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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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The Geico STD story is the new McDonald's Hot Coffee story

Here’s a media literacy rule of thumb: any time you hear about how the courts have done something outrageous and absurd to some poor, long-suffering, gigantic, wildly profitable corporation…dig deeper. The canonical example is the “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Lawsuit” (aka Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants). You know, that time that an old lady got burned by her McDonald’s coffee and then sued for for $2.7 million?! Most people heard that story — and they heard it for a reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants

The Hot Coffee story was propaganda — specifically, it was propaganda for the idea that corporations should be shielded from legal liability when they maim or even kill the public through gross negligence. The real Hot Coffee story is a lot more complicated than the “lady gets millions because her coffee was too hot” tale that circulated widely.

One of the best explorations of the Hot Coffee story is Adam Conover’s excellent “Adam Ruins The Hot Coffee Story” video from 2016. In that episode, Conover explains what really happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E

The coffee that burned Stella Liebeck in New Mexico in 1994 was served at 190°F. It caused third-degree burns that permanently disfigured Liebeck, required multiple skin grafts, and disabled her for two years. The surgery was so drastic that Liebeck lost 20% of her body-weight while she was recovering.

McDonald’s had a history of serving coffee that was dangerously hot. It had received 700 complaints about the matter, and had had to settle numerous claims from people who were horribly burned by its coffee. However, it declined to settle with Liebeck, who initially sought $20k to cover her medical expenses.

Denied a settlement, Liebeck sued. The jury did award $2.7m, but the judge clawed it back to $640k. Liebeck likely didn’t get that amount — she and McDonald’s reached a confidential settlement under threat of McDonald’s appealing.

So, the real story isn’t: “Old lady spills coffee and gets millions.”

It’s “McDonald’s ignores hundreds of dangerous incidents for years, then maims a customer for life and refuses to pay her medical bills or change its practices to avoid future incidents. A judge says she’s due a fraction of the jury award, but she doesn’t get it because McDonald’s uses its massive litigation war-chest to force her into a confidential settlement.”

So why did you hear so much about this story? And why was the moral of the story inevitably about how bloodsucking lawyers are victimizing poor l’il multinational corporations like Mickey Dees?

It was propaganda. The “bloodsucking lawyers preying on innocent corporations” story is a creation of the business lobby, which has, for decades, argued that it should be immune to legal consequences when it harms or kills the public. The cause of “tort reform” is, in actuality, a corporate charter of impunity.

It worked. Over the past four decades, corporations have steadily whittled away the public’s right to civil justice, no matter how egregiously a corporation behaves. The main mechanism for this was the expansion of binding arbitration, a 1920s-era law that initially allowed big companies to agree to have their contractual disputes worked out by a mediator, rather than going to court.

Since the 1980s, a series of Supreme Court decisions have steadily expanded binding arbitration, allowing corporations to add “arbitration waivers” to their terms of service, employment contracts and other non-negotiated boilerplates. Today, the mere act of removing some shrinkwrap or clicking a link can result in the permanent loss of your right to sue, no matter how badly a company treats you.

Instead, your grievances will be heard by a corporate arbitrator, a pretend judge who is paid by the company that wronged you. Your case must be heard in isolation, and not part of a class action. The proceedings are secret, and even if you win, you don’t set a precedent for others who are similarly wronged. It’s “a justice system just for corporations.”

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations

American corporations pushed the expansion of binding arbitration waivers as a get-out-of-court-free card, and for many years, it worked. Remember when Wells Fargo forged millions of its customers’ signatures to fraudulently open high-fee accounts in their names? The company argued that because the forged agreements included arbitration waivers, those customers couldn’t sue over the fraud:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ceo-of-wells-fargo-might-be-in-big-big-trouble/

Everybody got in on the act. If you’re a Pokemon Go player, you’re stuck in binding arbitration:

https://consumerist.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-strips-users-of-their-legal-rights-heres-how-to-opt-out/

Same with Airbnb customers:

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2908/terms-of-service

Unsurprisingly, Trump loved binding arbitration. One of his first acts as president was to strip nursing home residents of the right to sue, which was great news for the nursing homes that murdered patients by abandoning them to covid:

https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/trump-administration-will-allow-nursing-homes-to-strip-residents-of-legal-rights/

(Older voters love the GOP, but it sure as hell doesn’t love them back.)

Forced arbitration wasn’t just a matter of civil justice — it was also a matter of economics. As Lina Khan and Deepak Gupta showed in their 2016 American Constitution Society paper “Arbitration As Wealth Transfer,” “Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich”:

https://www.acslaw.org/issue_brief/briefs-landing/arbitration-as-wealth-transfer/

But the business leaders who bankrolled the forced arbitration epidemic were — characteristically — overconfident. It turns out that arbitration has weaknesses. It’s possible to do mass arbitration — to automate filing arbitration claims by thousands of corporate victims, which triggers hundreds of millions of dollars in arbitration fees, which the company is on the hook for, win or lose.

Uber was one of the first companies to discover this, when thousands of drivers brought arbitration claims at once. Not only would Uber have to pay for arbitrators in each case, but because arbitration decisions do not constitute precedents, it would have to argue each case, over and over again, even if it won. The company surrendered and paid drivers $146m:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/uber-sues-aaa-block-100-million-fees-politically-motivated-arbitration-2021-09-20/

This spooked Amazon, which amended its terms of service for Alexa to remove binding arbitration:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Law-tech firms like Fairshake created automation systems to enable mass arbitration filings at scale and on a budget:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored

Something wonderful and wild started to happen. The companies that had argued for decades that binding arbitration was, well, binding, began to argue that arbitration waivers were unconstitutional, despite the precedents that they, themselves had bankrolled, at enormous expense.

The poster child of arbitration buyer’s remorse is Intuit, a company that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-prep fees from the poorest Americans by tricking them into fake “Free File” products using dark patterns on its website.

Intuit is now facing arbitration at scale — more than 100,000 claims — and a court has ordered them to hire arbitrators to hear each and every one of them. After all it was Intuit — not its customers — who put the arbitration clauses in its terms of service, claiming that court cases were a bad way to resolve their disputes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored

Which brings me back to McDonald’s, hot coffee, and juicy stories about giant corporations being abused by the courts.

Have you heard about the Geico STD judgment? A woman caught an STD from her then-boyfriend when they had sex in his car. She won a judgment against him for $5.2m. Geico insures his car. A court has ordered Geico to pay that judgment.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jackson-county-woman-says-she-222907031.html

But it’s more complicated than that!

It’s not a court that ordered Geico to pay the judgment — it’s an arbitrator. Geico is one of the companies that forces its customers into arbitration. Why would an insurance company want arbitrators to hear cases about its refusal to pay claims, rather than judges?

I mean, duh. Insurance companies have a long, dishonorable tradition of taking your premiums every month, then stranding you when you actually experience an “insured event,” arguing that the obscure, obfuscating language in their contract doesn’t cover your losses.

The real Geico STD story is this: Geico demanded that the case be heard by its arbitrator, who ruled against Geico, because Geico’s insurance terms did cover this event. Now, Geico is claiming that the arbitration it insisted upon “violates the company’s due process rights” and that its own arbitration agreement is unenforceable.

The case that’s being reported on isn’t about the $5.2m award for the STD. That happened way back in 2021. The case that’s in the news this week is a court telling Geico that when it forces its customers into arbitration, it has to abide by the arbitrator’s decision, even in those rare instances in which the arbitrator finds against the company who pays their fees.

But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. All this stuff about arbitration is buried way down in the story. The headline is: $5.2m judgment for a venereal disease!

This is McDonald’s Hot Coffee 2.0. Someone pitched this story, and the pitch emphasized the poor, downtrodden corporation (Geico is owned by Warren Buffet and has $32b in assets) — not the fact that Geico is reaping what it sowed. The real story here is: “Corporation seeks to replace civil justice system with a kangaroo court, and gets kicked by its own kangaroo.”

Incidentally, if you miss Adam Conover’s “Adam Ruins Everything” and you have a Netflix password, check out “The G-Word,” his incredible new show about regulatory competence and the deadly threats it holds at bay:

https://www.netflix.com/title/81037116

[Image ID: The Adam Ruins Everything title card for 'The Hot Coffee Case.' It is a split panel with Adam Conover on the left at a judge's bench, banging a gavel, and a confused Hamburgler on the right, in the witness box. They are separated by the center of the 'M' in the McDonald's 'Golden Arches' logo. Superimposed over this separator is the Geico lizard.]

#pluralistic

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tanadrin · 5 months

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I liked this video from Jamelle Bouie a lot, and I liked it even more because he delivered it as a floating eyes and mouth over an apple.

I'm going to respond to this comment as an apple because I kind of like doing it. It's fun. And I'm gonna respond to this comment by way of a story.

So, all Americans know about the anti-slavery movement, the abolitionist movement. And the way we're taught about the abolitionist movement or the anti-slavery movement, whatever you want to call it, is kind of that this was inevitable--that obviously slavery is terrible and obviously there are people against it and it was gonna end. We teach it as a thing that was bound to happen. So the Civil War comes and slavery is ended, and it's sort of a very neat story.

But I'm gonna ask you to put yourself in the perspective of an abolitionist or an anti-slavery politician in, say, 1840 or 1848; and if you are one of these people, you have a deep-seated opposition to slavery. If you're an abolitionist, you may have spent the previous 10 or 20 years traveling the country, giving speeches, rallying people, doing everything you can to stir up moral outrage at slavery. If you're a politician, you have been working, doing a grind of politics--somewhat dangerous, because people may not like slavery, but they're not super thrilled about black people either--but you are in legislatures, you are filing petitions, you are building coalitions, you are trying to make whatever headway you can to, if not challenge slavery, then at least challenge some of the racist and anti-black laws that are on the books. Both--whether you're an anti-slavery politician or ablitionist--you do not think in 1848 that slavery is gonna be over in your lifetime. You hope that it might be; but you have no particular expectation that it will be. You are not optimistic about the end of slavery. You may not even be optimistic about the world as it exists, because you look around and you see human bondage and horrible brutality that's been there for hundreds of years, and for all you know will be there when you're long dead.

So the question to ask is, why do these things? Why did these people bother? Why did they continue struggling against slavery, despite not really having any optimism about the end of the institution? And the answer--beyond a deep-seated sense of moral commitment--is that these people didn't need to be optimistic in the ultimate outcome, they just needed to be optimistic in the ability of humans, of people to make change; they needed to be hopeful about human agency. That's what they needed, and that's what they had. And so they did not know how far they would be able to take the baton, but they worked and hoped that when the end of their lives came, they'd be able to hand it off to people who could take it even further than they could.

The abolitionists and the anti-slavery politicians were essentially living out what Antonio Gramsci called the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. I think the exact quote is, "I'm a pessimist because of my intelligence, but I am an optimist because of my will." What this is is recognizing the reality of the world around you, not looking at the world as if it's any better--or any worse--but any better than it is; but not pinning your hopes for a better world on some sort of linear change, linear move towards something better; but pinning your hopes on one of the true constants of human society, which is the ability of human beings to work their will on the world, and the ability of humans to push and persevere.

So, this is all to say that I am not asking anyone to be optimistic about the world. That's very silly; the world's a very terrible place right now--not the worst it could be, but pretty bad--and I do not contest that. But I do think that people should have a bit of this optimism of the will, and this optimism about human agency, and our ability to build a better world. And this is sort of where my very strong distaste for doomerism comes from, because the sense that it is the worst, and nothing can be better, is just fundamentally incompatible with any kind of optimism of the will, any kind of belief in human agency and belief in our ability to change the world around us. And it's also why you will find me on this account often pushing back against the most negative renderings of what is happening in our society, for example. Not because I think everything is great--I do not--but because I do think that the path towards change requires one to have clear eyes about the situation in which you find yourself; and clear eyes both means recognizing the bad, but it also means recognizing those areas where you can make gains, and where you can find success; and where you can win minor victories.

And you may say, well, what's the point of a minor victory? But I think what the anti-slavery struggle demonstrates, what the civil rights struggle demonstrates, what the labor struggle demonstrates in this country, is that minor victories become fuel for modest victories, become fuel for major victories, and major victories can be the things that fundamentally change the entire field of play. So. Pessimism of the intellect, my friend, optimism of the will.

#i do not think i am very optimistic as a rule #but i'm still much more optimistic than bouie #nonetheless #i share his distaste for doomerism and for similar reasons #you cannot be clear-eyed about the world if you are consumed with pessimism

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buckybabesonly · 1 year

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An Experiment in Jealousy

Summary: You decided to try and make Bucky jealous. Now, you would pay the price.

Pairing: Bucky x female!Reader

Genre: Self-indulgent porn without plot tbh, lol

Warnings: slightly rough sex, dirty talk, slight!daddy kink, unprotected sex

Length: 2k

Bucky was the first man to ever make love to you. And boy, did he do everything right. He loved to pepper kisses all over your skin, worship your body, whisper I love yous and I'm so lucky to have yous against your mouth as he thrust into you slowly every night, eyes locked with yours as you both reached your climax.

Sometimes, less often, he would fuck you. When you had a fight and the inevitable make-up sex happened, or when you were just in one of those moods and ripped off his clothes with such ferocity that he just knew what you wanted, or when you told him outright that you wanted it fast and hard instead of gentle and slow.

Tonight, you knew what you wanted. You wanted him to use you, to own you.

And so you had spent the whole night flirting with Steve, playing it in such a way that just about bordered platonic without being too outrageous, but just enough to get Bucky ticking. This, coupled with how you had absolutely iced your boyfriend out all night and instead spoken to Steve with laser focus, would absolutely get you what you wanted. You were certain of it.

You watched Bucky from the other end of the bar to discreetly observe his reactions, his leather-gloved hand wrapped around a beer bottle, the other one lifting up to brush against his lightly stubbled jaw as he observed you. He took a sip of beer, his eyes piercing, and you could tell he was gently seething.

You suppressed a smile. Jackpot.

Bucky all but slammed you against the door of your shared apartment as soon as you had closed it, pressing up against you firmly as you gasped at his sudden movement. His hands framed either side of your head, body trapping you in place as you stared up at his icy blue eyes.

"Is that how you want to play, doll?" he murmured, gritting his teeth as your chest heaved against his.

"Bucky, please," you whimpered, not even pretending to be coy. You knew that he knew exactly what you were playing at, and now it was time to cash in.

"Please, what?" Bucky all but snarled, cocking his head to the side as you blinked at him.

"I need it. Need you."

"So desperate for my cock, are you? You want me to fuck you like the slut you are?" Bucky asked, eyes flickering down to your mouth.

His words sent delicious chills down your spine, arousal shooting straight to your core. Your hands grasped his leather jacket, moving to peel it off, but his hands were lightning. They wrapped themselves around your wrists and held them back against the door with a gentle thwack.

"No," he said sternly. "You need to be punished."

Your pussy was practically dripping. You were so wet that you were almost convinced he would be able to smell your arousal soaking through your panties.

"How are you going to punish me, daddy?" you asked in a faux-nervous voice, feeling his hard-on through his jeans already, heavy against your inner thigh. You knew he liked it when you called him that.

"On your knees," he said in his deep, authoritative voice, eyes daring you to object. His tone was void of his usual gentleness. Tonight, he meant business.

You sank down to the floor as he worked at his belt, unfastening the piece of leather and letting it snake to the floor.

"Take it out," he instructed.

You reached out and unzipped his jeans obediently, looking up at him with large, innocent eyes. You touched his bulge over his boxers as he sucked in a ragged breath, unable to hide the effect you had on him despite himself.

Tugging down the waistband of his underwear, his cock sprung free, thick and heavy and red, the velvety head waiting to be sheathed inside your mouth.

"Suck it and make daddy feel good," he commanded, his fingers lacing themselves through your hair.

You didn't need to be told twice. You opened your mouth and wasted no time in swallowing up his cock, his length barely fitting inside your mouth, but you tried your best. You relished the taste of him, the slightly salty tang of his pre-cum, urging yourself to take him deeper and farther down your throat no matter how your gag-reflex protested at the intrusion.

Your eyes teared up as he began to gently fuck your mouth, his hands tugging on your hair without the actual force to hurt you, but encouraging you to take more and more of him into your mouth.

"There's a good girl," he grunted, head rolling back in pleasure as you served him, your mouth forming a suction around his fat cock, your tongue gliding up the length of his dick as you released him with a pop.

Your eyes were wet as you dived in again to taste him, so addictive, enough to make you feel so fucking horny.

For a good five minutes, the only sounds filling the room were his dirty praises and the gargle of you choking on his cock. Eventually you couldn't hold in your needy whines any longer.

