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pin-k-ink · 6 months ago

Note

Yandere kurapika with a heavy heavy breeding kink. He’s absolutely obsessed with the idea of you being pregnant 👀👀👀

progeny // kurapika kurta

tw ⇢ dub-con, obsessive behavior, imprisonment/isolation, breeding kink, mentions of pregnancy, unprotected sex, dirty talk, mention of lactation, implied murder, drugging, handjob, grinding

wc ⇢ 7.3k

It had been six excruciatingly long years since the Kurta massacre. Six years of chasing empty leads, of doors slamming shut in Kurapika's face whenever he got close to the Phantom Troupe. His crimson eyes, once a source of pride amongst his people, now mocked him daily - glaring reminders of his failure to attain vengeance.

So when the encrypted message arrived with a potential location on a Kurta survivor, Kurapika could scarcely allow himself to feel hope. Too many times it had been cruelly dangled in front of him, only to dissolve into agonizing disappointment. He pored over the intelligence again and again, his hands shaking. This had to be legitimate. It simply had to.

Four sleepless nights later, Kurapika found himself on the first available airship to Yorknew City. His leg jittered anxiously the entire way, his mind cycling through every possible scenario. A trap from the Troupe? A sick game? Or could the near-impossible be real? When the ship finally touched down, Kurapika moved like a man possessed, following the coded coordinates to a dilapidated apartment complex.

His trembling hand barely registered the flimsy doorbell as he rang. Seconds ticked by like torturous eternities. Then, after what felt like a small age, the door creaked open to reveal...you. Kurapika's knees very nearly buckled at the sight of those telltale scarlet irises. Tears stung his eyes as he choked out a wavering, "You're one of my people."

That first night, he simply sat in reverent silence, studying the sacred eyes of his kinsman that he'd been deprived of for far too long. You seemed equally transfixed, if not deeply uncertain of this severe stranger's intentions. When you attempted to ask him to leave, Kurapika answered with a resolute headshake.

"I cannot do that. It's too dangerous to leave you here." His voice was thick with the weight of trauma, but carried a steely undercurrent of determination. "I'm getting you somewhere safe, where no harm can befall you."

True to his word, Kurapika immediately went about securing a transport ship to whisk you away from potential threats. You didn't have a choice. He had failed his clan once before through negligence - he would not repeat that grave mistake. This time, he would smother any flicker of danger towards the Kurta with extreme prejudice before it could even spark.

The following weeks were a fortified blur as Kurapika installed you in a veritable military bunker tucked high in the treacherous mountain ranges. He pulled every resource at his disposal to ensure your isolation and safety was absolute. Each day, he would rise before dawn to pursue his hunt for the Phantom Troupe, searching for that agonizingly elusive trail of vengeance. But like clockwork, he returned to the safehouse every evening, his frayed nerves only calmed by the sight of your scarlet eyes.

At first, Kurapika tried to keep things professional, nodding stoically whenever you greeted him. But the more time passed, the more you became his sole remaining attachment to a people he had lost. He drank in your every word, no matter how innocuous, wanting to ingrain the cadence of his kin on his psyche again. Your existence, your pure perseverance despite all odds, stoked something primal within him.

Eventually, Kurapika began staying later and later into the night, reluctant to abandon your presence, irrationally fearful something terrible may occur the moment he left your side. He started simpling...hovering. Watching you for long, unblinking stretches despite your visible discomfort. His fixation had been ignited, and it burned brighter with each passing day.

It was on one particularly humid summer evening when the stifling mountain air had you gasping for respite. You moved to crack open one of the safehouse's windows, hoping to coax in even the faintest whispers of a cool breeze.

The moment your fingers pulled against the latch, the electronic lock released a sad, mechanical whir of protest. You froze, realizing in that instant that the safety restrictions were not mere automated security protocols. They were under the total control of your increasingly overbearing guardian.

Slowly, you turned to find Kurapika shooting you a pointed look from the wingback chair across the room. His sharp jawline was locked, lips pressed into a severe line as he clutched the access fob in a white-knuckled grip.

"I wouldn't advise that," he said at last, his tone carrying curt reproach. "It's for your own safety to keep the windows secured at all times."

You opened your mouth to protest the blatant removal of your autonomy, but Kurapika silenced you with a mere arch of his brow. Heat prickled in your cheeks, flustered by his sheer audacity, his utter dismissal of your objections before you could even voice them. Who was he to declare what you could and couldn't do?

But as quickly as that spark of defiance flickered, it extinguished under the knowing weight of Kurapika's stare. He knew better than you, had spilled more blood and peered deeper into the abyss of human monstrosity. If he deemed something a risk, no matter how small, you didn't dare challenge it. Your very life rested on his prudence and protection.

So you bit back the fleeting urge to assert your independence. Instead, you gave a meek nod of surrender and retreated from the window with one last, regretful glance at the impenetrable night sky beyond the sealed glass panes. Your world had become startlingly small under Kurapika's wing.

He watched you like a lion scrutinizing its cornered prey until you sank back into the shelter of your designated space. Only once you had compliantly resumed your spot did that intense scrutiny finally ease, his body unsettlingly loose and calm again.

"There's fresh fruit in the kitchen if you need refreshment," Kurapika offered, as if making peace after the unspoken admonishment. "Let me know if you require anything else for your comfort."

You murmured a soft thanks, careful to not meet his pewter gaze for too long. The complex bundles of emotion they sparked - shame, defiance, loneliness, begrudging gratitude - were still too tumultuous to comfortably untangle.

With a slight dip of his chin, Kurapika turned his attentions back towards the scattered intelligence reports sprawled before him. But you could have sworn you caught the faintest wisp of a self-satisfied smirk playing across his lips as he resumed his nightly obsessive planning.

The message was clear: no matter how insular and temporary you hoped this arrangement was, he had no intentions of loosening his ruthlessly overprotective stranglehold. Not now, not ever. For in Kurapika's mind, he had already failed his clan once before.

He would not fail their legacy again, even if it meant eclipsing your every last freedom under his total, unwavering control. Your life belonged to him now.

What had begun as a flicker of protectiveness had been steadily stoked into an all-consuming obsession. And there would be no putting out that raging fire.

The next few days passed in their now familiar routine of forced complacency. Kurapika would depart each morning on his futile hunt for the Phantom Troupe's latest trail, leaving you confined to pacing the reinforced walls like a caged animal. You attempted to resist the itch of restlessness, but it clawed at your insides, making you increasingly reckless.

It was on one particularly moonless night when Kurapika was delayed by an anonymous tip that you decided to seize your fleeting window. You waited until the security monitors confirmed him still blocks away before punching in the override codes and disabling the safehouse's locks. You didn't have a plan or destination in mind - you simply needed to feel the sweet embrace of open air again, to remind yourself of the unfettered freedom you had lost.

The sleepy mountain town seemed almost haunted in the inky blackness as you strode its deserted streets. The crisp night wind caressed your face, and you reveled in the simple pleasure of being anything other than a prisoner in your own refuge. Eventually, your aimless wandering drew you towards the soft amber glow and faint music wafting from the local tavern.

A hand came to rest on the rickety oak door, then stopped as you wavered. Kurapika could return any moment now. But the fleeting indulgence of a cold pint and casual conversation with strangers was too tantalizing to resist any longer. Steeling your nerves, you pulled the door open and strode inside.

The raucous sound of drunken laughter and the thick fog of smoke immediately assaulted your senses. You wound through the crowd to the dingy bar, squeezing between bodies until you could flag down the bleary-eyed bartender. He poured you a tall glass of the darkest stout on tap without a second glance at your rumpled, out-of-place appearance.

As you nursed the first few sips, savoring the bitter familiarity, a rough voice lilted from behind you.

"Well aren't you a little ways from home?"

You turned to find a smarmy looking stranger waggling his brows lecherously. His breath reeked of stale beer and desperation.

"Just looking to unwind is all," you replied curtly, turning back towards your drink.

His calloused hand suddenly snaked out, gripping your forearm with surprising strength as he leaned in too close. "Well then how 'bout I buy the next round and we can 'unwind' together, sweetheart?"

You wrenched your arm away with a disgusted glare, preparing to hurl a blistering retort. But even as the first word formed on your lips, an eerie wave of dizziness crashed over you, blurring your vision. The tavern seemed to tilt precariously as you swayed on the barstool.

No...it couldn't be. That first drink. You made the mistake of leaving it unattended. As the horrible realization dawned on you, your faculties began to rapidly abandon ship.

"There's a good girl," the leering stranger's voice slurred as if underwater. "Just relax and enjoy the party favors."

You tried desperately to cry out, to raise even a tremor of alarm, but your voice failed you. The room pitched and spun until merciful darkness finally swallowed you whole.

The crisp slap of cool night air was like a bucket of ice water shocking you back to semiconsciousness. Your eyelids fluttered open to find yourself being half-carried, half-dragged down a dank alleyway by that stranger. The cloudy haze in your brain screamed at you to fight, to thrash and flee, but your body responded with only feeble murmurs.

Suddenly, a dark silhouette stepped out from the shadows up ahead, swiftly blocking your captor's path. The figure prowled closer, the dim streetlight glinting off a shock of brilliant blond hair.

Even in your drugged stupor, you immediately recognized the menacing aura radiating off of Kurapika. He had found you. Your heart should have leapt with relief, but your addled mind could only focus on the pure, unadulterated fury etched across his features.

"Let her go." His tone was low, practically subterranean with its seething intensity. "Now."

The stranger paused, seemingly taken aback by Kurapika's threatening presence despite outnumbering him. His grip on your arm only tightened stubbornly.

"This doesn't involve you, kid. I'd beat it while you still—"

He never got to finish that thought. Kurapika's knuckles connected with the man's nose with a wet crunch before anyone could blink. As he collapsed in a heap, clutching his bleeding face, Kurapika moved with terrifying fluidity.

A haze of fists and chains and guttural screams engulfed the cramped alley. You flinched with each tormented wail, hunched against the damp brick wall as your assailant's bones shattered piece by piece. The copper stench of blood flooded the air in thick, viscous clouds.

When it was finally over, the sickening sound of the stranger's gurgling breaths were barely audible above the drumming of your pulse thundering in your ears. Kurapika stood over him, chest heaving from exertion as he slowly retracted his bloody knuckles and Nen chains back into waiting.

Only then did his gaze fall upon your fragile, crumpled form. The molten rage simmering behind his eyes extinguished instantly, transposing into something akin to lucid fear. In a single deft motion, he scooped you up and cradled you against his chest.

"It's alright...you're safe now," Kurapika murmured, his voice dripping with the type of tender worry one reserves for a gravely injured child.

You opened your mouth to respond but only a pathetic whimper escaped your dry lips. Horror at your near miss quickly gave way to the warm comfort of Kurapika's secure embrace. Your eyelids grew impossibly heavy as you nuzzled against the soft linen of his blazer. Even as the world faded to black again, you felt utterly, inviolably safe within the confines of his sinewy arms...his obsessive protectiveness.

When you finally came to again, it was in the dimly lit familiarity of the safehouse's living quarters. Kurapika sat vigilantly on the edge of the mattress, his eyes two orbs of hollow, sleepless torment.

As you stirred, he immediately went into a flurry of doting. Cool rags were pressed to your clammy forehead. Chilled teas and electrolyte waters hovered against your lips, Kurapika tipping them carefully to soothe your sandpaper throat. His touch was insistently gentle, but you could sense the roiling tempest churning beneath that zen exterior.

In your addled state, you kept up a litany of small whining sounds and petulant fidgets. Kurapika bore each one with inexhaustible patience and care, stroking your hairline languidly as you grumbled childish complaints about your headache or an itch that needed scratching.

Even as the last vestiges of the toxin worked its way out of your system over the next several hours, you never felt fear or vulnerability - only the profound relief of being tended to so meticulously under Kurapika's hawkish devotion.

Several times, his gaze seemed to unconsciously drift down to your parted, pouting lips as you whined insistently. You thought you caught his throat bobbing ever so subtly, as if waging an internal war with some primal desire. But the moment never transversed, and he remained ever the devoted, if tightly-wound caretaker through the hazy night.

It wasn't until the first rays of dawn filtered in through the slitted windows that you drifted into a deep, restorative slumber. And in those last, fleeting moments of consciousness, you realized with dawning horror how completely and utterly co-dependent on Kurapika's obsessive protection you had allowed yourself to become.

In the aftermath of the nearly tragic incident, there would be no venturing outside again...not without him. Not ever. The fire of his obsession had been stoked into a conflagration - one he wholeheartedly welcomed if it meant never going through such terror again.

