#THE WAY I'D LET THIS MAN BE MY MASTER

[weakformingyu]

WONWOO AS A VAMPIRE AJDNKAJDIANSKAJSIAJ

twisted fate

🌙 staring. Wonwoo x afab!Reader

🔮 preview. “He deserved it,” Wonwoo assures you, reaching out to grab you by the back of the neck, pulling you closer. He’s covered in blood, and he looks like a sexy, wild monster. But he’s your monster, and you can’t help but react, leaning in- “Jesus Christ,” you hear Jeonghan breathe, turning to give you and Wonwoo privacy while he presses his lips against yours hungrily. At first, you can try to ignore the wet liquid on your fingertips as you grab at his strong shoulders, but you can’t ignore the taste on his tongue. Your body goes rigid and Wonwoo pulls back with a sigh, resting his forehead against yours. It’s an oddly peaceful moment amongst the chaos.

tw/cw. murder/blood, dickhead vampire wonwoo, yandere subthemes, kidnapping?, biting, blood play, throat grabbing, manhandling, begging, controlling!wonwoo, praise, dirty talk, fingering, mean dom Wonwoo, multiple reader orgasms, finger-licking, choking, unprotected sex, big dick Wonwoo, size kink, slight dacryphilia, gentle spanking, dumbification, begging, hair pulling, etc… I pet names: (hers) darling, brat, pet, etc.

👹 rating. 18+ explicit I wc. 14.3k

🍭 aus. vampire/vampire hunter au, soulmate au, enemies to lovers, etc…

☀️ mlist + an. I guess for October I just put out bangers, this one has a lot of blood play cuz it's vampire wonwoo, so be warned

There’s something different about you, and Wonwoo notices the moment you step into the bar. He has his fair share of experience with places that cater to vampires, and after over a hundred years, he knows how to spot humans with an interest in his kind. Many of the women swarming around him have a certain look in their eye, their pulses racing with excitement, but you… well, there’s something off about the way you hold yourself.

You certainly look the part of a fang bunny, your attire all black, but you’re dressed much more conservatively than the lingerie clad girls that normally frequent this place. Still, even with your form half hidden under a leather jacket, Wonwoo can tell he likes what he sees of you. 

Some of his friends like the hunt. They have big egos and take pleasure in chasing their food down, but Wonwoo doesn’t share in this thirst for a conquest. He won’t approach you, he’ll simply watch. It will be amusing to see what you end up doing tonight if nothing else.

His eyes follow you as you head to the bar, leaning over the counter to talk with one of the human workers. From a distance, and with the bar practically full of noise, Wonwoo can’t make out your words, but that doesn’t really matter to him. You’re interesting enough to watch, but Wonwoo’s not sure he’d actually care for anything you have to say, especially not when he can stare at your ass instead.

The discussion is a short one, and Wonwoo catches the bartender nodding in his direction. This is new behaviour, but the vampire supposes he shouldn’t be shocked at the loose lipped humans who work here. No one keeps a secret like a vampire, and as Wonwoo watches you slip a bill over the counter, he’s filled with annoyance at the money hunger of mere mortals.

You slip into the crowd again, and it’s clear you’re making your way over toward the elevated section of the club, where Wonwoo sits at a table drinking what appears to be red wine with two of his broodmates. 

“Who are you watching?” Mingyu asks, leaning forward to get a better look. 

“No one important,” Wonwoo responds smoothly, swirling the blood in his wine glass before downing it. He’s curious as to what will happen next, and if you are coming over in the hopes of being bitten, he wants to be satiated enough to not give into the temptation of draining you. 

Vampire bars generally have a strict no killing policy. The underworld has few sanctuaries like this one, and they can’t have human law enforcement going through their ‘wine barrels’ if a murder takes place in or around the property. 

Wonwoo’s eyes find you again. You’re much closer now, and your gaze is fixed on him. You’re like a cute little butterfly heading straight for the spider’s web, and it makes Wonwoo grin to himself. 

He stands up from the booth when you’re a few feet away, and Wonwoo notes your pulse quicken, your steps faltering. To your credit, Wonwoo is much larger now than when he was sitting, and he has to lower his gaze to meet your own. “Are you lost?” he asks, taking in your outfit at a leisurely pace now that you’re right in front of him.

“No, I-” You take a breath. “Are you Wonwoo?”

“Depends who’s asking,” he muses.

“I’ve been looking for you,” you try to explain, raising your voice over the noise of the bar. 

Wonwoo can hear you perfectly fine, but he knows the noise must be difficult on your weak human ears. He leans forward. “Sounds interesting. Let’s step outside to talk, it’s too loud in here.”

He watches the way you pause, considering the proposition.

You’re definitely not a fang bunny. Any vampire lover would jump at the chance to get alone with him. You’re much too guarded, and it intrigues him even more.

“Okay,” you nod. 

Wonwoo steps closer, hand finding the small of your back as he begins to guide you through the club toward the back exit. You stiffen under his touch, and Wonwoo’s fingers skim over the hilt of what he presumes to be a blade under your leather jacket.

He wonders how you got in with a badly concealed weapon, but he supposes the human bouncers can be just as susceptible to bribery as bartenders can. He’ll have to talk with the club owner about hiring vampire security, even if such jobs are ��below’ his kind. 

Your heart rate is increasing with each step, but you’re doing your best to breathe evenly, and Wonwoo is amused by it. Either you know he’s a vampire, in which case, you should know you can’t fool him, or, maybe you’re just stupid, he can’t quite tell.

Wonwoo’s heart doesn’t beat. It hasn’t in too many years to count, but he gets that familiar tingle of excitement running along his skin as he gets closer to the door that will lead you behind the bar. You’re not a sure catch, not what Mingyu would fondly call a ‘cute juicebox.’ Wonwoo’s always been curious, and his interest is peaked by the unknown outcome of this interaction.

As you make it to the exit, Wonwoo holds the door open for you. With one last pause, you walk through. 

The vampire grins to himself, following you into the night.

The alleyway is deserted, the perfect spot for Wonwoo to figure you out. 

His eyes follow you as you put a few feet of distance between him and yourself, running an anxious hand through your hair. 

“You were just about to tell me why you’re looking for me,” Wonwoo says, pretending to be helpful, when in reality, he only wants to satiate his own curiosity.   

“I heard you might know someone I’ve been trying to find, a Mister Sung.”

Wonwoo’s throat tightens. He hasn’t heard his maker’s name in many years. It frustrates him that it still has an effect on him, and Wonwoo’s fist clenches at his side. “I don’t know anyone by that name,” he lies. 

“I’ve been told you do,” you insist.

He’s tired of you now, anger growing by the second inside of him.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” Wonwoo repeats, unable to say the name in question. He refuses to taste it on his lips again, and he can feel his fangs beginning to throb, his need to taste something sweeter growing as he stares you down. 

You begin to reach for your jacket, but you’re much too slow for the older vampire, who immediately catches your wrist in a vice grip. 

“Don’t grab your weapon,” he warns. “It will only make me harder on you.”

Your pulse is racing now. Wonwoo can see your carotid artery leaping against your skin. He holds back a groan, stepping closer. 

You move away, back hitting the brick wall behind you.

“Nowhere to run,” Wonwoo muses. “You’re a vampire hunter, aren’t you, darling? Shame. I’ve never seen a hunter move as slow as you do. But I guess these days there aren’t many people who could teach you the craft, I’ve killed my share of them.”

Your pupils dilate with fear, and it makes Wonwoo’s head spin. He’s going to enjoy this. 

The club might have a no killing humans policy, but vampire hunters are free game. He’ll be doing everyone a favour, and get his fill while doing it. 

“Stop-” You gasp, struggling against his grip, but Wonwoo’s hands might as well be metal, as there’s no way you’re breaking free of him.

He’s grown tired of this. As a curious human who may have walked into the wrong bar, you’d been interesting, but as a vampire hunter with no skill, you mean nothing to him. 

He’s amused when you try to punch at him with your free hand, but that only leads to him grabbing it and pinning it with your other wrist, squeezing you tight enough to have you gasping again. 

With both your wrists captured in one hand, he’s free to bring the other to your face, pinching your jaw. “Don’t scream,” he warns you, “and don’t struggle, you’ll only make things worse.”

Wonwoo’s gotten accustomed to staring into a person’s eyes as they realize they’ve just met death himself, and he’ll never get tired of it. He licks his lips, able to taste your fear in the cold night air. His self control has worn thin, but Wonwoo’s never been the type to hold himself back from an easy kill. 

With one sharp motion, he pushes your head to the side, giving him full access to your neck. Your artery leaps, pressing against your skin, and Wonwoo lets out a groan of relief as he dives in, sharp fangs piercing you.

You release a muffled gasp, clawing at his forearm while you struggle against the wall. The taste that erupts across his tongue is unlike anything he’s ever had before. It’s rich like fine red wine, but there’s something else too, dark notes of cherry and pomegranate- 

Suddenly, it feels like Wonwoo’s been roughly punched in the chest. It’s so startling that he pulls away from you, staggering back in confusion and releasing your wrists. Clearly you didn’t punch him, so what was that-

You take the moment of confusion to whip your blade out of your jacket, holding one hand to your bleeding neck while you defend yourself with the other. “Stay back!” 

But Wonwoo can’t stay back, not now that you’re more intriguing than ever.

He stands, licking his lips. He can still taste you on his tongue, and it’s practically intoxicating. 

Wonwoo’s eyes shift to the weapon you’re holding. It’s a black, triple bladed knife, used by vampire hunters and meant to emulate a stake. One good stab from that and there’s no stitching it up, he’d be scarred forever, even with vampiric healing abilities. And if you actually hit his heart? He’d simply be gone.

Maybe you have more bite than he’d given you credit for, but Wonwoo knows he can still best you in a fight, he’ll just have to be a little more careful.

“I swear to God-” you warn him, waving the blade.

“Darling, there’s no God here,” Wonwoo tells you simply, eyes assessing your every motion. It’s clear which side of your body you favour, and with one hand still pressed to your bleeding neck, he has an easy opening.

When Wonwoo moves to the left, you turn your body to follow, and that’s all he needs to abuse your weak point. With lightning fast speed, Wonwoo gives your abdomen a rough push, sending you careening back to the wall. There’s a harsh crack as your head hits brick, and you crumple to the ground, blade falling from your hand.

Maybe he’d pushed you too hard- he hadn’t been trying to- but he can still hear your faint breaths. You’re alive, and you might not be that way for long.

Wonwoo has never, in all his years of living, given another being his blood. He’s never wished to. But staring down at you now, that all changes. He can hear your pulse getting weaker-

The vampire falls to his knees next to you, grabbing you by the back of your neck and pulling you closer. He brings his other wrist to his mouth, biting deep before holding it over your parted lips. 

 Wonwoo watches the dark red substance speckle your tongue and he presses two fingers under your jaw, closing your mouth in the hopes it will help you swallow. His wrist wound is already healing, and soon, you’ll heal as well.

There’s no medicine in the world quite like vampire blood, especially the blood of one as old as he. Wonwoo knows this. However, there’s still something inside of him that begins to worry about you. It’s a foreign emotion, worry, one he’s not had to deal with in a while, especially not in regard to a human.

Wonwoo grabs your blade off the ground, tucking it into his belt, then he adjusts you in his arms. It’s easier to simply throw you over his shoulder, so that’s what he does, standing up and looking toward the mouth of the alleyway. He can’t risk any humans seeing this, so he pulls out his phone, calling Mingyu.

“Bring the car to the back of the club,” Wonwoo instructs, leaving no room for argument as he hangs up. 

Less than two minutes later, Mingyu’s familiar black jeep is rolling down the alleyway. The car comes to a stop and Mingyu exits it, staring at Wonwoo in shock. “What happened?”

“Vampire hunter,” Wonwoo says simply, opening the door to the back of the jeep to set you inside. 

“What are you going to do with her?” Mingyu asks, watching through the rearview mirror as Wonwoo gets in beside you.

The elder vampire is quiet for a long while. “I’m not sure.”

Wonwoo is sitting in a chair near the bed, playing with your knife and watching over you diligently. It takes hours before you finally begin to stir. When you wake, you bolt upright, gasping. Your hand flies to your neck, but the wounds are already closed, your skin washed away of blood.

Your eyes find him next, and Wonwoo can’t help but be amused by the way you react, cowering away from him.

“So sleeping beauty finally wakes up,” Wonwoo muses, tossing the blade in his hand and catching it by the hilt.

You don’t say anything, but Wonwoo can see the cogs turning in your mind. “Why… why am I alive?”

“That’s a good question,” one he doesn’t know the answer to yet. 

“Am I a vampire?” 

Now Wonwoo is laughing. “No. Can you feel your heart racing? It’s a sign that you’re still human.”

You shift in his sheets. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he confesses. “First, I’d like some answers.”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I know,” he suggests. “This symbol on your blade, it’s a family crest. You belong to a line of vampire hunters.” You stay quiet, but to be fair, it hadn’t been a question, not really. “I recougnize this particular crest. It’s odd to see it again after so many years. I thought your line had been wiped out, but you’re still here, so I guess not.”

“Just kill me,” you state.

Your words cause an interesting feeling to bloom through Wonwoo’s chest again, and he cocks his head. “Is that really what you want?”

You bite your lip, then let out a heavy sigh. “No.”

The vampire stands from his chair. “At least I know why you were looking for Mister Sung now,” he says. “He killed your family, didn’t he?”

You stay quiet, but Wonwoo notes the small tremble that erupts through your form and it’s confirmation enough. 

“If it’s any consolation,” Wonwoo continues, “the vampire you’re looking for is dead. I killed him. Ten years ago.”

“He’s dead?” you ask, clearly shocked.

“It seems you’ve been running a fool's errand, darling,” Wonwoo clicks his tongue. “And you nearly died for it. I don’t think your parents would be too happy with you.”

It’s a low blow, and it causes a reaction. Your fists bunch in the sheets and your eyes narrow. “What do you know about my parents?” you spit. 

“I know they never got a chance to train you properly. I bet you’ve never even killed a vampire.”

Your shoulders slump ever so slightly and Wonwoo knows he’s hit the nail on the head.

“A vampire hunter with no kills under her belt,” Wonwoo laughs, “it’s cute you thought you could actually get me to be your first.”

“If you have everything figured out, what do you still need me for?”

“There’s still one thing I’m stuck on,” Wonwoo admits. “You did something to me, when I bit you. There was this… feeling, in my chest.”

“I didn’t do anything to you.”

He studies you for a moment. It’s true he hadn’t found any vampire repellents on you when he’d brought you back to his home. He’d kind of been hoping you’d tell him you’re a witch, and in a last ditch effort to get him away from you in the alley you’d used a spell of some sort. 

Wonwoo doesn’t want to consider the other possibility, he’s been refusing to even think about it, but now that the witch angle is off the table, the worst case scenario is at the forefront of his thoughts.

“I’ve got business to attend to,” he tells you simply, heading to the door. “You’ll be locked in this room until I figure out what I’m going to do with you.”

“And when will that be?!”

Wonwoo can hear the panic in your voice, and in some form he can sympathize with it. He’d been kept in a room for many years, under the command of a vampire sire he’d since revenged upon. “Not long,” Wonwoo promises, and it’s the most he can give you as reprieve before he shuts you into your fate.

“What’s so important we couldn’t do this over the phone or at the club?” Jeonghan asks as Wonwoo pushes into his home. 

“Give me a minute,” Wonwoo says, double-checking his friend's apartment for any fang bunnies or other vampires who could take what he’s about to say and use it against him.

“You’re so paranoid,” Jeonghan rolls his eyes. “You wanted us to be alone, so we’re alone.”

Wonwoo turns to face the vampire in front of him. “Tell me about Luna.” 

“You-” Jeonghan falters. “You never want to hear about Luna.”

“But I do now,” Wonwoo insists. “Tell me.”

Jeonghan moves to sit on his couch, and Wonwoo can tell that the mere name of Jeonghan’s lost love is nearly too much for him to handle, even after so many years.

“What do you want to know?” Jeonghan asks finally.

“You said she was your soulmate.”

“And you called me crazy for it, everyone did.” Perhaps this is another reason it’s such a sore subject. 

“Not everyone,” Wonwoo points out. “Sung didn’t like it.” 

Jeonghan visibly flinches at the name of their old master, and it’s no wonder why. Sung had gone after anything his fledglings found beautiful, and much more. It’s one of the many reasons Wonwoo had found a way to kill him, ending their eternal torment… but he’d been too late to save Luna, and it’s something he’s always regretted. Jeonghan is a shell of who he was before, and deep in Wonwoo’s black twisted soul, he knows that the man he used to call one of his closest friends will never truly be whole again. 

“She was my soulmate,” Jeonghan says, but at this point, it almost sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of that fact.

“How did you know?” Wonwoo presses.

“It was a feeling, I can’t really explain it.”

“Try.” 

Jeonghan lets out a deep sigh. “There was something about Luna, I knew it the moment I first saw her. I couldn’t describe it, especially not to any other vampires. She wasn’t just prey, she was more than that.”

She was enough for Jeonghan to turn her into a vampire, intent on spending the rest of eternity with her, an eternity that never came, for one of them at least.

“The first time I tasted her,” Jeonghan runs a hand through his hair. “She was like citrus and sunshine, I’d never experienced anything like her.” This is far off from the red wine and pomegranates Wonwoo had tasted when he’d had you. “It was the oddest thing- there was this feeling, in my chest-”

“Like a punch,” Wonwoo suggests.

Jeonghan’s eyes shift to him, and then he nods. “Yeah, like a punch.”

Wonwoo almost feels sick. “I still don’t understand how this made you realize she was your soulmate.”

“I couldn’t hurt her,” Jeonghan explains, “even if I’d wanted to. And when I tasted her again, when she let me drink from her, I realized what the feeling in my chest was.”

“What was it?” 

Jeonghan studies Wonwoo. “It was my heart.”

“Your heart?” 

The long haired vampire nods. “An echo. A memory of the life I once had. Luna made my heart beat again, if only when I was with her. She made me soft, like I’d been when I was human, before Sung and the eternal night.”

Wonwoo sits on the couch across from Jeonghan, looking down at his hands.

This can’t be true. Wonwoo had never believed it before- but now, well, now he’s experienced it for himself. 

How can a vampire’s whole long life change in one chance meeting?

Except, it hadn’t been chance, not really. Sung had ruined your life as he’d ruined Wonwoo’s, and fate had inexplicably tied you together. 

He truly can’t believe it.

“Why do you want to know all of this?” Jeonghan asks.

Wonwoo almost doesn’t want to admit it, for Jeonghan’s sake as much as his own. So he lies. “No reason.”

Jeonghan leans back, crossing his arms over his chest. “Don’t tell me you’ve found your own soulmate.” When Wonwoo remains silent, Jeonghan lets out a small laugh. “I feel sorry for any human unlucky enough to be tied to you.”

“I do too,” Wonwoo sighs. His indifference - and sometimes hatred - towards humans is well known in the vampire circles Wonwoo is a part of. He’s generally cold, unfeeling, a true vampire, the way his master made him. In fact, out of all twelve of Wonwoo’s broodmates, he’s likely the most successful by Sung’s measurements. He’d surely been the most strategically blood thirsty, and it had cost their former master his life. 

“You won’t be able to kill her,” Jeonghan warns. “Won’t be able to run away. If you’ve tasted her blood, if you’ve felt your heart, it’s only a matter of time until you give in again.”

Wonwoo hates that this is true. You’ve been on his mind the entire time he’s been away from you, and it’s already driving him insane. He’s not used to thinking about another being for long periods of time, least of all a filthy little human who fancies herself a vampire hunter.

“You’ll end up turning her,” Jeonghan concludes. “It’s the only way. Humans are fragile, and I know how much you hate to see weakness.”

You’ve been trying to find a way out of the bedroom for ages. There are no clocks, nothing to tell you what time it is, but you know dawn is coming, you can see it through the large windows that make up an entire wall of the room.

There’s safety in sunshine, and you’re extremely hopeful that it comes before Wonwoo does.

But your luck is not your own today, as you hear something outside the door just as the morning rays begin to creep through the glass. 

You make your way to the windows, pressing your body against them and waiting for the vampire to return. He takes his sweet time, and for that, you’re grateful. The room is half illuminated by the time Wonwoo opens the door, and he peers inside at you.

“What are you doing?” he asks, studying your seated form, back to the glass and morning sun.

“Protecting myself,” you fire back.

Wonwoo lets out a laugh, looking down where the sun reaches on the floor. Then, he steps into it. “Do you really think I’d have a room without tinted glass? The sunlight can’t touch me here. This is my safe haven, not yours.” 

Fuck.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with me?” you ask, feeling defeated.

“I’ll let you know when I do,” Wonwoo responds smoothly, walking over to the closet. 

He’s left the door wide open, and you eye it, wondering if you can make your escape.

“Don’t even think about it,” the vampire warns. “You won’t get far. I’ve installed an extra lock on my front door too, so even if you make it there, you have no way out.”

