#and the general public thinks it’s a GREAT company

[torgawl]

everyone here was soooo excited because a national channel was going to bring back this iconic tv series, directed specifically to the youth, from our childhood and adolescence that we are so nostalgic about after 11 years for them to disappoint us all with the trailer because it looks like elite 2.0

[xcziel]

.

[s-4pphics]

candy crush. (e.w.)

SYNOPSIS: you’re too sweet, and ellie hates it. 

WORD COUNT: 4.3K

WARNINGS: recordshopmanager!ellie, crumblcookiebaker!oc, hurt/comfort, ellie’s a cunt, ocs too sweet, FLUFF?? FROM ME??? HUHHH, crushing, slight suggestive thoughts

A/N: idk where this came from lol

Ellie’s reorganizing the vinyl selection when a delicate hand lands on her shoulder. “I know your miserable ass doesn’t enjoy company,” Dina hisses in her ear, purposefully hushed, “But you got company.” 

Ellie’s eyebrow quirks with confusion, leaving the earplug that blasts Head like a Hole to dangle over her shoulder. Her eyes glaze over the semi-filled shop, narrowing in on every face until she locks eyes with you from behind the guitar displays. The eye contact only lasts about 1.5 seconds before Dina smacks her leg. 

“Don’t look. You’re gonna make it weird.” Dina quietly snaps from beside her, occupying her hands with some misplaced records. 

“You know her?” 

“I see her around sometimes. I think she works nearby,” Ellie catches her smirking from the corner of her eye, “… I think she likes you.” 

“Fuck off.” 

“I’m dead serious. She’s been staring for the past 10.” 

“At who.” 

“At you, dipshit.” 

Ellie can’t help herself. She takes one experimental glance in your direction; discovers you typing away at your device with a black mask pulled down under your chin, bottom lip trapped between your teeth with worry. Your apron and tiny name tag indicates you probably work somewhere close by, but she can’t pinpoint where. You’re too far and her vision is failing.

“Get her numbe—“

Ellie’s head whips to face Dina, “If you don’t shut up, you’re fired.” 

“Abuse of power,” She snarks in return, “C’mon! She seems so—“

“D-Do you guys have any acoustics for sale?” 

You’re a ninja, for sure. Both girls' heads snap around to face you — who stands a bit too close for Ellie’s liking — phone desperately clutched to your chest and eyes wide as a doe. Mainly locked with Ellie’s before they drop to your name tag.

Crumbl. 2 shops down. 

Fuck. 

“Why, yes!” Dina says excitedly when Ellie doesn’t reply, “Most of ours have been used, but they’re still in great condition. Are you interested in renting or purchasing?” 

“Purchasing… I think.” 

“No problem. I can show you some that we have on display, and if you don’t like those, we have some stocked in the back!” 

Ellie’s forehead creases. Dina has never been this active in making a sale, let alone interacting with any customers. Ellie is always the one who’s forced to pick up her and Riley’s slack in the shop. She catches the light traces of disappointment that overtakes your expression at Dina’s interjection, but eventually, you’re led over to the guitar displays.

Ellie sighs in relief. 

That brief exchange gave Ellie everything she needed to know. She doesn’t find gratification in denying proposals at work, but after months of being hit on by a multitude of customers — the men particularly piss her off— she’ll be as stern as she needs to be to get the point of denial across. Sure, it makes her look like a cunt to the general public, but she’ll take that over being chased after on the clock. No questions asked. 

Ellie assumes that you’ve found what you needed because on your way out, persistent stares are thrown in her direction up until your departure. She dodges them with mastery. 

She would hate to have to embarrass a strip neighbor. 

Three days later, you stumble upon the record shop once more. Dina isn’t here to save Ellie this time, and Riley’s passing time in the break room. Your uniform is lightly dusted with white, presumably flour, and your mask is down, phone clutched to your chest like it holds all your secrets.

Your mouth drops open around a small smile when you approach the service counter, but Ellie interrupts before you can greet her. 

“What can I help you with?” 

She assumed her annoyance would be guarded by professionalism, but your smile drops at its corners at her tone. A light flinch that Ellie prays is enough to deter you from spending your breaks here. 