You had been rescued from the depths of pitiful frailty, only to become irrevocably entangled in the dark, singular orbit of Kurapika's unhinging fixation on you. And from that point on, fleeing its gravitational pull would be inconceivable.

In the days following your terrifying brush with tragedy, Kurapika became an utterly inescapable presence in every waking moment. Where there was once at least a semblance of periodic solitude as he attended to his Phantom Troupe hunt, now there was only the soft footfalls of his eternal proximity.

He lingered in the periphery like a silent, hollow-eyed sentinel as you tentatively went about your daily routines. If you retreated to the bathroom to bathe, Kurapika wordlessly trailed just beyond the cracked door - near enough to instantly intervene at any prospective threat, far enough to preserve a facade of privacy. You found yourself instinctively avoiding the mirror, unable to meet the shame of your own reflection exposed under his vigilant leer.

At night when you crawled between the sheets, Kurapika took up an immovable post in the wingback chair at your bedside. You lost track of how many dawns you awoke to find him stock-still in that exact position, eyes open but untainted by even the slightest hint of slumber. His piercing stare studied your sleeping form with the rapt diligence of a memorial statue guarding a crypt.

You stopped attempting to dissuade him from these nightly vigils. The few feeble protests you voiced only caused his jaw to hinge tighter, a muscle throbbing with mute ferocity. He would not be deterred or negotiated with - this was the price to pay for the grave lapse that nearly severed you from his obsessive care.

If you shuffled into the kitchen to prepare meals, Kurapika's shadow would materialize just behind your periphery. You quickly learned to suppress any instinctual startles at his sudden appearances, lest you mistakenly provoke his haunted man's nerves. He never spoke or impeded your chores, but the mere imposition of his intense presence transformed even the most banal acts into ordeals of hyper self-consciousness.

Some evenings as dusk cloaked the mountain safehouse, you would chance hopeful glances out across the perimeter's reinforced windows. Vast forests of pine and spruce swayed in hypnotic tandem with the coastal breezes sweeping up from the sapphire horizon. Your gaze traced every contour of the landscape beyond that glass barrier - drunkenly drinking in the beauty and vast freedoms you had once taken for granted.

Without fail, Kurapika would seem to materialize at your side during these morose ritualistic dances. Not an inch separated your arms as you stood wordlessly, noting how his chest would slowly rise and fall in mirror-sync to your own. His quicksilver irises carefully studied the longing etched across your features, probing for any fragile cracks that may signal another reckless bid for escapism simmering beneath the surface.

You soon discovered it was easier to not meet his needful, imploring stare on those evenings. To instead lose yourself in the melancholy meditation of what lay on the other side of that glass partition - the lush, unfolding world of oxygen and wilderness and infinite possibilities now forever sealed away from your grasp by this compound's fortifications. The reckless abandon that landed you in such peril in the first place.

Even during the sporadic moments you managed to steal for idle time - curling up with a borrowed novel or simply staring vacantly at the safehouse's sterile walls - Kurapika's presence would pervade your space like a congealing, inescapable vapor. You became aware of every infinitesimal motion in your peripheral field, each aborted gesture from him laden with fierce meaning and scrutiny.

He would simply materialize in your blind spots, folding that lithe frame into the nearest chair or loveseat until his entire posture radiated a single, silent statement: I'm here. I will always be here to watch over you from this point onward.

And you lacked the will to protest this gradual dissolution of personal boundaries. Not when the memory of that squalid alleyway still haunted your subconscious with visions of shadowy hands groping, of Kurapika's knuckles shattering bone in retribution. You were in his custody now, for better or for worse.

Even as the weeks blurred indistinguishably together, Kurapika seemed to only swell with more unquenchable determination. Daily you witnessed his demeanor oscillate from the gruff stoicism of a jaded warrior, to the endearingly focused worry of an overly-fretful parent, then finally the predatory ruthlessness of a beast safeguarding its sickly litter from any prospective encroachment.

There was a possessive ferocity igniting behind those slate irises anew each time his gaze passed over you. As if merely looking upon your face, your chest inhaling each breath, was an involuntary ritual - the only reassurance that could momentarily dull the roaring anxiety in his psyche.

So Kurapika kept vigil, and you stopped attempting to politely deflect his obsession. Better to accept this isolated existence under his ever-watchful protectionism than risk another lapse that may invite that same violence and horror down upon you both. At least here, within these confining walls, remained the unshakable constant of his presence...his dominion over your absolute safety.

The weeks crystallized into cold months, Kurapika's fixation only intensifying like a caged flame feasting on its own limited oxygen supply. Until eventually, you struggled to remember what life could have possibly looked like before this arrangement - before his utterly uncompromising ownership of your personal inviolability became the sole, inescapable pillar of reality itself.

You mustered up what little courage remained and approached Kurapika one evening as he pored over the dwindling stack of intelligence reports.

"Kurapika...I need to get out of here, even if just for a little while," you said, trying to keep your tone measured. "Taking a walk through the village, feeling the sun on my face. Please, I'm going stir-crazy cooped up."

His pewter gaze slowly lifted, boring into you with an inscrutable intensity. You braced yourself for the immediate dismissal, the curt rebuff that your pleas for a shred of freedom were selfish folly in the face of your security.

Instead, Kurapika simply gave a slow, deliberate nod.

"Very well. But I will accompany you. My presence is non-negotiable for your safety."

Your heart leapt at his acquiescence, yet you knew better than to voice any objections to his stipulations. That, too, was non-negotiable when it came to Kurapika's obsession.

The next morning, you ventured out with Kurapika at your side, his eyes sharply scanning every alleyway and passerby like a starving falcon scrutinizing the underbrush. You tried not to let his overdone protectiveness dampen your elation at breathing fresh mountain air and ambling aimlessly without the barriers of steel and concrete constraining you.

At one point, you stopped to admire a young mother cradling her newborn along the village square's central fountain. The infant was swaddled snugly in a pale yellow blanket, their tiny face completely ensconced in peaceful slumber. You couldn't help the wistful pang that tugged at your heart watching the scene.

"Would you like to hold them?" the mother offered warmly after catching your enamored glances.

You looked to Kurapika, almost reflexively seeking his permitting nod as if he were your warden. To your surprise, he simply watched in pensive silence as you gingerly supported the bundle's head and brought the sleeping babe into your embrace.

A serene calm washed over you as the newborn's warmth and weight settled against your chest. Your body seemed to instinctively know all the coddling motions - the gentle swaying, the soft shushes, the protective tuck of the blanket over their tiny frame. For a fleeting moment, everything from the outside world evaporated - the threats, the walls imprisoning you, even Kurapika's hawkish presence. There was only the simple perfection of cradling new life, so pure and unblemished by the world's cruelties.

All too soon, the spell was broken as the mother reached to take her child back. You surrendered them with one last, regretful look into their peaceful slumbering features. As you turned back towards the path, you caught an indecipherable look swimming behind Kurapika's silvery irises. Was that...yearning?

The walk continued in loaded silence until you reached the safehouse again. Ever vigilant, Kurapika checked and triple-checked all security parameters were active before allowing you both back inside. He then insisted on giving you a full body inspection, tutting over any prospective scratches or bruises you may have sustained.

Night fell, and you began your usual bedtime routine of winding down with a book on the living room's plush sofa. Right on cue, Kurapika appeared to take up his self-appointed post in the chair alongside you.

Rather than lapsing into his typical reserved observation, he seemed...restless this evening. You caught his gaze flicking over your face and abdomen several times, his stare carrying an uncharacteristic intensity more akin to hunger than mere study. Finally, just as you were about to question his odd distraction, Kurapika leaned forward in his seat.

"You looked quite natural with that baby earlier," he stated in a low, ruminative tone. "I could envision you as a tender, nurturing mother. The image....suited you."

You felt your cheeks flush hotly despite yourself, ears straining to detect even the faintest undercurrents of impropriety in his demeanor. Just what was he implying?

When you finally found your voice to respond, Kurapika cut you off by rising abruptly to his feet.

"Get some rest. That's enough activity for one day."

With that, he swept towards the bedroom, leaving you to simply blink owlishly in his wake. You worried your lower lip, unable to voice the nagging feeling that his comments carried some suggestive subtext your mind simply couldn't piece together.

For now, it seemed Kurapika's ever-watchful protectionism had evolved to encompass...other considerations. Ones that, given his increasingly mercurial obsession over you, prompted entirely new uncertainties to send your heart murmuring apprehensively against your ribcage.

In the days following Kurapika's unsettling comments about motherhood, an inscrutable new energy seemed to permeate his already intense obsession over you.

His customary silent vigils persisted as always - the motionless sentrylike presence shadowing your every action, the sleepless nights spent unblinkingly patrolling your bedside like a fanatical bodyguard. But there was also something... else underlying those mercurial silver irises whenever they washed over your form.

Kurapika's gaze had shifted from the typical hyper-focused studying for dangers into outright lingering. You began noticing his line of sight would unapologetically rake up and down the curves and lines of your body whenever you moved about the safehouse. As if he were committing to memory every last dip and swell, documenting it alongside the myriad threat assessments constantly churning through his mind.

His comments, once clipped and strictly pertaining to your security, started carrying strange insistences that left you disquieted.

"You have such a patient, calming presence," he remarked one afternoon while you lounged with a book. "The kids would love you."

You shot him a bewildered look over the rattling chains of innuendo in his tone, but Kurapika simply arched an expectant brow as if awaiting your acquiescence.

Another evening, you bent to retrieve a dropped utensil from the kitchen floor only to straighten and find his towering presence hunched mere inches away, studying you with unrestrained focus.

"Carrying a child would suit your figure," he stated in a detached, clinical murmur. Before you could even formulate a flustered response, Kurapika simply turned and strode off to catalogue more intelligence reports.

The most overt advancement came one evening as you diligently prepared dinner, muscles burning from chopping and stirring the hearty stew. You were so engrossed in your motions that you failed to notice Kurapika materializing behind you until his sinewy arms snaked insistingly around your midsection.

A startled gasp seized your lungs as his palms came to rest possessively over your abdomen, his firm chest pressing flush against your arched back. For a dizzying moment, you were overwhelmed by the masculine heat and musk of him surrounding you so utterly and inescapably.

"Don't linger over the preparations," Kurapika's lilting voice reverberated against the nape of your neck. You shivered despite yourself as his warm breath danced across your skin. "I'm...starving this evening."

His hips unconsciously canted forward ever so subtly, enough to insinuate himself deeper into the negative space behind you. The unmistakable prominence of his semi erect cock nestled with shameless insistence against the supple curves of your ass through the thin linen of his trousers.

Just as your befuddled mind scrambled for any coherent reply, Kurapika abruptly extricated himself and strode off with the same unruffled collectedness as always. As if he hadn't just allowed the most salacious depths of his obsession over your body to rupture, however briefly, to the surface.

You stood rooted in place, blood pounding deafeningly in your ears as a dozen frantic impulses warred within you. Outrage, indignation, fear, reluctant curiosity... and horrifyingly, something darker and more primal still that responded with undeniable want to the memories of Kurapika's powerful, unapologetic dominion over your personal space.

When you finally managed to recompose yourself and carry the pot of stew to the dining table, Kurapika was waiting with his customary inscrutable expression. No hint of the previous violation lingered in his pewter irises - only that same boundless, soul-deep need to protect and provide that had morphed into such zealous, all-consuming obsession.

As you picked warily at your bowl, hyper-aware of his eyes drinking in your every move, you knew there would be no acknowledgement or discussion of the incident. He had simply exercised another disquieting assertion of ownership over your body and intimate personal freedoms. Just as he had with everything else in the vise of his self-appointed guardianship.

With a smoldering pit of unease taking root in your core, you realized this new dimension to Kurapika's fixation was only beginning. What fresh transgressions would his possessive appetites attempt to justify through the warped lenses of security and obsession?

Only time would tell what depraved lines he may be willing to cross... all in the name of protecting the last remaining embers of his beloved Kurta legacy.

Over the following days, Kurapika's comments about you having children took a disturbingly frank turn. Gone were the veiled observations about motherhood - replaced by straightforward statements that left no room for interpretation.

"Feels like you'd make a good mom," he mentioned offhandedly one evening as you cleaned up after dinner. His eyes shamelessly raked over your body. "Got the hips for it, that's for sure."

You froze, heat prickling your cheeks at his brazen appraisal. Before you could formulate a flustered response, Kurapika simply continued.

"We should think about making that happen sometime. You know, for the clan's sake." He gave a nonchalant shrug, as if discussing something as mundane as laundry plans.

Your mouth opened and closed, utterly stunned by his audacious suggestion. But Kurapika didn't linger or acknowledge your discomfort. With a final weighted look, he turned and strode from the kitchen, leaving you rattled to your core.

