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With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

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

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

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oceantornadoo · 23 hours ago

Text

team bonding

jack abbot x f!reader

undefined age gap, praise kink, smut

"alright, everyone, great work today. go home and", you raise your hand and it's clear on robby's face that he forgot about your announcement. "go ahead, doctor." he steps back a little and gives you the floor, tired brown eyes pleading with you to make it quick. "so, as you all know, i'm the admin liason." a role you picked up after robby pleaded with you to become the in-between him and gloria. you negotiated a higher salary and that was that, forced into weekly meetings with her to launch new ideas about patient satisfaction scores. everyone groans at your statement, anticipating a new rule.

"hey!" the crowd turns to dr. abbot, standing at the edge of the circle with his arms crossed, already frowning despite his recent arrival. "respect, people. i don't care if you haven't slept in twenty-four hours." everyone mutters their apologies and dr. abbot sends you a wink, a flutter of butterfly wings beat in your stomach. you nod in gratitude and continue, unable to blame robby for not stepping in since he looks like he's about to keel over from his own double shift. "as admin liason, i was able to convince gloria that to up patient satisfaction scores, we need some team bonding." the crowd doesn't groan again under abbot's watchful eye, but there's a wave of apprehension that travels through.

"so," you pause for effect, to which abbot rolls his eyes, "i got us a free night out at Taylor's!" the change is instant, a few people cheering while the rest clap. Taylor's is the favored Pitt bar, close to the hospital but on the right street where ambulance sirens don't echo and the drinks are good enough. you pass out a few clipboards with potential dates for people to fill out their availability and continue on. "it has to be this month, so pick your available times wisely. we've been promise free cover, even if the band is playing, and four drink tickets to a max of thirty people. i'll let you know what date wins next shift!" with that, you give the floor back to robby. as you step backwards, you stumble on a foot that wasn't there before.

"shit, sorry." you whisper, tracking the foot that didn't even flinch up to black scrubs before landing on abbot's face, serene and unmoving. "you picked the right foot to land on." he whispers back as robby continues his ending speech, a warm hand landing on the small of your back to steady you as you recover. "how many times have you made that joke?" you ask, smiling when he huffs. "not as many as you think. don't have a lot of people who know and chose to step on me anyway." you gasp in faux-outrage, quieting down when robby sends you a raised eyebrow. his speech concludes and the crowd disperses, some people waiting in line to fill out the availability forms.

"nice job on the free night out." abbot remarks. the praise turns you to mush, a fight to contain the warmth in your cheeks as you look at the crowd instead of him. "thanks. apparently, it's cheaper to pay for a bunch of alcohol than hire more nurses. i'll take what i can get." you answer, remembering the frustration you felt with how quickly the admins agreed to employee bonding over fixing the worker shortage. abbot nudges you, breaking you out of your memory of last week's meeting with gloria. "take your clipboards and go home, doctor. you look like you need it." he orders, pointing to the now abandoned clipboards. you gather them in your arms and adjust the strap of your bag slipping down your shoulder before turning to face him one last time. the silver that mixes in with his curly brown hair, his slashes of eyebrows, the fading scuff on his face. "you don't like my eyebags, doctor?" you blink your eyelashes suggestively, jokingly, but all he does is roll his shoulders before nodding his head to the exit. "never said that. get some rest, doctor."

never said that. he likes your eyebags?

you ignore the revelation and nod, determined to get home and sleep before contemplating your crush on your coworker.

the night out comes two weeks later, a rare friday where most of your crew is off at the same time. it's you, collins, and mckay sipping on drinks in a small booth and watching the baby doctors fail epically at pool. "no, huckleberry, you have to angle it this way!" santos and whittaker fight over the proper way to hold a pool stick while javadi stands off to the side, observing the pool table like she's never seen one in her life. "five bucks says whittaker accidentally hits santos with the stick." you giggle under your breath, your second drink taking affect. the two women to your right laugh, too smart to take a likely bet. "i'm insulted you're taking advantage of us in a bet you know you'll win." collins snickers, clearly tipsy from her second martini. mckay mutters under her breath that even her kid can play pool better than these idiots. you collapse into a fit of giggles at that, pitching towards the open air on your left and clutching at the table to stay seated.

except, that air is taken up by a very solid torso.

your head hits a pleasant chest, and you sink in for a second before immediately remembering yourself and straightening. when you do, abbot is looking down at you with a smirk written on his features, one hand clutching a beer and the other propped above the booth. his bicep flexes beneath his long sleeve shirt, 'US VETERAN' embroidered near his heart.

"abbot."

"think you can call me jack, seeing as you're drunk and off duty, doc." you roll your eyes. you're just tipsy and having a good time with the same people you've seen so much death with. it's something like contentment, being surrounded by your coworkers and knowing there isn't any pressure in your existence. no lives to save, no charts to fill out, just music, alcohol, and entertainment. "i'm not drunk, jack." you emphasize the syllables of his name, tasting them for the first time on your tongue. to prove your point, you hop out of the booth and stand in front of him, perfectly in control of your body. "see?"

instead of answering, jack's eyes sweep up and down your body, lightning fast. you suddenly remember the low-cut shirt you're wearing paired with your favorite jeans that show off the contours of your body usually hidden by scrubs. his gaze stops on your cleavage, just for a millisecond, but the triumph of it sinks into your bones. you take in the cargo pants he wears that cling to the muscle of his thighs, a bit tighter than the ones he wears to work. it gives you the impression that he chose his outfit on purpose, and you suddenly wonder who he had in mind when he did.

"pool?" he nods to the empty table in the corner, clearing his throat and lifting his eyes above your face like he can't look there. you say your goodbyes to mckay and collins before leading the way, picking up two abandoned pool sticks as you walk. the empty table is on the other side of the bar, obscured by the case of alcohol in the middle. you're in your own world here, tucked away from coworkers and friends alike. "not to be a cliche, but i really don't know how to play pool." you admit, handing him a stick. your hands brush, electricity traveling down your veins before you pull away.

"you never learned at another bar?" he asks, producing a blue cube from nowhere and rubbing it against the tip of his stick. it's practically obscene, that thought, and you're temporarily mesmerized by how his hand veins flex as he move the cube back and forth. he finishes with his, and instead of taking your own stick out of your hands, he simply steps forward and into your space, cube in hand. you don't move as you watch his biceps contract with effort, a few inches from your face. only when he steps back do you remember the question he asked.

"i'm usually dancing on tables, not playing pool, old man." you supply, memories of screaming favorite songs with friends coming to mind. he grunts a chuckle, gathering the stray balls on the table with a triangle-looking thing until they're all together in the center of the table before setting it aside. "c'mere, brat." he commands. your body follows his order instantly, delivering you into his place at the end of the table until you're almost toe-to-toe. "hit the white one into the others." you frown at his lack of instruction, the stick in your hand feeling as unhelpful as a hammer in an ER. deciding to improvise, you place it on the table and try to recreate the hand placement you've seen in the movies. clearly, you don't do it well as abbot sighs, the air escaping his mouth and settling on your exposed skin. gooseflesh ripples across the back of your neck and you shiver at the feeling.

all of a sudden, there's pure heat behind you. capable fingers rearrange your own around the thin part of the stick, not a single excuse or ask for permission following. his hands are dusted with coarse hair, fine and not yet silver. each movement is another shock down your spine, trying to restrict your breathing so you don't bump into the little bit of space between your back and his front. your hold now resembles more of that on a scalpel than a fist, allowing you to push the stick forward and back to adjust it. "better?" he asks, words right next to your ear. you nod, shaken at his proximity and his own lack of reaction to it.

"this is your easiest shot of the game. take it."

you ignore any suspicions of a double entendre and push the stick until it clinks against the white ball. that one rolls forward, a bit slowly, until it knocks the other colors around. some don't escape the middle, and you sigh at the underestimation of force you had. one of the balls, a solid-colored purple one, rolls into the nearest corner of the table and dips down from sight. you squeal in success, sure that means something good. when you turn, you forget the stick in your hand, almost whacking him in the face.

"stand down, soldier. game's barely started." he says in a brusque tone, softening it with a half-cocked smile. you now realize how close your bodies are, one heaving breath enough to touch your chest to his own. you don't take it, but you don't step away either. "a ball went in! that's something good, right?" you ask, eager for more praise. his eyes flick to the ceiling, a deep inhale traveling into his lungs, before finally meeting yours. "yeah, sweetheart. good job."

sweetheart.

it nuzzles into the corners of your heart, settling on the floor and curling into itself. sweetheart. he doesn't comment on the slip of tongue, if it was one, simply watching and waiting with that iron stare of his. sweetheart. like melted chocolate and sugar spun whisps and fresh fruit, juicy on your tongue.

"teach me more?"

he teaches you about stripes versus solids with a hand hovering at your back. he points out angles and compares them to procedures with his knuckles brushing your own. he lets you cheer when you've hit the wrong ball in and protest when he hits three in one go. with each quip, you stand closer to him and try not to sink into the cedar scent of his cologne. you're a little more sober now, the alcohol haze receding, and you can track the firm but patient tone he uses to explain distance and force.

it's your last ball, a solid blue one that stares at you resolutely. jack already won, ages ago, but he ordered you to practice with all the ones you had left. you weren't going to leave his orbit if he didn't want you to, practically forgetting about your coworkers on the opposite end of the bar. you bend over the table, and despite you being secure with your stance, jack crowds your back, hands hovering over your wrists. "show me what you've got." he urges. the need to please him is a living thing under your skin as you put your every effort into the hitting the ball. your stick wobbles a bit but makes contact with the white ball, which knocks the blue one into the waiting net. job finished.

"i won!" you abandon the stick in favor of the doctor behind you, forcing him into a hug as you cheer. he mutters that you technically did not win, by any means, but wraps his hands around your waist anyway as yours encircle his neck. you've never felt so much of him at once; the corded muscles of his neck and his back coalescing into pure strength beneath you. you pull back, barely an inch, and for a second, he doesn't let you move. then he does, like you've imagined it, hands returning to his sides.

"jack..."

you trail off, unsure of how to address this thing between you. he has to have felt it, all this electricity with nowhere to go. jack abbot is fearless, so you've thought, until he takes a half step back. "i'm your attending." he reasons, though you've made no argument. you stay leaning against the pool table, needing him to be the one to come to you. "you're an attending, not mine. different shifts too." he shakes his head at the truth coming out of your mouth. "old man, remember?" he adds. you scoff at that, crossing your arms against your chest. the action pushes up your cleavage, and when his eyes dip for a second, you know you haven't lost him. "not that old. ten years apart, if you round." you won't plead. you won't debase yourself to earn his attentions, no matter how good his praise feels.

"i'm divorced, sweetheart. not exactly the best track record with relationships." he admits, a fact you'd already surmised by the faded tan on his left hand. "jumping to marriage already, jack?" your joke has the opposite of its intended effect as he stiffens at your words. "i'm too old to be casual." he reasons. "and i'm old enough to know what i want, but i won't beg, jack." you state, refusing to plead. it won't work if he doesn't want this as much as you, isn't willing to put aside skeletons in closets and just-

jack abbot takes a step forward and kisses you.

his hand cradles your skull, sinking into your hair and holding you in place. his other hand drops to your waist, tugging you further into his grip until you're not quite sure where you end and he begins. it's gentle but possessive as your breaths combine -- feels like you've done this before, the comfort of coming home safe and sound. you wrap your arms around his shoulders, tugging him further into you. finally, you can sink your fingers into his salt and pepper curls, their softness surprising you.

"there's a bathroom that locks back here." you surprise yourself by suggesting, a sudden need to make real all this yearning. in another life, your first time with him would be on a king mattress surrounded by candles and rose petals, but time is your enemy as a doctor. you know you've picked correctly when he doesn't second guess your suggestion, simply kissing your jaw before pulling you into the hallway off his right. tactical skills lead him into the all-gender bathroom, his hand wrapped in yours as he tugs you after in him. the lock clicks into place.

"c'mere." there's a surprisingly clean granite countertop he lifts you onto with quiet strength. deft fingers pull down the neckline of your shirt and the cup of your bra until his lips wrap around your nipple and suck. "fuck, jack." you whine as he rolls your other nipple between his fingers, the suddenness of it sending sparks to your core. you dip your hands back into his curls, nails scraping against his skull. you can't control how your hips buck into the air, need bubbling up and out of your skin. you've been wet this whole time, since he came up to you in the booth if you're being honest. you need him now.

"jack," you pull him off you, his lips red from lavishing your breasts. "another time. i need you." he swears at your urgency, unbuttoning your jeans and shoving them down to your ankles. your underwear is a lacy scrap of pink you picked out, hoping, and he whistles appreciatively. "this for me?" his thumb pets the wet spot on the front, trailing down as he presses down the length of your seam. he slips under the fabric, thumb finding your clit and rubbing in tight circles. "yes, yes, for you." you moan as he experiments, finding a pace you like. there's spit on your tits and your pussy is seeping over his fingers, belaying your desperation. despite that, there's an ache, an emptiness deep inside.

"please, jack." you ask. he hums, eyes locked on how your clit hardens under his thumb. "please, what?" he replies, calm and collected. "need your fingers." you plead. there's enough emotion in your voice to make him exhale a harsh breath before pulling his thumb away and hooking it around your underwear before pulling down. you open your knees wide, letting him get a look of your glistening pussy, needy for him. jack pushes in one thick finger, watching with rapt attention as one knuckle goes in, then two. his thumb finds your clit again and you're struck with how naked you feel in front of his clothed body.

one finger becomes two, crooking this way and that as he listens for your little sighs. you don't want to come like this, want to come on his cock even if the stretch hurts. you tug his belt loop until he steps forward between the cradle of your legs. that building crash of an impending orgasm is settling in your stomach and you lay a hand on his wrist, stopping him instantly. "shit, something hurt?" you shake your head, instead reaching for the top button of his cargos. "want your cock." you whisper, a little shameful of your desperation. he groans, helping you with the button and zipper until his pants drop, revealing black boxers. you run your palm against his hardness, smiling when he exhales loudly.

"take it out, baby." he orders, another petname rolling off his tongue. you follow his instructions, dipping your hand in and pulling out his cock. it's heavy in your hands, beads of white precum gathering at the tip. you guide him forward into your waiting pussy, stopping when he squeezes his hand on your knee. "i don't have a condom." he sighs. your heart flutters in your chest. "i'm clean and on birth control." you whisper. "i'm clean too." he grunts. this time it's him leaning forward until his tip taps against your clit before moving down to push against your weeping hole. you whine at the stretch as he pushes in, regretting the lack of prep you advocated for. his forehead lands against yours, his breaths coming out in pants. "so fucking tight." he mutters, straining as he controls his pace. you pant and attempt to relax, letting him slip further and further in until he's at the hilt.

