her hips back against his. Maybe she was a little out of line, but the look on Jacob’s face told her she was doing something extremely pleasing. She buried her flushed face in the crock of his neck and bit down into the pale, pristine flesh of his shoulders and marked it hers. A low moan from him. And then, his hand at her hip loosened its grip and cupped her face instead and suddenly he was kissing her, all sweet tenderness and heat. Jodie kissed him back hungrily, whining into his mouth. So close. She was so damned close– “Let go,” he said against her lips, after pulling his mouth away from hers. “…you’re beautiful like this. So beautiful.” His accent, music to her ears. Then suddenly he was just hitting the spot, and then she was arching off the bed and seeing stars, and she was just barely aware of his hips stuttering and then giving one final prodigious thrust and collapsing on top of her. They just lay there like that for an indeterminate amount of time (Jodie wasn’t going to be counting anything, she knew that much) until he rolled off of her and dealt with the condom. She was still lying on her back when he got back to bed and he curled up beside her.

Taking this as her cue, she wound her arms around him, pulled him against her, felt his breath on her neck and shivered with post-orgasmic delight. He pressed a kiss to her collarbone, then to her neck, making her giggle, and then he kissed her so gently she could almost cry. Jodie wished there was more to this, more than just her London flat and previous stolen moments in trailers. More time. More of him. Her fingers ran through his messy hair and pulled him closer for another kiss. And then another, until she felt him stirring against her again.

“Fuck,” she stated as her hand moved down his body to cup the curve of his arse. “We’re screwed now, aren’t we?”

He didn’t even try to argue this statement. His hands cupped her face and before she could breathe he kissed her. “Oh yes, we are.”

For the first time in a long time, Jodie felt whole.

His return ticket had been booked for the next weekend, but he managed to worm his way out of further events and auditions (“My new agent will kill me later” he jested) so that he could stay two weeks. One morning, he disappeared for two hours, but re-appeared with red and white roses so she forgave him the minor heart attack. “Seriously? Jake?,” the reference obvious, but she accepted them anyway. He disappeared as well an whole day, but she knew it was to see an aunt or an uncle in Essex. Easy to forgive.

Later that month, she followed Jacob back to L.A. (“For work!” she had claimed to her friends who were not buying this shit). He was there, of course, waiting at the airport, and he took her to his flat without any questions. Unexpectedly, there was an extra chest of drawers waiting for her. “Thanks. It would make things easier,” she said in a smile. “I’m looking forward to this.” “Me too,” he said, and kissed her.

It was Jacob’s phone ringing that woke them, and Jodie blinked, the California sun already shining through the window. She didn’t realized she was so tired. The Hollywood way of life -and other private exertions. She was vaguely aware of Jacob groaning, his arms unwrapping from her as he stretched to pick up his phone. She turned back, spooning around him and scattering kisses over his shoulders and neck as he talked. “Hello? Oh, Emma, good morning. Yes, yes, I’m fine. I don’t know, we haven’t… Okay. Yes. Yes, she’s still here.” Jodie frowned. Even though she only heard half of the conversation, she knew he was talking about her. Telling Emma she had stayed the night might not be a good idea. “I’ll tell her. Yes. Thank you. Bye.” He hung up after this little talk and placed the phone back on his bedside table, before turning back and wrapping his arms around her. “Hello.” He kissed her nose and she couldn’t help but smile. “Hello. Hmm, what did Emma want?” “Oh, nothing, just be sure everything was alright. She is planning a dinner this week so, we could go? And she says hello.” “Jacob…” She tried to be serious but it was difficult with his hands on her hips, just upon her ticklish spot. “Why did you tell her I was here?” “It’s true, isn’t it?” “I’m not sure she had to know…” “Oh. She already knew.” “What?” He shrugged. “Said it was obvious and that we should have realized before.” Jodie turned pale, her blood freezing as she wondered what she meant by obvious, and who else knew. And then she remembered the many smiles and teasing and eye-rolling from her friends. Was the great actress Jodie Comer so easy to read? “Are you okay?” he cupped her face and brushed her cheeks gently, eyes full of affection. Oh shit. She was in love with this man -maybe she hadn’t realized it all quite yet. Or maybe she had, and this sudden understanding was like letting out a breath Jodie didn’t know she was holding since months. “More than okay,” she sighed, and let him kiss her, and more.