The inappropriate remarks only escalated from there. Kurapika seemed to grab any available opportunity to leisurely speculate about you bearing his child in graphic detail.

"Pregnancy's gonna do amazing things for those breasts," he mused one morning while you brushed your hair. You could feel the heated trail of his stare lingering on your chest in the mirror's reflection.

You very nearly dropped the hairbrush, whipping around to gape at him in disbelief. Kurapika simply held your flustered glare, his expression infuriatingly impassive.

"What? Just being honest here," he stated with a casual shrug of his broad shoulders. "Don't act so scandalized. This is a big damn deal for preserving our people."

His dismissive indifference towards your obvious mortification only fanned the flames of your humiliation. You wanted to shriek at him, to demand he stop vocalizing such disturbingly personal thoughts. But Kurapika's piercing stare maintained its unwavering intensity, extinguishing any momentary flicker of outrage before it could take root.

You knew better than to protest his obsession. Raising objections now would only make his intentions that much more overt...and quite possibly hostile. The thought chilled you to your core.

So you suffered in whip-tailed silence as Kurapika's indelicate comments plagued nearly every interaction. No activity, no matter how innocuous, seemed off-limits for him to unsubtly speculate about you becoming his breeding mate in graphic vernacular. And with each new remark, you saw the feral glint smoldering brighter and brighter behind his slate irises.

It was only a matter of time before he outright admitted the depraved depths of his fixation upon you. You dreaded that inevitability, but decided playing meek and obedient remained the wisest strategy for self-preservation. At least until you could formulate an escape plan from under his obsessive watch.

You did your best to hide any discomfort at Kurapika's increasingly frank comments about you having his children. Outward protests only seemed to egg him on with even more graphic remarks. So you kept up a facade of calm obedience, hoping it might discourage him from acting on his unhealthy fixation.

But Kurapika wasn't so easily deterred. His obsession had morphed into an all-consuming hunger that chipped away at his restraint day by day. You saw the signs - his jaw clenching, fists balling up as he inwardly battled those urges. Sometimes you'd catch him staring at you with undisguised longing, his gaze hungrily tracing your curves.

It all came to a head one autumn night as you pretended to read, keenly aware of Kurapika's presence lingering nearby. The tension was suffocating, his pent-up intensity rolling off him in waves. Several times you felt him move closer, only to sense him forcibly checking himself. Finally, you decided to try excusing yourself to the bedroom.

The moment you stood up, Kurapika pounced with startling speed. In one fluid motion, he gripped your shoulders and shoved you back into the armchair, caging you in as he straddled your hips. His lithe body was coiled like a panther pinning its prey.

"Enough games," he growled, his voice low and gritty with want. "No more pretending."

You gazed up at him wide-eyed, taken aback by the naked hunger etched across his chiseled features. This wasn't the restrained Kurapika - this side of him was feral, unrestrained. Arousal and obsession burned in his dilated pupils.

He leaned in close, the hard planes of his body hovering over yours as his hot breath fanned your flushed cheeks. You could feel the thrum of his hammering heart against your own chest.

"You know how obsessed I am with continuing our legacy," Kurapika rasped with grit-toothed intensity. "I'll do whatever it takes."

One calloused hand fisted in your hair, wrenching your head back as he asserted his dominance. You instinctively froze, trembling at his overwhelming presence and display of power. Kurapika drank in your fear and captivation with a ruthless gleam.

"Don't fight it," he warned in a husky timbre. "By morning, you'll be pregnant with my kid whether you like it or not."

A shudder rippled through you at the grim finality of his words. Yet some primal part of your psyche still couldn't help responding to the masterful undercurrents of his seduction, your body warming despite your trepidation.

Kurapika's eyes narrowed, sensing that fractional flicker of reluctant arousal. With taunting slowness, he closed the gap until his lips hovered a hairsbreadth from yours. His tone took on a dangerous, velveteen purr.

"That's it...just accept what's going to happen," he murmured, the barest brush of his mouth against yours. "Don't fight my obsession growing inside you."

Then with a predator's swift strike, Kurapika's mouth crashed into yours with smothering, impatient desire. He hungrily devoured your gasp of surprise, his fervent onslaught of lush dominance overwhelming your senses.

His mouth moved hungrily against yours, hands roaming over your body as if mapping every curve. Kurapika broke the heated kiss for air, eyes glazed with undisguised longing.

"Do you have any idea how gorgeous you'd look pregnant?" he murmured with awestruck reverence.

One of his hands drifted down to splay possessively across your lower abdomen. Kurapika's gaze followed, drinking in the feminine plane as if he could somehow envision it swelling with new life.

"Carrying my child..." he continued in a hushed, wondrous tone. "Your body nurturing the next generation of our people."

He leaned in to trail feverish kisses along the slender column of your neck, causing you to shiver.

"It's all I've been able to think about," Kurapika rasped against your skin. "Just imagining how radiantly fertile you'd look, swollen with my baby..."

His hand stroked tantalizingly over your abdomen again as he nuzzled into the crook of your neck, inhaling your natural scent like an intoxicating elixir.

"I want that so damn badly," he admitted in a throaty rasp thick with yearning. "To see you heavy and glowing with our future growing inside."

Kurapika's kisses wandered across your jawline until his smoldering gaze locked onto yours again, pupils blown wide with naked obsession.

"Say you want it too," Kurapika pleaded, thumb tracing maddening circles low on your belly. "Tell me you'll let me put a baby in this luscious body..."

He drank in every microexpression flickering across your features with rapt focus, hanging on your every reaction. Kurapika leaned in closer until you were sharing the same heated breaths.

"Can't you just picture how incredible you'd look?" he murmured, voice strained with longing. "Tits getting heavy and full, that stomach finally swelling outward with our child growing inside..."

One of his hands cupped your breast almost reverently, like weighing the promise of its future maternal fullness. Kurapika's thumb brushed over your peaked nipple, drawing a soft gasp from you.

"Fuck...you'd be so unbelievably sexy carrying my baby," he groaned, utterly transfixed. "A goddess - all ripe, fertile curves and that beautiful glow mothers-to-be get."

He nuzzled his scruffy cheek against yours, peppering your jaw with open-mouthed kisses until you squirmed beneath him. Kurapika's palm stroked insistently over your abdomen again, as if willing his fantasies into reality through sheer habit.

"I can see it so clearly, feel how soft you'd be..." His voice dipped into a gravelly timbre. "Just imagine me waking you up with a nice, hard fuck every morning. How many times would I have to breed you before it finally took?"

A jolt of arousal coursed through you, your cunt clenching at his crude, possessive words. You bit back a whimper as Kurapika's hand snaked down between your thighs. His fingers expertly sought the sensitive nub of your clit, coaxing it with languid strokes.

"Maybe I'd just stay buried inside you all night," he growled, grinding his stiffening cock into your hip. "Keep that pussy nice and filled up with my cum, see if that does the trick..."

Your eyelids fluttered shut as Kurapika continued stroking your sensitive folds, his other hand kneading your breast. You felt utterly lost in the haze of his carnal need, swept away by his possessive lust.

"Fuck, that's the sexiest thought," he rasped, grinding his bulge against you. "Imagining you all stuffed and swollen with my kid, knowing I'd bred you..."

Kurapika's lips sought yours, tongue slipping inside to explore and claim. You whimpered into his kiss, helpless to the overwhelming desire coursing through your veins. He finally broke the kiss, his eyes smoldering with naked want.

He didn’t say anything, just studied your features intently as he slowly unzipped his fly. Kurapika's hand disappeared beneath his trousers, pulling his rock-hard length free. He gave himself a few languid pumps, hissing softly at the contact.

You stared, transfixed. His cock was just as you imagined - thick and veiny, pulsing with a hungry need to plant his seed.

"Go on...feel it," he ordered gruffly.

Your hand reached out on instinct, fingertips ghosting tentatively over the engorged flesh. Kurapika let out a hiss, his hips bucking into your touch. You felt a thrill at his response, a surge of feminine satisfaction.

He pressed his cock firmly into your palm, forcing you to curl your fingers around the warm girth. You stroked him experimentally, relishing the velvety-smooth skin stretched tight over his pulsating hardness. Kurapika let out a guttural moan, eyes fluttering shut as his head lolled back in pleasure.

"Get a good look, honey ," he purred. "This is what's gonna put a baby inside you."

His hands reached out to grasp your hips, yanking you down on the armchair until you were splayed before him. Your dress rode up to your waist, exposing your slick-drenched cunt to his ravenous gaze.

Kurapika's cock bobbed excitedly at the sight, already drooling an obscene amount of pre-cum. He gripped your hips, dragging you flush against him. The swollen head nudged your soaked slit, smearing its sticky promise against your heat.

"Gonna make you a mommy tonight," he breathed, eyes glazed with lust. "My sexy little wife, full and round with my kid."

With that, he plunged inside your cunt in one rough, impatient thrust. You cried out as his thick cock stretched you impossibly full. It was a delicious, overwhelming ache, like your body was being molded and shaped to his whims.

Kurapika set a punishing pace, fucking you with relentless intensity. He was like a man possessed, driven by a singular purpose. His hands dug into your hips, nails scoring your skin.

You clutched desperately at his broad shoulders, fingers raking his skin. You were completely overwhelmed by the sensation of him dominating your body, filling you up over and over again with his need.

Kurapika's face was contorted with lust, eyes screwed shut as he pounded into you. His breath came in ragged gasps, sweat-slick chest heaving with exertion. You could feel the raw urgency in his movements, the desperate need to spill his seed deep inside.

Your fingers threaded through his silken hair, gripping the roots as you held his fevered gaze. Kurapika's eyes widened, pupils blown wide with arousal at the display of submission. He gave a guttural groan, his pace faltering as he struggled to stave off his imminent release.

"So fucking sexy," he growled, teeth gritted as he fought to hold himself back. He pistoned into you harder, deeper. His thumb reached down to furiously circle your swollen clit. "Come on, honey. Let me hear you scream..."

You arched into him, the friction of his thumb on your sensitive nub and cock pistoning into your cunt pushing you towards the edge. Kurapika's hips slammed into yours with bruising force, his thrusts becoming more erratic as his orgasm neared.

You felt yourself teetering on the edge, body tensing with anticipation. His hand gripped your thigh, hiking it higher for deeper penetration. That last bit of delicious pressure was all you needed to send you careening over the edge.

Your walls clenched around him, milking his throbbing cock. You came with a strangled cry, body spasming as you squirted onto his cock. Kurapika gave a ragged gasp, his hips stuttering as he chased his own release.

With one final, primal thrust, he buried himself to the hilt. You felt the warmth of his seed flooding your womb, painting your inner walls with his virility. Thick, creamy spurts of cum filled you to the brim, his cock pulsing and twitching as he emptied every last drop.

Kurapika's hips rolled languidly into yours, prolonging the aftershocks of his climax. You clung to him, legs trembling from the intensity of your orgasm. Your bodies were entwined, sweat-slick skin pressed flush against each other.

As the haze of lust ebbed away, Kurapika's gaze softened, taking on an adoring warmth. He caressed your cheek, his voice thick with emotion.

"I hope I got you pregnant," Kurapika murmured, voice hushed with naked longing. He leaned down to trail openmouthed kisses along the column of your neck.

"Can you imagine?" he rasped against your skin, sending shivers down your spine. "Your belly swelling with our child, my obsession made flesh and blood?"

He nuzzled the crook of your neck, inhaling your mingled scents with an almost spiritual reverence. When Kurapika pulled back to meet your gaze again, his eyes were alight with feverish yearning.

"I'm going to dote on you relentlessly," he vowed in a low rasp. "Worship every curve, every new glow you get from carrying my baby."

His palm stroked over your lower abdomen, fingertips committing every plane and whisper of definition to memory.

"You'll let me, won't you?" Kurapika's tone edged towards pleading. "Let me obsess over you morning, noon, and night while you nurture our offspring?"

He dipped down to trail reverent, openmouthed kisses along the valley between your breasts.

"These are going to swell up so full and ripe..." he muttered thickly, voice muffled against your fevered skin. "I can't wait to taste how sweet your milk will be."

Kurapika's smoldering gaze met yours again, pupils blown wide with naked obsession. His hand splayed possessively over your abdomen once more, relishing the possibility of it bearing new life.

"Just stay right here with me and make my fantasy a reality," he rasped, the barest hint of a plea entering his gravelly timbre. "Let me put a baby in you and finally satisfy this all-consuming obsession."

His thumb stroked over the hint of your hipbone, gaze following the motion with rapturous focus.

"I'll take care of you both..." Kurapika vowed, voice dropping to a rugged murmur. "Mind, body, and spirit - you'll want for nothing beyond my total devotion."