"i'm close, jack." you admit, clit still fluttering from its earlier attention. "i am too." he kisses the side of your cheek before gathering you in his arms, tipping you back until your head hits the mirror. the angle allows for a wider stretch as he pulls out and pushes in again, the intrusion getting easier to take. jack experiments with small thrusts until your breathing evens out. once it does, his hips snap in controlled movements as he fucks you. that thumb rubs your clit again as praise drips from his lips, each sentence sending you closer and closer to orgasm.

such a good girl.

so good at taking it, baby.

just a little more, you can do it.

"feels like heaven, sweetheart." he growls, sucking at the skin of your neck. that's what sending you over the edge, crying into his arms with the satisfaction of praise. you're floating and still moving as he fucks you through it, cumming only when you're an inch from overstimulation. warmth fills your tummy and you look down to see cum slip out of your pussy, spilling over his cock. he slips out of you with a grunt, shushing your whines at the sudden emptiness. fingers fill you instantly, pushing cum back in until it won't stay anymore. he cleans you up with paper towels, kissing the insides of your thighs reverently to heal the sting. jack drags your panties up your legs, satisfied when you jump off the counter onto wobbly legs with his cum in your underwear. he tucks his cock back into his boxers and drags your jeans up your legs, zipping and buttoning them until you're covered back up. strong hands squeeze your jaw until your mouth opens for a wet kiss, practically debauched after what you've done.

"c'mon, sweetheart. still got two drink tickets left."

i can't stop thinking about him. pls enjoy.

#jack abbott #jack abbot #dr abbott #dr abbot #tornadothoughts #jack abbot x reader #jack abbott x reader #the pitt #reader insert #smut #jack abbot fic #dr abbot fic #jack abbot smut

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rafeandonlyrafe · 8 months ago

Text

over the clouds

words: 1k

warnings: pregnancy, flying on a plane, established relationship, protective!rafe, some anxiety from rafe about reader being pregnant, illusions of sex but nothing happens

“rafe.” you say gently, placing your hand on his chest. “im only 20 weeks, don't you think this is a bit of an overreaction? the flight is only three hours.”

“probably.” rafe smiles, taking your hand in his and bringing it to his lips, pressing kisses against your fingertips.

“you're ridiculous.” you roll your eyes, a smile taking over your face as well.

“im being extra safe.” rafe grabs your suitcase, only packing a duffel bag for himself for your short vacation to the bahamas.

he continues to cross the tarmac, the nurse he hired to join you on the flight following close behind. you know it will help settle rafes nerves about you traveling while pregnant, so you don't continue to push.

you're surprised rafe let you out of the house at all, he's always been a protective boyfriend, putting you first at every moment, but when you became pregnant, his protectiveness took on a whole new level you didn't know existed.

“let me help you up the stairs.” rafe sets your bags down, hands coming to your waist as he follows closely behind you until you're inside of the private plane that rafe bought specifically to take you on vacations to the caribbean.

“thanks.” you giggle, deciding not to mention that you have stairs at tanneyhill that you climb up and down every day.

you settle into your seat, rafe joining the crew in buzzing around, the crew getting the plane ready for takeoff and rafe getting you ready with anything you could ask for before you even open your mouth.

you've got your seat reclined halfway so your feet can be up, the l&d sat directly behind you. a glass of cold water is placed in your hand and multiple kisses are pressed into your face and hair by rafe.

“takeoff in five.” rafe says to you, relaying the message just said over the intercom.

“okay.” you laugh. “thanks.”

rafe takes his seat across the aisle from you, briefly regretting buying a plane that required you to be sat apart, but he knows it's only for a short duration.

you place your hand on your stomach as the tires start to move against the runway, making sure your seatbelt is below your belly.

“everything okay? is he kicking?” rafe questions.

“nope.” you shake your head. you've had a couple kicks but rafe hasn't been fast enough to feel one. “im fine. baby is fine. just preparing for takeoff.”

“okay.” rafe hums, keeping his eyes on you instead of out the window as the plane lifts off the ground. as soon as he's able to, he unbuckles and crosses the aisle, sitting on the arm of your chair as he dotes over you, pushing your hair out of your face and bringing the glass up to your lips to take a sip so you don't even have to raise your arm.

you let out a yawn, flights always making you tired, even short midday ones like this.

“nap time.” rafe declares, helping you recline your seat the rest of the way back before grabbing a blanket from the overhead bins and draping it over you.

you close your eyes as you let out another yawn, relaxing into the plush seat, glad you're not cramped in a tiny public airplane.

“it's safe for her to nap while we are in the air right?” rafe whispers to the nurse, hoping you don't hear.

“yes.” she chuckles, an older woman who says she's birthed thousands of babies.

“okay.” rafe nods. “thanks again.”

“honey, you're paying me to go on a two week vacation. no thanks needed.”

you miss the rest of their conversation as sleep overtakes you.

you let out a whine as you wake up, instantly throwing the blanket off of you and standing up so fast you get slightly dizzy.

“baby?” rafe is up in seconds, holding onto your hips as you begin to walk.

“im about to pee my pants!” you squeal and rush into the tiny bathroom, shutting the door right in rafes face although you're certain he would have crammed himself inside too if given the option.

you finish your business and come out with a frown on your face.

“i still feel like i gotta go.” you tell rafe as he walks you back down the aisle to your seat.

“that's the baby.” the nurse pipes up from behind you. “probably pressing on your bladder. he'll readjust and the feeling will go away.”

“oh.” you hum, patting your tummy. “move it, baby. you're making me uncomfortable.”

rafe kneels between your legs, placing one hand on your waist and the other on your hip, but not before pushing up your shirt to reveal your bump.

“come on, son.” rafe says in a soft voice. “be nice to your mama.”

you giggle as rafe presses his cheek into your skin, your eyes closing as you relax again.

you're guessing you're close to your destination and you're excited to land and go to the beach house your father passed down to you, buying his own bigger one on the other side of the island, always investing into new properties.

they pop open when you feel the little foot pressing against your skin.

“rafe!”

“i felt it.” rafe looks up at you, wonder in his eyes as he presses his hand to the same spot his cheek was just resting on.

it's another minute before your baby kicks again, right against the warmth of rafes hand.

“hello baby.” rafe says, tears welling up in his eyes as he presses his lips to your tummy. “im here. daddys here.”

you bend down to give rafe a kiss, needing your lips against his as a tear slips down his cheek.

“you're gonna be the best dad ever.” you tell rafe. you never imagined when you started dating in high school that this is how your relationship would end up, but you wouldn't have it any other way.

“only because ive got the best girl to help me.” rafe kisses you deeply, moving to his feet to bend over and give you a proper kiss.

“woah there.” you giggle, pulling away. “wait until we get to the house.”

“what, don't wanna join the mile high club?” rafe grins, and you'd probably let him take you right there if it wasn't for the nurse clutching her pearls right behind you.

sfw tags: @winterrrnight @bejeweledreverie @ladyinbl00d @ethanthequeefqueen @drewsephrry @wearemadeofstardust0

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https-yutaliker · 8 months ago

Text

━━ stranger - kenji sato x fem! reader

singer! reader x kenji sato

wc: 2.6k --- warnings!

pwp, unprotected sex, breeding kink, praise, pet names (baby, good girl, etc.), pussydrunk kenji, switch!kenji, switch!reader, cunnilingus, teasing, edging, munch kenji

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . ✦ . 　⁺

"i know your face, i know your name, but i don't know you. isn't that crazy?"

leaves fly around outside, the cool autumn breeze flowing through the crisp air. the giants had finally earned a championship for the first time in years, the helpful addition of kenji sato being the supporting backbone of it all. for the large celebration they had hired you and your band for the occasion, just the right moment as you guys were getting to the point you would take any offer available.

with you as the lead singer, your voice travelled smoothly through the residence, eyes closed as you were caught in the groove that were your instrument players. as you open your eyes for a harmless scan of the area, you notice him. kenji sato.

he nursed a shot of whiskey in his hand, taking the occasional sip as his teammates surrounded him. but his eyes never strayed from your figure. taking the last gulp he set down his drink firmly before walking over to you, ambition clear as day in his eyes.

“hey,” you hear next to your ear, his breath falling over the shell as his arm comes to settle around your waist. “[name], right? i really liked the set tonight with your crew. your voice is angelic, y’know that?” he speaks, his heavy gaze locked onto yours. you gaze up at him wistfully, body tingling where his hand rested nonchalantly on your hip. you giggle, hand coming up to cover your mouth. “aww, well thank you. the kenji sato thinking i’m pretty and my voice is good? i’m surprised i haven’t tipped over by now.”

his eyes darken slightly, smirking at your words, somewhat surprised and thrilled his presence had this much of an effect on you. “really?” he starts, leaning closer into your space. “you’re that surprised i think you’re pretty?” with his next words, he moves down to your ear, his breath slightly puffing against it. “and it’s not think, it’s something i know for a fact. you’re gorgeous.”

you stare wide eyed at his words, your heart nearly stopping. stomach fluttering, your face grows warm with the added sensation of his warm breath washing over your ear. seeing your shocked expression, kenji’s smirk only deepens. body pressed against yours, he lifts his hand to grasp your chin in between his index and thumb, guiding you to keep your gaze locked onto his.

“wanna get out of here?”

as kenji drags you inside the house you snicker as you make it inside, the sight of his eagerness easily amusing. he crowds into your space, your arms wrap around his neck as you capture his lips with yours, melting into his hold. he moans involuntarily against you, the tension and anticipation exploding all at once at the feeling of your body pressed against his. his arms wrap around you, pulling you close, and he wastes no time deepening the kiss. the pent up desire from the car ride and the hours of wanting you come rushing through him, taking over as he kisses you.

his mind is fuzzy, thoughts racing. he wants to get you to his room, but part of him doesn’t want to stop. desperate, your hand trails up to tug at his hair harshly, your leg sliding up to cradle his hip. the feeling of your leg wrapping around his hip and your hand pulling at his hair has him almost losing his mind. he groans against your lips, grip on you tightening, almost as if he’s scared you might disappear. he pushes you further into the doorway, pressing you against the wall and trapping you underneath his body.

kenji breaks the kiss to trail down your jawline, lips ghosting over the supple skin as he feels you shiver underneath his hold. “i wanna memorize every inch of your body..,” he groans. you feel a hand cradle the small of your back, arching into it. your body flushes as his intoxicated gaze makes contact with yours.

“k-kenji,” you manage to gasp out, tugging at the raven strands. “maybe we should take this to your room instead.” he lifts his head from your neck, appearance mussed and disheveled as his intoxicated gaze locks into yours with lidded eyes. “r-right.. yeah.. room.. that’s.. probably a good idea," he stammers out. kenji practically drags you to his room, his legs carrying you both there in record time. his body thrums with anticipation. the second you enter his room and the door is shut he pounces, pinning you against the door. his body molds against yours, his lips devouring your neck, hands roaming anywhere they can reach.

you whine at his sucking, your hands coming to scratch at his back as your leg cradles his hip once again, grinding against him with pure need. kenji groans at the feeling of your body grinding against him, his teeth sinking into your neck from the sensation. his hips thrust forward instinctively, his aching cock pressing into your core. his body craved more contact as he started to get rougher with his hands and lips.

the hours of waiting for you, fantasizing about what it would be like to have you like this… it’s driving him absolutely insane.

“[name]… fuck, i can’t get enough of you, baby." he groaned, lips parting as his eyes shut at the sensation. his thrusts slowly speed up, his hands landing on your hips as he grips them in a vice. a moan escapes you at his words, your hands tracing the hem of his shirt before tugging at it hungrily, craving to feel his skin against your own. “shit, take this off,” you whine, the pressure of his clothed cock against your cunt making your knees feel weak. he immediately obliges, undoing his buttons hurriedly before tossing it to the side and crowding into your space once again, attacking your neck and chest with his lips and hands.

“want you so much… so much.” he breathes against your skin, whining as he paws at your skirt. your frustration gets the best of you as you push kenji onto the bed, climbing onto his lap as you ravish him. the atmosphere is so hot, a mix of limbs and longing as you two claw at each other, the desperation almost unbearable. his hands fly up to grip your hips as he falls back, desperate to keep you as close to him as possible. he moans into the kiss at the feeling of you rolling your hips into his own, his hips meeting yours with equal fervor. his hands grip harder on your hips, bruises bound to appear later.

kenji breaks the kiss, lips glistening and eyes low as they burn into your own. he lets out a shaky breath. “god, i need you so bad.” you pull back flushed before you giggle, running your fingers through his hair before lightly tugging him lower so he has to look up at you. “yeah? What do you need me to do, ken?” you tease, the atmosphere thick with pure desire. kenji’s heart practically bursts, his body shuddering at the touch of your nails against his scalp. he swallows dryly before replying hoarsely. “need you to let me taste you.. please.” his hands move from your waist down your legs as he lowers himself onto his knees, leaving your hand resting limp on his head. “anything you’ll give me, i’ll take it.”

you raise your eyebrow at the sight before guiding him back up by his chin, guiding him to the awaiting mattress. kenji stumbles back, you following right behind as you situate yourself to sit on his stomach. grabbing a fistful of raven locks you force him to look up at you, his eyes slightly glossing over.

“you said anything i give you right? let’s see how well you hold up your word, sato.” you breathe out, tightening your grip on his hair. at the sensation his eyes flutter closed, slightly rolling back before he comes back to himself.

he holds your thighs open, keeping them close to his own body before leaning into your core, nose pressing against the skin of your cunt as he presses a light kiss against your clit, licking a stripe against it. you shudder, back bowing into itself at the sensation. at your reaction kenji grows eager, sucking slightly at it before licking messily into your folds, his grip strengthening as a moan escapes him. “god, fuckin’ love how you squeeze around my tongue like that,” he pants, shoving his tongue back into you, curling to lick up every ounce of wetness that leaked out. you moan loudly, slapping your hand over your mouth as the other comes back down onto kenji’s hair.

“shit – kenji,” you sighed, your eyes half-lidded as you struggle to keep your gaze on his own. “keep… keep going,” you manage to garble out. he laps at your cunt hungrily, every drop landing on his tongue making him dizzy with the desire for more. one of his hands slowly moves from your thigh, making its way to your dripping cunt before his fingers trace your folds. he delves them in swiftly, a cry escaping you. squelching sounds fill the room adding to the erotic symphony, your hips grinding down onto his face quicker with added desperation.

he moans into your cunt, hand bruising your hip as his fingers scissor you open carefully. the stretch has you squirming, your eyes shutting as his fingers probe deeper. “‘s good baby — ah, feels so good ken.” he hums into your wetness, pulling back momentarily. “you taste so good, could eat this pussy for days.” he pants before diving back in as he laps up your wetness. his fingers work in and out of you swiftly, curling just right with every movement of his tongue. tremors rack your body, your release teetering just on the edge. “so- so good, kenji– ‘m gonna cum,” you gasp, body tingling as you prepare to let go.

hearing your pleas, kenji pulls off with a smirk, your pained whines being cut off as he pulls you into a searing kiss, hand grasping at your hair for purchase. his tongue licks into your mouth with a force that has you moaning, kissing him back in earnest. you part, heavy panting filling the thick atmosphere. you stare for a split second at each other before ripping your clothes off respectively.

the sound of your top being discarded and your skin against his own has kenji’s mind running rampant. the sensation of your lips pressing against his own, breathy moans filling his brain makes him snap. he breaks the kiss, breath coming out in labored gasps as his trembling hands come to fit your thighs, the meat of your skin escaping each crevice as he tries to position your bodies together.