"Please, can you put it inside me?" you begged.

"Mmm. I don't know if you deserve it."

Panic flashed briefly within you. Bucky had been known to deny you of release before when you had been particularly naughty, and you mewled in protest. You didn't want to be teased tonight.

"Please, I'll be good. Need you inside me. Don't you want to come inside my tight pussy?" You knew exactly what words would make him attack you hungrily like predator on prey.

Bucky snarled and bent down to grasp your upper arms, jerking you upright to your feet. He shucked off his jeans which were still pooled around his ankles and picked you up with ease, bridal style, taking you to the bedroom. He tossed you onto your bed like you weighed nothing.

He shrugged off his jacket and tore his shirt off so he was completely naked, his muscular chest and arms flexing as he undressed. You were still on your back as he crawled onto the bed, positioning himself on top of you, knees on either side of your thighs. You watched as he hitched up the bottom of your dress so it rolled up to your waist, pulling down the neckline so your breasts fell out and presented themselves to him.

"You want this?" he asked, slapping his cock against your pussy through your panties. His hands reached down to grab your tits, squeezing roughly.

"Please, please, please," you chanted like a mantra, hands reaching out for him. You pushed your panties aside with one hand and took his cock in the other, urging him to go inside.

"Needy, aren't we?" Bucky chuckled, biting down on his lower lip. "Tell me what you want. Use your words, doll."

"I want your cock in my cunt," you said desperately, wanting - no, needing to be filled by him. "I want you to fuck me like the fuckdoll I am. I want you to cum inside me, please - Bucky!" You screamed out when he suddenly thrust inside you without warning, without letting you adjust as he entered you all at once.

He bottomed out with a groan, his cock stretching your tight hole.

"Oh god, Bucky," you moaned as he moved with ruthless speed, fucking in and out of your pussy with such force that your tits bounced with every movement. Your eyes rolled into the back of your head as he leaned down and kissed you angrily, tongue sliding into your mouth.

"This cunt is mine," he hissed, punctuating every word with a sharp jerk of his hips. "No one else. You belong to me. Say it."

"I - ah - belong to - ah - I belong you you, Bucky!" you whined, struggling to catch your breath. "Wait, not so fast, please," you moaned as he hit that spot deep inside your cervix with no mercy.

He didn't stop his pace, only moved to prop your legs up over his shoulders to allow him even better access to you, his cock seemingly sinking even deeper into you, in a way that felt impossible. You felt so full, so over-stimulated, you knew you wouldn't last long.

"Not so fast?" Bucky repeated with a humorless laugh, mocking you. "You wanted it to badly before, doll. I'm just giving it to you."

"Ah -Bucky - " tears of pleasure leaked from the corners of your eyes as you struggled to make a coherent sentence.

"Love how you're clenching around my cock. You were made to take my cock, to be filled up by me," Bucky said, the words making you wetter by the minute. "Gonna cum inside you, doll, gonna give you every last drop. Gonna remind you who you belong to. Gonna pound my cock into you until you beg me to stop."

"Daddy, please, cum inside me," you gasped. You could feel yourself reaching your orgasm, that feeling of pleasure creeping up slowly until you found yourself begging Bucky to keep going. "Please don't stop, don't stop, i'm almost there. Please keep fucking me, Bucky!"

A feral noise left Bucky's mouth as his cock continued to dive in and out of your sore pussy, never once faltering. You knew he could feel it when you clenched around him with a gasp, stars blinding your eyes as you came, his name falling off your tongue.

"Oh god," you gasped, heart beating rapidly as Bucky never stopped moving, smirking at your shaking form.

His hands reached down to flick at your clit as you squirmed, too sensitive.

"Bucky, no," you whined weakly, the pleasure too much for you as he continued to play with your pussy all the while his shaft disappeared into your cunt again and again, slick with your juices.

"You can do it one more time, doll, I know you can. Cum for daddy," Bucky grunted.

"Are you gonna cum inside me?" you asked as you felt the burning beginnings of another orgasm slowly stir inside you, biting on the inside of your cheeks to stop yourself from screaming. Your hands made their way to Bucky's neck, pulling him down to kiss you again.

"You're my cumslut, aren't you?" Bucky asked, eyes boring into mine. "Or do you want me to cum on your tits? Your face?"

The image of him painting your face white with his semen was almost too much. Tempting, but you knew you wanted it all in you tonight.

"Inside," you requested, almost begging.

He grunted in acknowledgement, and you knew he was close as he continued to draw circles around your clit.

He sped up the pace, one hand reaching out to grab the headboard behind you, vibranium hand crushing the wood as his hips stuttered. He groaned loudly as he shot his seed inside you, unloading his cum inside your willing cunt.

"Fuck, doll, you feel so fucking good," he hissed.

It was your second undoing at the feeling of him filling you up, and you unraveled seconds after he did, tears streaming down your face at the absolute electric pleasure of it.

He collapsed on top of you, both of you sweating and panting, his lips burying themselves against your neck.

"God, that was fucking incredible," he said eventually, slightly out of breath. His cock was still inside your pussy, and you whimpered at the feeling of him sliding out of your hole as he softened, his cum following suit.

"You're leaking out of me," you sniffed in protest.

Bucky reached down to deftly slide three fingers into your used cunt, inciting a squeal from your lips, a teasing smile on his face as he lifted his head to look at you, challenging you.

His fingers fucked you, fucking his cum back inside, playing with it as you almost sobbed out loud at the feeling. Eventually he withdrew his hand and lifted his digits to your mouth, which you opened automatically.

You licked him clean, the taste of your combined fluids making you shiver with delight.

"Mmm, Bucky..."

You felt your eyes grow heavy as you finally came down from the high, but you could feel Bucky growing hard against you again, his hand pumping his cock to encourage it.

"Doll, we're not even nearly finished yet."

#bucky barnes #bucky smut #bucky barnes smut #bucky barnes pwp #bucky pwp #bucky x reader #bucky x reader smut #daddy!bucky #bucky x you #bucky x you smut #mature

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muntitled · 8 months

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𝙎𝙥𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙

Spider!Hyuck x Fem!Reader

𝙒𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: 𝙀𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙙 𝙍𝙚𝙡𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥, 𝙇𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙖𝙜𝙚, 𝙑𝙞𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚, 𝙈𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝘽𝙧𝙪𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙨, 𝙎𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝘼𝙣𝙜𝙨𝙩, 𝙁𝙡𝙪𝙛𝙛, 𝙎𝙥𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙪, 𝙈𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨, 𝙅𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙪𝙨𝙮 (𝙒𝙚𝙖𝙥𝙤𝙣𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜!𝙅𝙚𝙣𝙤), 𝘿𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙎𝙢𝙪𝙩 (+18, 𝙈𝙞𝙣𝙤𝙧𝙨 𝘿𝙉𝙄), 𝙂𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝘿𝙞𝙧𝙩𝙮 𝙏𝙖𝙡𝙠, 𝘿𝙤𝙢/𝙎𝙪𝙗 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙩𝙤𝙣𝙚𝙨, 𝙈𝙪𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡 𝙈𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, 𝙃𝙪𝙢𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝘾𝙪𝙣𝙣𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙪𝙨, 𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝘿𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙆𝙞𝙣𝙠, 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙐𝙥 𝙨𝙚𝙭

𝗛𝗲'𝘀 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗼 𝗣𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗲 𝘀𝗸𝘀𝗸𝘀𝗸𝘀

You are dreadfully aware of every single millisecond that passes without you by his side. While the seconds bleed into nanoseconds, it introduces a new string of endless possibilities that may or may not occur while Hyuck is out.

Everything that would and could go wrong.

Freak accidents of wayward punches and dodging bullets ran through your head like a freight train.

The boy was clumsy enough to get bitten by a radioactive spider for God's sake. He is quite literally drawn to disaster.

Perhaps you would have found it attractive if it was not the bane of your very existence.

"I think this is why I'm attracted to you." Hyuck had said absentminedly the previous night. "You fuss over me way too much, and I like it way too much, so really that says more about me than it does you."

"Please don't move too much, I'm almost done-" his big doe eyes bore dangerously into yours while you concluded stitching a wound on the side of his face. Thankfully, it had been a shallow laceration, but it still punctured a nasty rip in his mask.

"I also really like it when you yell at me, or like scold me really softly. It gets me excited."

You ignore his giggles, sighing while your heart panged at the bruises scattered across his face.

"Does that mean I have mommy issues, Miss Psychologist?"

Another sigh automatically unsheathed itself from your lungs as you pressed a disinfected cotton ball to his cheek and watched him wince. "I'm not a psychologist-"

"Yet." Said Hyuck.

"Yet." You nodded, "And you know I don’t believe in any of Freud's incest logic."

"Fuck," Hyuck cursed under his breath, which you intially though was from wound repair but you quickly found out was from something else.

"You're so smart," he had affirmed with wide, soaped over eyes.

"You're quite literally studying biochemistry which is far better than my silly little psychology degree."

"And humble too!?" Hyuck was quick to grab ahold of your wrist.

"Hyuck, let me finish-"

Before you could even think, he placed your palm directly on the bulge that had grown underneath his suit, "I need you, okay? Baby, I always need you," while his eyes fluttered shut, mumbling "my pretty girl," under his breath, you had been completely and utterly spellbound by his use of the word 'need'. You were pleasantly surprised at how affected you were by the notion that your outrageously smart, charismatic and not to mention literally powerful boyfriend could ever really 'need' someone like you. 'Want' is okay. 'Want' is safe and free of complexities and obligations but 'need' extended far beyond letting him fuck you as senseless as he did last night...

But the worry was a neverending story. It hit you simultaneously - multiple little televisions streaming every possible kind of disaster all at once. Everything that might happen while Hyuck is out saving Seoul, potentially needing you and you not being there.

Even the deafening blare of the music leaking out of mysterious speakers failed to keep all the dreaded inevitabilities at bay. With a solo cup of soju in one hand and your phone in the other, you opt to gaze down at your phone quivering visciously in your hand. The minimal amount of alcohol floating in your bloodstream does little to hinder your functionality as you refresh the chat.

Hyuck's contact detail attached to a cute little picture of him stuffing his face with sushi sends a viscious pang to your heart as you sit robotically on the end of the smokers couch, nestled under a cloud of perfume and cannabis. Around you, a feverish game of truth or dare has befallen with people on the adjacent couch but your mind is elsewhere.

In Hyuck's business, death would be inevitable. All that matters is the final message you sent. One that he failed to respond to.

Check in, Spider.

To which he would allay your troubles by swiftly and quickly responding with:

checking in

Always without the improper punctuation as if to let you know he was currently very busy swinging about high rises.

This time however, he failed to check in and you're left stranded in the living room of a house party in Hongdae, with no actual clue as to where in the city your boyfriend had found himself.

"I'm sure your nerd boyfriend doesn't need you to smother him all the time," it was the drunken slurs of a fellow classmate, who's grating words succeed in peeling your eyes away from your screen momentarily.

"You're not his mother." Said Jeno with a grossly charismatic smirk, only for you to stab him with the deadliest glare you can muster. Your jaw is locked, and your phone is suffocating in your iron grip.

"And I'm sure you didn't need to smother your hair in so much hair gel, but alas, we can't all have nice things."

Ignoring the hum of praise for your rebuttal, you press send on the second message:

This party sucks... please check in.

"Instead of wallowing all by yourself, you could actually try to have some fun. Perhaps loosen yourself up in the process?" Jeno sits way too close, his side, pressing into your side without a lick of space to separate you too, but the space lessens to an even bigger degree as he leans sideways. Your head is fixed on your lap as his lips brush past your ear with the unmistakable hint of soju wafting against your neck. "Truth or dare."

"What?" You ask, utterly discombobulated, having seemingly forgotten where you are. Jeno's Cheshire cat grin is unwavering as he asks, "Truth or-"

"Oh shit- someone top the volume!"

Almost like clockwork, a sea of gasps settle amongst the other patrons congesting the living room. You send Jeno a furrowed brow to look at the tv past his grinning face, only to be immediately met with an utterly nauseating scene splashed across national television. The news anchors' tone of voice robs the scene of its devastation.

"Patrons say the shootout which occured in the Seoul district of Itaewon could have been an 'unmistakable act of terror' were it not for the friendly neighborhood Spiderman who appeared just in time to rid the gunman of his bullets. Witnesses are in awe of the Spiderman's innate, superhuman reflexes which allowed him to-"

You fail to keep the panic from exploding onto your face as the news anchor drones on and on in the background. Around you, your classmates make a quip or two before quickly losing interest. This is nothing new.

"Anyway," Says Jeno, "Truth or Dare?"

But you feel utterly sick to your stomach with the notion that Hyuck flew blindly in between an open crowd and a loaded gun. Heroism be damned, what would any of it mean if he ended up fucking dead? Your boyfriend had the capacity to flood your entire brain, therefore prompting Jeno to repeat his question.

"Princess? Truth or Dare-"

You realize then that you are dreadfully obsessive. Always fearing your partner may fulfill the inevitable and get hurt and leave you. You couldn't bare to live in your own skin if you turned out to be something that Hyuck left behind...

"Dare." The voice immediately has you snapping your head away from the tv. Everything happens at once. It is as if the sun is peeking through the crowds, bathing you in unforgettable light as you look up to find the one man you've been searching for all night. Your mouth hangs open as Hyuck sits directly beside you on the armrest of the couch. His body heat immediately restores a once thirsty, inexplicable part of your soul, rendering you a muted mess.

"Shit was crazy," Says Hyuck, pointing vaguely at the screen of the television, before looking back down at you with sly smile on his lips, "Or so I hear."

His gaze is unwavering as he pushes his thick rimmed glasses further up his nose. Your eyes are restlessly taking all of him in. Scanning every crevice of his face for any unfamiliar bruise while assessing the state of his perfectly imperfect state of curly black hair. He dons an oversized white tee and loose baggy jeans - quite literally the epitome of collegiate youth, with no signs of his double life.

"Sorry bro," says Jeno, effectively breaking the spell between the two of you. Hyuck very begrudgingly removes his eyes from the side of your head before looking at Jeno, who says, "You've got to wait your turn-"

Hyuck practically whines out loud, as petulant as a child when he throws his head back and says, "Can't you just dare her to fuck me? She is my girlfriend..." Hyuck leans forward, his fingers drawing odd circles on your shoulder as he says to Jeno, "You are aware of that, aren't you, Mr Muscle-"

"Give my turn to someone else!" You rush to interject before Hyuck embarrassed himself in front of your entire department. When did he have the time to consume alcohol because he certainly is not sober?

You're bombarded by a flurry of conflicting emotions as you secure your hand around Hyuck's wrist and drag him through the party and up the stairs. Your face is utterly muddled as you try to sieve through your emotions of anger at him for ignoring your messages and for having to be a superhero. All the while, Hyuck lets you pull his him away, a lazy smile dancing on his face as he signals a thumbs up to passersby.

It is only when you're in the confines of the homeowners guest room that you're able to hear yourself think beyond the humdrum of hip hop music. Your head pounds with the force of your emotion and you're quick to pull Hyuck inside, before pushing him against the slamming door.

"Don't throw me around, I'll cum," He whines petulantly, melting into the door before squeezing his eyes shut. You give him a murderous glare as you crowd him against the door.

"No message back, Hyuck!? You're utterly unbelievable-"

"And you're utterly gorgeous. Is this a new dress?" You slap away his hand away skimming the lining of your lace mini dress - an outfit you would've liked him to appreciate at the beginning of the night, before you found out he ditched you in favor of psychotic lunatics.

"All I ask of you is to follow through with checking in! Message me! Even if it's a freaking full stop or an emoji! Even if you're not in a position to type out a full sentence - which is complete and utter bullshit by the way, I've seen you and your high-rise selfies." You're unaware that Hyuck's slightly tipsy mind is flooded with nothing but lust and adrenaline from yet another successful day of protecting his city. He's swimming in the high of gratitude, which only multiplied once he got to lay eyes on you and your black dress, your slightly drunken hooded eyes, and your glossy, lined lips. Lips that are very firmly cursing him the hell out. He really tries to be a proactive listener and take your scolding but it once again goes straight to his dick, and his hooded eyes drift from your eyes, to your lips, to the warmth of your, to your unmarked neck, to-

"Are you seriously staring at my tits right now!?"

He immediately snaps his head up to you, inadvertently pulling you close towards him until your front was flush against his front. "Let me suck on them please- I've missed you so, so much today."

You could feel your defenses waning. A boyfriend like Hyuck was a dangerous thing to have, especially since he harbored the power to distract you so easily from your anger. Your mind is fuzzy as Hyuck lowers his lips into the crook of your neck while his fingers make careful contact with the skin of your thigh.