- -

#rpf #J² #*OOPS I MADE A THING AND I AM SORRY*#i post it now when everybody is sleeping so you don't have to endure this shit #can u believe it's my third fic about them? it comes from to 'awkward meeting' to 'let me eat you in your new flat'#it escalated so quickly #lol

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neverisalongtime-ja-blog · 7 years

Text

Chapter 4: Angry released

Hello everyone. Another Thursday another chapter! I wanna thank you all again for the feedback ‘cuz it gives me life. I really hope that you all like this chapter, we are entering the interesting part now so enjoy!

And don’t forget to tell me what you think!

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

Read chapter 3

- So you had a date with Josh? - Mandy asked while trying some notes on her bass.

- No. We just went for some drinks. Brian was there too. I don’t wanna date anyone, how many times I… - Anastasia couldn’t finish her words.

- I would be happy if you dated Josh. He is my friend, you are my friend, it’s a win-win situation for me- Eric laughs.

Dead Curse was rehearsing for a small festival tour they were going to do in the summer. But first they had a small record release gig they were going to play in LA.

- I invited him to the show – Eric said.

- Josh? - Anastasia asked but she knew the answer.

- Yeah. He has more free time now that the Chili Peppers record is almost done.

- Thank the Universe for that – Anastasia said mocking the situation.

Anastasia radiated security on stage. Once she stepped on that place, she became this powerful woman without any fear. That Dead Curse show celebrated the release of their third studio record and was held in a small club in Los Angeles in front of about 200 people. To be there, those fans had won tickets through contests on Californian radio. The show was going well and Anastasia liked to look at the audience in the face and one of those times she could take a glimpse of Josh on a side balcony. She smiled.

- I saw Josh in the crowd – Mandy said once the show was over and the band was resting backstage.

- Mandy… – Anastasia replied.

- Ok I’m not gonna say what I’m thinking then – Mandy said rolling her eyes.

- You don’t need to. And no… he’s not here for me – Anastasia rolled her eyes too.

- I swear that this mind-reading-thing you two have scares me – Nick said putting a clean t-shirt on – I’m waiting for you at the bar – he said leaving the place.

Once the girls changed their stage outfits to more everyday clothes they walked outside to the bar place. There was Nick, indeed, joined by Eric, his girlfriend, two more guys, another girl and Josh, they were all laughing and drinking. On the way there Anastasia stopped walking suddenly; the girl she didn’t know at the bar was hugging Josh. Mandy realized the situation and hugged Anastasia forcing her to walk and with a quick glance she hinted her that she had her back.

- The stars of the night – Eric said receiving the girls.

- Stop! – Anastasia smiled.

- I’m pretty sure you know Jonathan, and this is Clint – Eric said the two guys to Anastasia and Mandy.

- Jonathan! – Mandy hugged him. He was one of Mandy’s bass teachers over the years.

- And, of course, Josh – Eric finally said.

- Yeah. Like I never saw you before – Anastasia smiled and Josh smiled back.

- Well, you kind of abandoned us at the recording studio… so… - Josh said.

- Make me feel bad now – Anastasia said.

- By the way this is Carrie – Josh introduces the strange girl to Mandy and Anastasia. The girl took her arms off Josh to shake hands with the shocked girls and put her arms around the guy again.

- Hi Hannah! –Mandy and Anastasia said at unison to the girl next to Eric and took place next to her.

- It’s nice that you guys are so supportive of each other – Mandy said to the guys present. All of them had another band together called Dot Hacker.

- For me is always a pleasure watching you guys live. It’s so fun! – Jonathan said – and Mandy has improved so much!

- It’s my first time, though – Clint said – and I think It’s Josh’s first time too.

- Yeah, it took me a lot to finally see you guys playing – Josh said.

- And what do you think? – Anastasia asked – You like it?

- It was amazing – he smiled to Anastasia – I mean, you are another person up there.

- How is that? – Anastasia questioned.

- I don’t know. You are energetic. You dance and jump. You aren’t shy at all - Josh answered.

- Yes. You are a hotter person up the stage – Mandy said – which is hard to believe because you are already an incredible hot person on a daily basis - Mandy hugged her friend giving her an accomplice look and both laugh.

The night passed between drinks and laughter but Anastasia couldn’t take her eyes off Josh and his girl. He did not introduce her as his girlfriend, he just said her name, but something definitely happened between them. Eric and Hannah gave Anastasia a ride home and when the three of them were in the car she had to bring it up.

- It shocks me that you wanted me and Josh to be together but you didn’t tell me he has a girlfriend.

- Well I didn’t know. If something is happening there is pretty recent – He answered – Are you jealous?

- No I’m not – Anastasia said – I just had to mention.