“i want you so bad…. please.”

“fuck — okay,” you moan into his mouth, grabbing his length steadily as you raise your body above his own. sinking down, you keen as your head falls back, fingers digging into his broad shoulders. kenji lets out an animalistic moan, any possible remaining cockiness quickly dissipating as the tip of his cock slipped past your folds. “that’s it, baby, take it all.” he muttered under his breath. his body arches into yours at the pure pleasure of it all, breath already picking up speed as his hips thrust up involuntarily.

he needs more.

from the top of the night until now, he’s been itching ever since your name rolled ever so smoothly off the tip of your tongue. “[name]..” he moans, his eyes glued to your own. “so good… god baby you feel so fucking good.”

you whine obscenely at the utterance of your name, your head lolling into the crevice of his neck as you grind into him. “shit… kenji, want more..” you babble mindlessly. the feeling of your walls fluttering around him causes him to groan, shifting his hips into a steady rhythm that has him grasping at your thighs desperately. every grind of your body against his has him gasping in pleasure. the feeling of your body surrounding him, the press of your skin on his, the hot breaths against his neck.

it’s driving him absolutely delirious with need. the sound of your murmured words has his heart clenching in his chest, his mind reeling with the need to give you more, to give you anything you needed.

“give you… anything you want, sweetheart.” he gasps out between groans, hips bucking up harder against yours. the sensation of him speeding up makes you yelp, your nails scraping roughly against his back as you bite on his shoulder roughly. your eyes squeeze shut before you release just as quickly, a wail leaving your lips as you attempt to grasp him closer. “goddd – kenji i’m so close,” you gasp out, breath quivering as a tear cascaded down your cheek.

“i know baby, i know.” he breathes into your ear, pulling your body closer to him as his thrusts speed up. “but look, you’re taking me so well, yeah?” he pulls your hips further down right as he thrusts up, and your jaw drops. tremors rack your body as your lips part in a silent cry, the only thing escaping your mouth being a measly cry. “a-ah, k-kenjii” you yelp, feeling your legs tighten around his waist. “right… right there – fuck!” the way he moved, controlling his hips with every motion and maximising his motions.

he chuckles, admiring the view above him as you unravel in his arms. he finds himself tossing his head back in bliss with a lean arm clinging onto the cool wood of the headboard. you’ve lost track of how long it’s been, a hazy cloud lingering over your mind as your eyes roll back in pleasure. you clench around him, whimpers spilling out of your mouth as your legs tremble. seeing you lose focus he grips your chin tightly, forcing you to face him. “eyes on me baby, don’t stop,” he pants, feeling your walls tighten.

the sounds of kenji’s orders push you over the edge, your eyes rolling back as you throw your head back. pleasure washes over you like a bucket of ice cold water, your hands grabbing at his shoulders helplessly. “k-kenjiii- fuck!” you yelp, feeling your legs tighten around his waist. “want.. want you to breed me..” the sound of you unraveling in his hold and hearing your voice calling his name has a wave of desperate need coursing through him. just when he didn’t think things could get any more intense, he hears your words, and his mind goes white with raw need.

“f-fuck.. need to breed you.. need to fill you up.. oh christ..” kenji gasps out, his mind completely gone. his arms wrap around you even tighter, holding you close and moving you against him, his breath hot against your sensitive neck. you shudder, the feeling of his length in your sensitive cunt leaves your lips parted, your hips grinding incessantly at the painful pleasure as your nails scratch at his back needily.

each time you move against him, he feels like his mind is shattered. the sounds you’re making, the way he can feel you pulsing around him, the scratch of your nails against his back, it’s all pushing him closer to the edge. he can’t stop, can’t hold back anymore, his body is completely overcome with the intense ecstasy.

he gasps out a moan and buries his head into the crook of your neck as he thrusts up into you once, twice, his body tensing as he finally lets go. “oh god..” he heaves, thick cock letting hot spurts of white filling you up comfortably, a sigh escaping him as he leans fully onto his headboard. you sigh contentedly at him finishing, the warmth of it making you slightly quiver in his hold. “so full,” you mumble, your head falling softly onto his shoulder as you melt into‎ his strong hold.

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . ✦ . 　

"in a different book, on a different page. you said you were different, but you’re the same, stranger."

#kenji sato x reader #ken sato x reader #kenji sato smut #ken sato smut #kenji x reader #kenji sato x you #ken sato #kenji sato #ultraman rising #Spotify

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amywritesthings · 10 months ago

Text

press four for more options. | part one.

( Read on AO3 )

Pairing: levi ackerman x f!reader (attack on titan / shingeki no kyojin) Word Count: 4.6k Summary: After seeing your ex with his new girl at a work party, you take the not-so-smart advice from a friend to call a sex hotline to get over him. Your match? A baritone bossy dom named Levi.

Warnings: 18+ MINORS DNI - alternate universe (modern), slow burn, eventual smut, sex work, phone sex, dirty talk, dom!levi, light dom/sub Credits: dividers by @saradika-graphics

part two. | masterlist

“Thank you for calling the Scout Services Hotline. You’re only a dial away from your wildest fantasies with the sexiest singles near your area.”

God, even the automated voice sounds porn-y.

A breathy feminine voice straight out of a 1975 VHS tape croons into the dead air of your small apartment bedroom, setting your nerves on edge.

God forbid the noise travels through the walls into your next-door neighbor's bedroom. Harriet and Miro do not need to hear what you’re up to this Friday evening.

Maybe, up to this Friday evening.

You haven’t decided yet, though one could argue that calling was half the battle.

Dressed head-to-toe in an emerald cocktail dress with a face full of tear-stricken makeup, you feel utterly ridiculous sitting at the foot of your bed — not even the edge of the mattress, but the goddamn floor.

Even your black heels, now scuffed from someone stepping on them on your way out to fetch a cab, remain dangling at your toes.

(As non-committal as your last relationship, ironically enough.)

The experts say don’t shit where you eat. Dating someone you work with typically goes up in flames as fast as a rogue wildfire — and you should have listened to all of the warning signs, but Porco Galliard had been so damn charming that you’d forgotten just about everything.

Including your dignity, apparently, since you seemed to conveniently forget the part where he has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Pieck Finger well before you got hired at this place.

Not exactly side chick behavior, since he technically didn’t cheat, but the sting of being second place before the race even started lingered deep.

(Didn’t you know? He always chooses Pieck. It’s just one of those things.)

Well, no missing that now.

Especially since the two of them were so cozy at the annual shareholder event — right in front of your fucking salad.

The event’s slated to end at eleven so you’ve been nursing a wild array of drinks since seven, with little breaks.

In retrospect, the napkin with scribbled chicken scratch that Annie Leonhart, your closest colleague, shoved into your hand in the midst of your brooding at the bar may have been a joke:

You need to loosen up. Call this stupid sex line and get that stick out of your ass.

She wasn’t kidding.

Every muscle in your body is too taut, including your brain.

So you took a cab, stumbled into your apartment, and landed — here.

Your phone sits right in front of you next to one of your half-worn heels, on speaker at the lowest setting.

Maybe it’s best to let the pre-recording list the entire numerical menu.

Maybe it’ll deter you from pressing anything at all.

“If you already know your match’s extension, press one.”

Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

You tap the napkin carelessly against the stem of your glass of wine, contemplating exactly how Annie Leonhart managed to find the information for this service to begin with.

Did she already have a match?

Did she regularly call them to blow off some steam?

She's always so chill. It would make sense.

There’s a chance this is a nasty prank at your lowest moment, but you don’t think Annie cares enough about other people to plan such a masterful takedown.

At the work event, she seemed pretty serious about the legitimacy of Scout Services Hotline, and honestly?

Even if you had been drinking all night at the event, you were going to need way more liquid courage to even consider trying your hand at calling a sex line to quell weekend loneliness.

So naturally, you opened a new bottle of wine.

At the first glass of wine, you still weren’t ready.

The second? The napkin sat adjacent to your laptop as you played compilations of sad break-up songs further aggravating your spiraling depression.

The third was the charm to get you to pick up the fucking phone to see what the fuss was all about.

“If you’re looking for someone specific — whether it’s the man, woman, or person of your dreams — press two.”

Tempting.

Your finger reaches out for the ‘2’ on your screen, but you wait it out.

“If you don’t have a preference for your delicious match, press three.”

“You could’ve done without the delicious part,” you mumble to yourself, picking up the glass of wine to take a generous sip. An involuntary grimace tugs at your cheeks.

“If you’re looking to speak with one of our representatives or need more assistance, press four for more options.”

For a solid five minutes you wait.

Contemplating.

Deciding.

You could press the red circle to hang up and go to bed.

It wouldn’t be the first time you rubbed one out and called it a night.

After all, what’s one more lonely weekend?

The spiel starts up again on a loop with the same seductive, breathy feminine voice.

“Thank you for calling the Scout Services Hotline. You’re only a dial away from your wildest fantasies with the sexiest—”

You smash a button, but you’re not sure which one you’ve clicked.

Before you can lean over to see on your screen, a different feminine voice comes over the speaker.

It’s a little higher pitched than the menu screen voice, but it’s still inviting. Warm.

“Thank you for choosing the Scout Services Hotline. You’re speaking to Petra. May I have the pleasure of knowing the name of the person I’m speaking to this evening?”

A name.

You should give a name that isn’t your real name.

But technically wouldn’t your name be on the credit card if you go through with this anyway?

“You can give a nickname, too, if that makes you feel better,” the woman named Petra adds as if she's a mind reader, breaking the running silence on your end of the line. “A lot of our clients like giving a fake name for security and anonymity.”

“Doesn’t that break once you put in your credit card information?” you blurt, not realizing the thought has spilled on your lips.

Petra laughs musically.

“Technically yes, but if you prefer to be called something, then we’ll be sure to add that to your profile. I take it it's your first time calling.”

Why are you doing this again?

“Painfully obvious, right?” you lament, staring down at the scribble on the napkin.

Did Annie have a fake name with this service?

“Not painfully at all,” Petra promises. “It’s a learning curve. So what may I call you?”

Real or fake?

Committed or just testing the waters?

“Scarlet?” you suggest, wincing immediately at the on-the-nose literary reference.

Letters, passion, blah blah love — it’s about the only creative thing your wine-addled brain can muster.

“I like Scarlet,” she hums, and immediately your brain is set on fire.

Are you going to be seriously this easy?

“Are you female, male, non-binary, genderfluid, prefer not to say…?”

“Female.”

"Pronouns?"

"Um, she and her."

“And you’re over eighteen?”

“Definitely over eighteen.”

“Perfect. So, Scarlet — did you have a preference on who you wish to speak to today? If you have a fantasy you wish to fulfill, then I can select someone for you.”

You want to scream.

Neurons fire as you try to come up with a cool and collected answer, only to allow the elixir of truth on your tongue to spill the beans.

“Just someone who’s got their shit together, honestly.” You exhale an awkward laugh. “I don’t know. I’m just calling because — I mean, I know you don’t care, but I like… um, deep voices? Stronger voices. Honestly I have no idea what to—”

“I have just the person.”

You pause.

Blink.

But you didn’t even describe anyone, not really.

A voice, maybe, if they cater to kinks of that nature.

You can only imagine they do — it’s a sex hotline, for crying out loud.

“Wait, you do?”

“Mhm!” she perkily states. “Is a man alright for this evening?”

A man with a deep voice who allegedly has his pretend shit together.

Granted it isn’t the opposite of Porco, he’s fairly capable at his job and out living his life just fine, but maybe you were just looking for a copy.

(Or a clue.)

“A man is… fine,” you hesitate. “Wait, so when do I give you my credit card information? My friend hooked me up with this, um — I don’t know if you have her name or if I should even say it, I know there’s probably some confidentiality—”

“Hold that thought,” Petra interrupts cheerfully. “You get the first fifteen-minute session for free, actually — you called just in time before our first-timer coupon expires.”

You can’t hide your surprise.

“Really?”

“Really!”

Ha, your fucking luck.

“If you're enjoying the call, just tell your match and we can set up your card and keep it going. All we ask is that you take a survey after your session. Then you’ll be in our system with this phone number! We’ll never solicit you for calls, but it’ll make the process faster the next time should you call our hotline again.”

You drop your head back on your mattress, sighing heavily.

“...okay, yeah. That sounds great.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure.”

“Give me one moment, Scarlet,” Petra giggles.

You hear something shift on her side.

Maybe she’s swiveling her chair. Are they located in an actual office building?

God, an office where people just do this for a living sounds larger than life.

“I’ll connect you with your match in a moment.”

Then the line cuts out to the opening notes to Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, and you’re pretty sure you’re this close to chugging the rest of this bottle in one gulp.

“Is this seriously what you do on weekends, Annie?” you mumble to yourself, enduring the brutality of the waiting music while Petra connects you to your alleged match.

A man with a deep voice who has his shit together.

Is that even a real kink?

Has the bar really gotten that low?

Should you have described someone’s appearance? It wasn’t like it mattered over the phone.

As soon as it gets to the high note of the song, the line cuts again — silence.

Immediately you scramble to sit up taller, your hands fumbling to grab the phone from the floor.

You bring it up to your face, cupping the device in both palms to muffle the noise if it becomes downright pornographic in seconds.

Moment of truth.

With bated breath you wait — the person on the other line sighs, heavy and deep, before answering with the most nonchalant tone.

“Thank you for calling the Scout Services Hotline. You’re speaking with Levi. May I ask whom I have the pleasure of speaking to?”

Holy fuck.

Immediately you forget your own voice listening to the hum of the receiver.

While you’ve only joked in passing that you have a voice kink, it’s screaming in neon lights here and now: this man’s voice may be monotone, but there is a growl to it.

A rumbling.

At this very moment, you completely forget that this man is on speaker phone and you’ve just returned home from the worst work event in the world.

You don’t have an ex-boyfriend.

You don’t even know your home address.

You’re simply… existing, lips parted, taking in the sheer tingle rolling through your torso.

“You there?”

Right, you’re meant to talk back.

“Huh? Oh — yes! Yeah,” you recover poorly. “Hi. It’s, um, it’s Scarlet.”

“Mm, Scarlet… Scarlet, Scarlet, Scarlet…”

The way the name drags along his tongue nearly makes your mouth water.

His voice — Levi — is smooth, like the velvet on your dress you’ve yet to take off.