"Missed hearing your voice, criminals are no fun." He murmurs into your neck, already sporting that needy little of tone of voice that he knew would always succeed in getting you wet. "Missed hearing you, and smelling you," his lips drift against your neck, spraying warm kisses along your collar as a distraction from his hand slipping further up your skirt...

"Do you know how boring it actually is, half the time? I still have to make police feel like they're actually doing something so some moments I'm just perched on high rises, left to my thoughts" He presses a kiss to the supple flesh of your cleavage spilling out of the dress' neckline, "Do you know what I think about, pretty girl?"

You shake your head. You're only really aware of Hyuck's hands settled on your hip under the skirt of the dress as he lifts himself from your neck. There is a small smile on his lips as he is now the one pushing you backwards.

"I think about you. I think about kissing you," his voice is airy and teasing, "I think about hugging you," the back of your knees connect with the edge of the double bed which he effortlessly pushes you down on, "I think about smelling you, and feeling you and fucking you," Hyuck's movements bleed into urgency, at having you splayed on the bed. His hands are restless on your body as he lifts your skirt to push your underwear to the side, unable to divulge anymore time to undressing. He kneels his tall frame on the ground as he pulls your thighs towards the edge of the bed. Your knees are framing his face and he looks at you from between your shaking legs.

"P-Please, Hyuck..." all your anger and all your sensibilities have all melted away in the wake of your boyfriend blowing teasingly against your exposed core. The very sight of how utterly drenched you are sends Hyuck into a frenzy.

"Fuck, babe. Don't beg like that- I told you, you're gonna make me cum."

He is unable to keep his gaze off your glistening cunt and the arousal that he spreads against your inner thighs.

"F-Fuck I need to taste you-" serves as your one and only warning before he lowers his lips to your clit. You scream into the air, back arching off the covers as Hyuck sticks his tongue out and begins to lap furiously as your vagina. He encircles a large hand around your thigh, securing your pussy firmly against your lips with no escape. You're left to endure his needy whimpering as he kisses your cunt with absolute fervour.

"F-Fuck, I- I think it's too much-" You attempt to pull away yet again but this boy is strong and very fucking needy and he refuses to let you get away from his lips suctioning your cunt while his tongue delved inside...

Your hips immediately grind your pussy further against him, only eliciting a whorish moan from him before he quickly rises. His curls bounce as he nods profusely, "Fuck, yes, baby... use my mouth okay? Please, please, please-" by the third 'please' he's attached his lips to your pussy once more, brain utterly flooded with lust and satisfaction at the feeling of your hips pushing against his face. Your movements have him nosing your cunt, evoking another strained moan from you - a moan so dirty and slutty, is has him automatically bumping his bulge against the bedpost to rhythm of his tongue moving in and out of you.

"Are you going to cum for me, Pretty Girl?" He asks, swiftly replacing his tongue with his fingers which slide so easily into your slippery cunt it had him grinding further into the bed. "Fuck- you're taking my fingers so well, baby!" His glasses fog up and clear in intervals as he nears his releases. He honestly doesn't know whether to watch how your face contorts into the glory of your orgasm or whether to watch your cunt swallow his fingers.

"You're gonna cum by humping my fingers, aren't you baby?" He more so tells himself, egging his impending orgasm along with a slow, nod while his fingers spear in and out of your pussy.

"F-Fuck, I think I'm cumming-"

You're most certainly cumming a nanosecond later, and the sight of your parted lips and the sound of your words have Hyuk whining into the air before melting into his own orgasm from rutting against the bed. His head melts in between your legs, while he completely makes out with your cunt and his fingers continue to fuck you through your orgasm. Your body is floating.

Gone are the worries.

Gone is the sliver of anger.

You're vaguely aware that this might have been Hyuck's plan all along, but you can not even bring yourself to be angry. Not when he is delivering such sincere kisses on your quivering, aching cunt.

"What the heck are you doing?" You ask, panting heavily as you watch your boyfriend be so utterly transfixed by your vagina, he's taken to whispering to it.

"I think she wants me to cum inside her next time. She's saying you should go on the pill-"

You muster enough energy to roll your eyes before saying, "take your fingers out of me-"

"But I like having my fingers inside of you-"

"Hyuck-"

"And I'm sorry, okay?" He lowers his head to press a gentle kiss to your inner thigh, "I'm sorry for not responding to your message. I promise to check in. Always."

There is no stopping your heart from melting, especially not when he is around.

"Okay," you say with a shaky breathe, "I believe you,"

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merakiui · 2 months

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thinking,,,,, a very deranged concept in which you and floyd are in love and jade is the (silently) jealous twin cast aside. no one knows jade stalks you from afar, that he silently slips inside your shared home with floyd, that he doesn't do anything outrageously rash. he just watches and admires, burning the sight of your sleeping form into his retinas. it's harmless, really. just a passing infatuation stage, surely.

he's been stalking you for years, though. so maybe it's more than that. jade's certain it's just because you're interesting. because no one has ever stayed with floyd for this long before. floyd always grows tired of his romantic partners. surely your and floyd's relationship is fleeting.

but then floyd proposes and you say yes. and suddenly jade can't be happy with just watching. suddenly jade has to confront the fact that his brother and his beloved are getting even closer. soon you'll start a family. soon you'll grow old together. soon he will be forgotten. just your friendly, always polite in-law. never anything more.

he was content to wait it out, to swoop in when you and floyd inevitably break up. but now that will never happen. jade, who has always gotten everything he's ever wanted, can't have the one thing he's craved for years. you are forever out of his reach, snug and secure in floyd's arms.

jade, who has always been so meticulous and level-headed, takes it upon himself to right this very egregious wrong.

when floyd goes missing, everyone is shocked because it's so sudden. there's just a messy note. some nonsense about how he needs a break, how he doesn't want anyone coming after him, how he'll be back soon. you're confused and distraught. did the family business catch up to him? some bad people who were after him... you don't want to think that way! he wouldn't just leave in the middle of your engagement. he had been so thrilled to plan the wedding, to look at venues, to think up a fun menu... if something was truly bothering him, he'd talk to you about it. right? right? at least, that's what you tell everyone who asks. you have no idea where he's gone. no one does.

suddenly, it's as if he never existed at all. there's no trace of floyd. no one's seen him or heard from him. no one knows where he's gone. and as time passes you begin to think that floyd might never come home.

jade plays the part of the grieving brother well. oh, he's sick with concern. that's his only brother! whatever he's going through, surely it doesn't warrant a disappearance. :( oh, this is just terrible... he just wants his brother to come home.

jade's a great actor. an outstanding mimic. no one knows of the journal he keeps, every page filled with endless scrawls. it's obsessive practice. jade practiced floyd's handwriting to perfection until it was an exact copy. and then there are the notes he's made on floyd's habits, distinctions between the two of them.

the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. jade thinks so when he welcomes you, broken, devastated you, into his arms. it will be okay. he's here for you. they'll find floyd one day. one day he'll come home. one day you'll get your dream wedding.

until then, jade can be your floyd. :)

#meraki mumbles #once again i am back on my crazy jade agenda <3 #is floyd dead? is he just being held captive somewhere? who knows~~

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booksandabeer · 5 months

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Ramblings on Fandom: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Delusional Shippers, and Alleged Misogyny

So with the release of Season 2 of What If…? emotions are once again running high, the outrage is outraging, and people are up in arms about the whole Captain Carter situation. While I do think that some reactions are a little overblown, even needlessly aggressive in tone to the unfortunate detriment of their otherwise convincing arguments, I share the confusion and frustration about the sudden centering of a long-dead & never excessively popular character, the sidelining of the Steve-Bucky friendship, and the as-inexplicable-as-it-is-total exclusion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. However, I’m not here to talk about the show because (1) I haven’t watched this season and have no plans to (why waste time torturing myself with something I know I’ll hate?) and (2) other people have already written dozens of metas about it, so what could I possibly add at this point.

What I do want need to talk about (lest I explode) is something that has irritated me for a long time and that is now happening again: Every time someone even mildly criticizes Peggy Carter, expresses doubts about her suitability as a heroine, or even just questions her disproportionate importance to the franchise post-EG, inevitably a certain section of fans will come out of the woodwork to immediately throw around accusations of misogyny and yell about how we’re all just a bunch of delusional Stuckies who are mad that she got "in the way" of our ship. Sigh.

This is gonna be a long one, so I’ll put it under a cut. Rant incoming. You've been warned. If you don't want to read, simply scroll on by.

First of all, let me state very clearly that I’m not debating the existence of misogyny and sexism in fandom spaces—or in the media from which these fandoms originate. At all. It exists, it’s a thing, I’m not denying that. Which is exactly why it frustrates me endlessly to see these accusations thrown around as a gotcha! argument to shut down any and all critical debate around a female character. All it does in the end is escalate rhetoric and radicalize attitudes.

In the case of Peggy Carter, specifically her treatment by Stucky shippers, I’ve always found 'misogyny as a motive' to be a largely unsubstantiated accusation.¹ Now, I neither presume nor do I want to speak for the entirety of Stuckynation, so I will not claim that there aren't corners of the fandom where people discuss her in ways that I find off-putting and deeply unserious, but I will say this: If you genuinely believe that disliking one (1) fictional female character equals “hating all women” and wanting to suppress and marginalize their presence in fiction and real life alike—then I think we need to take that word away from you until you’ve learned its true meaning.

You might also want to ask yourself how exactly reducing a female character to a mute trophy wife or a heroine who has to act out her love interest’s recycled storylines helps your feminist fight.

As to the “standing in the way of your ship” part of the argument. Very simply put: No character can stand in the way of something if there never ever was “a way” to that something to begin with. “Being mad” implies that there was a reasonable expectation that wasn’t met, a substantive hope that was crushed. Now, I’ve said this before and I’ll gladly say it again a million more times: No Stucky shipper in their right mind ever truly thought that there was even the slightest chance that Marvel Studios owned by the Walt Disney Company would allow Steve “Captain America” Rogers and Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes to be canonized as an explicitly romantic pairing in their billion dollar franchise. Be serious. That was never in the cards. I wish we all lived in a world where it was, but we don’t, and it wasn’t. The best we could ever hope for was for Steve and Bucky to get a good, satisfying, in-character ending. And if, in Steve’s case, that would’ve included hints (or more) about a possible rekindling of his, uh, aborted romance with Sharon—then so be it. But we never got any of that. The characters never got any of that. Instead they sent Steve into 1950s suburban hell, literally trapped him behind a white picket fence, and condemned him to a life of passivity and lies, all so he could be married to a woman he barely knew a long time ago in a completely different world; who built and ran a top-to-bottom Hydra-infested organization, but apparently never noticed that there was anything wrong with her life's work. For decades. Great. As for Bucky—well, we’ve all seen the devastatingly grim-faced, utterly lonely, and deeply sad version of him that was presented to us in TFATWS. Happy endings all around, I guess.

So. Am I mad that Steve didn’t get to ride into the rainbow-colored sunset with Bucky at the end of EG? No. Because that was never going to happen anyway. Would I have been mad had he ended up with Sharon or another female character in the 21st century? Also no. Granted, I wouldn’t have been ecstatic about it, but mad? No. But am I mad that Steve ended up with this specific female character under these specific circumstances as presented in canon? Fuck yeah, I am.

The thing is: I personally believe Steve and Peggy to be fundamentally incompatible when it comes to the way they view the world and their respective places in it; their morals and values; their capacity for compassion and empathy; their ability and willingness to compartmentalize, compromise, and collaborate with people and institutions whose ethics and/or politics do not align with their own. I have a real hard time believing that a relationship between these two (or worse, a hasty marriage) could be either happy or long-lasting.

I don’t believe Peggy to be inherently evil, I don’t hate her, I simply think she operates within a different moral framework than Steve (and even genuinely believes it to be a righteous one).² Your mileage may vary, but I personally happen to find that framework reprehensible, even indecent, and ultimately dangerous. After all, over the course of the 20th century, we have seen exactly where that kind of “the ends justify the means” brand of pragmatism leads—over and over again. Not to mention that the people who use this line of argument to defend characters like Peggy (or real-life politicians for that matter) never seem to want to look too closely at who gets to define what "the ends" are in the first place and who decides when they've finally been met.

(Never. The answer is never.)

And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with depicting, and even centering a narrative around a morally (dark)gray character—oftentimes it’s actually the more interesting option—but you cannot at the same time claim that they are purely good and should be only admired as such when their actions literally tell an entirely different story.

So, no. I will not accept Peggy Carter as the shining aspirational heroine that the MCU so badly wants to sell her to me as—while simultaneously continuing to reveal things that paint an increasingly darker picture of her character. And I will certainly not celebrate seeing one of my favorite characters of all time—whose defining trait was that he couldn't ignore "a situation pointed south"; who used to fight for the little guy and against the establishment; who once said about the very organization that Peggy Carter helped build that it was so corrupt, it all needed to go—rendered morally inert for some hollow happy ending that may as well be a conservative’s wet dream full of false nostalgia for an America that never really existed. I cannot find it in me to be anything less but mad about that.

But that does not make me a misogynist. It does not make me a delusional shipper. It makes me someone who looks at what the MCU has been telling me about Peggy Carter for years now—over and over again—and takes it at its own word.

--------

¹ If you’ve actually read a a fair number of Stucky(!) fanfics you will have noticed that the reverence afforded to and "page time" devoted to her character and her relationship with Steve is somewhat disproportionate to anything that's backed up by canon—well, up until EG, where she was suddenly reanimated as The Great Love of Steve’s Life—and in my experience, it's highly unusual for any fandom to put so much (mostly) positive attention on another character, let alone a potential love interest that is not part of the endgame ship.

² I also want to emphasize that if you love Peggy and she's your fave: good for you! I genuinely have no beef with you. People can agree to disagree. All I ask for is that we maybe stop willfully ignoring the less savory aspects of her character. You don't need to pretend she's perfect to justify your affection for her. I LOVE Steve, and yet I have no problem conceding that he is FAR from perfect.

#*drops post & runs away* i may regret this but it's my blog and i rant if i want to #i know some people will roll their eyes & i debated posting this at all but i simply had to get it off my chest once and for all.#so there. now i can be free. or something.#also i have no idea what to tag this & i personally find 'anti' tags silly bc why is critical discussion automatically labeled as 'anti'?#but whatever i'll play nice. so i guess:#anti peggy carter #anti steggy #anti endgame #hope that covers it #wading into the dIsCoUrsE

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imagine-darksiders · 2 years

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So, what do you think of this? Bowser sees Y/N in an extreme state of danger, like, I dunno, trying to be taken against her will by an arranged Prince suitor or something, and the state of her distress/fear get's him so mad he transforms into Giga Bowser.

Well, first of all, I have done nothing BUT think of this for the past week! Thanks so much for the inspiration! Here's a little drabble <3

TW: Physical abuse, Kidnapping, Captive Reader, Implied arranged marriage, Giga Bowser is kinda scary? Mentions of being eaten etc

----

Bowser's thunderous footsteps come grinding to a halt of their own accord, stilling the colossal Koopa in his tracks at the opposite end of the docks, his eyes bulging open at the sight that looms out of the mist to greet him.

He's found you, his little runaway, for which he's rendered breathless with palpable relief.

But to his mounting dismay, there's another human with you.

A stranger...

A man.

And not only is this man encroaching well into your personal space, but his hands have captured your wrists as well, keeping you anchored in place with his chest shoved firmly against yours.

The pair of you are so wrapped up in the presence of the other, that neither one of you notices the King lurking nearby.

For a single beat, Bowser almost can't tear his wild-eyed stare away from the fingertips squeezing into your supple skin.

But then, he hears your voice, laden with thick and palpable alarm that's badly disguised by the composure you're attempting to maintain.

“Falkner, please,” you're shakily telling the other human, “Whatever agreement you may have had with my father is null and void now that he's dead!”

“Bullshit!” the stranger is quick to contend, giving you a rough jostle that throws fuel on the fire already raging in Bowser's gut, “Your old man promised you to me! I didn't sail halfway around the world just to be told no!”

Neither of you register the Koopa, not even when he lowers his horned head and takes a heavy, dangerous step towards you, his hackles starting to rise just like his gorge.

Just who the Hell does this idiot think he is to speak to you so crassly?!

Another step sends the pebbles near his feet skittering across the ground.

Your jaw is set, but you continue to tug at your ensnared wrists as you retort, “Promises made in a drunken stupor are hardly binding agreements!”

The man's face is swiftly changing from sallow and pallid to a vivid crimson and he parts his lips to shout, “You are mine by rights! You're coming with me!”

“Let me GO!” At last, perhaps inevitably, your voice cracks.