With that, he sealed his promise with a searing, breathtaking kiss that made his singular obsession for impregnating you resoundingly clear.

#hunter x hunter #hunter x hunter x reader smut #hunter x hunter x reader #hunter x hunter smut #hxh #hxh x reader smut #hxh smut #hxh x reader #hxh kurapika #kurapika #kurapika kurta #kurapika x reader #kurapika smut #kurapika x reader smut

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month ago

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China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI’s backdoor

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

State-affiliated Chinese hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others; they entered their networks and spent months intercepting US traffic – from individuals, firms, government officials, etc – and they did it all without having to exploit any code vulnerabilities. Instead, they used the back door that the FBI requires every carrier to furnish:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

In 1994, Bill Clinton signed CALEA into law. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every US telecommunications network to be designed around facilitating access to law-enforcement wiretaps. Prior to CALEA, telecoms operators were often at pains to design their networks to resist infiltration and interception. Even if a telco didn't go that far, they were at the very least indifferent to the needs of law enforcement, and attuned instead to building efficient, robust networks.

Predictably, CALEA met stiff opposition from powerful telecoms companies as it worked its way through Congress, but the Clinton administration bought them off with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to acquire wiretap-facilitation technologies. Immediately, a new industry sprang into being; companies that promised to help the carriers hack themselves, punching back doors into their networks. The pioneers of this dirty business were overwhelmingly founded by ex-Israeli signals intelligence personnel, though they often poached senior American military and intelligence officials to serve as the face of their operations and liase with their former colleagues in law enforcement and intelligence.

Telcos weren't the only opponents of CALEA, of course. Security experts – those who weren't hoping to cash in on government pork, anyways – warned that there was no way to make a back door that was only useful to the "good guys" but would keep the "bad guys" out.

These experts were – then as now – dismissed as neurotic worriers who simultaneously failed to understand the need to facilitate mass surveillance in order to keep the nation safe, and who lacked appropriate faith in American ingenuity. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a security system that selectively fails when a cop needs it to, but stands up to every crook, bully, corporate snoop and foreign government. In other words: "We have faith in you! NERD HARDER!"

NERD HARDER! has been the answer ever since CALEA – and related Clinton-era initiatives, like the failed Clipper Chip program, which would have put a spy chip in every computer, and, eventually, every phone and gadget:

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

America may have invented NERD HARDER! but plenty of other countries have taken up the cause. The all-time champion is former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who, when informed that the laws of mathematics dictate that it is impossible to make an encryption scheme that only protects good secrets and not bad ones, replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-australia-will-trump-the-laws-of-mathematics-turnbull/

CALEA forced a redesign of the foundational, physical layer of the internet. Thankfully, encryption at the protocol layer – in the programs we use – partially counters this deliberately introduced brittleness in the security of all our communications. CALEA can be used to intercept your communications, but mostly what an attacker gets is "metadata" ("so-and-so sent a message of X bytes to such and such") because the data is scrambled and they can't unscramble it, because cryptography actually works, unlike back doors. Of course, that's why governments in the EU, the US, the UK and all over the world are still trying to ban working encryption, insisting that the back doors they'll install will only let the good guys in:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

Any back door can be exploited by your adversaries. The Chinese sponsored hacking group know as Salt Typhoon intercepted the communications of hundreds of millions of American residents, businesses, and institutions. From that position, they could do NSA-style metadata-analysis, malware injection, and interception of unencrypted traffic. And they didn't have to hack anything, because the US government insists that all networking gear ship pre-hacked so that cops can get into it.

This isn't even the first time that CALEA back doors have been exploited by a hostile foreign power as a matter of geopolitical skullduggery. In 2004-2005, Greece's telecommunications were under mass surveillance by US spy agencies who wiretapped Greek officials, all the way up to the Prime Minister, in order to mess with the Greek Olympic bid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305

This is a wild story in so many ways. For one thing, CALEA isn't law in Greece! You can totally sell working, secure networking gear in Greece, and in many other countries around the world where they have not passed a stupid CALEA-style law. However the US telecoms market is so fucking huge that all the manufacturers build CALEA back doors into their gear, no matter where it's destined for. So the US has effectively exported this deliberate insecurity to the whole planet – and used it to screw around with Olympic bids, the most penny-ante bullshit imaginable.

Now Chinese-sponsored hackers with cool names like "Salt Typhoon" are traipsing around inside US telecoms infrastructure, using the back doors the FBI insisted would be safe.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Image: Kris Duda, modified https://www.flickr.com/photos/ahorcado/5433669707/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #calea #lawful interception #backdoors #keys under doormats #cold war 2.0 #foreseeable outcomes #jerry berman #greece #olympics #snowden

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malcriada · 4 months ago

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URGENT: GFM ORGANIZER NEEDED

are you living in one of these following countries?

Canada

Australia

Mexico

Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Austria, Luxembourg, or Finland

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, or Switzerland

do you have experience setting up a GFM campaign or know someone who does? do you want to help a person suffering in Palestine? if the answer to these questions is yes, please read on further: Nesma @nesmamomen reached out to me and asked if i knew anyone who could organize a GFM campaign for her friend Tamer, who also lives in Gaza. Tamer lost his house and his father, sister and children died because of the bombing. he is in a desperate situation and needs support urgently Tamer has gone through unimaginable suffering and would need a trustworthy and experienced GFM organizer that can help him set up a campaign.

please get in contact with @nesmamomen if you fit this description or know someone that could help! if you are seriously considering this, please be aware that exchanging sensitive information needed for setting up a gfm campaign is not safe to do via tumblr messaging, please use more encrypted chat spaces (Nesma has whatsapp and you can contact her there!)

taglist for reach under the cut (if you'd like to not be put into these lists, please let me know and i will remove you)

@timetravellingkitty @meaganfoster @briarhips @mazzikah @mahoushojoe

@schoolhater @pcktknife @transmutationisms @sawasawako

@feluka @terroristiraqi @irhabiya @commissions4aid-international @wellwaterhysteria

@deepspaceboytoy @post-brahminism @junglejim4322 @kibumkim @neechees

@mangocheesecakes @kyra45 @marnota @7bitter @tortiefrancis

@toiletpotato @fromjannah @omegaversereloaded @vague-humanoid @criptochecca

@aristotels @komsomolka @neptunerings @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @heritageposts

@ot3 @amygdalae @ankle-beez @communistchilchuck @dykesbat

@watermotif @stuckinapril @violentrevolution @mavigator @lacecap

@socalgal @chilewithcarnage @ghelgheli @sayruq @northgazaupdates

#from the river to the sea palestine will be free #free gaza #gaza strip #free palestine #gazaunderattack

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luminoustarlight · 1 year ago

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Your Eyes Only | Anakin Skywalker

You leave Anakin a special recording on his tablet.

rating: explicit | pairing: tcw!anakin skywalker x afab!reader | wc: 719 warnings: SMUT [masturbation, recording of sexual acts, breeding/pregnancy kink, dirty talk], swearing

this came to me last night after watching the latest ahsoka episode. no spoilers though!

There is a special place in galactic purgatory for one Anakin Skywalker. A secret marriage is one thing but this crosses a whole new threshold.

If it weren’t for the thankful prince who insisted on throwing a banquet for Anakin and Ahsoka after rescuing him, Anakin wouldn’t be in this position.

He’d be halfway back to Coruscant.

He wouldn’t be in a private room with his personal tablet in one hand and his stiff cock in the other. Like he said. Galactic purgatory.

He should’ve known better when you handed him his tablet before he left and emphasized, “for your eyes only.”

He thought maybe it’d be a few photos of you. Certainly not a video recording of you on your bed with your legs spread and fingers dancing over your clit.

“Do you have your hand around your cock, Ani? Are you making yourself feel good?”

“Yes,” he subconsciously replies to you, even though he’s watching a recording. You’re massaging one of your breasts while barely slipping two fingers into your hole. Anakin groans at this, the dark desire in his belly only getting stronger. He swipes his palm over his tip and drags his hand down his length, lubricating himself with his pre-cum.

“I miss you, Ani,” you insert two fingers into your pussy, moaning and arching your back into your touch. “You’re so much better at this than me.” Your fingers move in and out, in and out. “Your hands are bigger… fingers are longer…y’just fill me up so much better.”

It drives Anakin insane hearing how wet you are. He hates that he can’t taste you. He hates that he can’t nuzzle his face against you, holding your thighs open with so much force it hurts. His hand pales in comparison to how your cunt feels around him. So snug and warm, he’s convinced it’s the most divine feeling in the galaxy.

“I know you wish you were in this tight little pussy, fucking me hard… or soft, whichever you’d like… but you’ll be back home soon. Then you can have me as much as you want. Cum in me as many times as you want. Filling me up until it sticks.”

Your voice is music to Anakin’s ears. It’s astounding how such filthy words can sound like a sweet melody when coming from your lips. Maker, he wishes he was with you. You can’t tease him with the idea of putting a baby in you when he’s on another kriffing planet. He continues to twist and squeeze his hand around his dick to help alleviate the throbbing. The image of your swollen belly is too much for him to bear. His skin is burning— with lust or shame, he doesn’t know. But what he does know is that you’re about to cum. He sees it in the way your breathing changes, when you shut your eyes and purse your lips. And then you say it.

“Gonna cum, Anakin— oh, fuck! Ani, I’m cumming!” your toes are curling and your body is twitching as you feel an electric current course through you.

Oh, that sends him over the edge. He bucks his hips up, fucking his hand with fervor until he’s spurting hot white seed on his abdomen. “Shit- fuck—“ Anakin drops the tablet and puts his fist in his mouth to suppress the sound of his orgasm. He hasn’t cum quite so hard from his hand in a long time.

You’re coming down from your highs together, despite being planets apart. You crawl to the edge of the bed, your face now in clear view on Anakin’s tablet. You always look so beautiful, however, you’re especially stunning after you’ve orgasmed. Must be a result of the chemical reactions that occur during intercourse.

“I miss you. Come home safely,” is your last remark before the video ends.

“I miss you too, angel,” Anakin answers. Once he cleans himself up he’ll see if he can send you an encrypted message. That thought, however, vanishes as soon as there is a loud knock on his door.

“Anakin! Are you almost ready?” It’s Ahsoka. “The banquet starts in 3 minutes!”

Anakin scrambles off of the bed and hurries to wipe off the cum on his stomach. “Be right there, Snips.”

Yup. He is definitely going to galactic purgatory.

live action clone wars anakin is SENDING ME and the fact that hayden just naturally looks older.... ugh. he's so yummy.

◂ anakin masterlist ▸ main masterlist

#anakin skywalker #anakin skywalker smut #anakin skywalker x reader #anakin skywalker x you #anakin skywalker x female reader #tcw!anakin

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drekkavac · 13 days ago

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[ 𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐑𝐘𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐄. ] 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐕𝐄𝐘. ❝ oh she laughs ! She can smile too . ❞

𝐒𝐌𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐒 , 𝐋𝐀𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐒 , 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒 𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐀𝐑𝐄? The laugh had come to her seemingly out of nowhere. Her life until this point had been nothing but waking nightmares for them. If she though hard enough , the last time she 𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐃 herself to smile , to laugh … They found out. They 𝐀𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐘𝐒 knew. Somehow …

Legacy had a way of finding out everything.

Even now , in a 𝐑𝐄𝐁𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 attempt to find freedom that she still wondered was real or not. She could kill him right now. It'd be easy. It 𝐖𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 have been easy before. It 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 have been easy. But for one reason or another , she couldn't do it. A momentary error that they were still debating was a good one.

It's when @halfdent brings 𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 to the gesture of hers , that laugh that had snuck out without her knowing , causing her face to darken to a light shade of pink to betray the pale almost ghost like features. Had she known who her mother was … she would know her to be the one to give her those features , along with the one green eye she possessed to pair with the 𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐋𝐘 icy blue one on the other side. Eyes look down from him , cast now to her fidgeting hands. There is was , the quick 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐀𝐋 of emotion to bring back the cold exterior she learned to be the safer expression.

