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gojorgeous · 11 months ago

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“heatwaves”

pairing: alpha!gojo x omega!fem!reader summary: when a work trip takes you to japan, the last thing you expect is a heatwave... and some guy with blue eyes? content: MDNI (18+ only), nsfw, a/b/o dynamics, no established relationship, dubcon (i feel like it’s always kinda dubcon with a/b/o), p->v, unprotected sex, creampie, breeding, biting, blood, marking, spit, praise, swearing, pet names (baby/sweetheart/princess), brief mention/implication of pregnancy, knotting, reader gets picked up, reader is american, reader is unaware of their omega status, reader experiences their first heat, reader and satoru “bond” without having a fully conscious conversation, reader and satoru are early twenties. a/n: it's here! somebody spay me. by popular demand i have written alpha!gojo for you all… just a classic reader goes into an accidental heat at work and (x) character happens to be the nearest alpha LMAO. this is entirely uncreative, but i love it for that!!! straight smut with a little plot if you squint hard enough! i hope it lives up to your expectations. find my alpha!geto fic here and find the list of my 1k event fics here. enjoy and remember, ALL AGELESS BLOGS WILL BE BLOCKED! credits: dividers by @cafekitsune. wc: 5k

Nobody ever told you that Japan was so damn hot.

Hot was not what came to mind when you’d heard you’d be taking a trip to Tokyo. Temples? Sure. Mt. Fuji? Great. Hot? No fucking way.

But, here you were, boiling away under the sun on what you’d thought would be a fun little work trip. Instead, you were just suffering with every step, trying to listen to what Principal Yaga was saying and failing miserably.

“These are the sparring courts. No students right now, but they’ll start training within the hour.”

You rub at the back of your neck, cringing when your palm comes away coated with a thin layer of sweat. Gross.

You lift your eyes to the sky, wondering how much longer this was going to take. Your little trip to Japan was to organize an exchange program with Jujutsu Tech. Your students had been begging to take a trip to Tokyo, to where their cursed energy would be closer to the source and, consequently, stronger. You had to admit, it was a good idea. A few months spent training here in Japan would do them good. From the moment you’d set foot on Japanese soil, your power had thrummed faster in your veins than ever before.

Principal Yaga was giving you a tour of the grounds and had sealed your horrible fate when he’d decided to start outside. You barely heard a word the man said. New York was never this hot…

“Are you alright?” You blink, fanning your face as best you can. It provides no relief. God, it felt like the heat was penetrating your fucking bones…

When your eyes slide to Principal Yaga, you’re surprised to see that he looks genuinely concerned. “Y-yeah.” You blink again, shocked by your own stutter. Maybe you were coming down with something? “I’m fine, just not used to this kind of heat, I guess.” You fan your face again and clench your jaw when it still does nothing.

Yaga’s brows furrow and you see him glance around, like he’ll find said heat standing next to him. How was he wearing so many layers?

“How about we head inside and take a break, then? We can continue the tour… later.” You nearly fall to the ground and kiss his feet. Air conditioning is truly God's gift to man…

You smile and it’s all genuine. “That would be amazing. Thank you.”

Yaga nods, but you think his eyes linger on you for just a beat too long before he turns. He still looks confused… or maybe flustered? That only leaves you confused.

You follow after him, each step feeling like you’re sinking deep into cement. You tug at the collar of your shirt, trying to get some ventilation. When you finally reach the building you nearly sigh with relief. Air conditioning… that’ll be good. Just what you need. A few minutes inside and you’ll be good to go. You’ll just have to remember not to wear so many damn layers again when you continue the tour.

You’re smiling as you step inside, so ready for relief that you’re practically shaking– but relief never comes. Your brows furrow. You brush your arm through the air. It… doesn’t help. It’s strange– you can feel the coolness of the air conditioning, feel it gliding up and across your skin, but the heat doesn’t subside, doesn’t so much as lessen.

“I trust you know how to find anything you might–” Yaga clears his throat. “Need?”

Your brows furrow. He’d shown you all the school’s resources last night and your room was already stocked with food, toiletries, and every other thing you could possibly need. Of course you knew where everything was…

“Yes… Thank you.”

Yaga shifts so uncomfortably you think that maybe he’s about to pee his pants. “Right, well, you have my contact information. Let me know if I can be of assistance in connecting you to any… resources.”

You’re more confused now than you were at the start of this conversation. “Right…”

“Take care.”

Yaga shoots you one last– worried?- glance and stalks down the hall. You’re left wondering what the hell is happening in his mind and why he seemed so desperate to offer you resources?

You blink, clearing your mind as best you can, but some sort of fog seems to be settling over your consciousness. Definitely coming down with something, you think.

You make your way through the halls, steps still feeling suspiciously heavy and heat still radiating off your body. A cold shower. That’ll help. Or so you thought. The further you walk, the more each hallway starts to look like the next. Was it left or right next? Was this hallway always a dead end? Since when was there a bathroom there?

You’re leaning against the wall now, panting. Something is pooling in your gut, something warm and far too intense. Your inner thighs are wet, too. You want to convince yourself it’s sweat, but… you’re horny. More horny than you’ve ever been in your whole damn life. You think you might die if you don’t get some dick in the next ten minutes. What the fuck?

You slide yourself into the next room you see: an empty classroom. Thank fucking god. You grab the back of a chair, hands shaking with how hard you’re gripping the wood. You take a deep breath. You need to get a hold of yourself, need to figure out what the fuck is happening to you.

You swallow and try your best to think. It’s not without difficulty. Your head feels like somebody’s filled it with glue. It takes a minute for a coherent thought to come through, but when it does, you think it’s a good one. Doctor.

Yes– you don’t feel well, so obviously a doctor is the correct choice, right? You scramble for your phone in your back pocket but freeze when the brush of your own hand against your ass sends a jolt up your spine. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Carefully, you extract your phone from your pocket, but it’s too difficult to even remember your fucking passcode. You press your thighs together, trying to relieve some of the overwhelming ache that’s forming between your legs. Something is definitely wrong.

You fumble with your phone, but your hands are shaking so hard it just tumbles to the floor.

“Fuck,” you breathe. “Fuck, fuck, fuck?”

“Yo, who’s baking cookies in here without me?”

Your head snaps up and, with some difficulty, your eyes settle on a… man. You suck in a breath. He’s… dazzling. He’s wearing all black, but it’s not a student uniform. One of the teachers that you’ve yet to meet, then. White hair and pale skin contrasts against his clothes, but his eyes are covered by a pair of sunglasses set low on his nose. Even in your delirious state you still have the wherewithal to wonder who the fuck wears sunglasses inside.

You get a quick look at him before a wave of intense- fuck, desire?- washes over you. You tremble again and shock yourself when a whimper tumbles from your lips.

“Oh, shit,” you hear him say. You glance at him from the corner of your eye and watch him inhale again– deeply. His lips part. “Oh, shit.”

You clench your jaw and tighten your grip on your chair. Your legs are shaking now– you can barely stand. You squeak pitifully.

The second the sound leaves your throat you hear footsteps– rapid, hurried, concerned, ones. Warm hands clasp your waist and you cry out at the touch, electricity sparking on your skin.

“Shhh, it’s okay.” He turns you gently to face him, hands steadying your swaying body. “Who the fuck left you alone in here?” His hand is rubbing soothing circles on your lower back now and you think you’ve never felt something so good in your life. It’s so good that you almost miss what he said. Almost.

“W-What?” You see his brows furrow as you peek up at him. At this angle you can see under his sunglasses. His eyes are blue. Really fucking blue. You think he might be the most attractive man you’ve ever seen, even with the expression of… anger?- that he’s currently wearing.

“Whoever he is, I'll kill him.”

That makes you blink. An extra sliver of clarity opens in your brain. “What are you talking about?”

He tugs you a little closer, wrapping an arm fully around your waist and pressing you up against him. You try to ignore the fact that you love it, that you want nothing more than to wrap yourself around him and climb him like a fucking tree.

“What idiot leaves an omega going into heat?” He’s glaring at the doorway like he’s torn between staying here with you and running after said idiot to pommel him into the ground.

“‘M not an omega.” The words are out before you’ve even stopped to consider them. It’s true. You’re not an omega. You’re a beta. You’ve always been a beta. You’ve got the little “B” on your ID card to prove it. You were tested at birth, just like everyone else, and even if you really were an omega you would have presented years ago.

He only glances down at you and snorts. “Funny, sweetheart.” His hand is still rubbing those little circles into your back and it’s enough to make that fogginess in your mind grow a little thicker.

But your fear, your uncertainty outways your instinct. You pound a weak fist against his chest, not to push him away, but to get his attention. He’s still glaring at the doorway like he wants to murder it.

“‘M serious,” you gasp. “I’m a beta… I don’... know whas’ happenin’… to me.” Each word is a tremendous effort to form. Your tongue seems to have lost its ability to do anything but hang limply.

That gets his attention. He lifts a hand, gently brushing your hair back from your eyes and then cupping your jaw. “Is this your first heat?”

You find yourself leaning into his touch despite the fact that you’ve only known him for thirty seconds. Your eyelids flutter. “N-Not a heat… jus’ feel… sick.”

His brows furrow again, deeper this time, and he shakes his head. “How old are you?”

You know why he asks. Most omegas present around eighteen or nineteen. “Older than… nineteen…” You try to laugh, but it only comes out as a whimper.

That answer only serves to make him push closer. You feel his hand trailing down your neck, skimming gently over the skin until he reaches a spot you hadn't even realized was so… sore. You keen at the touch. Fuck, no. There was no way. You had swollen fucking scent glands.

You try to push away, but he pulls you in, burying his face in your neck. You shudder when he groans. “You smell like a damn bakery exploded,” he chuckles, and the sound is muffled by your skin. When he pulls away he makes it look like the action is physically painful. He cups your face again. “Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you’re an omega. If this is your first heat then…” he swallows and your eyes track the bob of his throat. “You’re just a late bloomer, baby.”

You shake your head desperately. It’s just the stupid heatwave. It’s just… hot outside… right?

You try to think about how this could be possible. It could be that the test you took as a baby was wrong… it happened sometimes. It was rare, but it happened. But if you were an omega, what would have triggered your presentation now? What had changed?

Your eyes widen. Japan. You’d set foot in fucking Japan. Ever since you’d gotten here, you’d felt power pulsing in your veins. Maybe it hadn’t been just power…

“N-no–”

A gentle thumb smooths over your cheek and you meet his eyes again. You shiver when you see a whole lot more black than blue. “You have no alpha?”

You whimper, leaning into him. Touch me, touch me, touch me, a part of you begs. You shake your head again and a tear slides down your cheek. “No,” you whisper.

Strong arms slide beneath your knees and you squeak when you’re suddenly suspended in the air. When you glance up he’s grinning triumphantly. “You have one now,” is all he says before he’s carrying you out of the classroom and twisting through the halls.

Warmth rushes over you at the sensation of being held, and something begs you to give into it, to give into the heat still washing over you, to the throbbing between your legs. You fight it and fight it hard.

“Where’re we going?” you ask, but your voice is sounding more and more like a whisper.

His eyes stay focused ahead, even as he presses a comforting kiss to the crown of your head. “Your room, sweetheart.”

Your brows scrunch. “How d’ you know where–”

“‘M following your scent, baby.”

He can do that? You bury your face in his neck, embarrassed, only to be hit by a different scent so delicious your mouth starts watering. You groan. Loudly. There’s a scent pouring from his neck that’s filling your head with memories of spices you can’t name, but suddenly know you love.

You think you hear him chuckle and then feel a gentle hand on the back of your neck, encouraging you. You snuggle deeper into him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and burying your fingers in his hair. Taste him, taste him, taste him your mind chants. It’s too good an offer to deny. You lick a stripe across his skin.

Your groans are instant. He’s squeezing you closer, leaning into your touch, and you’re pulling him closer. Your fingers curl into his jacket, tugging and tugging. You lick again and now he’s the one groaning.

“Damn, that feels good,” He sounds as surprised by that fact as you feel. The swaying of his steps comes to a sudden halt. You whine, missing the rocking of his body. “Think we’re here, princess. This it?” His hand is smoothing over your hair, slowly coaxing you away from the curve of his neck. You blink, not wanting to leave the paradise of his scent, but also feeling some overwhelming urge to please him.

Your eyes settle on a door and you recognize a little chip in the wood. You nod. “Mhm.”

You gasp when his hand grips your hip, wriggling through your pocket until he pulls out a little brass key.

“Perfect,” he says, and his voice sounds like he’s all too pleased with himself. He shimmies your key in the knob until the lock clicks and then you’re inside. The door slams shut loud enough to make you jump and squeak.

“Oops, sorry, baby. Guess I’m a little excited, heh.” His hand squeezes your hip soothingly and you mewl at the wave of heat that pulses through you. Your clit throbs almost painfully and you feel something gush onto your thighs. You whimper.

He inhales. “Oh, shit,” he breathes, and then you’re moving again. He navigates your room like he knows it. He probably does. From what you can tell, most of the rooms at Jujutsu Tech follow a standard layout. He weaves down a hall to the left and then into your bedroom on the right.

He lays you on the bed gently, tenderly, like he’s afraid you might break if he drops you so much as an inch. “There we go,” he breathes. You can’t deny that it feels good, that it feels right, to be lying on the softness of your mattress, but it’s not enough.

You claw at him, wrapping your arms tightly around his neck and pulling him close. You want something from him, need something, but you can’t name what. You just know that the heat boiling beneath your skin can only be sated by him, that the throbbing between your legs can only be calmed by him. “P-Please,” you whimper. Tears well in your eyes. You need him so bad it physically hurts.

