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sprout-fics · 9 months

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Breaking and Entering

(John Price x F! Reader)

(Call of Duty Masterlist)

Rating: M Wordcount: 4.2k Tags: Girl Dad Price, Wife Reader, Angst, Fluff, Feral John Price, Cuddling, Hurt/Comfort, TF141, (Unrealistic interpretations of UK gun laws) Warnings: Home invasions, Deadly use of firearms A/N: AKA the home invasion fic nobody asked for

When your number lights up his phone, Price knows it by heart.

There’s just one problem.

You aren’t supposed to call this one.

He’s in the middle of a briefing when it happens, discussing relevant intel ahead of a mission happening in the imminent future. Arms folded, beside the projector screen, voice taking on his gruff, clipped tone used only to convey orders, information, commands. It’s a late workday, but the intelligence that has just come in is valuable, extremely relevant to the team’s next hunt. As much as Price would like to be home, he can’t be. Duty comes first, and you’ve learned to accept that in him.

His phone rings in his pocket, and he catches Gaz’s face just in time to see the expression of ‘Really, Cap?’ Before he excuses himself, looks at the screen.

It’s you.

Normally he’d have his phone on silent for briefings, but now he’s glad he’s forgotten. He’s told you explicitly that this number is for emergencies, and emergencies only. Short of life or death scenarios, this number is exclusively off limits.

Which means when he sees the number, his heart sinks below his stomach.

He’s answering and moving before your voice even comes through, wordlessly striding from the briefing room and ignoring the questioning calls from his team after him. There’s no preamble to your conversation, and he tries to remove the anger, the fear from his voice when he speaks.

“Where are you?”

“In the bedroom.” You whisper back urgently, and he can hear the tremble in your voice, can practically feel you shaking through the phone. There’s a pause on the other end of the line as he shoves open the doors to the command center towards the direction of the parking lot.

“John.” You whisper again, voice very small, hushed and quiet. “John, there’s someone in the house.”

Price doesn’t freeze despite the cold wash of dread in his veins. There’s only motion under his feet, heart pumping full of adrenaline in his chest, where something fearful, furious, brutal coils in a low growl.

Before he can respond, however, there’s the sudden crash of something on the other line and you whimper.

“Where are the girls?” He demands as he waves off an officer who salutes him as he walks by, swinging his hand so hard the other man flinches.

“In the bathroom. I locked them in, they’re being quiet like their mummy told them.” You reply, and he can hear the growing sob in your throat. You’re terrified, beside yourself, but you don’t say it, don’t tell him how worried you are, how you want him to come home. You know he’s already on his way, you know to be brave, and for a moment Price’s heart swells with the tender affection of pride before it quells when there’s another clatter in the background.

“Hang up and call the police.” He tells you on no uncertain terms, pulling his keys from his jacket and all but racing towards his car.

“I already did. Told them where we are but-”

You pause then, release a low, shuddering exhale that crackles through the phone.

“John, I just wanted to say I love you.”

“Don’t.” He snaps before he can stop himself, gripping the steering wheel with a white-knuckle grip. “You are going to be fine, you understand me? You and the girls. I’m on my way, the police will get there before I do.”

And if they don’t, there will be hell to pay. He adds silently.

He can hear you suck in a breath to say something next, only to pause.

The stairs creak in the background.

Price floors the gas.

“Get the gun.” Price tells you gravely, flashing his credentials at the gate operator without looking at him. “Can you get to the safe?”

It had become necessary due to the nature of his work to ensure you had a certain level of self-defense for your safety when he wasn’t home. Price had more enemies than he could count, and while he had made every precaution to ensure nobody, not even his team, knew of your existence, he had placed a certain level of insurance with you just in case. The paperwork had been a nightmare to get through, but with the mention of his specific job description, the powers that be had allowed an exception to the laws on weapons, leaving you with a short revolver hidden in a safe in the bedroom.

You don’t answer his query, but Price can hear a rustle, the sound of you moving across the room to the top of the dresser.

Moments tick by, and Price doesn’t speak in the silence, not wanting to offer a single sound that may alert the intruder to where you are. You remain just as quiet, but Price can hear the low, slow click of the safe’s lock as you twist the code into place.

April 22nd. Your eldest’s birthday.

“I’ve got it.” You whisper, barely audible through the phone.

Price sighs in relief, the smoky breath of him curling across the dashboard as he weaves through traffic, speeding tickets be damned.

“Good girl.” He rumbles, trying to keep his voice low, even, reassuring. “Is the door locked?”

“...Yes. Yes.” You reply back, and he swears he can hear the sound of the gun shaking in your hand as you hold it.

“Loaded?” He asks again. There’s a click that is too loud when you open the chamber to check.

“Six bullets.” You murmur, voice a little more even, more level now in a way that makes his heart ease, makes the commanding, logical instinct of his military training activate.

“I want you by the door.” He orders you as if you’re one of his own. “Both hands on the gun, just as I showed you. Understand?”

“Yes, Sir.” You answer, and that alone, the wry humor you give him nearly has him smile, chuff with affectionate laughter. Yet whatever humor he possesses is terrifyingly absent in this scenario, the one that could very well end with both you and his daughters dead by the time he gets home.

Bloody fucking hell. Where are the bloody cops?

“John…” You whisper then, just a touch louder so he hears you better over the thrum of the engine. “I can’t hear him. I think he’s gone.”

Price allows his eyes to flutter shut for all of a moment, clamping down on the premature relief that rises in his chest.

“Are you sure?” He asks, softer, trying to ease your frayed, tender nerves.

He can hear you swallow over the line, trying to wet your dry throat. “I…I think so.” You tell him at last. “I don’t-”

BANG-!

The sound of the bedroom door being kicked in.

He can hear you scream from the other end of the line, voice rising sharply in panic and terror as another, deeper voice echoes in the background, rising even louder with words he can’t hear. The sound is garbled, unintelligible as your phone drops to the floor. Price can barely hear the sound of his own voice when he shouts for you, words cracking in his throat. The road around him blurs, and he looks to the display on the dashboard to gauge the time until his arrival.

Two minutes.

Two minutes for you to die, for his two beautiful daughters to be killed as they scream for you, two minutes for the undeserved happiness of his life to be stolen from him.

Price yells again, voice desperate, calling your name. There’s the sound of struggle in the background, and you curse at your attacker- feral, untamed, terrified. Like a wild, injured mother animal defending her young from a predator.

Yet before Price can call out for you again, there’s a crunch, another, and the line goes dead.

The world drops out from under him.

The tires of Price’s car screech as he takes the turn into the neighborhood far too quickly, leaning with the inertia of the vehicle as he races down the street towards the house where his whole life is falling apart.

The car lurches to a stop in the middle of the street, Price not bothering to park properly as he tumbles out of the driver’s side door and towards the front step of the townhouse.

BANG-!!

A gunshot.

Price sees the image of your smiling face in a beautiful white dress flash behind his eyes.

The house goes silent.

Price used to be a religious man. His father would drag him to church on Sundays, would insist on his boys dressing proper and maintaining the appearance of good, devout, obedient children. He tried very hard to make himself believe through his adulthood, but in the years spent toiling in the dusty, blood-soaked underbelly of the world, Price has long since convinced himself there is no God left for ruined men like him.

Even so, in this moment, he prays.

The front door is locked, latched tight. The burglar must have come through the back door into the garden. Price calls for you, and it’s a stupid move on his part, alerting the enemy to his position, perhaps startling them enough to give them an opportunity to escape. Yet the silence that greets him has his blood thrumming, deafening in his ears and he kicks, once, twice at the center of the door before the latch buckles and the thing swings open on its hinges.

There’s crying from the bedroom.

There’s no gun on him, too frantic to grab a side-arm before he sped off base. So instead Price reaches for a knife hidden in his pocket, holding it ready in front of him as he slowly ascends the stairs. The crying is louder now, and he can tell it’s younger voices. Whimpers, tearful whispers from his two beautiful girls still locked in the bathroom. Yet the bedroom where you are remains silent, and as Price reaches the top of the stairs he tries to remember whatever saint offers the blessing of protection, safety.

He rounds the corner, and instantly his toes bump against a limp, dead body sprawled on the floor of the bedroom. Price doesn’t look down immediately, trying to steady himself, preparing himself for the sight of his beautiful wife dead at his feet.

A dark hoodie. A surgical mask. A pool of red soaking into the carpet.

It isn’t you.

“John.”

Price looks up, and in the darkness of the bedroom he finds you with your back against the dresser, several drawers half open and spilling their contents onto the floor. You sit, holding the revolver, legs askew on the floor, hands trembling fiercely, shoulders shaking-

Alive.

Price collapses to his knees in front of you, and you whimper into him as he hauls you into his arms. You nearly push at him, still caught the shock of being ambushed, attacked, touched by a man that wasn’t him. When you squirm, Price merely holds you fast against his chest, murmuring low, raspy reassurances until you still.

“Shh, it’s me. It’s me, love. You’re safe. It’s over.”

With one hand, he tucks his blade into his jacket, with the other he slowly removes the weapon from your grip, clicks the safety on, and tucks it to the side, well out of the way. No doubt the presence of the weapon will be a nightmare to deal with when the police arrive, but that’s not his concern right now.

“Are you hurt?” He asks, turning you face up to him in his palms, and he can feel the wetness on your cheeks, can see the liquid stare of you in the darkness of the bedroom. You shake your head, lip trembling but trying not to cry, and it aches at him like nothing else. The hurt is only soothed by the taste of your lips, a desperate kiss, wet with the taste of your tears as you instinctively part for him, allowing a shuddering little gasp to break through. You whimper again, something that sounds like ‘John’, grasp at him a little harder until he tucks you back into his chest.

“T-the girls-” You try, voice cracking, and Price hushes you, rocking just a touch as you try to calm down.

“They’re in the bathroom.” He tells you quietly. “They’re safe.”

You hiccup at that, finally allowing a sob to break free as you cling to him, bury your face into his chest so his shirt stains with tears.

“I-I was so afraid.” You confess, and Price merely tucks you closer to him, hauls you into his arms with the promise of safety.

“I know, love. I know.” He tells you. “You’re safe. You’re alright. You did well, my brave girl.”

You cry a little harder at that, and at last Price hears the sound of sirens at the edge of the neighborhood, racing far too late to where the two of you sit in the darkened bedroom.

He hauls you up into his arms when they arrive, helps you down the stairs and presses you into the arms of a kindly police woman before returning into the house. An officer in a yellow jacket urges him to stay put, but Price snarls in his face, startles him so badly the man takes a step back and pales.

It’s easy to climb the stairs now, to come to the locked bathroom door that shelters his children from the horror they did not witness. As soon as he opens the door they spill into his arms, his two beautiful daughters, weeping against him in wordless blubbers of terror and relief. Yet the first question they ask isn’t about where he was, what has happened, why the police are there. Instead his eldest, at the age of six, her gorgeous eyes the same color as her mother's, stares tearfully up at him and asks: “Where’s mummy?”