Bowser's jaw aches with how tightly his fangs are wedged together.

He can feel a fireball trying to crawl its way up his throat, leaving a sting that burns like venom along the walls of his trachea, but he gulps it down. No matter how great and terrible his rage might grow, he'd be remiss to let an attack loose with you so close to the firing line.

But there's something else building in his chest. Something swollen and ugly that rumbles like a slumbering giant just underneath his scales when he sees the moisture glistening on your dainty eyelashes.

Bowser hasn't ever seen you cry. Not even when he informed you that you'd be a permanent guest at his castle. Not even when it dawned on you that you could never go back to your old home across the seas. Not even when you fell from your window during an escape attempt and sprained your ankle, and the pain was great enough that you actually clung to him as he lifted you gently into his arms, your lips stuffed together to refrain from whimpering.

So to see you this close to tears now instills an outrage in him that differs from his usual temper. This is tumultuous. Primal, even.

He wants you to notice him now, to glance over and see that he's here for you, that you'll be all right because Bowser would never let anything bad happen to you.

Heart aflame, his pace quickens to a lurching gallop.

With a wrench, you manage to free one of your hands from Falkner's grip and use it to pry his fingers from your remaining wrist. “I said, GET! OFF!”

The anger in Bowser's chest dims only slightly to make room for a burst of pride.

But that momentary delight is stamped out as swiftly as it comes.

In an awful, jarring instant, the man - evidently fed up with your continued resistance – reels his hand back into the air behind his head, fingers pressed together, open-palmed...

Bowser can see the disaster unfurling right in front of him, but his shame is in knowing that he was too slow to stop it from happening.

The hand hurtles forwards...

A harrowing 'CRACK' ruptures the air as calloused skin meets the vulnerable flesh of your cheek.

Your head is flung sideways and you cry out, eyes wide with shock, and it's only then that your startled gaze land upon your audience. Cheek humming, the tears finally spill over the walls of your eyelids, tumbling in ceaseless rivulets down your face.

You choke on a wet sob, unable to drag your gaze away from the Koopa.

You can't summon the will to be pleased for his interference, if anything, you're ashamed to have been caught by your captor in a moment of such vulnerability.

Perhaps it's the tears distorting your vision, or perhaps the slap had knocked something loose in your brain, but through blurred vision, you think you can see a change come over Bowser, and if you didn't know any better, you'd almost swear that he was growing.

A hiss from your side catches your attention, but you don't turn to look at Falkner, though you can see him flapping his hand about to rid it of the lingering sting. “Damn,” he sucks a breath through his teeth, “Now look what you made me do... If you hadn't been so difficult, I wouldn't've had to do-” He finally notices the ground trembling beneath his leather boots. "-that...?"

Whatever had been hiding under the surface of Bowser's scales is howling out with rage, stirred from its slumber by the vicious and unprovoked attack on his friend.

Muscles ripple and bulge as they expand, bones snap, twisting out of shape. The Koopa King's gums burn as his fangs grow longer, sharper, squeaking against one another whilst his rapidly changing jaw struggles to keep up with their rate of growth.

It's agony, this transformation, but it can't be helped.

His friend has been struck. Hurt. And everything in him, every last instinct and sinew and atom, is bellowing out at him that he needs to protect you.

He would swallow this agony over and over again if it keeps you from experiencing pain.

He may be monstrous in size and temperament, but he isn't a monster.

He can't be...

Anger feeds into his expanding body, giving itself more space to spread like a wildfire, or perhaps more like a wave of churning acid that washes through his veins and takes the place of his blood.

It must... Because his body feels as if it's corroding.

“What the HELL is that?!”

Falkner's shriek adequately echoes your own inner monologue.

And you thought Bowser was terrifying before.

The tyrant must be absolutely livid with you for managing to escape from your room. If only you hadn't run into Sir Falkner on the docks. You went looking for a rescue party, but the man who did come to 'rescue' you might be even worse than King Bowser. At least Bowser, for all his uninvited clinginess, had never raised a hand against you.

Now though, locked in his blood-red stare, you start to wonder if you've pushed your luck just a step too far.

Pounding footsteps take off behind you, slapping against the cobblestone as Falkner simply turns tail and runs, leaving you frozen in place with your limbs as rigid as petrified wood, like your body knows instinctively that to turn your back and run from something with teeth that sharp is a very bad idea.

Inevitably, Bowser's head shoots up almost the moment Falkner starts to flee, and you're helpless but to watch on in horror as a gigantic paw surges over your head and snatches your would-be suitor right off the ground, hoisting the man up into the air.

Falker's resulting scream chills you down to the marrow in your bones, so wracked with terror and urgency that it sets your teeth on edge.

The oversized Koopa draws the thrashing human up to his maw and peels back his thick, rubbery lips, giving Falkner an uninterrupted view of his fate.

A constant growl spills between gleaming fangs, each one about the length of your own forearm, and the sound itself is loud enough that it could be mistaken for an unending grumble of far-off thunder, easily drowning out the man's screams.

It's gruesome to see. Your imagination runs wild with awful possibilities that you pray don't come to pass. Trembling in your boots, you lower your gaze to stare unblinkingly at the ground instead whilst short, sharp breaths fall out of your lungs, coming fast enough to leave you feeling light-headed.

Slowly, carefully, you take a single step back.

This might be your only chance to escape.

But then, like a damning acknowledgement of your cowardice, Falkner screams your name.

“Y/N!” he screeches, his back arched against the pain of being crushed in Bowser's grip, “HELP ME! PLEASE!”

'...You don't have to help him,' logic whispers into your ear, set on self-preservation, 'Nobody but his mother would miss him. He's a bad person, and you're not a hero.'

No. You're not a hero. And it certainly wouldn't be heroic to save a man like Falkner, who does more harm than good most days.

Bowser's immense jaws part in reaction to the human's screams, and his growl explodes into a deafening roar that blasts the man's hair back and forces him to pinch his eyes firmly shut.

Similarly, you raise your hands and slap them over your ears, teeth grit until the sound starts to fade. You can only imagine what the volume had done to Falkner's eardrums.

Even through the cushioning of your palms, you still hear him crying out once more, “DO SOMETHING!”

… Your head twists slowly towards a little wooden boat that bobs invitingly on the nearby docks. You're strong enough to work the oars, you could very easily jump into it, raise the little, white sail and let the wind carry you far out to sea, away from this place.

Away from Bowser.

This could be your only shot of escaping imprisonment and going home.

“I beg of you!”

… You could...

“Y/N!”

… Oh, damn it all.

Your eyes snap back up to Falkner and you immediately start to feel the burning of your cheek, as if to remind you of what he did.

But already, your scruples are disintegrating. A direct cry for help is a tough thing to ignore, after all.

On shaking knees, you reclaim the step you'd made in retreat and instead move towards Bowser, tipping your head back and peeling your tongue from the roof of your bone-dry mouth. “B-!” You falter on the first syllable and have to swallow roughly before trying again. “Bowser!”

Almost as soon as it had begun, the thunderous roar falls silent, echoing off in the distance until it's lost over the crashing waves.

Falkner continues to gasp and whimper inside the colossal fist, but those haunting, blood-red eyes turn gradually in your direction, pinning you once again in their subtle glow.

Your legs threaten to buckle as you realise he's now focusing solely on you.

You've no idea if he can be reasoned with in this state, but you know you can't do much else but try. “Release him, Bowser!” you yelp without an ounce of any real authority, “I'm the one who ran from you! Not him! Put him down!”

The docks are still and disarmingly placid for a time, disturbed only by the sounds of Falkner struggling to free himself, and the breaths that enter and leave a set of gargantuan lungs.

The hulking Koopa continues to glower down at you, his nostrils flared wide to reveal a red-hot glow from within, like a burning core.

Just as you begin to fear that your plea will go unheeded, Bowser hisses through his fangs, and then, without much ceremony, he simply opens his fist and Falkner goes tumbling out of it, landing awkwardly on his ankle and eliciting a yelp of pain. Still, he wastes no time in whirling over onto his backside and kicking madly to push himself out from under the behemoth's shadow.

You follow his retreat from the corner of an eye, but you don't break Bowser's stare.

You daren't, even as he takes a lumbering step in your direction. The ground underneath your shudders with the impact, as though the island itself is afraid of his wrath.

Another step covers much of the distance between you, and the realisation that he's coming your way snaps you out of your trance. You've given Falkner a chance to escape. Now, you'll be taking yours.

Skirts flying, you whip yourself about and take off in a dead sprint. Behind you, the air quivers as Bowser releases an urgent chuff, the heat from his breath washing disconcertingly over the back of your neck and spurring you to kick up your heels.

However, you barely make it ten paces before a colossal palm suddenly descends from the sky and crashes into the ground just ahead of you. You let out a yelp and hit the brakes, but you've already come too close to his hand, and so, like a venus fly trap closes around a hapless insect, Bowser's fingers spring to action, sweeping you up off your feet and pinning you against the soft, warm leather of his palm.

“No, no, no!” you bleat, scrabbling desperately at thick scales as the ground falls away below you and you find yourself lifted up to Bowser's big, yellow muzzle.

All you can do is wait for the crunch. For the pain. To hear your bones grind together when he eventually clenches his fist.

You're ashamed to cry in front of him, but you're too afraid to stop. Nausea churns your stomach and you screw up your face in anticipation, eyes clamped tightly closed.

The agony of waiting is almost too much for you to bear.

You're too wrapped up in your fear to notice that Bowser has yet to even slightly tighten his grasp. If anything, his hold is shockingly gentle. The pad of an immense thumb is pressed against your belly, exerting just enough pressure to keep you safely tucked in the hollow of his palm.

Several, unbearable seconds tick by whilst you quiver and breathe as though you've just run a mile.

You nearly lose your composure, biting down on your tongue to stop yourself from demanding that he just get your punishment over with.

And then, you feel it.

A gentle pressure, so light that you'd think a butterfly must have landed on your neck, but when your eyes burst open and you catch sight of a monolithic finger all but filling your field of view, you realise what a fool you were to close your eyes at all.

Bowser, it seems, has raised his unoccupied hand towards you, and the very tip of a single claw has come to rest in the hollow of your throat. You can feel it's ghosting presence as you swallow thickly and your larynx presses a little more solidly against it for all of a second.

You're too stunned to make a move.

With a gentleness that doesn't at all befit his size, Bowser slowly lifts his claw, and in doing so, your head is pushed up, then turned slightly to one side, exposing your cheek.

The cheek that had been viciously struck.

Why is he...?

Pinned under the weight of his scrutiny, you fall utterly motionless, your mouth stuck open as if you're emitting a silent scream.

A lonely tear escapes the confines of your lashes and trickles down to your chin when it dangles precariously for a before it falls, plopping down onto Bowser's fingertip.

The behemoth's muzzle shifts close, and those dark and dangerous eyes narrow to thin slits as he inspects your cheek. You'd almost entirely forgotten about the throbbing ache lancing across your face, and even now, adrenaline is doing wonders at keeping most of the discomfort at bay.

All of a sudden, Bowser's pupils shrink and a thrum of aggression starts up in his chest like the engine of some ancient and powerful machine. Drawing his head away from you, he twists it over his bulging shoulder and aims a vicious snarl in the direction that Falkner had fled.

You can't help but flinch when his fingers twitch around you, but he must have noticed the movement, because not a second later, the growl is cut off and he swings his nose around to peer down at you again, his slitted pupils expanding like ink in water once they land on you.

Your pulse is jackhammering against your skin. Nothing about this is adding up. He seems more agitated about Falkner than about you. But... you're the escaped prisoner...

You don't have much time to ponder over his strange behaviour though. Just as carefully as it had appeared, the Koopa's forefinger slides gradually from beneath your chin and you can finally gulp down a greedy breath of air, realising belatedly that you'd stopped breathing the moment he touched you.

All around you, the behemoth starts to move, pulling you close and tucking you against his chest as he takes step after impossibly lengthy step, turning his immense bulk about to head back across the island to your gloomy, familiar prison.

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

You used to wonder if it was simply Bowser's ostentatious taste in décor that made him choose such grand, wide doorways to separate the rooms of his castle. Now however, as the gargantuan Koopa squeezes himself through the entrance to your given chambers, his shell scraping noisily against the wooden doorframes, you realise the design might lend more to practicality than aesthetic, especially if this... transformation happens on a regular basis around here.

God, you hope not...

You've remained stiff as a board in Bowser's unwavering grasp all the way back, fearful of provoking a violent reaction out of him like you had when you tried to struggle out of Falkner's grip.

Shoulders sagging as he releases a massive sigh, the Koopa trundles to a stop at the foot of your bed and at long, long last, he peels you away from his chest. Your ears ring after so much time spent having to listen to a mighty heart thudding rhythmically right next to your head.

Again, with a care that you certainly never would have expected him to possess, Bowser cups you in his palms and lowers you onto the plush sheets, sliding his hands out from underneath you as if he's placing down a fragile, porcelain doll.

As soon as you're out of his grasp, he deflates, heaving a billowing breath and all but dropping onto all fours in front of you. Alarmed, you scramble backwards until your spine hits the bed's headboard, blurting out a yelp when Bowser's chin drops down to thwack on the sheets in front of you. The weight of his skull alone causes the bed to buckle and groan in protest, but to your astonishment, it somehow manages to support him as he gets himself settled, peering down the length of his snout and ensnaring you in that ruby-red gaze once more.

Your fingers flex into the sheets around you, bunching them up and wrinkling the fine cotton.

'Now what's he doing?'

His eyes are glued to your cheek again, his intense stare broken by the occasional, languid blink.

You're not expecting it when he suddenly moves.

He only extends his neck a little to bring his head closer to you, but he's so massive, the motion it far more jarring from your perspective. With a shriek, you slam your eyes shut and instinctively throw up your hands, pressing them hard against the soft muzzle, as if they alone are enough to keep him from advancing on you any further. To your immense shock however, the moment your fingers meet the warm surface of his nose, Bowser falls still.

You risk prying open an eyelid to peep up at him.

Judging by the impossibly wide smile that now stretches across his face, he's apparently delighted by this new development.

This is the first time you've touched his face.

Your palm is almost lost to a vast expanse of yellow skin, sitting right on the ridge of his nose between his flaring nostrils.

The Koopa's own gaze is heavy-lidded, each pupil angled to keep you within his sights whilst a pleased hum travels through his throat and causes the bed to quake underneath you.

His fangs remain safely tucked behind his lips, and as the seconds tick by without your hand getting snapped off, the tension in your fingers gradually begins to dissipate.

With your heartbeat receding as well, you allow yourself to lightly stroke just the tips of your fingers down his snout until they pause on the cusp of his upper lip, drawing a reverent shudder from the almighty juggernaut.

Pressing your teeth together, you inhale slowly through your nose, and murmur, “...Bowser?”

It's as if you've just broken him from some kind of trance.

The King's face suddenly twists up and he emits a throaty groan, like he's in pain.

Quick as a flash, you tear your hand from his muzzle and press yourself back as far away as you can when he peels his chin from the bed and brings both of his gargantuan paws up to clutch at his head, staggering to his feet.

“Bowser!” you cry again, this time in alarm, “What's happening!?”

A disconcerting notion occurs to you - that he could be on the verge of going bezerk - and you hurriedly throw back the covers with a view to scramble off the bed and make a break for the doors. But as soon as you move, the Koopa's eyes spring open again and zero in on you, trapping you in a stare so full of frantic desperation that you stop at once, though more from confusion than fear.

And so, you're left to do nothing but watch as the jagged behemoth undergoes another, painful transformation.

The heavy shell on his back grows smaller, losing the serrated quality of its spikes. His tail shortens, his jutting fangs soften around their edges. The sweeping horns on his head recede back inside his rapidly shrinking skull until only their tips remain poking out from between his mess of a mane.

You almost choke on a gushing sigh of relief when at last, the King is back to his regular, brutish self, knelt on the ground at the foot of your bed - though it strikes you quite abruptly that you shouldn't be feeling reassured by Bowser's presence, no matter which form he takes.

Despite your misgivings, you still find yourself croaking out, “A-are you okay?”

Arduously, he braces a palm on the end of the bed and uses it to push himself up onto his feet again, eventually dragging his eyes over to you. He gives you a brief, searching glance, focusing for an uncomfortable minute on your face, then, without a word, the Koopa spins around and staggers purposefully towards the adjoining bathroom, disappearing through the door.

Plagued by uncertainty, you allow your fists to tentatively unclench around the bedsheets, lowering them into your lap as the squeak of a tap filters out from beyond the ensuite door, followed by the unmistakable rush of running water.