“How many people have you killed here?”

“None.” Wonwoo is looking through his clothing casually, back to you. You’re not sure if you can believe him. “Go on, check the doors.”

You dart from the room, quickly getting your bearings in the small but luxurious apartment. When you make it to the front door, you find he’s not lying. There’s an extra deadbolt on it, and try as you might, you can’t get it open.

You move to the kitchen next, looking for knives of any kind- but there’s literally nothing to be found in any of the cabinets. You suppose a vampire has no use for utensils or food- 

Instead, you unplug a lamp, picking it up to use as a bludgeoning weapon if the need arises. You stare toward Wonwoo’s bedroom, and he crosses your line of sight. He’s shirtless now, a pair of sweatpants low on his hips.

The sight is gone far too soon, and you wait, frozen with your lamp. 

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t come out of his room.

After a few minutes, you go to peek inside. The vampire is laying in his bed.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep,” he muses almost lazily. “It’s been a long night.”

You’d heard rumours about vampires needing sleep, but you hadn’t actually believed the tales. 

“What am I supposed to do now?” you ask.

“Get comfortable,” Wonwoo sighs. “You’re not going anywhere.” He opens his eyes when you stay standing in his doorway. “Put the lamp down.”

“No.”

The vampire lets out a laugh. “Suit yourself.”

“I’ll kill you in your sleep,” you warn him.

“No you won’t.” Wonwoo rolls onto his side, facing away from you. The covers are around his hips, and you get a good view of his excessively broad shoulders. His skin is perfect, not a blemish in sight, only muscles for days.

You lower the lamp a little. 

This man is crazy. Absolutely batshit insane. 

You watch the vampire as he drifts to sleep, and as soon as you feel you’ve waited a substantial amount of time, you begin to tiptoe to his closet. Your blade has to be somewhere.

You’re hyper aware of the fact that at any moment, Wonwoo could wake up. You keep your noise level to a minimum, rifling through his things. Finally, after what feels like forever, you feel the tip of your blade under your fingers as you look through a folded pile of hoodies. 

The twisted knife pulls out from the fabric and you have to fight the urge to cry out in happiness. When you look over your shoulder, you find the vampire still asleep. He’s on his back now, and it would be the perfect opportunity to stake him.

You’re aware that if you kill him, it will be much harder to leave the apartment, but you’re confident that if you bang on the front door long and loudly enough, someone will come save you. 

You begin to tiptoe toward the bed, adjusting your grip on the knife. 

If there’s one thing you can say about vampires in general, it’s that they’re beautiful. Wonwoo looks absolutely angelic, even while asleep. You falter at the edge of the mattress, simply watching him. If he hadn’t nearly killed you last night, you might hesitate longer, but the memory brings your drive back, and you hold the blade over his chest.

But your hands can’t bring it down. You can’t pierce his skin the way he’d pierced your neck just hours ago.

Come on, you think to yourself. Just stake him. 

Wonwoo’s eyes open, and he simply stares at you for a moment. Then he grabs your hand, disarming the blade and tugging you roughly, sending you toppling onto the mattress next to him. 

“Fuck!” you scream, kicking and trashing against the vice grip he has on your wrist.

Wonwoo lets you go. “I would have been disappointed if you didn’t try.”

“I hate you!” you yell, sitting up only to be tugged back down again.

“No, you don’t.” Wonwoo straddles you this time, grabbing both your wrists and pinning them above your head with one hand while the other continues to hold your family blade. 

“I do!”

“I killed the vampire you were hunting, something you would have never been able to do. Some part of you must be grateful for that at least,” Wonwoo points out. “I’ve saved you from becoming a killer. Trust me, it’s not a weight you’d be able to hold easily.”

His words make your skin cold, and you stop wiggling beneath him, staring up at the beautiful vampire.

“There we go,” Wonwoo says, tone almost soothing. “If you’re good and calm, I’ll give you some information. Although, you won’t like what you’re about to hear.”

“Have you decided to kill me yet?” 

Wonwoo quickly shakes his head, releasing your wrists so he can sit straighter, staring down at your form. “I’m not really sure how to tell you this.”

“Just spit it out!”

“Impatient little thing, aren’t you?” Wonwoo grins, tracing the tip of the blade across your collar bone and making you freeze. You’re breathing heavily, fighting every urge to try to push him off of you. “Fine, maybe I won’t tell you.”

He gets off of you, rolling onto his back again. He begins to play with the knife, gently tracing one of its edges.

“Tell me,” you press. “I’m being good.” 

Wonwoo laughs, and you hate how attracted you are to him when he smiles, his fangs all pointy and sharp. 

“Fate is like this blade,” he says finally.

“A killer?” you suggest after a moment of deliberation.

“Twisted,” Wonwoo corrects you. 

“Twisted how?”

“Sung. He ruined my life. Ruined yours. I killed him, thinking I knew everything there was to know, but there was still information he could have given me. Information that died with him, like the vampire hunter legacy that died with your parents. Now here we are, two remnants of the same past, our souls scarred, but entwined, twisted by fate.”

You’d definitely not pegged this vampire as a poet, but there’s something very genuine about the words leaving his pretty lips.

“What do you know of souls?” you ask, words dripping with vitriol. “You don’t have one.”

“It would appear I do,” Wonwoo muses. 

“Then what do you know about mine?” 

“Enough.” 

He’s told you something without telling you anything, and it’s infuriating.

“When I bit you, I felt something,” Wonwoo says quietly.

“Besides hunger?”

He grins at your sarcasm. “Yes, besides hunger.”

Wonwoo drags his finger across the blade again, but this time, it cuts him. You watch dark red blood bloom, and after a moment he brings it to his lips, licking it clean. By the time he pulls his hand away, you see the small cut has healed.

“When I bit you, my chest hurt.”

“What does that mean?” 

“I wasn’t sure at the time,” he admits. “But I know someone who’d felt something similar, so I went to talk to him. Do you want to know what he said?”

The anticipation is nearly killing you. “Yes.” 

“He revealed to me that amidst a world of vampires, witches and werewolves, there’s also such a thing as soulmates. And so, like this blade, fate is twisted.” 

You stare at the vampire, trying to process what he’s just said. 

But it doesn’t make sense to you.

“You can’t be saying that we’re soulmates-”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Wonwoo shifts, holding the blade out to you. “Here, try to stake me again.”

After a moment of deliberation, you take the knife, lining it up with his throat. But try as you might, you can’t bring yourself to kill him, can’t even cut a tiny scratch against his perfect skin.

“This doesn’t prove anything,” you say finally, feeling completely defeated.

“Sure it doesn’t,” Wonwoo grins, but his smile tells you another story. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to sleep. You’re free to join me if you want.”

You take the knife away from his neck, releasing a loud sigh. “Just don’t bite me.”

“No promises.” Wonwoo rolls on his side again, back to you. 

You hate how calm he’s being about all of this, but you suppose that’s what happens when you’re the one holding all the cards. 

You can’t hurt him, but you’re pretty sure he can still hurt you, if that bite from last night is anything to go on. 

It takes an hour of letting him rest before you finally place the knife on the floor, settling into the bed with a huff. Your mind is completely full, but you’re exhausted too. Sleep finds you soon thereafter. 

You wake up cold, and it only takes a moment for you to realize why. There’s a vampire attached to your back, his chest pressed tightly to your form, skin like ice. 

You want to pull away, but you can’t. You’re stuck, trapped in his tight embrace. 

There has to be a way out of this, not only his arms but his apartment too. You’ll find a way, there has to be a way- 

With a few deep breaths, you’re finally able to get control of yourself, and you begin to shift away from Wonwoo- only for his grip to tighten on your body. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, voice groggy as if he’s just woken up.

“I have to get out of here,” you insist.

Wonwoo releases his hold on you, and you dart out of bed, looking around at the dark of the room. It’s evening already? How long did you sleep? When you look outside, you see the sun has set, the sky a hazy purple. 

“People will look for me,” you say, trying to reassure yourself.

“What people? Your family is dead.” 

He’s such an asshole. He can’t possibly be your soulmate, he can’t be-

You turn to look at Wonwoo, only to find him standing right in front of you. He’s so large, his chest perfectly muscled- and he’s staring at your neck.

“Don’t even think about it,” you warn, clapping both hands over your throat.

He laughs. “But I’m thirsty.”

“How very enticing,” you say sarcastically. 

“I’ve been thinking.”

“You have?” you act shocked, picking up your blade.

“Put that down,” he tells you. “I’ve been thinking about something my friend told me. He said I’d have to turn you eventually.”

“Now I’m definitely not putting this down!” You brandish the knife at him and it only makes his grin wider. 

“You’re cute,” the vampire muses. “I can’t let you leave here while you’re human. It’s a dangerous world out there. Turning you would give me… security.”

“I’d still run,” you insist.

“You wouldn’t be able to. Not if I told you that you can’t.”

“I’d still try-”

Wonwoo bats the blade out of your hand, grabbing your wrists to pin them to your front while he steps closer. “You’re not listening,” he tuts. “Fledgelings can’t disobey their masters, and if I turned you-”

“You’ll never be my master,” you spit. 

“You might not like me now, but you’ll get over it,” Wonwoo assures you. “I can’t say I’m particularly fond of the fragility of your human body. I can turn you and you’ll be much more powerful. You’ll stay beautiful and young, forever.”

Blood is thrumming through your body, and so is fear. Your pulse is practically racing as you stare up at the vampire who thinks you’re his soulmate. 

How can he be so sure of this?

In the dark recesses of your mind, there’s some pleasure in being wanted, maybe even needed- but you push the thought away, struggling in his grasp. “Don’t do this.”

Wonwoo doesn’t respond, he simply steps closer, causing you to move back until you’re pressed between him and the wall. He stares down at you, an intensity in his eyes. 

“I’m going to ask you something, and I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying, so be a good girl and try to be honest, okay?” 

“Screw you!”

He places both your wrists in one hand, bringing the other up to cup your cheek. “Would you hate me if I kissed you?”

“Yes!” 

“Lie,” he grins, leaning even closer. “Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you.”

“I don’t want you to kiss me.”

“Another lie. Your heart jumped just now. Whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, your body always tells the truth.” 

You’re speechless, staring up at him with wide eyes.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” the vampire warns you. “It will be better if you try to enjoy yourself.” 

He gives you a moment to respond, but you can’t. There’s nothing you can say as Wonwoo closes the distance between your lips. It’s a soft kiss, much softer than you’d ever expected from him. Your body reacts, eyes closing, and you find yourself kissing him back.

Wonwoo grins, releasing your wrists in favour of grabbing your hip, pressing you harder against the wall. His tongue glides against your bottom lip and you can’t help but open your mouth for him, fighting the moan that bubbles in your chest. 

There’s something about this that feels electric, and after a mini battle with yourself, you give into the experience. Your hands grab at his strong shoulders, nails digging into his flesh as you kiss him back with more vigour, opening your mouth for him.

Wonwoo lets out a growl, deep in his chest, and the sound turns you on more than you’ll ever admit. His hand is bruising on your hip now, groping at your skin and slipping under your shirt. You shift in his embrace, pulling him closer when you wrap your arms around the back of his neck.

His hand on your cheek moves down, gently latching around your throat. The motion makes you gasp, and Wonwoo pulls away from your lips, staring down at you. “Thirsty.”

“You fucker-”

“Thirsty,” he repeats, pressing you against the wall and tightening his grip on your neck. You watch him drag his tongue across his sharp fangs. “Just say yes,” the vampire whispers. It almost sounds like he’s begging. 

You’re at war with yourself. Your body is clearly reacting to Wonwoo, but your mind still isn’t there yet. It’s almost torture, pressed to the wall by a man with a perfect body and power that practically thrums off of him.

You find yourself giving a small nod. “Don’t hurt me,” you plead.

“Never,” he promises, kissing you softly one last time before he arches your jaw to the side. You grab at his shoulders, ready to dig your nails in when you feel his fangs- 

His lips press to your throat and a shiver runs through your body. His tongue tastes your skin, drawing a circle that has you nearly dying with anticipation. When the bite finally comes, it’s not painful or sharp, it feels something like a hickey, and then it begins to throb.

A gasp tumbles out of you, and you cling to Wonwoo’s broad shoulders, closing your eyes. The vampire releases a groan, reaching for your hand so he can intertwine your fingers, squeezing gently. 

You’ve never felt close to someone like this, and the realization has your head spinning… or maybe that’s the blood loss. 

“Wonwoo-” you whimper, starting to worry at how long he’s been sucking on your throat.

The throbbing stops, and you feel his tongue gliding over the bite mark, an attempt to soothe your skin. Then he’s pulling away, looking down at you as he licks his lips clean of your blood.

“Good girl,” he praises you, letting go of your hand. “Your turn.” You watch as he brings his thumb to his mouth, biting the tip before grabbing your jaw, pressing the digit into your mouth. “This will heal the mark,” Wonwoo explains, watching as you begin to suck on his thumb.

He doesn’t taste like blood. Instead, you’re reminded of strawberries and stone fruits. You swirl your tongue around his digit, sucking him deeper into your mouth-

“That’s it,” the vampire groans, slowly pulling his thumb from you. He drags it across your lip. “All better.”

When you touch your throat, you find only perfect skin. There’s nothing to suggest you’ve just been bitten by a vampire. 

“If it’s any consolation,” Wonwoo leans down, his lips ghosting over your own, “you taste delicious.”

“You-” you swallow thickly, “you do too.”

“Yeah?” He grins. 

You can only nod, leaning forward eagerly to capture him in a kiss again. 

You’re hungry for him, hungry in a way you’ve never been before, hungry for more.

Wonwoo gives into your needs, working his lips against yours harder while his hands find your hips again. Your own fingers trace his broad shoulders, dipping down to tease over his chest before finding his abs-

“That’s enough for tonight,” Wonwoo says suddenly, pulling away.

You realize you’d been about to grab his sweat pants, and you feel slightly embarrassed. You’re not sure what’s come over you-

“Sorry-”

“As much as I’d love to give you everything you want, as a human, I’d break you much too easily, darling.” 

Is he… is he going to withhold sex unless you become a vampire?

Jesus, are you actually considering this now?

What has this man done to you?

“I’m going out,” Wonwoo announces.

“Where?”

“The club. You were a tasty treat, but I’ll need more soon.”

For some reason, the thought of him biting anyone else makes you almost jealous. “Take me with you.”

“To the vampire club?” Wonwoo laughs as he heads to his closet. “No.”

“Please?” 

“No.”

“Why not?” you ask.

“It’s too dangerous.”

“What if I stick to your side all night?” 

He turns to look at you, cocking a brow. “Not thinking of running anymore?”

You shake your head quickly.

“Shame, a lie,” Wonwoo sighs. “But I guess… anywhere you go, I’ll find you.” He reaches out, wrapping his hands around your throat and pulling you closer. “You’re mine. If you run, the consequence will be a turning, does that sound fair?”

You feel like you’re gambling with fate, but you nod all the same.

“Say it,” the vampire tells you. 

“If… If I run, you can turn me.”

Wonwoo studies you for a moment, then he releases your throat. “Fine. You can come to the club. We’ll get you food along the way if you promise to be good.”

Entering the club with Wonwoo is extremely different from entering alone. The bouncers seem to know the vampire with his hand firmly wrapped around your own, and although they give you odd looks, no one says anything.

The crowd parts for Wonwoo, and you feel eyes drilling into your form. 

It had taken months to track down this specific club, there are few vampire safe havens like this one, and people tend to keep their mouth shut about this sort of thing. Yet, within the location itself, everyone seems to know who’s vampire and who’s human. It’s an unspoken hierarchy, one you’re disturbing by being so close to Wonwoo while still owning a pulse.

Wonwoo leads you to the booth section you’d found him in last night. There are three vampires already sitting there, and they all stare as you approach. “Shouldn’t have brought you here,” Wonwoo sighs.

“Why not?”

“They’re never going to let me live this down,” he explains. “I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

It’s an interesting notion, the idea that you’re bringing down this asshole vampire’s street cred. But at the same time, you didn’t force him to bring you here. You’ll never be able to force Wonwoo to do anything.

The vampire with the longest hair stands up from the booth as you approach, and you’re shocked when he smiles at you. “This must be her,” he says, holding out a hand. When you take it, instead of shaking, the beautiful man leans down to kiss your knuckles. 

“This is Jeonghan,” Wonwoo tells you.

You give the vampire your own name, and when you hear Wonwoo whispering it behind you, you realize he’s yet to learn it. Had you really gone this long without introducing yourself to him properly? Had you let him bite you, and kiss you, and call you good girl, all without knowing your name?

“You’re the vampire hunter,” comes the next voice, and the tallest vampire you’ve ever seen stands to tower over you. “I thought you’d be dead by now.”

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo warns, his hand moving to the small of your back in an almost protective gesture.

“Vampire hunter?” The third man cocks his head. “I see you’ve brought us a pretty little juice box.”

“Joshua,” now it’s Jeonghan’s turn to scold someone, and you realize through the long haired vampire’s behaviour that he must be the friend Wonwoo went to see about soulmates. There’s definitely a softness to him that the others don’t have, an understanding.

“Is she not dinner?” Joshua simply blinks in confusion, unable to see what he’s done wrong.

“A fang bunny then, not dinner,” the final vampire suggests.

“Excuse Soonyoung and Joshua,” Jeonghan sighs, addressing you again, “looks don’t account for manners. How about I take you down to the bar for a drink and Wonwoo can explain to our friends what’s going on,” he leans closer, lowering his voice, “Wonwoo’s never brought a girl home, I’m sure you can understand the surprise.”

You’d promised Wonwoo you’d stay by his side all night, and you can’t help but look at him for permission to leave with Jeonghan. Your vampire mate meets your gaze with a steady look, and he gives you a quick nod before turning to his friends again.

Jeonghan takes your hand, pulling you away from the table and back toward the bar. “You two look good together,” he muses. “Fragility looks nice next to Wonwoo’s controlled chaos, it’s a good balance.”

“What’s with you vampires and hating human fragility?” you ask.

“I can’t speak for all vampires, but I can tell you it’s a trait of our fledgling group. Our old master was… brutal, to say the least. It left its scars.” Jeonghan looks down, and you can see an unreadable emotion cross his face. But he’s forcing a smile a moment later. “It doesn’t matter, Sung is gone, we’re free now.”

So Wonwoo hadn’t only freed himself and you when he’d killed his maker. How many people had he saved? You’d seen the act as something of a bloodthirsty move of defiance, but you  hadn’t been aware of the domino effect of it all, hadn’t been aware that Sung had been cruel to humans and vampires alike, even his own spawn. 

The bartender comes over with two glasses of red wine, and you reach for yours, only to have Jeonghan’s cold fingers latch around your wrist. “Don’t drink that,” he warns you, eyes shifting to the human bartender. “She’s not a red wine lover.”

“I can drink this-”

Jeonghan leans closer, voice lowering. “It’s blood, darling.”

Your eyes dip to the glass of red liquid and you pull your hand away, swallowing thickly. Something tells you this blood wouldn’t taste like Wonwoo’s had, there’d be no strawberries and stone fruit, only harsh metalics. 

“What would you like to drink?” Jeonghan asks.

You give your order and the bartender scurries away. Jeonghan moves both glasses of blood in front of himself, lifting one to his lips. 

“Stupid humans,” he mutters, only realizing his mistake a moment later. “Not you of course, as Wonwoo’s soulmate, you’re an extension of us.”

It’s very odd to be accepted like this. You’ve never met any vampires like these ones, and they’re reshaping your view of things that go bump in the night.

Your gaze moves back to the table of vampires, and you’re shocked to find Wonwoo standing with a new person you’ve not yet met. They’re comparable in size, and from your distance, it almost looks like they’re arguing. Then you see Wonwoo motion, pointing toward the hallway that leads to the alley he’d taken you last night.

“Jeonghan?” You tap on the man’s arm. “Who’s that with Wonwoo?”

“Shit,” Jeonghan cusses. “He’s bad news.”

And here you’d thought Wonwoo was bad news, can this new man be even worse?

You watch the two heated vampires begin to head through the crowd, clearly intent on taking this outside. Mingyu, Joshua and Soonyoung watch from the booth, but they don’t make a move to follow. 

“Does- does Wonwoo need backup?” you ask.

Jeonghan considers it for a moment. “Doubtful. He’d probably be mad if we went out after him.”

As you watch Wonwoo disappear, your heart clenches in your chest. “I think we should follow.”

“He’s fine,” Jeonghan assures you.

“I don’t care.”

“Wonwoo wouldn’t want you there,” the vampire tries to convince you. “You’re fragile, human, it would only make things worse.”

“Screw that.”

“Your drink isn’t even here yet-”

But you’re already moving away from the bar, and Jeonghan scrambles to follow you, grabbing both glasses of wine. “This is a bad idea,” he insists, but you’re done listening to him. “Wonwoo can take care of himself.”

To be fair, that might be true. However, there’s a pull, deep in your chest. Something tells you Wonwoo will need you soon, although you’re not quite sure in what capacity. 