“Outside.” He tells her with a gentleness he had forgotten he possessed, hauling her younger sister up into his embrace as she sniffles into his shoulder. “Let’s go see her.”

Yet before he steps back into the bedroom, he kneels down and stares at his brave, eldest girl and tells her: “We’re going downstairs. Don’t open your eyes until you’re outside, understand?”

She does, of course she does. He’s never given her a reason to doubt him, so the both of them squeeze their eyes shut, don’t open them even as Price lifts them over the dead man still laying oozing on the floor.

When they get outside they rush towards you, fresh bouts of tears in their eyes, asking about the blood splattered on your nightgown, staining it crimson. He can see you panic, nearly explaining the truth, before you shakily smile, hold them both in your arms and tell them: “It’s strawberry jam, my loves. Mummy is very silly and spilled jam all over herself.”

It takes the better part of an hour to explain to the police what has happened, to have you checked over by a paramedic, one who offers peppermints to your two girls as they balance at the back of the ambulance. Price entrusts you to them, discussing the situation in low, grave tones with the officers over why they were not as quick to respond as he had hoped. The officer from earlier is defensive at first, tries to puff his chest and explain to Price the logistics of the response, and Price levels him with a mere look of stony, violent anger that instead has the man fumbling for an apology.

It’s that alone that has the man dismiss any possible charges for you, takes one glance at the weapons permit and tips his hat at the captain with a small ‘Sir.’

At long last, after the crime scene tape has been rolled out and the house cordoned off, does Price return to you and the girls, who have calmed down considerably and now doze drowsily on either side of you, still dressed in their pajamas. You lean up into the tender kiss he bestows upon your forehead, murmurs another reassurance there before tilting you into his palms.

“We can’t stay here tonight.” He tells you gently, and you sag in relief.

“A hotel?” You ask, and Price only shakes his head at you, watching your brow wrinkle in confusion.

“I’m taking you to base.” He replies softly, firmly. “No place safer in the world than with me.”

You know it’s true, he can see it in your smile as you gaze up at him, adoring, with a trust he still struggles to tell himself he’s earned.

So you’re bundled into his car alongside your two young girls, the three of you in the backseat as he retraces his path back in the direction of the base. It’s only once you also begin to doze off in the back seat that he hazards a glance at his phone.

Five missed calls, three from Gaz alone, one from Soap, and one from Laswell that’s followed with a text saying “Call me. ASAP.”

He has a lot of explaining to do.

Somehow he manages to talk his way past the gate guard, who looks puzzled at the woman and two girls sleeping in his backseat. Yet he waves Price through, and eventually the four of you arrive at the officer’s quarters. Price manages to hold both of his daughters, one in each arm, with you clinging to his side, hiding your face in his sleeve as you pass the soldiers who pause with long, drawn out stares at the sight before them. It’s an unusual circumstance to say at best, and Price knows he’ll have to corner more than one man tomorrow to ensure their silence on the whole affair. All that matters right now is getting you and the girls to safety, to somewhere the three of you can bunk down and sleep this dreaded evening off.

What Price doesn’t expect to find, however, is three younger SAS agents awaiting him in front of his bunk, leaning against the wall and talking quietly amongst themselves. Gaz, Soap, and Ghost startle at the sight of their captain holding two young girls in their nighties, and a woman at his side with blood not entirely scrubbed from her nightgown.

“...Sir?” Gaz manages tightly after Price silently brushes him aside with little regard, unlocking his door. Yet when Gaz tries to assist the captain shoots him a look. The expression that flits across his sergeant’s face has him regretting it almost instantly, but apologies will have to wait as he ushers you inside. It takes a moment for Price to carefully deposit his sleeping daughters into the neatly made military cot, and when he does he catches your eyes just as you nod to the three men still hovering in the doorway.

It’s with a sigh that Price rubs the back of his neck and turns towards his concerned and puzzled team, clicking the door shut behind him so the conversation does not disturb his family.

“Introductions will have to wait until the morning.” He announces quietly, hearing the fatigue in his own voice. “They’ve had quite the night.”

“You never said you were married.” Soaps blurts out before he can stop himself, and at the look Price gives him in regards to his volume he mildly tacks on a little “...Sir.”

Price allows himself a moment to knead the bridge of his nose, huffing a suffering sigh as he decides what to say next.

“There’s a reason I haven’t told you boys.” He explains at last, looking up. “You know our work. You know the enemies we’ve made, myself more than the rest of you. You know they will exploit every opportunity of ours that they can.”

He levels his team with a severe, grim stare. “I will never allow my family to become one of those opportunities. Understood?”

The silent, unspoken words there ring loudly in the silence that follows.

This is a secret. For the four of us. Do not ever speak of it to anyone else.

He can see them trade glances, still confused, apprehensive, but at least agreeable to Price’s explanation.

“Copy.” Gaz offers quietly at last, and both Ghost and Soap nod as well. Price manages to catch his lieutenant’s stare for a moment, and Simon darts his gaze to the door behind his captain, and then to Price meaningfully, nodding.

Of course Simon would understand the gravity of secrecy that comes with this, Price thinks, and for a moment he regrets not telling his second in command sooner.

“Good.” Price announces summarily after a beat, and the clipped tone of him has the team straighten on instinct. “We can talk more in the morning. Dismissed.”

Ghost nods, about to stride away when he catches Soap about to make further comments, grabbing him by the back of the shirt and tugging him away. Price can hear the Scot grumble in irritation, but obediently follows behind his LT. Gaz stays a little longer, shifting uneasily on his feet.

“Sargeant?” Price asks, and the tone isn’t unkind, still regretting the venom he shot the man earlier.

“Sir.” Gaz begins, eyes cast down to his feet. “...Are they alright?”

It’s that question, the soft, uncertain concern of his sergeant that makes Price’s shoulder go lax, has his breath exit him in a soft, steady sigh. His broad, calloused palm settles on Gaz’s shoulder, making the man look up with a worried, grimaced expression.

“They’ll be fine.” Price tells him, voice dipping low as it does for his own daughters. “They’ve had a bit of a shock, lad. They need to sleep it off, know that they’re safe now. You can help me with that come morning. Understand?”

Gaz brightens at that, always wanting to be useful, to prove himself to the man who has taken him under his wing.

“Of course, Sir.” He offers, reassured, and Price nods.

“Good. Get some sleep. The girls will be a handful tomorrow, I have a feeling I’ll be needing assistance.”

Gaz nods, makes finally to leave, when Price calls him once more.

“Gaz?” He asks, making the man pause. “Call Laswell. Tell her I’ve got three VIPs I’m dealing with. She’ll understand.”

Gaz’s gaze brightens, and Price inwardly cringes, recognizing the error he’s committed. No doubt Gaz and Laswell will be having an extended conversation in his absence about the things he’s failed to mention. Yet Gaz chirps an affirmative and vanishes down the hall before Price can stop him.

When Price returns to his room, the door clicking behind him softly, he admires the sight before him. His two daughters splay across the bed, clinging to your form tucked between them as you hush a lullaby to ease their dreams. Thankfully, they both have managed to fall asleep quickly, likely exhausted by earlier events. The sight of his girls soft, sleepy, blessedly safe in his quarters is nearly enough to bring him to his knees.

You look up at him as he leans on the door, beckoning him into bed. It takes a moment to divest himself of all but his shirt and pants, but eventually Price manages to scoot his way into the narrow cot, hauling his youngest atop his chest to make room. She curls there with a whining, sleepy murmur before falling still once more. A hand settles in her hair, idly stroking as Price coaxes her further into dreams.

Against his side, you scoot so your head lays against his bicep, your eldest daughter now tucked safely between you. It’s a bit awkward, the four of you trying to scrunch together on such a narrow cot, and Price doesn’t doubt that by morning he’ll be sleeping in his desk chair. Yet now, in the soft lull of evening, in the absence of gunshots and dead phone lines, he allows himself to be at peace.

“I nearly lost you.” He finds himself rasping quietly, as if he can still barely understand the thought. You make a sound of dissatisfaction at that, nudging him in disapproval.

“None of that.” You scold quietly, and Price holds his tongue about the fears he wants to say, the pleas for forgiveness he wants to ask of you for not being there when you needed him the most.

“I love you.” He says instead, and despite not being an emotional man, he finds the hollow of his heart aching, empty with regret.

You’re silent for a moment, and there’s a part of him that wonders if you’ll return it, if you’ll suddenly realize how selfish he’s been in allowing himself to love you despite his duty.

Instead you turn, grasp at his hand, bring it to your lips in a firm, tender kiss.

“I love you too, Captain Johnathan Price.” You whisper, and Price’s eyes close, chest aching, the world quiet around him, and yet full. When he breathes, it releases as a sighed prayer to the heavens, a plea for mercy for your safety, for his own forgiveness, for the promise of another day, another hour with his family in his arms.

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@guyfieriii @zwiiicnziiix @writeforfandoms

#John price x reader #captain john price #captain john price x reader #price x reader #x reader #reader insert #female reader #oneshots #call of duty #call of duty mwii #cod mw2 #modern warfare 2 #mw2

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burnednotburied · 18 days

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"You're My People"

AO3 Link

Pairing: Abby Anderson x fem!reader

Synopsis: You and Abby take refuge in an abandoned house to catch your breath and attempt to recover after the encounter with Ellie in the theater.

Tags: slight angst; hurt/comfort; mentions of death and blood; tending to injuries; (mostly) unspoken romantic feelings; reader is a young woman (same age as Abby)

Note: To be absolutely 100% clear, the reader is NOT meant to be Lev or Yara. Reader is a woman (about the same age as Abby) who met Abby on Seattle Day 1 when she was also meeting Lev and Yara. The four of them stuck together. None of this is super relevant for this story. (Just know that Yara was with them, but she was killed just as she was in the game, and Lev is around here somewhere.)

I have a lot of ideas for this character/storyline. It’s likely that I will continue to flesh things out in future fics, so I’ll leave the rest of the story to be explained later.

I put reader in many of the same scenarios as Lev was in the game, sometimes removing Lev altogether for the sake of the story. But reader obviously has a very different type of relationship with Abby than Lev ever would (or should) have.

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“Don’t ever let me see you again.”

That’s what Abby had said to that girl – Ellie – before walking away without so much as a backwards glance.

You had quietly followed Abby out of the theater, because what else could you do, but you didn’t know how you were supposed to feel about what you just saw.

Watching Abby incapacitate one man and shoot another in the face without hesitating. Seeing her beat Ellie into the floor while she lay there motionless.

And the other woman. The one who was pregnant…

“Good,” Abby had seethed when Ellie told her. She almost seemed happy about it. Happy to repay the wrong that was done to Mel. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.