It doesn’t. Your eyes still shine like the star that you aren’t. 

“I, um… I actually wanted to talk to you. If that’s okay—“

“Is it regarding the purchase you made a few days ago?” 

Dina slid Ellie a notice on the down payment you made for your used dreadnought since you weren’t able to pay in full. The scolding she received about “taking care of you” whenever you returned made her teeth grind together. 

“N-No. I just—“

“I’d appreciate it if we kept the conversation about that,” Ellie uses the scribbles on her notepad as a distraction, “Did you have any questions regarding the instrument? Or if you’re interested in taking part in the lessons we offer, I could redirect you to Riley. She’s in charge of—“

“I just wanted to see if you were… interested in sampling out some cookie flavors I came up with? I’m a baking and pastry student and—“

“Look,” The tip of Ellie’s tongue sharpens into her cheek, irritation evident when you two are eye-to-eye. “I’m not sure where this proposal is coming from, but frankly, I’m not interested.”

The drop in your expression doesn’t stop Ellie’s relentlessness. 

“I don’t know you, and I don’t know why you thought I’d be a good candidate for… taste-testing, but I’ll politely decline. No thanks.” 

Her declination doesn’t sound polite in the slightest; quite snippy and condescending from your perspective, and it forces your windpipe shut. Only for a second before a strangled gasp leaves your lips. You’re not sure if it’s out of shock or lack of breath, but it aches in your lungs all the same. 

Ellie’s glare sends holes through your back as you rush towards the exit, the small bell singing through the store and alarming your leave. 

All Ellie can hope is that you got the message. 

It’s a new week, and therefore, a new Crumbl cookie line-up. Dina won’t stop raving about the carrot-cake cookie which doesn’t resemble a cookie at all. It's tiered and way too soft and stacked with icing that’s sweet enough to rot teeth from the gum. 

It reminds Ellie of you, for some reason; Somehow still managing to be a nuisance without trying. 

Even more so now since Dina’s been using her 45 to walk down and see you. To talk to you. Dina has yet to cough up what about — not that Ellie cares. It’s just weird that you two suddenly have so much in common after knowing each other for all of two days maximum. Whenever Dina clocks back in, she tortures Ellie with dramatic retellings of your stories. 

It’s Thursday; a quiet day for the shop that Ellie uses to her advantage when the sun is at its peak. Searching through cheap magazines and playing Candy Crush on her phone. 

What a time for you to come barreling in. The formerly enjoyable shriek of guitar suddenly sounds like nails on a chalkboard at your appearance. No longer are you in all black. You’re in a sundress. An orange one. You look like a popsicle. 

And you bear gifts. Ellie’s mood turns even more sour when she sees two bright yellow gift bags with smiley faces on them and a tray filled with coffee stuffed in your hands. 

“Good morning!” 

You’re smiling, gleaming, and Ellie’s nose turns up. She plucks one of her earplugs out and closes her graphic novel. 

“How can I help you?” 

You set your bag down on the display case of her prized arch top, and she sighs in exasperation. Annoyance sparks when she notices one of the bags has her name on it, flowers and hearts and sparkles surrounding the tag. 

“Can you not put your belongings on the displays, please? I’d have to clean up after you since none of my employees will.” 

You’ve already moved your bags and exclaimed apologies before Ellie could finish her sentence. She’s seconds away from shoving her earplug back in to tune you out, but you’re fast. Persistent. She hates it.

“I’m really sorry about that,” You say gently, and Ellie shrugs you off, “I, um. I-I came to, uh…”

Ellie blinks rapidly, “If you’re here to apologize for last week, don’t bother. It’s not needed.” 

“Not at all! Well, I’m just… I wanted to drop by and—“

“You’ve gotten quite comfortable with just… dropping by. Have you realized that?” 

Ellie’s squint is harsh and scrutinizing, and sorrow overshadows the light in your pupils. 

“Since it’s obvious that you’re not understanding me, I’ll put it like this,” She leans a bit over the counter, front fully pressed against the glass and palms resting on the stainless steel, “I’m not interested in anything you have going on. Stop using your breaks as an excuse to come see me. I don’t wanna go out with you. And I don’t want to do a taste test. Drop it already.” 