- You don’t need to worry about her – Hannah said - You have no capable competition in this world. She didn’t leave him alone one single second. It was annoying.

- I don’t really care. I already said that I don’t wa…

- Want a relationship! – Eric and Hannah finished Anastasia’s sentence and laugh.

- That was fucking unnecessary – Anastasia laughed too.

Jokes aside, Anastasia realized that she does care about the situation and for the next couple of weeks it was all she could think about. She didn’t mention anything to Eric and he didn’t say a single word about Josh. She didn’t see him neither until she was invited to a small party at Anthony’s house in Malibu.

The Peppers was going to start a small tour for Festivals all around the word and coincidentally Dead Curse was going to play at some of the same festivals too. It’s good to mention that both bands shared the same manager and record label.

Anastasia wore a pair of jeans, an off-shoulders grey top with a pair of white sneakers and her midnight blue hair was long and loose. She drove to Malibu with the band, they were going to stay at Anastasia’s sister place there: a huge mansion at the town shore. It was two houses in one. The big one was owned by Barbara and she lived there with her twins and on a side a two floor place was owned by their father and was the perfect place to crash on weekends and even had a small recording studio on the top floor with amazing views of the beach. Both houses where close enough to make one big mansion.

Anthony, Chad and Flea were their neighbors so once Anastasia left her car at Barbara’s place they walked to Tony’s entrance.

- Hi! I’m so glad you all could come! – Anthony said receiving them.

- Tony! – Mandy threw herself to hug him and he hugged her back.

They all had known each other for long time. Once inside the house Anastasia spotted her sister having a fun conversation with Chad’s wife of which she was good friends with. She greeted both of them and her sister quickly poured her and Mandy a glass of wine each.

While sitting in the kitchen she looked to the backyard and saw Josh with Carrie again. She and Mandy shared a glance.

- What’s wrong? – Barbara wanted to know.

- Anastasia has an existential crisis because she doesn’t wanna date anybody but she really likes Josh and now Josh has a girl and now Anastasia is wishing I would shut my mouth… – Mandy said smiling.

- That’s not gonna last – Nancy, Chad’s wife, said – She’s is just with him because he is a rock star. They are going to start touring soon and she is going to stay here and forget about him. Believe me I recognize a groupie when I see them.

- You have no idea of how many groupies she has had to deal with – Barbara said clicking her glass with Nancy.

After a while, the girls joined Anthony, Chad, Flea, Josh, Carry, Eric, Nick and their manager at the patio.

- We were talking of how bad food is at tours – Eric said sarcastically to the girls.

- Man the worst! I always gain a few pounds when I start touring ‘cuz I’ll eat everything everywhere we go – Anastasia said smiling – Well when I stay here I eat a lot too.

- Where you like to go to eat? - Josh asked.

- I’m a huge taco truck fan – Anastasia said.

- Those places are gross – Carrie opined with a funny expression on her face.

- Well I like them. I love pizza too! Well, everyone does – Anastasia said looking at Mandy this time.

- There is a pizza place near El Sereno that opens 24 hours and the best time to go and grab some pizza is at two in the morning – Josh said.

- Who will eat pizza at two of the morning? That’s the worst idea – Carrie opined again.

- How good is that pizza? It can’t be better than Manolo’s on Venice – Anastasia said ignoring Carry’s comments.

- It’s better than Manolo’s – Josh said smiling.

- I don’t believe you – Anastasia said and Josh smiled more.

- Well talking about tour food Nick was telling us which Festivals are you guys going to play in and we are gonna coincide in at least ten of them – Chad said.

- Really? That’s going to be fun! – Anastasia smiled. At this point she was a little bit tipsy.

- I know! – Anthony exclaimed – It’s going to be one hell of a summer.

- I hope! ‘cuz I haven’t been having good days lately – Anastasia said looking at Josh. The alcohol was taking over.

- How is that? - Anthony asked.

- Let’s said that things aren’t going the way I want them to go – Anastasia said looking at Josh and not a single person there understood a single thing.

- Oh man. I think we are gonna go to sleep. We’ve been working hard this week – Mandy said sharing a smile with Eric. They were the only ones capturing the situation.

- Are you crazy? – Mandy asked laughing once they were at the house.

- I’m so angry! – Anastasia said.

- Why? As far as I know you don’t want to be with Josh – Mandy asked.

- I don’t know! – Anastasia exclaimed throwing herself into the couch in the living room - I don’t want anything with him but I don’t want him with anybody else!