If you hadn’t called out Abby’s name when you did, dragging her from the haze that was her desire for retribution…

Well, you could guess what would’ve happened.

You were just glad the two of you had decided not to bring Lev with you. That he was somewhere safe.

Neither of you spoke a word as you navigated through the dark streets of Seattle, her leading the way with you following quietly behind, just as you had been doing since you met. Although now you may have allowed for a bit more space between the two of you than you did before, trailing further behind. Lost in thought.

It had been three days since you met, but it felt like so much longer. A nagging voice in your head insisted that you really didn’t know Abby very well, despite how it felt.

She hadn’t given you any reason not to trust her. She had never hurt you. In fact, she had fought so hard to keep you and (more importantly) Lev and Yara safe. She had even turned against her own people, killed her own people, for the sake of protecting you.

No, that wasn’t right.

Those weren’t Abby’s people anymore.

“You’re my people.”

Abby had looked so earnest when she said it back on the Seraphite island just hours before. And you had believed her.

The words left you with a feeling deep in your chest that was hard to describe. You thought it might’ve been… belonging. Something you’d been hoping for but never found. You’d always wanted to truly belong to something.

Or someone.

There hadn’t been any time to dwell on the feelings or what they meant.

And now all you feel is a pit in your stomach.

Why were you so shaken up? This is stupid. You’ve killed before, and you’ve watched Abby kill.

But this felt different. It wasn’t self-defense. It wasn’t necessary. It was dark and angry and honestly terrifying. She was honestly terrifying.

But it was justified, wasn’t it? You could argue that maybe it was necessary.

Ellie had been hunting Abby for days, killing her friends and seemingly anything else in her path.

Ellie killed Owen.

You weren’t sure of the exact history between him and Abby, but you did know how important he was to her. And you had seen the look on her face when she found him dead.

Who’s to say Ellie would’ve ever stopped coming after Abby and the people close to her? Who’s to say she’ll even stop now?

You’re just beginning to arrange your fractured, contradicting thoughts in a way that makes sense when Abby comes to a sudden stop in front of you. You would’ve run into her if she hadn’t stretched her hand out behind her in warning.

“We need to stop. Get out of the rain. Regroup.” Her voice is strained.

You hadn’t really even noticed that it started raining again, harder this time, but you can walk in the rain. Lev is alone, waiting for the two of you to return.

You open your mouth to protest, only to shut it again when Abby turns to face you fully. She’s balancing her weight unevenly, heavily favoring her right leg. A significant bloodstain runs all the way down to her left ankle. And her face…

The pregnant girl had come from nowhere, attacking Abby from behind. She managed to slash across Abby’s cheek with a knife before you took her down with an arrow through the shoulder. It had been your only real contribution to the fighting in the theater, but it had been unavoidable. Abby had been in danger.

Now she’s standing in front of you, soaked from head to toe, from the rain and with blood, and you have no idea how much of that blood is hers, but there are definitely some significant injuries that need to be tended to.

Abby takes in your silence and your wide-eyed stare for a moment before shifting a little in place and clearing her throat. “Um… we can try in there. Yeah? The houses here should all be deserted.” She gestures weakly to the building closest to you.

You finally find your voice. “Yes, yeah. Let’s—let’s go in there.”

You pull your gaze away from Abby’s and walk past her, toward the small house, pulling your bow from where it rests over your shoulder and notching an arrow in the string. It suddenly occurs to you that you’ve walked all this way without your weapon drawn while Abby was injured and unarmed. For a moment, you’re glad that the Wolves and the Seraphites are too distracted fighting each other elsewhere to be roaming around in this area. Or else you and Abby would probably have been killed by now, both of you practically stumbling through the streets like a couple of vulnerable, mindless children.

You shake your head, silently scolding yourself and promising to be more alert, starting right now with sweeping the house.

The front door is mostly intact and slightly ajar. You approach carefully, painstakingly forcing it further open with your shoulder, fighting against rusted hinges and warped wood. The floorboards creak beneath your boots as you step inside, quickly scanning the entryway for anything or anyone that poses a threat. Abby follows behind you, trying not to visibly limp on her injured leg and holding up a small flashlight taken from the aquarium.

“Come on. You need to sit down,” you say over your shoulder, just loud enough to be heard over the pouring rain outside. For a moment, it looks like she might argue with you, maybe insist that she make sure the building’s clear first, but she seems to decide against it, giving you a quick nod of her head in response.

With your bow still drawn, you lead the way through the first floor of the building, passing a bathroom and a kitchen before arriving in what was once the living room. The room is filled with furniture in various levels of destruction and decay, somehow the most well-preserved among them being an old couch pressed against the back wall.

You point to it. “Sit,” you tell Abby. The fact that she listens and moves toward the couch without protest, albeit very slowly, is further proof of the extent of her injuries and her level of exhaustion. “I’m going to check the rest of the house, okay? I’ll be back. Don’t move.”

Abby lets out a scoff, immediately followed by a second, more pained noise. “I couldn’t go anywhere if I wanted to.” An attempt at a joke, made through gritted teeth. You give her a hesitant, worried look, long enough that she forces a small smile and attempts to reassure you with, “I’m fine. Go.”

She’s lying and you know that, but you don’t have much of a choice. You turn to go quickly search the house.

The second floor is clear of any discernible threats but also of anything that would be useful in helping Abby. On your way back to the living room, you rummage through the downstairs bathroom and a couple of mostly empty coat closets in hopes of finding something. Medical supplies. Even clean cloths.

You find nothing there and move on to your last hope, the kitchen. This room is even more ransacked than the rest of the house, and still, you don’t find what you’re looking for.

“Ugh,” you loudly groan, clasping your hands together on the back of your neck and casting your gaze upward in frustration.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Abby quickly asks from the other room, sounding ready to jump up off the couch and rush to your rescue even in her current condition. It makes you smile until you remember that this is no time to be smiling.

“It’s nothing. The house is clear. I was just looking for some medical supplies.”

“Who needs medical supplies?” she asks, trying her hand at a second joke. This time you let yourself smile for just a second.

“You do, Abby,” you say, “You need medical supplies. Urgently.” You’re still staring up like the answer will be written up there if you just look hard enough, when something in the space between the one of the top cabinets and the ceiling catches your eye. If you’re not mistaken, it looks like the corner of a first aid kit.

It’s too high for you to reach standing, and there’s nothing for you to stand on top of. The countertops are broken, the pieces scattered across the room, and the wood of the lower cabinets is rickety and unstable at best.

You’re grumbling under your breath about damn high ceilings and unnaturally tall cabinets as you reenter the living room to find Abby almost exactly where you left her, left leg now up on the couch and elevated, right foot still on the floor. Both of her hands are hovering over the gash in her thigh, like she’s not sure if she should touch it or not, her face tense and focused. She’s in pain.

You pull your eyes away and look for something sturdy enough for you to stand on, eventually deciding on a mostly intact, only slight wobbly small metal table.

“Do you really think now is the best time to rearrange the furniture, honey?” Abby asks, glancing at you in her periphery. She’s joking again, and you know that, but you can’t help the warmth that pools in your cheeks at her use of the affectionate pet-name.

“I--“ You clear your throat, “I need something to stand on. I think I found something in the kitchen.”

“Aww, you can’t reach the top shelf by yourself?” Abby asks, amused. She turns her attention from her leg to watch as you drag the table out of the room. It squeaks along the floor the entire way, making her laugh softly.

The fact that she’s being playful with you starts to ease your lingering panic about her many ailments. If she’s cracking jokes, she can’t be that close to dying, right?

“Crazy how you’ve lost like half your blood supply, and yet you still have enough energy to tease me,” you say, your own teeth gritted now. The table is much heavier than you anticipated. “And, for your information, the thing that I’m trying to get is not on the top shelf. It is above the top shelf. On top of the cabinet.”

“Uh huh. Sure… Take your time. I’m just over here, casually bleeding out.”

“Well, I’m no doctor. But I’m pretty sure that if the knife had hit any major arteries, you would’ve bled out a long time ago. So you’ll be fine for another minute. Probably.” With one final shove, you manage to get the table where you want it.

You carefully step up on the table, hoping that some sadistic asshole didn’t throw an empty first aid kit all the way up there just to waste the time and energy of some poor, desperate fool in need of medical supplies. (You, of course, being that poor desperate fool.)

After brushing off a thick layer of dust, you grab the handle. The kit is full.

“Yes!” you shout, nearly stumbling off the table in your excitement.

Abby can tease you all she wants and try to make light of the situation, but she can’t hide the look of relief that washes over her features when she sees what you’re carrying.

And, if you were paying closer attention to her face, she also wouldn’t have been able to mask the way her eyes go wide and her cheek – the one that’s not covered in blood – gets visibly pink when you get on your knees in front of her. “Uhhh hey, you can—you can sit on the couch.”

You raise your eyebrows, confused by her sudden nervousness. “No, the angle will be better this way,” you insist. “Just bring your leg over here.” She concedes, avoiding eye contact as you help her maneuver her injured leg so that her foot is back on the floor, practically between your knees.

There’s already a tear in her pant leg where the gash is. So to avoid having Abby stand up and take her pants off or cutting all the way around at mid-thigh, leaving her with half a pair of pants for the foreseeable future, you opt to just rip the fabric a little more on either side of the tear.

But you have a bad habit of occasionally thinking about something and then doing it, forgetting the often necessary in-between step of alerting the people around you to what you’re going to do first. You take the already-ripped fabric of her pants in your hands and tear, successfully making a hole large enough for you to properly clean and dress the wound.

The sound Abby makes when you do this surprises you. It’s almost sounds like a whimper—a noise that you don’t think you’ve ever heard her make before. There’s a twisting heat in your gut that seems to be a recurring side effect of being close to Abby, which you choose to ignore in favor of focusing on the more urgent (and honestly less daunting and less complicated) task at hand.

She’s quiet as you get to work cleaning the gash. Wincing slightly but remaining still.

The cut is deep, but as you expected it missed the femoral artery. You would have to stitch it up, though, and you told Abby as such. She nodded and watched you carefully as you quickly prepared, hoping to get this part over with as quickly as possible.

You moved even closer to her. Abby’s shin gently pressed against your front as you leaned over her knee, bringing your face closer, your movements precise and intentional.

Abby brings her hands down on either side of her legs, bracing herself. Her shoulders tense, muscles engaged. You have to tear your eyes away. Focus. You look back down at her thigh.

As you work, a strand of your hair falls from where you had tucked it behind your ear and into your face. You let out a light, annoyed huff. Before you attempt to blow the strand out of your eyeline, Abby’s fingers gently brush it back behind your ear. You feel yourself blush deeply, saying a quiet thank you before going back to sewing her up.