❝ Are bad jokes something everyone does? ❞ It was a 𝐐𝐔𝐈𝐂𝐊 deflect from her own actions. Common when someone pointed out something that made her nervous , as if 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 didn't make her nervous out here , so long without returning home. So long that she was beginning to wonder when she would be pulled back. It happened every time she ran. One way or another , they always pulled her back. They'd been watching , waiting for that to happen , but those agents never came. The joke had been the first time she had let that guard even in the 𝐒𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐄𝐒𝐓. ❝ Or is it just you? ❞ The words she spoke were English , she was fluent in the language along with many others , but the accent that went with it 𝐎𝐁𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐋𝐘 had a Russian sound to it. ❝ You're different from most people. ❞

#║▌ THE UNBAPTIZED CHILD RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. // IC.#║▌ ENCRYPTED MESSAGES. // ANSWERED.#v. dc.#║▌ KISS ME YOU ANIMAL I NEED TO TAKE YOU IN REAL SLOW. // HALFDENT.#halfdent

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robin-evry · 13 days ago

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HII i'm loving your works omg! could i ask you to make a bronya!yuu or silverwolf!yuu? (you can choose just one if you want). take care or yourself and do your work at your time, no need to rush! :D

I decided to do two but sorry if bronya is so short , aww thank you.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐅 𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐎𝐋𝐅!𝐘𝐔𝐔 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐖𝐒𝐓🐺👾

A member of the Stellaron Hunters and a genius hacker. She sees the universe as a massive immersive simulation game and has fun with it. She's mastered the skill known as "aether editing," which can be used to tamper with the data of reality.

Silver wolf!yuu is rarely known in nrc, they prefer to stay behind the scenes only a few students know about their existence.

Rarely appear in public, mostly using their holograms to go to school. It's pretty rare to see them actually outside of the ramshackle dorm.

Has a habit of disappearing and appearing, imagine your standing there and suddenly a hologram or game particles appear and silver wolf!yuu appear beside you.

Every time Crowley manages to piss them off, silver wolf!yuu would choose an area to vandalize at school, and some students manage to learn when you take a photo of it you can get a hidden message from silver wolf!yuu about Crowley.

silver wolf!yuu has a habit of collecting data about students, they have a database about their past, quirks, strength and weakness.

A very famous gamer in twst known to beat unbeatable levels of any game in twst and they use a fake alias. They hear about idia ranting towards Ortho about their game persona and find it funny. And join many game tournaments and win them easily and they gained money for this.

The ignihyde dorm is their second home, the dorm has good wifi for gaming. And manage to get close to idia and Ortho and talk about games with each other.

Their uniform has technology imbued to it. allowing them to access and project holographic screens on command. These are mainly used for quick data checks, sending encrypted messages, or pulling up maps and files in real-time without needing a handheld device.

They possessed a higher advanced technology than anything in twst. Also they use their aether hacking to change the ramshackle to their liking.

In battle, they would dominate due to having a lot hex on their side, they can hack into reality and get in the students file and remove the overblot. Or use it to discover and apply weakness towards the enemy.

They also have a mysterious job, operated as a freelancer, known for taking on jobs that require skill, secrecy, and the ability to circumvent the most complex security systems. Their reputation was built on their expertise in digital infiltration, information gathering, and high-stakes hacking, often working for those willing to pay for their skills without asking too many questions. most of their clients seem to be suspicious or not morally good.

Notorious for being a phone addict always playing their game outside or inside of class and when they were asked a question they immediately answered it correctly.

They also have a talent of engineering zoning out imagining about creating new tech ideas, mods and strategies for games.

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐅 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐘𝐀!𝐘𝐔𝐔 𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐖𝐒𝐓 ❄️🌬️

Heir apparent to the Supreme Guardian of Belobog. She possesses pride befitting of a princess, but also the determination and integrity of a soldier.

Bronya!yuu is the embodiment of what a leader and an heir should be. Their charisma is able to encourage people and lead them towards the right path.

As well a dignified soldier bronya!yuu may look weak but are by far one of the most efficient in hand to hand combat, able to pin down a student who is bigger than them.

Has a tendency to reminisce about their mother and would just sit there and reminisce about them and grim would always be there to comfort them.

An expert marksman, rook and them once a week have a contest with each other who ever is the better marksman.

They are by far one of vil favorite, they are dignified, elegant and strong like a soldier and a princess should be, they also inspired epel to be more like them he admired them and have lessons with him where they tutor him.

They are patient and calm in the heeds of battle always believing as being one in harmony they could work together and forge a more successful path, as well being the back bone of a battle planning and helping them behind the scenes by shooting at the enemy

Them and Lilia would usually trade military tactics to each other over a cup of tea and also discussing other topics

They usually get burned out and they don't know when to rest, since they always have to keep a princess like dignity many of the first years notice and comfort them during hard times.

Bronya!yuu abilities allow them to enhance their comrade ability extremely towards its potential, as well to summon winter soldiers to help them but it takes a lot of energy.

Have a love and interest in history, usually seen in the library studying about twst long history and enjoy talking about them to their friends.

As well being a top student, always studying and getting good grades without any issue and always be respectful towards people

By far have a good reputation at school for being a capable leader, many students admire their discipline, while others have some sort of a sense of rivalry with them.

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motherroam-rs · 9 months ago

Text

Sleep Deprivation

Relationship: Hunter x Reader

Summary: In the search for Omega, Hunter struggles to sleep and needs a push to get some rest.

Warnings/Tags: Sleep Deprivation, Angst, Comfort, uhhh I think that’s everything

Word Count: 1.2k

Notes: The first 3 episodes have me in a chokehold, I wanna see Hunter happy again - Here’s a super short angsty lil comfort fic for Hunter set just before the beginning of episode 2 🫶🫶 Apologies for any grammatical errors!

Every noise in the Marauder seemed louder with just the three of you in it. Any hum, beep, and sigh seems to be amplified, even Gonkys small movements seemed to echo through the empty space just as loud as Wreckers snores.

Though, it’s not the only change. The ship seems too big now, and it’s hard to remember a time where it was so over-occupied that you would all fight over who got to sleep in a bunk for the night, and who had to use a sleep mat on the floor. Durasteel walls that previously made you all feel like fish packed together in a can, now seemed to stretch out impossibly, making it seem that you were planets away from the ships other two occupants.

Currently you’re sat in the co-pilot chair, preoccupied with your glitchy datapad, attempting to send an encrypted message to Echo for any updates from the clone network. You’re biting down on a sigh at how you wished Tech were here to fix it for you when Wrecker nudges your foot with his own.

You look up, puzzled at the man but your silent question is answered by the attempted jerk of his head. Behind you both sits Hunter, staring abysmally at the control board of flashing lights with his fist tightened around a horn from Roland Durand. The lights cast a harsh shadow on his features and your lips can’t help but work themselves into a frown at the dark circles beneath his eyes.

It had been well over 24 hours since he last slept.

Glitchy datapad now abandoned, you give a quick nod in thanks to Wrecker, before leaving the cockpit to approach Hunter. His chair doesn’t turn, and despite his enhanced senses and the lack of noise in the ship to cover your steps in any way, he gives no indication that he’s heard you. You follow his line of sight to both Tech’s goggles and Lula, both of the items bringing a pain to your chest.

“Hunter?” You press your hand to his armored shoulder, and he finally turns to look at you, slightly startled and you can’t even recall a time that you’ve ever caught him so off guard. Now that he’s facing you, the exhaustion is evident in more than just the dark circles under his eyes, his body seems to slump against the support of the chair in some sort of emotional defeat.

He’s been running himself into the ground over the last few days in pursuit of the Pyke needed in order to get the lead you had all been after, but at least you and Wrecker still managed to somewhat take care of your basic needs of sleep and rations.

Before you can speak, he turns back towards the controls, as if sensing what you were going to say about the neglect to his sleep schedule.

“Tech made this all seem… easy.” Gloved hands gesture to the console of flashing lights, his throat bobbing with a dry swallow as he shakes his head. “All of it takes me twice as long as it took him.”

Hunters hand pinches the bridge of his nose, the same way he does when he has an oncoming headache and your hand presses to the unarmoured section between his shoulder and neck, an area that is usually covered by his scarf. At the touch, his eyes close and lips part with a soft release of breath.

He needs to sleep.

“Come to bed, Hunter.” The whisper echoes through the too-quiet ship, amplified like every other noise, and for a moment it looks like he’s going to refuse. He doesn’t speak, but gives a slight nod of his head, and brushes your hand away to stand and begin removing his armor as he follows you on the way to your shared bunk.

After so long of racing to be the first one on the Marauder after a mission to secure your own bunk for a night, there was some sad irony in the fact that you now couldn’t sleep alone. Following the loss of Tech, and the painful absences of Omega and Echo, all attempts to adjust to the atmosphere of loneliness on the ship were almost painful.

At the start, you think you barely managed a standard 8 hours across 3 full day cycles, let alone in one night, and your restlessness didn’t go unnoticed by Hunter, who had probably slept even less than you. On the fourth night of staring at the ceiling and trying to muffle your quiet crying in the too-silent ship, he had abandoned his bunk beneath you and climbed into your own. His arms allowed you the comfort of not grieving alone that night, and almost every night since.

At some point, it delved into more than simply finding comfort in each other so you could both sleep, sending you far enough past the line of friends for Wrecker to tease you both in an attempt to lighten the heavy atmosphere in the Marauder.

Now only wearing the lower half of his blacks, Hunter lifts himself into the shared top bunk, and offers you a hand up, immediately pulling you into him once you’re safely up. In the small confines of the bunk, you’re entirely pressed to his firm body, yet he still holds you tightly against his bare chest as if fearing you’d slip away the moment his eyes closed.

He’s pulled the thin blanket over you both, but with the heat of his body it’s more than enough to keep you warm. “We’ll get her back.” You murmur against Hunters chest in assurance as one of his hands pulls your leg across his own, entangling the two of you together.

You feel his hand twitch against you, “It’s been a long time, and we still don’t know where she is, the only lead we can get right now is by handing over a Pyke to the Durand family.” His voice is heavy with exhaustion and you crane your neck up, lifting yourself from his chest to place your hand on his stubble covered jaw, forcing him to look at you.

“We’ll get her back, Hunter, but you need to sleep.” You lean in to press a kiss to the lips that seem to have set themselves into an ever present frown since that day on Ord Mantell.

Hunters hand presses to your face to mirror your own, his other arm tightening around your waist protectively as he kisses you back. Even when you pull away and rest your head back on his chest, his fingers continue to trace slow patterns on your waist, still refusing to let you go as he gives in to his tiredness.

You wait for his breathing to slow, ensuring he’s asleep before you allow yourself to close your eyes and follow him. In the night, you dream of living together in a house on Pabu, where the only echoing noise is Omegas laugh, where there are no empty spaces to make you feel lonely, and where Hunter can finally rest.

#the bad batch season 3 #the bad batch #bad batch season 3 spoilers #bad batch hunter #tbb hunter #bad batch hunter x reader #hunter tbb x reader #angst with a happy ending

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wiseagent · 8 months ago

Note

smooch?

THE SPY CAN'T HELP BUT SMILE UPON TED'S PLEA , perhaps a bit too willing to comply with it & enthusiastically so as well. it has been far too long since they've had a chance to spend time together , his fault , as he's been drowning in assignments , & with anya & henry off to the side talking about their favorite cartoon shows , he didn't see any issue in divulging in some public affection. IS THIS NECESSARY FOR THE MISSION ? his mind would query , forever putting his work before anything else. for once , he knows the answer is no , but rather than do it for WISE , he'll do it out of selfishness ━━ out of his own needs.

❝ you have an amusing way of asking for affection , my darling , ted , ❞ loid whispers as he leans down to kiss @belasso's cheek , the contact brief , but it's enough to spark fireworks in his own chest. out of the corner of his eye , he spots anya & henry now looking their way , his daughter looking especially confused. WHAT IS SHE THINKING ? ❝ perhaps i should make you wait for a proper kiss when these two are not present , ❞ he whispers with a wink. ❝ for now , shall we all go to the ice cream shop ? i think after witnessing that bit of affection , the children are in need of some sweets. ❞ with a laugh at anya's immediate approval at his suggestion ﹙ screaming ❛ ice cream ❜ repeatedly as she dances around them ﹚ , loid lets an arm wrap around ted as they approach their children , ready for a relaxing , family day with the ones he loves.

#belasso #˗ˏˋ ᶜᶤᵖʰᵉʳ ᵃ· ﹙ ic ﹚ ﹕ another role to play.#˗ˏˋ ᶜᶤᵖʰᵉʳ ᶜ· ﹙ answered ﹚ ﹕ encrypted messages.#˗ˏˋ ᵃˢˢᶤᵍᶰᵐᵉᶰᵗ· ﹙ mission 004 ﹚ ﹕ slipping through my fingers.#THEY RETURN #i have missed tedloid they are so soft #the family we never knew we needed ;___;

0 notes

goosewriting · 6 months ago

Note

hi! saw that you are taking requests, can you do a cal kestis one where him and reader go to some nice planet after a mission and reader asks Cal to dance under the stars. then reader remarks about the planet or view being beautiful, and cal says something like "but you are more so" and then they both get shy for a bit and one of them confesses, ending with a sweet kiss?

thank you love your work sm ♥️

Constant

summary: after a mission, Cal and reader get separated from the rest and have a sweet moment together.

relationship: Cal Kestis x gn!reader

warnings: none, fluff!

word count: 4k

A/N: it has been a while since i’ve written Cal and it shows omg i feel so rusty. also i may have gone a bit off topic with the intro/setting sdfsdf i really hope this works for you anon, thank you sm for requesting :D

(english is not my first language. constructive criticism and grammar corrections are very appreciated!)