Another squeak... and a few moments later, the Koopa comes stomping back into the room, this time with a wet flannel clutched inside his meaty paw.

“You should've let me pulverise 'im,” he grumbles, stalking around the bed until he comes to the side you're sitting on.

Gobsmacked, you let your mouth fall open, close it, then open it once more to ask, “I... I beg your pardon?”

“That GUY!” he snaps, “You shouldn't'a stopped me. He deserved the worst!”

You blink stupidly, lifting your eyebrows in tandem until they sit high on your forehead. “I'm sorry.. Are we... not going to talk about what just happened to you!?”

“What's there to talk about?” he grunts, flicking his tail up onto the bed before sinking his hefty backside down after it, fidgeting with the sodden flannel between his claws, “You got hurt. I got mad.”

“You got mad!?” Scoffing at the absurd understatement, you continue, “Bowser - you turned into a gigantic, terrifying monster who looked like he was three seconds away from chewing me up and spitting me back out! All because somebody slapped me!?”

You expect an uproarious retort, which would definitely be in keeping with your usual repartee with him, so it comes as a shock when Bowser glares heatedly at you for a few moments, then merely turns his nose away from you, hiding his expression.

It's... notably uncharacteristic of the hot-tempered Koopa. So much so that it prompts you to tilt your head and call, “Bowser?”

You can't see his face beyond the shell that covers his back, but motion on the covers draws your gaze down to see his tail. Slowly, the appendage curls inwards, tucking itself up against his thigh. Dejected.

“You didn't deserve what he did...”

You look up at Bowser again, blinking owlishly to find his arm reaching back towards you, though the King keeps his face stubbornly pointed in the opposite direction. The little, white flannel is draped across his proffered palm.

Keeping a dubious eye on the Koopa, you hesitantly stretch your hand out to his, pinching the fabric between your thumb and forefinger and pausing for a second to marvel over how cold it is. Drawing it into your grasp, you waste no time in bringing it up to your face and gently pressing the cool material against your cheek, unable to keep back the tiny smile that grows on your face with that slight modicum of relief.

You recognise his gesture is meant to be a peace offering, and you are grateful for the flannel... But you're also still bitter.

“So,” you hum pensively, eyeing his robust arm as it drops down to rest on the bed beside him, “I didn't deserve that. But I do deserve to be locked up and held prisoner in your castle?”

“I keep you safe.” His head twitches in your direction with a cursory show of teeth that are hardly very frightening anymore, not now that you've seen what they can become, “I keep you fed and warm and happy. I'd never hurt you.”

“No. You keep me fed and warm, and that's it,” you tell him sharply, “I don't feel safe here. And I am far from happy.”

You're more than aware that you're antagonising him, but you think you're damn well within your rights to do so. It isn't enough that he keeps you locked up in this castle and forbids you your freedom, but now he expects you to act as if you're happy about it too?

Another, disgruntled noise leaves him as he lurches off the bed, landing on his feet with a thud.

"Where are you going?" you demand.

"I'm-!" Bowser heaves a sigh, running a clawed hand through his thick, fiery mane. “I'm goin' to get you a proper ice-pack...” Trailing off, the King tromps heavily across your room, making his agitation known with every, deliberate step until he reaches the door.

Your teeth tug at a piece of loose skin on your lower lip. “... Bowser.”

He pauses, his hulking frame suddenly looking so small and vulnerable in the gargantuan doorway, with one of his hands sitting poised upon the handle.

Even from the bed, you can see the flash of his crimson iris swivelling in your direction.

You try to regard him passively, but the ice in your gaze is starting to melt fraction by fraction, and you don't know whether he can see it or not. “... Thanks,” you call gently anyway, lifting your shoulder into a shrug, “For... you know, for scaring Falkner off.”

You watch his eyelid widen, as if he's surprised to hear a word of thanks, from you of all people.

There's even the minutest quiver in his lip as it tries to tug itself up into the ghost of a smile. But then, he gives his head a rough shake, and the smile is gone.

“Just protectin' what's mine,” he rumbles, pushing the door open and slipping through the gap. The door closes again a second later, and your ears catch the sound of a heavy key sliding into the lock and turning, sending the tumblers clunking home.

… What's his...

Right.

A hollow space expands between your ribs, the familiar hole that disappointment often leaves behind.

Drawing your knees up against your chest, you wrap an arm around yourself for comfort, keeping the flannel pressed to your cheek as you wait for him to return with that ice pack.

#mario #super mario bros movie #bowser #bowser x reader #physical abuse #giga bowser #g/t #giant bowser #protective bowser #possessive bowser #the physical abuse isn't done by Bowser btw #hurt/comfort #pining #unrequited crush

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vixstarria · 6 months

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there was a great piece of art posted here awhile ago (i SCOURED but couldn’t find it again so if you or anyone knows what i’m talking about pls let me know the artist) where astarion and tav were sleeping, astarion was having a nightmare and grabbing his arm super tight, but when tav tried to wake him up he attacked them on accident and was then overcome by remorse. if you’re still taking requests (if not pls disgard) i think it would be really interesting to hear your take on something like that in a fic, especially with your other pieces about their relationship along with his healing journey

Funny you should mention this, I happened to have a small piece along those lines that I had written for something else but scrapped. I've now expanded it, here it is:

Astarion was thrashing in another nightmare. Usually his night terrors paralysed him, but this one was different. You thought nothing of it when you reached out to try to wake him, when suddenly you found yourself pinned to the bed by your neck. He was leaning over you with an animalistic snarl, fangs exposed, and not a trace of humanity behind his eyes. Some rage or pain fuelled demon was wearing his body. Astarion wasn’t there.

The hand on your neck squeezed, fingernails piercing your flesh. You couldn’t breathe. Your trachea was about the be crushed.

Every moment seemed to stretch out into a lifetime as your mind frantically searched for anything you could do, suddenly grasping for survival.

Knee him between his legs? You couldn’t, not the way you were lying. Smash something blunt against his head? There was nothing within reach. Cast a spell? There was nothing you could do fast enough, and your fickle patron seemed to have diverted their attention elsewhere while you slept.

As the inevitability of your demise started to sink in, you saw a trickle of blood running down Astarion’s neck, from the same spots as where his nails were digging into your skin.

The rings.

You shut your eyes and bit down on the inside of your cheek, hard. As your mouth filled with your own blood, you heard a gasp. The grip on your neck loosened, and you instinctively rolled out of bed, coughing and spitting. Your mind was still racing, immediately switching to thinking of ways to prevent this from ever happening again.

Sleeping draughts? Can he drink that? Or something that can keep nightmares away? Is there some kind of amulet of dreamless nights? Or do I just keep an empty bottle on the nightstand, something that will just shatter loudly if need be? Or-

“What have I done..?” Astarion said in a horrified whisper. “I hurt you, didn’t I? I’m so sorry...”

Oh stop fixing and just be there, you jackass! you thought to yourself, as you rose from the floor and flung your arms around him.

“No, no, I’m okay, it’s not your fault.” You took his face into your hands. “Look at me, love. It’s not your fault, you know it isn’t.”

“How tragically typical of me would it be, to kill the one person I care for? The one I want to protect.” Astarion’s voice was small, flat, quiet. “I shouldn't sleep next to you anymore. I can't be without you, I guess I can’t be with you either.”

“Don’t say that, please. It will be fine.”

“And what did you... how did... where is all this blood from?” he said finally.

“The enchanted rings,” you said, getting up to grab a healing potion. “I bit myself to wake you.” You took a sip, swishing it around your mouth, and handed the vial to Astarion. He took it, too stunned to say anything.

“At least if you tore my throat out, yours would have ripped itself out as well. Imagine how stupid we’d look when someone finally found us,” you continued.

“Really? You’re joking about this?! This isn't funny,” he said, looking at your incredulously.

Good, outrage was better than anguish, you thought.

“No, it’s not funny, it’s romantic,” you persisted. “But we’re never taking these rings off, you hear?” you added softly, sinking back on the bed and sliding onto Astarion’s lap. It was only once your body started shaking in uncontrollable sobs that you realised you had forgotten to feel anything for your own sake.

“Never,” he whispered, drawing you closer and pressing his lips against your forehead.

#bg3 #astarion #baldur's gate 3 #astarion x tav #asks

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dancingbirdie · 9 months

Note

hi I love your writing and I wanted to ask if you could write soft Lae'zel with tav. Since it would be interesting and Lae'zel even when she is soft isn’t what we tend to think of as soft. Again I love your writing and I hope your day is going well sorry for rambling!

Anon, this was so much fun to write - I hope you enjoy it as well! I LOVE Lae'zel. She's my in-game warrior wife. Hopefully I captured her persona well enough. xoxoxo

Source of My Bruises/Source of My Joy

Rating: Teen

Word Count: 1.1K

Warnings/Tags: Descriptions of injury/blood/violence, angst, FLUFF, Lae'zel x f!Tav, Act 2 spoilers, Minor Act 3 spoilers.

She remained hunched over Tav’s hands, like a supplicant before an altar. The sight brought tears to Tav’s eyes. She had never seen Lae’zel so affected.

A whiplike sting across her sternum and collarbone. Warm liquid flooding down her chest. Unforgiving coarseness of jagged stone under her. A guttural cry of outrage. It was all Tav could remember before losing consciousness.

Slowly, she opened sleep-crusted eyes to take in her current surroundings.

She was lying in Lae’zel’s tent. The Githyanki was seated next to her, polishing a greatsword with singular, intense focus. Her momentary distraction afforded Tav the opportunity to study the warrior, appreciate her fearsomeness. Her austere beauty.

Not that Tav had ever been inclined toward bouts of lovesick ogling, but there were precious few moments when she could truly appreciate the Githyanki uninterrupted. Lae’zel was a force of nature to behold. Like a supernova made flesh.

Tav knew she intimidated and exasperated the others in their party, but not her. Tav had been captivated by Lae’zel from the instant she dropped in front of her on the Nautiloid ship, poised to cut her down like chaff separated from wheat. It had been like coming face to face with a natural disaster. Glorious. Fearsome. Staggering.

Gazing at her now, Tav took in the deep furrow of Lae’zel’s brows. The harsh lines of a grimace etched around her mouth. The slight flaring of her nostrils. Her pursed lips. The rhythmic motion of her arms as she cleaned the blade. Her body was almost vibrating with pent-up energy.

Without further delaying the inevitable, Tav made a weak attempt to clear her throat and announce her consciousness. But the movement sent a surge of pain spearing through her chest, causing her to cough harder. Bringing a hand to her chest reflexively, Tav noticed for the first time the thick weave of bandages covering her upper torso. The herbal, earthy smell of some medicinal salve wafted to her nose. What in the seven hells had happened?

Of course, Tav had sustained her fair share of wounds on their journey thus far, but she had never been so badly injured as to warrant this level of care. Whatever had happened to her, it must have brought her a hair’s width from death.

“Chk. Cease your squirming. The bandages will slip,” Lae’zel commanded, having dropped her weapon and clambered to Tav’s side to readjust the wound dressing.

“What-” attempted Tav, before pausing to try to swallow the cotton feeling in her mouth.

Sensing her discomfort, Lae’zel reached for a carafe of water beside Tav’s head. Gently, more gently than Tav would have thought possible for the Githyanki, Lae’zel cupped the back of Tav’s head and helped her take small sips from the pitcher.

“Thank you,” Tav murmured, resting back on the pillow once more. But despite the softness of Lae’zel’s touch moments before, the warrior now glared at Tav with barely restrained ire.

“Istik! You were foolish to stumble into that Cloaker’s lair alone. You would have succumbed to your wounds had I not reached you in time,” she spat. But there was an undercurrent of some new emotion in her voice.

Tav’s eyes widened in surprise at Lae’zel’s words. Slowly, as if she were dredging the memories from some deep pit in her mind, the encounter moments before Tav slipped into unconsciousness resurfaced.

She, Lae’zel, and the rest of the party members had been exploring the ruins of the Temple of Shar. There had been an alcove in one of the temple antechambers. It resembled other passages they had seen leading to the Underdark, or at least that’s what Tav had thought. She’d scaled the crumbling wall to get a better look, explore the area further. It wasn’t until she was standing in the area proper that she realized the alcove was much larger than it had appeared, its ceiling far higher than what her eyes could see. The Cloaker had struck from above her, its barbed tail lacerating the flesh of her chest and shoulder. She had heard someone cry out from behind her, but the wound had been too great for her to remain conscious.

The anguished cry had come from Lae’zel, Tav realized now with certainty. The truth of it struck her speechless. She had never heard the Githyanki utter any sound like that before.

Tav swallowed thickly, keeping her eyes steady on Lae’zel.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” she whispered honestly.

Lae’zel had been opening her mouth, preparing to rebuff Tav’s counterpoint, but snapped it shut in surprise as she realized the words Tav had spoken were not stoking an argument, as they usually tended to do, but rather quelling it.

In the blink of an eye, the inferno that had been Lae’zel’s barely-contained rage and distress simmered. Her hands trembled slightly as they took Tav’s in a firm grip.

Tav watched as she leaned over, lowering her forehead to rest against the backs of Tav’s hands. She felt Lae’zel shudder, saw her back heave with stilted, uneven breaths. She was holding onto Tav like she was a lifeline.

“Zhak vo'n'ash duj. Source of my bruises,” Lae’zel whispered after a while, her voice heavy with emotion. “I was certain I would lose you to that cursed creature.”

“I can only assume you tore it limb from limb. I hate I missed such a scene,” Tav said in an attempt at levity.

“I eviscerated its body and burned the remains. It deserved nothing less,” Lae’zel swore in a muffled voice. She remained hunched over Tav’s hands, like a supplicant before an altar. The sight brought tears to Tav’s eyes. She had never seen Lae’zel so affected.

“You will never lose me,” Tav said in a soft whisper. “I am yours, Lae’zel. I will forever be yours, even in death.”

Lae’zel lifted her head to meet Tav’s gaze.

“We are bound,” she intoned.

“We are bound,” Tav responded, lifting a hand to cup the Githyanki’s cheek. She marveled at the way Lae’zel seemed to melt into her touch, her eyes fluttering closed, her breaths evening out.

“Come here,” Tav said, after a few quiet moments had passed. “Lie down with me. We both need rest.”

Lae’zel’s eyes flickered open at the suggestion, a torn expression on her face. The need to protect versus the need for comfort warred plainly across her features. But Tav would have none of her valiant posturing tonight. She knew that both of them needed the embrace of one other, after everything that had happened. Tav gripped her cheek more firmly.

“The others will keep watch, Lae’zel. Stay with me now. Please,” Tav urged.

Lae’zel stared at her in silence for a beat longer before finally giving in. Stretching out her long legs, the warrior relaxed into Tav’s side, careful not to disturb the bandages wrapped across her torso.

Tav took Lae’zel’s hand in hers once more and gave it a firm squeeze.

“I am yours,” she assured Lae’zel again, just for good measure, as her eyelids grew heavy with the need for rest.

Sleep was quickly coming upon her. She thought she heard Lae’zel’s quiet reply in Githyanki before she slipped away, but Tav did not understand the words.

“Zhak vo’n’fynh duj.”

The phrase carried her into a dreamless, peaceful slumber.

#dancingbirdiewrites #bg3 fanfiction #lae'zel x tav #lae'zel x reader #lae'zel fanfic #bg3 lae'zel #lae'zel #lae'zel romance #baldur's gate 3 fic

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netherfeildren · 6 months

Text

The Cassandra Complex : Interlude : Tartarus

Series Masterlist

(Din Djarin x F!Reader)

Content Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence; Torture; Murder; Blood and gore; Self harm; Suicidal ideations; Depression; Unreliable narrator; Alcohol and drug use; Overall very dark themes

A/N: The chapter is what the tags warn. Please, heed them carefully. Short because it's only an interlude, but the next chapter is almost done!

Rating: Explicit 18+

Word Count: 3.5K

Read on AO3

INTERLUDE : TARTARUS

Can you eat winter? […] Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? […] Can you punctuate yourself in silence?

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

You are captured at the start of the cold season.

The first man you ever killed had been old. Weathered and beaten down by the galaxy and life, and forgotten or absconded to a decrepit and abandoned planet. Once thriving and rich, it had been bled dry and starved by the Empire, and now remained to stand only as a reminder to others as what not to be, a warning of how you’d end up if you did not submit.

Your master had hunted him for months, a mania about the search that was mouth slicked ravenous and vicious. Something sick about the way he’d obsessed about the man, murmuring his name over and over again at all hours until you were sure you knew the vowels and consonants of it better than your own. You’d never discovered the root of the obsession, the reason for the killing, and when you’d finally found him, he was not at all what you’d expected; brittle boned, white of hair, skin soft and folded over so that it sagged and drooped around his frame, seeming to hang around him out of mere sheer habit.