When the last stitch is done and you’ve carefully wrapped the wound, you feel Abby’s fingers run through your hair again, this time for no other reason but to draw your eyes up to meet hers.

“Come up here,” she says, her voice low. You stand, bringing the first aid kit with you, and feel the springs in the cushions creak beneath you as you sit on the couch, facing her, closer than is probably necessary. Before either one of you says anything else, you begin gently wiping away the blood surrounding the cut on her cheek, cleaning around the wound.

It's clear to you now that her wounds weren’t quite as detrimental as you had feared. With her leg sown up, her face was the only other thing that required your attention. Most everything else was superficial and would heal on its own. The rain had done a poor job of washing away all the blood, but it seems that much less of that blood had come from her than you had anticipated anyway.

“I can do that,” Abby says in a whisper, watching your face as you carefully and meticulously clean hers.

“I know,” you reply, just as quiet. “I want to.”

A few moments go by in silence until Abby once again breaks it.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” she begins, quickly adding, “Not sorry that I did it, but sorry that you had to… see me that way.” Her eyes are downcast. You know it’s weighing on her. Not just everything that happened today, but the fear that what happened could have a lasting effect on this thing you two have only just started to build. Call it trust or friendship or maybe something else entirely.

You shake your head. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad I was there. You shouldn’t have had to do that alone.” Abby nods, but you know it doesn’t do much to assuage her worries.

You still don’t understand what happened back in the theater. Or why it happened. Part of you wants to ask for the history now. How she knows Ellie. Why she wants Abby dead.

Maybe in time she will tell you, but you’ve already decided to trust her. To lean into whatever this thing between you is, and whatever it might become.

So instead, you ask another question that’s been in the back of your mind.

“Did you mean what you said earlier?” You pull your hand away from her face, finished cleaning the cut there. It may form a scar, but it doesn’t seem deep enough to warrant stitches. (And you’re not brave enough to try, on her lovely face so close to her eye.)

Abby smiles softly, leaning forward just a bit to bring your faces closer together. “You’re going to have to be more specific, honey.”

That pet-name again. It makes your head spin. Makes you want to close the already shrinking distance between you and press your lips to hers. But you don’t do that. Instead, you explain, “On the island. When you said that… I’m your people.” You pause, hesitating over the last few words.

Abby stops for a moment, almost looking confused, and you start to spiral internally. You realize that it was probably just something she said in the heat of the moment. To calm you down and get you to keep moving, towards safety. You wish you could take your question back, retract your stupid words. Swallow them up and hide them inside you, along with your ever-growing feelings.

Abby finally answers. “Yeah. Of course I meant it. You’re my people.”

“Yeah?” You break out into a grin.

She nods, smiling and sincere. “Yeah.”

It’s that one, small word that makes you close the distance between you. Not to kiss her, but to gently rest your forehead against hers. Abby seems stunned, like maybe she was expecting the other thing, or hoping for it, but she recovers quickly, closing her eyes and maintaining the physical contact. You close your eyes too.

“You’re my people too, Abigail Anderson.” You can feel her laugh quietly and open your eyes, pulling away just enough to see her face again. “So… where do we go from here?”

“Santa Barbara, California,” she says. You remember overhearing part of a conversation about that between Abby and Owen yesterday. You figured that’s where she would be heading; you had just hoped to be given the chance to tag along. But you guess you didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

So you nod your head thoughtfully. “Sounds good… Sunny.”

“Hmm, yeah. That’s what I hear.” You’re both smiling. Happy, strangely enough, given the circumstances.

“Abby…”

“Hmmm?”

“We are going back to get Lev before we leave though, right?”

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

Note: If you read all of that, THANK YOU! This is the first fanfic I’ve written—and the first time I’ve written at all in a long time—so this is me dipping my toes in the water.

It definitely ended up being a lot longer and a lot less spicy than I anticipated, but I wrote what came naturally. I hope to continue this storyline, likely backtracking to when Abby and reader met, so we’ll be seeing more of these two. We’ll get to the fun stuff eventually!

#abby anderson #abby anderson x fem!reader #abby anderson x reader #abby x fem!reader #abby x reader #abby tlou #tlou2 #abby anderson fanfic #abby anderson fic #abby anderson angst

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smellslikebot · 2 months

Text

"how do I keep my art from being scraped for AI from now on?"

if you post images online, there's no 100% guaranteed way to prevent this, and you can probably assume that there's no need to remove/edit existing content. you might contest this as a matter of data privacy and workers' rights, but you might also be looking for smaller, more immediate actions to take.

...so I made this list! I can't vouch for the effectiveness of all of these, but I wanted to compile as many options as possible so you can decide what's best for you.

Discouraging data scraping and "opting out"

robots.txt - This is a file placed in a website's home directory to "ask" web crawlers not to access certain parts of a site. If you have your own website, you can edit this yourself, or you can check which crawlers a site disallows by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL. This article has instructions for blocking some bots that scrape data for AI.

HTML metadata - DeviantArt (i know) has proposed the "noai" and "noimageai" meta tags for opting images out of machine learning datasets, while Mojeek proposed "noml". To use all three, you'd put the following in your webpages' headers:

Have I Been Trained? - A tool by Spawning to search for images in the LAION-5B and LAION-400M datasets and opt your images and web domain out of future model training. Spawning claims that Stability AI and Hugging Face have agreed to respect these opt-outs. Try searching for usernames!

Kudurru - A tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks/redirects AI scrapers from your website. I don't know much about how this one works.

ai.txt - Similar to robots.txt. A new type of permissions file for AI training proposed by Spawning.

ArtShield Watermarker - Web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, which may cause an image to be recognized as AI-generated and excluded from data scraping and/or model training. Source available on GitHub. Doesn't seem to have updated/posted on social media since last year.

Image processing... things

these are popular now, but there seems to be some confusion regarding the goal of these tools; these aren't meant to "kill" AI art, and they won't affect existing models. they won't magically guarantee full protection, so you probably shouldn't loudly announce that you're using them to try to bait AI users into responding

Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Devs recommend glazing pictures last. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

WebGlaze - Free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. Request an invite by following their instructions.

Mist - Another adversarial noise tool, by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook.

Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features and "poison" datasets, with the goal of making it inconvenient to use images scraped without consent. The guide recommends that you do not disclose whether your art is nightshaded. Nightshade chooses a tag that's relevant to your image. You should use this word in the image's caption/alt text when you post the image online. This means the alt text will accurately describe what's in the image-- there is no reason to ever write false/mismatched alt text!!! Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

Sanative AI - Web-based "anti-AI watermark"-- maybe comparable to Glaze and Mist. I can't find much about this one except that they won a "Responsible AI Challenge" hosted by Mozilla last year.

Just Add A Regular Watermark - It doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? Try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or human) to remove. You could even try testing your watermark against an AI watermark remover. (the privacy policy claims that they don't keep or otherwise use your images, but use your own judgment)

given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, I'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost, and I'd like to know more about that. in any case, I thought that people writing alt text/image descriptions more often would've been a neat side effect of Nightshade being used, so I hope to see more of that in the future, at least!

#reference #ai art #ai discourse #not sure how else to tag this #long post

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alatismeni-theitsa · 2 months

Note

https://www.tumblr.com/cardassiangoodreads/722229585723424768/im-just-going-to-say-right-now-that-i-dont-think?source=share

Just curious about your thoughts

The post and the tags because this person has blocked me preemptively - and they're lucky cause I wouldn't shat all over them. This person is a USAmerican very removed from Italian culture.

My Answer:

Ooooo coloniser rhetoric in the 21st century! That's a sight for sore eyes! (Which became sore cause they see such takes all the time).

Funny how this person talks about how objects belonging to Greece right after saying that our heritage figures (like our gods and heroes) don't belong to us. If Greek culture is a global culture why can't foreigners keep the objects? Hmmm I wonder…. They still put the "Greek" or "Roman" to characterise the stories but the moment Greeks and Italians speak up, then all of a sudden "the stories akksuually have no culture, they belong to all of us!" 😂😂😂

I wonder if this person understands what the term "heritage" means, because gods and heroes are definitely part of one's heritage and we never stopped preserving the texts that spoke about them, and they are still part of our living culture.

I'm all for listening to the members of the diaspora but when we are at the point when one of them is regurgitating imperialist points, not only there's a big divide with current opinions in Italy, but I also cannot leave such points unanswered. Also, many Italians, like Greeks, are sick of how their myths are treated but this person didn't even check, they just spoke over them. Because they didn't bother to ask people, obviously.

Ancient Greek heroes and gods still mean a lot to us. They always meant. They were born from visions, dreams, and other sacred methods, or oral traditions from our ancestors, reflecting specifically the ancient Greek culture. It's good that foreigners can access them and relate to a degree but divorcing any folk story from its origin is always negative. Especially when this culture is still ongoing.

Our Christianity is revamped ancient Greek religion, I wonder, does this person know that? Our temples have the same parts. We still have home altars, and divinities presiding over domains. Our hagiography is how we used to paint our gods and creatures. We still have almost the same nature creatures. The customs have remained and have persisted, and I won't have someone who clearly ignores this say "They gave the religion up". Ftou.

Also when it comes to our gods and their symbols (and yes btw we call them "our" gods lots of times), we can deduce things from our local tradition and environment, whereas an Anglophone who worships the gods or is interested in them but doesn't know stuff about the country of origin of those gods has no idea about our history, methods and environment. Example: Foreigner refuses to accept that there's a pine cone on Dionysos' thyrsos (although it looks like a pinecone) because "it doesn't make sense" and very excitedly suggests another plant instead. Greek lets them know that it is actually a pine cone not only because it looks like a pinecone but because the pinecone has been used in our winemaking process forever, and Dionysos also presided over this process. Guess Greece and its environment and it's people are still relevant to the religion, and it also turns out that the symbols of the gods derived from the Greek reality. Who knew!

Now onto another point. Op says that the Greek stories became "global culture" because they got shared everywhere. Them being shared is not a bad thing! However just studying them and be taught about them is not culture. By this logic, and since Egyptians "gave their old religion up", ancient Egyptian gods are now MY ancient gods because I can find books about ancient Egypt at my local bookstore. woww 😂 What about this? Almost every Greek knows 100 and 1 nights. We have made it into a play also. SOO... these are our cultural stories now, right? West Asians and Arabs in general shouldn't speak if they ever see us and other nations being ridiculous about the stories, and stereotypes and changing the characters a lot but still claim we are doing great, right? Got it.

The way this post is written it's like Germans and Brits kept the ancient Greek myths alive since ancient years or something. Greeks themselves never stopped preserving their own ancient texts, and they escaped with them in Europe after the fall of Constantinople, so NW Europeans REDISCOVERED them 1500 years later. They had lost interest by then.

Funny they mention different nations that were Hellenized or became Roman territories because people living in these nations are exactly those who don't speak about Greek and Roman culture as "a global culture". It's always North Westerners who start these discussions, I wonder why…..