— — —

Despite the mission ending successfully, you got found by an angry squad of troopers, and in your escape, you got separated from the team. Cere and Greez made a hasty escape on the Mantis; Merrin disappeared from sight in a green cloud, so you knew she was hidden somewhere, and she’d be fine. You and Cal however had to run through the maze that was the village, hearing the many boots behind you. Luckily you encountered a ship with a hyperdrive, so while in your mind you apologised to the owners for “borrowing” their ship (they’re not getting it back), you made quick work of hijacking it, kickstarting the engines and making a swift exit into the atmosphere, then jumping into hyperspace.

It wasn’t usual for the crew to have to steal a transport, but when you did, all of you knew the drill: access the computer, scramble the signal, and send out an encrypted message to the Mantis so the others knew you were safe.

After you mentally tick off every item in the to-do list, you let yourself fall into the co-pilot seat with a sigh. Next to you, Cal checks the scanner one last time, and is about to punch in some coordinates into the navigation system, but his hand stops mid-air.

“So, where are we going exactly?” he asks.

“We need to lay low,” you think aloud and take the holopad out of your backpack, bringing up a galactic map of the region you’re currently in. You scroll back and forth for a minute, until you find a suitable goal. Stretching your arm over to Cal so he can see your screen, you point to the pin you just set. The little ship is decently shaken by the speed, so Cal gently places his hand over yours to stabilise the device to be able to read the tag. Even though you’re both wearing gloves, and physical contact isn’t exactly rare between the two of you, you can still feel the slight prickle of heat on your cheeks. You mentally curse at yourself for being this affected by such small gestures. Your thoughts are quickly interrupted however as Cal lets go of your hand, fully leaning back into the seat with a huff.

“Is there really no other choice?” he asks.

“All things considered, it’s a good one,” you offer. “We need to land to properly dismantle the transponder before the ship gets reported as stolen.”

“Right,” he sighs and punches in the coordinates. The computer shows a loading bar quickly reaching the end as it finishes calculating when to leave hyperspace. It’s actually in just a couple of minutes.

You lean back into the seat as well, placing the holopad on your lap. You turn your face to Cal with a silly grin.

“Besides, I hear they have wonderful weather this time of year.”

The Jedi doesn’t answer but you can hear his light huff as he playfully rolls his eyes. BD, sitting on the seat behind Cal’s, beeps amusedly as well.

You smile to yourself, your eyes lingering on Cal’s profile perhaps a second too long. He seems to feel you looking, and just as he turns his face to you, you quickly look the other way. Before you can give in to the embarrassment of having been caught staring, the computer signals it’s time to drop from hyperspace.

Cal’s focus goes back to the front, and he places his hand on the lever, pulling it down. Adjusting your position on your seat, you can’t help but crane your neck a little as the flurry of lights in front of you comes to a halt, replaced by the image of a green planet: Takodana. As you approach the surface, you take in the sights, the mountains, the lakes. Everything looks so… lush, and alive. It's a nice change of pace after the multitude of arid, dusty planets you seem to have been limited to lately. You swear you still have sand in your boots from a mission weeks ago.

Picking your holopad back up, you zoom into the map, giving Cal instructions on what route to take and what altitude to maintain. There’s a clearing in the forest that seems big enough to fit the ship, so you decide to land there. Once the engines are turned off, you three get to work: Cal walks out the short ramp to start working on the transponder to fry it, while BD stays in the cockpit to wipe the travel logs. You check the small cargo hold, opening all storage containers, looking for anything useful, be it rations, equipment or medical supplies.

After a while, you find that there are some tools and miscellaneous things that could be useful. Those you put in one of the bigger storage boxes and leave it near the door so it’s easy to reach; the rest you just put away again where it was. Giving yourself a nod of approval, you stand up and dust off your legs, as you’ve been kneeling on the metallic floor which apparently did not get mopped very often. You exit the ship, walking around to the other side, where you see that Cal has removed a panel from the outer hull to essentially start taking the ship apart to access the parts he needs. Several ship modules now lie freely on the soft grass, and Cal’s upper body is hidden from sight as he’s leaning far into the machinery. You hear him grunt and curse under his breath as he struggles with particularly stubborn bolt.

“Can I help?” you ask as you approach him.

He evidently did not hear nor feel you coming, as he was too focused, so your presence takes him by surprise. You see him flinch at being startled, his head hitting on something to which he flinches again, now from the sharp pain on his temple, and he crawls out completely, a hand shooting up to where you could see a reddening spot on his skin. You can’t help the little snort that escapes you at his antics, and he looks at you in mock offence that you are amused at his expense.

“You good?” you ask, taking a step closer towards him. Your hand instinctively reaches up to his face, gingerly brushing away his own so you can check for any injury.

“Yeah, just didn’t hear you…” he mumbles, not pulling away from you, and letting you inspect his face closely.

“I thought Jedis could feel someone’s presence,” you tease him, and only then do you realise how close your faces are. Cal doesn’t give you any snark back, instead he just holds your gaze. With a sudden strong gust of wind, the late afternoon sun manages to peer through the thick tree canopies, and you’re like hypnotised. The warm sunlight catches on his copper eyelashes, and you catch a glimpse of the specks of gold that swim in his ocean eyes. If they’re green or blue, you never quite settled on, as they seemed to change depending on the light. This is by far one of the more beautiful versions you’ve had the pleasure to see, though.

His eyes are just as focused on yours, and for a split second, they dart down a bit, then back up to hold your gaze again, and your breath hitches. Did he just–?

BD’s beeping breaks the spell, and you take a step back from him, clearing your throat.

“Yeah, no. Uhm, you might get a bruise but uh, other than that you’re fine,” you give him your diagnosis, fidgeting with your sleeve. “Sorry again for startling you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

You stand there in silence for a second, rather awkwardly, when BD beeps again, a little more insistent this time.

“Huh? Yeah,” Cal turns to the droid. “I’m almost done here. You’re gonna fit into the opening far better than me though, mind giving me a hand?”

BD agrees, quickly hopping over to where the hull still stays open and exposed. As the two get back to work, you take out your holopad again, looking at the other pins you had marked on the map earlier.

“While you work on the transponder, I’m going into the ‘city’–” You use your free hand to gesture quotation marks in the air. “–to get us some food.”

“It won’t take long though,” Cal says, peeking back out from the ship. “If you wait for a bit we can go together.”

You tilt your head at him with an apologetic smile.

“No offence, but we’ve seen your face and name plastered on multiple wanted notices across several systems now,” you point out. Cal opens his mouth to retort something, but you don’t let him. “I’m still unknown, all in all. There’s going to be bounty hunters, mercenaries and who knows what else that might recognise you.”

Cal hesitates for a moment, biting the inside of his cheek, until he has to admit to himself that you’re right. Especially with a ship currently out of commission and as such unable to make another quick escape, you really want to make an effort to stay hidden until you can meet with the rest of the Mantis crew again. He sighs deeply, making it evident that he’s not really entirely on board.

“Just… be careful?” he pleads.

You pat the blaster on your thigh holster twice and give him a winner smile.

“When am I not?”

Before he can reply (and you’re sure he has a carefully curated list of shenanigans of yours spanning over several years), you turn on your heels to grab your things and head out into the forest. Using your holopad, you navigate through the thick vegetation. You take a little detour to check out the lake though, and find an overhang at the cliffs which is decently hidden, but has a wonderful view of the water and the mountains on the other side. You take in the sight for a few moments, then continue your trek to your goal, the Takodana castle. Also known as Maz’s castle, since it’s run by the so-called queen of the pirates, Maz Kanata. You’ve heard stories about her exploits, and while you don’t necessarily have any emotional attachment or feeling of belonging to pirates and certain groups of outlaws, you do appreciate what she’s done here, making a place for people to take a respite. As long as things are kept civil, anyone is welcome.

The clearing you chose to park the ship at was a really good decision; despite being quite far away from a castle, as it took you nearly an hour to get here, you notice that the closer you got, the more movement there is. And the less people know you’re here, the better. As you walk up to the entrance of the tavern in the central hall of the castle, you wish you had worn some sort of cloak or hooded cape. You’re pretty sure no one has any means to recognise you, but you can’t help feeling a little exposed.

Taking a focusing breath, you push the heavy entrance door open, and enter the space. Some faces turn to look at you, but most customers ignore you, keeping their focus on their conversations and games.

You beeline towards the bar, and the bartender gives you a hard once-over, raising a brow as you take a seat on a stool. You order food and drinks to go, placing some credits on the slightly greasy surface. He merely grunts in response, taking your payment and disappearing into the kitchen.

While you wait, you take a moment to look around. You see all sorts of people and creatures. Most of them seem relaxed, just trying to have a good time before they continue their journey to wherever they’re headed next. There’s some more… suspicious individuals in the darker corners of the establishment, hiding their faces under hats, masks or large hoods pulled down to their noses. You take mental note of a Nautolan to your left, who hasn’t let you out of her sights ever since you came in. She doesn’t look particularly suspicious, but the contrast of ther white outfit against the deep green skin caught your attention. From under the wide brim of her hat, her staring is starting to make you a little uneasy, but before you can glare back, a kitchen worker comes out from the back, handing you two bags of greasy food which to be quite honest, smells better than expected.

You thank them with a smile, stuffing everything into your backpack, then take your leave. It’s a shame you won’t make it back in time for Cal to have his food while it’s warm, but beggars can’t be choosers, you suppose.

The trek back is uneventful, but you take a different route than the one from before, just in case. Every now and then you look over your shoulder, listening carefully to check if anyone is following you. But other than your somewhat laboured breathing, the buzzing of insects and a raspy bird call somewhere above you, you hear nothing.

By the time you’re back at the ship, the sun is starting to set, and you find that Cal has set up a makeshift camping site next to the now reassembled ship, consisting of a tarp hanging from one of the wings and held down on the ground by carefully laid out rocks of appropriate size and weight. It creates a canopy of sorts, under which the Jedi is sitting on one of the storage boxes you left within reach behind the cockpit. Two more boxes serve as improvised seating around a lantern set to a dim, warm light that projects Cal’s shadow onto the greenish-beige tarp.

This time, he feels your presence before he sees you, so even though you approach without making a sound, his head is already turned in your direction by the time you see him. You meet his gaze and greet him with a smile. Making your way to where he’s sitting, you set your backpack on the ground, kneeling down to get everything out.

“Room service has arrived,” you announce, handing him the now cold food. “Wish we had a microwave though.”

He chuckles, taking his portion from your hands, opening the packaging rather eagerly.

“Lighting a fire would also work, but that would make the whole ‘stay hidden’ thing redundant.”

“Yeah,” you sigh as you sit down across from him. “Oh well. Let’s dig in.”

“You could have had your food while it was hot though,” he remarks and takes a bite. He hums in pleasant surprise; it’s not too shabby.

“I could have,” you respond, inspecting the food in your hands, looking for the best angle to bite into. “But I wanted to eat with you.”

He just looks at you for a moment while he chews.

“Why?” he asks after he swallows.

“Because it gives me a sense of–” domesticity, is what you want to say, but you stop yourself just in time, trying to find an alternate answer while willing the heat creeping onto your cheeks to go away. “A sense of normalcy. Across species, planets and time, sharing meals with your loved ones has always been a constant.”

You hope he doesn’t take the “loved ones” too literally. Then again, there’s no denying that you do feel rather strongly towards him.

“And given what we do,” you continue. “I appreciate little moments like these even more, I suppose.”

Cal gives you a look that you can’t quite read, so to stop yourself from saying anything else, you take a big bite of your food, your gaze falling to the ground. He seems to be thinking over your words, his eyes drifting to the side.

“I do too, by the way,” he says after a few moments of silence.

“Hm?”

“Appreciate these moments, I mean,” he clarifies. “Up until now, I never found the words to describe it, but the way you put it, that’s exactly it. The crew, you and the guys. Despite everything that’s going on right now, you’re my constant as well. And the little moments of normalcy we get, as you said, I cling onto them too.”

You shoot him a genuine smile. It warms your heart to know he feels the same about the little patchwork family you find yourself in. People you trust your life with, and people you can’t imagine a life without. Especially without Cal.