The smile he gives you is soft and genuine and it takes your breath away. He dips his head and you think you see him slide those sunglasses down his nose and toss them to the side. You don’t pay too close attention, though, because he’s kissing your neck again and your body is screaming with sensation.

“Aw, I know, baby. Don’ worry. ‘M gonna take care of you now. Jus’ relax.”

His words spark something in you– your last bit of consciousness. A brief moment of clarity shines through the fog of your mind and you remember what the hell is happening, what the hell you’re doing. You squeeze your eyes shut and shake your head desperately. No, no, no, this is not happening to you. There’s no way.

“Hey, now. None a’ that.” Fingers clasp your chin, holding you still. When you peek your eyes open, you see that he has in fact removed his sunglasses and that his eyes are more black pupil than dazzling blue. His jaw is clenched and his breathing is heavy. “Don’t try t’ fight it. Jus’ try to enjoy it…” His head dips and suddenly he’s nipping at your scent gland again.

You thrash and scream, but not in fear or pain. You’ve never felt something so good in your life. Every graze of his teeth feels like heaven. Your skin zings with electricity, sending pulses of pure need straight between your thighs.

You grab at him, tangling your fingers in his hair and tugging him closer. Your chest is heaving when you speak. “Please, p-please-”

“Shhh…” You think you hear your shirt tearing, but you’re too focused on pulling him closer to care. His tongue licks a stripe up your throat and your eyes roll back.

You’re sure your shirt is off now. You can feel the cool air, but it does nothing to ease the heat raging inside you, pulsing and pumping through your veins.You feel him tugging at your pants, too, and you try to raise your hips. He only shushes you again. “Jus’ relax. Let me do the work, baby.”

Your pants are gone in seconds, even without your assistance. So is your bra and then your panties. He tries pulling away to undress himself, but you mewl and his eyes blow even blacker before he’s back over you again. He settles for popping the buttons straight off his shirt and shimmying out of his pants.

The sight of his bare skin makes you whimper and then you’re clawing at him again, dragging your fingers across his shoulders, over his chest, down his abs. It’s a greedy touch and one that he returns. His palms move along your body, kneading and squeezing at any flesh he can grab. It feels so good that you think you might pass out– but it’s still not enough. Something is still missing. You feel… empty.

His fingers trace across your stomach and it’s too late to realize what’s happening before he’s circling your clit. You jerk and jolt at the touch, but he presses his chest to yours, pinning you. The throbbing only worsens when his fingers settle into a rhythm.

Tears leak down your cheeks. It’s too overwhelming. You’re burning– burning from the inside out. The pulsing between your thighs is all-consuming with its intensity, with its-

“Need! N-Need–” you’re crying out, but you don’t even know what to ask for– don’t even know what you need.

“God, Fuck, I know, princess,” he groans. He licks a long stripe up your neck. “But ‘s your first heat. Gotta–” he has to pause to swallow. He’s panting, now, just as lost as you are, and you get the sense that he’s restraining himself. “Gotta get you ready… go slow.”

You shake your head. Now, now, now is all you can think. You need him now. “No… please…” You bury your head in his neck and find that spot that’s pouring his spicy scent into the air. Your mouth waters and you lick him, letting your teeth graze his skin.

“Fuck!” He shivers atop you and you feel the pure strength restrained within his muscles. “Fuck- okay. Okay. Relax f’ me, princess.”

You try, you really do, but your body refuses to do anything but try to pull him closer. You feel his fingers digging into the flesh of your thighs, pressing them up, up, up until they’re pressed tightly to your chest and your feet are dangling on his shoulders. The position makes you whine, feeling more exposed than you ever have before.

“You on birth control, baby?”

Your brows furrow. It’s becoming harder and harder to focus on what he’s saying rather than simply the sound of his voice. Were you? You try to think, try to remember through the pit of glue that is your brain. No…

You shake your head. “N-No…”

There’s a slight pause, a beat of contemplation, and then he’s laughing. “Guess I’m bouta be a daddy then, heh.” He chuckles again and the sound rings through you with a wave of pure bliss. His lips brush your neck again, settling on your pulse and making you whine. “Don’t really mind as long as I get you.” Your head rolls back submissively, exposing your throat. Yes, yes, yes, your mind screams. There’s nothing you want more than that, you think.“Okay, here we go, baby.”

There’s hardly any more warning. One second you feel him shifting between your thighs and the next he’s pressing inside of you, feeding his cock in inch by inch. The stretch is… delicious. It burns, fuels that fire inside you, but it makes the heat feel more… pleasurable. Your back arches and your head rolls back submissively.

“Oh, fuck, princess.” His voice has gotten higher, more like a whine than anything else. When you gaze up at him you can see the flush in his cheeks, even through the fog in your mind. More, more, more your mind screams. Or maybe you say it aloud, because more is exactly what he gives you. The second you feel him tucked up against your cervix the second he begins to take you. He sets a pace that is somehow both brutal and gentle, with strokes that rattle your skull and also give you exactly what you need. His hands grip your hips, holding you still to take exactly what he wants to give. His head dips until he has his lips wrapped around your nipple, and his tongue is swirling so deliciously that you can’t help but drag your nails down his back.

Your body rocks with every thrust, teeth rattling and eyes rolling. The heat inside you grows… tighter, like it’s all pooling to your core, waiting for something you still can’t quite name.

“N-need…” You don’t know what you need, still. Only that you want to beg for it so badly it hurts.

His tongue slides away from your nipple, tracing a line up between the valley of your breasts, over your collarbone, before he finally settles on your pulse once again. The nick of his teeth makes something click in your mind. This is what you need. Bite me, bite me, bite. Claim me, claim me, claim me.

“Yes,” you breathe. Your fingers dig into his scalp, pulling him closer, coaxing his teeth to sink in, to stake their claim. “Oh God, yes. Please.” You sound delirious, you think, but then so does he when he answers.

“Not yet, princess. Not yet.” His tongue darts out to lick across your neck again and you can only sob. Why not yet? Now, now, now…

Tightness coils in your muscles, the throb at your core reaching a breaking point. You feel something coming, something like an orgasm but yet also not. You know that when whatever is pooling inside you releases, you will shatter, and you’re not sure you’ll ever be put back together.

Your nails claw across his back hard enough to draw blood and the action forces out some sort of low grumble from his chest that makes you whimper and melt into the mattress. The tip of his nose draws a line up your throat. “Keep doin’ that, baby. Mark me up.”

You don’t dare deny him. You scratch at his skin, desperately trying to pull him closer. His thrusts grow faster and your thighs begin to tremble and shake on his shoulders, overwhelmed with the intensity of all you’re feeling. You pull at him, grab at him, thread your fingers through his hair.

Your body jolts with each thrust and you’re sure you’re going to burst any moment. But you can’t. Not yet. You still need something, something he hasn’t given you yet. He groans and the sound is so delicious that you feel it sliding over your skin and settling in your bones.

“M’ gonna knot you now, princess,” he breathes. “Gonna make you feel so good. Gonna take care ‘ve you.”

You whimper at his words. You hope they’re true. You don’t think you can take much more of the incessant gnawing of need in your gut.

“Please…” your voice is hardly more than a whisper. His breath is hot as it shakes against your neck. He’s licking and nipping at you ravenously, like he needs you just as badly, like he wants to claim you as badly as you want to be claimed.

His thrusts quicken even further and your jaw falls open, neck arching. You don’t think you can hold on much longer. Apparently, neither can he.

You feel it the moment he starts to swell inside you. It’s perfect, you think. It can’t get better than this– but then it does.

His teeth graze your throat again, this time a little harsher and with a little more intent. “Mine,” he whispers. The second he bites you everything goes blurry.

You’re experiencing… heaven. There is a rush of that electricity that buzzes under your skin. It bursts forth and you feel it reaching out, forming a link between the two of you that you know is now impenetrable. It pulses and burns and you can feel him, feel his pleasure, his desire, his need for you and only you– his need to make you his. You think your souls must be blending, merging, with how deep the connection runs. You think you know him, know everything you could possibly ever need to. You know he’s the one. You know he’s yours.

It’s perfect, the way it fulfills every desire you’ve ever had, the way he notches inside your cunt like that’s where he was made to be, the way his teeth clamp around your throat and bond you together forever.

You scream for him, you think, but you can’t tell through the complete and total haze of pleasure. Your walls spasm around him, milking him for every last drop, and you feel the heat of his cum coating your cervix. The heat at your center finally releases, bursting and flooding through you in a way that feels like pure bliss has been injected into your veins. Your thighs quake and tremble with the pure intensity of it all and white spots dot your vision.

His body is tense above you, shivering with the magnitude of what’s just happened. He’s groaning into your neck, your flesh still clamped between his teeth like he never wants to let go. You’re not sure you ever want him to.

Your breaths shake in and out, lungs heaving as you finally come down. His knot is still settled deep inside you and with the few strings of consciousness that slowly filter back into your mind you know that he’ll remain there for a while.

His teeth release from your neck with a squelch that you think you would be sickening in any other context, but only makes you whimper at the loss of contact. He only hums and finds your hand, twining your fingers together as he laps at the fresh bite on your throat. It feels… amazing. Not in the way it felt before, like he was licking pure lust straight onto your skin, but more like he’s giving you a comfort you have never known in your life. You feel safe in his arms, like nothing could ever hurt you here.

His lips press a final kiss to your throat before you feel him shifting. He gently rolls you both onto your sides, getting comfortable and pulling you to his chest while you both wait for the next wave of lust to hit you. It will, you know. Sooner rather than later, too. Your mind has cleared enough to realize what’s happening, what’s to come. You won’t be leaving this room, this bed, for quite some time.

A gentle hand brushes a sweaty lock of hair from your eyes before it settles on the nape of your neck, massaging the sore muscles there. You sigh and raise your gaze to find him already looking at you, an easy smile on his lips. He has dimples, you realize, and he’s… breathtaking. And now… he’s all yours.

There’s a beat of silence between you, a moment of reconciliation with what’s just happened between you, of what it means. You blink up at him, your lips parting to say something, anything, but instead your brows furrow in thought.

His smile drops instantly. He leans into you, thumb caressing your cheek. “What is it, sweetheart?”

Your mouth runs dry. You peek up at him from beneath your lashes. “What’s your name?”

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cgcjhanjeriblog · 1 year ago

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shadow4-1 · 8 months ago

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I'm just imagining helping Gaz upgrade the firewalls on the personal tech of the 141, and accidentally catching glimpses of their search history.

Like, it's not like you're actively trying to look. But the program you're updating has to check all of the websites/servers the 141 has been perusing. If anything is compromised you need to know, Laswell needs to be informed, etc.

Despite his name, Soap's history is bar far the dirtiest and most extensive. His searches consist of pretty much everything that a normal weirdo guy would look up. You're able to ignore most of it but you notice he'd cleared part of his browser data at some point and well...you couldn't help yourself. You check and immediately regret it.

public airsoft fuck

gun tongue fucking

military boot cock stepping

You can't bear to see any more so you delete the rest of his search data for him and move on.

Gaz's search history is surprisingly very normal. You almost snort at how much of a difference it is compared to Soap's. You also come to the realization that he probably already cleared and deleted his history. Then you also realize he probably knows you're looking at everyone's history and probably chose to leave these behind. You feel your face grow hot as you glance down the very short list.

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next door neighbor anal

massage porn

You huff and keep going, next is Price. You breathe a sigh of relief, he only has a couple searches and none of them have demeaning expletives in them. You spare them a passing glance.

Paddling adult film

Thigh high models

You raise a brow. Thigh high models, you could understand, but "paddling"? Like...spanking? With a paddle? You swallow thickly and shake your head. The shibari makes you wince too. Figuring out your Captain was into rope bondage and spanking was too much knowledge for one person.

Shibari classes near me

And, just like you'd expected, Ghost had no search history. You breathe a sigh of relief and do a sweep of the rest of his phone. Nothing. No recently viewed caches, cookies, pictures, or anything. The phone was so well taken care of it might as well have been brand new. You went back to the main browsing page, but before you could close out the app, you notice the page has a bookmark. You open up the bookmark tab and low and behold, there's two links. They look shady but you check them out anyway.

The first one is a cam site. The host of the channel is offline, but judging by their many saved livestreams, they're very active. You decide to turn back, but a very specific thumbnail catches your eye. It's the cammer, but with their mouth stuffed full of a random man's cock. It wouldn't have stopped you in your tracks if a) the man's leg tattoo didn't look so familiar and b) if the cammer didn't look suspiciously like you.

You immediately clear all of the data on the phone, essentially factory resetting it. When Gaz comes back into the tech closet you shove at his chest. He just chuckles and shrugs.

You're never doing this again.

#cod imagines #mw2 #call of duty #mw2 headcanons #simon ghost riley #cod mwii #john soap mactavish #captain price #simon riley x reader #kyle gaz garrick

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cmruniversity · 2 years ago

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bluesidez · 6 months ago

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Hi I saw your req open and I flew here ehe-

Hear me out please 😭

Miguel is a geneticist (someone who works around denetics) and sometimes he doesn't understand the programs that he 'made' and Lyla has to help him. That makes Peter B. and the spider-teens very suspicious of him.

What's even more suspicious is that once a month he leaves the Spider HQ to who-knows-where.

After some stalking investigating, they find out that every time that he leaves; he goes to a park to meet [Reader], that is the one who helped with all the tech he has at HQ.

When he returns the next day, he is confronted about it and explains that [Reader] is an old friend and he trusts them with the Multiverse secret. However Peter B. and the others obviously saw the mutual attraction between both of them so they help out Miguel confess to [Reader].