“A pretty name for a pretty thing like you.” Something ruffles and Levi makes a small noise on the other end, likened to a cut-off hum. “Tell me what you look like, Scarlet.”

All you can do is stare at a chip in your wooden dresser directly across from you, listening to him speak.

“I’m…”

What do you even say?

How come you have to say anything at all?

Can’t he just read a takeout menu to you and call it a night?

Before you can answer, there’s an amused huff. “Someone’s nervous.”

Your face turns — well, a certain shade of scarlet.

“Ha. Sorry, I’ve—”

“Never done this before?” he finishes for you.

How mortifying.

“Is it that obvious?”

“It’s cute,” he relents, and you feel your face turn a degree hotter. “Don’t worry — I’ve been told I’m a great teacher, so you’re in good hands.”

“You’ll have your work cut out of you, trust me,” you breathe, feeling like you’ve been injected with an overdose of a truth serum. “Because I just got home from this stupid work event. My ex-boyfriend brought his new girlfriend — who also works with us — as his date — yay, me — except I feel like I was the side-piece-in-waiting for them. So he’s off getting laid and I’m calling a complete stranger on a random Friday because my work colleague recommended this phone sex hotline for a quick solution.”

Silence.

You blink twice as dread settles in your cut. You tap the phone off of speaker and push the device close to your ear, balancing it with your shoulder.

Did you scare him away?

Was that too much of a depressive dump?

You suddenly want to crawl under your bed frame and hide there forever.

But then — a gentle chuckle sounds from the other end of the line, and arousal shoots straight to your lower belly.

“Good thing all of the dirty talk is my job, then,” he muses. “You’re supposed to lay back and listen.”

“Listen?”

“Yeah, unless you weren’t looking to get bossed around.”

It isn’t the worst idea you’ve ever heard, that’s for sure.

“If I’m honest with you, Levi, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” you confess, running a hand down your face.

“Then let me figure it out for you. We have time.”

The man calling himself Levi pauses on the other end.

“Did you want to get fucked, Scarlet?”

Well, shit, he didn’t have to say it like that.

“Yes,” you blurt without thinking, then fumbling to recover. “I mean— Sorry, clearly I called thinking about sex, and your voice is extremely lovely and actually very hot—”

“Oh, you think so?” Levi interrupts, honey-smooth voice humming with amusement with that same hum that’s going to make you scream.

“Absolutely. Completely. Are you serious?” you sputter. “You’re like an ASMR wet dream.”

“A what?”

“A wet dream?”

“No, the other thing — ASMR?”

“Um, like when people make really niche quiet noises to a microphone with their mouths, and it gives you the tingly sensation in the back of your head.”

“Interesting,” Levi says. “So are you saying that’s what I do to you?”

For the umpteenth time, your brain blanks.

God, you could scream into your pillow.

If you weren’t so afraid you’d forget to mute your microphone first, then you already would be.

“Yes! — I mean, yes, but — wait, can we just pause this for a second?”

For a moment he doesn’t answer, but the tone of his voice shifts: still just as sultry, but with a hint of confusion and a dash of concern.

“Of course. Is everything alright?”

No, this entire night is weird.

If you don’t say something, then this is going to just keep looping and wasting his time.

“Okay,” you start, mustering the courage to get through your speech, “I know I’m spoiling the first-caller coupon for a free call and I’m sorry, I’ll totally pay for the session since you’re great and sound insanely hot and I’m sure you’re amazing at your job, but I just…”

You trail off, collecting your swimming thoughts.

“...I’m something like six or seven drinks in, I am craving potato chips, and I’d really like to just talk to someone for a few minutes.”

There.

It’s out in the open, your confession to the liminal altar.

You half-expect him to hang up rather than wasting his time with someone like you, but to your surprise, there is no click. No call ended. No new automated message.

“Six or seven is a lot,” he comments, and you can picture a brow furrow even if he doesn’t have a face. “Does this mean you handle your liquor, or is this a one-off rager?”

“I think I’m only still functioning because I ate my weight in dinner rolls at the party.”

“Do you have a glass or bottle of water near you?”

The switch up lessens the tension in your shoulder blades in an instant.

His voice is just as crooning, deep and inviting, but it’s nice to simply be asked.

“Nope.”

His voice sharply changes, authoritative and firm. “Then go get one.”

The demand does something to you.

Without thinking twice you begin to rock up on your heels, standing at full height.

“Okay, Mr. Bossy.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asks with a sprinkle of sarcasm. “Someone who has their shit together, if I read the notes right.”

“They write that stuff down?” you ask genuinely, minding your step as you pad barefoot across your apartment to your fridge.

“It’s your session,” he reminds softly. “We do whatever it is you want to do.”

“Even if it’s just to talk?”

“You’d be amazed at how many people call just to talk. Though I can’t say it’s my specialty.”

“No?”

“No. I’m not much of a small talker.”

The refrigerator door swings wide. “What’s your specialty, then?”

“Kink play, mostly. Dom and Sub. Guided masturbation. Edging. Making decisions for people who want to forget about making them for a while.”

One second the bottle of water is in your hand.

Next it’s on the floor.

“That’s, uh… a wide array of specialties,” you say. “And your rate, it’s…?”

“Not cheap.”

“Got it. So I’m really flubbing this free call.”

It’s small, but you hear a chuckle on the other end. “You said you wanted to talk, Scarlet, so we’re talking.”

Bending to grab your water bottle, you untwist the cap.

“Does this bother you, wasting your time talking?”

“You’re not wasting my time, Scarlet,” he says with such a promise that you almost believe it’s genuine. “You have a pretty voice, and you’re funny.”

“Shut up.”

“You do, and you are.”

“Uh-huh. And do you talk to a lot of people during your shifts?”

“That’s confidential.”

“So a lot.”

“Confidential.”

“And the length of calls,” you test, “are they hypothetically confidential, too?”

“It’s per minute, so.”

“Per minute?” you gawk. “Jesus, I’d go bankrupt talking to you.”

“Well, premium members receive bills per half hour,” he explains. “More bang for your buck.”

“Quite literally," you mumble. "And what’s a premium subscription get you?”

“Didn’t you check out the website before calling?”

“I told you I stumbled out of my cab and called the number on my napkin, Levi,” you chide. “I didn’t exactly do my research in my sexually frustrated state.”

“Fair, can’t blame you there.”

There’s something of a grunt on the other end, like he’s stretching his arms over his head.

Maybe he’s sitting in an office chair, too, going through the motions of his profession the same way the Petra lady had been.

You keep wanting to imagine what he’s doing on the other line, but you realize you haven’t asked the titular question yet.

“Hey, Levi?”

“Yeah, baby?”

It’s breathy, a roll of thunder in his tongue.

Instead of an office chair, you imagine a man lying on his bed.

Maybe his tie is half-done, hanging loosely around his neck.

Button-down open, exposing the planes of his chest; dress trousers unbuttoned and loose around his hips, so he can easily slide a hand—

Whoa.

You stop walking back to your bedroom and blink twice. “Oh, so you like pet names.”

Your face, in miraculous humiliation, grows another degree hotter at how amused he sounds with himself. “I never said that.”

“Sure,” Levi replies with a smirk to the concession. “What is it, Scarlet?”

(Maybe you’ll permanently change your name to Scarlet after tonight if it sounds this good on a man’s lips.)

You finally unzip the side of your dress and wiggle out, before finding a cozy spot in the middle of your mattress.

“How much time do I have left on this freebie?”

“Approximately three minutes.”

Time flies when you’re too busy gawking over someone’s voice, apparently.

“Can I ask what you look like?” you finally decide, playing along.

“I’m surprised it took you this long to ask,” Levi responds, returning to that same seductive tone he’d used when he first picked up the line. “Black hair, guess it’s a little shaggier than usual. Undercut.”

You squint to your ceiling. “I’m thinking of Dimitri from Anastasia right now but with black hair.”

“I have no idea what that is.”

“You’ve seriously never seen Anastasia?”

“It’s a movie?”

“Oh my god, Levi, I’m so sorry for your childhood.”

“It’s an animated movie?” he scoffs. “Even worse.”

“You wound me,” you joke, pressing a hand over the cup of your beige bra. “What color are your eyes?”

“A gray-ish blue,” he tells you. “Sharp nose. High cheekbones. I’m a daily gym go-er, so I’m mostly lean muscle. I can probably pick you up, easily.”

So a fit man with an undercut hairstyle with gray-blue eyes and a relatively sharp face.

Now you have a face to the image of a man lying on his bed, still in that button-down shirt and dress trousers.

His happy trail is probably dark, too, disappearing just under the waistband of his boxer briefs.

Or boxers?

Maybe nothing.

Your hand moves on its own accord to the waistband of your panties, toying with the fabric.

Contemplating.

Wondering if it’s wrong — when it really shouldn’t be wrong at all.

“You sound handsome,” you murmur. “I wouldn’t mind being picked up.”

“Wouldn’t be the only thing I’d do to you,” he flippantly states, and your brain blanks to pure putty. “You sound a little more winded than before. Doing alright over there, party animal?”

“It’s late,” you lie even when you damn well know you don’t have to lie. “Lots of drinking, first water of the night, lying down…”

“Better make it two waters before you fall asleep,” Levi states. “That’s an order, Scarlet.”

“Uh-huh.”

Your hand dips under your underwear, testing the waters.

But—

“Final sixty seconds,” he adds. “Any last words you want to get in before the line disconnects?”

“Only one minute left?” you protest, ripping your hand out of your underwear to pull the phone away from your ear.

14:02

So it really had been a fifteen-minute call.

God damnit.

Tapping the speaker icon once more, you stare at your phone and press your tongue against the inside of your cheek.

“What’s your extension?”

Because you have to know.

Even if you don’t call again, it’s a comfort to have it on hand.

Levi waits a moment before responding.

“Two-five-one-two.”

2512.

You swipe away from the call to quickly pull up your notes app, tapping the number down with a noted reminder: the guy with the hot voice!

“Are you going to call me again, Scarlet?”

You open your mouth, but you struggle with an answer.

(You only have a few seconds! Think, idiot, think!)

“I’m not sure if—”

Click.

“Hello? Levi?”

“Thank you for calling the Scout Services Hotline. Please stay on the line for a quick two-minute survey so we can better serve your fantasies in the future.”

Out of time.

You drop your phone to your stomach and groan.

Instead of calling back, you close your eyes — and, not before long, fall asleep to a dream of only one voice.

— —

Saturday is a wash.

You wake late, missing an invitation to brunch.

For the better half of the day, you wonder about him.

Levi.

Your arbitrary match that doesn't feel so arbitrary anymore.

(It's placebo effect, you tell yourself. They're supposed to make you feel wanted.)

Punishing yourself for your excessive liquor and stupid plans, you trudge to your local gym and do your best to stay focused on your workout.

Every nameless person with dark hair that walks past you on the sidewalk from your apartment; anyone could be him.

The man waiting in line at the coffee shop.

The man who accidentally walked into you while you were switching the song on your playlist at the crosswalk.

The man weight training in the corner of the room, fringe cascading down his face as he drips sweat.

You keep the napkin in your gym bag, then transfer it to your purse as you run errands.

You could call.

It isn’t like you’re strapped for cash at the moment.

Granted it’s very wish fulfillment and it isn’t like he’s actually into you, but the attention is nice.

Besides — you haven’t thought of your ex once since you woke up.

Annie texts you twice within ten minutes of each message, which is unheard for her.

[A. LEONHART]: So? Did you call?

[A. LEONHART]: Hello, earth to moron. At least like my message to tell me you’re alive. I’m not being interviewed by Dateline for you.

(Ah, there she is. Classic Annie.)

[YOU]: Yeah, I called. Not sure if it’s my thing.

[A. LEONHART]: Sometimes they match you with a dud. 2nd time’s the charm ;)

[YOU]: Do you ever use someone’s extension?

[A. LEONHART]: Duh. I’m a regular of one guy.

Okay, so she talks to a guy. Something grips your stomach as you type your reply.

[YOU]: Can I ask his name?

[A. LEONHART]: Why, so we don’t eiffel tower this?

[YOU]: jfc annie

[A. LEONHART]: lmao his name is Bert

So not Levi.

For some odd reason, you breathe a sigh of relief as you close out of your messages.

Maybe you're one of a million, but at least you're not sharing with Annie.

Once you return home from your errands, it's close to dinnertime.

You cook something simple for yourself, occasionally glancing over at your purse like you can x-ray vision through the fabric to see the napkin.

Then again, it isn’t like you actually need the napkin.

The number is already in your phone.

Pulling out your device, you set it on the kitchen counter and draw a slow, calculative inhale.

One more call can’t hurt.

Levi may not even be working.

Hell, he could be talking to someone else.

A regular.

Several regulars.

For over five minutes you stare down at your most recent calls list, willing yourself to just get brave for one second to press the button.

(It isn’t like Porco’s going to call you.)

The soured thought propels your hand without thinking, fingertip pressing the green phone icon faster than you can think.

You brace for the ringtone, fists balled tight on the cool kitchen surface.

“Thank you for calling the Scout Services Hotline. You’re only a dial away from your wildest fantasies with the sexiest singles near your area. If you already know your match’s extension, press one.”

You continue staring.

Are you really doing this?

It isn’t like it means anything, which is exactly what you need with the upcoming work week.

A distraction.

A very expensive distraction, but hey — you’ll avoid takeout for a few weeks.

How bad can it get?

“If you’re looking for someone specific —”

You press one.

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading part one of my zany little 'Sleepless in Seattle' modern au! This has been a bluesky idea for a while now, and I needed a little reprieve from my other angsty Levi longfic silver underground, so I hope you enjoyed the ride.

There will be actual smut in part two, but as a Reader!Writer I had the thought of 'would I be suave enough to do the first phone call flawlessly or totally waste my free coupon'? and this chapter was born, lol. I promise this is not Porco slander.

Thank you for likes, and even more love to those who choose to reblog this to help spread the word of this new series or reply in the comments. ilu xo

#levi ackerman x reader #levi ackerman x you #levi ackerman x female reader #attack on titan fanfiction #snk fanfiction #snk fanfic #aot fanfic #aot fic #snk fic #levi ackerman fanfiction #levi ackerman smut #levi ackerman fanfic #shingeki no kyojin fanfiction #fic: press four for more

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kutepik · 1 month ago

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how i think LADS LI would be as parents after you give birth (i’m being honest here lol)

Xavier: He’s clumsy with the baby at first, but he slowly gets the hang of it. Trying to put the baby to sleep ends up making him fall asleep, and that’s a problem—because you can’t trust a newborn’s safety to a man who can pass out like a rock anywhere, anytime. You handle the baby 90% of the time because either he’s working or he’s asleep, even when the baby cries at night. He does get up once in a while, but you don’t let him do anything because you’re sure he’d doze off while holding the baby. Lucky for you, the baby sleeps a lot too—after all, they take after their dad.