Your pace quickens as you head down the dark hallway, and you push open the exit door, quickly looking around. 

Wonwoo has the other vampire pressed to the brick wall behind the bar, and they’re grappling at each other, practically snarling. You have no clue who’s the aggressor, but you know who the winner will be, and you reach into your jacket for your blade.

“Wonwoo!” you scream, catching his attention for a moment, but it’s all you need to toss the weapon toward him. He catches it easily, driving the stake into the other man without a second thought.

A choked sound leaves you, and a hand covers your eyes. Jeonghan presses against your back, cradling you while you hear the sounds of your vampire mate eviscerating his opponent. 

Jeonghan turns you in his arms. “Don’t look,” he urges, removing his palm from your view. He’s still holding a wine glass, and you see the other sitting on the garbage can a few feet away. The sight of the blood makes your stomach churn. You try to take deep breaths to calm yourself, but it’s difficult in a situation like this.

Something moves in the periphery of your vision and you turn your head to see Wonwoo standing there, reaching for the wine glass. His skin is marred with red, his hair a tangle of curls. Your mate’s eyes are dark, and he closes them as he downs the red liquid, tossing the glass to the side when he’s through with it. The cup shatters across the alleyway. 

“Wonwoo-” you breathe, reaching for him, needing to check if he’s hurt.

“Why did you two come out here?” he asks, staring at Jeonghan.

“She insisted.”

Oh, to be thrown under the bus by a vampire.

Wonwoo cracks a grin, gaze shifting to you. “Brat.” 

“Killer,” you retort.

“He deserved it,” Wonwoo assures you, reaching out to grab you by the back of the neck, pulling you closer. 

He’s covered in blood and he looks like a sexy, wild monster. But he’s your monster, and you can’t help but react, leaning in-

“Jesus Christ,” you hear Jeonghan breathe, turning to give you and Wonwoo privacy while he presses his lips against yours hungrily.

At first, you can try to ignore the wet liquid on your fingertips as you grab at his strong shoulders, but you can’t ignore the taste on his tongue. Your body goes rigid and Wonwoo pulls back with a sigh, resting his forehead against yours. 

It’s an oddly peaceful moment amongst the chaos.

Wonwoo lets you go, turning to his friend. “Help me with the body,” he instructs.

“The club owner isn’t going to like this,” Jeonghan groans, although he does as he’s told, following Wonwoo toward the body crumpled by the wall.

The vampire has been practically torn to pieces- you shift your gaze again, wiping at your mouth just in case there’s any blood on your skin.

“I’ll explain what happened,” Wonwoo says. 

“Explain it to me then.”

You focus on the ground, not wanting to look as you hear the two vampires open a large dumpster. 

Wonwoo has lowered his voice to respond to his friend, but you hear the words soulmate and threatened. 

Had this killing been over you? The thought makes your stomach tie into knots again.

“You can’t bring her here again, not while she’s still human,” Jeonghan muses.

“You think I don’t know that?” Wonwoo snaps. “I didn’t even want to bring her today!”

“Then why did you?”

“It’s hard to say no to her, something you should understand. Can’t believe you let her come out here-”

“I didn’t let her do anything,” Jeonghan insists. “That soulmate of yours has a mind of her own. Besides, my hands were full.”

Your eyes shift to the glass of wine still sitting on a small trash can, and you move to retrieve it. 

“You’ll get this properly cleaned up, won’t you?” Wonwoo asks.

“Yeah, I got you,” Jeonghan sighs. “But you owe me one.”

“I’d expect nothing less.” 

You hear them walking over again, and you turn to face the approaching vampires, holding out the ‘wine’ for Jeonghan.

“Thank you, darling,” he offers you a smile, taking the glass. 

You can only nod, gaze shifting to Wonwoo, who still looks gorgeous even while covered in blood. 

He takes your hand gently. “Come on, brat, let’s get out of here.”

Mingyu had come around with his car to take you home, helping avoid any uber drivers who would take one look at Wonwoo’s blood-speckled face and driven the other way. It had been a tense ten minutes, with hardly a word spoken.

Now, you’re in Wonwoo’s bathroom, helping him take off his shirt so you can wash him clean.

He watches as you ring out a warm soapy cloth, bunching it up and bringing it toward his shoulders first. It’s hard to focus with his intense gaze fixed on you, but you do your best, wiping away the blood from his throat.

“I have to turn you,” he says.

You sigh. “I know.”

“Are you upset with me?”

You shake your head, daring a look into his dark eyes. 

The vampire cocks his head, hands finding your hips while he leans back against the sink. “I’ll be gentle,” he promises. “One bite, I’ll nearly drain you, and on the cusp between life or death, I’ll give you my own blood. You’ll probably pass out, for a little while, and when you wake up, you’ll be like me.”

“Except you’ll be my master,” you point out, drawing the cloth across his bloody cheekbone. 

“I won’t abuse that power.”

For some reason, you believe him.

Silence fills the bathroom while you continue to clean him, but your mind is very much active. 

You’ve spent over ten years with one goal and one goal only, to avenge your parents. You’d been told it was a fool's errand, so you’d never quite planned for what came next. Part of you had always expected to die young- and if you’d been at the house instead of with a friend the day Sung had come for your family, you would have. 

The idea of living forever is a lot to grapple with, but Wonwoo’s the one that makes it possible.

He’d completed your life task, and now, he’s offering you a new path, one that’s rich with shadows, but also love. In a way, maybe you can’t ask for anything more than that.

“Do you think it will satisfy you?” you question. “Having me when you know I can’t refuse you?”

Wonwoo considers you for a moment, and his silence makes you anxious.

“I just mean…” you bite at your lip, cleaning the last speckle of blood from his skin before tossing the cloth down. “Wouldn’t it be better to have me for the first time while I’m still human? When you know I’m saying yes out of my own free will?”

“Darling,” his fingers dig into your hips, “are you asking me to fuck you?”

“I’m just- I know I want you, I think that much is obvious. I just think that if I wait to have you until after I’m a vampire, maybe there will always be a part of me that questions it. I want to experience you now, as I am, as a human.”

“It’s an interesting proposition,” Wonwoo admits.

“Just interesting?” you tease, wrapping your arms around his strong shoulders.

Wonwoo straightens. No longer leaning against the sink, he towers over you again, and it takes your anxieties away. 

“Is this really what you want?” he asks.

You take a deep breath and nod. 

“I’ll be as gentle as I know how,” he reaches out, brushing his fingers along your arm, “but I can’t make any promises.”

“It’s okay,” you assure him, tongue darting out to wet your lips. “I like rough.”

“Are you sure about that, pretty girl?” Wonwoo grins, grabbing your hips and tugging you closer. 

It feels amazing to be pressed against him now, your palms coming to rest on his broad chest. He’s so beautiful, you can hardly control yourself around him anymore. 

“I want you to ravage me,” you tell him. “And when we both finish, you can turn me. I think… I think I’m ready for my life with you. There’s nothing for me with the old one anyways, not anymore.” 

The vampire studies you, and you avert your gaze, only for his fingers to find the bottom of your chin. He tilts your head up so you’re forced to meet his eyes. “I’m going to take care of you,” Wonwoo whispers, and then he leans in to press his lips against yours.

You melt against his chest, wrapping your arms around the back of his neck. Your mouth parts much too easily for Wonwoo, and he drags his tongue along yours, earning a sigh of relief from deep within you. Your brain has been so full since seeing Wonwoo eviscerate that rival vampire, it’s good to be in your body now, mind going numb from your soulmate’s touch.

In one easy motion, Wonwoo turns you so you’re the one with your back to the sink. He bends down, tearing your pants off before grabbing your thighs and lifting you onto the counter, slotting between your legs while he kisses you harder. 

His hands find your shirt, and you break the kiss to tear it off, leaving you in your underwear. Wonwoo’s lips find your neck, and you tangle your fingers in his hair, groaning. You throw your head back, wrapping your legs tighter around his hips. “Bite me,” you urge him, missing the sensation.

The vampire grins against your throat, and you feel his fangs a moment later. He doesn’t tease you with kisses or licking this time, he simply sinks his teeth into you. The throbbing feeling courses through you and you gasp, digging your nails into his shoulders while Wonwoo drinks from you. 

You’ve never felt close to someone like this before. Wonwoo is grabbing your hips hard, leaning closer while he uses you for his own strength. He presses forward, allowing you to feel his cock growing in his jeans, denim catching against your panties. Then his hands slip behind you, and he undoes your bra, tearing it off. 

Your nipples pebble in the cool of the bathroom, and Wonwoo’s cold hands don’t help any as they move up to cup your breasts. Your soulmate pulls away from your throat, releasing a groan.

Warm blood begins to drip down your skin, he’d bitten you harder than last time. As the track of red makes it to your nipple, Wonwoo bends down, capturing the sensitive bud in his mouth and licking roughly. 

You whimper at the sensation, tangling your fingers in his hair as he drags his tongue up, collecting all the blood that’s just spilt from your neck. The vampire groans when he makes it to your bite mark, and he adjusts slightly, biting his thumb before pressing it into your mouth. “Need you healed or I might lose control,” he says, voice husky.

You can only suck in his digit, closing your eyes and enjoying the tingly feeling of your wound disappearing. 

Your soulmate pulls his hand from your mouth, bringing his newly spit-covered fingers to your panty-clad core. He applies a good amount of pressure to your clit and you cry out, grabbing at his jaw to bring his lips back to yours.

The vampire rubs you teasingly, working you up until you’re practically rutting against his hand. “Please,” you moan, feeling absolutely desperate now.

Wonwoo rewards you by pushing your panties to the side, sinking two fingers into your hot core while you groan into each other’s mouths. 

“Already so wet for me,” Wonwoo muses. “Is this how you always react to vampires, darling?”

You shake your head, whimpering as he strokes your inner walls expertly. “Just you,” you tell him.

Wonwoo lets out a growl. With his free hand he grabs your wrist, bringing your palm to his chest. “Can you feel what you’re doing to me?”

At first, you’re confused, but then you feel something, a rough thumping, as if his heart is clawing to get out of his ribcage. “I’m doing this to you?” you ask in wonder.

“And this,” he guides your hand down further, so you can feel how hard he is in his jeans now. 

“Fuck, you’re big-”

Wonwoo laughs, working his fingers into you even harder. “Think you’ll be able to make it fit?”

“Uh huh,” you nod eagerly. “We’ll make it fit.” 

His digits crook up, stroking a spot that has your thighs quivering around his hips. You squeeze his cock through his jeans, hoping to drive Wonwoo even a fraction as wild as he’s driving you.

Your soulmate lets out a satisfied groan, and the sound goes straight to your core, which squelches around his fingers. “I’m close,” you warn him, nearly panting now as the orgasm builds in the pit of your stomach.

“Yeah?” Wonwoo grinds his palm against your clit and you’re nearly seeing stars. 

You let go of his cock, needing to anchor yourself on his strong shoulders as he leans in to kiss your throat. He focuses on the spot he’d bitten, and even though it’s healed, you’re still sensitive there, sending throbbing tingles through your form.

“Fuck, Wonwoo-” You clench your eyes shut as you reach your high, your entire being now consumed with pleasure. You’ve never felt anything like this. It’s almost an out of body experience, your cries leaving your lips as you dig your nails into his shoulders, throbbing ceaselessly with ecstasy. 

“That’s it, pet,” Wonwoo coos, fingers continuing to abuse your hole even as your walls contract around him. “Who’s my good little human?”

“Me,” you whimper, threading your hand through his hair so you can keep him to your throat. You almost want to ask him to bite you again, but you hold yourself back, enjoying the last moments of your orgasm.

You finish with a gasp, breathing hard. 

Wonwoo takes his hand from your core, pulling away from your neck. He watches you with dark eyes as he brings his fingers to his lips, licking them clean. The vampire lets out a groan. “Everything about you tastes so fucking sweet, darling.”

God. You need him like you’ve never needed anyone in your whole life.

“Please,” you moan.

“Please, what?” he teases.

“Take me,” you whisper. “Make me yours.”

“Darling,” Wonwoo leans closer, his lips ghosting over your own, “I thought you’d never ask.”

He pulls you off the sink, tucking you close to his chest and carrying you back to the bedroom. The lights are off, and when he gently places you on the bed, his beautiful frame is illuminated from the glow of the bathroom. 

You can’t see his face, but you can see he’s smiling, and his fangs flash. His hands move to his belt and he undoes it. You bite at your lip, sitting up onto your elbows while you watch him. 

He pushes his pants down, and you can just make out the impressive size of his cock. “Wish I could see you,” you muse.

“I can see you,” he retorts. “When I turn you, you’ll be able to see in the dark too.”

“Are you really going to make me wait?”

“You won’t have to wait long,” Wonwoo reminds you. “You can be patient for this first time, can’t you, human? After tonight, we’ll have forever.”

You can’t even imagine what forever entails, and you distract yourself from it by pulling your panties down, tossing them to the floor. You spread your legs for the vampire at the foot of the bed and he releases a groan.

“You are beautiful,” he admits.

“Even for a human?”

“Even for a vampire hunter,” Wonwoo presses a knee to the bed.

“Thought you said I was a sorry excuse for a vampire hunter.” 

“I may have said something along those lines,” he grins.

“A vampire hunter with no kills under her belt-”

Wonwoo presses his hand to the bed next to your head, leaning over you while you wrap your legs around his hips. “Are you looking for an apology, darling?”

“It would help,” you sigh, enjoying the way he ruts his cock against your hot core.

“I’m sorry I called you a filthy little human who fancies herself a vampire hunter,” Wonwoo smirks, “I was having a bad day, and I misspoke… you’re a darling little human who’s about to become a vampire fucker.”

“Wonwoo-” you push at his chest, hating how harsh his words sound.

“You’re right,” your soulmate concedes, “you’re not a vampire fucker, I’m the one on top.”

“You’re horrible!” you screech, but at the same time, you’re giggling now.

“Tell me you love it,” he insists, leaning in to press his lips to your neck. “Tell me you don’t want me to fuck you stupid. That you don’t want me to sink my fangs into this pretty throat and make you mine, my eternal mate, untouchable to anyone but me.”

It does sound nice, and you shiver as Wonwoo presses his cold body down against yours.

“I’ll enjoy it once you’re turned,” Wonwoo breathes. “You won’t be able to be bratty with me. I’ll ask you what's on your mind and you’ll have to answer.”

“I’m just thinking how nice this is going to be,” you admit.

“Nice?” He laughs, pulling away to look down at you. 

“Obviously it will be a lot to figure out,” you back pedal slightly, “but… I don’t know, you really are my soulmate, and I know you’ll take care of me.”

The vampire simply blinks. 

“What?” you ask, cupping his face.

“This is the first time you’ve admitted it,” Wonwoo points out. 

“I wouldn’t let you bite me if you weren’t,” you remind him. “Wouldn’t let you fuck me-”

“I haven’t fucked you yet,” your soulmate grins, pushing his hips so his cock brushes by your clit as if to prove his point.

“And I’m devastated,” you say dramatically. “Please, Wonwoo- just fuck me!”

Wonwoo presses his lips to yours, and you love that he’s smiling into the kiss. You tangle your fingers in his hair, hooking your legs tighter around his hips. You’re still so wet from his fingers, and each small drag of his cock between your pussy lips feels like heaven. 

He’s such a tease, but you kind of love it.

The vampire adjusts slightly, reaching between your bodies, and then his cock slides into you. It’s just the head at first, but it’s enough to have you gasping and clawing at him. He thrusts shallowly, pushing deeper and deeper until his hips are flush to your own and every impressive inch of him is stretching you open.

“Fuck-” you whimper, toes curling from how full you feel.

Wonwoo collects one of your hands, linking your fingers and pressing it down against the pillow. “Are you sure you’re ready for this, my pretty human?”

“Uh huh,” you nod, swallowing thickly. “I told you,” you lean up, letting your lips ghost past his while you stare into his eyes, “ravage me.”

Your vampire lover groans, smashing his mouth to yours and squeezing your hand, then he begins to thrust into you and your mind goes completely blank. He fills you up perfectly- it’s like you were always meant to be full in this way. 

Now that you’ve tasted this, how can you ever get enough?

You can tell he’s holding back, can tell he’s still trying to be careful with your fragile form. You lock your legs tighter around his hips, a wordless encouragement to go harder. You wonder what it’s going to be like once you’re on his level, once you’re a vampire like him. If sex with him feels this good and he’s only at a fraction of his power, you bet undying fucking will kill you all over again.

Each snap of his hips presses his cock deep into your core, and your walls greedily eat him up. You’re moaning desperately against his mouth, squeezing his hand while tangling your fingers through his hair with the other. 

Wonwoo’s fangs drag by your lip, teasing you just enough to be on the verge of painful. 

You’re so lost in him you don’t even care, you bite him back, tugging on his curls and whimpering a sound of affirmation. This time, when his teeth make contact with your lip, it’s with enough force to pierce. 

Wonwoo groans immediately, suckling on your lower lip. It’s throbbing slightly, but unlike when he goes for your neck, his teeth aren’t still inside of you. He’s simply made a small incision, and now your vampire lover is making the most of it, kissing you so greedily that you can’t even taste the metallic proof of what he’s just done.

He simply can’t get enough of you, and you can’t get enough of him. You push on the hand capturing yours to the bed and Wonwoo relents, allowing you to grab at his shoulder while he fucks you harder, pressing you into the mattress.

With his fingers now free, he shoves them between your bodies, rubbing your clit and making your legs shake around his hips. 

With each lick and suck at your bleeding lip, he’s getting rougher with you. Your life’s blood is giving him strength, making him more feral, and you’re enjoying the show. 

Your pussy is throbbing again, just like your lip, and you know you’re achingly close to another orgasm. When has cumming ever been this easy? Wonwoo feels like a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, you’re still not sure.

“Close, darling?” Wonwoo asks, dragging his tongue across your teeth. You taste something on him, and realize he’s bitten himself, allowing his blood to heal your lip wound just as suddenly as it had been given. 

You nod, crying out as he rubs your clit harder. He stares down at you, in the dark there are angular shadows on his face, his pretty cheekbones all sharp-

“You look…” he licks his lips, “beautiful.”

“Wonwoo-” you whimper, body shuddering at the praise, your core twisting and aching as he continues to fuck into you wildly.

“That’s it,” the vampire coos, “cum on my cock, I need to feel you.”

You literally can’t help yourself. His voice is too sexy, his cock is too big, and you’re way too deep into the kinkiness of bloodsharing vampire sex to refuse any command he gives you. You let out a cry of ecstasy as your second orgasm of the night slams into you, ravaging your form and making you see stars.

Wonwoo buries his face against your neck, teasing you with his teeth and tounge while he fucks you through his high. With each second of overstimulated pleasure, you hang on the edge of anticipation, wondering if he’s about to bite you-

But he doesn’t. He simply works you through your orgasm until you’re a shaking mess.

You can feel tears in your eyes, but you’re not quite sure why they’re there.

When Wonwoo looks down at you again, he notices your tears, his brows furrowing. But he doesn’t question you on it, he simply brushes them away with his thumb while you shiver and recollect yourself after that mind numbing high.

You drag his face in for a kiss, pouring all your emotions into the merging of your lips. It must be clear to him that you’re okay, that you’re feeling just a little broken right now- but to be fair, you had asked him to ravage you.

There are underlying feelings being brought up, and in the periphery of your mind, you’re questioning your own mortality.

This is your last night on earth as a human, your last hour even- and although you know Wonwoo will take care of you, there’s something scary about it.

You’re diving into the deep, dark, unknown with your new soulmate, entrusting him as your guide after living an entire life without trusting anyone.

Trusting feels foreign to you, but you do trust Wonwoo, and that’s a scary thought in and of itself.

“Okay,” you say, swallowing thickly and letting out a shaky breath, “I’m ready for more.”

“I’d almost worried I’d broken you,” Wonwoo admits, pressing another soft kiss to your lips.

“It was a good broken,” you tell him, heart swelling in your chest at the fact that he’d been concerned for you. 

“And now my little human wants more,” Wonwoo muses. “You’re not as fragile as you look, are you, darling?”

You shake your head.

“Think you can get on your knees for me?” the vampire asks, pushing his body weight off of you.

“Uh huh,” you nod, whimpering a little at the loss of his cock from your core. You get into position, turning your back to him and adjusting on your knees, wiggling you ass gently to entice him.

“Pretty human,” Wonwoo breathes, hands ghosting down your sides before taking two fistfuls of your bum and squeezing. 

You feel his cock at your entrance again, and he pushes into you, making you both moan. In this position it almost feels like he hits deeper. You go fully doggy, resting your face against his pillows and arching your back.

“I’d tell you to be good for me, but I’m pretty sure I’ve fucked the brat out of you already. Isn’t that right, darling?” He lands a gentle smack to your ass that has you whimpering. 

He’s such a cocky asshole and it makes you groan. You can feel yourself throb around him at his words, betraying what you really think about the line he’s just used on you.