Fluff + a little suggestive with Gn Reader please ^^

Anyway drink lots of water and keep yourself healthy!! ❤❤

[Undercover Lover]

lab tester: @hikaru-sama 🩻

pairing: Miguel O’Hara x gn!Reader

summary: Miguel is willing to stop the world for you, you just want to be the small part of his world that makes it better.

content warning: fluff, longing from reader and Miguel, the spider-teens are all menaces (as in they all have chismosavirus), Peter is Peter, a little suggestive but nothing crazy, I also made Miguel’s relationship with the teens pretty adorable (Papa Miggy 🥺)

word count: 5.8k, halfway proofread (don't ask...)

a/n: This request is not outlandish in any way, btw. It's very cute! I hope you don’t mind that I added a little extra to the programming aspect. THANK YOU TO THE MIGGY SERVER FOR YOUR HELP AS ALWAYS! I have been wallowing in the chats for who knows how long. I thought it would be cute and funny. Also, I've been doing better with my water intake! I hope you're proud. 🥺

Miguel blew out a tired breath, eyes blurry after staring at the same set of files all day.

“Lyla, could you replay the scan from this morning?”

“I don’t know, can I?”

Miguel frowned as his eyes panned to the flickering yellow glow, “Are we doing this right now?”

“Doing what?” Lyla posed with her head tilted in her hand.

“Lyla. Replay the scan from Earth 450-”

“Here’s what I found on scams on 4chan.”

“I said scans not scams- what are you talking about? And what is 4chan?”

Lyla switched to a pose that mimicked The Thinker, her heart-shaped glasses morphing into ones made of stone.

Miguel shifted his weight to one side, hands on his hips as he watched Lyla float around his desk.

“Pull up the LYrate Lifeform Approximation code.”

Lyla snickers, glasses shifting to match the marks of a clown’s face, “You don’t know how to work that, buddy.”

“I didn’t ask you to tell me that, I asked you to-”

Lyla opens the file before he can finish his spiel.

“Now, what?” Lyla whispers with glee. “Gonna hack into the motherboard? Break down the firewall?”

Miguel ignored her and read through the constant formulas, coding that he's never even seen before becoming longer and longer.

Lyla popped up right in his peripheral view, pulling out one of the smaller codes to highlight, “What’s this one mean?”

Miguel squints at the line, “Something about how you respond to tone?”

“It’s my hair color,” Lyla’s voice is high and giggly like she was anticipating his completely wrong answers. “What about this one?”

“I, I don’t know. Your jacket?”

“Voice modulator,” the code danced around him as Lyla switched her voice to something of an old Hollywood star. “You’re not very good at this, tuts.”

Miguel felt a strange chill as Lyla walked around with a long white dress instead of a jacket and her brown hair in curls falling down her back. She laughed at him some more as she pulled her now, thick-rimmed triangle-shaped sunglasses to the top of her head.

“Lyla-”

Miguel’s watch jolted, a notification blaring at him. He answered with haste, mind frantic.

“Miguel? Is something up with Lyla, because I asked her to find this Mysterio’s dimension, and she started playing some wrestler’s theme song instead,” Jess huffed, throwing the villain's body over the back of her motorcycle. “Now, he won’t stop singing it.”

Miguel felt his head start to pound, “Something’s going on with her. She’s not functioning at her normal state.”

“You’re never functioning at a normal state,” Lyla sighed dramatically, arm over her head with wind blowing around her. “Always so tense!”

“Oh my god?” Jess’s eyes went wide as she took in the Lyla at Miguel’s side. “Why does she sound like that?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m shutting her down until I can fix it. Just send the Mysterio back here.”

“You can’t turn me off, Miggy! Don’t you want me to sing for you?”

“Yeah, hurry up and log her off. She’s freaking me out.” Jess ended the call with a disgusted face.

With her gone, the room was filled with Miguel’s thoughts and Lyla humming and brushing her hair in a vintage mirror, something she would have never cared to do on a regular day.

Looking at the lines of coding in front of him, there was no way he was going to find what was happening.

He reached across his desk to a new screen, searching for a certain folder. Miguel laughed to himself as he read the title.

Don’t open unless it’s ABSOLUTELY crucial to your health…and well-being. .3.

Miguel would consider this a crisis.

He tapped the folder, watching as a sprout of several different colors surrounded him. He shifted it through the lights, some of them being pictures of you and him, some of them being animated GIFs of cats, and others being helpful guides to small technological problems. He kept searching until he found a yellow tab that read “LYLA? LIGHTS OUT!”

With one click, Lyla went from twirling and singing in heels to being dormant, gone to the Spider Society. Letting out the breath he was holding, he shifted the files back into the folder and geared up to make the announcement.

“Attention Spiders,” Miguel held his watch up to his mouth. “Lyla will be down for maintenance for a couple of hours.”

He could hear the collective groan from the society all the way in his office.

“And I will try my best to get her up and running for future missions. Until then, please send any anomalies directly to Margo and stick to local crimes as well as protecting your respective neighborhoods.”

As soon as he ended the announcement, Margo was flooding his watch with back-to-back memes. Miguel remained confused watching a little girl in a cowboy hat complain to her grandpa while he dismissed her.

“I can send someone else down there to help you.”

“no because if anyone breaks my tech, it’s coming out of YOUR 🫵🏾 paycheck”

“Everything comes out of my paycheck.”

“whatever dad”

“?”

Perturbed, but not wanting to waste any more time, Miguel locked his office and called your number.

Two rings and you were picking up the phone.

“Hey, Spider-ider!”

“Hi,” Miguel refused to admit how the nickname sounded cute coming from you. “I need your help with something.”

“No ‘How are you?’ or ‘Sorry I haven’t checked on you in forever.’ Just straight to business, huh?”

“Sorry,” Miguel collected himself. “How are things? Did you manage to get the job with that tech company?”

“Why, thank you for asking, Miguel! I’m pretty good. Things are different! I did end up getting that job, but the manager is eerily creepy, so I’m trying my best to pile up the meanest HR case or try to wiggle my way into a new department. So far, the former is slowly but surely working, not sure if my sanity can take much more. How are you?”

Miguel's eyebrows shifted a bit, “You know you can just call for my help if anything goes wrong, right?”

“Miguel, you’re protecting so many people. More than I can even fathom, actually. I’m not going to ask you to stop to check on me.”

You should. He’d drop everything.

“It wouldn’t take much from my end, I could just-”

“Miguel.”

He bit his cheek, knowing you wanted to move the conversation along.

“How are you?” you asked again, tone back to normal.

“I’m neutral. Same thing as always. Now, it’s just that Lyla was really unbearable today.”

“Unbearable how?”

Miguel went into every detail, pulling in some last-minute reports from other Spiders that managed to use her before he shut her down.

“So you’re telling me she glitched out, wore an alligator head, and integrated ‘Flat Fuck Friday’ into every conversation?”

“Well, that was just one of the many cases. Is that, is that all you heard?”

“No, I got it,” you fixed your face to try and hold back your laugh. “It sounds like she hit her funny bone.”

Miguel looked up at the ceiling and back at you, “This is serious.”

“And I’m being as serious as I can be!”

“She’s causing all of this trouble because of a funny bone.”

You laugh at Miguel’s deadpan tone, “Ok, so technically it’s called a laughing virus. It’s been hitting a lot of major search engines for some reason, but Lyla is the closest to human-like AI there is, so it’s a funny bone!”

“As stupid as that is, I need your help to come fix it.”

“Aw, you need me to come check your work?��

Miguel avoided your gaze, “There is no work. I couldn’t tell one line from the next.”

“But Miguel, you were doing so good last time. What happened?”

“I-I don’t know, I thought I had one right but I mixed up tones with shades.”

“That’s still on the same playing field, so you got something right! That’s good progress, Miguel.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll be there soon. Don’t do anything crazy, although you’ll probably just loom over the desk dramatically.”

Miguel opened his mouth to rebuttal but you already ended the call with a laugh.

With truly nothing but his thoughts, he hurried to clean his space. There were a few loose wires and an empty box from the cafeteria scattered around.

By the time you were tapping the code into his office door, his platform was back on the ground and he’d just swept up some dust that managed to build in the corner of the room.

“Don’t clean up now just because I’m here,” you watched as his shoulders jumped a bit at your voice.

“I’m not,” Miguel huffs and sets the broom against the wall.

“Sure.”

Miguel comes closer to you with his hands on his hips.

You were probably the main reason that Lyla was the way she was, sarcastic and immature.

The only difference was Miguel could mute Lyla or switch modes for some peace. For you? It was non-stop. The only way he knew how to get you to stop was a method that’s been crowding his dreams ever since he met you.

He saw your lips moving at a mile per minute, but nothing was really reaching his ears.

They looked so soft, so perfect. He wondered if he should just let the society function on its own for just a few more hours.

“Miguel!” You waved your hands in front of him. “Lyla being down has really stressed you out, huh? You’re unfocused.”

He cleared his throat, “I still have a lot of work to do.”

“Well, let’s get to it!”

Miguel moved so you could walk to his desk, heart racing.

Whatever it was you were about to try to teach him wasn’t going to stick. He just knew it.

“Hey, Miguel! You know, I was wondering if we could implement some type of spider-baby daycare? MJ is pretty busy these days,” Peter strided into Miguel’s office with a wiggly Mayday strapped to his chest.

The platform was down, but the serious figure was nowhere to be found.

“Miguel?”

Peter tried to feel him out, but there’s no way anyone could miss Miguel in plain sight.

“Hm,” Peter put two fingers out for Mayday grab. She squealed glee, taking one finger to chew on. “If I were a Miguel, where would I be?”

He pondered through the halls, eventually finding himself at the entrance of the cafeteria. Mayday looked up almost as if she was disappointed.

“I need fuel to think!”

Peter ran down the line grabbing his usual: a 2099 burger, a large fry, and a medium cola, he’s dieting!

At the end of the line, a familiar voice called his name.

“Hey, kiddo! How’s it going?” Peter made his way to the table occupied by the younger spider crew.

Miles squinted at him, “Not a kid, but it’s going good! Have you seen Miguel? He was supposed to be training me an hour ago, but he’s not answering his watch.”

“Funny that you say that,” Peter stuffed his mouth with a handful of fries. “Went to his office and he wasn’t there.”

“What is with him and disappearing lately? It’s not like him,” Gwen mumbled. “I was supposed to report to him not too long ago and he wasn’t here.”

“Time is an enigma,” Hobie was tuning his guitar. “Glad he’s finally taking advantage of it instead of chatting about doomsday.”

“True, but he missed part of the big party we planned three months ago, too,” Pavitr supplied.

The table stopped and stared at Pav with various deadpan looks.

“What? He promised he’d try my special dish! He never breaks our promises.”

“He did pile a load of work on me when Lyla broke. Usually, he would come down and help me, but he said he was busy fixing her,” Margo turned to Peter.

The table sat and pondered for just a second then the teens started spouting out nonsense.

“He’s retiring!”

“He’s going to give HQ up.”

“He’s not going to another universe again, right?”

“He’s finally taking breaks.”

“He’s dying!”

Again, the table stopped to look at Pavitr.

“False alarm?”

“Look,” Peter held his hands up. “I don’t think it’s any of that.”

“What makes you so sure?” Gwen sounded nervous.

“Uh, he would tell me!”

Miles snickered at that which caused Mayday to fall into a fit of laughter.

“What? He’s told me things before. We’re buddies!”

“And where is your so-called buddy right now?” Margo folded her arms.

“Touche,” Peter took a giant slurp of his drink, cupping a hand under it to make sure nothing dripped on Mayday’s head. “But don’t you have a way to find him?”

“The Grumpy GPS? Yeah, but I’ve never used it because he’s always here,” Margo sighs.

“How about the next time he disappears, you let us know?” Gwen suggested.

“Love it,” Hobie fist bumps Gwen.

Miles scratched his neck, “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

“Says the guy that snuck into the Spider Society,” Pavitr shook his head.

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” Gwen raised her eyebrow. “Margo is on Miguel-duty. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, right guys?”

Everyone nodded their head in determination.

Peter smiled. He’s still got this mentor thing down!

Margo was down near the Go-Home-Machine running Style Savvy through an emulator.

“That is so ugly,” she sang as she watched another contestant’s outfit go down the runway.

Her judging was interrupted by a dancing cartoon spider with bushy eyebrows.

She paused the game and stretched her arms to the other side of the room to give everyone a call, “Mission ‘Where is the Old Man?’ is up and running. The Grumpy GPS has been added to you guys’ gizmos. I’ve got everything ready to hack.”

“It sounds like we’re doing a lot more than tracking,” Hobie mumbled.

“But what if he actually is dying?” Gwen was lacing up her ballet shoes tight. “He would tell us, right?”

“Oh, but when I said that, it sounded crazy,” Pavitr pulled his mask down. “The double standards are appalling.”

“He could be just avoiding us. Can’t say it hasn’t happened before,” Miles’ voice was low and testy.

“He wasn’t avoiding you, Miles, he was just…projecting,” Gwen said matter-of-factly.

“Are we back on this? Sending the entire society after me is projecting. Missing our training sessions that he set up multiple times? That’s just foul.”

Gwen and Miles went back and forth, fussing over little things.

“They’re bickering again. How cute,” Pavitr stage-whispered.

“1 mission on Miles winning?” Hobie asked.

Pavitr thought for a second, “Deal.”

“You’ll probably be the most upset if he really is sick,” Gwen comments.

“Says who? I’m not worried,” Miles zipped up his jacket halfway.

“Then why are you bouncing around like that, Miles.”