People from the aforementioned nations already interact healthily with their ancient heritage - which is not Greek or Roman culture but always a local version with Greek or Roman elements, and that's great too. I haven't heard a Pakistani say "Theseus is our hero too!" or a Tunisian say "Zeus is our local ancient father of the gods!" Because they know exactly how the mix happened and what their national identity is. And I'm getting more and more tired of seeing Westerners erase these experiences too, and just make assumptions for other nations.

I swear I mostly see USians getting butthurt about other people getting conquered 2.000 years ago. The nations themselves don't give a shiiit. Guys, I know our antiquities are the only interesting thing about us in your eyes but Please Make An Effort to understand people from ancient cultures and how we don't give a shit about these conquests cause they happened Two Thousand Years Ago, and we had other tragic stuff in the meantime. Thanks

Also, as I said, these conquests are not why Greek myths are popular today. The conquests were so incredibly old that the average person in these countries (Balkans, the Mediterranean, West Asia) - and Greece - had no idea who built the ancient ruins they saw around! Does this person think Greek myths were handed down from Moroccan grandma to Moroccan grandchild from 300 BCE to 2024 continuously or something?

Greek myths are very popular in most parts of the world today because the West (meaning not Greece, especially at the time when we were "cattle") popularized them non-stop the last few centuries. And they did a shitty job, at that. In fact, Greeks abroad have been cringing about this treatment of our myths since the 15th century but, as usual, we were not being heard.

And what does "global culture" even mean?? As if you see any culture to how the US (because OP focuses on the US and the retellings there, from the looks of it) interacts with our stories. As if they care about the meaning of the story. (There are a few notable exceptions ofc but they remain FEW) People with such arguments just want to feel guilt-free when using our myths out of context. That's why Western academic cycles often run in circles about "what the myths mean" while Greeks have told you exactly what they mean.

The US audience is still not free of the coloniser WASP approach. They see our myths STILL as a product of modern White Supremacy instead of an ancient Greek product, and they often condemn the myths and "better" them by completely pushing them into USian lens to the point they don't look or feel like the original myths anymore. (All the above you don't dare to do with cultural stories and figures from nations you want to respect, by the way.) Is this the cultural "exchange" they're talking about?

I'm done hearing in the international spaces that my culture is "boring" because USians have seen horrible adaptation after horrible adaptation. I'm tired of USians making wild assumptions about how "horrible" our gods are because whoever told them the myths didn't give a simple explanation about our ancient societies. (Don't start crap about accessibility, there are very accessible ways to talk to kids, teens, and adults about other cultures and teach them age-appropriate tales) I'm tired of my heritage being commercialized to that degree. All Greeks roll their eyes in USAmerican movies about our culture and we call them Amerikaniés. And don't worry, I'm getting to the real stuff.

How our ancient culture is treated and how we are sidelined has real consequences on our lives abroad AND inside our culture, on how we are perceived, on how our surnames are perceived, on how we "don't look like Greeks", on how our Greek myth retellings don't get published abroad! They speak in front of us about our own words as if they are magical and mythical and strange! The opinions and perspectives of Greeks are not sought abroad, and you are a masterclass on why this happens. We make y'all uncomfortable. You feel better if you forget about us.

Another exhibit: All the hurtful comments of foreigners who centered the HUGE milestone of same-sex marriage in Greece because all they could imagine - while queer Greeks suffered a lot these last few months - was their wedding in Gay Mykonos and Lesbian Lesbos. This was their first reaction. They didn't possibly think that Greeks were seeing that because we are far away and irrelevant, right?

Obviously culture-mixing is not bad but the West didn't mix our culture with theirs. They just took it for entertainment and their popular culture never saw the depth or the meaning of it. OP speaks about how our stories were spread while actively avoiding speaking in depth about the problematic elements of that spread. They recognize to a small degree how Greeks feel about the matter but they dismiss most of our concerns in such a nonchalant way that all that comes to my mind is "privilege".

And speaking of power… Greeks have less systemic power than the countries of the West. We are the US' puppet, are you kidding me?? Our armies get deployed wherever the US wants. Our politicians don't even fart without a telephone from the US. We are the whores of the German, Belgian and French governments. Greeks abroad still face discrimination for their customs and how they look, and how their food smells, and how our religion is and how our hymns sound, and other ridiculous stuff. Our infrastructure is slowly being bought out by Germans and USians to various degrees. There are different scales to exploitation and bigotry, I agree, but that doesn't mean that only the roughest bigotry cases are worth discussing.

"We could also talk about the additional level of exploitation in how imperial powers used Greek mythology as an argument for the "superiority of the West," while at the same time plundering Greece's resources and treating it like it exists only as a tourist site" They are SO close to getting it, and yet their post says otherwise.

Fetishism of a culture makes the members of the actual culture feel alienated and hurt. As a person of Italian ancestry you should know how this specific "global culture" argument has been used to strip Greeks and Italians of any claims, so the "dirty Greeks" can be separated from the "pure WASP" USian upper class of the time who deemed themselves more suitable to engage with the material.

"Greeks spreading their culture through military force all over (eventually) most of Europe" what the hell?? Sorry, guys, (side-eyes the other Greeks) we conquered Romania??? wow!

Plus, this person doesn't know the difference between the Greek colonisation of Italy and Sicily and the recent European colonisation, and - to say it very politely - they should open a book.

By The Way

You can still interact with the Greek culture without having a colonial attitude! Nobody is barring you! I want to make this abundantly clear!

Most importantly, you don't have to make arguments for "global culture" when it's simple to place the myths inside their original context while interacting with them! You just have to read a bit more books that are on the internet and your library for free! Recognising that a foreign culture is not yours, and that you engage with it because it's just popular, doesn't stop anyone from interacting with it. You simply refuse to interact with them at the proper, deeper level, because you always want to center them around yourself. You want to interact with foreign stories just how the colonisers did it. Congrats.

I'm talking about the majority of cases. Of course people in the US can take all sorts of inspiration from foreign myths and adapt them to their reality. And it's a good result when they're being respectful and have studied the stories beforehand.

All we ask is to engage with the material in context so you can understand what our ancestors wanted to express. If your only view of Greek myths has come from other Americans and NW Europeans then you see them through coloniser lens. That's non-negotiable. I had people from other countries recite to me USAmerican viewpoints about the Greek gods, as if they were fact. Cause it's the only exposure that's happening worldwide right now.

You can interact with Greco-Roman myths whether Greece and Rome touched your country or not, we don't care. But please don't get your source from the pop US culture. These people think that it makes sense for nymphs to look like trees (that's an Anglo-Saxon and Celtic nature creature depiction. Ancient Greece was very anthropomorphic). It's not a crime if you change some stuff in a retelling but why willingly ignore the original depictions and what they have to show you for the ancient people who created them?

Pfff... Thank you anon for bringing this trash to me. I needed to - metaphorically - throw something in the trash. It took me a few hours to answer this but well... I do write a lot and this post was full of shit I had to shovel.

#answered #xenoi doing bs #uscentrism #representation #appropriation #greek myth #greek mythology

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butch-reidentified · 4 months

Text

1. What is a woman?

Argument for Using "Cis-Identifying"

And related: A conversation with a "NERF" about radical feminism, gender identity ideology, and what we/I actually believe.

2. Inform yourself on some of the work I've done for trans people before you continue the trend of cowardly hypocrisy.

3. My thread responding to the way much of the tumblr trans community handled my sharing my story of surviving the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting (often by stealing my lived trauma and removing my url) is easily one of the most - if not the most - important posts pertaining to trans discourse I've made to date, and Tumblr won't let me pin it. Of course. So here it is. And a bonus: This lovely ask.

4. Hope for Women (this is a very new project, WIP)

About Me:

I am a butch lesbian, married to a badass gnc (but not butch) radfem lesbian goddess whose misandry surpasses even my own; she does have tumblr but rarely uses it - @psychichologramnightmare is hers. I'm 27/Taurus/May baby, though I'll be real, I've never liked astrology and found my birth chart n whatnot always laughably wildly inaccurate to me (sorry astrology girlies). Former competitive rock climber, still in love with hiking and climbing. Wilderness survivalist. Trained & armed woman, advocate for female-only firearm ownership.

My wife and I run our own business, and bought our first home together at 24 & 25 respectively - it's a lovely 4/3 on a quarter acre where we have 5 mango trees and more, plan to start growing our own food and herbs, foster kittens, and provide free housing (and more) regularly for those in need. We do a LOT of IRL feminist action/work/organizing. I post about some of that work pretty often, but I couldn't possibly post about all of it (even if it were safe to do so). I am basically organizing (mostly offline, but some online as well) full-time now.

Survivor of abuse, CSA + captivity, trafficking in my teens where I was forced into porn as a minor, the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando 2016, and more. I am no longer affected by any of these in any negative psychological manner. I own my past, every moment of it, and wouldn't change a thing I've experienced. What I often tell people is, "I'm not glad it happened; I'm glad I was there."

I got my Bachelor's in Neuroscience/Neuropsych, used to work in a top neuro research lab, and have been a coauthor on a peer-reviewed scientific journal publication. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on POTS, ADHD, some of the relevant epigenetics, and norepinephrine dysregulation. I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos & POTS in 2015, before pretty much anyone had heard of them (including most doctors). My POTS is very well-managed now, but chronic pain from EDS is more of a struggle.

I practice witchcraft as a form of artistic expression. I don't consider myself spiritual as I've had a lifelong inability to "believe," but I am particularly passionate about lesbian-centered/lesbian-exclusive (esp butch & gnc lesbian) witchcraft. I am open to commissions for spell jars/sachets on a purely donation basis (we recently were victims of identity theft and are still struggling to recover, but I'll do them for free happily). This is essentially artistic expression to me, something to express love and sisterhood - why I'm not actually charging or anything and will even pay shipping and materials myself if you'd like one but don't want to/can't donate. To me, it's very similar to commissioning a painting or something of the sort, and I deeply enjoy the process of making them, esp for other women, the love that goes into doing so. See tags: #witchcraft, #brujeria.

Adoptee with complex history. Adoption-critical but not abolitionist - I plan to adopt with my wife in a couple years. I've talked a fair bit about my experiences, adoption trauma, ethical adoption, and more. Check out my tags such as #ethical adoption, #adopted, #adoptee, and so forth (tagged on this post for easy accessibility).

I spent many years surrounded by majority-trans-identifying friends/acquaintances both irl and online, deeply involved in trans spaces & activism, and even identified for a bit & was on T for a while. I am not "uneducated" or unfamiliar with trans-identifying people, their experiences, or gender identity ideology in general. You, like me back then, very probably have been lied to about radfems ("terfs") and what we believe and fight for. I am happy to talk in good faith (provided you do the same) 1 on 1 with anyone who is curious about what we actually believe and what we stand for, what common radfem takes on gender identity ideology & trans identity actually are and why.