“That’s what I thought.” You can practically hear him grinning, and his hands move to your waist. His touch is almost bruising, but it feels so good as he begins to thrust into you again. Each movement has his hips hitting your ass, and the sound of sex fills the room.

You love the noises he’s making, soft, breathy groans, and deep rumbles that border on growls. There’s no time for talking anymore, your mind is much more preoccupied in the pleasure building within you both.

You’re still sensitive from two orgasms, so when you slip your hand under your body to rub your clit, your pussy immediately reacts. You clench tightly around Wonwoo, who lets out a moan at the sensation, fucking you even harder and faster.

Each thrust has you crying out now, whines of desperation slipping out of you while you rub your clit, eyes shut. 

Suddenly, Wonwoo is wrapping a hand around the front of your throat, pulling you up onto your knees with your back to his chest. His lips ghost by your ear. “So eager to cum again?” he asks.

You can only nod, grabbing at the forearm now pinned against your front while Wonwoo’s other hand tightens around your neck. He’s buried deep inside of you now, unmoving, and you’ve never felt this full.

“You know what happens when you cum, don’t you, darling?” 

“I-” You’re so delirious from his cock you can’t even think.

“‘When we cum, you can turn me,’ that’s what you said, wasn’t it, pet?” Wonwoo lets out a chuckle. “Are you really that eager? Or just a little dim with my cock buried so deep in this perfect pussy of yours?”

“I remember,” you gasp, head beginning to swim with how hard he’s gripping your throat.

“So you are eager,” the vampire confirms. “That’s cute.” 

He lets go of you, pushing you down to the bed. His hand finds the back of your neck and he holds your face down, grabbing your hip with the other. “I guess you can cum as fast as you want, little pet. I’d be happy to taste you again.”

You’re gasping against the pillow, enjoying how rough he’s being with you now. There’s something about having his hand on your neck, keeping you down while he begins to fuck into you again. 

“Are you close?” you ask, enjoying the groans leaving his own lips.

Wonwoo laughs. “When you cum, I cum.”

“Lucky me,” you whisper, reaching for your clit again. Your pussy pulses with ecstasy as you begin to rub the sensitive nub, your eyes closing from the pleasure. 

“Naughty human,” Wonwoo states, but there’s something like pride in his tone. “I guess I haven’t fucked the brat out of you just yet.”

“You love that I’m a brat,” you insist. “It gives you something you want to control, and we both know how much you like control.”

Wonwoo’s thrusts falter ever so slightly. “I didn’t realize you knew me so well, little soulmate.”

“I do,” you groan. “Just like I know that if I start begging, you’ll really lose your head.”

Wonwoo lets out a laugh, and you see it as a challenge.

“Please,” you whimper, rubbing your clit harder and cutting off your soulmate’s laugh. “Please, Wonwoo, I’m so close-”

The vampire behind you lets out a growl, fucking you faster. His grip on your neck pushes you down against the bed more, but it does nothing to muffle the begging that’s beginning to tumble past your lips.

“Want you to fill me up. Want you to make me see stars. Want you to bite me like only you can-”

“Fuck-” Wonwoo groans.

Suddenly he’s letting go of your neck and flipping you over. You’re not on your back for even a moment before he’s pushing into your core again, his lips eager against your own. His tongue invades your mouth, shutting up your begging while you tangle your fingers through his hair.

One of his hands is planted on the pillow next to you, and the other is on your hip, digging into your skin while he fucks you so hard the bed shakes.

“Please,” you whimper, so close to the edge you can almost taste it again.

Wonwoo’s mouth moves to your throat and your entire body tenses with anticipation, teetering on the edge of pleasure that you know is going to be nothing like anything you’ve ever experienced before.

You drag your fingers against his scalp, panting hard. “Bite me,” you beg. “Bite me, please- I’ll cum so hard if you just bite me-”

The vampire lets out a primal groan, and then his teeth are sinking into your flesh. The throbbing sensation erupts through your entire body, going straight to your core, which clenches desperately around Wonwoo’s cock. 

A strangled cry leaves your lips as your orgasm overtakes you. Your grip tightens in Wonwoo’s hair, holding him to your throat as you ascend to a height of pleasure that has you weak all over- 

From the noises leaving your soulmate, you know he’s just cum too, and the thought makes your body tingle as he drinks steadily from your neck. 

His thrusts begin to slow, but the speed to which he’s devouring you remains a constant. Suddenly, you realize that there’s no coming back from cloud 9, you’re simply floating- floating, floating, with only his hair as your anchor, but soon, you begin to lose your grip on even that.

Your throat is really pulsing now, but it’s getting noticeably weaker, and the heat of the bite is dying down. Maybe it’s not the only thing dying, you realize, with your eyes closed and your lids too heavy to lift.

Something presses to your lips, filling your mouth with a familiar flavour. 

Strawberries and stone fruits.

You do your best to swallow, but it’s kind of difficult. You’re so tired, so very tired-

“Drink up, darling,” Wonwoo says. His voice feels far away. “Come back to me. I’m not done with you yet.”

Part of you wishes you could simply drift off, but your soulmate's words are enticing. You push yourself to do as he says, drinking the sweet nectar and regaining your strength, drawing you back to him. 

When you’re finally able to open your eyes, Wonwoo isn’t on top of you anymore. He’s laying in bed next to you, watching. 

You roll onto your side, mirroring him. “Did I pass out?”

“I warned you that might happen,” he reminds you, reaching out to push a strand of hair away from your face. 

His touch sends sparks through your body and you lick your lips, feeling pulled to the man in front of you. That’s when you realize, the lights are still off, but you can see Wonwoo perfectly. “I’m like you now,” you whisper.

“You’re like me,” Wonwoo agrees. “Do you have any regrets?”

“No,” you shake your head. “Do you?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Just one.”

“Yeah?” You shift closer, palms flattening against his cold chest. 

“After you passed out, I realized there’s one thing I never said to you while you were human, not in so many words, at least.” 

“It’s not like you’ve known me long,” you try to assure him.

“That doesn’t matter,” Wonwoo insists. “I still should have said it. Like you wanting to experience me while still human, I should have said it while you still had a heart that beats.”

“I hate to break it to you, mister vampire,” you grin, taking his hand and pressing it to your chest, “but my dead heart is beating for you the same way yours beats for me. Just say it now.”

Wonwoo takes his hand from your chest, reaching up to cup your cheek. “I love you, even though I thought I’d never love anyone. I thought I’d be alone forever, but now… here you are. And I… I love you.” 

You grin at your vampire mate, adoring how vulnerable he’s being with you. “I also thought I’d be alone forever,” you admit. “Thought I’d die young and bloody, which, I guess is kind of true, but you’ve given me something new, something I could have never imagined, and I can’t wait to explore this second life with you. I love you too, Wonwoo, as crazy as it sounds.”

Wonwoo grins, and you return the expression. His thumb moves up to drag past your teeth. “The fangs suit you, my love,” he muses.

The petname makes you smile wider, shifting closer and wrapping your leg around his hip, mounting the pretty vampire. “Hungry,” you whisper, leaning down to press your lips to his neck.

“We’ll have to go get you some food.”

“Not for that,” you laugh, licking his throat. “For you.”

“Are you sure you’re strong enough, darling?” Wonwoo asks. “You’ve just been turned, maybe you should rest-”

“I’ve got strength enough to have you again, that is… if you have the energy, my big, scary, vampire master.”

Now it’s his turn to moan at the new petname, even if it is said slightly in jest.

“Still a brat,” Wonwoo muses, fingers skimming down your sides. 

“You’ll be entertained forever,” you insist.

“And what if master tells you to be a good girl and keep your pretty mouth shut?”

You laugh. “Then you’d miss me after a minute and ask me to start begging again.”

Wonwoo sighs in defeat, then he’s rolling the two of you so you’re on your back, pressed between him and the mattress. “I guess we might as well start your new life off with a bang, shouldn’t we, my love?”

“I’d be mad if we didn’t,” you admit.

Wonwoo only laughs, pressing his lips to yours. You might have forever with him, but right now, you’re as eager and needy as you’ve ever been, and he doesn’t mind catering to you, not one bit. 

☀️ mlist + an. thank you for reading! Vampire Wonwoo just bites different- I know I say that about every new fic but for real, I'd initially planned on this being a more slow burn but Soulmate sexy vampire asshole Wonwoo? as if we all wouldn't be climbing that man like a tree

🍭 support me by. sending a tip here or here - or become a patron to access monthly bonus content and extensions for fics like this one :) find the Patreon teaser below! 

🔮 preview. “Tell me what you want.” You kind of hate it when he uses his vampire master abilities on you, but at the same time, it allows you to dish out your darkest fantasies with no fear of disapproval. “I want you to make me cum so hard I can’t even think.”

cw/ tw. Oral (f receiving), blood play/vampiric drinking from each other, biting, roughhousing, fingering, orgasm control, orgasm denial, dacryphilia, overstim, man handling, pinning, unprotected sex, dirty talk, praise, size kink, soft dom wonwoo, mentions of wandering eyes, multiple reader orgasms, thigh grinding, hair pulling, etc… I pet names: (hers) brat, darling.

👹 rating. 18+ explicit I wc. 2.8k I teaser wc. 300

🌙 staring. Wonwoo x afab!reader

bonus

“Bratty baby is at it again,” Jeonghan says fondly, watching you saunter away from the table with Mingyu toward the bar. “Serves you right for staring at that juice box.”

“You’re not going to take my side on this one?” Wonwoo laughs, amused at the night's turn of events.

“Not a chance,” the long-haired vampire grins. “I don���t know why you’d even need to look at any of these fang bunnies with a soulmate like her.”

Wonwoo sighs, knowing his friend is right. He still can’t help but defend himself. “A man gets thirsty.”

“That’s what this is for,” Jeonghan retorts, swirling the liquid in his wine glass. “You gave up fang bunnies and juice boxes the moment you met your soulmate, and we both know it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wonwoo shakes his head, eyes shifting to you again. He supposes it’s only fair that you get to flirt with the bartender after he’d just been caught looking at a scantily clad woman, but the fairness of the situation does little to lessen the fire building inside of him.

You should know by now that he only has eyes for you… even if his gaze wanders from time to time. He can’t help his predatory instincts, although, he should get more of a manage on them. In fact, he should stop bringing you to vampire bars altogether, but it’s difficult to resist a night out amongst his brood mates. 

“We all know this is a kink of theirs,” Joshua muses. “They fight a little, piss each other off, and then they fuck in the back of Mingyu’s car while he drives them home like a chauffeur.”

“That’s only happened twice,” Wonwoo insists.

Joshua scoffs loudly. “Mingyu had to implement a no fucking in his jeep policy, it definitely happened more than twice.”

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[thinkinonsense]

call me if you're lonely⟡

old man!logan howlett x phone sex hotline worker!reader

cw: dirty talk, mutual masturbation

author's note: very short. just an idea that came to mind.

masterlist

this is so desperate, logan thought to himself as he dialed the number written on the fourth page in the second column. in pretty cursive words it read, call me if you're lonely!

your number had been living in the back of his head for almost a month now but he never got this close to calling it. in the column, it's written that you are a college student working on your masters degree and that you are very popular within your profession as a phone sex hotline worker. honestly, logan didn't care if you just started yesterday. he's been so stressed and overworked lately that he needs a release soon. logan waited as the phone rang after entering his card information. he's sat up on the old mattress under him, waiting patiently to see if anyone answers.

on the third ring, someone picks up.

"thanks for calling, hush hotline." you say, giving him the typical welcome speech before jumping straight in. "what would ya' like me to call you tonight, sugar?"

the sweet tone in your voice made logan's boxers feel tighter. resting his hand on top of his heavy cock, squeezing lightly and slowly stroking himself over the thin material.

"james is fine, honey." logan mutters.

"i like the way you call me, honey." you purr, getting relaxed in bed.

you had a long day; woke up late, missed class, messed up during important meeting at work and needed to blow off some steam. normally, the people you talk to over the phone don't have an effect on you, instead opting to fake it and offer phony pornstar like moans but something made you want to give it another shot.

"is that so?"

the stranger's voice was rough around the edges. deep, cold, straight to the point. it sent a shiver up your spine. usually, your customers were weak. willing to give into your every word and fully submit to you.

"mhm," you hum, lightly running your fingers up and down your thigh. "so, what's gotcha call in tonight, james? rough day at work or you just wanna hear me touch myself for you?"

"bit of both." he was already lost in this little world between the two of you.

“aw, can’t wait to make you feel good." you tell him, playing with the lace of your underwear. "wanna hear what i'm wearing right now?"

"mhm." he grunts.

"a white t-shirt and lacy blue underwear. wish you were here to take them off of me." you sigh, slipping your hand under the waistband.

"what would you do if i was there right now?"

"hmm, think i'd start by kissing you, making sure you get nice and hard for me then i would beg you to fuck my tight throat for hours. are you hard for me right now?"

"y-yes." logan sighs, trying to slow down a bit.

"that's sweet, james. got me blushing just thinkin' about it." you run your middle finger through your folds, gathering the slick and circling your button a couple times.

"just blushing?" he teases, catching you off guard.

"not 'just blushing'." you giggle softly. "you also got me r-really–ah, fuck! really soaked."

logan could hear the obscene squeak of you dipping your fingers inside of yourself. his chest moves up and down at the same rhythm as his strokes. your pretty little gasps made it difficult for him not to release right away.

"s-shit, honey." he groans, listening to the small wet slaps of you fucking yourself. "wanna taste that pussy of yours. i'm sure it's as sweet as that fuckin' mouth you got on you, honey."

never have you actually gotten wet from the men that call you. most of them let you do all the talking, only offering moans and whimpers. you couldn't quite place a finger on it but something about james was doing it for you.

"w-wish it was you inside of me instead of my fingers." you whine, tickling the spot that makes your vision blur.

"bet you would look so pretty wrapped around my cock, honey."

"i would look even prettier with you dripping out of me." faintly, you can hear him shuffling around, trying to stifle his groans. "don't hide yourself, baby. wanna hear you."

like a rubber band, something snapped inside of logan. unable to control his noises anymore, he's fucking his fist faster than before, chasing after every little moan you let out.

you move to rubbing your button switching occasionally, picturing the man that you believe james to be. a little older and rugged. maybe even someone your father would be friends with. someone you would definitely have a secret crush on.

logan's hips thrusted with need. the louder you got, the faster his orgasm was approaching. he had to hold off, he thought to himself. hear you cum first. by the broken whines and little hiccups you let out, he could tell you were only moments away from your release.

"f-fuck, i'm so close." you squeal, legs shaking a little as you near your high.

"me too, honey."

within seconds, your head is thrown back against the silky pillow case. the sheets under you were drenched but you were too full of bliss to care. logan finally allowed himself to let go as well, pearly white spurts coating his lower stomach and even some landing on his tank top. it's quiet for a minute or so before your little giggles can be heard on the other end of the line.

"something funny?" he asks, confused.

"no, no, it's just..." you giggle again with a sigh. "ever since i started this job, no one's ever made me orgasm. at least not like that."

"hm.." logan couldn't fight off the smile creeping on his face. "might need to call more often then."

"i'll be looking forward to it."

[robo-writing]

Logan is submissive like a dog is submissive to his master. He revels in the attention you give him, feeds off it. Greedy man he is, he'll take and take, and never will he be satisfied. Your love, your adoration, your infatuation–all fuel to add to the fire that is his devotion. You say jump, he says how high.

Of course you never know how good you've got him trained until it really counts.

The only thing standing between you and a group of men is all six feet of your boyfriend, leering at the assholes who were harassing you on your way home–only leering because your sonorous voice begs him not to hurt them.

Even the sight of their scared expressions isn't enough to satisfy him. True satisfaction would be him using the men as punching bags, but not if it would upset you; as much as he wanted to rip them apart, you were reason enough not to.

It was his fault in the first place, he should've been here to protect you. Your voice begs again– "Don't do it, they're not worth it." And you make him believe it, teeth bared as a warning, but slowly backing away. "Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind," he growls, and they all scatter like mice. Your hands stroke his arm, not stopping until you see his shoulders slowly untense. He lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, then looks at you. "I'm sorry," he says, pulling you close. "You have nothing to be sorry about," you say, and he can't bring himself to argue. Not when you look up at him like the sun. "For a second there I thought you were gonna take their heads off," you chuckle, leading him to the front door. "I was." "Stop joking Logan–" "I'm not." Your eyebrow raises, having already stepped inside your shared apartment. Before you can protest he descends upon you, holding your neck as to deepen the kiss further. Your lungs burn, allowed a second of reprieve, then returns to kissing you again. "I'm not joking," he gasps. "Best thing in my life, I'd fuckin' kill for you." The way his lips leave you dizzy, you believe every word.

[rin-may-1103]

The Eyes of Death.

This story is mostly inspired by Jaybirbie's prompt | Master post | Next?

"Hey, sweetheart?" Danny called, quickly jotting down the last sentence for his paper. He'd have to remember to go back and reread it and make sure he didn't trail off into another tangent. He swears he wasn't this bad at managing his ADHD back in Amity...

"Yes, Danny?" Damian asked, turning back from the door to face him as he scrolled further down the story he was reading. The familiar font of Gotham City's gazette blurred as a picture of Mr. Freeze and Penguin finally loaded. So that's what was going on. Danny should have known; the bats already dealt with the other usual rouges, and these two were next on the list.

"Can you walk with me? I just know Nancy and her boyfriend are out there, waiting. I really don't want to deal with them again... We could spend more time at my place? Tucker sent me another movie, and I'm unsure if I should watch it alone after last time." Danny pleaded, quickly shoving all of his papers into his bag. He'd deal with straightening them out later, it wasn't like his professors weren't used to his wrinkled essays at this point.

However, he should probably redo the blueprints for Workshop. Mr. Anthlow was a hardass, but nothing could compare to his anger when a student handed in wrinkled blueprints; he claimed he wasn't going to have another 'Tanner' incident on his watch, whatever the heck that meant.

He was not looking forward to whatever Nancy wanted to talk to him about, she looked excited. Which could only mean bad things for him; considering the last time she was excited, he ended up spending time with Bane of all people. And there was no way her boyfriend was just going to let Danny get away again.

Damian grimaces, finally looking up and away from his phone. "I'm sorry beloved..." he held up the device just in time to show an incoming text from his Father, "I promised Father I'd be home a while ago. And with what's happening down on-"

"It's ok, I'll just head out the back door," Danny cut in, seeing the start of guilt on his boyfriend's face. He knew how much Danny hated having to deal with those two, and the fact Damian hasn't been able to even introduce himself to them hasn't helped. With a smile, Danny scooped up his textbooks and made his way to stand in front of Damian, "They can't bother me if they don't see me!"

Unsurprisingly, Danny could feel the guilt grow and start to float around Damian as the boy glanced at his phone, the message tone sounding out again in warning.

Danny only met Damian's father once; it was just a simple shake of hands and sharing names before the man ran off, but it did leave an impression. The man felt tired and paranoid; like, to the point Danny kind of wanted to drag Jazz over and lock the two of them in a room, paranoid. (Danny wants to say he's never seen someone that paranoid, but he'd be lying. He looks in the mirror after all.)

The point is; Danny's only met the man once, but that was enough for him to know that the man would tear down the world if he thought for even a second that one of his kids was in danger. This meant, that if Damian didn't go and reassure his father that he was alive and safe within the next sixty or so seconds, then there was a possibility that there wouldn't be another date for at least another week.

And considering this "study date" was supposed to make up for the last one Damian had missed because of his Father? Yeah, Danny wasn't going to be happy if Damian got grounded or dragged into another 'surprise' family road trip because his father was convinced his children would be dead before the 'yearly' planned get-together in November.

They had a trip to the zoo planned for tomorrow, and Delilah was supposed to be allowed out with her kids. This would be Delilah's first public outing since her kids' birth. There's no way Danny was going to allow Damian to miss that. (he swears to the ancients, if there was a rouge attack he was going to kill someone, Dark Dan's future be damned.)

Lifting his heels off the ground so he could stand on his tiptoes, Danny snagged Damian's arm and pulled him down so he could kiss his cheek. "I'll get home safe, just focus on keeping your dad from going insane. We've got a date at the zoo tomorrow and we're not missing it even if your father becomes the next city rogue."

Damian wrapped his arms around Danny, trapping him in a hug as he sighed in fond frustration. "I promise I won't miss it, ok? I'll be there."

Danny rolled his eyes and pushed Damian back, dropping back to stand on the ground, "You better, 'cause hell hath no fury like a gorilla denied the chance to meet her human best friend's boyfriend."

Damian snorted, before looking away and pretending to cough. Danny moved his textbooks to rest more securely in one of his arms, so he could point at his boyfriend. "I'm not kidding, if I show up tomorrow and tell her all about my life and you're not there, she will break out and track you down. I won't stop her either, you'd deserve whatever she does to you."