Hobie sighed while Pavitr cheered.

“If you guys are done, Miguel’s moving on foot heading down 5th. I pinned a checkpoint,” Margo sent the coordinates to their watches.

“Time to go see if big man’s a killer,” Hobie yawned. “Or not.”

Peter felt the ground shake under him, hair rising on the back of his neck. His senses were screaming at him to turn around.

The thing is, if he turned around, he'd lose track on Miguel who was currently inside of the very building he was standing on top of.

The shaking grew, pebbles and vent plates rattling around him, then everything fell back into place.

One, two, thre, four pairs of feet hit the ground.

“Where’s Margo?” Peter asked, eyes not leaving the ground under him.

“In our ears singing,” Gwen groaned. “Where’s Mayday?”

“Enjoying a lovely Mommy-Daughter date with MJ and her girlfriends. Glad to have you all join me.”

“How’d you know he was going to be here?” Hobie crossed his arms.

“Like I said, buddies!”

“You waited outside of his office, didn’t you?” Pavitr pointed his finger at Peter.

Peter turned around with an offended face, “Details-schmetails!”

“Well, do you have any idea what he’s up to now?” Gwen put a hand on her hip.

“Well, we’re on the roof of an apartment, super expensive might I add, and I’m assuming his apartment is here. So maybe he’s just getting a nap in.”

“He’s on the move,” Margo’s voice buzzed through all of the teens' ears and they ran to the edge of the building, practically pushing Peter to the side.

“He’s wearing normal clothes for once,” Gwen’s voice was shocked.

“His trousers are quite nice,” Hobie nodded as if he was looking at a magazine.

“It’s so…weird,” Miles shuddered. “I’ve never seen him in anything else but his suit.”

“He wore a nice button-down to my Zoom celebration once,” Margo hummed.

“Guys?” Pavitr’s voice went high. “Where’s Peter?”

The three of them turned around to see a missing pink-robed Spider.

“Oh, come on!” Miles jumped from the roof to the next one, following the pink fluff. Miguel was walking fast on the sidewalk and Peter was keeping his trail from up high.

“Really, Peter?” Gwen swung alongside the two with the rest right on their tails. “Some mentor you are.”

“I’m a great teacher! You’re all catching on quite well,” Peter swung lower as Miguel crossed the street.

Colors flew across the sky, contrasting with the constant grays and small specs of green of Nueva York. Scaling from building to building was a lot easier with flying cars added to the mix, but it was a little odd to see wobbling vehicles every now and then.

“I think you guys should slow it down. His pace changed,” Margo noted. “He’s stopping at…a park? Didn’t know they still had those here.”

With a sturdy pull, Miles used his web to stop Peeter from running any further and the now quintet landed on the ground a safe distance from the park.

“A little dreary for a park, innit?” One eye on Hobie’s mask went higher than the other.

From where they were hiding, steel statues stood tall, tufts of greenery growing up the structure. There was more pavement than grass and the walkways contained several dips and turns.

“I think there’s some flare to it,” Miles countered. “Could use a lot more color.”

They quieted down as they watched Miguel find an empty bench. He sat down and started to rub his hands against his pants. He sat for a minute or so before he checked his watch and his leg started to bounce.

“Is he waiting on someone?” Gwen whispered.

“Oh, I wonder who it could be?” Pav whispered back.

“Why are you guys whispering?” Margo paused her side mission of trying to find any security cameras in the area.

“Doesn’t he have super-hearing?” Miles asked.

“Over this much noise?” Hobie brought the talking level back to normal. “If he doesn’t suspect us of following him, there’s no need for him to focus on us.”

After about five minutes of watching and making a game out of how many times can Miguel check his clothes, with Peter mumbling about how the pants aren’t going to get any looser with those thighs, everyone holds their breath as they watch someone take a seat next to him.

Miguel’s entire demeanor changed.

His face lit up, his back straightened, and the tension from his body fell.

“No way,” Pavitr whispered excitedly. “Guys!”

“What’s going on? I still can’t get into the security cams,” Margo’s voice was impatient.

“Miguel…has a partner?” Gwen tilted her head watching the two react. The mystery person got up to hug Miguel as he sat on the bench. He hesitated a bit, fingers twitching awkwardly before he hugged them back. “Or not.”

“If one of you could get closer, I could pitch the sound to everyone. And, I could see!”

Everyone turned to Miles.

“Why is everybody looking at me?”

“You can turn invisible, genius,” Gwen said.

He just sighed and faded from head to toe.

“How’s it going Spidey?” you lean back from your hug to look down at him. Your hands rub his shoulders. “You look nice today.”

Miguel averted his eyes, “You’re not supposed to call me that-”

“Outside of HQ or our phone calls. I know, I know. Seriously though, why are you so dressed up today? Got a hot date waiting?”

Miguel tilted his head, “Do I really look nice?”

The shirt he was wearing was barely hiding anything, any tighter and it would have been considered a muscle tee. It was tucked into some slacks with a belt that made his tiny waist even smaller. The pants hugged his thighs just enough.

“Yeah!” More than he could imagine.

“Thanks,” he smiled a bit. “There’s no hot date. Just wearing something casual.”

Your shoulders lifted at the words.

“Cool, cool.”

“You look nice, as well.”

“Really?” you looked down at your last-minute outfit. Some gray joggers you found at a thrift store and a hoodie you’re almost certain has a random bleach stain somewhere on the back. “You’re digging the midnight chic?”

“Midnight chic?”

“Yeah, an outfit you wear when going out for a snack in the middle of the night.”

Miguel pursed his lips, “It looks soft. Comfortable.”

You involuntarily gripped your bag tighter, watching Miguel’s eyes roam you from the neck down.

Lately, he’s been saying things that make your stomach flutter, from being willing to beat up your boss to fussing at you for running errands so late to remembering small details from months ago.

Only recently has his eyes began to wander. He doesn’t catch on as fast when you explain things to him. You’ve caught him staring at you while you’re looking at other things. His smile lingered a little longer. His hands were a lot more careful. Sometimes, he’d tense up when you touched him.

It was all so confusing and the feelings you’ve pushed down for years have crawled their way back up, waiting at the back of your tongue to be announced.

Still, you were just here to help him for as long as he needed you. Nothing more, nothing less.

You cleared your throat, “Okay so, you said you needed help with…Excel?”

“Mm hm,” Miguel nodded and locked his eyes back on your face.

You pulled your laptop, turning up the brightness so that the scenery wouldn’t shoot straight through the transparent device.

“So, this program is like, extremely old.”

“I know, but it's a middle ground for all of the Spiders. Anything newer would be too much for about a fourth of them and anything older would take ages for anyone to complete.”

“Got it,” you inch close enough to Miguel for his cologne to dance around you. He leaned closer to squint at your laptop and you had to will your hands to not shake like jelly. “So, the program is actually pretty simple. You just enter formulas, charts, numbers, or information in these boxes. There’s a lot more manual work than we’re used to, but it won’t take much to get used to.”

You walked Miguel through everything you’ve taught yourself over the past few days. Having him put in formulas and waiting for the result.

“Like this?”

“Almost! You’re missing a letter here.”

“Can you go over it again?”

Miguel's hands would hover over the keyboard, eyes focused and nose scrunched. Sometimes you would fight the screaming in your head and place your hands over his, helping him punch certain numbers in.

“Miguel, I think you’re messing with me. We’ve repeated this same thing on four other sheets now. I know you’re smarter than that.”

He poked his tongue in his cheek, “I’m just quadruple checking. Gotta teach this to some older people.”

“Fine,” you snort. “One more time and then I have to get ready to go.”

“Already?” Miguel turned to you. “I thought you didn’t have to be somewhere until this evening.”

“I don’t, but I can’t go looking like this. You spent 30 minutes arguing with me about the interface. Don’t you have to go back to HQ soon?”

“No.”

There was a noise behind you. You turn around to see nothing but a curved wall embedded with vines.

You put your heart to your chest, “God, I thought that was a reporter or something. Just the wind I suppose.”

Miguel’s eyes stayed planted on the empty space, “On second thought, let me walk you there. Don’t want any surprises.”

“So you don’t need me to go over this for the fifth time?”

“Nope,” Miguel grinned down at you. “I got it the first time, actually.”

“Oh my god,” you laugh as you hit his arm. He doesn’t even flinch. “You’re such a jerk.”

He looked around and got behind you to squat down, tapping on his gizmo. You could only hide so much of him. “Would a jerk swing you to your apartment?”

You look up at him equipped with his mask.

“He probably would, actually.”

“Aw,” Miguel said, red marks for eyes holding so much sadness. “Oh well.”

You yell as he yanks you up by the waist and shoots his web up to the nearest flying car.

“Miles! You almost screwed us over!” Margo did her best to wipe their trace.

“I panicked!” Miles tried to explain himself as he ran on the windows of a skyscraper.

“For what?” Gwen flipped as she connected from one structure to the next. “It was so clear that he meant that he wanted to be with whoever that was, not because he wants to quit HQ.”

“Seeing him like that feels like we met a new man,” Hobie said. His boots were light in the air. “Don’t like it.”

“You say that like he doesn’t let you get away with everything,” Pavitr said.

“Like what?”

“Like giving away food to the street cleaners.”

“Or like pasting your band stickers everywhere.”

“Or painting an ACAB mural.”

“To be fair, Miguel aligns with every single one of those things,” Hobie shrugged.

“This is great and all, but talk about a major fail,” Peter sighed. “He clearly needs a wingman.”

“I thought he did pretty good!” Miles said.

The rest of the group made a range of judging noises.

“His game definitely needs some work and he’s already on his way back to HQ, so hurry it up, guys. We need to hustle and huddle.”

Miguel was at his dock again, preparing to go check out the anomalies of the week.

He was back doing the thing that distracted him most: thinking about you.

Yesterday only confirmed what he’s been thinking about ever since you opened your mouth.

He’s absolutely infatuated with you.

At first, he thought it was a fluke, a blip in his timeline. No matter how many times your jokes made him chuckle or your smile brought him warmth, he wasn’t going to lean into it.

But then, you called him one night and your voice brought him back from the darkness that was consuming him. Stories of your life, an exchange of nostalgia, a whisper of hope for the future, and the confirmation that he was more than the error in time that he thought he was.

You’re something that he more than adored.

And yet, he still hasn’t figured out how to tell you.

He wanted more than the monthly meetups to refresh his memory on the stupid tech that kept this building running.

Truthfully, he could call Gabriel, or worst case scenario, Xina for help, but every time he got a chance it was your name that crossed his mind.

Miguel sighed as he started to shut some tabs down.

“Spiders incoming,” Lyla popped up to inform him.

Miguel saw the gaggle of teens plus Peter walking to his office.

“Here we go,” he grumbled.

“Turn that frown upside-down! Company is always good,” Lyla said.

Before Peter can open his mouth Miguel is beating him to it.

“What do you want?”

“Ouch!” Peter laughed. “Not up for a bit of family bonding time?”

“Not with you.”

“Oh c’mon, Miguel,” Peter inches forward as Miguel’s platform comes down. “Hear us out.”

“Make it quick.”

The teens all stared at Peter who looked back and forth between them.

“Do any of you not know what the word ‘quick’ means?” Miguel asked with irritation lining his voice.

“Well,” Miles started.

“You see, we were thinking that you might need some help,” Gwen finishes.

Miguel crossed his arms, “Help with what.”

“Your sad flirting,” Hobie says.

“What?”

“You know,” Peter puts his arm around Miguel’s shoulders. “You need a wingman!”

Miguel’s frown grew deeper, “What are you talking about? Did you guys spy on me?”

Six voices overloaded Miguel’s eardrums, all explaining their part of some convoluted scheme.

“Alright, alight! Quiet!” Miguel holds his hands out. “Margo!”

Miguel pinned his eyes to her with his eyebrows pinched.

She danced from foot to foot, face scrunched, “We just! We were worried about you so we followed you and saw you making googly eyes at someone!” The words spilled out of her like water.

Everyone but Hobie looked at Margo incredulously.

“What?” she whined. “He was giving me his disappointed look. The disappointment was torturing me!”

Miguel turned and paced, pinching his nose as he whispered to himself.

“Miguel, they could help you!” Lyla said cheerfully. “You’ve only been crushing on them for what…multiple years?”

“Lyla!”

“Multiple years? No wonder you’re always so tense. That’s pretty sad, bro,” Pavitr hummed.

Miguel pointed his finger, “Don’t bro me.”

“Still seeking authority in his moment of weakness. Something’s got to give,” Hobie went to lean on a wall.

“We really thought something terrible was going on,” Miles’ shoulders drop. “You also go M.I.A. whenever you have a problem.”

“We just wanted to help,” Gwen supplied.

“Hey man, don’t blame the kids for this one, alright?” Peter’s voice lowered so only the two of them could hear it, albeit a bit useless in a room full of power-holding teens. “Say the word and we’ll stay out of it, but the kids deserve to know why you were canceling on them at least.”

Miguel looked at Peter with an exasperated face before looking at the teens, three of which looked like they were about to cry.

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and let out a deep breath, “I’m not sick.”

“But lovesick?” Margo asked.

He gave her a tired look, “Yes.”

“Well why not say that instead of just disappearing?”

“They’re the one who helped make the tech for this society. Without them, there would be no updated gizmos, no updated Lyla, no new ideas. Every time I left it was to…get insight on something here. To fix broken tech.”

“And to stare in their face,” Pavitr snickered.

Miguel panned his eyes to the floor, too embarrassed to admit it.

“What’s the hold up in telling them how you feel?” Peter asked. “There’s no time like the present.”