Zayne: He’s read every parenting book out there and knows how to handle any and every issue. Becomes that annoying guy who monitors your diet to ensure healthy breastfeeding. He’s meticulous (too much so) and constantly checks on the baby like it’s a medical examination. He’s hardly home—being a doctor means surgeries every week—so you bond with the baby first. He struggles to call the baby by their name, and sometimes you feel like he treats them too distantly. He doesn’t know how to play or be silly, but in his own way, he takes care of both you and the baby.

Sylus: He set up a post-birth recovery room and hired a caretaker for you and the baby. Calls the baby “little thing” and isn’t comfortable holding them. Sends the twins to buy toys and clothes, filling the room with useless stuff that won’t even be used until the baby can walk. He does it to make up for his lack of presence and parenting skills. He gets bored and frustrated when the baby cries too much and demands your or his attention, so he insists on keeping a nanny around. He has no idea how to handle the “little thing” but hopes they grow up fast so he can teach them how to use a gun.

Caleb: He also gets an FAA nurse to take care of you and the baby during the first month. Buys everything apple-themed of course. He took care of you when you were younger, so he has no trouble handling baby duties—feeding, bathing, putting them to sleep, etc. He travels a lot for work, but when he’s back, he insists that you rest while he takes care of the baby. Unfortunately, he’s terrible at dealing with tantrums and gets easily frustrated. Eventually, he hires a nanny too—after all, you’re spending way too much time with the baby and not enough with him, and that’s just not okay… Sometimes he misses having you all for himself.

(i’m sorry for not doing rafayel i don’t know much about himm so please give your suggestions)

#love and deepspace #lads x reader #lads x you #lads headcanons #lads caleb #lads xavier #lads sylus #lads zayne #zayne x reader #caleb x reader #xavier x reader #sylus x reader

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summercourtship · 10 months ago

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WASTE NOT (18+)

or, the reader is travelling with the Ghoul when he discovers she's never fucked before. You figure out what comes next.

cooper howard/the ghoul x reader | warnings/notes: loss of virginity, masturbation, exhibitionism, piv sex, oral sex, barely proofread | side note: i might end up reusing this general plot for a longer multi-chapter fic, we'll see

read on AO3

Five hundred caps, two hundred upfront.

That’s how much it took for you to get out of the gilded cage that was your hometown, a decent sized settlement inside of what used to be a Rodeo stadium and aptly named for it. That’s all it took for you to escape your father, the mayor of said town who kept you under lock and key, both literally and figuratively. You’d tried to escape before, attempts that had been thwarted before they even began. It only led to you being locked in your room and only allowed to walk the town with a bodyguard, someone hired to make sure you didn’t run for it.

Some people might say that it was a privilege to be cared for so much that you didn’t have to constantly fight for your life. You thought it was a surefire way to get you killed when you finally did leave his grasp.

Since running away, you’d done many things for the first time that most people did before they were even ten years old. Held a gun, caught your own food, killed a man.

And the man you’d paid to take you through the wastes was the first ghoul you’d ever met. Your settlement didn’t ban them from entering, but they weren’t exactly welcoming either. But you’d been immediately drawn to him, which you at first chalked up to the novelty of meeting a new kind of person, the kind you’d only read about.

However, as you’d continued traveling with him and the novelty wore off, you quickly realized that the draw you felt to him wasn’t just because of culture shock.

The Ghoul, which was the only thing you called him because he’d given you nothing else to call him, was sitting by the fire he’d built, a slow curl of smoke drifting from the cigarette hanging in his mouth. You looked over at him, observing how the light from the flames reflected off of his worn and imperfect skin. It was a sight you’d seen almost every night this week, but every time you felt like it was the first time you were seeing him.

Your week was almost up. When you’d hired him, you’d told him you only wanted to leave your town for a week, just to experience the Wastes before returning to your “ivory tower,” (his words, not yours). It had taken some bargaining on your end (and you had to give him chems in addition to the caps) but it had worked. You were out of the clutches of your father, you were finally experiencing life for the first time.

And you had no intention of going back when the week was over.

You were sitting across the room, perched on an old bed that was still standing in the half-ruined house, though shack might be more accurate. An entire wall was missing, letting you look right into the starry night sky from your seat. But mainly you were looking at the Ghoul, who was looking after one of his guns. You brought the drink you’d been nursing- just a Nuka-Cola you’d found on your journey and saved for this moment- taking a deep sip of the fizzy drink when he spoke up.

“Stop starin’ at me.”

You choked, sputtering up the Nuka-Cola in your attempt to catch your breath. In your coughing, you only managed to spill more of the drink on yourself, an unfortunate chain of events that left you with a soaked through shirt. You cursed under your breath, looking down at the brown liquid that would surely stain the fabric. Did you even have a clean replacement in your bag?

Leaning towards your bag, you placed the almost empty bottle on the floor before flipping the flap, peering inside.

“You might wanna take that off before the flies smell the sugar.”

Your current task forgotten, you stared up at the Ghoul, who wasn’t even looking at you when he said it. But the idea of taking your shirt off around him when you knew that he could see it was terrifying. However, he was right when he said you’d need to get the shirt off of your body soon and put it into your bag. Who knows how much sugar was in Nuka-Cola, how far its sweet scent would travel if it was out in the open. And you certainly didn’t want to attract any bugs your way.

Sitting up straight, you cleared your throat. Your fingers worried at the hem of your shirt.

“Could you turn around…” Your voice trailed off at the look on his face, a brief glance your way.

“It’s nothing I ain’t seen on other women.”

“Okay, but I’ve never-” You stopped yourself from finishing your sentence, realizing exactly what you were admitting, but the damage was already done. The Ghoul leaned forward and you tightened your grip around yourself, as if the shirt still being on your body would protect you from his judgment.

“You’ve never…?” The pregnant pause hung in the air between you, but you weren’t going to clarify. You didn’t move, which must have been enough of a confirmation for him because he whistled low in his mouth. “Why am I not surprised? You didn’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

As if shooting a gun naturally came before losing your virginity. (Maybe it did, you wouldn’t know).

“Can you stop?” You huffed, your face hot. “If I had wanted to, I would have.”

But it seemed that any of your attempts to get him to drop the subject wouldn’t work, because he was looking at you intensely, an unreadable look in his surprisingly human eyes. Not for the first time, you wondered what he looked like when he was human. You’d tried before, to imagine what it looked like when his skin was smooth and he had a nose and hair, but nothing seemed to match his demeanor as well as being a ghoul did.

“And why didn’t you want to?”

“I-” You swallowed nervously, your heartbeat in your throat choking you. “I didn’t see the point, not when my dad is probably going to marry me off to some geezer who can’t get it up anyway. And I don’t need your judgment about it.”

You were now trying to hold onto any semblance of dignity you had left. Pretending like you’d made a conscious choice to not lose your virginity instead of it being a result of your virtual imprisonment by your father. Like you hadn’t yearned for the touch of someone else. (And, of course, like you hadn’t yearned at all for him over the course of the past week.)

“Do you touch yourself, at least?”

You froze, looking across the room at him like he was a Deathclaw. He leaned forward, perching his elbows on his knees. Like he could smell your apprehension, or worse, your burgeoning arousal.

“Do you touch yourself?”

This isn't something you had talked about ever with anyone. But you couldn’t help answering him. “Y-yes.” If he looked surprised that you actually spoke, you couldn’t tell over your own embarrassment.

“Show me.” When you didn’t respond, still sitting there staring at him like he had grown two heads, he sat back in his seat again, his hat dipping low. “Or don’t. I’m not going to force-”

You cut him off before he could continue, suddenly not wanting this opportunity to pass you by. After all, you only had this last night with him and then you would go your separate ways. If you horribly embarrassed yourself, it would only be for tonight. “Okay.” You think that this is your biggest streak of surprising the Ghoul. But he recovered quickly, a sly grin sneaking onto his face.

“Take your shirt off first.”

Nodding, you slowly reached down to the hem of your shirt, trying and failing to will your hands to stop trembling. Then, quickly, you peeled the sticky fabric off of your skin. You were a bit annoyed that you had managed to spill so much onto the shirt- it was a nice shirt, a rare find on the surface. But it didn’t matter now, considering where it had led you.

You dropped your shirt onto the floor, unable to look at him as he surely looked at your chest.

Suddenly feeling bold from his gaze, you did more than just take off the glorified rag from your chest- you divested yourself of all of your clothes, placing them into a messy pile by the mattress. You were now exposed to the elements and to his gaze, heavy as he looked over your body. Once again, he didn’t betray any of the surprise he might have felt.

“Should I-”

“Lie down.”

You stared at him before you slowly lowered yourself, trying to keep your eyes on him. When you couldn’t anymore, you closed your eyes. If you couldn’t see him, it wouldn’t be nerve wracking to be watched. But even as you thought it, you could feel the heat of his gaze on you.

“Touch yourself.”

At his surprisingly gentle command, you exhaled shakily. Gently, you dragged your hand down your body, your breath quick. After a moment of teasing yourself, you pressed the pads of two fingers against your clit, rubbing a slow circle against the sensitive bundle of nerves.

Immediately, you sighed, relieving tension you didn’t know had been building. While you had masturbated every night at home, you certainly needed the relief it gave you after a week of stress and almost dying. You were surprisingly wet, though not enough to qualify as dripping. your fingers circled your clit, your hips sudden bucking slightly.

Across from you, the Ghoul groaned, and you tilted your head up, looking at him. His eyes were entirely focused on your cunt, watching the wet slide of your fingers over your folds. His teeth were clenched together, and you gasped at the sight of him watching you so intently before you bit your lip to muffle the sound. Then his eyes moved from your fingers, looking you straight in the eyes as he started to speak.

“I bet you touched yourself all quiet, trying not to let daddy hear you fucking yourself. But your daddy ain’t here, and I want to hear the noises you make.”

You whined, his words going straight to your cunt. What was more painful was that he was correct- many nights you’d bit your pillow as you’d fucked yourself with your fingers, trying to keep quiet.

“Go ahead, slip a finger inside-“

You stopped moving, looking at him again, taking the moment to catch your breath.

“I’ve never really done that-“

The Ghoul cursed, and before you could blink he was off of his chair, moving closer. He was now knelt in between your legs, his gloved hands on your knees and staring up at you.

“I gotta fuckin teach you everything, don’t I?”

Swiftly, he removed his gloves, throwing them onto the pile of your clothes. Then he swatted your hand away from your cunt before replacing it with his own fingers. At the dramatic shift in skin texture you gasped, immediately grinding against his rough fingers mindlessly as your hands flew to your mouth to muffle your cries.

“None of that, I told you I’m gonna hear the sounds you’re making ‘cause of me.”

He moved down your body, pressing kisses and delivering brief bites to your flesh. With each nip of his teeth you gasped, torn between the desire to push his head away or beg for more. Then he reached your sex, pausing for a moment and letting his warm breath fan over you. You squirmed, unsure if you wanted to beg him to touch you or if you wanted to run away from the sheer overwhelming intensity of it all.

Then his mouth was hot against you, his tongue licking a thick stripe up the length of your cunt, and you wondered why you’d ever thought about not letting him do this. With no nose in the way, he was able to press his face fully against you. He dipped his tongue into your opening, flicking it against your walls and thrusting a few times, the movement of his tongue in addition to his fingers overwhelming.

He groaned against you as he lapped up your wetness, sounds of a man dying of thirst reaching an oasis.

With a final wet sound, he removed his tongue before moving to suck on your clit, his hand moving from your thighs to return to your core.

“Fuck, you’re tight.” He murmured as he pressed two of his fingers inside of you. You’d tried before to fuck your self like this but always found the feeling unsatisfactory. But his fingers were larger than yours, able to hit the places inside of you that you had begun to think were myths.

It was overpowering, and any thoughts that weren’t about him quickly dissipated.

Every indent and ridge of his skin dragged along your cunt and the sensation of being filled combined with the attention he was giving to your clit started to build you towards your peak.

“Come for me, cmon.”

But even though you’d never come before at the hands of another, you knew what you wanted. You were afraid that if you came now, he wouldn’t actually fuck you. And if you were taken back to your rinky-dink town, you wanted to at least say you’d been fucked by someone you wanted.

“I want to feel you- hm- inside me.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” His teeth were gritted together again, like he was so entirely focused on making you come that he didn't want to hear anything else.

“Yes, I do.” You raised your hips to meet the thrust of his fingers. “I want your cock, I need you to fuck me-“

“Fuck.” He murmured, eyes lidded as whatever shaky resolve about actually fucking you he had broke. “For someone who never killed before this week, you’re dangerous.”

With swift movement, he pulled himself out of his pants and climbed up your body, pressing his hips against yours. He hovered above you, the head of his cock rested heavy on your clit, his hips rolling once to grind the length against your wet cunt.

“Please.” You murmured, raising your hips to meet his cock. He gave you a dark look, and if he had eyebrows you’re sure one of them would be raised as if to say ‘you ready?’

Then he started to press in, his thick head catching before he pushed through the tight ring of your opening. Your mouth was slack, eyebrows furrowed as you focused on relaxing for every inch that was slowly pressing into you. When you looked at him, he was entirely focused on watching his cock disappear into your wet heat.

He was slow, but you didn’t think it was due to any care for your comfort. No, from the look on his face, you would hazard a guess that he enjoyed slowly taking your virginity, feeling each inch of you give way to his thick cock. He liked the surrender.

When his hips finally nestled against yours, he rested for a moment, his breath heavy.

“Ready?”

Okay, maybe he cares slightly about your comfort- the thought was quickly erased when he pulled out and slammed back in, filling you quickly. You cursed, your hands flying to the bed to scramble for something to hold on to. But there were no sheets on the filthy mattress. So instead, you reached up to him, grasping the back of his duster for dear life as he began to fuck you in earnest.

He lowered himself as you wrapped your naked legs around his hips, bracing himself on his elbows above you.

“So fucking tight.” He murmured against your face. One of his hands slipped from where it was braced above you to circle around your clit, the pressure just enough to send you back towards your peak. “This cunt belongs to me now, y’hear?”

“Yes- fuck.” You babbled, and when he whispered against you to finally come, you did so with no hesitation. Your legs gripped him tighter against you, his thrusts shorter but more forceful with the constraint. With your cunt clenching around him as you sighed through the aftershocks of your orgasm, he removed his hand to suddenly grab your chin, looking you in the eyes.

“Where should I-“

“Inside me, inside me please.”

For a moment he looked like he was going to argue with you. But then you clenched down on his length again and his hips stuttered against you, a low groan escaping him. Reinvigorated, he began fucking you even harder, which had seemed impossible.

“Take it, take my cum like a good girl- that’s it-“ his words left him as he finally finished, his hips pumping as he cursed and spilled his warm spend inside you. You hummed at the feeling of it, the tiny thrusts as he pumped you full of him dragging his cock along your sensitive walls.