"Alright, alright. I get it, and I already promised I'd be there didn't I?" Damian chuckled, raising his hands up in surrender. Which would have been cute if it wasn't for the fact that his phone went off again, this time in an insistent buzzing. His eldest brother's ringtone; which meant Damian was going to be busy for a while.

Cursing, Damian turned and answered, "I'm in the middle of something, this better be important Grayson," glancing back at Danny, he mouthed for him to wait a moment as his brother started talking.

Smiling, Danny shook his head, snatched Damian's jacket, and started making his way out the door. There was no way Damian would finish this phone call any time soon. Danny's learned not to wait after the last four times this happened. Damian turned back with betrayed eyes, but the urgent voice of his brother buzzing even louder held him back. Waving goodbye with a smile, Danny shut the door and started making his way down the hall.

He'd have to ask Damian what happened tomorrow, Grayson didn't usually call him, especially when he knew Damian was spending time with Danny. He said it had something to do with how it was sacrilege to interrupt time spent with a significant other. Danny had wanted to ask him more about it but hadn't gotten the chance when The Riddler crashed their spontaneous meeting.

Speaking of The Riddler, Danny's social science paper wasn't looking too hot right now. He'd have to block out a time for him to work on that at some point this week. He wasn't doing anything on Friday, well, besides his early morning classes. That should work...

"Hey, Danny!" someone called, pulling him out of his musing. Glancing up, Danny internally groaned when he noticed Nancy waving at him in sheer delight. Giving her a half-hearted wave, Danny sped up and continued making his way to the back of the library. If he was quick enough maybe he could-

To his dismay, Nancy's boyfriend stepped out from behind one of the shelves and latched onto his arm. Tightly.

Just great, this is exactly what he wanted to avoid. Curse his inability to pay attention when he got lost in thought. Damn ADHD. Blasted non-existent spatial awareness. This was what he got for relying on his ghost sense, he just knows it.

"She said hi, kind of rude of you to just keep walking, Kid." Wyatt huffed, roughly dragging Danny back and towards his girlfriend. Nancy smiled brightly as Wyatt let him go, allowing Nancy to weave her arm with Danny's and practically drag him toward the front of the building.

"There's this big party going on tonight, some Jr invited us. He said it was going to be a night to remember! You should totally come with us, Danny! My friend Shela said she was bringing her nerdy freshmen too! I just know you'd fit right in with them!" Nancy squealed excitedly, shaking Danny as they finally made it to the front doors.

One of the desk attendants rolled their eyes at them as Danny glanced over, hoping that Barbara might intervene. No such luck, she was nowhere in sight, probably off somewhere shelving books. So much for that plan.

"uh, thanks, but I already-" Danny tried, stopping when Nancy scoffed and yanked him out the door and into the frosty night. "Damn, it's cold!" Wyatt cursed, taking his jacket off and quickly handing it over to Nancy. She let go of Danny and pulled it on, then stared at Danny for a moment, "Put your coat on Danny, no way in hell am I letting my kid catch a cold!"

Rolling his eyes, Danny wrapped Damian's coat over his shoulders. He was too lazy to actually put it on, not when that meant handing his textbooks over. The last time he did that, Nancy got bored and started doodling all over them. (how she had managed to do that in the little time it took to put a hoodie on, Danny wasn't sure.)

"I just want to go home, Nancy. I'm not really a party person." Danny sighed, allowing Nancy to drag him down the dark streets. His apartment was in this general direction anyway. Nancy turned to her boyfriend with a huff, "Wyatt! make him come with us!"

"Let the nerd do what he wants, it's not like it affects us if he kicks the bucket all alone," Wyatt grumbled, rolling his eyes.

Ouch, but true. Please listen to your grumpy boyfriend, please listen to your grumpy boyfriend, please listen-

"But Shela said she was bringing Carly!" Nancy turned back to Danny, a pout clear on her face, "You two would be so cute together! she's nerdy just like you! And she's totally into all those murder mystery shows you watch!"

Damn it. Not this crap again.

"That's nice, Nancy, but I'm not interested. I already told you guys, I have a boyfriend," Danny sighed, trying to gently extract his arm from hers; for a human, Nancy sure had one heck of a grip.

"Yeah, right," Wyatt snorted, patting Danny's back, completely ignoring the fact that Danny was literally wearing someone else's jacket. "We'll believe you when you introduce us, until then. You're a virgin loser."

And there we go, people; the reason Danny wanted to crawl into the sewer and die whenever he saw these two. They were nice, don't get him wrong, but they were also stubborn idiots.

"Being a virgin has nothing to do with my relationship status, Wyatt. I'm ace. you've known this since the first time we talked." Danny grumbled, allowing Nancy to drag him down another street. He wasn't sure exactly where they were going now, but he was too tired to care at this point.

If these self-claimed 'Parents' of his wanted to drag him to this stupid party, then fine. Whatever. It's not like Danny had any other plans tonight anyway.

"Asexuality isn't a thing man," Wyatt huffed, speeding up so he could guide them in the right direction now that they were heading into a rougher patch of buildings. Danny could see the man was shivering, though trying to act tough in front of Nancy. Smirking, Danny sent a cold breeze his way. The man scowled up at the sky, cursing quietly.

"Yeah!" Nancy agreed, smiling brightly down at Danny without a care in the world. Like they didn't have this conversation every other week. "You just haven't met the right person yet, Danny! And I know how awkward it is to admit that you're staying celibate until marriage, but you don't have to hide it behind being ace."

Taking a deep breath, Danny closed his eyes and focused on not shouting out of frustration. The celibate comment was new, the acephobia, not so much. "Ok, first of all; Asexuality is a thing, which many people ARE. Literally, 1% of the world is ace. That's over 70 million people. Second of all, I'm not celibate, and I'm not sure if you even know what that means, considering you know I was raised Atheist."

"What does being an Atheist have to do with celibacy?" Nancy asked, tilting her head to look at him. Danny groaned, smacking his forehead against his textbooks. He was NOT going to explain this to them tonight.

"You know what, Nancy? It doesn't matter." Danny huffed, trying again to gently pry her hands off. He wanted to go home. He wanted to cuddle with his boyfriend. He wanted to go back to Amity. Maybe go to the realms and play with Cujo. He did NOT want to deal with these idiots.

Wyatt stopped walking and turned to face them, rolling his eyes as Nancy pouted at Danny. "Come on babe, let the loser go. He obviously doesn't appreciate your efforts."

"but who else is going to convince him to live a little? He's just going to go back to his apartment and sulk by himself!" Nancy cried, tightening her grip again.

"Who cares what the kid does, Nancy? let the dude die a virgin loser. Now let's go, we're already late as is."

"But I really want him to-," Nancy tried, cutting herself off, as both she and Danny spotted a cloaked person appear out of the shadows behind Wyatt.

Wyatt lifted his brow before slowly turning to see what the two of them were staring at. The cloaked figure suddenly whacked him over the head with a metal pole before he could fully turn around. Wyatt's body dropped to the ground with a heavy thump, making Nancy scream, "Wyatt!"

Shit, Danny stepped back, trying to pull Nancy with him as the cloak dude tossed the metal pole to the side with a loud clank. Which was confusing, why would he through away his weapon?

"Shut her up!" the cloak dude cried, bending down to grab Wyatt's arms. He better not be telling Danny to do that, because that would just be stupid and- Suddenly, a dozen more cloaked people flooded out of the darkness and surrounded them. That answered Danny's questions at least.

Danny tensed up as a couple of the people tried to grab onto him. Quickly pulling Nancy back, successfully this time, Danny glanced around to try and find an exit. He couldn't do anything crazy right now, not unless he wanted to give away his secret, but some self-defense should be fine.

Nancy suddenly let go of his arm and smacked one of the cloaked people in the face, "Don't you fucking dare touch me! Wyatt! Kid, get out of here!"

Danny turned to her in alarm, eyes wide in horror as she quickly disappeared into the cloaked crowd. Another cloaked person managed to latch onto Danny's shoulder, reminding him to focus on his situation. Quickly stepping back, he slammed into the man grabbing him, knocking his grip loose. Ducking under another attempt, Danny swung out his leg and tripped the dude into two others.

Twisting to try and make his way over to where he figured Nancy was, Danny dropped his textbooks and punched someone in the face. Damian's jacket was yanked off his shoulders, making him turn with a growl. Punching another person in the face, Danny lunged at the group.

"Hurry! before the bats find us!" the supposed leader cried, making even more cloaked people surround Danny. There was no way a normal civilian would be able to fight their way out of this, so Danny would have to allow himself to be caught soon. Only after biting and scratching the fuck out of them though. Just because he had to let them catch him, doesn't mean he has to make it easy.

~30 min later

Danny stared at the leader as the man droned on and on about needing the right sacrifice for the ritual to work. Nancy and Wyatt grumbled behind him, agreements from the other kidnapped victims filling Danny's ears like bees.

"The sacrifice shall be the one who treads the veil between life and death, the one who's beloved by the spirits as their own! He shall be pale as a corpse, his body kissed by death many times throughout his life. His hair as black as the sky on a moonless night, cradled by the moon since birth." Mr. totally-read-one-fake-ritual-book-when-he-was-a-teen-and-now-has-to-make-it-everyone's-problem droned on dramatically, reverently dragging his finger down the old dusty tome's page,

"so Mr. Wayne?" Nancy huffed, pressing her back into Danny's side. Wyatt chuckled, shoving his foot into Danny's knee, "No, it's totally Mr. Drake he's talking about. Have you seen that dude's eyebags? they make him look like a ghost."

One of the strangers leaned over, rolling their eyes, "No, it's got to be Mr. Dent. The dude's literally half living half not."

"No, Two-Face is half insane, half burnt chicken. Ain't nothing about him going to please ghosts. He was a fucking lawyer, for Christ shake." another guy added.

"the dude said 'he' which crossed out half of y'all," Danny added, glancing at the group around him. The women blinked and then rolled their eyes; only in Gotham would they get kidnapped and not actually be needed.

"Assholes," Nancy huffed, she glanced over her shoulder and down at him, her face set into a frown, "You good, kid? you're like freezing cold."

"I'm fine," Danny huffed, focusing back on the leader. He could just feel the old magic rolling off the book; this was something dangerous, especially in this dipshit's hands. Ancients, he was going to have to do everything he could to keep the man from actually doing the ritual or mess it up if the bats didn't get here in time.

One of the cloaked people suddenly dragged a camera out from a side room, grumbling about networks and livestreams being shit. Huh, well that would definitely help provide their location to the bats. They must be really inexperienced cultists then...

"The sacrifice shall fall into our hands by fate's design. The sacrifice is here and waiting for what his whole life was meant for. Now-"

"Elder!" one of the other cloaked figures cried, waving their phone in the air in excitement. Dread quickly filled Danny's stomach.

"All the bats and birds are busy dealing with those scoundrels they call rouges! If we hurry, we can complete the ritual before they can interfere!"

"Perfect!" Mr. 'Elder', cheered, slamming the tome closed and handing it off to one of the others. "So?" Mr. Elder started, turning to face them with a sharp grin, "Who's it going to be?"

Danny glanced at the group behind him, all of them having gone silent as the cloaked group started pulling out their ritual things, one of which was a very blood-stained knife.

Mr. Elder started circling them, humming and hawing as he studied each one of them. He stopped next to Wyatt, studying him intently.

Quickly weighing his options, Danny straightened up and glared at the man, "I'll be your sacrifice."

Immediately Nancy leaned away from him with a gasp, Wyatt's foot dropping to the floor with a thud. "Danny, no!" Nancy hissed, turning her body so she could face him. Danny didn't glance at her, just continued glaring at the cultist. The cult leader laughed, "Well then. So it shall be! You heard the sacrifice, tie him to the chair!"

With everyone watching, all Danny could do was tense as four of the followers walked over and pulled him up. "No!" Nancy shouted, leaning over and grabbing onto him. Wyatt reached out to Nancy, wanting to pull her back. The men tensed up, ready to interfere. Quickly pulling back, Danny frowned at Nancy and Wyatt, "I'll be ok, just don't do anything stupid!"

They harshly pulled him up and away again, before Nancy could reply. And because he was already pissed off, he made it as difficult for them as possible as they dragged him to the wooden chair. The camera person focused the lens on them, recording it as they shoved him down to sit and wrapped a bloody rope around his limbs.

So much for thinking they were inexperienced... They've done this before, he knows now. How many times? He wasn't sure, but if he had any say in it after tonight, they'd never do it again.

Once he was securely tied to the chair and gagged, because Danny couldn't help himself but insult them, the cultist started preparing the ritual. Why they hadn't done so beforehand, Danny wasn't sure; that is until one of them sliced a deep gash into his right arm and collected his blood into a bowl.

With a grimace, Danny watched as they mixed his blood with black paint and started drawing a circle around him. The camera dude stepped closer and practically shoved the camera into his face. leaning back, Danny glanced between the camera and the people drawing with his blood.

Suddenly, his arm tingled with ectoplasm, making him panic for a second. he can't heal the wound! not with all the people around him and being recorded! Shit, what had Vlad done last time?? Uh, right! core smothering. He could just smother his core to stop his body from healing. Man, acting like a civilian was a pain in the ass.

Glaring up at the camera now that he wasn't as panicked, Danny watched as the dude stepped back, pulled out a paper, and started reading out loud. "GOTHAM! tonight you shall join us as we summon the most powerful being in the world!"

Did he seriously need the paper just to remember that?

The leader stepped forward when the circle was complete, "Now!" His voice echoed around the silent warehouse, startling the other kidnapped victims. The cameraman turned and focused on him, stepping out of the circle altogether. Danny watched the kidnapped people out of the corner of his eye, wanting to make sure they weren't hurt during this whole fiasco.

"Let us begin!" the leader cheered, suddenly gripping Danny's shoulders tightly. "Join me as we summon our lord and savior! The great tyrant of the dead! The embodiment of war and bloodshed! The one named PARIAH DARK! THE HORRIFIC GHOST KING!!!!"

Immediately, Danny was both completely terrified and amused. He had been worried that they were going to try and summon some great evil demon, not the fucking old tyrant. He could fight Pariah any day of the week.

No, what terrified him was the fact that because Danny won the right to the crown by defeating Pariah the first time, he had no idea what this summoning was going to do. Was it going to work like they wanted and summon Pariah? cool, great even. He can deal with that, might have to reveal his ghost powers if the fight got dirty, but nothing too bad.

or was it going to summon him because he was the king, and if so? how? Would that even work considering he's the sacrifice? would he just disappear and reappear? This could lead to a lot of questions Danny was NOT ready to answer. Gaslighting everyone here into believing he could fight Pariah as a 'meta' human would be easy, convincing everyone that he's not the ghost king or a ghost AFTER getting summoned; not so easy.

The leader released Danny from his grip as he walked over and snatched the tome from one of his followers. Snapping the book open, the man started chanting without warning, pointing at random people to notify them when it was their turn to start.

It was like watching a school play; all the student's doing as they were taught as their teacher directed from the side. Cultist A slammed the bowl of leftover blood on the ground, splattering the black remnants all over Danny and the circle. Which was gross, Danny was going to have to burn this shirt, because there was no way he was going to get this stain out. Cultist B tossed salt at Danny a few minutes later, smacking him in the face with the small white crystals. Shaking his head, Danny glared at him. Cultist B threw the salt again.

The leader's smile grew as he continued chanting.

Seven other cultists joined in the chanting, waving their hands up and down as their voices echoed around them. Danny glanced nervously around the warehouse, hoping he'd spot one of the bats. This was being broadcast, they should be on their way at the very least.

After another minute of looking, Danny glanced back at the other kidnapped victims. Nancy was balling her eyes out, burying herself into her boyfriend's chest. Wyatt was staring at him with wide eyes, clearly unsure about what to do. Probably feeling guilty because they both knew the leader was going to choose him. A few others were looking away, clearly fearing for his life. The rest watched on, trying to show him through their actions that they were there with him till the end. (whether he 'died' or not)

It was weird, but Danny had to give it to them; Gothmites were badass. He doubted anyone in Amity besides his friends would have been brave enough to watch what was happening. Even if they didn't know if he would live or not.

His core crackled, making him choke a little as he finally felt the pull of the summoning. Well, that's just great. Shaking his head, Danny tried to clear his throat. The summoning was making him feel weird and he did not appreciate it.

The chanting got louder as one of the people walked up to him, holding the knife in a white-knuckled grasp. Danny eyed it wearily, glancing between it and the rafters above. Where the hell were the bats when he needed them???

The cultist kneeled before him and raised the blade, slamming it down into his chest right as the leader stopped chanting; Danny gasped, more out of surprise than pain as he stared at the knife. The dude gave him no warning that he was going to stab him. Usually, cultists slit people's throats, right? What the fuck was up with stabbing him???

His blood slowly bubbled up and around the knife, slowly staining his shirt red. Yeah, there was no way in the realms he was going to be able to save this shirt now. Man, he had liked this one too.

He could hear Nancy's sobs turn to wails as the cultist yanked out the knife and handed it to the leader, who Danny just now noticed had joined them in the circle. His blood started gushing down his chest with every beat of his heart, again he held back his core. (what does he do now??? faint? scream? how do normal people react to getting stabbed?????)

"Take this lowly sacrifice as a sign of our eternal loyalty, and grace us with your presence! Your humble servants plead that your godly ears hear our prayers! Join us in this mortal realm and bequeath us your power and name to rectify the sins of our brethren!"

Ok, first of all Danny was no where near lowly you piece of fuck-

Danny's core pulsed, sending out nauseating pain up and down his spine. Gasping, Danny leaned as far forward as he could, trying in vain to grasp at his chest without using his powers. His core crackled, striking a blinding flash through his brain. The echoes of his death crawled up his left arm, waking the old dead nerves into firing signals at his brain.

Danny couldn't help himself, he screamed as the pain grew worse and worse. His thoughts turned hazy, his body cold as his core pulsed again. His heart stuttered and then froze, his core flooding his body with freezing ecto not a moment later. Absently, he could feel the wash of ectoplasm crawl over his body, changing his body minutely. He didn't transform, but he definitely looked more ghostly than human.

All the pain disappeared a moment later, allowing Danny to slump forward, his head hanging low and blocking his face from view. His chest did not rise in ragged breaths, nor did his fingers twitch with life. His mind was still sluggish and clouded with something, making it nearly impossible to think. Squeezing his eyes shut, Danny tried to focus.

"Your Highness?" someone asked, their voice too loud as it rang in Danny's ears. His core pulsed, another flood of ectoplasm flooding his body. His eyes slid open again, allowing him to see the green glow lighting up his chest and lap as he stared down at them.

Slowly, Danny lifted his head, his bright green gaze locking with the man in front of him.

Next?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

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

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[sun-snatcher]

Your take of Círdan being an old man who enjoys pestering people is my absolute fave bc yeah if I was the oldest elf alive I'd be a little shit half the time too for funzies

( credits to the lovely @peregrintook for this beautiful gifset ! )

✵ — WATER-DAMAGED!

summ.  Elrond arrives at Círdan’s workshop. He finds his heart instead. or:  The Herald and the Artisan fall in love. pairing.  elrond peredhel / f!reader  w.count.  1.2k (a lil baby!) a/n.  set in s2e1, friends-to-lovers kinda , fluff galore , mutual pining , Círdan being a thirdwheel (but highkey enjoying it because he’s a little shit like that)

       YOU’RE QUICK TO attempt to bundle Elrond up like a child when he’d arrived. 

Frantic, almost, at the sight of Lindon’s renowned Herald— drenched to the bone, head-to-toe, and dripping river water from his mess of curls, leaving puddles and a wet track wherever he went on the stone of the workshop.

“He’s not here yet,” is what you’d said, when he’d urged you for Master Círdan. The shipwright had gone off to appraise proper timber for the frames of the vessels prepared for Valinor, now that High King Gil-Galad has decreed preparations to set sail. 

“But he should return by nightfall, latest. So will you please sit down, Elr—”

“I cannot,” he overrides, wholly unconvincing through the chatter of his teeth. “You’ll be at risk if I stay.”

You blink. “…From who?”

“I—”

In the distance, a horse whinnies. 

Elrond tenses instantly.

“…Are you— hiding?” you realise, as he springs to his feet to make headway for the sidedoors. “Elrond, wait!”

“Thank you, truly, for your kindness, but I cannot allow the King’s Guard—”

“That was just Silef,” you say incredulously, muscling the door back shut and stubbornly standing in his way. “My mare, remember? From the stables just uphill?” 

A pause. 

He listens with pricked ears: gates of a stable door squeaking; hooves clopping from paddock ground onto pasture grass; the sound of grain and feed being chewed on, after a moment's pass. A notable absence of marching Elven armour and feet stamping its way downhill towards him. 

Just Silef. You’re right. He’d been paranoid. 

“Á quildessë, Elrond,” comes your quiet voice, gentler now as you chase to meet his anxious gaze. “I will make sure no one comes into this workshop, unless it’s Master Círdan himself,” you assure, resting your hands on his forearms. “Just please, sit down. You’re shaking.” 