You both continue eating in silence, surrounded by nothing but the gentle breeze blowing against the tarp, swaying it slightly, and the sounds of the forest.

“Did you contact Cere yet?” you ask after a while, remembering that you aren’t here on vacation, but you actually have to properly regroup with your crew soon.

“I did. And yes; I used the encryption you showed me,” he adds with a chuckle before you can ask. “They’re currently waiting for an opening to pick up Merrin, and after that they’re headed here.”

“Any idea on how long that might take?”

He hums to signal he’s unsure, while crumpling up the foil wrapper now that he’s done eating and throwing it into a trash bag.

“Not sure, could be anything between a couple of hours and a rotation. Two at most, I think.”

“Huh.” You tilt your head at his response, and realise that for a relatively short but still undetermined amount of time, you’ll be stuck here. Alone. With Cal. Your heart quickens ever so slightly, and you clear your throat as you also throw away the waste.

Standing up, you clasp your hands together with a clap.

“Let’s make the most of it then, shall we? C’mon,” you gesture for him to follow you.

“Where are we going?” he asks, giving you a suspicious look, but he can’t stop the boyish smile spreading on his face either way.

“Just follow me.”

You bend down to turn off the lantern, and in an instant you’re both surrounded by darkness. It takes a couple of seconds for your eyes to get used to it, and in a sudden moment of confidence, you take his hand in yours. He doesn’t say anything nor does he pull back, letting you guide him through the forest to that one spot at the cliff you had found earlier.

“I hope you know where you’re going,” he says with a chuckle.

“Oh please, when have my orientation skills ever let us down.”

“Well,” he starts.” There was that one time on Kashyyyk. And in the Zeffo underground. Oh and let’s not forget about–”

“Alright, alright. I get it,” you laugh. He still hasn’t let go of your hand, so you use your free one to push away a branch to pass through a thick bush. “But trust me this time, you’ll like it.”

“I trust you,” he replies, so truthfully and genuinely, without a second of hesitation nor a drop of sass. It almost makes you stop in your tracks, but you continue walking, and you wonder if he can feel the way your heart is beating against your ribcage through the Force.

Just a moment later, you arrive at your goal. Letting go of his hand, you turn to face him, stretching your arms out to the sides.

“Ta-da,” you announce in a sing-song voice. “I think it’s better in the daylight when you can see the landscape, but–”

“Look,” he interrupts, grabbing you by the shoulders and turning you back around to face the open space in front of you. “It’s not bad at all like this either.”

You can’t help the light gasp escaping your lips at the sight: there’s a short trail of lights along the shore on the other side of the lake, their reflections dancing in the water, but the rest of the forest is dark, allowing the starred sky to fully shine. There are no clouds obscuring the view, and the moons hang low in the sky, covering everything in a silvery hue. The stars seem to sparkle up above, and your eyes are mesmerised by them.

“It’s beautiful,” you whisper.

Cal hums in response, and your heart almost jumps out of your chest both in surprise and anticipation at how close he is to you. Standing behind you, Cal essentially speaks into your ear and it sends a tingle down your spine.

“But you are more so.”

Your brain all but short circuits at those words, and you react only when you feel him gently turning you around to face him. Your hands shoot up to his biceps while he hesitantly places his on your waist. Is this really happening?

You open your mouth to say something but nothing comes out. you're once again completely lost in Cal’s eyes, now reflecting the map of stars in them, the usual blue turned a dark petrol in such little light, deep and rich and threatening to drown you. A threat you’ll gladly accept as a promise.

“I, uh,” Cal swallows hard, trying to gauge your reaction in the dark. “I hope I'm not crossing a line here.”

“You are,” you reply, and for a split second you can see the panic wash over his face. “But I want you to.”

“Okay,” he says with a shaky breath, one hand coming up to gently stroke over your jaw with his knuckles. He looks away with a light scoff at himself. “I don’t actually know where to go from here.”

Your hands slowly inch upwards until you're holding Cal’s face, and he leans into the touch, momentarily closing his eyes, relishing the moment.

“Wherever it is, let’s go together,” you say, and he smiles at you, which you mirror.

He starts swaying you softly from side to side, and you chuckle, but follow his movements. For a few moments, you two dance under the stars to the symphony of the forest.

“I was so worried earlier today when you left alone,” he admits after a while, coming to a stop. “Not because I don’t think you can’t take care of yourself – I know how capable you are first hand. But the thought of something happening to you… I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I feel the same, Cal. You’re so important to me. In this mess of a galaxy, you are my constant.”

Instead of replying, he finally closes the already small gap separating you, and captures your lips with his in a short but sweet peck. He pulls back just barely to tilt his head to the side slightly, kissing you again, his arms now properly snaking around your lower back to pull you closer.

After breaking the kiss, you pepper some more all across his face wherever you can reach, just for good measure, ending with one to the tip of his nose, exaggerating the ‘mwah!’ sound. His chuckle is more akin to a giggle, and the sound is heavenly. He leans in again, this time to touch his forehead to yours.

For a moment longer, you just stand there in each other’s embrace, breathing in one another. Then Cal breaks the silence.

“We should do this more often.”

You pull back to look at him.

“Which part?”

“Spending time together, just the two of us,” he says, holding both your hands in his as he sits down and pulls you down with him, and you lean your head on his shoulder.

"Hmm, I agree."

“Let’s message the Mantis again and tell them to take their time.”

You laugh, playfully pushing your body into his, and he laughs as well.