Ellie watches your lip quiver with a harshness exclusive only for people like you, tears welting in your eyes and your fingers pinching at the hem of your sundress. Insecurity is practically seeping from your pores, and your gaze drops shamefully to the floor. 

Ellie’s just about to tell you to kick rocks when the STAFF ONLY door swings open and exposes Riley. Her break ended 20 minutes ago. 

“Hey! You’re early!” 

Ellie scoffs, “No, you’re late—“

“Not you. Be quiet,” She waves her off and smiles at you, who’s smiling back at her with guised genuity. A complete 180 from the you seconds ago. Since when were you and Riley on speaking terms? Friends?

She jogs from behind the stand, “Dina told me you weren’t coming til 3!” Riley throws her arms around your shoulders, and your hands tremble where they rest on her forearms. “Are those the goods?” 

“Yeah!” Your voice sounds heavy. Like you’re guarding a breakdown, “I-I had some time so I stopped by a little early.” 

“I got some to spare til Dee gets here. Hang out with m—“

“Actually!” You intervene shakily, “I have some other drop-offs to make. I really appreciate you guys doing this for me.” 

“Are you sure you can’t stay? Watch me get my Food Network judge on?” Riley suddenly points in Ellie’s direction, “Who knows. Sourpuss might even pop a grin once she tries one.” Ellie’s cheeks run red-hot.

“Sorry, Riley. Maybe next time,” You’re already wobbling towards the exit, “But, please call and tell me what you think! Dina, too! Any feedback is appreciated!” 

“I’m sure they’re delicious, Monster!” Riley compliments playfully, “Text me when you’re home!” 

When the door shuts, Ellie sees Riley’s back stiffen at the sight of you frantically wiping your face through the glass. 

“What the fuck did you do.” 

“I didn’t do shit. She’s loitering.” 

“Lo— Oh my fucking god, you’re an embarrassmen—“

“No, she is. Taking up space for no fucking reason to come and see me. She’s loitering—“

“You’re blowing a fuse over fucking cookie samples?” Riley stares at her like she’s nuts, “And not to burst your self-centered bubble, but I told her to come. She’s been asking all the stores on the block if they’d like to taste ‘em.”

Ellie pauses, expression softening only slightly when Riley continues, 

“I told her you don’t like chocolate, so she made a peanut butter version for you.” Riley shakes Ellie's special, slightly smaller bag as a means to taunt her, and the freckled girl’s face burns red. Glows even harsher when her friend throws in, “You cunt. She’s a sweetheart. Not everyone is fucking obsessed with you.” 

Riley leaves Ellie to simmer in her discomfort, slamming the break door shut. The day seems to drag on longer than usual. 

-

-

-

Ellie’s organizing the break room when she comes across her small baggie that Riley left behind. She would’ve expected her friend to take them home after Ellie’s dramatic blow up, but there it sat on the counter, untouched and jeering. 

Tempting enough for her to rest the broom against the counter and inspect its contents. Wafts of cinnamon and peanut butter hit her through the small opening of the bag, and her heart gives a squeeze. The cookie is iced to perfection — an entire scenery on the light brown canvas. So many flowers and trees and the blue hues of the sky; almost too much detail. It looks printed on. 

You’re artistically talented and the cookie smells divine. 

One nibble wouldn’t hurt. She’s sure the damage she caused is already irreversible. 

But when she cradles the carefully swaddled cookie, a small note falls from beneath the bunched cling wrap. She knows she shouldn’t. She should really, really leave the neatly folded piece of paper where it lays. Down the cookie. Trash the bag. 

She takes the cookie and the note back to her seat at the table. The cookie isn’t what she unravels first. 

“thought I’d make you a separate batch. Riley gave me the heads up about your chocolate disdain. I’m too paranoid to ask for your number in person, so I thought I’d use bait instead. I hope it’s convincing enough. Please let me know if it’s decent. Thank you for tasting.”

Signed with your name and a smiling heart with wings. Ellie’s heart shatters, remaining shards dangling from the rim of her ribcage. She can already see her friends glaring through her chest when they visit the apartment to berate her tomorrow morning. She already knows what they’re going to demand from her, but she’s three steps ahead. 