I have a history of purely physical sex dysphoria (physical sensation like pain or itching). I got "top surgery" (elective mastectomy) due to this and other reasons: constant painful breast cysts & very large breasts (DDD even when I weighed under 100 lbs). I was not trans-identifying by the time I got this surgery (though I tried to briefly identify as nb/transmasc just bc I felt obligated, but hated it). I have never wanted to be a man socially and genuinely hated the very thought. I came out the womb feminist, got in trouble throughout primary school for fighting boys who tried to pull sexist bullshit, always lowkey believed in female superiority (I mean just look at our biology, lifespans, pain tolerance, the things we've done throughout history despite violent patriarchal oppression...). I spent years preparing myself. I read from & spoke to women who regretted this surgery, challenged myself at every turn, dove deep into my mind and thought processes, tried alternative treatment attempts, worked with a non-affirming therapist, made sure my past traumas were fully healed, and waited until I was in my mid-twenties so my brain was more or less fully matured. I have no regrets about it. I still have some (still purely physical sensation) dysphoria ("phantom male genitals" type of thing) at times, but have come to manage this very well. More on this here.

Formally assessed psychopath & participant in research by leading psychopathy experts. Check out this post and my #psychopathy tag (tagged on this post for easy accessibility) to find out everything you think you know about us is wrong 💕

Note: When it comes to politics, I strive to discuss exclusively that about which I am *uniquely knowledgeable* - by which I mean, essentially, that I (believe I) have something to contribute that is unlikely to be found on every other blog. I do not and will not make posts or reblog posts about topics I do not feel this way about. You are not entitled to know my views on every hot-button issue, and I have no intention of speaking on that which I know little about, or that I don't know enough about (through study or personal experiences) to contribute something you can't get a thousand other places.

Tag Guide (WIP):

#mine -> original posts, including ask responses

#ask -> ask responses only

#anon hate, #anon love -> should be self-explanatory. anon love does include some non-anon love for simplicity.

#catposting, #dogposting, #petposting -> images of cats, dogs, and both, respectively (not always my own)

#Wilder wives -> posts pertaining to me & my wife (last name Wilder)

#mvawg, #mvaw, #male violence -> male violence against women/girls

#ethical adoption -> my takes as an adoptee on the issues within the adoption industry & how adoption can be done ethically

#what we believe -> fairly new tag for posts trying to educate on what radfeminism is actually about/damage control for disinformation & misinformation about it

#trans violence -> violence committed by trans-identifying people, including threats of and graphic violent fantasies (primarily misogynistic ones)

#trans misogyny, #trans lesbophobia, #woke misogyny, #woke homophobia, #woke lesbophobia, etc. -> what it says on the tin

#mine #pinned #hope for Women #ethical adoption #adoptee #adopted #ntsd #neurological type sex dysphoria #sex dysphoria #witchcraft #brujeria #tra receipts #trans violence #male violence #mvawg #trans misogyny #pinned post #about me #what we believe

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jerich0two · 2 months

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Also, while I'm at it, here's a belated

Intro Post

because I've been more active on Tumblr than I thought I would be (which is always the way!)

(Who-Am-I Stuff)

I'm Jericho, but feel free to shorten that to Jeri. Born 2006, baby (formatted so I don't have to update this post every year with a new number). Any pronouns are fine by me!

I'm aromantic and asexual (all the way; turned up to 11; the whole 9 yards; etc., etc. No gray/demi here, so far as I know!). Wouldn't normally consider it relevant, but I've posted a fair bit of aroace-related content, so I feel like it's worth mentioning just to be clear!

(What-I-Do Stuff)

I'm not entirely sure what I plan to do with this blog yet (or how long my little streak of activity will last), but for now, I'll probably just post fan art (and likely only fan art, despite self-indulgently drawing my OCs 24/7). Also, reblogs.

(Personally, I don't think I have a consistent art style. You won't catch me using the same brush two weeks in a row! But I hope you like what I make regardless haha)

Hazbin Hotel dragged me into the spotlight very abruptly, but I like other stuff too! Lackadaisy and Spider-Verse in particular. I'm not Hazbin-exclusive! Fab show though.

(If I think of anything else that I ought to put here, I'll edit it in.)

(P.S. I don't consider myself a furry, I just like foxes /lh, and yes, my little sona/mascot fella was in part inspired by Fabian from Zoophobia! ^^ AND (while I'm sure the concept is as old as time) I was inspired to make the little intro drawing after seeing the one @/nouverx made! Remove the slash if you'd like to check him out, I don't want to bother anyone by tagging them ^^")

#intro post #jeri's tag for other stuff

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helioselene · 1 year

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HOW TO: WRITEBLR;

so youve migrated from writing twt to writeblr -> what now?

the following is my masterpost on the ins and outs of navigating the writeblr landscape! while it can be scary to deep-dive into the world of writing on tumblr for the first time, there are a few actions you can take to make it a lot easier to interact and share your writing.

psa: this is neither an extensive nor complete list of writeblr tips! but i hope it can help :)

INTERACTION;

interacting with others is one of the most important aspects of writeblr. im going to be splitting this section into a number of sub-sections because there are several topics relevant to creating a system of communication with other writers on here.

likes and reblogs; unlike twitter or other social media sites, likes do not hold the same weight on tumblr. as well as liking a post, the most important step you can take is to REBLOG. reblogging will share a post to your blog and thus your feed. in doing this, your followers and anyone who checks out your blog are going to see the post, rather than if you just like or comment. reblogging allows more people to interact with a post. content creators (including writers) can be motivated to continue posting when their posts are reblogged because it shows there are enough people interested in their works. the same goes for you! the more you reblog other people's works, the more likely your own posts will be reblogged, thus gaining more traction for all your hard-earned efforts.

taglists; you might be asking: what is a taglist? a taglist is usually featured at the bottom of your post when you share your writing. it includes people who have shown interest in your works - all you do is simply @ them. it means that people who are keen won't miss out on seeing the things you post about your wips! it is essentially an opt-in type deal, where people can choose to be added or removed from being notified about updates, excerpts, and the like.

don't abuse your taglist. don't tag them for every little thing you post about your wips - try to keep it to major posts like excerpts or new art, etc.

**** A HANDY HINT: writeblr etiquette states that you should never just add people to your taglist. only add them if they specifically ask.

tumblr tagging system; the tumblr tagging system is going to be your best friend as a writer. tags allow you to manage your posts + can act as a navigation system for your blog.

when tagging, make sure to not replace characters if it's for a trigger warning. 'assault', for example, should never be replaced with '@ssault'.

if posting an excerpt from your wip, i would suggest the following tags as the bare minimum: 'WIP NAME', 'WIP NAME EXCERPT'. if you're posting it as part of an event, you may also wish to include 'EVENT NAME'. you can also have a specific tag for things your friends write, for resources you may find helpful, etc. the possibilities are endless. a hint: the first five tags are the only tracked tags. the most important tags you want to add should be your FIRST FIVE TAGS on a post. furthermore, only the first twenty will show up in the search function.

tags are a good way for you to interact with other writers! when you reblog a post, OP will be able to read your tags where you can add how much you loved their work, etc.

POST FORMATTING;

do; - add trigger warnings to your posts if they contain sensitive topics. - add a plot, characters, etc. other writeblrs want context for your wip beyond just a number of dot points about tropes. - put your post under a 'read more' if it is a long post. - tag any nsfw content. - add a transcript of any photos/images under a 'read more'.

don't; - use any sort of fonts beyond the regular when writing a general post. using the 'chat' font, for example, reduces accessibility to your posts and makes it difficult for people to read. - just post dot points of your wip. - plagiarise. - use other people's posts as a place to self promote.

PINTEREST IS NOT AN ART SOURCE;

this is one of the biggest differences between tumblr and other social media sites: pinterest is. not. an. art. source. the truth is that people aren't going to care if you post a moodboard with nothing beyond a few random photos of a castle and a knife, etc. sure, they may look pretty, but don't do it for a number of reasons.

first, you should always post art directly from a credited source (e.g. unsplash or picrew).

second, it doesn't show enough about your wip! people want context! not just random photos!

thirdly, most photos or art on pinterest do not CREDIT their sources. this is theft and this is bad. which leads me onto the next topic.

CREDIT YOUR ARTISTS;

CREDIT ALL ARTISTS. if you use any sort of artwork, i swear to all things holy, give credit to the ORIGINAL sources. pinterest, as mentioned, is not an art source. most artwork on that site is stolen or posted without credit, which, funnily enough, is a form of theft. if you're going to post any form of photo or art, please give credit. it doesn't matter what form it takes; link to the original artist or photographer in a way that is not hidden.

MOODBOARDS AND GRAPHICS, OH MY;

one sad truth about being on tumblr, as with a lot of social media sites, is that your posts will gain a lot more interaction if you use some form of graphic or photo along with your writing. graphic making may seem daunting but it doesn't have to be! they don't have to be complicated or anything more than a few photos - as long as they have relevance to your wip. moodboards are not necessarily a bad form to take when making graphics for your posts. however, if it just features a random collection of photos that tell your audience nothing about your work, they're not going to care. writeblr is all about actually imparting information about your wips, rather than just vibes. ****as mentioned, any form of artwork or photography needs to be credited to the original source. however, etiquette is also to not repost art without express permission from the artist. if you don't have permission to use someone's art, DO NOT put it in your moodboard or graphic.

BLOG AND BLOG THEMES;

tumblr is a really great site for expressing yourself through your blog, especially if you use custom themes! if (like me) you're terrible at javascript and any form of http coding, there are a number of blogs you can search for to find custom made themes that are easily adaptable for your needs.

but why use a theme beyond expression?

one of the best aspects of using themes is the navigation aspect. most writeblrs have some form of navigation page (beyond just simply using the tumblr tagging system) to allow their audience to find information about their wips, writing resources, and the like! it makes going through your blog easier for both you and others.

also: make sure to include information about yourself on the blog (but of course, not to the point of doxxing yourself). most tumblr users, especially those on writeblr, will think you're most likely a bot if you dont include at least some things about yourself. the most common things to add are name, age and pronouns! also a dni can be used.

WRITING TIPS AND TRICKS;

titling your wips by @crtalley

plot structure by @nouveauweird

how to blurb by @yvesdot

notion templates for writers by @atelierwriting

the tropes guide by yours truly

so you're missing a plot by @seasteading

novel length by @serpentarii

thank you to everyone who helped me in writing this post! love you all <3

#writing resources #writing advice #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing #writeblr community #writers #wtwcommunity

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5ummit · 6 months

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Permanent Blacklists for AO3

Would you like to permanently remove fics with your squicks, triggers, and dislikes from all AO3 searches by default so that you never have to think about or encounter them again? Well now you can!