- Do you realize that doesn’t make fucking sense? – Mandy was laughing hard and was a little bit tipsy too – You need to drown this issue in alcohol. I think Barbara has some here.

The girls took a bottle of vodka and walked barefoot to the pool side at the backyard. After that bottle ended another came and when they realize both were sleeping in big pool chairs.

- That’s what I call a wild party – Barbara said to Mandy and Anastasia that morning.

- Shut up Barb – Anastasia said entering the kitchen where her sister was cooking lunch – My head is going to explode.

- I bet that! – Barbara said.

- How much did we drink? – Mandy said.

- Enough to fall sleep on the pool chairs where Josh found you two – Barbara said without taking her eyes off the onion she was cutting. The girls shared a look.

- Josh found us? – Mandy said bursting into a very loud laugh.

- Yes – Nick’s voice sounded after the girls. He was coming down the stairs – And then he carried Anastasia up to her bed. It was so romantic.

- Ha ha! – Anastasia faked a laugh – Sometimes it’s hard to remember that none of you is less than 26 years old.

Anastasia got on her feet and walked back to her bedroom. She was the one feeling like a teenager. Valentine killed all possibilities of love again for her. She didn’t want to feel like she felt in her last relationship. She always felt attracted to Josh but never thought of being with him in a romantic way, but now seeing him with another girl, a girl who doesn’t deserve him, made a whole swirl of emotions appear inside of her. A whirlwind of emotions that she had tried to suppress for months.

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The Porn Business Isnt Anything Like You Think It Is

Midway through the second season of Silicon Valley, the HBO series that so skillfully spoofs the Bay Area tech scene, the plot turns to porn.

Inside the offices of Pied Piper, the fictional startup at the heart of the show, a shaggy-haired coder hacks into a rival company. The rival, he discovers, has landed a $15 million contract with a porn outfit called Intersite, also fictional, agreeing to build software that will compress Intersite’s videos and send them across the ‘net. Pied Piper’s CEO, Richard Hendricks, is bemused. “I don’t understand,” he says. “How does Intersite have all this money?”

“It’s pornography,” says the guy with the highfalutin facial hair.

“Adult content has driven more important tech adoption than anything,” says another colleague. “The first fiction ever published on a printing press was an erotic tale. And from there: super 8 film, Polaroid, home video, digital, video on demand—”

“—credit card verification systems, Snapchat—” adds a third.

“Pornography accounts for 37 percent of all Internet traffic.”

“Thirty-eightwhen I’m on it,” says the guy with the highfalutin facial hair.

In many ways, the exchange is typical of the show. It’s good for multiple laughs, particularly if you’re wise to the shamelessly eccentric ways of the modern tech world. Punchline aside, the big laugh is that nod to Snapchat, a mainstream private-messaging-and-video-chat app whose status as a porn service is, shall we say, unofficial. But Pied Piper’s porn encounter is a rare case where Silicon Valley gets things wrong. Typically, the parody rings so very true. In this case, it doesn’t.

‘The thing about the adult industry today is that … it’s a very low-margin business.’Chris O'Connell, Mikandi

In the popular imagination, the eternaltrope is that the porn industry drives the adoption of new technology; that it accounts for some astronomically large portion of all Internet traffic; and, yes, that it generates equally enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who run its operations. We picture these people as sleazy Southern Californians wearing pinkie rings and polyester. Or, if we’ve come to realize that the pinkie-ring caricaturemakes absolutely no sense in the age of the Internet, we see them as ruthlessly clever businesspeople with a sixth sense for where the big money lies. That’s the stereotype Silicon Valleyembraces. Later in the episode, when Hendricks turns up at an adult industry conference, we encounter an army of porn execs dressed like bankers.

But it isn’t like that at all.

Some of it may have been true in years past. But no longer. A colleague of mine calls this a meso-idea, an idea that has ceased to be true but that people continue to repeat, ad infinitum, as if it still was. With the rise of mobile devices and platforms from the likes of Apple and Google, not to mention the proliferation of free videos on YouTube-like porn sites, the adult industryis in a bind. Money is hard to come by, and as the industry struggles to find new revenue streams,it’s facing extra competition from mainstream social media. Its very identity is being stolen as theworld evolves both technologically and culturally.

It’s a world where Playboy is going PG-13—in print and online—because it can’t compete with the Internet at large. Mobile and social media platforms have pulled us away from the openness of the worldwide web and into walled gardens, squeezing the avenues of distribution for porn, co-opting its audience (at least in part), and forcing outfits like Playboy to become more “mainstream.” The larger porn industry is headed in the same direction, careening away from the stereotypes held by journalists and pundits and pop culturelike Silicon Valley. “That’s obviously a fictional adult company—because I don’t know a single one that would pay $15 million for compression software,” quips Chris O’Connell, who helps run a real adult company called Mikandi. “The thing about the adult industry today is that … it’s a very low-margin business.”