…He is. He hadn’t even realised. 

It might have been adrenaline, or the bite of the cold from wind and water— but he’s trembling, nonetheless, like a leaf. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, much, much later, when you’d stoked the coals of the workshop hearth to life, and set him upon a wooden seat beside it.

From the open foyer of the atelier, the sea-reflected hues of the setting sun does little to hide the tentative worry in your features. Your voice is as gentle as the lap of tidewater. “There’s nothing to apologise for.”

“I shouldn’t have… barged in.” 

I shouldn’t have involved you in the first place, and put you at risk for treason for harboring a dissenter.

The firelight paints your face in soft, flickering licks of ochre as you tenderly dry off the dampness in his hair, the water trickling down his face. “You were afraid,” you reason generously.

(You don’t tell him that he looks adorably… pitiful. With eyes like that of a kicked puppy, almost. Even worse that he looks half-drowned.)

Elrond doesn’t argue. You’ve always been a kind friend to him. So, so kind. Ever-ready and steadfast to extend an olive branch, impervious to tactlessness, or even offence, from the sheer tenacity of your patience. Elrond has always admired you for it. Elrond has always—

Liked you. Cared. Loved.

(Too much to allow himself to let you get caught in this tangle he’s been forced into.)

He lays a hand over yours, and you pause mid-wipe of a droplet down his lined jaw. His eyes are shut briefly, as if falling into the comfort of your touch— candid indulgence. It makes your heart stutter.

That you’re allowed a quiet moment to admire him this close, so much so you can see the rings of sundering blue in his eyes; or to touch him this affectionately, so much so you could feel the very change of temperature on his skin— 

You think you’ve been blessed with a handsome vision by the Valar themselves.

“You must be curious,” he says, voice a low murmur. His palm swallows yours entirely. His fingers are warm by now. (You shouldn’t notice such details— but you do. You’re an artisan, after all. Or perhaps hopeless romantic is a better suited term?) “But this is beyond even me.”

He slides your hand down, much to your dismay, and uncurls the pouch he’s been clutching onto since he arrived. Now that it’s infront of you, there’s a pull to it you can’t quite understand.

You reach, almost too keenly— 

—but you close his fingers around it instead.

If Elrond had shown any surprise, you didn’t notice. 

“Must be why you’ve sought out Master Círdan,” you muse, looking up at him. “If it’s beyond you, it’s most certainly beyond me, a mere shipwright’s apprentice.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Elrond adds quickly, realising how he must have come across. 

“I know,” you laugh, before he can take off into a tangent. (It’s bright and musical to Elrond’s ears— thinks if he could drown in its sound, he would have done so willingly.) “You forget I know you.”

Not entirely, he doesn’t say. You don’t know how much my heart sings to be near you. How much your presence— or the very thought of you, even— have always brought comfort to me. 

You don’t know how much I’ve been resisting the urge to kiss you since you first sat me down by the fire.

He feels a little smile coming, the kind he couldn’t help, that would light his whole face whenever he cast his gaze on you. “You do, don’t you?” he whispers, voice sinking into something almost— nostalgic, at the sudden unravelling of old memories shared with you throughout the age.

“Well, when it comes to Kingdom politicians…” you shrug teasingly. “As much as I’m allowed to be privy to.”

He barely laughs, too busy looking at you with rapt, reverent attention. It curls a timidness in your heart. “You are allowed all of me. Always.”

Something takes wing in your chest. Butterflies, maybe. Doves taking flight in your ribcage. 

As are you, to me.

At least, that's what you would’ve said, had your ears not caught the distant clop of hooves headed downwind towards the river edge. “Master Círdan is here,” you say instead, diverted. You recognise the huff of his steed anywhere.

You watch Elrond perk up and tune into the approach: the rustle of saddle and stirrups, the shuffle of robes and footsteps. When the doors squeak open and shut, the Kingdom’s shipwright finds the Kingdom’s herald standing in the heart of his own workshop.

“Elrond,” he says, by way of greeting. There’s naught a hint of surprise in his voice— Círdan had felt a call louder than the sea long before he’d arrived, and now he can understand it’s carried in the herald’s charge. “Have you come to seek a certain apprentice of mine?” he asks, regardless.

It’s playful. Knowing.

“He seeks you, Master Círdan,” you answer politely, rounding from the corner where you’d grabbed your spare pelerine cloak to pass to Elrond. “Here, to keep warm.”

“Thank you.”

You bow your head to them both. “I shall be at the lighthouse just across.”

Your fingertips brush against Elrond’s hand as you leave. It tarries; merely a millisecond— enough, however, for Círdan’s keen eyes to catch— before he watches you depart through the sidedoors to give them the privacy they needed. 

Elrond's hand flexes reflexively. Longingly.

A beat passes.

“…Are you sure it is still me you seek?” Círdan muses, brows shot to his hairline.

The tips of Elrond’s ears burn. 

[liliewrites]

"IN THE HEARTHFIRE'S EMBRACE"

a/n ; HALLOO:DD so, here's the first part of the "let the world burn" series inspired by the song of the same name from chris grey. more women will be added to the list as i go, so feel free to drop some suggestions which genshin women you think would be a great addition to the series. anywaay, thanks for readingg:))

-warning/s ; a bit of descriptive violence, mentions of blood and burning but not directed at the reader. -pairing/s ; arlecchino x fem!reader.

where in ; these women would go against every person in teyvat-- would even watch teyvat burn, all for your sake.

(men please dni utc!)

“Lynette, whatever happens, keep your mother safe.”

The words rang in the little girl’s ears repeatedly as she held the older woman’s hands. They were not related by blood in any way, but this woman had taken care of her, raised her and nurtured her for as long as she could remember. So she keeps her father’s words, and protects the woman with what she has.

“There they are! The wife of the Knave!!”

With an annoyed curse beneath a whisper, Lynette grabs onto your hand tightly, pulling you to run away as the spies have found you in your hiding spot. Tired, panting and breathless- your legs felt like it was about to give out, but thanks to the adrenaline spiking through your body, you just kept running, and running, and then finding yourself driven in a corner with nowhere to escape as the spies had surrounded you from all sides.

Despite being struck with fear, your motherly instincts came first as you held your precious daughter in your arms, wanting to protect her more than wanting to be protected by her.

“Mother, I can… I can handle this!” Lynette exclaimed, but you knew better, it was two against half a dozen grown men and only Lynette was capable of fighting out of the two of you but her alone would not be enough to face them. “My child, settle down, I'd rather die than witness you slain in front of me. Let me protect you, so hush.” 

You whispered, tears starting to form in the corner of your eyes as immense fear ran through your veins. You closed your eyes shut to brace yourself for impact, heart filled with dread as one of the men neared you with a blade of his own. He let out a sickly chuckle at your demise, the wife of the Knave’s to be precise, then raising his arm up to—

“Fucking imbeciles.”

—to fall in front of you beheaded, with warm and thick blood splattered against you and the child in your arms. You opened your eyes to look up but you already knew who it was and to your horrific relief, it was your wife covered in blood who stood menacingly in the background. Her hand letting go of her scythe that she earlier held with a grip so tight, her hands trembled while she slayed the wretched men in blinded fury then she started to slowly walk towards you.

You gasped at the sight and immediately covered Lynette's eyes as she was no more than just a child who although you knew was no stranger to this kind of scenery, you still wanted to shield her from the gruesome sight. Nonetheless, still, you felt glee to see your wife.

As for said wife, Arlecchino’s chest was heaving in pure, unfiltered wrath and with no remorse stepped upon the men’s lifeless bodies in a rather harsh manner. Her sharp, pointed heels stabbed itself into the flesh as she made her way towards you through the fire she had caused in the midst of tearing the men apart just a few moments ago.

— but as soon as she reached you, the look in her eyes softened and all hostility she held had instantly melted away. Replaced by a vulnerable and fragile display of guilt and fear as the apathetic mask she’d mastered to put on for years straight had cracked for a brief moment out of fear for you. “My beloved, I am deeply sorry for arriving so late...” she apologized and her tone sounded so different than how she insulted the man who almost killed you. She gently pulled you up into her arms and held you and her daughter with a relieved sigh. 

“I didn't realize that a few had escaped and chased after you, my beloved. I am terribly, terribly sorry for making such a horrible mistake.” Her voice was shaky and you knew that behind the tough exterior she tried to put on, her heart was broken beyond a million pieces at the thought of almost losing you. 

“My dear, it is alright. Lynette kept me safe, and we are alive.” You tried to reassure her, but at the moment you had mentioned the word “alive”, the intense emotions kicked in as she was reminded of the fact that if she arrived just even a second late, you and her daughter would’ve been dead along with the men that lay on the ground. The raging embers of fury ignited once more, so she separated for a moment to summon countless burning crimson blades in thin air one after another, embedding it into the lifeless bodies that lay on the ground. After her little outburst, she looked at the burning men with a glare and held you tightly to keep you safe and secure to provide you solace, amidst the burning chaos of flames that surrounded all three of you.

“My beloved, if you were to die at the hands of such crooked men, tainted and ruined, I could never find it in my heart to watch the world prosper without you as it’d have no meaning at all.”

She spoke with such conviction that it felt like a comforting flame that soothed the fear in your heart but to those who dare lay a finger on you, this served as a threat as this same woman who held you and your child with such a gentle hold and looked at you with tender eyes swearing that she would be capable of attempting to kill the Tsaritsa with her bare hands in a heartbeat— if it meant protecting you.

There is no sane bone in her body, that was indeed a fact, but if you were to be taken away from her then she’d be willing to watch the world go poof, drowned in the flames of her agony of your loss if it were to ever happen.

[ryiju-muunie]

hiii ^^ can u write ab how perverted each JJK man is? plz plz plz includ choso!!!!! i luv my little bbg

Dirty Little Pervert!

HOW PERVERTED ARE THEY?

[Gojo, Geto, Nanami, Choso, and Toji]

18+ viewer discretion is advised

fem!reader/JJK MEN Warnings: established relationship, fem!dom!reader [Gojo], sub!Gojo, anal fingering, dumbification, public sex, dub-con, exhibitionism, slave play, pet/master, hair pulling, degradation, spanking/flogging, bratty!reader [Nanami], brat taming, dacryphilia, daddy kink, mutual masturbation, sex toys, Choso's is really sweet, hunter/prey, consensual non-consensual [Toji] breeding kink, biting, blood play [blood drinking] Word count: 1941 DESC: How perverted are each JJK man on a scale from 1 to 5?

I actually had so much fun with this! I've never done a multi-fic before I'd love to do more!

This is not my most well written fic but hey it's something!

Satoru Gojo: ★★✩✩✩ Submissive/Dominant

Satoru Gojo was the most pathetic man you had ever been with. You had never heard a man cry and whimper more than him, which was strange because when you first met him you had him completely wrong. From the way he acted and from how he presented himself, you pegged him for a dominant guy who liked to fuck submissive girls. You initially thought it would be a problem, being a dom yourself. So it surprised you when you heard him casually admit to being a sub. 

“I like a real dominant woman. Someone who can fuck my smug attitude outta me.” That was all he needed to say. Because soon that’s exactly what you did. 

You just used your fingers, pumping them in and out of his tight little hole. He was already so sensitive that’s all he needed to become a slobbering and filthy mess. You watched as the boy you knew as cocky and conceded fall apart, whimpering and crying out that he wanted more.

“You like that slut?” You smirked, arching your fingers to touch his sensitive prostate. Satoru moaned, nodding his head against the bed. Both of his hands were gripping the sheets and his back arched as he felt a wave of pleasure shoot through his cock. He’d already cum several times, writhing around in it. But he still wanted more. And not to mention, you wouldn’t let him leave until you milked him completely and utterly dry. 

“M-mommy.. Please.. F-f.. mmm… shit.. Mm-fuck.. Fuck.. fuck me… p-please!” He sobbed into the cushion, jerking his hips to the sensation. It wasn’t long before he felt it get too intense and he spilled out again onto the bed, screaming out with pleasure. He threw his head up and arched even more that he possibly could. All from your plush little fingers. You hadn’t even begun to stroke his cock or fondle his balls and he was completely and utterly gone. He was in a haze, fucked dumb from your digits. 

“More…” he rasped, looking over at you with his tongue sticking out, “I want… more..”

Suguru Geto: ★★★★✩ Exhibitionist and slave play

Suguru wasn’t one for hiding his perverted nature. You shouldn’t have been surprised when you both came home from a late day at the office and he was beginning to pull down your pencil skirt. One hand pulled at the hem while the other used little force to push you stomach-first against the hood of his car. You let out a breathy gasp and turned back to him, trying to see what exactly he was doing.

“Suguru?” You asked, trying to get an idea as to what was about to happen. You didn’t want to admit but you were already soaking wet. You knew with the nature of your relationship he didn’t need to ask, if your master wanted to fuck you you knew to oblige. No matter where you two were. 

He pressed his raging boner against your ass and let that speak volumes. He hadn’t been able to concentrate without thinking about fucking you in public. He wanted everyone to hear you moan that he was yours and no one could ever fuck you like that. He wanted you to cry and choke on his cum as he pounded into from the back. Suguru wanted everyone to know who owned you. 

Your skirt came off and fell down to your ankles, revealing your underwear. He inhaled sharply and pulled his cock out from his slacks, letting it hit your fat ass with a small noise. It was within seconds that he was inside you. You gasped and arched your back, feeling one of his hands on the small of your back and the other grabbing your hair, pulling you back to him. 

“You like that, huh? Whore? Little pathetic slut?” Suguru spat in your ear, making your pussy throb in between your legs. You were the most self-respectable girl, never letting anything get to you. But in your sex life… you were a different person. You were a total slut for your husband, doing anything and everything to please him. 

Kento Nanami: ★★★✩✩ Spanking and Brat taming

Kento wasn’t a very perverted guy at all, he’d only ever really think about that stuff when he was with you. You never pegged him for the guy who was into going to fetish bars or doing ACID on a Tuesday night, and you were right. However, you didn’t account for the fact he had his own kinks and ways of pleasuring himself. He never admitted but he enjoyed his fair share of BDSM, only with the right person of course. When you came in, with your bratty nature and your big innocent eyes… he wanted to corrupt you. He wanted to cum on your tits and force you to lick it off or give you a piece of his mind after a long day of work, fucking into you with no care for your own personal boundaries at all. But… he restrained himself enough to limit his kinks to a select few things.

So you found yourself, bent over on his lap with a flogger in his hand, while his other lifted up your pink skirt. Of course, you didn’t wear underwear. He had gotten used to the fact you were the pervert in this relationship, doing everything to get a rise out of him. And it worked. You had been able to make him so sexually frustrated it was pissing him off. He needed to tame you and make you bend to his will over and over, and over again. 

Of course, it would only make you behave for about a week before you started to test his patience again, and then the cycle would repeat. And god he loved it.

“Okay dirty girl,” he spoke gently, “Remember if you stop counting I start over,” and with one fell swoop the flogger smacked your ass. You let out a whimper and threw your head back, counting the first number.

After a few more spanks from the flogger you hazily looked over at him, drool pooling on your bottom lip and dripping onto the floor, “I.. mm.. I forgot… my place,” you let out a hiss as Kento frowned and raised his hand, slapping your ass with enough force to make you cry out. “Mm! I’m sorry!” You let out a sob before he smacked it again, “D-daddy Mm.. mm sorry!” 

“You’re going to show me how sorry you really are, okay?” He raised an eyebrow as you, looking you over as your body shook. You didn’t realize it but he was so incredibly hard it was becoming painful for him.

Choso Kamo: ★✩✩✩✩ Mutual masturbation

Choso actually isn’t that much of a pervert! Choso had never found himself interested in BDSM or crazy sex. He preferred the romantic aspect of a relationship over the sexual, which he was very glad you did too. There was nothing he really wanted to try or had a desire to do. All he really wanted was to be close to you in any way possible. So maybe there was one thing. He wanted to see how you pleasured yourself when you were all alone. He wanted to see how you touched yourself to the thought of him, and he wanted to show you how he touched himself to you. 

When he suggested the idea you thought it was really sweet and agreed. It made him happy to think you wanted to be as close to him as he wanted to be with you. You watched as your boyfriend shyly peered over at your exposed pussy, glistening just for him. You placed your small vibrator over your clit, letting out a faint sigh at the new sensation. Just watching you begin to please yourself made a small jolt of electricity travel through his cock.

“Baby…” You cooed, motioning for him to lay beside you. Choso nodded and laid back, resting his head against your shoulder, “You wanna touch yourself too?” 

“Mmhm…” He nodded, looking down at his growing erection. It took a few seconds before he was freed from his pants and sopping wet from his precum. He shyly placed his hand around his shaft and stroked upwards, before focussing on his tip. You watched him with a curious expression, slowly rubbing circles around your clit with your bullet vibrator. You let out a small moan as you watched him massage the slit on his tip, before going back to stroking his length again. All the while, his eyes were on you. Your face and the cute expressions you were making. 

This felt more intimate than sex. A way to be close to one another without truly touching each other. Even though he longed desperately to touch some part of you, that’s why he was leaning his side against yours. Your warmth and your smell were so comforting, it was all he needed to masturbate near you. He really, really loved you.

Toji Zenin: ★★★★★★ Hunter/prey and CNC

Toji wins. Toji fucking wins. He’s the most perverted man you’ve ever met. The first thing he asked you when you walked up to him at that bar was your bra size, and that same night he was taking it off with one hand. Your relationship was purely sexual from the moment it began and you both loved it. You would do any kink or any weird thing he suggested, as he would for you. As long as it meant he got to breed your pretty pussy in the end. 

Today you both had decided on something… out of the norm. It was dead of night, maybe 3 AM? And you were in a lovely wooded area, running for your life. Behind you, you heard something chasing after you. Maybe it was a beast, maybe it was a man, you couldn’t tell. Toji was supposed to be chasing you, but it had been so long since you had seen him that you weren’t sure what was behind you anymore. You looked down at your surroundings but it was pitch black, the only thing you could see were a few branches in front of you. You still saw them yet you tripped. 

You fell face-first into a pile of leaves, scrambling when you heard… growling. A large hand grabbed your shirt and you gasped, struggling against it. You could barely see, you didn’t realize he had leaned down and began to bite you. You let out a cry, “Agh! S-stop!” You continued to struggle, whimpering when the man behind you broke skin and started to suck on the blood seeping from your neck. 

“Pretty thing. Shame… M’ gonna fuck you so good,” Toji whispered, throwing you back into the ground. He was giving you a chance to run, to escape. But you didn’t want to. It was so fun to role play, to pretend you were in any real danger. You knew even though your relationship was sexual he’d kill for you and your tight pussy.

“Please…” You cried as you felt your pants rip from the top down, exposing your ass, “Leave me alone…” You buried your head into the leaves, a large hand grabbing your hair and pulling you up. 

“I said I’m gonna fuck you good. Now stay quiet you fucking brat,” Toji pushed you down, making you squeal in pain as he slapped your ass a few times. Your skin stung and you knew this was just the beginning of a long sexual experience with your lovely sneaky link, Toji.

[yandere-fetish]

Yandere Patient X Female Reader

Part One

warnings: disrespect, rude, slow burn

Yandere Patient is a highly dignified CEO on his way to one of his many companies from the vast countryside. He's reading the newspaper and catching up on the latest magazines, detailing the latest hot topics and debates. The indifferent expression paired with wire framed glasses only made his handsome face more attractive.

The driver comes to a stop at a stop sign while looking both ways. There's no one around. He turns right to drive towards the city.

Yandere Patient reaches for a small drink out of the mini fridge, then the car jerks.

*SKIIIRRRTT*

*CRASH*

Yandere Patient is knocked out as his legs are disfigured in a gory way. The pain was unbearable, but Yandere Patient was in no condition to feel the pain due to the concussion. His eyes flutter shut as the driver is crawling out the front seat, attempting to check on his master.

Yandere Patient scowls at his uncle's suggestion. He doesn't need anyone to take care of him. He doesn't need an extra person supervising the way he moves or watching his every breath.

Yandere Patient didn't need a babysitter. He's a damn grown man, for God's sake!

"They're not a babysitter. They would live in the servants quarters and tend to your needs. Just treat them like a maid. They would only aid you when you need them to—"

"*scowls* And I won't need them!"

"*sigh* Nephew, there's just some things you need to understand in life, mainly that there's no 'I' in 'team'. You cannot do everything by yourself."

"Tch. Watch me! *wheels away in his new wheelchair*"

"Jenna, *sighs and stares at a picture of his sister* what am I going to do with this kid?"

This is where you come in.

You show up at noon, ready to meet your newly appointed patient after hearing so many coworkers complain about how aggressive and snarky this patient has been since joining their agency as a client.

You really hadn't wanted to take this patient under your wing but since the agency was willing to fire anyone who didn't at least try, so you had to.

The sooner you come, the sooner you can leave.

So, here you are, standing on the doorstep of a luxurious mansion with a thirty-foot driveway. You'd never dream of living in a place such as this, let alone working in one.