The ability to do this has actually been around for a little while but it relies on some new CSS functionality that wasn't supported on all major browsers until fairly recently (though you may still have to enable it manually on some). I'm not going to explain how this method works or how to code AO3 skins in general, as I've only dabbled in it a little and there are already some very good tutorials out there. If you want all of the details, check out these guides:

Skins and Archive Interface FAQ – The official skins guide created by AO3. Lots of good information but might be overwhelming and confusing for a beginner.

A Non-Extensive Guide on How to Start Creating a Skin for AO3 by ao3skin – Some good, fairly easy to understand, beginner info on CSS and specifically how it applies to AO3 skins.

Permablocking Specific Tags - Site Skin by Eli0t – Everything you need to know to create permablock lists. If your blacklist doesn't seem to be working as expected, check this for troubleshooting tips.

What I can offer though are some handy pre-made blacklists that you can use as-is or as a starting point to create your own so that you don't have to go to the trouble of figuring out how any of this works or hunting down relevant tags. Just copy the code, open AO3, go to My Preferences > Skins > Create Site Skin, paste it in the box, title it, and click Submit!

Note: The following lists are very specific to me and my own personal tastes. Absolutely no judgement if you love any of the things that I choose to blacklist. You do you. I just happen to like my fics fucked up and relatively canonical.

★ No Reader Fic – Hides all self-insert and reader fic.

★ No Alternate Universes – Hides anything tagged with the most common AU tags. There are so many incredibly specific AUs there's no way to list all of them and AU tagging is also extremely inconsistent from fic to fic so this blacklist may only catch 80% of AUs, but that's better than nothing. You could always exclude the entire alternate universe tag, rather than trying to list specific ones, but unfortunately canon divergence and other less extreme AUs would get caught in the crossfire, which is not worth it for me.

★ No Fluff – Hides anything tagged with the most common fluff and romance tags. I specifically left out "fluff and angst" though because sometimes that's used for things that are mostly angst with only a bit of fluff and I do love angst.

★ Bonus: No Dead Dove – This list is not mine (for obvious reasons) but I know some people may find it useful. Hides anything with the main archive warnings and many common problematic, taboo, or controversial tags. Some of these I wouldn't even classify as dead dove, they're literally just kinks, so I'd suggest reviewing the list carefully and removing any that don't apply to you.

Additional Notes:

This system doesn't work exactly the same as AO3's exclusion filters because you can't use top-level wrangled tags to block all subtags. It only blocks exact matches.

Once the blacklist is implemented you'll see no indication that anything was blocked (except for fewer fics listed on each search page); the entire blurb will be hidden. The tags and fic counts listed in the filter bar will remain unchanged. If you want more advanced features like whitelisting or adding something to indicate when a fic was removed, check out the permablocking guide by Eli0t.

Here's a link with info on which browsers currently support the new "has()" element, which this blacklist system relies on. As of right now Firefox for desktop still has to be manually enabled (for instructions see the section on flag enabling in the permablocking guide). Firefox for iOS isn't listed on this website but it seems to work fine for me.

There are other browser-specific extensions that let you permablock tags, such as this one and this one, that may be more a little more user friendly, but I've never tried them so I can't vouch for them and they may not work consistently between different devices. The good thing about doing blacklists via skins is that, after setting it up once, it should work automatically on pretty much any device (as long as you're logged in to your AO3 account).

#I'm so stoked about this feature #it's a GAME CHANGER #I put a lot of effort into creating my blacklists #I couldn't not share them and hopefully make someone's life easier now that I've already done all the work #assuming anyone shares my preferences #ao3 #ao3 skins #ao3 help #tutorial #wendy's help desk

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foldingfittedsheets · 4 months

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re: Jim Butcher post and tags — Ye e e eah h h… I wanted to think it was just the character and that the narrative didn’t support it, because there were just enough times that other characters called the main character out on his b.s. that I thought: maybe? maybe there’s some self awareness?

Then a few things happened:

I stumbled across this post (and some related discussions that are forever lost to Xitter by this point):

luciazephyr dreamwidth 548703 (in case it removes the link due to anonymity)

I ended up interacting with Butcher on social media due to some closely overlapping/intersecting social circles (long story).

anyway, after watching him only interact with a couple mutual friends whenever they posted anything social justice related, and only to whitesplain and mansplain and cissplain (etc) all over the place, repeatedly, despite very gentle and patient attempts at education and calling in…

……yeah I think the only reason the narrative seemed at times to not entirely support the misogyny was due to the (rather cool in many cases) women in his life* possibly giving feedback, and maybe due to sensitivity readers, rather than because of any awareness the author has internalized. *At the time. I don’t know how many of those women are still in his life at this point, but that’s unrelated gossip/speculation.

(I really hope this only sends once, because it’s given me 2 error messages now)

Yeah, I know that for my male friend recommending the books to me the in text call outs definitely made him be like, “See? The author is aware!” So I had to write a fuckin essay of bullet points to get him to understand and acknowledge the textual misogyny that was just baked in. The nail in the coffin is Murphy the “straight” woman checking out a naked werewolf lady and having no reaction to a jacked naked dude.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve read them but I remember literally every woman is introduced on a fuckability scale- including his kids teenage daughter. There’s no plot relevant older women or anyone who’s not bangable hanging around the narrative. Lots of older dudes and mentors as long as they’re male.

He digs into native shit that tribes have asked white authors to never touch, turns a Jewish man into a crusader for Christ, and just generally doesn’t listen if any fans took issue with portrayals.

The bummer is that he is a skilled writer in terms of plot and pacing which is why I read several of them teeth gritted hoping things would improve.

When they didn’t I found the Harrietta Lee books which are a fun lesbian spoof on the Dresden Files that I quite enjoyed, and of course October Daye.

#ask ffs

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evajellion · 5 months

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SMRPG AU where Smithy wins

OKAY HERE IT GOES-

So hypothetically, let's say Mario, Peach and Bowser just completely vanish after Exor crashes down. Either they straight up died or got isekai'd to Smithy's realm by accident, idk I will let the rest of you figure it out.

Years and years pass, Geno can't really get the Star Pieces without Mario and co. so… Smithy just, straight up takes over Star Road and lets his minions do whatever.

Here's what we thought up-

Smithy: Bowser's Castle was nice, but after learning what the Star Pieces did, Smithy went directly to the source and took over Star Road himself as its new overlord. He built an entire factory around it and over the years, is now known as "he who grants wishes".

Of course, much like the main villain in "Wish" (terrible movie btw), Smithy only grants wishes that he likes. He ignores wishes that are selfless or relevant to one's family, and only grants stuff relative to wealth, gain, or wanting to win.

It's less out of malice and more out of ignorance, really. He doesn't see any value in wanting things that have no material value or glory.

Mack/Claymorton: After ambushing the castle, Mack became the new ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, but he said the name was stupid and changed it to the Claymore Kingdom.

There are, a lot of parties, almost every week. He's a complete tyrant who threatens and torments the Toads to the point where the Chancellor actually wishes Bowser would come back. If he gets bored? He decides to wage war on another kingdom "for fun".

He's getting an ego about it too, which some joke is just "him compensating for his size".

Bowyer: Honestly no one has any clue what Bowyer does. Some treat him like an actual forest cryptid that haunts the maze because he's been in there so long. People who enter the forest now never come back.

Bowyer doesn't understand the concept of killing anyone really, so it's not like forest intruders are dead. He just thinks it's fun to play "freeze tag but you're frozen for good" with anyone who comes by. Essentially, it's all a hunting game to him.

He probably views all his immobile visitors as trophies more than anything else.

Yaridovich/Speardovich: Eventually, he succeeds in duping someone to fight Jonathan and takes the Star Piece for himself. Smithy grants him his promotion and he is made mayor of Seaside Town, and he is a captain of his own crew of Drill Bits.

Jonathan is none too happy about this and makes beef with Yaridovich every day over what he had done. Jonathan prides himself on being a good fighter, but unfortunately, Yaridovich fights dirty.

Eventially, Yaridovich made a habit out of pirating other incoming ships himself. He wonders if doing this will get more promotion from Smithy, but… Smithy seems to have been ignoring him.

Axem Rangers: After beating up the Czar Dragon, Smithy suggests they take care of Nimbus Land since it's "uncomfortably close for his liking". They immediately make themselves known by exposing Valentina's lies and kicking her out, inadvertently making them heroes.

Axem Red and Pink take a lot of pride in removing Valentina and being adored by residents of Nimbus Land, but Black isn't happy with it at all and wants to go back to causing chaos. Green is neutral about the whole thing.

Axem Yellow meanwhile, managed to turn Dodo to their side simply by calling the large bird a "good boy" and giving him legumes as a treat.

Boomer: He's the shogun of Bowser's Castle, but nothing more. He guards Exor as he always did, and commands Smithy's Army, striking down anyone who dare cross his lord.

However, he isn't exactly happy with his position. He knows not to question Smithy, so he just… remains quiet about it. At the very least, he's humored by Axem Red's new heroic personality.

But he also fears if Red will turn on Smithy since he's so bent on appearing as "hero" for Nimbus Land. Boomer dad moments. :')

Exor & Count Down: Stationary. Exor is happy but Count Down seems bitter he cannot do more, he's kind of stranded and stir crazy.

Cloaker & Domino: They moved out of Smithy's dimension (much to Count Down's further frustration/loneliness) and settled into Marrymore for… obvious reasons.

Smithy doesn't mind so long as they can distribute. Domino quickly took advantage by becoming the most well-known medicine/potion seller in the land, kinda like Fairy Godmother. Excuses to depict Domino in sexy business glasses for my one friend who thirsts for him lmao.

Factory Chief: A second factory was built up in Star Road, that Smithy had taken charge of, so the Chief is now fully in charge of the old one inside of Exor! He's pretty happy about it.

The Director's son (because he has one for some reason?) is also working in the new factory while his father, the Clerk, and the Manager remain in the old one with the Chief. They all seem very happy, but the Director's son wonders if what Smithy is doing is right…

Gunyolk: Not used to having brothers. He was created by the Chief exclusively, and is now being mass produced, but… he liked it when it was only him and "papa".

Hypnosis Priest: She resides in Star Hill, discarding of wishes that Smithy tossed out. Essentially, she turned the entirety of the Mushroom Kingdom into a cult that worships Smithy as their Star Road overlord, with her as the leader of it.

And that's all I got, hi, feel free to throw anymore suggestions!!! :D

#super mario rpg #smrpg #smithy gang #yaridovich #bowyer #claymorton #I will NOT be turning this into a fic #………… unless I am paid /j

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mamamittens · 1 year

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Oh, Sweet Child of Mine (Pt. 11)

Platonic Whitebeard Crew & Reader-Insert

Main|First|Previous

Warnings: Yandere behavior (somehow I think I managed to loop Teach into it now too, so congrats, you've charmed a bastard man). If you find yandere content uncomfortable, please do block the tag 'oh sweet child of mine' as well as any relevant variations to 'one piece yandere'.