You’d swept into his mind, pilfered and pillaged and violated it; his past, his whole life, his family, cradled in the blink of your eye. You’d pulled his joints from their sockets, his fingernails from their beds, and his eyes from their cavities. You’d taken him apart piece by little piece, a slow going saturation of pain until little remained of the creature. Until the final piece you’d pulled from him was his breath, his very life, swallowed and settled heavy into your own soul.

You had been very young when you’d killed him, a girl of only seven years old.

You’d once heard that stars are made of a different matter than the four worldly elements – a quintessence – that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. You’d swallowed so many souls thinking they might be stars during that time. Perhaps, in an attempt to take some light within you, infuse yourself in the goodness of another’s quintessence. Young and naive and untried. You’d learned eventually how wrong you were. The damage you’d unknowingly wrought upon yourself. And when you remember it all now, the unending reaping, you think: I was young once, and you wish you could cling to that child, beg her to forgive you, beg her to run earlier.

Perhaps, that had been the beginning of the end, and everything after that had been nothing more than one eternally futile battle towards inevitable failure.

For some idiotic reason, you return to Corellia after you part ways with him. Idiotic or desperate, who can really tell, but without a doubt, bitter and angry and devastated. Filled with a keen missing and a fury and an outrage that he’d left you, that you’d allowed yourself to be left. That you’d pushed him away. That really, the destruction of everything was your fault. The day it had suddenly hit you that you’d destroyed everything for nothing, that you’d destroyed the two of you for no real reason at all except for petty and inconsequential fear, had been a monumental sort of devastation. You’d not been able to make it out of your dingy rented bed for days afterwards. And so you’d chosen to believe that this was the end of destiny, rather than the beginning of what had always been fated to you. For choosing to believe that you’d destroyed it yourself was better than the truth, that he had never really been meant to be yours in the first place. And if it were anything else, you’d finish it, destroy it to completion. It if was something less, you’d smash it like a rock, tear it as if it were a piece of parchment, but it is not, for it is your heart, your very heart, your memory.

The only thing left.

While you’d been with him you’d thought that you were healing, that you were healed. That you’d been made whole in his image. That after everything, after so much darkness, one single silver flame to illuminate the night would shine a light on your newfound completeness. But you’d realized, later, when it was too late, how wrong you’d been to think so. Love does not mend the torn seams back into rightness – it fractures the whole thing wide open, splits you down the middle.

And you’re so full of the most poisoned sort of regrets, a living, breathing, fire filled thing that seemed to exhume you from your own misery and would not let you exist peacefully in the deathlessness you’d have chosen for yourself. But it was impossible to go backwards now. Like any unloved thing, you’d not been sure if you really existed until he’d put his hands on you, and now, to have been forced to return to that half life, to be forced to exist in the purgatory of his aftermath – it was fury inducing, rage awakening.

All my hurts hurt worse now, and there is no escape and no reprieve, and it always feels as if the sky seems to peer down on me in a strange and pitiful way. How did that feel? It asks. I’m sorry I caused harm, I reply.

Time no longer exists, and so all you know is that it’s been an unknowable amount of nothing since you’d last seen him.

You ache all the time, try and forget, can’t help but remember

You’d always known exactly how it would play out. Step by step the course your life would take – the Force guided you, and yet, you were still lost. You were still confused. You’d known that he would leave, you’d always known. Just as you’d known you would be the reason he left. You’d waited for it, and yet, when the moment arrived for him to go, you were shocked. And hurt. You were hurt that he would leave you even though you had pushed him away, even though you had always expected it to happen, even though you were the perpetrator of your own abandoning and had always known that you would be.

And so, perhaps, you’d continued to return to Corellia despite knowing it was dangerous for you there, that there were whispers of a dark creature scurrying along the planet’s underbelly, that they’d seen your face all that time ago and rumors still abounded. But it had been the last place you’d found each other, and so some idealistic, stupidly desperate part of you thought that, perhaps, fate would look upon you kindly once again. That dark red thread of fate woven into action one more time, ringing taut with purpose and destiny.

Perhaps, you return looking for a fight or a beating or some form of punishment, certain that you’d find it in that cesspool of vice and crime and corruption. In that place that knows what sort of creature you pretend not to be.

Eventually, however, you get more than you’d bargained for. Or maybe, precisely what you’d wanted.

You’re betrayed by a slippery little Twi’lek. One who’d pretended at being interested in some easy, fun drinking and debauchery. One who you were not aware had awaited the return of a prize such as you for a long, long time. One who’d held the image of your face and your power in the cradle of her mind, ravenous for the moment when she’d finally be afforded a taste and a pay out.

If you could not lose yourself in anything else, him, or even something worse – the dark called to you again so often now, it frightened you – then you’d lose yourself in a bottle, a game of Sabacc, even, on occasion, or when things were particularly dire, a little bit of Spice, just to take the edge off. To make you forget. The smell of the past is everywhere, the smell of too many illusions, too many truths, and you try and resist all the time, you feel yourself actively resisting. But you lie in the awareness of it so often, in the miserable hold of rented beds where no comfort and no warmth is ever to be found on so many nights, that at any moment something terrible could happen. It’s not gone, that coldness inside of you. It’s not gone, the dark side, and it calls to you louder now that he is absent.

You consider yourself in new and strange lights now. A miasma of girl and power and tragedy and myth, always, always the myth of you. You are aware of yourself, of that myth, in so many lights.

Violence has changed me; my body has grown cold. Now there is only mind, cautious and dim, with the sense it is being twisted. I have never loved being alive, and it is difficult to remember that I should.

Din has changed me; my heart is half stone, half devoured. The sun has gone away, tucked inside of him, and I am always cold now, and even though I can't see it anymore, him, it’s comforting to know he’s still out there, somewhere. That the sun still exists.

And so, in need of credits, the Twi’lek finds it easier to sell you off to the highest bidder when she first captures you – that being a league of fanatics who had, at the height of the Empire, venerated the Sith as lords – Gods even – who bent the knee to the dark side in hopes of a power greater than they even really knew the truth of.

Drugged and cuffed after you’d been too stupid or uncaring to even try and defend yourself, you let them take you. You let them take you. You remember that first night in the hole in the ground you’d sentenced yourself to, before she’d left you to your fate with your captors, arm broken, bone jutting grotesquely from your skin, she’d looked down at you from her great height as you lay limp and ready for more breaking on the dirty ground of the cell deep in that Tartarean pit, brow split open and drooling crimson, glassy eyes wide and unseeing, filled only with the memories of gleaming metal, she’d called you a monster with the greatest of contempt and hatred in her eyes. And you’d laughed and laughed and laughed at the reality of you now, sanity gone away, only a little bit, only a little bit; after all, there had always been more madness than goodness anyways.

And you’d wanted to cry: I am not a monster! I am not a monster! But you knew she would not believe you.

This is only what you deserve, creature. Spit from her mouth like venom. You think of the Thalassian crone, all that time ago, or only yesterday: How does it feel to be nothing? She was kinder to you than you know this will be, and for a brief moment you pretend to miss her, fantasize with the idea of him coming to save you once again.

You’d wanted to lie and say that you were not a monster any longer, that you’d changed, that you were better, different, but that would have been a lie, for at your core you knew there would always live within you something of a slightly monstrous countenance, no matter what you did or made of yourself. And what you wanted to say, even more than that, was that perhaps a monster was not such a terrible thing to be. Perhaps, if you’d ever been given the chance, you could have served as a shelter and a warning, all at once, for a family you’d never been allowed to have. Perhaps, if you’d ever been given the opportunity to have been that, nothing much else would have really mattered.

You want to tell her his name. To let it serve as proof of the only goodness that has ever lived inside of you. But you do not. And you let them keep you for far too long, lying in that dark, damp hell, letting them hurt you.

She returns often, the pretty, purple Twi’lek with the sharp teeth. She takes Din’s earrings from you, that first day, and if you’d still had tongue and teeth and voice to thank her for the chance to look upon them, you would have.

They pull your skin from your bones and your bones from your skin, over and over again, and you try and lie that you don’t know what you did to deserve this, but you do. You do know. You remember the old man, the very first one, you think of all the countless others after him, the flash of shrieking beskar. You remember every single crime and sin and face and scream. Every scream, but loudest of all, your own.

You exist only in thousands of agonies.

And they’re creative in their torture and punishment, caring in the imagination of it. They burn the flesh from your bones only so that the Force can heal you back to strength. Slowly, excruciatingly, keeping you drugged and chained, diminishing your connection to yourself. Beaten and flogged and savaged over and over again. You think, or you tell yourself, that you feel little of it, or none at all.

More than anything, you feel so acutely how little it all matters.

Why have you done this to yourself? You’re sure you should ask. I don’t know. What is this all about? Be honest. Anger. Are you angry? Yes. You already knew this.

Perhaps, your mind has finally broken and fragmented in a real and irrevocable way. Perhaps, this is finally destiny finding itself.

You lie in the dark and let it hold you as it did when you were a child, alone and enslaved. You watch the water snake through the cracks of the stone walls, and you are so small, and suddenly, there’s a hole in your cheek and you heal and heal and tear apart again; taste the outside air with your newly grown tongue, and the blood that pools in your mouth reminds you that you’re still alive and made of nothing but regret.

You hold one single comfort like a newly blooming flower in your mind, the only thing that remains: We were together once. I forget the rest, before, now, it no longer matters. We were together once.

For an interminable age, you allow yourself to be poked and prodded, cut and flayed, experimented on – the silly notion these cultists hold that perhaps they could harness your power for themselves, bottle it. Hurt, you allow yourself to be hurt for too long. They never break you beyond repair, but they get very close, many times, and sometimes, you hope it’ll be too much, it needs to be too much just once, and then it could, perhaps, all end.

Your bones ache and wounds open where the too sharp edges of you abrade against the too hard stone, and you relish in the healing and reopening, relish in the suffering. You remind yourself that you chose this, that you continue to actively choose this, that all your choices are yours now, even the losses, and you caress that secret piece of you in the furthest, darkest recess of your mind, your lifeline, and it feels so good to finally be in control of the things that hurt you. Even if it is a false sense of control, even if it’s all only a reality of your mind's own making.

And sometimes, when the delirium has sunk its fangs in you entirely, and you almost don’t know who you are, you think: surely he’ll come to get me. He doesn’t know you’re here. Surely I didn’t fall in love with him just for this. He doesn’t know you’re here. If he knew, he’d come, he would, he would.

Two years is a very long time to be away from a thing you need so much.

I no longer care what sound it makes when I am silenced.

Two years is a very long time to forget.

If I die, it is not this life I will miss, it is him I will miss.

But an even longer time to remember.

How to forget? How to forget? How to forget?

Eventually, you lose yourself, and the brightness of torture becomes the brightness of night, and you’re gone within it.

You consider yourself: the myth, the archetype, the soul, me, me, the Cassandra, the Cassandra.

[Scream] [Scream] [Scream] [Scream]

Din.

You cling to him through the night, through the brightness, through the nothing. You dream of his hands and his hair and the vividness of him. You dream of that pure, golden heart. You dream of beskar and space and being loved.

You dream of being loved.

You do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You don’t know how long you allow yourself to be held within this womb of punishment, but you know that it is a very long time.

And then one day, unbidden and unexpected: one moment, you’re hungry, a strange and cold and gnawing hunger like something you’ve never felt before. A hunger of the soul. Your mind, so hazy that sometimes you don’t know if you remember your own name, that at certain instances the only image you can recall is the gleam of beskar – you smell vetiver and sweat and blaster smoke and the leather oil of his gloves. You hear his voice. The feeling of his hand in yours the second before you wake, and for a single moment before your eyes open, you’re somewhere else besides this damp Tartarus you’ve condemned yourself to, somewhere green and alive with him.

The third time you meet: You blink, and it’s all darkness and steel bars, and then, a dim light far in the distance? No. A blade of silver beskar.

He’s here. Near.

She had said to you once, your now made sweet Twi’lek: You’re going to die here. Surely, not soon. But one day, we’ll pull your life from you. Once we’ve pulled everything else, taken all we can, we’ll take your life too. And then you’ll be nothing, erased from memory, erased from myth. Nothing at all forever.

You’d taken her words with consideration. You felt strongly that you could not die any longer in any way that truly mattered. If nothing more, than for the memory of him, the memory of that togetherness could never be taken from you, it would always exist and could never be killed, and so what more mattered after that? Nothing really. They could take your life, your power, but they could not take Din, they could not take the myth of what the two of you had created together.

And always the myth, always the myth. You understand now, after an age in something worse than darkness, that you are yourself the creation of myth, and myth is indestructible.

She is made sweet and venerating in the end, and she dies so beautifully, your Twi’lek, and in the singular instant before you pull her heart from her chest, you recall her words from before, how like the Thalassian she’d seemed, nothing at all forever, and you tell her the second truth you’ve now come to understand more surely than anything else: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes, and I am no longer a Sith.”

You free yourself from the cruel and unforgiving hands of the dark for the second time in your life.

You’d thought once that you’d never again let yourself be captured, never again enslaved, and to have let yourself end up here like this of your own volition, your own wanton stupidity and miserable desire for punishment, this is the lowest a creature has fallen in a millenia, surely, and he’s on the same planet as you now, and you’re filled with the sudden blinding terror that he’d somehow know you’re here. That he’d find you. And that he should see you like this, brought so low and so broken, it would be worse than anything, any pain or suffering or torture you could have ever endured.

And so you call to that dormant tether you’d held this entire time, to the Force, to yourself, and you kill your captors. All of them. In one fell swoop. Without much of even a single thought on your part. And you thank her, when you pull his stolen, blood splattered earrings from her ears, for teaching you so much, for reminding you that power without conscience is a terrible thing, and that you know this better than anyone. And you walk out into the cold and dark night, silent and obscure as a shadow can be, even more so, if possible, prepared to make your unnoticed escape from him.

But of course, he finds you anyway.

Chapter IX

Netherfieldren's Masterlist

Updates Blog!

#vic fic #TCC fic #din djarin #din djarin x reader #din djarin imagine #din djarin fanfiction #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x you #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian fanfiction #din djarin smut #pedro pascal characters #the mandalorian AU #star wars fanfiction #Star Wars au

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rottenpumpkin13 · 1 month

Note

Angst idea

Hojo finally has enough of Sephiroth acting too normal and “emotionally human” because of Genesis and Angeal, so he decides to drive a wedge between them. To do this, he films a lab session where he questions Sephiroth heavily about his friendship with Hollander’s brats. Sephiroth lies to Hojo and tells him that they mean nothing to him and that he is just using them to please PR because the public likes them together. He doesn’t know he is being filmed.

Hojo leaks the video and Genesis and Angeal see it when the Turks investigate. PR is outraged. Even the president is pissed that Sephiroth has caused such a ruckus for the public.

Sephiroth doesn’t know what to do.

To confess to them that he was lying would mean revealing the truth. That he was afraid of Hojo and his anger towards the man all along had been a way to mask his deeper anxiety. They would all know his greatest weakness. Perhaps it’s better to say nothing.

But maybe “Hollander’s brats” can see the hints from the video. The way Sephiroth tries to sit up perfectly straight to hide any shaking. The way his eyes dart down when Hojo raises his voice. The way he flinches slightly when Hojo moves closer to him. The way he’s paler than normal under the lab lights. How he sounds cold and empty, almost as if he’s disassociating. They’ve never seen him like this before.

And maybe they realize at last that their best friend has a very dark side to his life that he never speaks of.

WELP. There's the hurt! 😭 *slaps the comfort down on the counter through my tears*

- - - - - - - -

Sephiroth braced himself for the backlash that would inevitably follow the leaked video. He knew Angeal and Genesis would be furious, considering everything he had said about them, invalidating their friendship.

The day the video was leaked nearly killed him.

The weight of their potential anger consumed him, overshadowing even the relentless scrutiny from the media and the rest of the company. It all meant nothing to him.

All he could think about was their reaction. Genesis and Angeal. The only two people he cared about in the entire world. And he was about to lose them.

After enduring a day of meetings and interrogations, Sephiroth's anxiety peaked when his attempts to reach his friends went unanswered. Genesis had turned his phone off, and Angeal's went straight to voicemail. He didn't get the chance to see them that day due to the chaos that consumed his schedule after the video was leaked.

With a racing heart and trembling legs, he made his way to Angeal's apartment, desperate to hear anything from them. He'd even endure their shouting at him if it meant he could see them.

He knocked twice, meaning to knock a third, but the door opened alarmingly quickly.