When he finally pulled out of you, watching as his cum dripped out of your opening, he looked back at your face with a sly smile.

“I hope you have some RadAway at home.”

____

The Ghoul didn’t bring you back into the city. He seemed to think you were experienced enough to handle the last hundred yards of desert without him. I’ll come back later for the rest of my caps, I have some business I need to deal with. Did you feel a little bad that you were cheating him out of three hundred caps? Yes. But you hadn’t thought this far when you’d paid him the first time, and now it was too late.

You barely said goodbye.

Once you were out of sight, you took off running in the opposite direction, only looking behind you once to make sure no one was watching or worse, following.

You were free.

____

Well, you were free for about two days.

Then, one evening, you sheltered yourself in an abandoned house. Two stories, though you only peeked in the upper story to see if there was anything worth grabbing. You didn’t want to risk the floor falling out from under your feet.

A noise in the doorway draws your attention upwards, to where the Ghoul stands, silhouetted in the setting sun, like he had just left for a second, not for days.

You’re allowed a split moment of happiness at the sight of the familiar figure before you recognize what's in his hands. You barely have a second to try and escape before, like a flash, he whips the lasso around your torso, drawing it tight and pulling you closer as you struggled against the rope. But it held fast, and with every passing second you were losing ground. Finally the pressure of the rope was too much and you collapsed to the ground, the sun bearing down in your eyes until a shadow fell over your face.

“Y’know, when I went back to your little… Rod-e-o to collect on the final portion of my payment, I really expected to see you there. Tellin’ people you regret ever leaving. Maybe I’d have to rough you up a bit for the caps, though I’m sure you’d enjoy that. So imagine my surprise when I find out your father has put up a reward for whoever finds ya and brings ya back.” He laughed, a cruel and humorless thing. “I’ll get paid for takin’ you out and takin’ you in. And the word around town is that there’s a man there willin’ to take you off your father’s hands.”

His last words made your stomach sink, more than anything else he had said. It was something your father had threatened, even if he hadn’t meant it as a threat. Maybe he thought it was your dream to marry and have children. But you knew that whatever man he picked for you to marry would be powerful, powerful enough to ensure that your father would remain in office until he died.

And powerful men were cruel.

“No-” You gasped out, suddenly out of breath.

“Ah-ah-ah.” The Ghoul tuts softly, leaning down. “D’ya really think a week is enough experience to survive out here?”

“I won’t go back.” You spit, renewing your struggle against the rope. “You can’t make me.”

If you were a complete idiot, you’d say: I’d rather die than go back. Because while, in spirit, it was true, you knew that he would take your word for it. And you really didn’t want to tempt him to put a bullet through your brain.

You may have fucked him, but you certainly weren’t anything special to him.

“You don’t have much of a choice, sweetheart.”

“He wants to marry me off!” You said, like saying it indignantly would change his mind about taking you in as a bounty. “I refuse.”

“And what’ll you do when I drag you back?”

Find a way to escape again, even if it takes years.

Like he read the answer in your eyes, he stood up straight.

“I sympathize, I really do-” You sincerely doubted it, but let him keep talking, “but unless you’ve got something better to offer me, I’m afraid you’re going in.”

“How many caps is he offering you?”

“600.”

“I have more saved.” You laughed, though it lacked any actual humor. “Every cap he gave me for years, I’ve squirreled away. Not letting me leave my room really helped me save money.”

“And how, exactly, are you going to get to your stash without your daddy finding you?”

You tried to find kindness in his words and were surprised when you did. Though he may not have meant it, he had already given you a perfect out the night before.

“No self-respecting man is going to want to marry a woman who fucked a ghoul. And no mayor will tolerate his daughter making a fool of him like that.”

For a moment, you think he takes offense to this. But then a smile creeps across his face, hot and hungry.

“Well then, I think we can come to an agreement.”

#don't let this flop #cooper howard #cooper howard x reader #cooper howard x you #the ghoul #the ghoul x reader #the ghoul x you #fallout #fallout series #fallout fanfic #reader insert #my writing #lemon #it is 7:30

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butchvampireheimerdinger · 5 months ago

Note

okay hear me out…butch4butch Sevika where Sevika is a power bottom???👀 reader is taller and stronger than her but very shy and intimidated by her🙈

Pairing: Powerbottom!Sevika x gentle giant-service top! reader

Warnings: ns/fw, fingering, cunnilingus, grinding/dry humping, smoking, mentions of violence, and horny lesbian activityyyy

Word count: 3k

A/N: Love you. Love this. You have come to the right place for this one, my friend. The lack of butch4butch Sevika content is criminalll if that woman has a type it begins with D and ends in Y-K-E-S. Anyways, how appropriate is it that my first fic is butch4butch Sevika smut. Checks out. (that being said, it is my first fic so you freaks betta be NICE) Now without further ado…

You Have No Idea

By ButchVampireHeimerdinger

It was the slow ending to an eventful shift at the last drop. Customers were in good spirits all night, likely due to a sudden influx of Piltie goods some gang had rattled up through more or less honorable means and was making its way through town. In any case, the energy was contagious and it had you, the buff and generally even-tempered server/bouncer, doing things you didn’t normally do. Like drink on the job — just a beer you had been nursing for over forty minutes — and fraternize with patrons. Y’know, other than the obligatory how are you, do you wanna pay out now or open a tab. Real actual conversations -- which led you to number three on the list of Things You Don’t Normally Do; you were hunched over the bar playing Texas Hold ‘Em with three regulars. Two were men, you didn’t remember their names, but they always came to the bar at about this time. A package deal — they snickered in your direction as a nearby shady-looking customer walked out on his tab.

“Hey, isn’t that your cue, tough guy?” The man gave you a patronizing sort of eyebrow raise as he dealt the next round.

Technically, it was. You got hired pretty much on account of your physique — you were 6’3” and a tank, always had been. Broad shoulders, biggest girl on the playground growing up, you gained muscle at the drop of a hat. You didn’t even try. But it was all for show. You were more of a lover than a fighter. Sometime in the first few months of the job the staff discovered you were better equipped to work inside the bar. Customers liked you because you were polite, a breath of fresh air from the culture of animosity that permeated the undercity. Still, it didn’t help your ego in situations like this. ”Hey, you don’t know what she’s got under her sleeve.” The third voice at the table spoke up. The right hand of Zaun. Sevika.

She had been a regular since before you started and probably would be long after. You had heard some pretty nasty stories about her and the things she was capable of. But when she came up to your counter for a drink, she came without malintent, always respectful to the waitstaff. It was disarming. Tonight, especially, your eyes lingered over her toned shoulders and sharp collarbones.You wanted to run your hands over them, to see how her body would react. And maybe it was the house IPA you had been drinking, but probably not.

Sevika gestured toward your dwindling pile of poker chips with her chin as she looked down, analyzing her hand. “Clearly, she must be the type to play the long game.” This earned her another light fit of snickers from bar idiots one and two, but they were easily impressed. You rolled your eyes.

Sevika raised two chips. The table matched. She spoke again.

“So, tough guy, do those arms of yours get you any female attention? Since you’re obviously not using them for any other tactile purpose,” her eyes traveled to the empty seat where the tab-skipper had been sitting.

You shrugged, suddenly warm and very aware of your body and not sure where to rest your gaze. “I get around.”

For some reason, tweedles dum and dee found this hilarious, and howls of laughter followed. You slapped your hand over your heart and feigned a look of deep hurt, to mask the bit of real hurt you were feeling. Yeah, it had been a while, but surely not long enough to warrant that response.

“Is it that implausible?”

Sevika chuckled and shook her head, but her expression was good-natured.

“Just make your move, Casanova.”

You had a full house. Three aces. Two kings. You matched, and didn’t raise.

Sevika raised, the men matched, and you folded.

The table revealed their hands and Sevika won the pile with a straight. Not a bad hand, but the round would’ve been yours if you had taken the risk. Sevika clicked her tongue, scolding you, which made your palms sweat. You averted her gaze and became suddenly interested in wiping down the bar.

Following your pitiful defeat, the two guys payed out, leaving the bar empty save for you, Sevika, and a couple stragglers who always stayed until morning and probably didn’t have anywhere else to spend the night. To your surprise, the woman beckoned you over once more. Something in your heart lifted. Something in your pants dropped.

“Blackjack?” She pushed the cards toward you, and her dominant sort of gaze made you feel, once again, compelled to do what she asked.

You won the first few rounds. Sevika was risky to a fault. If it wasn’t 21 exactly, trust she would draw. And she always made you the dealer, watching your hands intently, hungrily, even, as you shuffled. The third round was a tie, but she didn’t have anything left to raise.

“Tell you what,” she said. “You win this round and I’ll spread it around that I walked out on my tab, and you chased me down and kicked my ass for it. Should prevent other situations like our friend earlier, at least for a while.”

“Are my bouncer abilities really that pathetic?” You picked at the side of your nails. Sevika’s gaze pierced through you and you found it difficult to meet her eyes. But you didn’t necessarily hate the way her eyes took you in. Slowly and deliberately, like you were a battle map and she was trying to parse out her strategy.

“And if you win?” You looked up, all innocent. Maybe you imagined it, but your doe eyes seemed to rile her up a little bit. Something in the way her jaw shifted, the way she rubbed her flesh palm on her pants.

“Already planning for defeat? See, this is exactly your problem. You’re talking through a universe where you lose before we’ve even started.” She shoved her pile towards you again.

“Deal ‘em.” She commanded, you obliged.

“I’m serious! I just wanna know what I’m agreeing to. Fools rush in, and all that.” Your voice made everything sound like a question. With her, it was. Sevika was hard to figure out.

“You’re cute. If I win, I want…” The woman took a hit of the blunt she was holding and used it to gesture, her movements creating little loops of smoke that rose and dissipated. Her eyes followed them, and not you. For once.

“I want an hour. With you. N’ those arms.” You jerked while shuffling, accidentally knocking over your beer in your surprise. You picked it up quickly, hoping she didn’t notice.

“You serious?”

“Deadly. Fuck me up, Casanova.”

She won. Wasn’t even close. Three sevens, if you could believe it. As soon as you slapped the last seven down, you both shot up from the counter at light speed and she followed you to the back.

“A little eager, aren’t we?” Her voice was low and husky, but with a little something else.

��Sore winner,” was all you could think to respond. You shoved her lightly. She shoved you harder with her prosthetic arm. The two of you kept at it, pushing and shoving back and forth as you practically raced to The Last Drop’s back office. Play-fighting, like you were “one of the boys,” but it had a bit of a bite to it. Like you wanted to eat each other alive.

The office was hardly used except for the rare moments when staff wanted to crunch numbers. Or, of course, engage in extra-professional affairs like this one. That couch had seen some things. You fiddled with the key for what was apparently a moment too long.

“I’m getting bored out here, Casanova.” You looked into Sevika’s eyes through her thick brows, a couple inches below yours. You slammed your shoulder into the door and it gave way immediately, with a satisfying bang as it swung open. Sevika followed, grabbing you by the shirt as she brought your lips down to hers, hard, and kicked the door shut behind her without looking.

She dragged you toward her, her back pressed against the peeling drywall. Her tongue dragged against your bottom lip and something deep in your pelvis vibrated in anticipation. One of your hands reached up to the wall, to keep you both steady. Sevika grabbed your other hand and guided it under her tank top. You squeezed her breast, tracing over her nipple with your thumb. Your bodies pressed together and you brought your knee in between hers, rolling your hips forward and pressing your leg into her crotch. She moaned into your mouth. Like her voice, it was deep and gravelly.

You set a pace. Her hips seemed to agree with it, bucking upwards to get that friction where she needed it most. Her hands gripped your waist and hips as she started to manhandle you, making you move faster against her. Your kissing was frantic and sloppy, like there was anger behind it. Your lips shined with her spit, and you moved to kiss up and down her neck. She reacted with a throaty panting noise when you got to a sensitive spot — a fleshy and soft area where her jaw met with her neck. You twisted your head to the side and downward to get better access, to fully exploit that weakness. Without fully thinking through your actions, your sucking collapsed into biting. You drove your teeth into her neck and Sevika’s jaw shot upward as her panting became gasping. She grabbed the back of your head and pushed it harder against her neck to say what she couldn’t; more, more, more.

Your hands fumbled with her belt and she noticeably did not help you with it. It was like she got a kick out of watching you struggle. You finally got them unzipped and you reached under to start palming her through her boyshorts. She had already soaked through. Good.

You pulled away to look down at her again while tugging lightly at her waistband. You raised your eyebrows to ask, May I? Chin still tilted upward, she nodded, huffed out a “yuh” sort of noise, and hooked her leg around the back of yours to bring your chests closer, all rough.

You pulled down the panties and your fingers dipped into her folds. Sevika’s eyebrows knitted even closer together, if that was possible. You continued sucking and working that spot on her neck. Her lips were against your ear and you heard her panting grow more desperate, more melodic; whines and vocalizations mixed with the gruff and grainy rhythmic in-and-out of her breaths.

Your middle and ring finger sort of skated all around her entrance, just barely avoiding her swollen clit. You took in the sight — Sevika’s heaving chest, her eyes closed as she chased the pleasure you were giving her. Her moans grew to something not exactly desperate, that wasn’t like her, but deranged and shameless. She panted like she was breathing fire. And like she didn’t care if all of The Last Drop could hear her, even though they probably couldn’t.

The pulse of her hips grew a little more erratic and she shifted her legs like she was ready to switch positions. You gestured subtly with your head toward the couch, and she dragged you toward it.

The woman collapsed on it and rested her arms outward, elbows relaxed on top like it was a throne. She leaned as far back as she could as you helped work her pants and boyshorts all the way down until they dropped to her ankles. She pulled her shirt off with both hands, pulling it up and over from the back of the neckline. She threw the tank top to the side and all of the air left your lungs, as you took in the sight of her upper body. Where you were buff, she was cut. Unlike you, Sevika didn’t have the type of figure that was imposing simply by nature — her physique came from blood, sweat, and tears. She had the body of a bruiser, of someone who spent their life fighting. The Sevika before you made you realize why some of the patrons kept their distance. But it somehow made you want to get closer. It made you want to please her, and to be good at it.

Sevika had a manspread going and you dropped to your knees in front of her. But she wasn’t having that — not yet. With her flesh hand she grabbed you by the throat and dragged you up to her lips for another messy kiss. Your teeth clashed together and when your tongues made contact, you felt those butterflies low in your pelvis. You moaned into her mouth instinctively, and it came out higher and breathier than you expected. You felt her lips form a slight smile against yours and she released her hold on your neck, making you drop down to your knees. You were certain the impact must have shook the entire city block.

Breathing heavy, you went to start kissing and sucking at her inner thigh, but she tilted your chin upward to look at her. Breathless, she commanded,

“Take your shirt off for me, Casanova. I wanna see those arms while you… Yeah.”