She ate the entire cookie in two bites right where she sat. It was delicious. Almondy, not too sweet, gently spiced. Probably the best she’s ever had.

Ellie has never been to Crumbl before. 

The viral spot is always bustling — too crowded and filled with loud teenagers with a sugar rush for her taste. Plus, she’s already on the clock when they first open. But the record shop is closed on Fridays. 

She put an extra bit of care into her appearance. She doesn’t recall the last time she did her hair. Half of it is pinned up and her button-up is neatly pressed. Jitters rustle in the pit of her stomach and her forehead is a bit damp, mainly because she can see you through the goddamn window. 

In uniform, you stand at the register with the same beaming smile from last week, talking and giggling with your coworkers, and Ellie instantly feels guilty. Your day seems off to a great start, and here she is… About to ruin it. She almost turned around at the thought. 

But the small bell above the door blares loud, and your bright smile drops once you recognize her, and with that, her stomach. Ellie mentally notes the bags forming under your eyes and the tension in your shoulders. It looks like you haven’t rested for days. Her heart squeezes. 

Your movements turn robotic; stiffly perched on the sides of the iPad stand as your thumb works on the screen. You haven’t looked Ellie’s way since. She approaches the counter with her tail between her legs, fidgeting with her middle finger. 

“Um… hey.” Ellie’s quiet. Out of place. Afraid. 

“What can I get for you?” 

Even with the stiffness, you somehow still manage to sound as soft as a cotton ball, but Ellie’s body locks. The scenario hits her like a brick wall; she’s doing exactly what she accused you of doing to her last week. Bothering her at fucking work. She should’ve never come to your place of business to coddle her ego. She feels like a hypocrite. You certainly see her as one. 

“Um… A cookie?”

“… What flavor.” 

“Uh… peanut butter?” 

You swallow thickly, voice hollow, “That’s not on the menu for this week,” You point towards the display of cookies that were big enough to feed a family, “These are the six we’re serving until Sunday. You can also look at the menu on the screen.” 

Ellie follows your pointing finger. How the fuck does this place work? Weekly flavors? What the fuck does that mean? She quickly examines the names of cookies that flash across the screen: raspberry cheesecake, pink velvet… Mom’s recipe? Odd name for a dessert but she lets it slide. 

“W-What’s your favorite?” 

You’re a baker, for fucks sake. You’d have better taste than anyone, better than her, she’d painfully admit. 

She watches your fingers clench around the screen, tapping mindlessly. 

“Um… raspberry cheesecake.” 

“I’ll get a dozen.” 

“O-Of the same flavor?” 

She shrugs like it’s obvious, “… Yup.” 

You give her one skeptic look before tapping at the screen. “It might be a little wait. About 15 minutes. Do you mind?” 

“No.” 

“Cash or card?” 

“Card, please.” 

More tapping, “That’ll be $41.65. Swipe or tap whenever you're ready.” 

A financial dent over a box of cookies was not on her bucket list. You hand her the receipt, and before you can rush to the kitchen, Ellie exclaims, “When’s your break?” 

“Excuse me?” 

“W— um, when’s your break?” 

Your coworkers are suddenly very interested in Ellie, all four of them eyeing her like venomous hawks. Her cheeks burst into flames. 

“Um… I don’t think that’s any of your concern.” 

And you’re right. Anything involving you is short on Ellie; it was never her business, but a burning in the pit of her stomach desires to learn. Needs to catch you at the right time to give you a proper apology even though she doesn’t deserve the time of day. She doesn’t know what to say. 

You use her floundering as a scapegoat and hustle behind the slamming doors. Just as Ellie rushes to leave empty-handed, one of your employees — Abigail reads across her name-tag, keeps professional, but Ellie’s skin burns with the fire in her eyes. 

“We’ll have those right out for you,” monotone, but gruff. It makes Ellie wonder if you told any of them about her — she doesn’t doubt it. 

“You can wait outside.” 

One stiff nod, and Ellie’s booking it until her feet plant on the packed sidewalk, nearly bumping into a couple with interlocked hands. It takes 25 minutes for the box of cookies to be rigidly placed on the lounge table by another employee. Ellie scurries into her truck with a boiling face and pulls out into the road. 