And as you both look at the stars, you know in your heart that things will be okay. Everything will work out just fine. The Empire, Jedis, inquisitors. Right now, nothing of that matters. All you need is here beside you, and as long as you have Cal, you know you can take on whatever the universe has in tow for you next.

~~~~~

🐥 taglist: [link to join in my pinned post!]

@DyByNyght, @galaxtic-writings, @kalea-bane, @soka-writes-things, @Padawancat97, @Riddikulus-Obsessions, @optimisticprime3, @starilicious, @ivelostmyabilitytoeven, @alternatescififandomelover, @lovelyygirl8, @Cathyket, @wildefire

#please don’t come at me for using a planet from the sequels #it’s a pretty planet ok!!#goose feathers #cal kestis x reader #star wars cal x reader #jedi fallen order x reader #jedi survivor x reader #star wars x reader

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mulders-too-large-shirt · 17 days ago

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my favorite scully moments from s4

in episode 1, she cracks encrypted messages, commenting that “you say ‘a twenty letter code’ to any scientist and they immediately think ‘protein amino acid sequence code’, which is what this turned out to be” <- and that is genius at work right there!!

skinner pulling her aside to ask “do you realize what you are promoting?” when she puts together there's a whole international smallpox conspiracy, and she cuts him off with a clear “i am a SCIENTIST, sir” <- that is right!! you tell him!!!

trying and failing to come up with a theory for how the photos in episode 4 became terrifying: “plus, the film is two years out of date” “oh” “the-the photographic chemistry could have changed” “uh-huh” “the-the dyes fade… they… alright, that’s your theory?” (had me absolutely giggling)

we also learn in episode 4 that she took german in college <3

in episode 6, she spends a great deal of time explaining the science behind sleeping pills and their controversial effects

(and i also loved her fury that such an advanced facility was being used for plastic surgery rather than life-saving care)

tearing into the culture of lawlessness while testifying in episode 9; talking about how she left the medical field to protect the innocent and punish the guilty- such an excellent moment, more of that good old fashioned scully righteous rage combined with inherent optimism- and her continuing to read her statement despite the council repeatedly cutting her off (as she should!)

choosing to be jailed rather than reveal where mulder was located, because she will do the right thing no matter the consequences (and is also just a really great friend)

((and bonus points for skinner checking up on her: “you holding up alright?” “i’ve got plenty to read”, she says, as she flips through medical texts))

“it is my natural inclination to believe they are acting in the best interest of the truth… but i am not inclined to follow my own judgment in this case” (casting aside her own optimism in the face of such corruption, understanding her personal bias and objectively putting it to the side… i admire her ability to do so)

((but still. after all she has been through, it is natural for her to believe that the government means well. it's incredible))

this exchange from episode 12: “where could he hide an adult body where it wouldn’t be found?” “i’ll show you” (cut to them sorting through the medical waste, mulder looking horrified as she casually says she needs his longer arms to sift through the body parts)

((but isn't it just great that she knew the answer to that question instantly?))

in episode 12, when she realizes that leonard betts trying to kill her means she has cancer, she responds to mulder saying she should be proud of stopping him with a quiet “i just want to go home”

(we get another "i'm going home" moment in episode 22, after their confrontation in the hallway about her fears, and the exhaustion contained in those few words could make me weep)

in episode 14, she writes letters saying goodbye to mulder, trying to convince him her inevitable death was not his fault: “and if the darkness should have swallowed me as you read this, you must never think there was the possibility of some secret intervention, something you might have done”, she wrote, knowing how he would blame himself, trying to spare his feelings of guilt even as she knew she had so little time left

later on, her nose starts bleeding while they're making an arrest; “quit staring at me, i’m fine!”, she says in the voice of someone who is deeply not fine, her helplessness inspiring a fury that thrashes about and digs its claws into everything inch of her

how she told mulder she was going to die, but insisted to her mother that she was fine- her mother is furious she didn’t tell her she was sick, shaking in fear, giving her a kiss and a hug, and saying that she is her only daughter now as they hold each other. while she can tell mulder the truth, she can't find the words to tell her mom how bad things really are

writing in her journal that she needs to draw strength from mulder, needs someone to lean on, even though she works so hard to be entirely self-sufficient; “i need to know you’re out there if i’m ever to see through this”

(contrast this with her earlier attempts to do absolutely every single thing by herself and bask in the character growth)

((but then she REJECTS what she wrote in the journal, saying that she isn’t giving up, and she has so much to prove to herself and her family- they have the conversation in the hallway that made me cry and cheer and yell and experience every emotion in between as she realizes that she is something worth fighting for))

in episode 18, she tries her best to save pendrell, telling him that “we still haven’t celebrated my birthday, pendrell; i’m not gonna let you off the hook like this” - it's the way she spent his last moments on earth trying to make him smile that gets me so emotional

later, she's having this very tense face off with skinner until he notices she was trying to hide her nosebleed; he grabs her hand and says “i have a responsibility for the safety of the agents under my supervision, agent scully. i’m not going to put another agent’s life in jeopardy just to keep her out in the field”, and she assures him she’s okay with tears in her eyes (the way he pierced through her best attempts at a stony exterior… i'm emotional)

they visit max fenig’s trailer again and she still HATED it lmao, she says “i remember being amazed at what some people will call a home”

(and then she disses the very bare hotel room they visit in the next episode, saying “i’m not sure if ‘living’ is the word i would use to describe this space” - give her all of the blankets and throw pillows, she wants a cozy house)

((this, combined with her saying "i want to go home" when she is experiencing moments of earth-shattering grief, made me realize how important to her it is that she have a nice, comfortable, safe space for herself))

smirking at her own stupid joke in episode 19; “what was he wearing, a long black robe and carrying a scythe?”

she knows the lowest temperature a human body has ever reached and survived (70 degrees) and also uses the phrase “nuclear magnetic resident spectra”, both of which made my heart skip a few beats

“okay, so this photo that was never taken, when was it never taken?” <- SEVERELY underappreciated line!!!!

in the opening of episode 20, she starts reciting facts about babies born with extra appendages in incredible detail, and i want to know so badly why she is educated on the subject. scully, please give us the story time video

she also mentions her plans to write an article on “diminished acetylcholine production in recidivist offenders” when she goes home from work. because that is how she spends her evenings, very casual. no big deal (said with great sarcasm)

her realization in episode 22 that the killer had been switching around the rings on each victim’s fingers, based on some blurry photos (it was a very good catch!)

talking to her therapist, admitting she struggles to talk about her fears, and that mulder’s passion has been a source of strength during her sickness

(we then, very briefly, see her praying in her nightgown in her apartment, before mulder knocks on the door to ask for her medical opinion. i find that shot so compelling, especially when you contrast it with her saying in the finale that she is not ready to return to the church- it must be too personal to talk about, god must be something she wants to experience on her own at this point in her life)

((and she grapples with the revelation that everyone else who had seen the spirits had been dying, knowing what it means for herself))

the way she shoots the evil nurse in the shoulder not to kill her, but to incapacitate her… scully, your aim is legendary

fun facts with scully, episode 23 edition: dostoyevsky had waxman-geschwind syndrome!

VERY FIRMLY telling mulder that he NEEDS to get to the hospital, and when he continually refuses, instead asking to go on a road trip, she agrees... ONLY on the condition that she drives!!!!

and when his terrible trauma ketamine trip culminates in him almost shooting her and himself, she manages to talk sense into him, before she rests her entire body on him, shielding him, not letting him move, weighing him down like an anchor back to reality

(her being the one taking charge in this episode even while she feels she is losing so much of her agency in her life makes me so emotional)

when mulder interrupts her family dinner in episode 24 to go on a quest for alien answers, she reminds him that this is his goal, and not hers. when he tries to convince her, she refuses to budge- it was frustrating to watch him put her in that situation, but amazing to watch her stand her ground

(and the fact that she wasn’t able to tell him her cancer was getting much worse is also so fascinating to me- why couldn't she bear to break it to him? would saying it aloud make it real?)

and of course, her tracking down the dude that shoved her down the stairs and nearly hitting him with her car (it was deeply satisfying)

#so many good moments. she is my girl!!!#the x files #txf #dana scully

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago

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How to design a tech regulation

TONIGHT (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. TOMORROW (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

It's not your imagination: tech really is underregulated. There are plenty of avoidable harms that tech visits upon the world, and while some of these harms are mere negligence, others are self-serving, creating shareholder value and widespread public destruction.

Making good tech policy is hard, but not because "tech moves too fast for regulation to keep up with," nor because "lawmakers are clueless about tech." There are plenty of fast-moving areas that lawmakers manage to stay abreast of (think of the rapid, global adoption of masking and social distancing rules in mid-2020). Likewise we generally manage to make good policy in areas that require highly specific technical knowledge (that's why it's noteworthy and awful when, say, people sicken from badly treated tapwater, even though water safety, toxicology and microbiology are highly technical areas outside the background of most elected officials).

That doesn't mean that technical rigor is irrelevant to making good policy. Well-run "expert agencies" include skilled practitioners on their payrolls – think here of large technical staff at the FTC, or the UK Competition and Markets Authority's best-in-the-world Digital Markets Unit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

The job of government experts isn't just to research the correct answers. Even more important is experts' role in evaluating conflicting claims from interested parties. When administrative agencies make new rules, they have to collect public comments and counter-comments. The best agencies also hold hearings, and the very best go on "listening tours" where they invite the broad public to weigh in (the FTC has done an awful lot of these during Lina Khan's tenure, to its benefit, and it shows):

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2022/04/ftc-justice-department-listening-forum-firsthand-effects-mergers-acquisitions-health-care

But when an industry dwindles to a handful of companies, the resulting cartel finds it easy to converge on a single talking point and to maintain strict message discipline. This means that the evidentiary record is starved for disconfirming evidence that would give the agencies contrasting perspectives and context for making good policy.

Tech industry shills have a favorite tactic: whenever there's any proposal that would erode the industry's profits, self-serving experts shout that the rule is technically impossible and deride the proposer as "clueless."

This tactic works so well because the proposers sometimes are clueless. Take Europe's on-again/off-again "chat control" proposal to mandate spyware on every digital device that will screen everything you upload for child sex abuse material (CSAM, better known as "child pornography"). This proposal is profoundly dangerous, as it will weaken end-to-end encryption, the key to all secure and private digital communication:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/18/encryption-is-deeply-threatening-to-power-meredith-whittaker-of-messaging-app-signal

It's also an impossible-to-administer mess that incorrectly assumes that killing working encryption in the two mobile app stores run by the mobile duopoly will actually prevent bad actors from accessing private tools:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/

When technologists correctly point out the lack of rigor and catastrophic spillover effects from this kind of crackpot proposal, lawmakers stick their fingers in their ears and shout "NERD HARDER!"

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/12/nerd-harder-fbi-director-reiterates-faith-based-belief-in-working-crypto-that-he-can-break/

But this is only half the story. The other half is what happens when tech industry shills want to kill good policy proposals, which is the exact same thing that advocates say about bad ones. When lawmakers demand that tech companies respect our privacy rights – for example, by splitting social media or search off from commercial surveillance, the same people shout that this, too, is technologically impossible.

That's a lie, though. Facebook started out as the anti-surveillance alternative to Myspace. We know it's possible to operate Facebook without surveillance, because Facebook used to operate without surveillance:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Likewise, Brin and Page's original Pagerank paper, which described Google's architecture, insisted that search was incompatible with surveillance advertising, and Google established itself as a non-spying search tool:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Even weirder is what happens when there's a proposal to limit a tech company's power to invoke the government's powers to shut down competitors. Take Ethan Zuckerman's lawsuit to strip Facebook of the legal power to sue people who automate their browsers to uncheck the millions of boxes that Facebook requires you to click by hand in order to unfollow everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/#cda-230-c-2-b

Facebook's apologists have lost their minds over this, insisting that no one can possibly understand the potential harms of taking away Facebook's legal right to decide how your browser works. They take the position that only Facebook can understand when it's safe and proportional to use Facebook in ways the company didn't explicitly design for, and that they should be able to ask the government to fine or even imprison people who fail to defer to Facebook's decisions about how its users configure their computers.

This is an incredibly convenient position, since it arrogates to Facebook the right to order the rest of us to use our computers in the ways that are most beneficial to its shareholders. But Facebook's apologists insist that they are not motivated by parochial concerns over the value of their stock portfolios; rather, they have objective, technical concerns, that no one except them is qualified to understand or comment on.

There's a great name for this: "scalesplaining." As in "well, actually the platforms are doing an amazing job, but you can't possibly understand that because you don't work for them." It's weird enough when scalesplaining is used to condemn sensible regulation of the platforms; it's even weirder when it's weaponized to defend a system of regulatory protection for the platforms against would-be competitors.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in government-protected monopolies. Somehow, scalesplaining can be used to condemn governments as incapable of making any tech regulations and to insist that regulations that protect tech monopolies are just perfect and shouldn't ever be weakened. Truly, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when the value of their employee stock options depends on them not understanding it.

None of this is to say that every tech regulation is a good one. Governments often propose bad tech regulations (like chat control), or ones that are technologically impossible (like Article 17 of the EU's 2019 Digital Single Markets Directive, which requires tech companies to detect and block copyright infringements in their users' uploads).

But the fact that scalesplainers use the same argument to criticize both good and bad regulations makes the waters very muddy indeed. Policymakers are rightfully suspicious when they hear "that's not technically possible" because they hear that both for technically impossible proposals and for proposals that scalesplainers just don't like.

After decades of regulations aimed at making platforms behave better, we're finally moving into a new era, where we just make the platforms less important. That is, rather than simply ordering Facebook to block harassment and other bad conduct by its users, laws like the EU's Digital Markets Act will order Facebook and other VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms, my favorite EU-ism ever) to operate gateways so that users can move to rival services and still communicate with the people who stay behind.

Think of this like number portability, but for digital platforms. Just as you can switch phone companies and keep your number and hear from all the people you spoke to on your old plan, the DMA will make it possible for you to change online services but still exchange messages and data with all the people you're already in touch with.

I love this idea, because it finally grapples with the question we should have been asking all along: why do people stay on platforms where they face harassment and bullying? The answer is simple: because the people – customers, family members, communities – we connect with on the platform are so important to us that we'll tolerate almost anything to avoid losing contact with them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

Platforms deliberately rig the game so that we take each other hostage, locking each other into their badly moderated cesspits by using the love we have for one another as a weapon against us. Interoperability – making platforms connect to each other – shatters those locks and frees the hostages:

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

But there's another reason to love interoperability (making moderation less important) over rules that require platforms to stamp out bad behavior (making moderation better). Interop rules are much easier to administer than content moderation rules, and when it comes to regulation, administratability is everything.

The DMA isn't the EU's only new rule. They've also passed the Digital Services Act, which is a decidedly mixed bag. Among its provisions are a suite of rules requiring companies to monitor their users for harmful behavior and to intervene to block it. Whether or not you think platforms should do this, there's a much more important question: how can we enforce this rule?

Enforcing a rule requiring platforms to prevent harassment is very "fact intensive." First, we have to agree on a definition of "harassment." Then we have to figure out whether something one user did to another satisfies that definition. Finally, we have to determine whether the platform took reasonable steps to detect and prevent the harassment.

Each step of this is a huge lift, especially that last one, since to a first approximation, everyone who understands a given VLOP's server infrastructure is a partisan, scalesplaining engineer on the VLOP's payroll. By the time we find out whether the company broke the rule, years will have gone by, and millions more users will be in line to get justice for themselves.

So allowing users to leave is a much more practical step than making it so that they've got no reason to want to leave. Figuring out whether a platform will continue to forward your messages to and from the people you left there is a much simpler technical matter than agreeing on what harassment is, whether something is harassment by that definition, and whether the company was negligent in permitting harassment.

But as much as I like the DMA's interop rule, I think it is badly incomplete. Given that the tech industry is so concentrated, it's going to be very hard for us to define standard interop interfaces that don't end up advantaging the tech companies. Standards bodies are extremely easy for big industry players to capture:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

If tech giants refuse to offer access to their gateways to certain rivals because they seem "suspicious," it will be hard to tell whether the companies are just engaged in self-serving smears against a credible rival, or legitimately trying to protect their users from a predator trying to plug into their infrastructure. These fact-intensive questions are the enemy of speedy, responsive, effective policy administration.

But there's more than one way to attain interoperability. Interop doesn't have to come from mandates, interfaces designed and overseen by government agencies. There's a whole other form of interop that's far nimbler than mandates: adversarial interoperability:

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

"Adversarial interoperability" is a catch-all term for all the guerrilla warfare tactics deployed in service to unilaterally changing a technology: reverse engineering, bots, scraping and so on. These tactics have a long and honorable history, but they have been slowly choked out of existence with a thicket of IP rights, like the IP rights that allow Facebook to shut down browser automation tools, which Ethan Zuckerman is suing to nullify:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Adversarial interop is very flexible. No matter what technological moves a company makes to interfere with interop, there's always a countermove the guerrilla fighter can make – tweak the scraper, decompile the new binary, change the bot's behavior. That's why tech companies use IP rights and courts, not firewall rules, to block adversarial interoperators.

At the same time, adversarial interop is unreliable. The solution that works today can break tomorrow if the company changes its back-end, and it will stay broken until the adversarial interoperator can respond.

But when companies are faced with the prospect of extended asymmetrical war against adversarial interop in the technological trenches, they often surrender. If companies can't sue adversarial interoperators out of existence, they often sue for peace instead. That's because high-tech guerrilla warfare presents unquantifiable risks and resource demands, and, as the scalesplainers never tire of telling us, this can create real operational problems for tech giants.

In other words, if Facebook can't shut down Ethan Zuckerman's browser automation tool in the courts, and if they're sincerely worried that a browser automation tool will uncheck its user interface buttons so quickly that it crashes the server, all it has to do is offer an official "unsubscribe all" button and no one will use Zuckerman's browser automation tool.

We don't have to choose between adversarial interop and interop mandates. The two are better together than they are apart. If companies building and operating DMA-compliant, mandatory gateways know that a failure to make them useful to rivals seeking to help users escape their authority is getting mired in endless hand-to-hand combat with trench-fighting adversarial interoperators, they'll have good reason to cooperate.

And if lawmakers charged with administering the DMA notice that companies are engaging in adversarial interop rather than using the official, reliable gateway they're overseeing, that's a good indicator that the official gateways aren't suitable.

It would be very on-brand for the EU to create the DMA and tell tech companies how they must operate, and for the USA to simply withdraw the state's protection from the Big Tech companies and let smaller companies try their luck at hacking new features into the big companies' servers without the government getting involved.

Indeed, we're seeing some of that today. Oregon just passed the first ever Right to Repair law banning "parts pairing" – basically a way of using IP law to make it illegal to reverse-engineer a device so you can fix it.

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/03/28/oregon-governor-kotek-signs-strong-tech-right-to-repair-bill/

Taken together, the two approaches – mandates and reverse engineering – are stronger than either on their own. Mandates are sturdy and reliable, but slow-moving. Adversarial interop is flexible and nimble, but unreliable. Put 'em together and you get a two-part epoxy, strong and flexible.

Governments can regulate well, with well-funded expert agencies and smart, adminstratable remedies. It's for that reason that the administrative state is under such sustained attack from the GOP and right-wing Dems. The illegitimate Supreme Court is on the verge of gutting expert agencies' power:

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/05/us-supreme-court-may-soon-discard-or-modify-chevron-deference

It's never been more important to craft regulations that go beyond mere good intentions and take account of adminsitratability. The easier we can make our rules to enforce, the less our beleaguered agencies will need to do to protect us from corporate predators.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

Image: Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #cda #ethan zuckerman #platforms #platform decay #enshittification #eu #dma #right to repair #transatlantic #administrability #regulation #big tech #scalesplaining #equilibria #interoperability #adversarial interoperability #comcom

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