Do not tolerate this behavior in real life.

Stay safe and have fun!

If my mental math is correct, I should finish this in 4~ish more chapters. So we're nearing the end!

Also, surprisingly sympathetic take on Teach's backstory, didn't know I had it in me. This is assuming the fan theory that he's from a winter island and was with Whitebeard since he was young, btw.

Word Count: 2,099

Teach grinned as his new crew set the sails to leave the small island he’d recruited them from. Dawn was just breaking and he wanted to make good time—just in case he already had tails from his old crew. He wasn’t entirely sure how much of a head start he had given the rush he was in to ensure Thatch didn’t eat the fruit. Decades looking for it and he nearly lost his chance again.

He adjusted your limp body under his arm for a moment, enjoying the palpable feeling of his power increasing from the contact. The shadows seemed to writhe hungrily at his senses, eagerly awaiting his command in a way they simply didn’t without you. You… well, you were a bit of last minute surprise as well. Sure, in theory, he could just take your fruit but he wasn’t confident it would work the same way. And he couldn’t risk wasting it if it didn’t. Besides, you’re the perfect bait.

He has the power. He has the plan. Now he just needs the reputation to become the Pirate King. And what better way than taking down his old crew one at a time? Sowing chaos to fracture them until Oyaji is too weak to stand against him and properly claim rise to his lofty goals as ‘Blackbeard’. Killing Thatch would certainly get someone on his ass, though he was torn between commanders as to who it could be. Izo was sore enough about losing old friends, and Marco may feel responsible as first mate. But Ace—well, he was a spitfire at the best of times and his old commander to boot.

Taking you was sort of like kicking the hornet’s nest. While also becoming even more powerful in a single move. How could he not do it?

The minor issue of ensuring you never have a chance of squirming away was easily solved with a bit of chain. It’s not like you were particularly strong, though you were smart enough to not do anything too risky—which he appreciated really. Though he’d prefer you sticking around willingly if only to not have to carry you every time you fell asleep.

Teach chuckled a little to himself as he returned to his newly minted quarters. You were wearing down pretty fast the longer he was ‘on the run’. No real chance to properly rest or recuperate from what must be a stressful situation—for you at least. If he neglected to feed you every now and then it only helped ensure you were weaker than before. Who knows, he might not even need the chain if this kept up.

Teach set you down on the sparse bed, unhooking his end of the chain to secure it to the latch on the wall. It wasn’t like he was going to use the bed himself. He paused a moment to watch as you curled up against the wall, completely dead to the world.

Heh. Cute.

He didn’t get why Oyaji recruited the way he did. Pretending to be a big family when they were actually just a band of pirates taking what they wanted. Too soft for a man with the strength to do anything he desired. Too many vulnerabilities. But every so often he thought he understood it… a little. Late night parties with lighthearted competition. Long running arguments about inane subject that both parties are a little too invested in to be serious.

Teach reached down and removed your glasses, examining the cracked lens. Bending it in the light to watch it refract as he considered your position. His prisoner and, technically, first mate. Though he wouldn’t be having you fight—not that he’d trust you to fight for him right now. He had the absolute upper hand over you. Chose to stay his hand. Because you had use to him.

He heard you shudder a little and paused, setting the thick glasses down. You were cold—weak body sensitive to the relative chill in the room. Unbidden, he remembered long, cold nights on his home island in the snow. Powerless and unsure if he’d survive to see daylight again.

Until Oyaji found him. A small, frail part of his chest ached at the memory. The sheer relief that he was safe now. His next meal guaranteed at no cost. No more cold, lonely nights. Even now, he calls him that. Oyaji. Despite fully planning to kill him. The idea didn’t conflict in his head. It was simply the way of things. Old replaced by the new. What higher respect could he pay his father-figure than personally ensuring his demise to further his own prospects? To step out of the shadows and get rid of one of the few people alive that can remember the sad, pathetic child in the snow?

Perhaps this strange sense of sentiment was his own, personal weakness. Crafted by a man too weak of heart to truly conquer the seas.

Teach shrugged off his coat, laying it over you gently. Chuckling when you stopped trembling.

He was a pirate. He could indulge in whatever vice he wanted… though perhaps cautiously. It wouldn’t do to deride Oyaji for something he, himself, was guilty of in excess.

He didn’t get why Marco took you. Why Oyaji agreed to take you in. Well, aside from your devil fruit. But the soft glove approach smacked of weakness given your surprisingly stubborn refusal.

But the slow, rolling satisfaction that settled in his chest knowing that he made sure you weren’t cold… he thought he could understand Oyaji a little better now. Why he kept picking up strays everywhere he went so indulgently in the same way he’d sneak sips of good booze when the nurses weren’t looking.

It was a strange, frail sort of pride to partake in. Pride at providing. But Teach learned at Oyaji’s knee to take enjoyment from the little things in life.

Besides, it wasn’t like you could sell him out or take advantage of what scraps he gave you. As long as you behaved, he supposed there was no problem in these small gestures of kindness. So long as you never forgot your place, that is.

--*--

Luffy laughed, loudly and with glee as his older brother teased his crew. He was so proud of the people he’d recruited so far and wanted Ace to see what he did. Those bright, beautiful sparks that drew Luffy like a moth to flame. The spark that Ace himself had since they were children that only grew since they parted. Ace was still hurt, a little broken inside, but it had healed since they last met.

“Why are you here, anyhow?” Nami asked, “I thought Whitebeard mostly stuck to the New World?” Ever inquisitive, Luffy’s smile widened at how clever his navigator was. Ace scowled, tipping his head towards the man he brought with him.

Pineapple. Well, Ace called him ‘Marco’ but obviously Pineapple was better. Tall and blond with bright blue eyes—achingly reminding him of Sabo but different enough that Luffy could barely see the ghost of his other brother.

“We’re tracking down a traitor. He tried to kill one of our own and kidnapped another.” Pineapple scowled with dark eyes. Luffy’s crew was shocked—giving Luffy the impression that this was an even bigger deal than he first thought.

“A nakama-killer? Who?” Ussop asked breathlessly, “What kind of monster would make it out from a Yonko ship after that?!”

“Teach.” Ace hissed in a way that reminded Luffy of the few times he said Bluejam or Celestial Dragon. Fire flickering between his teeth. “He goes by ‘Blackbeard’ now. Promise me if you run into him you won’t fight him, Lu. He nearly killed Thatch. You’re not strong enough to fight him yet.”

Luffy made a noise of surprise, both at Ace’s words and the name.

“Hey, didn’t we already run into him?” Zoro asked, glancing at Luffy for confirmation. Luffy remembered the weird pirate well. Poor taste in food and rude as hell.

“Yeah, we did actually. Weird guy with a weird laugh. With the tired four-eyes.” The two looked at Luffy sharply. “I almost got in a fight with him but he weirded me out.”

“Tired four eyes?” Ace asked with a pissed off expression. Luffy felt a small twinge of guilt for not helping the stranger at the time, but something inside him whispered ‘not yet’.

“Yeah. They were connected with a chain. Thought he had a slave or something but Nami said it wasn’t quite right.” Luffy explained. Nami nodded, tensing slightly as the two looked at her for more answers.

“Well, usually slaves just have the collar. And he didn’t make any demands or order them around. They just had to… follow him. He even yanked them by accident and apologized. Most slave owners don’t bother with that.” Nami huffed.

Luffy pouted. They looked promising. He even felt… weird when they were around. Like he was stronger somehow. His heart like a steel drum in his chest. Like he felt when he was around his nakama. But they lacked a… spark. Like they lost it and Luffy didn’t know how to give it back. Almost tried anyway but his crew stopped him.

He hoped that next time they found that spark again. He’d love to have them on his crew.

Ace nodded.

“We’re getting close, at least. Hopefully we’ll catch up to them soon. Who knows, we might be able to introduce you guys properly!” Ace grinned, the edges a little sharp like he was suggesting dine-in-dashing when they were kids and hunting crocodiles was too much of a hassle. Luffy grinned.

“I wanna meet them again! Hey! Hey! Ace, do you think they’d join my crew?” Luffy cackled when Pineapple and Ace jolted at the question. Ace narrowed his eyes, clicking his tongue with a thin smile.

“Oi! Don’t go stealing from my crew, you little shit!” Ace hooked his arm around Luffy’s neck stretching it out as he gave Luffy a noogie through his hat.

Luffy squirmed, crying out at the unfairness.

“Ack! Aaaaccee~! They look cool. Though really tired! I promise to take good care of them! Ace!” Luffy complained. Arms failing uselessly as Ace kept him pinned in place. “Ace!”

Luffy’s crew watched with wide eyes as Pineapple smirked from his spot against the wall.

Okay, that felt a little like Sabo.

--*--

You looked out at the growing island, Banaro, chain wrapped around your waist so it wouldn’t drag across the deck. You knew that Teach would come over shortly to reattach it to his bracelet. For the past couple of months, he’d given you relative freedom while at sea and restricting your movement once they got close enough to an island. For the most part, you’d been avoiding the crew, which Teach encouraged.

Probably to make sure you didn’t get any outside help, not that you felt confident you would have received any if you’d asked.

The closest chances to escape you’ve noticed was the revolutionary early into your capture with Teach and Straw Hat—surprisingly. Not that you think Teach knew that.

Though the occasional spotting of a sea king was also promising, Teach had them firmly sail in whatever direction was away from potential pods. Kill joy.

Anyway, it wasn’t that Straw Hat was stronger than Teach, he was definitely a bit too green to manage it given Teach’s decades at sea.

But… that devil fruit of his.

It called out to you. Boundless as the horizon. A drumbeat that vibrated your soul. A call to… something. Something just out of your reach. And you had the sense that if you had only known what that ‘something’ was, Straw Hat would have thrown hands the minute he saw you.

The pirate seemingly breathing in sync with his fruit, only held back by how weak he was currently. Which was a strange thing to sense. Usually fruits were just not utilized well. They didn’t typically hold such obvious power that the user simply was unable to access it at that time.

It felt elastic. Snappy and twisting in a way that you found delightful. Made you want to laugh without even hearing what he was saying.

You smiled a little. Strangely optimistic for the first time in a long time.

Pirate King, huh?

… Somehow, you felt as though Straw Hat Luffy would shake the world. And despite being a ex-marine, you looked forward to it.

Hopefully, you’d be in a position to see it for yourself.

#one piece yandere #yandere whitebeard crew #platonic yandere #reader insert #oh sweet child of mine #reader making everyone yandere istg #really got that rizz #not always a good thing tho #yandere blackbeard #yandere ace #yandere marco

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