When she makes it to her apartment, she eats three mini cheesecakes in one sitting.

She sees why they’re your favorite. 

The following week was filled with glares and curses from Dina and Riley — your newfound friends, evidently. They have a way of making Ellie feel like a worthless dunce. They both have rubbed in the tales of you being a thrill to be around; the life of the party whenever they hang out. 

It makes her nauseous. And sad. 

But her sadness swiftly shifts to bewilderment when she catches you smoking near a lamppost after closing. Still in your uniform with a bag over your shoulder, pants dusted in white, proof of your labor. It’s dark out, the only illumination coming from the light stood tall above you and the orange gleam of your cigarette. The sight shocks her. You didn’t seem like the type. 

Maybe that’s where Ellie went wrong with you: constantly assuming… who you are. Your desires, your intentions with her, her friends. She’ll admit her wrongs, of course. 

But it has to be to you. 

Ellie scares you when she approaches, inhaling the nicotine a bit too roughly because you start heaving. Shoulders hunched and jumping with every cough. 

“Uh — fuck, I’m sorry! I-I thought you could see me coming! I didn’t mean — fuck —“

You’re still choking, but you hiss in between, “What the fuck do you want!” 

“I’m just — I’m sorry about —“

“You’re not — cough — you’re not sorry! You made your point clear. I don’t why you keep — cough cough — following me. I left you alone like you wanted!” 

“I DON’T WANT THAT!” Ellie shrieks in panic. 

It’s a heavy-handed admission. A weighted confession that was said too aggressively given your flinching away from her. She takes an instinctive step forward. 

“Your cookies… tasted fucking incredible. I’m also an asshole.” 

The drag you take from your cig while she rambles is almost comedic. Brows cinched at the middle of your forehead, gauging her. You’re not convinced, but you’re not fleeing like the first time. She takes a leap, and a large step towards you. 

“I feel really… really bad,” Ellie’s much quieter, eyes unwavering and the softest she’s ever shown you, “I shouldn’t have… said all that. To you. I’m just so used to being harassed at work. I’m sorry.” 

Maybe nicotine calms you. Your body language isn’t as taut compared to when Ellie first initiated conversation, and your eyes soften at her reasoning. 

The rasp from your timbre melts her skin like butter. “I didn’t know you went through that. That sucks.”

Ellie shrugs, “I didn’t know you were… nice.” 

She made the mistake of attempting playfulness, “Maybe ‘cuz you wouldn’t let me talk.” You snark while ashing. 

“I’m sorry.” Ellie implores. 

You take one last drag before stomping out the flame. “Me too. For bothering you.” 

Ellie cringes at your choice of words, but nods in acceptance. “Are we, uh… okay, now?”

A small smile grows on your face. It’s cute. Makes your cheeks puff out like a hungry squirrel. 

“We’re good.” You extend a fist out to her, and she connects her own at the knuckles. 

When they drop, Ellie nervously stares at her shoes, “Do you want a ride home?” 

“I’m alright, thanks.” 

“C’mon, I don’t want you waiting out here by yourself.”

You pause before asking, “What’s the catch?” Your brow arches mischievously.

Ellie doesn’t hesitate, “More of those cookies.” 

A giggle escapes you. Soft and airy like a feather. Ellie feels a tight clench in her chest. A thumping from her ribcage. Has your smile always been this vibrant? She mentally kicks herself for not noticing before. 

Ellie escorts you to the passenger's side of her passed down pick-up: opens the door for you and makes sure you’re buckled in before starting it up. She learns you’re a metalhead when she cranks the radio to the highest volume. 

… How quickly can crushes develop? 

Two months. Ellie’s spent two months finding every excuse to spend time with you. She welcomes your visits to the record shop and silently thanks the heavens above when you call after her shift to talk about your day. Listening to your rambles about customers and their weekly cookies has become the highlight of hers. 

She’s also found comfort in watching you fail at playing guitar. You’re adorable whenever you strike an incorrect chord or break a string. She’s more than willing to guide you through your trials: late-night invites to her apartment to practice. One of your goals was to learn how to play the entire Vanara soundtrack. 