“Don’t tell me yesterday was an example of what happens when you try to confess?” Gwen’s face twisted up, teeth clenched in second-hand embarrassment.

Miguel’s silence was enough of an answer.

“Tío,” Miles closed his eyes then looked back up dramatically with his hands out. “¡Vamo’! Sácale, llévale al cine.”

Lyla put a spotlight on Miles and held a microphone out to him while Miguel groaned.

“Cómprale, un ramo de flores!”

“Ya no puédo mas,” Miguel swiped through the holographic mic. “Eso no va a funcionar.”

Miles slumped, “But how do you know? You haven’t even tried! Bañate, junto con el-”

“Don’t finish that song, Miles,” Miguel’s fingers went to his temples.

“You should really listen to the lyrics-”

“Why don’t we help you win them over?” Margo stood in between the two, ending the squabble. “It’s clear that they seem to like you too.”

Miguel's eyes went softer staring at Margo’s pleading face, “How do you know?”

“We quite literally saw it,” Hobie spoke as if Miguel lost his mind. “No one ever talks to you that sweet.”

The teens all nodded their head in unison and Peter did a horrible job at hiding his laugh.

Hobie wasn’t done, “Don’t let someone like that slip through your fingers.”

Miguel was at the park again, dressed up even more than last time. An open navy button-down was tucked into his pants, his slacks were dark gray, and he had on one of the more expensive pairs of dress shoes he owned. A chain he borrowed from Gabriel adorned his neck and he let his hair natural and loose for once.

Under Miles’ advice, he did buy some flowers. Hobie told him to remain calm, Gwen told him to just talk, Pavitr gave him a bullet point list of what and what not to do, and Margo told him that he was the best no matter how the confession turned out.

Peter went on and on about the importance of love and relationships but Miguel was never inclined to listen to him. He did keep the comment about letting you know how much he means to you to heart, though.

He was so in his own thoughts when you showed up in front of him that he didn’t even notice you at first.

He jumped when you tapped his shoulder.

“Woah, it’s just me. And you’re super dressed up today. What’s the occasion? I’m not taking ‘casual’ for an answer this time.”

Miguel swallowed dryly, grip on the bouquet of cool-toned flowers almost enough to wilt the stems.

“Flowers?” your eyes went to his hand.

“Yeah, um.”

Just breathe, Miguel!

Margo’s perky reminders sounded off in Miguel’s head.

“I brought them for you,” Miguel placed them in your hands.

“Oh!” your face lit up. “These are beautiful. Thank you so much. I didn’t get you anything, though. I didn’t know we were bringing gifts today.”

“No need. I wanted to get them because,” Miguel felt his throat closing in. “I really, really like you.”

The smile on your face dropped as you stared at him.

“It’s been particularly hard over the past years to try to focus without you running through my thoughts and I don’t want the fear of myself or my circumstance to stop me from having a chance to be with you.”

Maybe his ears could pick up how fast your heart was going, too.

“So if you’re willing, will you please go out with me?”

You dropped the flowers and brought him in for a tight hug.

“Are you kidding me? Of course, I’ll go out with you.”

Miguel was quick to wrap his arms around you today, burying his face in your neck, “No hesitation?”

“I’ve been wanting and honestly, waiting for one of us to make a move for years. You’re always so busy, so I was too nervous to even bother,” you look back at Miguel’s face, smiling from ear to ear.

“Sorry to keep you waiting then.”

You looked from his lips to his eyes, “Can we skip a few steps?”

“Such as?”

You pushed forward, melting into him as you slotted his lips against yours, head full of warmth and clouds. Miguel matched your pace, hand on your back as he pressed against you. When he opened your lips you pulled back, breath dancing against his.

“Swing me to my apartment?”

Miguel smirked, “Always.”

As always, like, reblog, and COMMENT. Let me know how you guys feel! 🩵

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago

Text

AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

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/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

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

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scary-grace · 1 month ago

Note

25 police lights flashing on concrete with shigaraki

thank you so much for the prompt! i wrote multiple different ideas for this one, all of which I hit trouble with, so if you end up hating it, let me know and I'll rev up another one of the ideas. I hope you like it! (dividers by @cafekitsune)

magnum opus

As a crime scene photographer, you're prepared to see some blood. But the crime scene you've just been called out to document is on a different level, and the longer you spend looking at it, the more convinced you are that everything about it is intentional -- not that you can convince anyone else. As you try desperately to raise the alarm, the man responsible for the murder grows more and more interested in you, and whether Shigaraki Tomura kills you or not, he'll be sure to show you things you can never imagine first. (cross-posted to Ao3)

You got the call at eleven-thirty, when you were already most of the way to bed, and by the time you get to the crime scene, the detective on duty is already pissed. “Took you long enough. The press is climbing the walls.”

“I got here as fast as I could,” you say, ducking past the tape securing the scene. “How long since it was called in?”

“Half an hour, but the press got here just as fast,” the head of the forensics unit – your boss – says. “It was all the responding officers could do to get the perimeter set up before they could contaminate the scene.”

“The scene contaminated the scene,” the fingerprint tech says. He looks grossed out, big-time. “I mean, look at it.”

There’s a lot to look at. So much that it’s hard to decide where to point your camera first. You usually start with the body, but the body’s not usually in so many pieces. The victim’s been gutted, and what was left after the murderer dug their innards out of their body cavity looks like it’s been drawn and quartered. And if you look away from the body, widening your vision to the scene as a whole, there are dozens of items that could be evidence. This is a construction site. Construction sites are a murder weapon all on their own.

Setting all of that aside, there’s the blood, a puddle of it beneath the body and enormous smears on the skeletal walls and concrete floor. It hasn’t congealed completely yet. When you crouch down to peer at it, you can see the flashing lights from the police cars reflected within it. Before you can think better of it, you snap a photo. “Hey,” the detective snaps at you. “This is going to take all night as it is. Let’s get a move-on. Start with the sketch.”

You wait for the sketch artist to step up, but nobody moves. You realize too late that they’re looking at you. “No,” you say. “I’m the photographer. Where’s Monoma?”

“Budget cuts,” your boss says. You wince. “Start sketching.”

It’s not a pretty sketch, because a) you’re not a sketch artist, and b) you’re rushing it. Forensics protocol insists that the sketch of the crime scene and all the photographs be taken before anyone else enters the scene, and with every minute that passes, you can feel your coworkers’ frustration growing. Once you’ve got rough outlines of where everything’s supposed to be, you set the sketchbook aside and pick up your camera at last.

You weren’t born with a metaphorical camera in your hands the way real, talented photographers are supposed to be, but there hasn’t been a point in your life where you weren’t more comfortable viewing the world through a lens. Maybe in a different life, you’d have been a fashion photographer, but in this one, you were plucked out of your university’s photography program by a criminology professor who’d spotted your photo essay chronicling the decay of a tanuki that was hit by a car. Patience, an eye for detail, and a strong stomach – according to Professor Sasaki, you were born to be a crime scene photographer.

Whether you were born to do it or not, you’re good at it, and you get to work documenting the carnage. It’s not like any crime scene you’ve come across before. The sheer violence of the victim’s death is startling on its own, but more than that, there’s something strange about the evidence that’s been left behind. The longer you spend looking at it, through the lens of your camera or with your own eyes as you add to the sketch, the more convinced you are that it’s not an accident. Nothing about this scene is an accident.

It looks that way, sure. When you were still a photography student, you got some practice setting up still-life shots, and you remember focusing on the smallest details, trying to make the scene you wanted to shoot fell into place naturally. You were good at it, but not good enough – there was always something that revealed the truth. No matter how realistic and accidental your shot appeared to be, you knew it was composed. Just like this crime scene is.

The arcs of blood spatter on the floor and the walls are too perfect. The dismembered limbs are cast out at artfully careless angles, hands arranged with palms turned up, fingers half-uncurled. When you’re photographing the victim’s head, you note the angle it’s been turned to – and when you zoom in, you realized that there’s something up with the eyes. The victim’s head is turned, and his eyes are focused on something that’s not there any longer. Is that where the killer was standing? No, you realize, it can’t be – in order to sever the victim’s head, the killer would have had to stand much closer. Which means the killer didn’t just turn the victim’s head. He moved their eyes, too.

You catch one of the fingerprint techs by the arm. “This is going to sound weird,” you say, “but you need to dust the victim’s eyes.”

“Huh?” Toru gives you a weird look. “Why?”

“I think the killer moved them.”

“Somebody like this? No way.” Shinsou, the detective in training, walks past, trailing after Aizawa, who’s actually in charge. “With this much violence and this much evidence and this dangerous of a scene? This killer’s out of control.”

“What if that’s what they want you to think?” You know it sounds crazy even as it’s coming out of your mouth, but at the same time, you’re absolutely convinced. “If a killer really wanted to, they could make a crime scene look like something it wasn’t. Like it was accidental, when really it was staged –”

“And why would they?” Aizawa turns around to stare at you. From behind him, you can see your boss, Sekijiro, looking up from the blood spray he’s been analyzing. “Why would an organized killer spend valuable time disorganizing their own crime scene? Why would they take that risk?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I think there must be –”

“What is it?” Aizawa cuts you off. You don’t have an answer ready, and Aizawa takes it the same as if you’d admitted there isn’t one. “I would expect someone who works in forensics to know this already, but the business of finding and apprehending criminals has very little to do with psychology. The simplest explanation is invariably the best one.”

You know profiling doesn’t catch criminals. Evidence does. But you’ve photographed plenty of blood-soaked crime scenes in your career, and none of them have given you the same uneasy feeling as this one. “But what if –”

“Which answer is more logical? That an organized killer would waste time that could be spent escaping on making a mess of their crime scene?” Aizawa’s tone of voice makes it clear how he feels about the idea, as if his expression hadn’t told you already. “Or that a disorganized killer left a disorganized scene behind?”

You know the answer, but you’re not about to open your mouth again. Aizawa’s made his point. But because he’s a detective, and detectives can’t resist an opportunity to be right about something, he hammers it home. “I don’t give you direction during your photography. Don’t give advice about things you don’t understand.”

He goes back to talking to your boss, and you take the last few pictures you need. Then you step past the crime scene tape, find a place to sit on the hood of a cop car, and go back to your sketch. It’s hard to focus when you’re smarting over Aizawa’s comments, which sting all the more for the fact that he’s right. You don’t know anything about catching criminals. Your job is to gather the evidence and hand it off to people who know what to do with it, not to come up with crazy theories of your own.

Still, though. You can’t shake your certainty off. As you fill in the details on your sketch, you can’t help but feel like you’re sketching a still life of another still life. It’s a perfectly disorganized crime scene, but in your opinion, the only thing real about it is the body in the center.

Like any performer, Tomura wants to see the audience’s reaction, but showing up at his own crime scene is a beginner mistake. Thanks to the drone he planted at the scene before he left, he’s got a front-row seat to the early-stage investigation of his latest murder, and he was so excited to see what the cops think of the it that his hands were shaking on the controls. That didn’t last. He’s been watching for an hour, and he’s more disappointed than anything else.

They aren’t getting it. Tomura doesn’t know how to make himself any clearer, but they aren’t getting it. They’re getting distracted by the location. By the timing. By stupid shit like the fingerprints everywhere, which aren’t even his. Tomura picked this city and this precinct on purpose, because the detective squad here is supposed to be good at cracking cases. Not that Tomura’s looking to get his case cracked. He’s looking to get his point across. But this group of cops is just like the rest of them. They can’t see that Tomura’s trying to make a point at all.

Disorganized. Tomura fucking hates that word. It’s the word the cops use to write his work off every time, and once they get that word in their heads, it’s all over. The only person who even suggested that there might be something more to Tomura’s scene was the photographer out of the forensic unit, and the detectives ignored you completely. It’s too bad they did that. You were onto something.

In fact, you were onto something from the second you showed up. You took your first photo before you even crossed the police line, and Tomura liked what you focused on – not the body, but the pool of blood underneath it. Something about it got your attention, and Tomura doesn’t need to know what it was. All he needs to know is that when you looked at his crime scene, you saw something more than fucking disorganization. And once you saw that, you kept looking, catching details Tomura’s been waiting for somebody to notice forever. Tomura wishes he could get ahold of your photos. He wants to see what his work looks like through the eyes of someone with vision.

Right now you’re sitting back from the scene, finishing a sketch of it. Tomura manipulates the controls of his drone, edging it a little closer and zooming in on the page. He can tell that photography’s what you prefer. You’re a lot slower with the sketch. But there’s one detail that jumps out at Tomura, one that fills his vision and makes his heart lurch out of step. You noticed the way he turned the body’s head, the way he moved the eyes, and you drew that – and you drew a line of sight to the corner of the sketch, where you’ve already put an outline.

The outline is person-shaped, which is fine for now. Tomura doesn’t care what it looks like. All he cares about is the fact that you figured it out. His crime scenes aren’t disorganized. There’s a purpose to the things he does. He didn’t spend fifteen minutes screwing around with the position of the head just for fun. It was hard work, and you noticed it. As Tomura watches, you add a question mark to the center of the outline.

You want to know what was there. You want to see more. Tomura feels a grin break across his face, opening splits in his dry lips. He knew all it would take was someone to notice first, someone to spread the word and get the rest of the world thinking in the right direction. He’d just thought the person who noticed would be Aizawa, the lead detective, rather than the photographer from the forensic unit. And he thought they’d have a better idea of the point he’s trying to make.