Mikandi operates the world’s largest porn app store. When I talked to the publisher of XBIZ, the leading adult business news organization, he called it “the future of the porn industry.” And in some ways, it is. But that future isn’t what the popular imagination expects.

O’Connell, Mikandi’s 29-year-old chief architect, lives in Tucson, Arizona, and he runs the company with Jesse Adams and Jen McEwen, the young Seattle couple who launched the store back in 2009, providing an alternative to the Android and iPhone app stores that forbid adult content. Apple also bars Mikandi itself from iPhones, and the only way to use it on an Android phone is to download it manually through a web browser—the same browser that serves up a seemingly endless stream of free pornography.

That said, Mikandi aims to offer stuff you can’t get elsewhere. A smartphone app does video and animation much better than a browser, and the store serves up carefully crafted stuff like hand-drawn hentai—aka Japanese porn animation. Over the last three years, the word “hentai” accounted for more Mikandi searches than the word “free.” The premium apps carry a price tag, and the company takes a cut whenever anyone buys one.

But the audience is relatively small. About 2.5 million people are registered with the Mikandi store, with about 345,000 visiting every three months. All of which means: O’Connell, Adams, and McEwen pull in yearly salaries somewhere in the low six figures, after paying “competitive” wages to a handful of coders in Seattle and Eastern Europe. “None of us own a yacht,” O’Connell says. Or as McEwen puts it: “You can’t understand the obstacles that are in our way.”

‘The Perfect Storm’

She doesnt mean obstacles of morality or law. Yes, many people frown on porn, calling it exploitative and debasing. But many others just see it as a part of life—a big part of life. There’s an enormous audience for porn, and whatever it signifies, whatever emotions it stirs in critics, this audience isnt going away. McEwen means economic obstacles, business obstacles, technical obstacles.

It wasn’t always this way. In the early aughts, online porn was ridiculously lucrative. Colin Rowntree, a porn producer, director, distributor, and member of the Adult Video News Hall of Fame, was a just mid-level player, and in those days, he and his wife, Angie, earned millions each year. But at the end of the decade, just about everything changed. Apple introduced the iPhone, which moved so much of our digital lives onto mobile devices whileofficially banning pornography in its App Store. Google pushed porn to the fringes of its search engine. And as The Economist and Buzzfeed have described, an army of “Tube sites”—essentially Youtube knockoffswith names likeYouporn and Pornhub—began offering a smorgasbord of online porn for free, much of it pirated, making it far more difficult for pornographers and distributorsto make money. All this happened as the worldwide economy tanked.

“It was the perfect storm,” says Rowntree. “People no longer wanted to pull out their credit cards. But they said: ‘Oh, there’s this thing called YouPorn. It may be grained and shitty, but at least I can masturbate.'”

The adult industry sought new avenues, including porn app stores, porn search engines like Rowntree’s Boodigo, and other workarounds, as well as “live cams,” where people pay to watch and interact with an adult performer in real time. That’s pretty much what strippers and porn stars have offered over Snapchat. But this too has its limits. One of the kings of live cams, Kink.com, the company the operates out of a castle-like former armory in San Francisco’s Mission District, has also seen revenues decline in recent years. Snapchat now works to shut down accounts dedicated to pornography.

Jen McEwen, Chris O’Connell and Jesse Adams. Annie Marie Musselman for WIRED

Certainly, some people will pay for a better experience than they can get on a Tube site. Todd Glider is the CEO of CMP Group, whose video service, Badoink, has found another loophole in the smartphone market—-it offers a video streaming tool that’s ostensibly content-neutral but can be used for porn—and he says the company pulls in $55 million a year in revenues. But the best content is often pirated and offered for free, much like Hollywood blockbusters and best-selling albums. The difference is that Hollywood has the political andeconomic power to suppress pirated content—and push official content through mainstream services. The porn biz can issue DMCA takedown notices and threaten legal action like anyone else, but it doesn’t have the clout to enforce the notices on a wide scale—or make anyone care that it’s being ripped off.

“The adult industry isn’t able to enforce its intellectual property protection,” says Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab who explored the economics of the adult industry in the 2013 study What Drives IP without IP? A Study of the Online Adult Entertainment Industry. “It’s not that much different from others industries—except that policy makers don’t really look at the adult industry and aren’t interested in helping the adult industry.”