You fought the smile forming and stripped for her. You took off your tank top and sports bra the same way she had — in one fluid motion, from the back. You were caught between a sudden wave of self consciousness and the urge to draw it out, to put on a show for her. You settled at maintaining eye contact as you subtly flexed for her, and placed your broad hands on her knees. Sevika smiled, all smug as she reached over to a nearby discarded vest, brought out the rest of her blunt, and lit up as her eyes poured over your exposed upper body. She inhaled deep using her metal arm, and with her flesh hand she traced over your biceps, satisfied.

All confident, you started on her inner thighs, taking your time. When your lips finally connected with her wet cunt, you heard her make a sharp exhale through her teeth. You kept going, first going over it all with a flat tongue, drinking in the moment, then using your tongue to explore her folds. Sevika let out a satisfied hum as you started sucking at her swollen, neglected clit.

That was when you brought your fingers up to her entrance, casually tracing, nothing else. That pissed her off.

Sevika slapped the top of the couch to get your attention. Your eyes snapped up to hers as she leaned forward to get all up in your face, with her signature sneer on.

“Did someone pay you to waste my time?”

You froze.

“That wasn’t rhetorical, I’m seriously asking you if some outside party with an interest in distracting me paid you to bring me here and do absolutely nothing with me.” You raised your eyebrows, eyes all wide and innocent. That made her groan, and she covered her face with one hand, your puppy eyes making her feel horny and desperate and a little guilty about snapping at you.

“Just. Fuck. Me.” She collapsed backward and you didn’t respond, just immediately did what she asked. You pushed your two fingers inside her without warning — hard. Again she exhaled through her teeth.

With your mouth, you continued giving her clit attention, and you pushed in and out of her, fingertips maintaining contact with her front wall, the one closest to you.

The sounds she made were pornographic, and it made you aware of the pool of slick that had established itself in the crotch of your boxers. Listening to her body, you gradually picked up the pace and you found Sevikas hand weave through your hair, grabbing you roughly at the scalp and pressing you closer and closer still.

Her face was angled toward the sky as she whined, her metal hand gripping the cushion tight enough to create what was probably going to be permanent ripples in the fabric. You brought her closer and closer and her grip on your head tightened as she bucked her hips upward, essentially fucking herself on your tongue and fingers. She occasionally let out a depraved vocalization that a trained ear might recognize as “fuck,” “don’t stop,” and “faster-FUCK faster.”

Until the pulse inside her cunt became erratic, and you felt a familiar tremor in her legs. You didn’t let up. You started fucking her deeper, with more pressure, using your tongue to play with her clit faster. Sevika’s thighs involuntarily snapped up to trap your head and you brought your hands up to brace them. Your tongue still moving as she cried out, loud and animalistic as she rode out her orgasm. Her thighs held you so tight against her pussy that you couldn’t escape if you tried, and the strength would probably have suffocated someone more petite.

Eventually, Sevika’s cries retreated back into deep panting and her legs dropped back to the floor, still trembling and spasming. She looked down at you, eyes half lidded, and gave you what could have been interpreted as a smile. She spread her arms back out on the top edge of the couch cushions, somehow still holding the half-smoked blunt. You shook your hair and a bit of ash fell out, which made you giggle. You were so invested in fucking her, you hadn’t noticed the active fire hazard against your skin the whole time.

With her chin, the woman gestured to the spot on the couch next to her. You settled in, your sides touching and your head leaning back against where her bicep was resting. She wrapped that arm around to bring the blunt to your lips.

“You can finish it, I don’t like the roach,” she said, and you obliged. You took a deep hit from her fingers and the last fiery bits assaulted your lungs, but you liked it. Sevika ashed it out on the couch, as if you hadn’t already desecrated it enough. You settled into a comfortable silence and she allowed you to lean your head on her pec, still uncovered. Until she spoke up.

“Promise me something, Casanova.” Her voice hoarse and gravelly from the earlier activities.

“Mm?” you responded. She wrapped her arm around you to reach up and ruffle your hair.

“Promise me you’ll never get good at cards.” You sucked your teeth and sneered back at her, giving her a hefty shove, which she gladly returned with equal force.

#arcane league of legends #arcane #arcane headcanon #arcane s2 #sevika #sevika arcane #sevika x reader #sevika smut #arcane smut #sevika headcanon #arcane fanfic #arcane fanfiction #sevika fanfic #sevika fanfiction #vampdoessmut #vampdoessevikasmut

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kteezy997 · 3 months ago

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and btw could u maybe start an series with an assistant x Timothée ?

Beyond Business-part one//t.c.

Warnings: cursing, mention of alcohol and drug use

“Timothée, you have the power to end this, any time you want to, so why don’t you?” you asked, waking into his home with him.

“You don’t get it, okay? It’s more complicated than you know.” he grumbled, heading to the fridge, opening it up to grab a bottle of beer.

“Timmy you reek of alcohol, do you really think you need more?”

He gulped down some of the cold liquid, stopping to glare at you, “As if it’s any of your business. You’re not my mother, y/n, just go home.”

As harsh as he was, he was right, he was your boss, and you weren’t friends. Your concern could only go so far before it was too personal.

Neither of you said anything more, Timmy left the kitchen, you assumed he was headed to crash in his bedroom after nursing on the brown bottle.

You left his apartment, reflecting on the past year of your life as Timothée Chalamet’s personal assistant. As you drove home, you remembered how goofy and lively he was when you were first hired. Now, he was becoming a hollow shell of that man.

He had been in a relationship with Kylie Jenner for nearly a year before you met him. But as time went on, after spending time with him, you wondered to what extent the relationship was real, or if it could qualify as a relationship at all. It seemed, to you, more of a situation-ship.

For the last six months, you saw Timmy become more dependent on alcohol and weed to help his moods. These days he was working crazy hours, traveling all over promoting his latest film. He was skinnier than you had ever seen him, and he was obviously tired as well. You, along with other people in his life, were worried about him.

The bad thing is, he is a grown man and he is going to do what he wants. He cannot be controlled any more than any other adult. So, for the most part, you felt as if you were watching him destroy himself and you were powerless to stop it.

.......

Timmy was bright and early with his apology text the next morning.

"hey, I'm sorry about last night. I shouldn't have been such a dick to you. especially not you, you don't deserve that. Let's have a good day together, yeah?"

You knew that he did not have the energy to hire a new assistant if you were to ever quit. He needed you, you both knew that. So you answered just a moment later.

"Okay. Want coffee after I'm finished running errands this morning?"

"Yes please! Thank you." he texted back immediately.

A couple of hours later, you made it to Timmy's place after picking up his dry cleaning, some groceries, his mail, and two coffees, one for him and one for you. You let yourself in with your copy of his key.

As you carefully carried the armfuls of items, you saw him drying his hair with a towel in the living room. "Hey, let me help." he said, dropping the towel on one of the couches and hustling over to you.

"Thanks." you said, and together you set all of the bags and the coffees onto the kitchen island. Carefully, you lay his garment bag flat on the surface.

"No, thank you for doing all of this." Timmy insisted, taking his attention from the items on the counter to look in your eyes.

You felt like his green eyes were piercing into your soul. This was the real Timmy. He had showered and sobered up from the drunken night before. "Well, it is my job."

“I know, but I’m still really grateful for you. Not everyone would put up with me for as long as you have.” he smiled.

You returned a smile to him, then said, “I should get these groceries put away.” you grabbed one of the bags, “But go ahead and tell me what’s on the agenda for today.”

As you started taking items out of the grocery bag, he cleared his throat, saying, “Oh, um, I just got some calls to make, so if you’d go through and answer emails for now that’d be great. After you’re done in the kitchen of course, I mean, no rush.” Between his sentences, he was also unloading the bags.

“Okay.” you giggled at him trying to help you, “I can get this, Timmy, you go make your calls.”

"Yeah," he set down a can of coffee, "yeah, okay." He gave you a soft smile before turning to leave the kitchen.

To you, he seemed almost...nervous? The vibes with him were different today. Not bad, just different. You didn't know what was up with him, but it was not your place to pry.

.......

A little bit later, you sat at his dining room table, replying to his vast number of emails on his laptop. In between calls, he would look through a script and read over his business contracts.

It began to feel like a normal workday again. Every once in a while, you would ask him a question and he would answer you and vice versa. He was himself.

"Alright, thank you, bye." Timmy ended another phone call. He sighed; it had been hours since he started. You knew that he was exhausted from talking to people for the day.

You peaked up from the laptop screen, still expertly typing your email message. Timmy made his way over to you.

As you typed, you heard his footsteps coming closer, until he was right next to your chair. You hit 'send,' and went on to another email, as nonchalantly as you could.

He leaned down, his hands on the table, his arms caging you on either side. You stopped, turned your head slightly to look at him, your heart was beating so fast.

January 5, 2025

Happy New Year, guys! Let me know if you’re excited for this new story!❤️

@gatoenlaciudad @thebetawolfgirl @musicandbooksaremyhappyplace @softhecreator @tchalamss @lixzey @bitchyunknownuser @ducktapebar @aoi-targaryen @yukideadinside @elloise0 @thatoneweirdgirl17 @mel-vaz @sammy-halpert @iwishchalamet @that-one-fangirl69 @jindongdongie @briefkittenearthquake @imnotoverlyobsessive

#timothée chalamet #timmy chalamet #timothée imagine #timothee x reader #timothee fanfic #timothee chalamet #personal assistant #slow burn

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andhumanslovedstories · 2 months ago

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This sounds like a shitty question but I promise it's in good faith: How does a healthcare strike work? Like what happens to the patients? When this strike was first kicking off I remember a lot of people saying doctors/nurses/healthcare CANT strike because it's too necessary, which is obviously nonsense, but like... what actually is in place to stop people from getting hurt during the strike?

Massive props btw, striking esp for something so important is brave and hard and I'm in such support of you guys. Hopefully it ends soon and inspires more healthcare workers across the nation to do the same bc the awful treatment has gone on FAR too long.

This is an incredibly fair question! And I appreciate you asking it. It works the way all strikes do: people don't do the work. The consequences of workers refusing to work is the point. And it sucks! We're fully aware of how much this acutely affects patients. A healthcare strike is an argument that whatever short-term harm might be done as a result of work stoppage is less harmful than the long-term harm of current conditions. Other hospitals and facilities can help with patients who would normally come to a striking Providence facility, but obviously there's only so much that they can absorb. Everywhere else is busy as well.

In the case of our strike specifically in Oregon (I can't speak to healthcare unions anywhere else), we gave a mandatory ten-day notice of intention to strike. Ideally, negotiating happens hard during that period. In practice, Providence said they were too busy coordinating replacement care to meet with the union during that time. Providence puts out travel contract nurses and hires scabs to keep hospitals running. In addition, the jobs that aren't unionized are still working. Nursing management works the floor as well.

Through travel contracts and having to turn away patients due to lack of staffing, the Providence system is bleeding money. The hope is that this and public pressure works to bring them to the negotiating table.

#nursing tag #nurseblr #nursing strike #labor rights #portland

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nursingjobs12 · 7 months ago

Text

A healthcare nursing agency connects nurses with job opportunities, offering flexible schedules, competitive pay, and placements in various healthcare settings.

#healthcare nursing agency #top travel nursing agencies #medical hiring agency #Full time Nursing Jobs

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wokeupinmars · 7 months ago

Text

The Pretty Nurse Who Lives Down the Hall

Pairing: Sierra Six / Court Gentry x Reader

Summary: Six spots a familiar face while he and Claire move into their latest apartment.

Warnings: Implications of past sexual relationship?

Word Count: 1.6K

Author’s Note: This is the first part of the Playing House series.

Part Two: “I’ll go wherever you go”

Part Three: The End of Beginning

Please comment and/or reblog if you enjoyed this!!

RG Masterlist

The sound of your laugh traveled down the hall and stopped him in his tracks.

Six’s eyes darted in the direction. He could make out the back of your head as you waited for the elevator. Was that really you?

It might have been over two years since he had last seen or spoken to you but there was no doubt in his mind that it was you. He could recognize your laugh anywhere.

He watched from afar as you got onto the elevator. You turned and before the doors closed, he could have sworn you made eye contact.

Claire’s voice pulled his attention from the closed steel doors, “Why are you just standing there?”

Six’s attention turns back to the young girl in the empty apartment, struggling to push the raggedy old couch from the center of the room to the wall. “Claire please don’t touch that,” he tells her, walking inside and shutting the door.

“Are we just supposed to leave it in the middle of the apartment?” She asks, putting her hands on her hips.

“No, but it’s dirty and heavy.”

“What were you looking at?” She questions.

“Nothing,” he responds, going through flyers of local restaurants the previous tenant had left behind.

Claire crosses her arms, “So you weren’t staring at the pretty nurse who lives down the hall?”

“I haven’t had the chance to do deep dives on our neighbors, if there’s a nurse that lives on this floor then I’m sure I’ll know within the next day or two.” Six didn’t let it show but the possibility of you living down the hall had him on edge.

You were a highly skilled assassin and took jobs as offered. You didn’t work for anyone, you worked for you. If the price was right and the target wasn’t a child you’d take the money and execute the job at hand.

Were you here for him?

You wouldn’t hurt Claire, he was almost certain about that.

His mind reeled thinking of the possible reasons why you were here. What if you were hired by the CIA to track him down take him out and bring Claire back to them?

He was quick to rule that idea out, as far as he knew you had never done a job for them before. But that didn’t mean you weren’t working for someone else, a lot of people wanted the gray man dead. And who better to do the job than you?

—

It was late when you got home. Your apartment was pitch black but you could still sense his presence.

And then you felt it, the muzzle of his gun digging into the small of your back. “You know, most people have the decency to knock."

“What are you doing here?” His voice was gruff.

“I live here, what are you doing here?”

He presses the piece deeper into your back, “Not good enough. What are you doing here?”

“I’m a nurse now. I live here and work in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital,” you answer, “Can I sit down? I’ve been on my feet all day.”

He pushed you towards your armchair.

You take a seat and he sits on the coffee table in front of you, his pistol still pointed at you. You slip your shoes off and rub your feet, “Can you put the gun away? We’re all friends here.”

“We’re not friends.”

You sit up straight and cross your legs, “You’re right. We’re not, we crossed that line a long time ago…I think about our weekend in Paris often.”

The memories of that weekend floods his mind. A majority of that weekend was spent with the two of you holed up in a hotel room with a balcony view of the Eiffel Tower, not that either of you spent any time soaking up the sight.

He clears his throat, “That was then, this is now.” Despite this rough tone, he does set the gun down.

“Who’s the girl?” You couldn’t hold your tongue, you wanted to know why he was here just as much as he wanted to know about you.

Six scoffs, “Like you don’t already know.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I did.” It was true, you took pride in being three steps ahead. “Are you here on a job or something? Posing as a single father?”

He leans forward, “It’s a long story.”