But maybe that’s on him. Tomura frowns at the thought, but once it hits, it won’t leave. If you noticed that he’s trying to say something but couldn’t figure out what he wanted to say, he might need to make it clearer. For whoever comes next, anyway. It’s not going to be you. Tomura still doesn’t want to get caught, after all, and he needs another victim sooner or later. Given the message he’s trying to send, his victim pool is kind of small. If he branches out from cops and detectives and soldiers and prison guards, it might throw the so-called justice system off his scent. Or it would. If he had a scent, which he doesn’t.

Killing you wouldn’t help to make Tomura’s point clearer, and killing somebody off the forensics team feels less like justice to Tomura than he wants it to. When he set out to expose the falsehoods at the center of society’s moral code, he focused on the people who actually enforce it. Sure, forensic specialists are a cog in the machine, helping to keep it running, but a photographer like you is just the one who collects the evidence, not the person who looks at it and turns it into a lie. Tomura could kill you. But your death won’t matter to the world. Tomura needs to save his kills for when they’ll count.

And with that in mind – Tomura lowers his hands to the controls again, lifting the drone away from its perch and sending it further over the crime scene, focusing on the cops and detectives. He keeps a running list of potential kills in his head, and he likes to add a few law enforcement personnel from every crime scene. It’ll be a while before he comes back to this city for a kill, but when he’s ready, he wants to know exactly who he’s targeting.

Detective Aizawa was a disappointment, and he shot down the only person on the scene who had even the slightest idea of what Tomura was trying to say. He’ll do. In a few months or a year or two years, Tomura will come back to this city, and when he does, he’ll give you another crime scene to capture. That should give him time to figure out how to make his point clear. And give you some time to get better at your job, so that by the time he gets back, you’ll know exactly what every detail of his crime scene means.

When it comes to crime scenes, you hate the ones with living victims the most. Your job requires you to be dispassionate, not to linger on the horrors, and as terrible as it is, there’s some peace in knowing that the victim of a murderer will never see the aftermath, or have to reckon with what was done to them. Living victims make it harder. Living victims are haunted. Living victims stare at you and everyone else with blank eyes, empty except for the questions: Where were you? Why didn’t you save me?

Saving people isn’t your job. It’s not even the cops’ job, really. But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel sickeningly guilty every time you break eye contact, lift the camera up to hide your face, and turn back to taking pictures.

Today’s crime scene is what’s probably going to wind up being investigated as attempted vehicular homicide. Or a carjacking. Or both. In any case, the evidence is scattered across a busy intersection, and you’ve been crawling around for half an hour, taking pictures of body parts, smears of brain matter, piles of broken glass, and all the parts of the car that flew off when its bumper basically exploded on impact with an oncoming bus. You’re irritated, and you can’t figure out why. With every picture you snap, your frustration grows.

It’s so senseless. And random. A snap of unthinking violence and a bad decision, and now three people are severely injured, not to mention everybody who’s been traumatized by one look at the scene. There was no point to this, and there’s nothing to solve. You aren’t helping anybody by snapping dozens of pictures. You’re just creating a record of the worst moments of someone’s life, a record they’re going to see in court if they’re even out of the hospital in time for the trial. You might be good at your job, but sometimes you really hate it.

It’s a relief when your supervisor calls you away. “I appreciate your thoroughness, but someone else will complete the photography,” he says. “You’re needed elsewhere.”

“Why?”

“A murder’s occurred in a district without its own forensic team,” Sekijiro says. “They need a photographer.”

You’d love to get out of here, but – “Don’t cops in districts without a forensics team know how to do their own photography?”

“For an ordinary murder,” Sekijiro says. “This isn’t an ordinary murder.”

A chill goes down your spine, and it must show on your face, because Sekijiro sweetens the deal with zero prompting. “You’ll be paid time and a half.”

“Okay,” you say. “Where am I going?”

The site’s an hour and a half away by car, but that’s crucial time for a fresh murder scene, so Sasaki calls ahead and lets the traffic cops on your route know that you’ll be speeding to get there quickly. You get there in forty-five minutes – you did a lot of speeding – and check in with the detective in charge of the investigation, a big, friendly guy named Toyomitsu. “Thanks for coming,” he says. “We have a trainee photographer, and he was going to do it, but –”

He nods at a guy with spiky red hair who’s sitting on the hood of a police car, looking all kinds of queasy. “No problem,” you say. “Did somebody do a sketch?”

“My partner. He’s not half-bad.”

Detective Toyomitsu’s partner looks queasy, too, but you think his is more stress-related. You look over the sketch, then pick up your camera, duck the tape, and come to a dead stop at the edge of the scene.

It wasn’t a chill down your spine earlier, when Sekijiro told you about the case – it was déjà vu, because in spite of the fact that this scene looks totally different in its setup, you can still see how carefully it’s been arranged. The blood spray exiting from the victim’s open body cavity looks almost artful, a near-perfect fan rather than the splatter you’re used to. The limbs are more contained this time, hanging by threads but still attached, and the same goes for the head, held upright by a meat hook jammed through the back of the neck. And even from a distance, you can see that the head’s turned at an angle.

“Is there a problem?” Toyomitsu asks – not accusingly, the way Aizawa would. “Need help with anything?”

You shake your head, and try to stiffen your spine in the bargain. You have a crime scene to document, and you’re getting time and a half. And this time, once you’ve done your job, you’re going to follow the victim’s eyeline. This time, you’re going to see what the killer wanted the victim to see. What he wants the investigator to see, too. Maybe that will help someone catch him.

You’re back.

Tomura was watching a stagnant crime scene, with the detectives and forensic unit standing around uselessly after the trainee photographer took one look at the scene and upchucked, and he was having a hard time staying awake. Which is bullshit – laying out murders like his takes effort, and no one was appreciating it, courtesy of some kid who spilled his guts. Tomura was so annoyed that he broke his no-forensics rule to add the kid to his hit list. You didn’t waste time throwing up. You were focused on his work. On him.

And then, like thinking about you conjured you up, you stepped onto the scene. Just like before, you were thorough, capturing every detail of Tomura’s scene. Tomura was thinking you’d be better at it by the next time his drone captured you, and he was right. You’re not just better than last time. This time, you catch all the details Tomura agonized over, focusing on exactly the things he’d want someone to see. It made Tomura feel weird. Almost anxious, but not quite. Giddy, or something. Weird, but good.

It would have been enough to see you study his scene, trying to understand what he meant. But once you were done taking photos, you left the scene and followed the eyeline he constructed for his kill. And now you’re climbing up onto a pile of crates, looking for what Tomura planted there for anybody smart enough to find it. He should have known it would be you.

The trainee photographer is following you. Once you’re on a level with the nook Tomura tucked the hint into, you glance back at him. “Hand me the camera.”

“I don’t think that’s evidence,” the trainee says. Fuck him. He’s just moved up a spot on the list. “It’s way outside the crime scene.”

“So make the crime scene bigger. Camera.” You hold out your hand, waiting, but you lose patience fast. “Fine.”

You’re taking pictures with your phone now, capturing the hint Tomura placed from every angle. Tomura feels weirdly exposed, and it doesn’t go away when you stop snapping photos and put on a pair of gloves. You’re pretty thorough. It won’t matter – Tomura took care of his fingerprints before he made his first kill – but he appreciates the effort. At least someone’s paying attention.

He leaves the drone where it is and turns his attention to the camera, zooming in on the details the same way you do when you’re taking pictures of his work. Your fingertips carefully unfolding the newspaper article. The focus in your eyes as you read it. The way one of your legs is shaking from the awkward position you’re staying balanced in. Your mouth grabs more of his attention than it should, given that it’s got nothing to do with his crime scene, but Tomura gives it a second look anyway. Maybe a third.

You glance back at the trainee. “I need an evidence bag.”

“That’s not evidence.”

“You’re not a detective. We don’t decide what counts as evidence. We collect everything and let the cops work it out.” You hold out your hand, waiting, until the trainee hands you an evidence bag. You slide Tomura’s hint carefully into it, then hand it back to the trainee while you climb down. “Give it back. I’ll bring it to the detective myself.”

The trainee really doesn’t like your attitude. Tomura doesn’t give a shit. In his opinion, your attitude is right where it should be. You care about the truth. You care about seeing things as they really are. If there were more people like you around, Tomura wouldn’t have so many people to put on his kill list. At the rate things are going, he’s going to be killing people until he drops dead.

The detective doesn’t want Tomura’s hint. Fuck him, too. Tomura puts him on the list, but absently – he’s still focused on you. “Do you mind if I keep this?” you ask the detective, and Tomura’s face goes up in flames. “I want to look at it a little longer.”

The detective nods. He’s barely paying attention, too busy directing his tiny gang of borrowed forensic specialists to dust for fingerprints that aren’t there. You, though. You’re studying Tomura’s hint through the plastic, lost in thought. Because you get it, just like Tomura thought. Or at least you get him. Enough. Enough to understand that he wanted you to see something and actually go looking for it.

He’s been wondering why his message keeps getting lost, why no one understands when he’s being clear as a fucking bell about it. Maybe he’s been going about it the wrong way. He doesn’t need the world to understand. Tomura needs one person, one person who gets it and can spread the word. And you’ve just made yourself the first and only candidate for the job.

Tomura sits back in his chair. The satisfaction of finding an answer, figuring out how to stay five steps ahead of the cops while still spreading the word, is familiar to him – but it’s cut with something that isn’t. After six murders, Tomura’s finally gotten what he wanted, so he should stop watching now. Instead he keeps watching, some part of him still unsatisfied, even as you slide the hint carefully out of its evidence bag and start reading. You’ve found everything he wanted you to see, but he wants you to keep looking. He wants you to keep looking until he doesn’t want to be looked at anymore.

It's a stupid thing to want. Tomura switches off the drone, irked at himself. He wants you to keep looking? That’s easy. The next time he sets up a crime scene for you, he’ll leave enough hints to keep you looking at him all night.

You’ve taken pictures of four weird murders now, found multiple pieces of evidence at the sites, and you’re starting to see a pattern developing. A couple of patterns, actually. It’s not just the eyes that give away where the extra evidence might be – it’s the angle of the hands, whether the fingers are pointed or not, and on the last victim, the killer even took the time to point the toes. Or toe. He cut the other four off on each foot, leaving only the big toe to indicate where to find the other things he left behind.

He always leaves things just outside the radius of the crime scene, things the cops dismiss and things you know to look for. There are never any fingerprints on any of it, which means the killer’s wearing gloves, deliberately covering his tracks. That means he’s organized. That proves what you’ve thought since you saw the first scene: Nothing this guy does is by accident. What you or anyone else who looks at the scene sees is what he wants you to see. And he really wants someone to see the pieces of evidence he’s leaving.

Well, you see it. You even went back to the first crime scene to grab what he left there – a plastic police badge, a kid’s toy. At the second site, it was a newspaper article about abuses of power committed by prison guards. At the third site, you found another newspaper article, a toy gun, and a military training manual with every single page torn out. You found the pages at the fourth scene, crumpled up and scattered amidst artful smears of blood, and that wasn’t all you found, either. This time you found fake diplomas – four different kinds of fake diplomas – and a military medal that may or may not be real. You’re not a detective or a profiler or anything, but it would be hard to look at all of this stuff and not conclude that this guy has a serious problem with the system.

It's borne out in the victims, too. The victims take forever to identify, just because he puts in so much effort eradicating their fingerprints, faces, and teeth, but each victim has been somebody with authority. A cop, a soldier, a prison guard, and a detective from a jurisdiction on the opposite side of the country, which is worrying on a whole new level. Not only does this killer set up misleading crime scenes, he’s willing to transport victims across the country to kill them in the exact spot he wants them dead. You don’t know if there’s ever been a more organized serial killer.

You’re comfortable calling him that. Four murders of victims who share a particular characteristic makes him a serial killer, and when you searched missing persons records by profession, you found three or four more who fit the killer’s specifications. You found a crime scene or two that might have been his also – his before he got comfortable being so elaborate. The photographer and sketch artist on those scenes didn’t follow the victim’s line of sight, but you have a feeling they’d have found something if they had. You do, after all. You find something more every time.

You tried to bring it to Aizawa after the third crime scene, and he all but told you to drop it. You’re creating a pattern out of circumstance, or exaggerating your own abilities, or turning this killer into some kind of mythical monster instead of acknowledging him as the twisted freak he actually is. But you think you’re right. No, you’re convinced. There’s a serial killer haunting Japan, gruesomely murdering public servants and running marathons around the police, and you’re going to make sure someone’s aware of it, even if it tanks your career. You just need a little more evidence first. One more piece to tie things together, so that when you go up and over Aizawa’s head to the head of Investigations, he won’t be able to ignore what you have to say.

And if he does, you’ve got a backup plan. The evidence you’ve collected is yours. You got yourself on the record asking the detectives if they want it, and they’ve all said no. The research you’ve done into the victims is based on their names being released to the public, and the dots could be connected by anybody who viewed the same evidence as you have. If Head Detective Yagi won’t listen to you, you’ll go to the press and blow the whistle yourself.

It's a solid plan – two plans – but you can’t help but feel a little uneasy. You aren’t on Criminal Minds or anything. You’re more like the dumb reporter from Red Dragon, the one who publishes a bunch of crazy stuff and gets himself whacked by the Tooth Fairy. And at the same time, you have the sense that something different is going on here. The way the evidence has been placed at the last two crime scenes has felt – not deliberate, because everything this killer does is deliberate. Not deliberate, but targeted. Like he’s leaving evidence in places only you would look for it.

But that’s insane. The killer’s not coming back to observe his crime scenes – part of your job is to snap photos of any crowd that gathers, and you haven’t seen the same person show up at any one of them. There’s no way the killer could be watching, and even if there was, there’s no way he’d be leaving things specifically for you. You’re not Clarice Starling or anything. You’re the dumb reporter. You’re finding things because you know where to look. That’s all.