Meanwhile, with the rise of Netflix and YouTube and so many other mainstream video services—including Facebook and Twitter—porn is no longer the dominant form of online video. It’s hard to tell how much porn streams across the ‘net—no reliable operation tracks this, including Sandvine, the primary source for internet traffic research—but it doesn’t account for 37 percent of all traffic. It’s not even close. Mikandi declines to discuss its traffic. But a better barometer is the Pornhub Network, which now spans several of the major Tube sites. Pornhub says its network receives about 100 million visits a day, and at least on part of the network, the average visit lasts about nine minutes. If you extrapolate, that’s somewhere in the range of 450 million hours of viewing a month. Meanwhile, Netflix serves 60 million subscribers, and these subscribers watch over 3.3 billion hours of programming a month (10 billion a quarter). Youtube claims hundreds of millions of hours of viewing daily.

“What happens is: someone comes up with a stat [about porn traffic] and everyone repeats it, but it’s not necessarily true,” Pornhub vice president Corey Price says. “If you just look at YouTube’s numbers, they’re astounding.”

The corollary is that, with the rising power of companies like Apple and Google and Facebook, the adult industry doesn’t drive new technology. In many respects, it doesn’t even have access to new technology. The big tech companies behind the big platforms control not only the gateway services (the iPhone app store, Google Search, the Facebook social network) but the gateway devices (the iPhone, Android phones, Google Chromecast, the Amazon Fire TV, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset). And for the most part, they’ve shut porn out. Besides, these giants now drive new technology faster than services like Mikandi or Pornhub ever could.

Porn distributors have become the imitators, not the innovators. This summer, Pornhub introduced a for-pay service, an alternative to its ad-driven free porn sites. In a press release, the company called it “the Netflix of porn.” When I talk to Price, he compares it to Spotify. And remember: the Tubes sites have spent the last decade mimicking Youtube. “We’ve innovated in some areas,” Price says. “But the adult industry being the leader of technology? If it was ever true, it isn’t true today.”

Silicon Valley doesn’t even get the clothes right. The reality is that people from porn companies wear whatever they want at conferences—a lot like people from other tech companies. “People who work in the adult industry are like people who work for other startups,” says one industry veteran. “But they have an edge. They have a certain countercultural attitude.” They’re a lot like people from other tech companies in so many ways. They just deal in a different type of online content. And even the content isn’t as different as you might think.

This Is What the Porn Industry Looks Like

Back in 1998, in his preternaturally entertaining expos of the porn business, “Big Red Son,” which detailed his visit to an industry mega-conference, David Foster Wallace observed a world populated by people who wore bad toupees and pinkie rings and used the word class “as a noun to mean refinement.” “All the clichs,” he said, “are true.”

They wouldn’t stay true for long. The Internet would soon remake the industry. It became less about producers and directors in Southern California, and more about people who put stuff on the ‘net. Old-school producers and directors are still around, but they’ve been superseded by the people who deliver the porn, and these people have moved into production as well. Twenty years later, almost none of Wallace’s cliches are true. In fact, not even the clichs that replaced those clichs are true. Nowadays, the porn industry looks nothing like those guys in bad toupees—and nothing like the steely-eyed execs who show up in Silicon Valley. It looks like Chris O’Connell.

The big adult business-to-business conference is called Internext, and it’s held at the Hard Rock Hotel, just off the Las Vegas strip. On the first day of this year’s show, O’Connell turned up in a blue mohair and wool suit, with a red tie and matching handkerchief. As he walked down the hall that Saturday night, past the framed guitars, the signed Led Zeppelin photos, and the freestanding, poster-sized porn-tech ads, he carried a lit Dominican cigar in one hand, and two smartphones in the other. The second phone is unlocked and rooted, so he can test new software code.

This is pretty much what he always looks like—though, if it’s cold, he might add a waistcoat, an overcoat, and a black fur felt fedora-like hat fashioned by a haberdasher in Romania. And on a Sunday morning, he might relax in a rugby shirt. But whatever he wears, he doesn’t wear it with irony. “I’m not a hipster,” O’Connell says. And he’s not. He’s a registered Republican. He’s an engineer who quotes Adam Smith. He’s a shareholder in a porn company who carries a commercial pilot’s license. Hes neither a ruthless businessmen in a suit, nor a coder in a hoodie. Hes a coder in a suit with a bit more color to it. He’s a guy with his own tastes—in clothes, in politics, in technology, in sex.