Funny how you'd be doing both for a while.

When the door opens, you're greeted by a tall and broad-shouldered with a friendly smile. He welcomes you in while telling you, in detail, about his nephew's accident and his.. preferences.

At first, you're shocked and confused, but nonetheless you agree.

"I'm (Y/N) (L/N) from True Home Care. It's nice to meet you, Mister—"

"*scowls and ignores you* I thought they sent the last one?"

"Now, now, nephew. She's come all the way here. The least you can do is try her out for a day."

"I told you and that cheap company that I don't need anyone's help! I'll be fine on my own!"

"Just give her a chance. I'm certain it'll work out this time—"

*glares at his uncle and wheels away*

"*sighs* I apologize, Mrs. (L/N). He's moody, as you can tell. He should come around with some coaxing."

"I.. I'm sure he's not very open to strangers. I'd feel uncomfortable opening my home to one, especially several. And it's Miss— I'm not married. *smiles*"

"You're not? *clicks his tongue at the thought of an idea* I apologize again. Let me show you to your room for the time being."

It's been a a week since you first arrived at Yandere Patient's home. You've quickly become used to your room that's the size of a living room with a comfy as fuck bed to go with it. The 65" TV was definitely a nice addition, and let's not get started on the en suite bathroom and the walk-in closet.

To say you were happy was an understatement.

Now, though, you had wished you were still in your comfy bed instead of in the kitchen, gathering Yandere Patient's favorite tea.

In the sitting room was Yandere Patient and his uncle. They were once again discussing your presence in the mansion, as if you weren't in the other room. The loud noises made you flinch from time to time, but you just reminded yourself that whatever happens will happen. You've done your job well and that's all that matters.

When you're finished with the tea, you serve Yandere Patient, silently keeping yourself to the side while the two argue again.

After the uncle strikes a nerve into Yandere Patient, he walks out of the house. Yandere Patient is so pissed that he slams his hands on the table, making the teacup jump. You flinch as Yandere Patient fists his hands, his muscular arms flexing in anger as he suddenly begins to try to stand.

You're too late; Yandere Patient is all ready on the floor. He slams his fists into the hardwood, bruising them severely.

You're careful to go to his side, helping him up. Yet, the moment you touch his arm, Yandere Patient automatically shoves you away from him with a scowl.

You end up running into a sharp, marble vase table with nothing on it, luckily.

"Get the hell out of here! You're not wanted, nor needed here!"

"*on the verge of tears* You know what? Fuck you!"

"*bewildered at your sudden back talk* What..?"

"You think I want to take care of some selfish, inconsiderate twenty-some year old brat who only calls his uncle when he has a problem? I'd rather lay on my back and give birth to a child to take care of instead of someone like you! If it wasn't for the high pay, I wouldn't even be here taking this damn abuse! I work damn hard everyday to make sure your needs are met, and what do I get in return? Verbally ridiculed and now physically abused! I don't give a mother fuck if you're rich, handsome, or have power; my job is to take care of you and to only take care of you! If I wanted to care for a whiny and stubborn man, I'd go online and get myself a boyfriend!"

*stares wide eyed at you as you're huffing from anger and pain*

"Now, let me help you get up and to the bath so that I can take a fucking break, Sir."

After wheeling him into the bathroom and helping him undress, Yandere Patient is extremely docile and quiet. There's no protest or stubbornness coming from him, much to your relief.

Yandere Patient, on the other hand, notices how you skim over his body but you don't linger anywhere at all. He frowns, not really understanding why. Looking away as both of you help Yandere Patient into his wide garden tub, you silently tend to his needs.

Yandere Patient apologizes, to which you scoff at but accept his apology.

It's silent while you're helping him dry off and get dressed. Even while you're wheeling him to his bed.

But when you begin to aid him into bed, Yandere Patient notices the bruise from earlier forming into a nasty one.

Since your scrubs were moving to reveal your skin when you bend at an angle, he could see how clearly he had hurt you. Something churns in his heart at the memory of pushing you out of anger, embarrassment, and frustration.

Yandere Patient doesn't realize what he's doing until he's gently touching the bruise on your side.

"*flinches while standing up* What are you doing?"

"I didn't mean to hurt you.."

"It's.. it's all right. I'm not bleeding so there's nothing to worry about."

"*furrows his brows* It's not okay. I went too far. Let me make it up to you."

"Don't worry about it, Sir. There's nothing you need to make up for."

"I insist. I'll treat you to a meal, or a day at the spa? Girls care about their skin, right?"

"*smiles* It's not necessary, Sir. Have a good night. I'll be down the hall if you need anything."

*after you've left*

"I'll make it up to you, somehow.. someway."

Part Two?

[shootingstarpilot]

Do you have any advice for writing Mace Windu?

Hello friend! I've been sitting on this for a while, because everyone's got their own interpretations, but mine is based on an idea I was struggling to put words to.

(Caveat that I have not read Legends material, that people can write what they like, etc. etc.)

The way I see it, Lucas specializes in writing stories in terms of themes and archetypes. This is why certain dialogue choices or the development of certain relationships can be... clunky, let's go with that. Characters (Obi-Wan and Anakin fall into their own category, sure) are written primarily as archetypes. You have Yoda as the wise old sage, Sidious as the ultimate evil-

And Mace Windu as the ultimate good.

We see this in the Chancellor's office, right? During the final showdown. This is the moment where Anakin makes his choice- stay in the Light or Fall- and the characters visually representing that choice are Palpatine and Mace. He's the Master of the Order. He's raised a Padawan who sits on the Council with him. He's an incredibly skilled swordsman- hell, his fighting style of choice (Vaapad) epitomizes how clearly he's mastered the art of internal balance!

All of that to say- his whole character is built around the idea that he is the Good Guy. That would be the one piece of writing advice I would give. If you're wondering how to write him, start with that idea- that he is written to represent the absolute opposite of Sidious. He's the ultimate good. He is the illuminating Light to Sidious' corrupting Dark. This is why antagonistic portrayals of him never ring true to me- they're coming from a foundational understanding that I simply do not subscribe to. It reeks of a fundamental misunderstanding of his character and of the whole saga's themes.

(And also racism. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the racism that too often plays a significant role.)

All of that being said, what might it look like to write from the foundation of Mace being the representation of ultimate good? The good thing about characters being written as archetypes is that it gives us fans a significant amount of freedom in determining what those characters look like when they're written as characters. Different people will have different takes, but for me:

Well, first off- he's the epitome of a Jedi. So all of what that entails- he is fundamentally kind, fundamentally compassionate, and fundamentally in control of himself.

He's funny. I think he has a very dry sense of humor, and that he finds joy in the smallest things.

He loves so much. He loves his Padawan, he loves his friends, he loves his family, he loves the Republic- he loves the galaxy enough to go to war for it, and he loves the men who'll kill his people.

There will never be a situation where he has the capacity to help and chooses not to.

And last but not least, I choose to believe that this man can bake pastries with the best of them. In my heart of hearts, he's a stress baker, and he mends his socks with purple thread.

Hope this helps!

[ddejavvu]

okay but mei, touchy bestie anakin with no boundaries??

like pls that man just brush against me and i’d become goo on the spot

we've expanded a lot on bff!james with no boundaries but I'd love more on anakin :)

--

It's not uncommon to see pairs of padawans looking as though their brief sparring session has resulted in the destruction of all of their bones. It's so common, in fact, that salles have a cooldown area, separated from the main floor and paved with tile so that the floors produce a chilling effect when exhausted padawans flop down onto them.

It's an odd hour of the evening and classes resume tomorrow, so you and Anakin had the salles to yourselves. You're sprawled out over the tile emitting intermittent groans here and there- perhaps Anakin is brushing up on his Shyriiwook.

When the sun no longer stretches to the door, now receding over the windowsill, you know you'll need to be back in your respective quarters soon to avoid 2 nagging masters lecturing on school nights and proper nighttime conduct which, apparently, does not include sparring.

You nudge your hand against the back of Anakin's own, "Let's go."

Another groan that speaks deeply to the exhaustion inside of you.

You peel yourself off of the tile first, but Anakin's quick to catch your arm, and a flick of his forearm means you're falling back against the floor once more. The angle that he pulls you at, however, lands you more on him.

You fall halfway on top of his chest, and your elbow hits his stomach. He lets out yet another grunt, this time of sharp pain instead of a dull ache, "Oh- kriff."

"Sorry!" You press your palm flat against him to get up, and it hits his chest, rock-hard and damp beneath his sweat-soaked tunic. You try pushing up and off of him but he catches your wrists, weakening your grip and holding you semi-upright above him.

"Easy," He soothes, folding upright himself with a heavy sigh and righting you in the process. He blinks languidly, and one his hands lingers on your own, "I don't think I can walk back to my quarters."

"I can't carry you," You try wriggling your wrist out of his grip, but he tightens his hold and pulls you in to smear his sweaty brow against your shoulder- too close to your chest for your stomach not to twist.

You feel a huff of his breath leak beneath the outer layer of your tunics and he draws back having left a stain on your clothes, eyes narrowed at it in sadistic pride.

"There," He nods once, using a great deal of effort to rise to his feet, "I think you should carry me. I won, after all."

"You always win," You grumble, taking the hand that he offers you and letting him haul you off of the ground, "Besides, I can barely walk myself."

Quite contrary to his beleaguered complaints, he merely rolls his eyes, stepping in front of you and offering you his back, his legs bending partway to lower him into a squat.

You stand frozen, half-indignant at being cut off, and half bewildered by the offer you think he might be making.

And he is making it, though his patience is waning as he urges you forwards with his hands, "Come on! If I keep squatting like this my knees are gonna give out."

You rush to scramble up into his grip, his hands winding around your thighs, fingers squeezing places you weren't aware were integral to your support.

"You're lugging me through the Temple on your back," You point out, but your arms tighten around his shoulders just in case he decides to rescind his offer, "Your knees are gonna give out no matter what."

His jaw tightens as you murmur in his ear- you know it by the way a muscle beneath his cheek jumps. You wonder if he can feel it- if he can sense it when you swallow the little saliva that's pooled in your mouth upon such close contact with Anakin, and he calls his abandoned lightsaber to his hand after that uncharacteristic moment of hesitation with a flick of his fingers.

"Hold this," He orders, stuffing the cold hilt into your hands that are crossed over his chest, dangling there over his broad shoulders. You don't ask why he can't just clip it to his belt- you're too busy focusing on the way that his hand comes back to grip awfully close to your core when he braces it back on your thigh.

Hand warmed by your skin, fingers inches away from your now-aching core, the muscle of his back pressed to your chest, Anakin marches through the halls of the Temple, palming your thighs to readjust your position on his back far too often.

[motherofdogs1010]

A Jedi in Arrakis II (Paul Atreides x Reader)

Summary: While on the run from Empire troops, Jedi padawan Y/N comes to find out that hyper-driving in a compromised craft can have some major setbacks when she discovers not only is on a new planet but a whole new galaxy as well...

Warnings: eventual 18+, eventual smut, pinv!sex, currently FLUFF, eventual NSFW, jedi!reader, simp!Paul, Bene Gesserit ideology, Bene Gesserit breeding ideology, spoilers for Dune I and II, angst, talks of questioning the Force and teachings

A/N: I am changing the timeline of the Dune plot and certain events

Dividers by @firefly-graphics Banner by @vase-of-lilies

Part I

A total of one month had passed since her arrival on Arrakis, the Duke have been kind enough to allow for her to stay with them. And during these few days, she had found Paul's company to be welcoming with the way he was intrigued about everything from the Force to her home on Naboo. It made her feel warm inside but she tried to ignore it, but she knew if Anakin was here, he'd been teasing her about it.

"What was that you did with the sandworm?" Paul asked, she looked at him.

"I used the Force", she answered with a frown. "Have you not heard of the Force?"

"No, never", Paul breathed, "it was... amazing. And what is that you carry?"

"It's my lightsaber", she answered as BB trailed next to her. "This is all so confusing, we are only a universe away and yet it's so different. This planet is really similar to Tattoonie and is very strong with the Force"

Paul let out a light chuckle in agreement, "it is. I would like to know more if you don't mind and tell you about Caladan, it's where I was raised."

"Of course", she said with a smile. "I'm only a padawan, if my Master was here, he'd probably get a big head and I'd love to hear more about your planet later."

"So, I'm assuming you're a student?"

"An apprentice, I don't become a Master until I am found ready to conquer the trials by the Jedi Council."

As she continued talking about the Force, the teachings, about Naboo, Paul seemed more interested as he listened intently and hanging off every word of hers. He did look over anxiously over at BB a few times before they came to one of the many loading bays at this compound as Paul asked, "can you really understand it?"

"BB? Yeah, anyone where I'm from understands basic droid language", she answered with a shrug. "BB's just a big goof, he's a prototype I was given."

BB let out a little offended noise and she patted his head.

"We have A.I. and robotics banned after we had a war with them", Paul said, she nodded.

"Atreides!" a booming voice declared and she saw a tall, tan skinned man with a big grin coming to Paul.

He looked like a warrior but the way Paul was excited to him let her know of the friendship the two had.

"Duncan", Paul said with a grin, "you're back from the South."

"With barely my life and oh! Who is this, Paul? A lady friend of yours", Duncan joked, she laughed. "I will say that those Fremen fight for blood."

"My name is Y/N and I... crash landed here when I hyper jumped", she said, BB whirled. "Oh and this is BB."

"I still don't understand how that is possible without Spice", Paul said. "You said Spice doesn't exist at all where you are from."

"I'm assuming my galaxy's technology is more advanced", she answered, "since we use droids and such, even our medicine is more advanced."

"Well, it is nice to meet you, Y/N, BB", Duncan said with a knowing grin, "I'm heading to my room to get some much needed rest."

Duncan turned and left with a grin as Paul watched as BB approached him, a finger poking BB on the head who let out a little war cry and began to bump Paul in the shins.

Paul had training to do and he had lend her to a quiet spot where she and BB could be, where she could focus on strengthening her Force training. Y/N had already done her lightsaber training, making sure she was still honing her skills even while on this odd planet.

"Ok, BB", she said, "let's get to it."

Sitting down with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, Y/N sucked in a deep breath and began to let her mind clear, remembering everything Anakin had told her and Ahsoka about being one with the Force. She had to empty her mind, allow herself to fully feel for the Force and as she evened out her breathing, she allowed for her mind and breathing to lull her...

🪐

The Reverend Mother had come earlier than expected and Lady Jessica found herself trailing behind her old teacher as the woman was scolding her for having birthed a son.

"What is this of a newcomer?" Reverend Mother asked. "I have heard whispers of a woman from another galaxy who possess odd abilities."

"She is no one", Jessica answered, "merely a lost traveler."

Jessica could feel the older woman's glare from behind the cage veil and felt like a student all over again.

"A lost traveler who held back a sandworm with a unseen power", Reverend Mother spat.

Jessica held back her emotions as she watched as a sudden thought passed over her mentor's eyes and Jessica felt unsure as to what she was thinking, but she held a hope it wasn't what she was thinking.

Had Paul been born a girl, he would have been married to na-Baron Feyd-Rautha of House Harkonnen, but Jessica had never intended to fall for Leto. It had been her greatest failure in the eyes of her Sisters when she chose to give Leto a son, that she chose to give her dearest love what he wanted: an heir.

At the time, her pride had made her even think Paul could become the Kwisatz Haderach, but now, she wasn't so sure and with the arrival of this strange girl, Jessica wondered.

She wondered if the Reverend Mother was plotting once again, she recognized that glint in the old woman's eye when she found a new individual to add to their growing breeding program.

Jessica tried to push down that curiosity and that anxiety that always seem to come when she thought about Paul's future.

🪐

"C'mon, Paul", Duncan encouraged, "focus. You need to always keep an eye on the enemy, it could mean life or death."

Paul nodded, "my mind was wandering, sorry."

The girl he had been dreaming about was here, he had first thought she could have been a Fremen with her garbs that she would sometimes be in the dreams, but no, she was from beyond their galaxy.

Paul sucked in a breath as he tightened his stance, trying to listen to Duncan's advice despite the way his mind was recalling the dreams.

The dreams where he could taste a unique drink as she smiled at him, it was a blue drink with the consistency of milk; another dream where they were here in Arrakis, the Spice in the sand glittering as they sat on a tall dune, watching a sandworm pass them by...

Arrakis was beautiful at night, Y/N concluded as she looked at the dark horizon; the air was cooler as she stood on the balcony. BB was in his hibernating mode to charge as Y/N was dressed in a thin nightgown meant for this weather, her robes folded up neatly as her hair hung loose from its hairstyle.

A knock came from her door and she sensed it was Paul, she walked over to the door and opened it.

"Paul", she greeted with a smile. "Shouldn't you be asleep? Being a Duke's son and such?"

"I wanted to talk more", Paul replied with a smile. "I decided my beauty sleep could wait a little longer."

"How kind of you", she joked, letting him in.

"I wanted to ask about your saber thing", Paul sheepishly said, "I've never seen anything like it and I wanted to ask more about you."

Y/N felt her eyes widen at Paul's statement about her, it made her heart thump in a way it hadn't before and she sheepishly looked away before moving to grab her lightsaber.

"It'd be too heavy for you to hold", she softly said, moving a bit aways so the heat of the saber wouldn't startle Paul. "Ready?"

Paul nodded with a boyish grin as she pressed the button, the hum of the lightsaber coming to life and the bright white of its color showing.

Paul looked at it amazed as she twirled it to show-off.

"How is it not heavy for you?" Paul asked.

"They train us from when we were young", Y/N said, "they give us little ones to get us used to the weight."

She shut the lightsaber off and put it on the dresser.

"Your galaxy seems so amazing", Paul softly said, walking in front of her. "I hope to see it one day."

"And Caladan sounds beautiful", Y/N replied back.

They were silent as they stared at one another, a small smile gracing Paul's lips as he said, "you look different with your hair down. I've never seen it."

"Oh", she said, flushed a bit. "Space Puffs are very popular on Naboo."

A strange feeling was in her chest, one that seemed to make her feel fuzzy and light as she stood in Paul's presence and she wondered if this is how Anakin felt when he saw Padme. One had to be a idiot to not see the glances the two gave one another.

"I better go back", Paul said after a minute, a boyish grin on his face. "If anyone saw me, they'd throw a scandal."

Y/N bite her bottom lip as she watched Paul leave and sucked in a breath as she contemplated these new feelings.

TAGLIST

@cloudlst

@khaleesihavilliard

@colors-for-the-world-please

[hrhmimieucliffe]

NSFW Alphabet with Doctor Zayne - ❄️

Minors DNI (Obviously)

Wanted to do this because I've never done an NSFW Alphabet before. Hope my fellow Zayne stans see my vision and agree with me though.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after the act) - Very affectionate and attentive. He would clean you up, help you relax, maybe even give you a massage if he went too hard. 🤫

B = Body part (favourite body part their own or their lovers) - He couldn't just choose one spot. He loves to kiss the palms of your hands when you touch and grab at his face whilst he's thrusting into you slowly and deeply. He loves to place gentle and loving kisses on your neck. He loves to run his hands all over your body, specifically your torso, grabbing fistfuls of your breast gently.

C = Cum (anything that has to do with it) - He doesn't really like the mess, so he'll be sure to clean it up as soon as possible. He'll also advise you to use the toilet, as that's what you're supposed to do after sex, then maybe you can have a shower... maybe he'd join you.

D = Dirty secret (Pretty self-explanatory) - He may act indifferent, but he secretly loves watching you walk and strut around in lingerie when you're in the bedroom. He slowly strips it off you with care, as he doesn't want to ruin it of course. He loves to see you in it, and treats it with care. His favourite part is definitely slowly taking it off you and revealing every inch of your perfect body. He definitely also loves it when you tease him in different ways.

E = Experience (do they know what they’re doing) - Come on now...🧍🏾‍♀️Though it isn't his area of expertise, I'd say as a Doctor in general, he might know a thing or two about stimulation. Even if he isn't experienced. 🤫

F = Favorite position - (Idk many positions so I'll just go by something I do know though I don't know the name of it 😭) I think Zayne would like an intimate position, such as a spooning position. I think him having you safe and secure in his arms, in a position where he can watch your facial expressions change, as seeing your different pleasured expressions gets him off. He likes to be close to you.

G = Getting Off (What gets them off?) - I think Zayne is the kind of man that could sit down and watch you intently as you give him a little show. A lapdance, a strip tease, anything like that. But even moreso, I think he would love it when you possibly take charge every once in a while. He secretly likes it when you make him ask nicely for you to let him finish🤫

H = Hair (grooming habits) - He is definitely well-groomed, no doubt about it.

I = Intimacy (in the moment romantic or rough/dirty) - Definitely romantic. He likes to make love. Slow, sensual, passionate, intimate, and gentle. He is a gentle dom in my opinion, but he doesn't mind you being on top every once in a while. He could indulge in something rougher if you ask, but I don't really think he'd put his all into it - afraid of hurting you of course.