Angeal and Genesis stood in the doorway , their faces stunned. Sephiroth was overcome with relief. They didn't seem angry or hurt, only concerned as they asked him if he was okay.

Collapsing into their arms, a wave of emotion washed over him, pulling his body down to the ground as tears streamed down his face.

They rushed to his side.

"Sephiroth, it's okay, we're not mad at you," Angeal's voice was gentle.

"We know," Genesis added, his expression softening as he met Sephiroth's tear-filled gaze. "Actually, we're not entirely sure what we know, but we're certain you didn't mean any of that BS."

Angeal rested his hand on Sephiroth's shoulder. "We noticed how uncomfortable you were on camera. You're not to blame for any of this, okay?"

Sephiroth's apologies came in broken whispers, barely audible through his sobs, and repeated over and over as he struggled to convey his regret and remorse.

"There's no need to apologize," Genesis reassured him as he rubbed circles on his back. "You haven't done anything wrong. It's okay."

Angeal and Genesis shared a glance before Angeal tried: "We won't pressure you to tell us what happened, but can you confirm that Hojo was behind this?"

A trembling nod from Sephiroth confirmed their suspicions.

"Hmm, I had a feeling," Genesis murmured, his gaze meeting Angeal's in silent flicker of rage.

Angeal took Sephiroth's hand, his grip firm and reassuring as he pulled him back up. "Come on. We can talk about this. We'll figure out our next steps together, got it?"

Sephiroth nodded, feeling relieved.

#ff7 #ffvii #final fantasy 7 #sephiroth #final fantasy vii #ffvii crisis core #genesis rhapsodos #ff7 crisis core #angeal hewley

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f1crecs · 3 months

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Fic Rec List - Sex Worker AUs

if your fic is on this list and you don’t want it to be, please let me know and we will remove it immediately, no questions asked. we have contacted most of the authors on this list, but sometimes people fall through the gaps - just pop us a message🤍

have a pairing you want us to do next? please read the faqs and then head to the inbox.

don’t forget to give the authors featured on this list some love in the form of kudos, bookmarks, and comments!

Lando/Oscar

nsfw: dancing on quicksand by @tearstrung | E | 3.3k Lando is outrageous, and Oscar struggles to understand what's a joke and what isn't - until he sees a link on Twitter. This fic is red hot, very funny, and perfectly characterised! Oscar's special brand of bamboozlement is especially wonderful here, as he comes to terms with Lando's job on the side. The ending is like a beautiful punch to the gut. Love it!

'Though, the guy’s skin is similar in color to Lando’s—olivey, the natural tan Lando wears year-round, even if he’s barely been in the sun with his shirt off. The same big hands, which don’t really match up with his small stature, rippled with lithe muscle; followed by a wide ribcage that slips down into a tiny, tapered waist. Nipples, shades darker and always hard from what Oscar can see from a long scroll. At the tips of the guy’s fingers, Oscar notices leftover chew marks, the skin pulled back, nails bitten short into nubs.'

Carlos/Lando

nsfw: when the time comes by @venerat | E | 7.6k Lando asks his friend Carlos, an escort, to arrange an appointment with another male escort for him. Lando has never been with a man and wants to have the experience. When Pierre falls ill and has to cancel, Carlos decides to go in his stead. Only one problem, though - Carlos is in love with Lando. Will he be able to keep his emotions in check? This situation could have been awkward but Lando is nothing but sweet and kind with Carlos. The encounter results in a lot of revelations for them both, and although they seem to start the next phase of their relationship a bit backwards, they clearly have a future together.

Time doesn’t seem to be very real. Carlos thinks. He thought it would be different than this, that’s all. Different from the way it’s—happening. Because the way it’s happening feels like sex. Real sex. It doesn’t feel like work. It doesn’t feel like a transaction. It feels like—trite; cliche, of course, but—it feels like passion.

Charles/Pierre

nsfw: pièce de résistance by @capsize (copenhagenborn) | E | 14.5k Pierre, a sex worker, is approached one night by the assistant of someone calling himself Marc. Marc, it turns out, is really Prince Charles of Monaco and is looking for an arrangement. This is quite low-angst for a royalty AU (don't get me wrong, I love my angst) but this fic just has them slot together so easily. Pierre is rather happy as a sex worker, which is actually a nice change when it comes to sex work fic. The relationship side of things is slow burn and even the inevitable miscommunication part of the story is done so well I enjoyed it.

'Pierre does spend the night. He sends Charles a picture of his gateau marcel and soaks in the tub as he finishes the bottle of wine they were supposed to share. The house is predictably a mess when he gets home: George is crying on the couch with his eyes glued to the television, a small Union Jack pulled from somewhere and now proudly displayed in front of him. Alex is sitting by his feet, badly hiding his laughter as he scrolls through what Pierre can only imagine being memes. Lando is passed out in the corner, a bottle of vodka close to his hand, while Oscar stares at him with an oddly closed-off look in his eyes. Pierre isn’t quite up to date on the current geopolitical relationship between Australia and the rest of the commonwealth. Pierre sits down next to Max at the dining table, sips his water and goes, “What does it mean if someone has to be summoned after the death of dear old Lizzy?”'

nsfw: cause baby, I'd be satisfied forever by @wolfiemcwolferson | E | 88.5k Pierre, retired from racing after a career-ending injury, is closer to 40 than 30 now and has reinvented himself as a designer. He's also venturing out of the closet. He is put in touch with Charles, who gets by as a sugar baby, and decides this is a perfect way to get some experience dating another man. Pierre finds himself developing feelings for Charles. I'm at a point now with @wolfiemcwolferson fic where I just gesture wildly at whatever they've written and make vague noises but in the interests of trying to sound like the sane person I pretend to be, this fic is a perfect distillation of the Pierre/Charles relationship. What if they didn't meet until later in life? What if Charles never went beyond karting? What if the age gap was larger? All of these, and yet, it's still them. There is a "soulmates in ever universe" theme in the Piarles fandom and this story absolutely embodies it.

'He’s beautiful and he smells like cologne and something fresh and he’s still not let go of Pierre’s hand - the cool leather underneath Pierre’s hand seems so…foreign. So flipped. Pierre considers all the time he touched other people’s hands while wearing leather gloves. “I hope I am not late,” Charles smiles at him still. “I missed my train and I -” “Charles,” Pierre says, realizing that Charles seems a bit nervous - a bit ruffled. “I only just arrived. “Come and let’s go inside. We can get warm.” His smile makes his perfect face less so - a mere mortal instead of the god he is and Pierre gets it immediately.'

Charles/Sebastian

nsfw: Be Snoozing That Lust In The Morning by @sebchalex & @meova101 | E | 14.5k When Formula 1 decides to clean up their sponsors, teams are left scrambling to find money. Ferrari finds an unconventional way to get more budget – Charles starts an OnlyFans. The initial premise of Charles having to get an OnlyFans to help Ferrari is just unhinged enough that it could be real – but this fic has a lot more to offer than just comedy. The way it follows Charles personal growth from not believing he could actually make money of OF, being embarrassed when Seb subscribes, to them working together to produce record breaking content and falling for eachother in between – its like a modern day fairytale, if Cinderella had to sell nudes to help the evil stepmom with money.

"This was the only way," Charles says. "I know this could tarnish the Ferrari legacy and everything, but I want to help my team. I will do anything to make them stay on top." Once he finishes his sentence, he looks straight at Sebastian. It's already disgraceful enough that he had to do this in the first place, but this type of rejection coming from Sebastian is making him feel worse. Finally, Sebastian raises his hands in a yielding gesture. "Fine," he says, sending a breath of relief through Charles. "I still have a problem with it." "Seb, I know. I wish there was another way as well, but—" "It's not about that," Sebastian says, looking even more pissed. "Have you realised that your pictures are terrible?" Well. Charles certainly hadn’t expected that. "What?" "Charles, if you are charging that much in the first place, then you should at least put in a little bit more effort," Sebastian explains, extending his hands out. "Your lighting was horrible, and it was blurry. Why did no one offer help?"

nsfw: With you I'm in real danger by @jean----ralphio | E | 55.5k Charles, a well-known porn actor, shelters from a mob of fans by hiding in a rare books shop. The bookseller recognises him but is too considerate to say anything about it. Charles notices and they strike up a friendship, and more. Charles and Seb are from such very different worlds. Charles is accustomed to sometimes being judged for his line of work but Seb treats him with utmost respect at all times, which should be a low bar but isn't. Things get a bit rocky for them in true romance story fashion, but all is well by the end.

Sebastian feels himself go bright red, as Charles’ mischievous smile turns gleeful. “I can tell the instant I meet someone whether they know who I am or not,” he explains. “So I knew right away that you know of me.” “Ah. Sorry.” Sebastian feels foolish, guilt settling over him for not having been honest about it from the beginning.

Pierre/Yuki

nsfw: your mouth makes me reconsider where my heart lies by @yukierres | E | 10.4k Pierre, still an F1 driver, discovers a streamer who plays video games while using sex toys and is immediately fascinated (and hugely turned on). He lavishes gifts and money on the man on his screen, and finds himself falling in love with someone he hasn't even met. The guys are so well characterised. Yuki is unashamed, he loves what he does, is brilliant at it and gets well paid for it too. You can see why Pierre couldn't resist. Pierre is confused and ashamed as hell to begin with (that darned Catholic guilt again) but can't stay away. The author grows the relationship to a point where it seems inevitable that Yuki will one day feel comfortable enough meeting Pierre in real life.

"That was -" Pierre says around breaths, a laugh in his voice, disbelief in what has just happened. Yuki himself has flopped back on the bed, laptop now beside him as he lies against the pillows. His eyes are wet and pink looking, a content sheen in them. "That was something else." A pleased cat-like expression forms on his mouth. "You enjoyed that Pierre?" He says with a blissed-out face, attempting to bat his eyes temptingly at the camera before yawning tiredly, the whole face scrunching up. It is more cute than seductive in the end, but it doesn’t matter because Pierre is head over heels either way.

Daniel/Max

nsfw: chemical highs and clear blue skies by @yekoc | E | 43.5k Daniel is a porn actor, which is where he meets newbie Max. Max, along with his cats, crash on Daniel’s couch whilst they continue to shoot various scenes together. They get to know each other and get to miscommunicate on the way to comfort. The pacing of the plot was really pleasant to read, as was the dialogue. Max is flippant but also careful and cautious at the same time. Daniel is self assured and kind and perhaps a little too trusting. Both of them keep their cards close and all of it makes for a very gratifying read.

'Max laughs, just a little bit, something that in someone else you might call a giggle. Daniel hasn’t seen him laugh before. He’s seen him come—in person, and then over and over again on video that one night, which he should probably forget about really quickly. Max laughing is oddly similar; it breaks something hard about him all to pieces.'

nsfw: Fly Fast (With Broken Wings) by @mysticalbreadcollective | E | 44.2k (ongoing) Max is an escort who turned to sex work due to lack of options. Daniel is an F1 driver, and Max's first ever customer. Daniel quickly becomes obsessed with Max - but the Max that Daniel first knows is a construct - the real Max guards his feelings out of necessity and can't afford to go all in with Daniel. Daniel doesn't understand the precariousness of Max's situation, or why Max would choose to keep working and earning his own money - keeping his independence - rather than agree to become Daniel's kept man. This fic digs deeply into the power imbalance and dubious consent issues of sex work, the necessary artifice of it and the need for emotional armour and distance on the part of the worker. Daniel, sadly, proves Max right with some of his behaviour - he can be selfish and spoiled, and sometimes outright cruel. There is love on both sides, but this relationship is a minefield they each misstep in more than once.

'“You think you are saving me, but it will be someone else. And maybe they will not be so nice.” Emilian says, and oh fuck, his voice is cracking a little at the end and Daniel can’t stand it. Because Daniel knows. He knows the types of clients, can imagine them, the ones that would pay extortionate amounts of money for Emilian. He feels sick hearing Emilian’s voice shake a little, wonders how nervous Emilian has been for this. What he was expecting, who he was expecting. When the agency told him that he was meeting someone who’d pay extra for him. If Emilian had built it all up in his head what he’d be asked to do. And then to say he’d been hopeful that it had been Daniel. Shit.'

Daniel/Lando

nsfw: asunder, asunder by @ladyeggplant | E | 53.3k Lando is very socially awkward, highly intelligent and cashed up. He decides the best way to lose his virginity is to hire an escort. The progression of the relationship here from transactional to something more is not smooth. Lando really doesn’t have much of an understanding about how a relationship should work and makes a few big missteps, especially later in the story as the emotional stakes get higher. Daniel is professional and gentle as he gradually figures out exactly what Lando needs. Lando is physically inexperienced and emotionally awkward and nothing about it is easy.

Silence settles over steeping tea and half-eaten fruit, and he wishes he’d left the music on, because at least it would make this awkwardness bearable. He’s had super wealthy clients before, but none of them this young, and none of them this achingly insecure where it was practically bleeding out of them. Everyone who has ever booked him as wanted him there, obviously—it feels like Lando would rather eat glass than sit in the same room as him. Daniel clears his throat. “So, first time, huh?” Lando chokes mid sip.

Carlos/Charles

In for a penny, in for a pound by @f1-stuff | M | 7k (ongoing) Charles, smarting after being unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend, hires an escort to take as his plus one to Arthur's wedding. A dashingly handsome man turns up to the rendezvous, and they figure out Charles checked the wrong box when he was making the appointment. He's spent the money, Carlos is easy company, so he decides to roll with it. This fic is amusing and sweet. Carlos is wonderful at his job - perceptive and empathetic and kind, and is probably way ahead in understanding of Charles's sexuality than Charles is himself.

“Charles...listen,” he says, shifting slightly in his chair. He looks self-assured and confident with one leg crossed over the other, hands loosely clasped over his knee. Charles is annoyed and jealous of him all at once. “I probably shouldn’t say this, considering why you hired me. But you are trying to prove to your ex that you aren’t sad and lonely by hiring someone to pretend to be in love with you...” The man raises his brows at him. “You do see the irony, no?” Charles scoffs, shaking his head down at his lap. But he can’t deny that this guy sort of, possibly, has a point. Great, even the escort he’s paying to not make him feel so pitiful is calling him out.

Mark/Seb

nsfw: pleaser by @alltimecharlo | E | 34.6k Seb is a student struggling to make rent, and Mark is a very successful lawyer. They enter a mutually beneficial agreement. This story is fantastic - the author characterises them both beautifully, and they are the perfect balance of sweet and hot and funny. I particularly loved Sebastian's first trip to Mark's house... A gorgeous story, with lots to love.

Mark’s sitting right there. Like, directly in front of the changing room in one of the extremely comfy-looking armchairs, his eyes latching directly onto his form once it’s revealed and lingering there so heavily that Sebastian almost feels the need to hide his entirely clothed body. The older’s green eyes flick up and down his lithe frame so intensely that Seb can feel his stomach doing flips and a burning heat instilling under his skin. It only worsens when he watches Mark’s tongue dart outwards to wet at his lips.

In order to keep this list organised we have chosen to categorise it as 'Sex Worker AUs'– note that we understand that some tropes here are not always sexual in nature nor are they always categorised as sex work. We respect any and all sex workers and non sex workers alike!

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wolfliving · 8 months

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It starts with him

What was once a promise of technology to allow us to automate and analyze the environments in our physical spaces is now a heap of broken ideas and broken products. Technology products have been deployed en masse, our personal data collected and sold without our consent, and then abandoned as soon as companies strip mined all the profit they thought they could wring out. And why not? They already have our money.

The Philips Hue, poster child of the smart home, used to work entirely on your local network. After all, do you really need to connect to the Internet to control the lights in your own house? Well you do now!Philips has announced it will require cloud accounts for all users—including users who had already purchased the hardware thinking they wouldn’t need an account (and the inevitable security breaches that come with it) to use their lights.

Will you really trust any promises from a company that unilaterally forces a change like this on you? Does the user actually benefit from any of this?

Matter in its current version … doesn’t really help resolve the key issue of the smart home, namely that most companies view smart homes as a way to sell more individual devices and generate recurring revenue.

It keeps happening. Stuff you bought isn’t yours because the company you bought it from can take away features and force you to do things you don’t want or need to do—ultimately because they want to make more money off of you. It’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, and it’s discouraging.

And it has stopped IoT for the rest of us in its tracks. Industrial IoT is doing great—data collection is the point for the customer. But the consumer electronics business model does not mesh with the expected lifespan of home products, and so enshittification began as soon as those first warranties ran out.

How can we reset the expectations we have of connected devices, so that they are again worthy of our trust and money? Before we can bring the promise back, we must deweaponize the technology.