He lives in Arizona because he likes the politics, including the gun laws. Like many others in the porn business, he sits at the libertarian end of the spectrum. Free speech and free guns. He also lives in Arizona because that’s where he went to grad school. After three years of liberal arts at Middlebury in Vermont and a few more years in the Silicon Valley startup world, he studied astronomy at the University of Arizona, working with the Large Binocular Telescope and contributing to academic papers in publications like The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. At one point, to make some extra money, he helped build some websites, and some of them were adult sites. Mikandi was a next step. The world was going mobile, and the likes of Apple wouldn’t allow porn apps. He thought it should. But he also liked the idea of, in his own way, rebuilding what Apple had built. He still does. “It’s a very hard thing to do,” he says.

As a metaphor, O’Connell works on multiple levels. He talks not like some smarmy San Fernando Valley opportunist or one of the porn industry automatons in Silicon Valley, but like a software engineer enthralled with things like the HHVM virtual machine, the Cloudfare content distribution network, and other really geeky stuff. After all, that’s what he is. He doesn’t just use tech. He builds it. And he does this under the aegis of a company whose Seattle offices, on the first floor of a nondescript building with no doorman, sit in the shadow of the glass towers that house Amazon, one of the big companies squeezing the porn industry. Plus, he’s the guy who put porn on Google Glass.

The Steve Jobs Effect

Jesse Adams and Jen McEwen launched Mikandi in the fall of 2009 after spending two years in China bootstrapping a business that made vibrating condom rings and other sex toys. At first, the Mikandi app store wasn’t much of a store. “We launched the day after Thanksgiving,” Adams says, “with no apps.” But it caught O’Connell’s eye. He had spent the last six month building a similar store, just so he could get one of his own apps onto phones, and he asked Adams and McEwen if they could combine forces. “They had the marketing,” he says, “and I had the technology.”

Jen McEwen. Annie Marie Musselman for WIRED

Before long, the store also caught the eye of Steve Jobs. That spring, the Apple founder and tech world patron saint unveiled the latest incarnation of the world’s most influential smartphone—the iPhone 4—and afterwards, he took questions from the press. At one point, a reporter asked if Apple would ever let people install software on the iPhone without the company’s explicit approval, and in response, Jobs pointed to Android. Google let people install almost anything on Android phones—if they ventured outside the official Android app store.

“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said, referring to Mikandi, warning that this store delivered porn apps without discrimination. “Anyone can download them. You can. Your kids can. That’s just not a place we want to go.”

It was another reminder that the Internet had changed in the age of the smartphone, that many devices no longer offered unfettered access to whatever the world cared to send across the Internet. But that bit of Jobsian self-righteousness also carried some untended consequences. Though Jobs didn’t mention it by name, about 10,000 people downloaded Mikandi onto their Android phones over the next 12 hours—ten times more than the usual—and traffic to the store promptly tripled.

And yet, all these years later, Mikandi remains a small business. O’Connell loves what he does. So do Adams and McEwen. And their business is successful. But it’s small. That’s because a porn startup can’t raise large amounts of money like other startups. And because their store has been pushed to the edge of the Android world. And because so much porn is available for free from the tube sites and other sources. “The adult industry has a very large content library, with, to use one of the buzzwords of the Internet, a very long tail,” O’Connell says. “You have so few viewers for each piece of content.” But nowadays, those aren’t the only forces keeping the company from the enormous bucks.

Ironically, O’Connell says, a company like Mikandi is also in a bind because so much free porn—or porn-like stuff—is now available through social media, from people posting stuff that isn’t necessarily for financial gain. Facebook bans adult content. And other social sites have done much the same. But not all of them. Twitter puts pop-up warnings over porn, but you can still get to it. Tinder isn’t all that different from an adult dating app. Snapchat cracks down on accounts dedicated to porn, but it is, by definition, a service for trading private pictures and videos. If you can get private pictures and videos through Snapchat, you aren’t as interested in porn from porn companies.

In some respects, the porn industry has been replaced by millions of people with ready access to camera tech, posting stuff to the Internet. That’s just the way the modern Internet works. “Adult,” O’Connell says, “is getting rolled into everything else.”

‘It’s Chaos. It’s Fragmented. It’s Broken. It’s Blocked’

As he built Mikandi amidst this new world order, O’Connell didn’t pay $15 million for video software. He and his team built it themselves. That’s pretty much the way it works in the porn business. Part of it, O’Connell says, is that with all that free porn available across the `net, industry margins are much too thin for that kind of spending. But even if a company did pay $15 million for that kind of tech, it isn’t likely to pay a mainstream startup a la Pied Piper.