You’re sitting at your desk, staring off into space, when Monoma, who got rehired a while back, bangs on the wall of your cubicle. “New scene,” he says, once you’re done jumping out of your skin. “The guy who called it in said to bring a barf bag or four.”

“Yeah. Okay.” You gather your workbag, ignoring the knot of prickly anticipation that unfolds to wrap its tentacles around your ribcage. It’s not the serial killer. It’s been less than a month since his last murder. There’s no way he’s at it again. “If it’s as bad as they say, bet you six bucks Shinsou throws up.”

“Six bucks says it’s Kaminari instead.”

“You’re on.”

Neither you nor Monoma win any money, because you’re both right, and the bets cancel each other out. You’re feeling sick for an entirely different reason. This is the most elaborately disorganized crime scene you’ve ever photographed, and it’s got the serial killer’s nonexistent fingerprints all over it. You wait until Shinsou’s done throwing up, then ask him to ask Aizawa to widen the perimeter. You have to come up with a lie about extensive blood spray, but it works.

It's not even that much of a lie – the scene looks like the killer attached a garden hose of blood to a ceiling fan and cranked it up to maximum – but you still feel guilty. Less guilty when Aizawa expands the crime scene to include the radius where the killer likes to hide his clues. You take your standard series of photos, by the book as much as you can possibly manage, and once you’re done, you go looking for the killer’s clues.

They’re inside the perimeter now. Aizawa and the other detectives will have to take them. You document each one extensively first, dragging Monoma over to sketch their positions, too. Then you put on gloves and lift them out of hiding. “This is weird,” Monoma remarks, as you lift an article about a defense attorney’s series of victories in child abuse cases out of hiding and set it down alongside a printout of cops’ salaries. “Slasher types like this guy don’t have a reason.”

“He’s not – that. The violence is an attention grab. He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t enjoy it, but I don’t think it’s the whole point.” You slide the second article into an evidence bag, then follow the victim’s severed index finger to the next hiding spot. “Every crime scene has had clues like this. He wants people to find them.”

Monoma hums the Criminal Minds theme song. “If this guy’s smart like you say he is, why would he leave clues so we could catch him?”

“That’s not what they’re for,” you say. You’ve gone so far as to look for links between the cases the victims have interacted with, and you’ve found nothing. “He doesn’t want us to catch him. He wants us to see.”

“Sure. Maybe that’s how we’ll catch him,” Monoma says. You glance at him and find him smirking. “He’s going to want to know if the lambs have stopped screaming yet.”

“Shut up.” You elbow Monoma, then crouch down to take a picture and pry the next hidden object out of hiding. It’s harder to remove than usual, and it comes free in two pieces. One of them is the needle off a polygraph test, which you only recognize because you’ve seen them in the lab at work. “Okay. Maybe if we can figure out where this is from –”

You hand it off to Monoma to be stored properly, then turn your attention to the other item. Compared to everything else the killer’s left, clearly identifiable and clearly linked to his cause, a single bullet casing isn’t exactly a smoking gun. You pick it up with a gloved hand, upend it, and find that a piece of paper’s been rolled up and wedged inside. The handwriting on the paper is bad, and the sentence is only two words. Look up.

You do, out of shock more than anything else – first straight up, then up and out, then pivoting in a slow circle, trying desperately to figure out what you’re supposed to see. There’s nothing. Whatever the killer wants you to see – and you’re sure now that he wants you to see it – it’s beyond your vision, beyond your understanding. There’s one thing you do understand, though. The killer’s watching his crime scenes, somehow. And now that you’ve been at so many of them, he’s watching you, too.

Fuck, that’s it. Tomura takes a screen grab, and then a second, and a third, capturing frame after frame of you, making eye contact with the drone camera. You didn’t know it was there. Tomura knew you’d raise the alarm if you saw it, and he doesn’t want his view of his crime scenes to be cut off, so he camouflaged it better than usual. But you found his messages, just like he knew you would. You found his note, too. And you followed his instructions, looking up and at the camera just like he wanted. At the camera. At Tomura.

It's a dumb thing for Tomura to want – you, looking at him. You already look at him, every time he makes a kill and sets up a crime scene. You’re looking at his work, which is the most important thing, so important that Tomura doesn’t need anything else. Or shouldn’t. But no matter how elaborate of a crime scene Tomura sets up for you, no matter how much time you spend carefully documenting it and gathering his hints, you never look at it as long as he wants you to. Or the way he wants you to, even though you’re doing exactly what he thought he wanted in the first place. Like Tomura said – dumb.

Dumb or not, it’s been on Tomura’s mind, and worse, in his dreams. He doesn’t usually have dreams, and the ones he has are bad, so the fact that he’s started having dreams about you taking his picture is a sign that he’s put too much thought into you. Every time Tomura wakes up from a dream where you’re taking photos of him instead of one of his scenes, he tells himself that he’ll kill you soon. And every time, he – doesn’t.

Killing you is the right thing to do. You’re a distraction from Tomura’s mission. Time spent thinking about you, puzzling over his dreams, wondering why it’s not enough that you only see his crime scenes – all of that is time wasted, because he’s not spending it on planning his next kill or crafting his next message. You’ve served your purpose, too. Even as Tomura pulls the screen grab over to a second screen and refocuses on the video feed, he can see you talking to Aizawa again, making the case that Tomura’s crime scenes mean something. Unlike last time, Aizawa’s actually listening.

He’s listening. The story of who actually cracked the case will come out, and when Tomura kills you, it’ll mean something – you’ll be a real, visible member of the system, someone whose absence will be noticed. Tomura will set up his best crime scene yet for your body, and when he moves your eyes, he’ll make sure he puts something special there for you to look at. The idea keeps him happy for about six hours or so. Planning out a crime scene’s always fun – sometimes more fun than the actual killing, or it is lately. It gets less fun when Tomura realizes that you won’t be there to see it.

When the so-called peace officers hold their press conference, announcing that they’ve strung five of Tomura’s murders together and declared him a serial killer, you’re nowhere to be found – not on the podium, not in the crowd. You’re not visible. That means you can’t be on Tomura’s list, and Tomura feels an unpleasant surge of relief at the thought. Your photos are in some of the articles written about the case, though, and looking at those makes Tomura feel even stranger than he does when he looks at the still shot of you he’s taped up over his bed.

He’s done his research on you by now. He’s got files for all his potential victims, and then he’s got a file for you, featuring everything about you he could find on the internet. You’re Tomura’s age. You’re single and you live by yourself. You wanted to be a real photographer at some point, which is where you learned how to turn every aspect of Tomura’s crime scenes into a work of art. Tomura finds some of your old portfolio still kicking around a defunct Instagram account, and he’s impressed against his will.

Tomura’s a serial killer, not an art critic, but he spends a lot of time around blood, guts, and dismembered corpses, which means he’s qualified to judge the whole set of roadkill photos you took. They’re – good. Even before you came across one of Tomura’s crime scenes, you knew how to photograph disgusting things and make them matter. Tomura’s scenes already mattered before you turned your camera on them; you just helped expand his reach. That’s not why he’s interested in your art. He tells himself otherwise, but every time he catches a glimpse of himself in one of the cracked, filthy mirrors in his apartment, he lingers for a second, wondering what you would do with his reflection. What he’d look like through your lens.

Tomura gives you another crime scene to photograph, this time featuring the corpse of the trainee photographer who was giving you a hard time at the second crime scene of his you shot. He can tell that you recognize the victim. He can tell that it throws you. So does the message he left for you – another bullet casing, another instruction to look up. Tomura sees your shoulders stiffen, and he leans forward in his seat, tense all on his own. You look up again, and – that’s it. Fuck. Tomura takes so many screenshots that his computer freezes for a second, already planning where he’ll tape them up, convincing himself that this will be enough for him.

It’s not. Tomura dreams that you’re taking his picture again, but this time, it’s weird. The two of you aren’t at one of his crime scenes; instead you’re somewhere else, somewhere with good lighting, and you’re taking pictures of Tomura from every angle, not quite close enough for him to touch. Tomura’s not posing for you, exactly. He just awkwardly shifts position, and you keep snapping photos. It’s warm in Tomura’s dream. After a while he takes off his coat. Then his shirt.

You don’t lower your camera entirely, but Tomura can see your eyes, and you look – interested. He holds still, and you take another few photos. Then you stop. Tomura knows what you’re waiting for. He’s seen that expression on your face at every crime scene as you hunt for his clues. Focused, intent, engaged, and being the target in person scrambles Tomura’s brain. What? he demands, embarrassed without reason. Do you want to see more?

I see what you want me to see, you say. Your eyes drift over Tomura’s body, shoulders down to his hips, lingering somewhere in between that makes Tomura’s face turn red. Is there anything else you want to show me?

When is Tomura ever going to get a chance like this again? He unbuttons his pants, but you don’t lift your camera again. Instead your gaze follow his fingers as he pulls the zipper down, stays centered between his legs as he takes off his pants. His hands are shaking, like they were the first time he laid out a crime scene, and the feeling he’s had every time he’s watched you crawl over his scenes with a camera rushes through him, more intense than before. He waits for you to lift your camera this time, to take photos of him from every angle, but you don’t. Instead you set it aside. Then you reach out to Tomura and –

Tomura wakes up mid-climax, his pants and his sheets halfway to being ruined, his hands miles away from touching his cock. The first thought that punctures the fog is surprise. Tomura knows bodies do this – he’s not an idiot – but he didn’t think this was something his body did. He’s a serial killer. If he’s going to get off to anything, it should be his murders. He’s never gotten off to killing anybody. But the idea of you looking at him face to face, you reaching for him yourself instead of waiting for him to act, you putting your camera down because you needed something else more – Tomura almost loses it a second time.

You didn’t even touch his cock in the dream – your hand brushed against his waist, slid to his hip, fingers brushing his inner thigh. Even the thought is enough to make Tomura squirm, and for the first time since you set foot on one of his crime scenes, Tomura’s head feels clear. No, he can’t kill you. He doesn’t need to kill you. What he needs is more.

How much more? The question’s too much for him. Tomura’s hands slide between his legs, pushing himself past overstimulation, into near-discomfort. How much more doesn’t matter yet. He can figure that out later. Tomura decides faintly, as his hips jerk and he shifts away from the pressure of his own hands, that a close-up would be a good start.

You know something’s wrong the instant you wake up, even before the headache kicks in, because you can’t remember falling asleep. What’s the last thing you remember? You were on a walk, you think. You smelled something weird – something sweet, that didn’t make sense for the park you were walking through. A thought had crossed your mind, some dark joke about chloroform smelling better than you thought it did, and almost as soon as you had the thought, a mask was clamped down over your mouth and nose, the sweet scent flooding into both when you inhaled and opened your mouth to scream.

You remember a little more, but a little more doesn’t matter. You’re being kidnapped. No, you’ve been kidnapped. You open your eyes, shocked to find that you can see. You’re in a small room, light on one side, shadowed on the other, and you can see someone moving around in the light, making adjustments to things here and there. Stand lights. It almost looks like a portrait studio setup, except it’s in the grossest basement you’ve ever sprawled out in. Not that you sprawl out in basements for fun. You only do that when you’re on the job.

Your job. Kidnapped. You’re in someone’s basement and you aren’t blindfolded. You aren’t tied up, either – your arms and legs are completely free. You sit up too quickly, grimacing at the pain in your head, and the figure amidst the lights turns towards you. “You’re awake. I was worried,” he says. One hand rises from his side to scratch the side of his neck. “Usually when I do this, I don’t care how they feel afterward.”

“You do this a lot?”

“Yeah.” You can’t see your kidnapper’s face courtesy of the backlighting, and whatever he’s wearing to hide it. “You should know.”

“I should?” You’re confused, but you shouldn’t be. You know what’s happening here. Someone kidnapped you. Someone who doesn’t care whether or not you hear his voice or see his face. You’re in his goddamn basement. “Who are you?”

“You don’t know?” He sounds surprised. “Come on. You know who it is. Who else could it be?”

Someone who kidnaps lots of people, who’s interested in you – he’s right. That could only be one person, and as the knowledge you’ve been pushing back against settles over you more fully, your vocal cords constrict so badly that you can barely speak. “You’re the Symbol of Fear.”

“That’s right,” the serial killer whose crime scenes you’ve been shooting says. “But you can call me Tomura.”

You squeeze your eyes shut, even though it’s too late, even though you’ve seen more than enough. “Symbol of Fear. If they were gonna give me a name, they should have picked a better one,” the killer – Tomura – continues. “What would you have named me, if you got to pick?”

“Are you going to kill me?” As soon as you ask the question, you kick yourself. That’s what kidnapped people in movies always say, and it always annoys the killer into killing them faster or more or worse. “I mean, of course you are. That’s what you do. And you told me your name.”

“My name’s not going to help you find me,” Tomura says. So it’s an alias. Fine. it’s not like you’re going to be able to tell anybody either way. “I know your name, so you should know mine. You’d have named me something better, right? I would have gotten a name a lot sooner if the cops had listened to you.”

You hear his footsteps. He’s coming closer. If he’s going to kill you, why hasn’t he tied you up? Is he trying to trick you into running for it? “Hey,” he says. He nudges you with his foot. “I didn’t bring you here to kill you.”

Your heart is racing so hard you can barely breathe. “I bet you say that to all your victims.”

“Not really,” Tomura says. He crouches down next to you. “They need to know what’s coming, so they have time to think about how they want to die. If they want to put on a brave face or beg for mercy or scream the entire way.”

“Which one do you want them to do?”