Guidelines for the hardware producer

What we can do as engineers and business owners is make sure the stuff we’re building can’t be wielded as a lever against our own customers, and to show consumers how things could be. These are things we want consumers to expect and demand of manufacturers.

Control

Think local

Decouple

Open interfaces

Be a good citizen

1) Control over firmware updates.

You scream, “What about security updates!” But a company taking away a feature you use or requiring personal data for no reason is arguably a security flaw.

We were once outraged when intangible software products went from something that remained unchanging on your computer, to a cloud service, with all the ephemerality that term promises. Now they’re coming for our tangible possessions.

No one should be able to do this with hardware that you own. Breaking functionality is entirely what security updates are supposed to prevent! A better checklist for firmware updates:

Allow users to control when and what updates they want to apply.

Be thorough and clear as to what the update does and provide the ability to downgrade if needed.

Separate security updates from feature additions or changes.

Never force an update unless you are sure you want to accept (financial) responsibility for whatever you inadvertently break.

Consider that you are sending software updates to other people’s hardware. Ask them for permission (which includes respecting “no”) before touching their stuff!

2) Do less on the Internet.

A large part of the security issues with IoT products stem from the Internet connectivity itself. Any server in the cloud has an attack surface, and now that means your physical devices do.

The solution here is “do less”. All functionality should be local-only unless it has a really good reason to use the Internet. Remotely controlling your lights while in your own house does not require the cloud and certainly does not require an account with your personal information attached to it. Limit the use of the cloud to only the functions that cannot work without it.

As a bonus, less networked functionality means fewer maintenance costs for you.

3) Decouple products and services.

It’s fine to need a cloud service. But making a product that requires a specific cloud service is a guarantee that it can be enshittified at any point later on, with no alternative for the user owner.

Design products to be able to interact with other servers. You have sold someone hardware and now they own it, not you. They have a right to keep using it even if you shut down or break your servers. Allow them the ability to point their devices to another service. If you want them to use your service, make it worthwhile enough for them to choose you.

Finally, if your product has a heavy reliance on the cloud to work, consider enabling your users to self-host their own cloud tooling if they so desire. A lot of people are perfectly capable of doing this on their own and can help others do the same.

4) Use open and standard protocols and interfaces.

Most networked devices have no reason to use proprietary protocols, interfaces, and data formats. There are open standards with communities and software available for almost anything you could want to do. Re-inventing the wheel just wastes resources and makes it harder for users to keep using their stuff after you’re long gone. We did this with Twine, creating an encrypted protocol that minimized chatter, because we needed to squeeze battery life out of WiFi back when there weren’t good options.

If you do have a need for a proprietary protocol (and there are valid reasons to do so):

Document it.

If possible, have a fallback option that uses an open standard.

Provide tooling and software to interact with your custom protocols, at the very least enough for open source developers to be able to work with it. This goes for physical interfaces as much as it does for cloud protocols.

If the interface requires a custom-made, expensive, and/or hard-to-find tool to use, then consider using something else that is commonly available and off the shelf instead.

5) Be a good citizen.

Breaking paid-for functionality on other people’s stuff is inherently unethical. Consider not doing this! Enshittification is not a technical problem, it is a behavioral one. Offer better products that are designed to resist enshittification, and resist it yourself in everything you do.

Nothing forced Philips to do what they are doing: a human made a decision to do it. They could have just as easily chosen not to. With Twine’s server lock-in, at least we chose to keep it running, for 12 years now. Consider that you can still make a decent living by being honest and ethical towards the people who are, by purchasing your products, paying for your lifestyle.

We didn’t get here by accident. Humans made choices that brought us to this point, and we can’t blame anyone for being turned off by it. But we can choose to do better. We can design better stuff. And we can choose not to mess things up after the fact.

We’re putting this into practice with Pickup. (We also think that part of an IoT reset is giving users the creative freedom of a general-purpose device.) If you’re looking for something better and our product can fill a need you have, consider backing us. We cannot claim to be perfect or have all of the answers, but we are absolutely going to try. The status quo sucks. Let’s do something about it.

Published October 15, 2023 By Jeremy Billheimer

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nevesmose · 2 months

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Nostraman Nature Sucks: An Attempted Lore Post

Ave dominus nox Night Lords fans. I thought I'd take some time to go through the various NL stories I have to hand and see what I could find out about the animals that lived on Nostramo. Might come in useful for something, who knows?

Sharks and Whales

As a child, on several coastal journeys with his father, he had witnessed the eyeless barrasal sharks that would group together to hunt the great whales of the open ocean. (Night Lords Trilogy)

His voice filters into something savage and predatory, as hungry as the eyeless white sharks of Nostramo’s blackest depths. (The Long Night)

Not a big surprise since they talk about them fairly often and have the Space Sharks as a successor chapter but Nostramo does have sharks. Pretty gnarly-sounding sharks if I'm honest.

I didn't know what "barrasal" meant, so I looked it up and only found one thread on r/40klore that had the same quote in it as above. Hmm.

Assuming it's not a typo or a more straightforward reference to something I'm just not getting, I'd venture a guess that barrasal, understood here to mean of or relating to "barras" like with "abyssal" could be connected to the French Revolutionary leader Paul Barras who is mostly remembered for supporting Napoleon's rise to power before being overthrown by him.

So maybe the older barrasal sharks will make use of younger ones as temporary hunting partners only to be inevitably betrayed and consumed by them. Sounds about right I think.

As for the whales, where do I even begin? I would imagine they're "whales" in name only like in Dishonored:

This does imply the possible existence of a whaling industry at some stage in Nostramo's history, though.

Crows

Jago reached into his pockets, offering a handful of breadcrumbs. Come, he said to the crows. Food for tonight. Flesh, flesh, flesh, they called back. He laughed as several of the black birds landed on his shoulders and outstretched arm. (Prince Of Crows)

‘Yes. I’ve seen them in books. Is a crow a type of bird?’ ‘Black of feather and dark of eye. It feeds on the bodies of the dead, and sings in a raw, croaking caw.’ (TLN)

Breaking news - legion that keeps referring to crows in shocking has crows on its homeworld scandal. "This is outrageous," said local Nostraman cutpurse and skin disease enthusiast Verxaglryn Quickstabber, "here we are trying to make a good name for Nostramo as a respectable hellhole, a place you'd be proud to exile your worst enemy to, and yet we're surrounded by some of the most intelligent and curious birds in existence. I was shanking someone in a back alley the other night and suddenly I saw a crow learning how to use rudimentary tools! Not on my watch, I said to the rapidly cooling body, and I threw my shiv at it. But it just flew away." At this point Mr Quickstabber was obliged to end the interview due to having been eviscerated by the Night Haunter.

I know their communication with Sevatar is happening in a dream but I really like the idea of the crows adapting to Nostramo by developing some kind of psychic hive mind that's also able to be understood by human psykers.

Crag Cougars

A beast of my home world. When next you see one of the Atramentar, look to their shoulder guards. The roaring lions on their pauldrons are what we called crag cougars on Nostramo. It was considered a mark of wealth for gang bosses to be able to leave the cities and hunt such creatures. (NLT)

Every single one of them is Scar from the Lion King, isn't it? An interesting hint about Nostramo's geography though, of which more later.

Rats

Groundcars whisked by, headlights brighter than deep-hive rats’ eyes, the occupants snug and safe behind armoured glass. (Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter)

No surprises here either. Where there's people there's rats after all.

Something with tusks?

The older Astartes grinned, wolf-like and keen, as the Atramentar either side of the Exalted’s throne growled through their tusked helms. (NLT)

This isn't that conclusive because a lot of Chaos Terminators have tusks no matter what legion they are, but Nostramo being Nostramo they probably belonged to a species of giant carnivorous mammoth that ate babies and sprayed acid from its trunk.

Cows? On My Sunless World?

‘They are still of standard human stock, and not to be mourned. What does it matter if the cattle fear the herdsman?’ hissed Krukesh the Pale. (KC:TNH)

This one's a real reach on my part as it's very likely just a turn of phrase, but I noticed it because wouldn't it be slightly more typical to use a sheep metaphor here? Plus it supports the existence of Nostraman cowboys/ranchers/vaqueros which is fun.

No bats?

His helmet bore a new, spread batwing crest in blatant imitation of Sevatar’s own. (A Safe and Shadowed Place)

A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin. (KC:TNH)

Although they appear a lot in the VIII legion's iconography and artwork, oddly enough I wasn't actually able to find a direct reference to Nostramo itself having bats. Let's cover my ass by saying this aspect might therefore have been brought in by the legion's Terran component instead.

Some Nostraman geography

The Hill Folk lived away from the cities, eking out an existence in the mountains. (NLT)

What's worse than living in a Nostraman city? Living on a Nostraman hill, apparently. This seems to just be an idea of ADB's that doesn't come up again but I've always found it quite interesting. Were the Hill Folk as scummy as the City Folk, just with more of a down-home Dukes of Hazzard vibe? Seems likely.

This also supports the idea of Nostramo not being completely urbanised like some Hive Worlds are. In my view its continents might have had a geographical layout a bit like Italy or Scotland where the cities are mainly on the flatter coasts with a more sparsely populated hilly/mountainous interior.

What else? (This part is just me making stuff up so feel free to ignore it. I'm not ADB, I'm not even ADB's hat.)

If the rest of Nostramo's marine life is anything like the sharks and whales then it's fucking terrifying. I would imagine, because it's funny, that a lot of Nostraman food features disgusting industrially-processed fish in some way or another. Like the food in Dishonored but even worse.

Is something wrong, dearest offworld husband? You haven't touched your stale bread, whalemeat and jellied eels.

Since all life on Nostramo seems to be comically carnivorous and aggressive, it would make sense in a 40K kind of way for there to be giant predatory penguins living at one or both of its poles. A bit like the monstrous blind albino penguins HP Lovecraft wrote about.

Last known infrared pict-capture of an early Nostraman settler attempting communication with a juvenile specimen of the native penguin species. There were no survivors.

#ended up mentioning Dishonored a lot #fine by me I love Dishonored #shall we gather for whisky and cigars tonight?#warhammer lore #wh40k #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #night lords #nostramo #neves loreposts

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la-pheacienne · 3 months

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Continuing my post about Jaime and Rhaegar’s respective roles in the sack of KL, let’s talk about Jaime and Rhaegar’s last conversation which I didn’t mention in that post and it deserves its own analysis. I find it extremely funny how both (some) Lannister stans and (some) Targ stans seem to think that the last convo between Rhaegar and Jaime was actually like this :

"Jaime, a sack is about to happen very soon. Elia and my kids are in a high risk of getting brutally murdered inside the very capital by the orders of your father who has ghosted us for some time but is deep down an enemy planning all of this in secret. Meanwhile, my father is planning to blow up the entire city any minute now because reasons. I’m leaving you here, alone, to take care of all this and keep all these people, my wife, two kids, father and the people of the city, safe from harm. If you fail to do any of that at any point, you’re incompetent, a traitor and a coward. Now I have to leave to do my thing with the others, don’t forget your duty and your vows, bye".

While it was actually like this :

"Jaime, there’s a war, we are in a pretty tight position and I gotta go to battle taking some men with me. Unfortunately my father wants to keep you close because he believes Tywin will not turn against him this way, and he’s kind of insane so there is nothing we can do about it without risking an even bigger outburst. Give me some time to get out of this mess, and then I’ll come back and we’ll fix this. All this will be over soon, bye".

So the first reading of Jaime and Rhaegar’s last convo completely misses the mark in many ways.

Some Lannister stans are screaming crying throwing up that Rhaegar left a literal cHiLD with all tHiS rEsPoNSIbILIty he doesn’t give a FUCK about anyone how dare he what kind of tHOUGhT PrOCesS is that !!!! Some Targ stans say that Rhaegar gave specific orders to Jaime to protect his father, wife, kids and city against multiple and opposite threats and thus honor his vows, and Jaime failing to do that means he is basically a traitor and a coward. And incompetent.

None of this is correct, because this isn’t what Rhaegar asked him to do, at all. Rhaegar did not know, could not know, could not possibly conceive or imagine or suspect that a sack was about to happen at the orders of Tywin no less and that his family was in immediate danger in.the.very.capital. Nobody.knew. That is why this sack is so horrifying. Also he may have been well aware that his father was insane but not to the point that he could expect him to literally want to blow up his own city. That is a whole other level of insanity he very legitimately didn’t expect. Thirdly, Rhaegar had no power to take Jaime or his family away at this point (« I dare not » is not an epheumism. He literally dares not. We’re talking about Aerys here).

All he asked Jaime to do is wait for Rhaegar to come back and in the meantime try to keep his father at bay. That.is.literally.it. Rhaegar said : « Give me some time, I’ll come back and fix this » And Jaime did wait and he did hope that Rhaegar would come back, but Rhaegar didn’t come back not because he decided to go on vacation with his new chick but because he got killed. Nothing went according to plan, and Jaime had to take matters in his own hands.

So :

Rhaegar did not leave """""all that responsibility""""" to a """"literal child"""". He left his father the king with the one member of the Kingsguard the king specifically wanted with him, and he told that member of the Kingsguard to literally, wait it out and be a KG. Apart from the fact that Rhaegar couldn’t take Jaime away because Aerys wanted him there, Jaime was not a random child, he was a member of the KG. Him staying with Aerys is technically what he was supposed to do as a member of the KG anyway, there is nothing abnormal or particularly stupid or outrageous or naive in this """"thought process"""", despite Jaime’s age. That order seemed both inevitable (it was Aerys’ order) and reasonable (Jaime was a KINGSguard after all), at the time.

Likewise, Rhaegar did not reasonably expect Jaime to go all Superman on both his father and Tywin’s men and save like the entire population of KL including his own family, all by himself. Again, what he actually told Jaime to do was literally wait for him to come back and try to keep his father at bay. He hoped Jaime’s presence would satiate his father until he comes back. That’s all. He did not know that Aerys would want to blow up KL, he did not know what Jaime would be forced to do and he did not expect the sack and the fact that his family would be murdered in the capital. He didn’t entrust Jaime with all these things simply because he wasn’t expecting these things. All these things were definitely not part of """the job""" Rhaegar gave him. Rhaegar’s GHOST saying to Jaime in his dreams "I left my wife and children in your hands" is manifesting Jaime’s guilt for not being able to save the family. It is a ghost in Jaime’s dream. This doesn’t mean that Rhaegar literally expected Jaime to prevent his father from blowing up the city and simultaneously protect his family from an entirely different threat that wasn’t even remotely a possibility then. Jaime failing to do all of the above by himself doesn’t make him a traitor, an incompetent loser or a coward.

The distortion of their actual convo led the entire fandom to engage in a strawman argument ad nauseam. Lannister stans are attacking Rhaegar for leaving "all this responsibility" to Jaime and Targ stans are attacking Jaime for failing to honor this responsibility, while "all this responsibility" was never part of their actual conversation to begin with because none them had the slightest idea of what was about to happen in the first place.

It is such a pity because this last convo between these two men is so tragic and haunting and beautiful, Jaime (grrm) describes his last visual memory of Rhaegar in an unusually poetic manner, and the fact that deep down he is still waiting and hoping for Rhaegar to come back makes me insane. « The day had been windy when he said farewell to Rhaegar, in the yard of the Red Keep. The prince had donned his night-black armor, with the three-headed dragon picked out in rubies on his breastplate ». « So the Prince of Dragonstone mounted up and donned his tall black helm, and rode forth to his doom ». « It is not Aerys I rue, it is Robert ». « I almost mistook you for Aegon the Conqueror ». « How much can a crown be worth when a crow can feast on a king? ». And instead of focusing on that and the symbolism of it all and that fact that it’s literally foreshadowing Dany’s or Jon’s « return » and their meeting with Jaime (Rhaegar will come back in the end in some form or another, all hope is not lost) we’re reiterating bad takes about a supposed conflict between them ad infinitum. It is boring, reductive and uninspired.

Be serious, read the text and stop spreading misinformation about either side. This is not a football game. We all love a fandom fight occasionally but it is important to actually engage with the themes of the story from time to time.

#i will not elaborate on jaime's guilt here (which also manifests itself during his accounting of the convo)#i did that in the other post #i will just say that yes #jaime FEELS that he failed rhaegar and it IS legitimate and anyone in his place with an iota of human decency would also feel that #this doesn't mean that it was his fault ORthat rhaegar literally expected him to do all that had to be done to prevent the final outcome #stop bad faith interpretations #stop twisting the story to fit a specific agenda #jaime lannister #rhaegar targaryen #asoiaf #valyrianscrolls #robert's rebellion #sack of king's landing #aspa rambles

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