The Silicon Valley bit about the industry driving the adoption of credit card verification systems takes on a new meaning when you consider that many credit card services now refuse to work with adult operations (in the early years, fraud, inordinate chargebacks, and other abuses were rampant). Many mainstream technology vendors take much the same stance, including companies that build email services and, yes, video engines.

“For adult companies, it’s chaos. It’s fragmented. It’s broken. It’s blocked,” Adams says. “You have to build your own newsletter service. You have to build your own billing system. All the game tools for distribution and ads—none of that is available to adult companies. All the awesome stuff that everyone expects you to have is blocked.”

That means adult operations need people like Chris O’Connell. After building the Mikandi video engine, O’Connell helps run a side business, Sendfaster, that sells similar technology to other operations, including customers outside the adult industry. Video tech isn’t just a cost. It’s a source of revenue. “The realities of the adult industry have meant that companies have to be scrappy,” O’Connell says.

And yet, no matter how much technology people like O’Connell are willing and able to build, they will still reach enormous roadblocks—just because their tech handles adult content. In 2013, O’Connell landed a ticket to Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, and he was among the few who had the opportunity to purchase a pair of Google’s computerized eyewear. He did, and that meant he could build software for the device, which seems to project a tiny computer screen somewhere out in front of you when you slip it over your eyes. So, together with Adams and others, he built an app called “Tits and Glass.” He was in the vanguard of a new kind of porn. The app let you share “share, comment, and vote on your favorite sexy photos with Google Glasses.” Then Google shut it down.

Jesse Adams. Annie Marie Musselman for WIRED

Just after the app was released, the Internet giant changed its terms of service, banning content that contained nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. That was the end of Tits and Glass. Later, O’Connell and crew also built an app store for Google Chrome OS—the company’s laptop and desktop operating system—and that was blocked, too. They wanted to put one on Google Chromecast, a gadget that puts apps and video on your TV. Same result.

Virtual Unreality

Nowadays, the prevailing narrative is that virtual reality will re-energize the porn industry. After I spoke to Alec Helmy, the publisher of XBIZ, whocalled Mikandi the future, he wrote back and mentioned VR. Buzzfeed, in its lengthy porn feature, paints VR as the great porn hope. You hear the same thing from, well, WIRED. But the future is more complicated than that. Think of Chris O’Connell and Google Glass. Think of Mikandi and Steve Jobs.

VR and its cousin, “augmented reality,” are controlled by the big corporations. Facebook owns the Oculus Rift. Microsoft built the Hololens. Google does Google Glass. These will treat porn at least like Android treats porn—or maybe even like Glass treated porn when O’Connell unveiled his app. In other words, they won’t allow it through official channels and maybe not at all.

Yes, the adult industry will build virtual reality porn. It has already started. Glider’s CMP Corp offers 180-degree and 360-degree videos through a site called BadoinkVR.com. But in more ways than one, porn VR will sit on the fringes of the Internet. And the mainstream services will offer VR that’s pretty porn-like. No, really. If we can communicate with each other via virtual reality, we will trade pornography—or stuff that’s close to it. Culturally, we’re moving towards a world where this kind of thing is more acceptable, where we’re more open about it. As much as the big corporations bar porn from their services, it still shows up, thanks in part to the people and companies who don’t call themselves porn vendors.

If all this true, then the stuff coming from the adult industry means less. As O’Connell explains, much the same thing is happening on today’s 2D Internet. If we have Snapchat and Twitter and Tumblr, we don’t need the porn companies—or at least, we don’t need them as much as we once did.

O’Connell and Adams and McEwen now kinda wish they had branded themselves as a mainstream operation—not as a porn business. If they called themselves something else, they would have more freedom to do what they want to do. Indeed, as Mikandi competes with all those mainstream services, it’s moving closer to mainstream content. Their store now offers games and comics and e-books. They’re embracing many of the same digital artists whose work shows up on Tumblr and other mainstream services. “In some ways, it’s about: how can we get less adult? Or rather: how do we serve our users more of the time? How do we provide them with the stuff they want all of the time?” O’Connell explains.

When it comes right down to it, he says, Mikandi isn’t all that different from your typical tech startup. It uses many of the same tools to build much the same tech. Yes, it still serves up stuff that’s more extreme than what you might find on even the most liberal of mainstream services. But that will slowly change too, as the mainstream moves closer and closer to porn. “You begin to wonder,” O’Connell says, “if the industry will cease to be its own thing.”