You mimic his movements, “I have time.”

A moment of silence passes before he moves in a little closer, “My place.”

You raise your eyebrows, “Wasting no time, huh? I guess some things really do never change,” you knew going to his apartment was about control for him but that didn’t stop you from teasing him.

He glares at you and you grin, “Lighten up Court.”

—

You knew they had just arrived but it became even clearer as you stepped into the apartment and saw the lack of furniture.

The two of you sat at the kitchen table. He explained the events that transpired over the course of the past few months.

“That poor kid,” you say with a frown, “How’s she holding up?”

Six lets out a sigh, “She’s a tough kid, I’m still worried but I think she’s handling it better than most people.”

You nod, “Strong girl.…and you?”

He drums his fingers on the table, “I haven’t really thought about my feelings. I’ve just been focused on making sure Claire’s okay and that we’re safe.”

“And do you feel safe here?”

He stares at you, his eyes softening when they meet yours, “I think so.”

His words hang in the air before he speaks up again, “So you’re a nurse now?” His eyes scan over your scrubs, “Quite the professional 180, don’t you think?”

You hum in agreement, “From taking lives to saving them…who would have guessed?”

The corner of his mouth twitches up into a slight smile, “Why the switch?”

There’s a brief hesitation before you answer, “Two years ago I turned down a hit…made an enemy out of the guy that tried to hire me and things got ugly for him and his goons when they tried to come after me.”

“Was it another kid?”

You shook your head, “No…he…” you were trying to find the right words, “He made things personal,” you spoke firmly and looked directly at him.

He knew what you were saying or rather what you weren’t saying.

He opens his mouth to say something but then he hears the creak of a door followed by the sound of footsteps approaching the kitchen, “Six—oh hi,” she greets once she sees he’s not alone.

She stands right beside him, it's obvious from her body language that she's wary of your presence. “Why are you bothering our neighbors?” She scolds him before turning to you with an apologetic look on her face, “I’m sorry about him.”

You watch in amusement at the scene unfolding in front of you before taking the opportunity to introduce yourself to her.

“She’s my friend.” It sounds more like a question than a statement but you nod in agreement.

“You?” Claire points at him, “You made a friend?”

“Old friends, actually,” you correct.

She looks to Six for confirmation, only shifting her gaze back to you after he nods. “How’d you guys meet?”

“Work,” you both answer.

“So you also worked for the CIA?” She asks, taking a seat at the table.

“No.” You were trying to keep your answers as vague as possible.

“So then you guys met on a mission?” Neither of you had the chance to respond as she continued with her questioning, this one starting with a gasp, “Were you his target?”

“No,” you both say.

You glance at him before answering, “We did meet on a mission, we had the same target.”

She lets out an “oh” and leans back.

“We teamed up to take him out,” Six tells her.

Claire tilts her head in confusion, “I thought you worked alone?”

“Not always. I’ve been partnered with people, but those were always planned.”

Her eyes bore into you, “So you were the exception?”

“I guess so,” you tell her.

She looks back at Six, a sly smile on her face, “Huh, I wonder why?”

“I wonder,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes at her implications, “You know it’s pretty late, you should be in bed.”

“It’s only 11:30.”

“Exactly,” he states, “Go to bed.”

“Fine,” Claire huffs out and pushes the chair back, the screeching of its legs scraping against the floor pierces the room, “But you could’ve just said you wanted to be alone with your lady friend.”

You stifle a laugh at her teasing.

“Don’t encourage her!” He sounded so stern but you can see the hint of a smile on his lips.

“Goodnight, Sweetheart,” you tell her as she walks out of the kitchen. She calls back a simple “Night.”

—

You and Six sat in silence.

“It is getting pretty late…I should get going,” you say getting up.

“You know…” he starts, standing up too, “Claire has a heart condition…maybe…maybe you can come around to make sure everything’s okay with her pacemaker.”

It’s a half-truth but you don’t call him on it, “I can do that.”

His hand rests on the small of your back as he walks you to the door. “It was nice seeing you again,” you tell him.

“It was,” he affirms.

“Goodnight Court,” you say softly, before turning and walking down the hall.

You glance back at him once you make it to your door. He was still standing there, only retreating back into his apartment once you unlocked the door to yours.

—

Part Two: “I’ll go wherever you go”

Part Three: The End of Beginning

#sierra six x reader #court gentry x reader #sierra six #sierra six x you #court gentry x you #court gentry fic #sierra six fic #the gray man #ryan gosling x reader #court gentry imagine #the gray man fanfiction #the gray man fic

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callsign-muffin · 8 months ago

Text

Heal Together: Chapter 1

(Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw fic)

I've been lurking on here for a while, reading Top Gun fics and I recently got inspired to write one of my own. Hopefully someone reads it and likes it!

Note about the format: Between every header is a change in the point of view :)

Summery: When Rooster was med-evaced back to San Diego from the mission field, the last thing he expected was to wake up with a tube down his throat and the most beautiful woman he's ever seen at his bedside.

Masterlist

Word Count: 2.1k

“Hey Carly, I’m taking over for room 4 today. Are you ready to give report?” You ask the cute blonde night shift nurse, she looked about 12 years old. What in the hell was she doing in the ICU of a military hospital? Hell, you should be asking yourself the same question. You hated it here at this boys club where nurses were ignored as a female dominated profession, despite being the people who spend the most amount of time at the patient’s bedside in a 12 hour stretch. But you were only one week into this eight week travel assignment and the money was great, so you just had to grin and bear it and make as few enemies as possible.

“The census is low, is this gonna be your only patient?” She asked.

“Yeah.” You pulled out your report sheet and pen, “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

You could tell Carly was fresh off of orientation by how nervous she looked before beginning to speak.

“Hey,” You placed a comforting hand on her knee, “take your time, tell me what you know, and if I have any questions I’ll ask them when you’re done. You just finished a long shift, it’s okay to be a little out of it. We’ll get all the info we need together. No pressure, okay?”

“Okay,” Carly nodded and took a deep breath, “This is Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, 35 year old male, full code, no known allergies…”

You quietly took down the pertinent information about Lt. Bradshaw as Carly spoke. He was a pilot, recovered after a crash, and was stitched back together pretty well on the aircraft carrier, he went septic and was transported back to the states to your hospital. Pretty standard stuff. He was currently on a ventilator for breathing support but all seemed to be going in a positive direction despite the shitty circumstances.

Carly finished her report with a sigh of relief, you had a feeling the staff nurses weren’t as respectful when receiving report from a new graduate. “Any questions?”

“Any family at the bedside?” You asked.

“No, no family. Apparently a guy named Pete Mitchell calls daily for updates, they’re not related but he’s included on the patient’s medical information release forms, so we can talk to him. Chart says he’s single, no siblings, and both parents have passed away.” Carly yawned, she was beginning to fade after a long night. You didn’t want to hold her up anymore than necessary, she needed to get home and go to bed.

“Okay,” You clicked your pen, “Sounds good. Let’s go check lines and meds so you can get out of here.”

She paused for a second as you got up from your chair at the nurses station, “Y/N… thank you for being so nice… I’m only a week off of orientation and things are still so new…”

You smiled at the compliment, “We’ve all been there. Every nurse on this unit was new at one point and I think sometimes they forget that. Hell, I’m a traveler and this is only my second week and there’s so much that’s new to me too. You’re doing great.”

You spent the first part of your morning before rounds with the care team just cleaning up the patient, organizing the room, all that good stuff. Though it wasn’t necessarily considered “professional”, you played some music softly from your phone as you worked. You found that music or just talking to patients on vents helped with agitation. You couldn’t imagine anything more tortuous than listening to repetitive beeping and alarms all day long and nothing else. Though most managers didn’t like it, that didn’t stop you. What were they gonna do? Fire you? Hospitals hire travelers at such a high price point when they’re understaffed and desperate. They needed you more than you needed them.

█ ✪ █▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█ ✪ █

“When the sun goes down, we’ll be groovin’

When the sun goes down, we’ll feel alright

When the sun sinks down over the water

Everything is hotter when the sun goes down…”

Who the fuck listens to Kenny Chesney anymore? Rooster thought to himself.

He knew he was sick, the docs on the ship told him that before they knocked him out to shove the tube down his throat. They told him he’d be med-evaced back to San Diego because the hospital where he was overseas didn’t have the capabilities to take care of someone as sick as him. He didn’t know how long he had been there, all the days run together when you’re too weak to open your eyes. He was used to having things done to him, he was past the point of getting agitated about it, because he knew they’d just sedate him more.

“Alright, Bradshaw.” A confident voice said, “All of your lines are untangled, your room is clean, and your initial assessment is done… How about we have a little spa day? You’re smellin’ a little… ripe.”

RUDE!

“HA! You can hear me! You raised your eyebrows!” She giggled, damn it was a cute giggle. Rooster honestly hadn’t realized he was moving his face. But he believed her because that’s what his face usually does when he’s surprised. “You’ve been caught. No more playing dumb.”

Water started running, splashing, and the suction was turned on… that sound usually meant his mouth was gonna get cleaned and he was gonna feel something funny down his throat. He hated it.

“Carly told me you were getting agitated during mouth care last night. Since you can hear me, I’m going to tell you everything I’m doing, so don’t get sassy with me.” She said, “Deal?”

Anything for the first person not to treat me like a damn vegetable. This was the first time someone actually talked to him and told him what the fuck was happening since he got here. It was a welcome change.

The kind yet sassy voice interrupted his thoughts, “Okay, mouth care. I’ll be quick, I promise.”

She didn’t lie to him, she was quick and the stupid suction caused him minimal discomfort. Maybe it was because he could brace himself, or maybe it was because she was just really good at her job.

“I’m about to give you a full body bath, so how about we get to know each other a little bit.” She said as she adjusted his sheets and pillows to reposition him, placing a towel under his head, and rinsing his hair with warm water.

Rooster’s whole body relaxed.

“My name is Y/N Y/L/N and I’m obviously your nurse today and will probably be for the next few days…” Nurse Y/N went on about where she’s from, her hobbies, how she’s not making many friends in this new hospital she’s been contracted out to.

Welcome to the military, it’s a boy’s club. He wished he could say that to her. He imagined medicine was similar to aviation, full of egos.

Before Rooster knew it, his whole body had been washed from head to toe. He hadn’t felt this clean in what felt like years.

“So Lieutenant… not to be crude but… I gotta clean your bits. But at least we’ve really gotten to know each other.” Nurse Y/N said, “Your girlfriend will thank me later.”

Ha! Rooster laughed to himself, What girlfriend?! My dick hasn’t been played with in months!

Like with the mouth care, her cleaning was quick and respectful. And damn, being clean felt so good. She went on to change his gown, sheets, and blankets. Rooster truly felt like a new man.

“Lieutenant Bradshaw, you’ve never looked better.” She said with a satisfied sigh.

That’s a damn lie, but I’ll take the compliments wherever I can get them at this point.

“Hey Y/N,” Another female voice said, “They’re starting with you for rounds. Are you ready to present your patient or should I stall?”

“Nah, I’m ready. Tell them to come in whenever.” Nurse Y/N said, then her voice got low and she whispered to Bradley, “I’m gonna try to get them to lighten your sedation and move towards trials of turning the ventilator off. It’s not gonna be comfortable but the sooner we start working towards getting that tube out of your throat, the sooner you can get the hell out of here.”

Rooster wanted to make sure she knew he heard her and that he was on board, it took every ounce of strength in his body, but he nodded.

█ ✪ █▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█ ✪ █

“No way.” The resident physician said simply after you gave your recommendation with your presentation of Lt. Bradshaw

You were dumbfounded. What the hell did he mean no?!, “This patient was more than ready to move towards extubation.”

“And what makes you the expert?” the resident asked.

Oh lord, this fresh out of med school asshole was turning rounds into a dick measuring contest.

“The fact that I’ve been at his bedside for the past three and a half hours, I assessed him, bathed him, turned him, and he is showing signs of progress. The next step is spontaneous breathing trials and extubation. The longer he stays on the vent, the more likely he is to get pneumonia, as we all should know, Doctor.” You explained coolly but made sure to add his (probably newly earned) title.

“I agree with…” The attending looked at you and scanned your badge, “... Y/N… What do you think from a Respiratory Therapy standpoint, Brent?” He looked over at Brent, the RT.

Brent smirked and narrowed his eyes at the resident, “I also think moving towards extubation is a good thing. If he has two successful trials, he could be off the vent by the end of the day.”

The attending physician nodded, “Then it’s a plan. And I think this is a really good lesson for the residents and medical students with us on rounds, the nurses know more about the patient than we do. We should always consider their recommendations because they have the most valuable view on the patient, simply because they spend time with them.”

You tried to dim the glow that was on your face.

“Thanks, Dr…” You scanned the attending’s badge the same way he did yours.

“Carter, Brendan Carter.” He extended his hand and you shook it, “Glad to have you here.”

That was the most welcome anyone had made you feel in the last week here. Who would’ve thought a wrinkly old attending doctor with dancing eyes would be the person to stand up for you and make you feel secure in your clinical decision making.

█ ✪ █▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓█ ✪ █

Rooster wasn’t sure how much time had gone by since Nurse Y/N told him she was turning down his sedatives but it felt like he could open his eyes almost instantly. It was so… bright. Once his eyes adjusted, he scanned his surroundings, the lights weren’t even on but the sun shining through the large window felt blinding. He looked to his left and saw the machine that the tube in his throat was attached to, the machine that had kept him alive for God knows how long. He looked to his right and saw multiple IV poles that attached him to lines and lines of medicine and fluid. Further to his right, he saw a woman standing at a computer, typing away furiously, her face was serious yet beautiful, was that Nurse Y/N?

“Good morning, Lt. Bradshaw.” She said quietly, “You’re still attached to your breathing tube, so you can’t talk. Now that you’re awake we’re one step closer to getting you off that thing. Sound good?”

Rooster nodded slowly, wishing he could thank her for everything. For talking to him, bathing him, treating him like a human-being.

“Do you feel strong enough to write?” She asked, “Can I get you a whiteboard?”

He nodded again.

“I’ll be right back.” She swiftly left the room.

Rooster couldn’t help but love watching her walk away. Along with a beautiful face, he could tell she had a great body hiding underneath those scrubs. It had been so long since he’d seen a pretty girl.

She returned quickly with a whiteboard and a marker, handing it to him, “What’s on your mind Lieutenant?”

Call me Bradley. He scribbled,

“Nice to meet you Bradley.” She smiled down at him, “How are ya feelin’?”

Better now that I’m clean and awake. He wrote.

“There’s something healing about a bath and being taken out of your drug induced sleep, huh?” She giggled.

Rooster nodded and started writing again, Thank you for everything.

“No biggie. I’m glad to see you doing so well. Is it okay if I do a full assessment on you, just since you’re awake now?” She asked.

He nodded, this girl could do anything she wanted to him. She was basically his angel.

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