J = Jack off (do they masturbate and how often) - I think he wouldn't do it often, as he's way too busy with work. But perhaps on a day off he'll get pent up and decide to rub one out. I'm sure he'd be thinking of you when he does 🤫

K = Kink (kinks what they like possibly unusual) - I don't think he has many kinks to be honest. Perhaps brat tamer, or primal (hunter). No daddy or master kink over here 🤫 Maybe he secretly likes to see you all tied up for him, though as long as its not hurting too much. I think perhaps he could have a size difference kink. After all, he'd love watching and witnessing how well you take him every time. Definitely a gentle dom.

L = Location (where they like to get it on) - He definitely would prefer if its not in public. He likes to be somewhere private where its just the two of you. Where no one can disturb you. Your body is his temple and he wants to be the only one to see it. It goes both ways, though.

M = Motivation (things that makes them tick/turn ons) - When you push him onto the bed and straddle him, 100%. When you visit him whilst he's working just to tease him and he has to resist the urge to give in. When you "accidentally" drop something and bend over. When you grind into him as you sit on top of him. When you slowly slide and drag your hands under his clothes, caressing that sculpted body of his, circling his nipple with your finger. It drives him insane. When you wear his favourite outfit just to rile him up.

N = No (turnoffs or absolutely won’t do) - Hair pulling (at least too hard), Spanking (Again, not too hard if he DOES do it), anything too kinky in general or like proper BDSM.

O = Oral (receiving or giving and how skillful they are) - He definitely loves to receive. He loves to sit back and watch you as you take him into your throat. He'll let out small soft grunts and groans every now and then, but he'd obviously be holding back. Maybe he'll whisper a few praises and stroke your hair. But, he also thinks it's better to give than recieve. Watching your face contort in pleasure, gripping at the sheets, arching your back, your body trembling, those adorable moans, the way you whisper his name. He'd be making sure your needs come before his. You're his favourite patient, and a good Doctor takes GOOD care of his patients needs before his own. 🤫

P = Pace (how fast they are and how long they last in bed) - Definitely nice and slow, but he'd pick up the pace the faster he gets to bursting and maybe be a little rough if you asked him to be.

Q = Quickie - I think quickies would be beneficial depending on when. Like you could tease him in the morning before he has to go work and he'd have no choice but to give in and take care of you when you beg him to and give him those big doe eyes. Maybe if it's late and you're in the office, he'd relieve some quick stress with you. Maybe he'd even let you suck him off under his desk whilst he's working (after you got him riled up on purpose, of course)

R = Risk (do they like to try new things) - I think he'd be open to new things, but mostly depending on how you feel about them.

S = Stamina (how many times they can go and how long each round lasts) - Maximum 3 rounds, just because he's a workaholic, and so he couldn't go for too long as he'd need to get his rest in for work the next day. But he always makes it up to you. When he has a day off, he'd go as much as you want him to.

T = Toys (are they game for using sex toys on themselves or lovers) - I think he wouldn't mind using one on you. His favourite would definitely be a remote controlled vibrator that he can activate at any time. You'd better hope you're not out hunting wanderers or with another person when he gets bored in his office and decides to activate it for fun.

U = Unfair (how do they tease or do they enjoy suspense themselves) - Oh, I think he wouldn't definitely be the type to make you whine and beg, edging you and watching you come apart as you plead for him to let you cum when he's two or three fingers deep inside you. Maybe he won't give in and you'll have to keep begging. Maybe he'll hold you still so that you don't seek any other stimulation to finish yourself off.

V = Volume (are they loud, what sounds, and do they talk) - Always low. Quiet. Hushed. Whispered. He won't moan too loudly, he'd probably hold it back or release it in an almost agonised growl and grunt. He likes to praise you, whether you're receiving or giving the pleasure. He would probably check on you whilst he was doing it to you to make sure he's not too rough or anything.

W = Wild card (random sincannon of any sort) - I think he'd definitely use his evol during sex at least one time 🤫 When it gets too hot, I'm sure a little ice would definitely help👩🏾‍🦯

X = X-ray (what’s down below in dem pants) - Girl...😏😩 he is packing of course. A good 5-6 inches.

Y = Yearning (sexdrive level) - It's not always high, but it certainly is when you tease him. Sometimes it'll go up just looking at you, or thinking about you.

Z = Zzzz (do they sleep after if so how quickly after) - He'll only sleep once he knows you're okay and all your needs have been taken care of. He'll watch you fall asleep in his arms.

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Am I right or no, girlies?

(If you saw any spelling mistakes, no you didn't)

[juyendraws]

[Limbus Company] Faust’s Development (or Lack Thereof) in Intervallo 6.5

So Murder on the WARP Express came out and uh… The suspicions I had regarding Faust’s future arc ended up being confirmed. Faust is definitely not reaching out to the truth. I didn't expect the seeds for her story to be planted so soon, but here we are. It’s real. And you're probably thinking, “Uh… WTF are you talking about?” Let me explain to you what I mean.

The message of Library of Ruina is a critical part to understanding what's going on in Limbus Company. I will tell you straight-up here and now, absolutely nobody in the fanbase knows what the hell LoR is actually about. Nobody. And it is such a shame, because it has such a great message that absolutely nobody talks about. I'd love to tell you much more about it, but that involves long explications on Jungian Psychology, the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the story itself, which I don't wanna subject you to yet (I am saving my esoteric lore dumping for the video scripts I’m currently working on). What I will tell you, however, is that the lessons learned by Angela and Roland in LoR are all about opening oneself to everything that is possible in life. The ways in which they do this are:

(1) To listen to one's inner world, or intuition. Don’t just blindly believe whatever someone else says. Follow your own inner voice. 

(2) To listen to one's outer world, or reason. Don't just believe whatever you want to believe. Look at the facts and be receptive to others' opinions. 

That's all you need to know for now about this particular subject. The theme of opening oneself to infinite possibilities is one that carries over from LoR to Limbus Company, and it is present in every Sinners' story. Literally all of them were/are limiting themselves in one way or another due to their flawed beliefs. And each of them is on their own journey of self-realization, or in Jungian terms, “individuation.”

The Mirror Worlds also expand on this theme. They provide infinite ways of looking at the same subject, which sounds wondrous and exciting at first, but it really just reflects what's already there. Remember Yi Sang's and Heathcliff's arcs? For Yi Sang, the Mirror reflected his already-existing potential, while for Heathcliff, the Mirror reflected his surrender to a perceived fate. Mirror World Identities may offer additional combat prowess as well as insight into the characters/worldbuilding, but they end up being quite limiting due to their usage (basically “cheating”) and very nature (as "reflections"). 

Moreover, Goethe's Faust was something that repeatedly showed up in my research on Jungian Psychology. I kept finding Faust's story referenced in articles, academic journals, as well as the book I'm currently reading called Man and His Symbols. This book was written by Carl G. Jung and some of his most trusted followers, and it legitimately explains what Project Moon's mindset was while forming the world and stories of their games (I am not even exaggerating. I have to constantly pause my audiobook and write down notes on what I'd just read because it keeps indirectly revealing PM’s intentions for the series). Anyway, in one of Joseph L. Henderson's chapters named “Heroes and Hero Makers,” he talks about how the archetype of the hero cycle is represented in many stories. An aspect of this archetype essentially revolves around the “hero vs. villain,” or in Jungian terms, the “ego vs. shadow.” The hero must face off against the dragon and triumph. It’s about the development of consciousness through the "ego" (awareness that one exists and has an identity) mastering and assimilating the "shadow" (the parts about ourselves we don’t like or don’t acknowledge deep down). This archetype exemplifies the stage that’s supposed to take place during childhood and adolescence—it’s about growing up. If the hero fails to slay the dragon, i.e. a person fails to assimilate their shadow into their psyche, they become stuck in this state of immaturity. Henderson uses Faust as an example:

“One can see this theme, incidentally, in a well-known literary hero figure—Goethe’s character of Faust. In accepting the wager of Mephistopheles, Faust put himself in the power of a “shadow” figure that Goethe describes as “part of that power which, willing evil, finds the good.” Like the man whose dream I have been discussing, Faust had failed to live out to the full an important part of his early life. He was, accordingly, an unreal or incomplete person who lost himself in a fruitless quest for metaphysical goals that failed to materialize. He was still unwilling to accept life’s challenge to live both the good and the bad” (Man and His Symbols, page 121). 

Henderson is saying that Faust is reluctant to face life’s hardships, so he lets his unconscious aspects—his shadow, or Mephistophiles—control what he does because it’s easier for him to live that way. And as a result, he remains this underdeveloped, immature person. 

In Limbus, Faust’s shadow is Mephistophiles, the reflection of her inner pride and desire to learn more. The knowledge she gains from the bus, her ability to communicate with her IDs, is incapacitating her ability to develop as a person. She’s using it as a crutch. And her overreliance on this knowledge, ironically, reveals how truly ignorant she is. The literal shadow cast in Faust’s E.G.O is her IDs for these very reasons—she is afraid of not knowing what to do.

Anyway, the reason I brought up LoR’s message and the Mirror Worlds earlier is because it is very, VERY relevant to Faust’s arc. Each of the Sinners need to reach out to all the possibilities of life. To not just blindly follow their own beliefs or the beliefs of others, but to see the truth through their own eyes, unclouded by bias. Through her use of the Mirror Worlds, Faust goes, “Well, I’m already reaching out to all possibilities! I’m following my intuition and using reason!” And she technically is, but it’s paradoxical. She is using intuition and reason… But it’s all through the use of her IDs, which are both “herself” and “not herself” at the same time. So she’s still just blindly following her own beliefs and the beliefs of others; she’s only listening to her own opinions and copying down what others say to her, all at the same time. 

I noticed this while rereading key parts of the game again. In Episode 6-25, the Sinners discover the researchers’ experiments below Wuthering Heights. Faust was utterly oblivious as to what their goals were, and Dante commented on how odd her behavior was when she finally started talking.

Later in Episode 6-44, she urges them to find out who informed Erlking Heathcliff about the Mirror Worlds, causing them to pick up on the fact that she doesn’t actually know everything.

In Episode 2 of the 3rd Walpurgis Night, Faust freezes up when asked by Dante to give a more detailed explanation on the Library. She then gives soft confirmation that she is, indeed, in cahoots with her IDs.

Murder on the WARP Express spilled everything. As a result of being separated from Mephistopheles, she is forced to be without her IDs and must figure things out on by herself. Her complete cluelessness regarding what to do demonstrates her lack of any true life experience. She acts like a newborn baby attempting to walk. However, while she is clueless, she is not helpless. She, in fact, does have the potential to grow if she puts her mind to it. Faust exhibits curiosity, ingenuity, and amiability when she must undergo the trials of the WARP train incident.

She takes interest in the perspectives of the other Sinners when asking for help. She is able to discover new things and problem-solve by herself.

Faust can learn on her own and make friends if she really wanted to.

...Unfortunately, she falls back to her dependency on Mephistopheles at the end of the story and closes herself off once again.

Faust refuses to experience any pain that could otherwise spark a realization about herself. She is harming her ability to form relationships with others, as she habitually ignores them or prevents them from giving her advice. She actively denies herself the chance to truly learn about the world and come to her own conclusions—she is impeding her own personal growth. 

Out of all the Sinners, Faust is probably the least developed as a person. Yi Sang, Ishmael, Heathcliff—even those who are about to undergo or are still undergoing their arcs such as Don Quixote, Rodion, or Meursault—are fully-formed people. Faust is not. She is still stuck at the stage of having evolved ego-consciousness while everyone else around her is already achieving the Self. She's worryingly far behind. It’s honestly really sad to watch. 

I was debating on whether or not I should make this post for a few reasons. For one, I’m unable to read Goethe’s Faust at the moment, as I am still preoccupied with my research on Jungian Psychology and Jewish Mysticism for the previous two PM games (Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina). I didn’t want to say anything too specific about Faust’s story until I read her book. Secondly, this topic is really difficult to explain without delving into the Jungian elements in the PM universe. I felt I would end up confusing people if I just came out of nowhere with this post; I initially wanted to speak more about the foundational elements before anything else. 

Nevertheless, I feel that this knowledge I had on Faust, Jung, and PM’s lore was relevant enough to share. I was SHOCKED at how accurately I had predicted Faust’s future character development. The only other person I told this to was my younger sister, and I said, “Faust basically found a loophole through the lessons Angela and Roland learned in LoR. She’s only believing whatever she wants to believe, while also only believing what other people tell her. She’s using Mephi and her IDs as a crutch… I think that’s why she’s alone a lot of the time.” AND I ENDED UP BEING RIGHT. I had to stand up multiple times while playing through the Intervallo with my sister because of how excited I was at this. 

Murder on the WARP Express demonstrates that a good understanding of the games’ themes and of Jungian literary analysis is absolutely essential to figuring out each Sinners’ arc in Limbus. Deciphering, for example, the specifics of Faust’s connection with Gesellschaft is not-so-much valuable as having a strong grasp on what aspects of her character PM is trying to explore. “What is the text communicating? How does it relate to Jung’s ideas? What is the lesson this character is meant to learn?”

That is what matters at the end of the day. 

[willowsnook]

Hello hello!! Just found your blog and I’m absolutely in love with your writing. So if it’s ok I come with a bar order.. whiskey with lime in a tall glass please and thank you

thanks for the kind words :)

lando norris x bsf! reader

You are mine, end of discussion

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

"Dude I am so fucking excited for today," you said to Lando as you guys walked into the paddock. He gave you a weird look.

"I mean I'm literally starting P15 but I really appreciate your faith in me," he replied scratching his head.

"I don't care about the race," you quickly said before correcting yourself. "I mean of course I care and you'll be amazing superstar but did you hear who is in the Alpine garage today?"

He shook his head at you frowning. You were busting at the seams with excitement.

"Joe Burrow!!!" You squealed. "Pierre said he would introduce me and I might die."

Even though you had moved from the States a couple of years ago you still avidly followed American Football. Now the Bengals weren't your team necessarily but Joe Burrow...that man had aura.

"Were you that excited to meet me the first time," Lando asked pouting.

"I didn't even know who you were," you replied laughing and Lando's frown deepened.

When you met Lando you had just moved to Monaco and had spent a lot of days working out of a coffee shop next to your building. On a busier day, he had asked if he could sit with you for a second as there weren't any seats open. You'd hit it off when he noticed that you were working but also had your phone set up to watch the Masters. He invited you to go golfing with his friend Max and a couple of others and you just fit in so effortlessly to the group. You definitely had a crush on him in the beginning but nothing had ever happened so you brushed it off.

"I have to go get ready now, but I'll see you after the race," he said shortly and walked off. Confused you watched him go, you'd definitely pissed him off but you weren't sure how.

Spotting Pierre, you rushed over to him as he was heading to the garage.

"Can't believe Lando is letting you loose to meet Joe Burrow," he said as you fell into step next to him.

"I didn't realize I had to get his permission to go anywhere," you said sweetly and he threw his hands up in mock defeat.

"I just know that if Kika was this excited to meet another man, I'd have a problem."

"You do realize that Lando is not my boyfriend."

"Mmhmm," he replied giving you a wink.

The two of you walked into the garage and you were growing more nervous, especially when you caught sight of Joe talking to Esteban. He waved at Pierre, shaking his hand and then his eyes fell to you, curious.

"This is y/n, she's a good friend of ours," Pierre introduced and Joe took your hand shaking it.

"She's also Lando's personal attack dog," Esteban joked and you laughed along with Joe.

"Nice to meet you, y/n," he said smiling. "It's good to find an American here holding down the fort."

"Yeah I couldn't weasel my way into the NFL so had to settle for second best," you joked and he laughed while Pierre and Esteban protested.

"You know it is taking a lot to be civil with you right now because you broke my heart in 2019," you said seriously and he smirked.

"Let me guess, Clemson or Oklahoma?"

"Oklahoma," you admitted looking away.

"I would say I'm sorry but I'm definitely not," he said teasing. "Even if it made a pretty girl like you turn against me."

You flushed and saw Pierre shoot Esteban a look who just laughed turning away.

"Are you watching in here?" Joe asked. "I'd love some good company."

"No, I'll be in McLaren," you told him. "Lando will throw a fit if I'm not there."

"Well I'd actually love to meet him, so I'll swing by later yeah?" You nodded bidding them all goodbye and heading back to the garage.

"Is she dating him or what?" You heard Joe ask and you slowed to hear Pierre respond.

"It's complicated."

His answer confused you but you brushed it off.

The race was amazing. You were so proud watching Lando fight his way to P4 and seeing Oscar take home the win. Finding him after the win, he swept you up into a big hug.

"I'm so proud of you buddy," you said grinning. "But you stink."

He laughed promising to take a shower before you guys left.

"Hey man, great race," you heard Joe say slapping Lando's hand.

"Thanks," he said politely. He had his arm around your shoulder and you moved to get out but his grip tightened, holding you there.

"Would love to see you at a Bengals game sometime, both of you," he said and you nodded brightly.

"I think we're good," Lando replied shortly and you elbowed him hard in his side giving him a look.

"Stop being so rude," you said annoyed but Joe just laughed.

"No worries, I'd act the same way if I were him," he said cockily.

"What's that supposed to mean?" You asked confused and he winked at you.

"He knows."

You could feel Lando steaming as you followed him into his driver's room, ready to lay into him.

"What on earth is wrong with you?" You questioned. "That was so fucking embarrassing."

"Oh I'm so sorry for ruining your chances with Joe Burrow," he said whirling on you. "I'm sure you it'll still work out though and you can start going to all his games, wear his merch, and wait for him outside the locker room."

"You are literally insane," you seethed and he laughed humorlessly stepping closer to you.

"Your place is not next to him," he said, voice rising. "It's right here in this room, next to me at every race and every day for that matter. You are mine, end of discussion."

You stood there gaping as he walked into the bathroom slamming the door. What the actual fuck? You were pissed. This whole time you had thought he hadn't felt the same way because he never said anything and it took Joe fucking Burrow to figure it out.

Ripping the door open you stormed into the bathroom, not caring about Lando being undressed in the shower. You yanked the shower door open stepping in, letting the water hit you as Lando stared at you with wide eyes. He started to say something but you cut him off, slamming your lips into his, pressing him against the wall.

He took over the kiss, moving aggressively while pulling you closer to him. You pulled back for air and he smiled softly at you.

"I love you," he said and your heart swelled.

"I love you too," you replied. "But I still want to go to a Bengals game."

He rolled his eyes, bringing you in for another kiss.

[gffa]

I'm going through my screencaps from Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade and it really kills me that I can't recommend this book to more people because it's from the point of view of a character falling to the dark side, so on the surface it comes across as very Jedi critical, but as someone who constantly keeps a hawk's eye out for what the other Jedi say and do so I can put it in my citations project, let me tell you, this book drives me absolutely up the wall with how much I was handed on a silver platter for how it's structured. It's a book that's set from the point of view of a troubled young Padawan, Iskat Akaris, and everything in her thoughts is about how she does try to let go of her anger, which she finds very difficult, but she also constantly craves battle and violence and seeks to find ways to justify that. She's offered by multiple people to find avenues to help her, but she always turns away from them, because they're not exciting enough for her. She never tells anyone directly of her struggles and any time another Jedi expresses support, somehow it's never good enough, she assumes it's not real empathy (because she thinks they wouldn't agree with her feelings--she doesn't want to be an archivist, she wants to fight, she doesn't want to take a regular position with the children in the creche--despite that she was really good with them and felt calmer afterwards--because she wants to be out in the galaxy fighting), and when she makes mistakes, she looks to justify why it wasn't her fault (she doesn't actually care about the civilians her actions hurt, she just cares that Adi and Yoda are telling her she has to be more careful). She's offered mentorship multiple times, by Jocasta, by Josk, Master Klefan talks to her frequently, Adi and Yoda make a point to tell her that two specific Masters are available to speak to, the Council offers her a position in the creche because they think she'd do well there--but that's not the excitement she craves, it's not the admiration for her battle skills that she wants, so she turns away from it. She's offered a position that's clearly very dear to them, it comes with multiple compliments and that they say it's meant to be beneficial to her as well (with the implication of how much it calmed her), and yet she sees it as a demotion, because it's not a mission with action and fighting. Everything that is the opposite of what a Jedi needs to seek. And it's done with such deftness to Iskat's point of view that, if you're not paying attention, it might seem like she is justified in these things. But when you look beyond her, you see how hard the Jedi are trying to help her, how many hands they hold out to her, and I want to write entire essays about this book but arrrghhhh I'm probably the only one who read this book in this specific way and who still has tolerance left for unreliable narrators who unfairly criticize the Jedi, but I can see the consistent pattern of how compassionate they are beyond it, so I feel I'd just be yelling into the void even more than I usually do, so instead I just sit with my feelings, like, I enjoyed this book through this lens, but it's a lens that scrapes a lot of people's nerves raw, so I can't blame them, but also oh man there's so much to chew on in this book and I just have to delete these caps as I make my way through my backlog. Arrrghhh.