“I don’t really care,” Tomura says. He pauses. “Maybe I would, if I was thinking about letting them go. But I’m not. I don’t tell my kills I’m not going to do it. So you can believe me when I say I won’t kill you.”

Part of you wants to believe. You’re desperate to believe that there’s some way out of here, but you know better. And if you know better, it doesn’t matter what you do now. “Then why did you bring me here?”

“I’ve been watching. Your work. You do a great job with my work,” Tomura says. It’s quiet for a second. You open your eyes, sneak a sidelong glance, and find him scratching his neck again. “Since you’ve been doing such a good job, I thought I’d give you a chance to shoot the real thing.”

Something taps against your leg. You open your eyes partway, without looking over at Tomura, and find yourself looking at a camera, identical to the one you use at work. “I set up lights and everything,” Tomura continues. “You can move them around if you want. I mean, you shouldn’t need to – my scenes always look good even when the lighting’s shit, but –”

“You want me to shoot you like one of your crime scenes,” you say. You see Tomura nodding out of the corner of your eye. “Um – why?”

“Can you do it or not?” Tomura sounds irritated. You risk a proper glance at him and see him looking away, his pale skin stained with a flush. His face is barely visible – not because of a mask, which would make sense, but because of a life-sized model hand, which serves basically the same purpose and looks ten times as weird. “I know you can take photos of other stuff. I looked you up.”

You can’t see his whole face. The name he gave you is fake. If you take his picture like he wants you to, he won’t have a reason to get angry, and maybe – no, he won’t let you live. He’ll kill you just like he’s killed everyone else. But like everyone else he’s killed, you’ve got time to think about how you want to die, and although you’re pretty sure you’re going to scream and beg like everybody else once he starts cutting you into pieces, you want to keep it together until then. Having something to do will help.

“You saw my other photos,” you say. “Were there ones you liked?”

“I like how you shoot my scenes,” Tomura says. “Just do it like that.”

He gets to his feet, then turns to face you, holding out his hands to help you up. The incongruousness of it catches you off-guard first, but only for a second, and it’s obliterated by just how strange it is to be confronted with his hands when you’re already so familiar with the terrible things he’s done with them. Tomura is a monster. His hands should be gnarled, clawlike, stained with blood. Instead his hands are clean, with ragged nails and a bad case of eczema, and they’re shaking slightly as he holds them out for yours.

You don’t reach for his hands. You raise the camera he got for you and snap a picture.

It startles him, and that means it startles you. “What are you doing?” he snaps. “Why are you taking a picture of that?”

“You’ve seen me shoot your crime scenes,” you say, thinking fast. “I take pictures of all kinds of things. Sometimes it’s just stuff that catches my eye. Your hands are like that.”

Tomura doesn’t answer. He takes one of them back to scratch the side of his neck, and you take a perfunctory grip on the other while getting to your feet under your own power. Tomura’s taller than you, and he doesn’t give you your hand back right away. You have to pull it free. “You can go stand over by the lights if you want,” you say. “Find somewhere you’re comfortable and I’ll adjust them to match.”

Tomura skulks over to the lights, and you take pictures of him as he goes, taking the opportunity to adjust the settings on the camera where you like them. Different parts of the Symbol of Fear come into focus as you take test shot after test shot – his blue-grey hair, tangled and worn to his shoulders, his red eyes, his dry lips – and you fix each of them firmly into your memory. Soon enough you’ll be able to describe him with your eyes closed, even with the hand over his face.

That feels good for only a few seconds. Just as long as it takes for you to noticed the bars on the inside of the basement windows and the barbed wire outside them, and to remember that you’re not getting out of here alive.

Tomura knows you like to take a lot of photos, but it seems to him like you’re overdoing it. You’re taking so many, and you’re taking them of nothing – in most of them, he’s not even looking, or his face isn’t in the shot. “Some of these are test shots,” you say, when he asks. “I’m seeing how the lighting looks from different angles, on different parts of your body. See?”

You hold out the camera for Tomura to check, and he looks away. He doesn’t like looking at himself. “What about the ones that aren’t tests?”

“Just things I’m interested in.” You let the camera fall to your side, then go back to messing with the lighting one-handed. “If you like where you are right now, you can stay there. I’ve fixed the lights so you’ll look good from every angle.”

“That’s funny.” Tomura snorts, but you don’t laugh. You look puzzled. “Me, looking good. It doesn’t matter where I stand.”

“If it doesn’t matter, then stay where you are,” you say. You lift the camera again, and Tomura ducks his head on instinct – and you take the picture anyway.

It doesn’t feel like it does in Tomura’s dreams when you take his picture, but Tomura’s willing to admit that it’s probably a good thing that he’s not affected so strongly. The thing this real-life photoshoot has in common with his dreams above all is the feeling of vulnerability, of exposure. Even with the hand over Tomura’s face, you’re seeing him. Like he’s been seeing you all along.

No, it’s not like that. He couldn’t talk to you through the drone like you can talk to him face to face. “Did you really not know it was me?” Tomura asks. You nod from behind the camera. He’s not even sure what you’re taking a picture of right now. “Who else did you think it was?”

“I didn’t know,” you say. “I knew you were watching the crime scenes somehow. I would have had to, after I got your message. I just didn’t think I was on your list.”

“You’re not on my list,” Tomura says. “Not like that, anyway.”

You nod. You’re adjusting your camera, and Tomura asks you another question. “Who do you think is on my list?”

“Cops. Detectives. Soldiers, prison guards, lawyers.” You take another picture. “People who are part of the system. Or adjacent to it. The guy at the last crime scene was just a photographer, like me.”

He wasn’t you. That was the problem. “I didn’t like his attitude. He was a special case,” Tomura says. “He got talkative towards the end. He was trying to figure out what I wanted to hear. By that point I just wanted him to shut up.”

“Is that why you tore out his tongue?”

You sound a little grossed out. Tomura thinks it’s fair to ask – when he’s arranging his kills, he tends to avoid sticking his hands in their mouths. “He bit it off, and I had to take it out so he wouldn’t swallow it. And since I had it, I figured I should put it to use.”

“The hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil thing played well with the detective,” you say. You shift where you’re standing, and Tomura shifts to match. “No, stay there. This angle works.”

“Works how?” Tomura says. You shrug. “The three-monkeys shit is on the nose. You guessed way before that, didn’t you? You were paying attention. You always are.”

Tomura likes watching you work over a crime scene, but if he set up that many crime scenes, he’d get caught. Sometimes he watches you at others, car crashes or assaults or murders with no meaning behind them. They don’t deserve your attention, not the way Tomura’s scenes do. “It’s hard not to pay attention to your murders,” you say. “You make them flashy on purpose, but people get distracted by the flashiness and miss out on what you’re trying to say.”

“What do you think I’m trying to say?” Tomura asks, trying not to sound like there’s a lot riding on the answer. “I want to hear it.”

You take another picture. “You have a problem with the system as a whole, but the thing that bothers you is when people fail to do what they promised to do and don’t pay for it. Or people who protect the wrong people, like that lawyer in the article from the second crime scene. The rest of us ignore it, so you want to make us look. Or make it so we can’t look away.”

You take another picture – of Tomura’s face this time, which is bad, because Tomura’s face is heating up. You didn’t just notice that he was trying to say something, you got it exactly right. Now it feels like it does in Tomura’s dreams. His skin crawls in a way that’s better and worse than itching, and when he looks away from you, you take another picture, and another. The flash is off, but Tomura can hear the shutter click, every sound winding him a little tighter. He scratches his neck with one hand, pulls at collar of his shirt with the other. “Did it work on you?” he asks, forcing the words out in an even tone. “Could you look away?”

“Not really,” you say. Tomura breathes a sigh of relief that’s a little too loud, and it catches your attention. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Tomura says through gritted teeth. You snap another picture. “What were you even looking at this time?”

“You,” you say, and you turn the camera in your hand, holding out the viewscreen so he can look, too.

Tomura recoils from the sight out of habit, but he keeps looking, and the longer he looks at it, the more he starts to see what you were trying to capture. Tomura’s eyes are averted from the camera behind his disguise, but the light catches his face in a way that startles him. Even the flush on his face looks different – not disgusting and contagious, but natural. Normal. Some word that makes it look like it belongs where it is. Is this how he looks to you? No wonder he needed you to keep looking. Looking feels good. Tomura’s never liked himself better than when he’s seeing himself through your eyes.

Still, you haven’t seen everything, and he needs you to. Tomura reaches up and grasps the hand, ready to pull it from his face.

You avert your eyes in a hurry, then close them entirely. “I can’t,” you say. “If I see you, you’ll never let me leave.”

“I have to,” Tomura says. His voice is oddly ragged. “Nobody else gets it like you do. It’s better for me if you’re out there.”

You set the camera down without looking back at him, and his hands close over your wrists tightly. “We’re not done,” Tomura says. “Keep going.”

He’s getting off on this. You can tell by the sound of his breathing, the unsteady rise and fall of his chest, the way he’s shifting in his seat, and your instinct is to flinch in disgust. But you’ve been watching him closely this entire time, and you didn’t see this response when you were talking about his crime scenes. It’s not violence or murder that gets him going, so what’s causing this? It can’t be this simple. There’s no way it’s just because you’re taking his picture.

If he gets off, maybe he’ll let you go. “I’ll take as many pictures as you want if you leave your disguise on.”

“Done.”

You pull your hands from Tomura’s grip and raise your camera again, wondering how much you’re allowed to pose him. If you’re allowed to. “Can I touch you?” you ask. “There’s this pose I’m –”

Tomura nods. His eyes are closed, and you take another picture, this one of the scratched side of his neck and his shirt pulled to one side, before you think about how you might want to pose him. He’s seated. If you could find something for him to lay back against, that would be ideal, but there’s nothing. “Lean your weight back on your right hand,” you tell him, and he does. “Do what you want with your left hand. Tilt your head –”

It’s beyond uncomfortable to see him follow your instructions, given who he is and what he’s done. You take a picture or two of the preliminary pose, focusing on the new angles created by his extended arm and single bent knee. There’s an awkwardness to him, but there’s something compelling about the way his form and features come together. Maybe in another life he’d have been a model, somebody’s muse. Right now he’s the subject of what’s probably the last photo you’ll ever take.

Tomura’s hair is in his face. You say his name to warn him, then reach out and brush the strands of blue-grey hair out of his eyes. At first your fingers are against his forehead; then you let them drift downward, from his cheek to his jaw to the It’s a mistake. Tomura shudders at your touch, the arm he’s balanced on barely holding him up, and you take a picture of that, too, struggling to stay out of the shot while capturing everything that needs to be seen. Everything needs to be seen. The perversity of the Symbol of Fear, a man who’s thrown the entire country into terror, coming almost untouched and almost on camera, is something you can’t resist capturing forever.

And if the sight of him does something for you, too – if knowing that you and your camera can make him like this ties your chest in a knot and sends heat flooding through you – you don’t need to share that with anyone. You’re the photographer. You don’t matter.

Tomura fumbles at the hand over his face, and like before, you shut your eyes. “Don’t,” he says. “I want you to see.”

“No.” You shake your head and lower your camera, for good this time. “If you meant it about letting me go –”

“Knowing my face wouldn’t help you find me,” Tomura says with disturbing confidence. You wonder why he’s so convinced. If he’s right. “I have to let you go. Nobody gets what I’m trying to say the way you do.”

“You’re okay with that.” Why are you trying to talk him out of it? “You’re okay with me going out there and trying to track you down.”

“Counting on it,” Tomura says. A hand that’s ended the lives of at least six people that you know of lands on your shoulder, then drifts upwards along your throat to cup your cheek. “You’ll keep looking. You’ll know when you’re getting close.”

“How?”

“I’ll come find you again,” Tomura says. You dare to open your eyes and see him smiling at you, through the fingers of the hand. His smile makes your skin crawl. “And that time, I won’t let you go.”

He’ll kill you. Or he’ll hang onto you forever and make you wish you were dead. Tomura sits up, still moving awkwardly, somehow relaxed. You’ve never seen a guy who just came in his pants look less embarrassed about it. You can’t reconcile the two pieces of Tomura in your head – the murderer of half a dozen at least who’s planning to kill more, alongside the man who craves connection and understanding so badly that it’s become a turn-on. One of them is reprehensible, unforgivable. The other is just human. How can he be both?

You’re lost in thought, so much so that you don’t see the mask in Tomura’s hand until it’s descended over your face. Tomura pulls you back against him, holding you upright as you struggle for breath. His arm is secure around your waist, and his voice is soft in your ear, if still a little breathless. “I’ll be in touch,” he says. “Keep looking. I’ll see you soon.”

His dry lips brush against the corner of your jaw, too light to be a kiss, too lingering to be an accident. It’s the last thing you’re aware of before everything goes black.

When you wake up again, you’re in your apartment with another splitting headache and a single bullet-point of certainty boring into your skull. You will keep looking for Tomura. You’ll have to, to try to stop him from committing even one more gruesome, vengeance-driven murder over a wrong you can’t begin to guess at. You’ll come close to stopping him, and when you do, Tomura will come for you again.

The thought is nightmarish. He’ll almost certainly kill you then; he won’t have a use for you anymore. But even as the certainty settles in, you find your stomach twisting into a dark, heated mess at the thought that at least one more time before you die, you’ll see him in a way no one else ever will. You’ll have one more moment with your camera, and the Symbol of Fear undone before you. If it’s the last shot you’ll ever take, whether it’s tomorrow night or next week or ten years from now, you’ll have to make it count.

When he kills you, and he will, Tomura will make your crime scene a composition for the ages. It’s only fair for you to turn him into a work of art.

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