Ellie assumed she simply enjoyed being in your space. She does, but something shifted between you during one specific session. It was past midnight, and Ellie could tell you were getting tired. She innocently suggested for you to spend the night so you wouldn’t have to Uber at such a late hour, and you graciously accepted her offer. When you started to get comfortable on the couch, she tuts in disapproval and invited you to share her bed because it was more comfortable. 

What a mistake. 

After showering and changing into comfortable clothes, you both crawled into bed and swiftly drifted off. When Ellie’s eyes opened the following morning, her heart immediately traveled up to sit in her throat. If anyone told her she’d wake up with you completely sprawled out on top of her with your warm breath hitting her neck and her arms wrapped around you, she wouldn’t have believed them. She was completely frozen beneath you, but not for the reason she’d assumed. 

Ellie was scared to wake you up. Ellie was scared you would move away from her. 

She was pulled between waking you up and pulling you even closer. You were soft and warm and you smelled like her cinnamon body wash. A literal human cookie. She caressed your back as delicately as she could, and you nuzzled into her shoulder with every swipe. She hoped the harsh thrashes from her heart wouldn’t disturb you. 

They didn’t. 

You took a piece of Ellie when you left her apartment that morning. She’s not sure which part you stole, but she hasn’t felt the same since then. A pull towards you that’s electric, sparks her to life, keeps her up at night. Whenever you’re away, at work, not next to her, she’s desperate to pull you close. To breathe in the natural scent of you. 

Evidently, crushes develop rather quickly. 

“I thought baking was supposed to be fun.” Ellie huffs from where she lays on her bed. 

“It is fun! My favorite past-time, actually,” She watches you pace around her bedroom, guitar still strapped securely around your shoulder, “It’s just stressful when you have chefs constantly breathing down your neck. It’s so hard to be creative because they nitpick everything.” 

Creating a menu is much harder than Ellie assumed. She’s become the person you’ve come to whenever you’re fired up from classes, ranting and raving about the apparent dickheads that judge your creations. After testing your recipes for as long as she has, how could anyone turn down a dessert from you? 

You’re such a hard-worker. Focused, determined… pretty when you’re brainstorming. Pretty when you’re talking… Pretty when you’re smiling. Standing. Staring off into the distance. 

“Hm.” 

It’s all Ellie can say. She’s been trying to mask her rampant stares at your bare thighs for the past… however the fuck long. They look so soft. So pliable. So easy to stretch and pry and yank at— 

Her guilty pleasure went from collecting Pokémon cards to gawking at your legs whenever you wear shorts. 

Ellie’s definitely crushing. 

Crushing very, very hard. 

[creepyscritches]

I read your post about open enrollment for the ACA and was hoping you might expand on why you believe it would take years to dismantle. I've been terrified that with a Republican house/senate, Trump could just snap his fingers and make it go away within months of taking office. I'd love some reassurance that that's not possible.

Hiya, sure I can share some thoughts on the matter! First, it's very important to understand the ACA is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge system with subject matter experts in dozens of places throughout the process. I'm one of those SMEs, but I am at the end of the process where the revenue is generated, so my insight is limited on the public facing pieces.

What this means is that I am professionally embedded in the ACA in a position that exists purely to show what conditions people are treated for and then generate that data into what's called a "risk score". There's about 6 pages I could write on it, but the takeaway is that the ACA is

1) intricately interwoven with the federal government

2) increasingly profitable, sustainable, and growing (it is STILL a for-profit system if you can believe it)

3) wholeheartedly invested in by the largest insurance companies in the country LARGELY due to the fact that they finally learned the rules of how to make the ACA a thriving center of business

4) since the big issuers are arm+leg invested in the ACA, there is a lot of resistance politically and on an industry level to leave it behind (think of the lobbyists, politicians, corporations that will fight tooth and nail to protect their profit + investment)

The process to calculate a risk score takes roughly 2 years. There is an audit for the concurrent year and then a vigorous retro audit for the prev year - - this is a rolling cycle every year. Medicare has a similar process. These are RVP + RADV audits if you would like the jargon.

Eliminating the ACA abruptly is as internally laughable as us finishing the RADV audit ahead of schedule. If Trump were to blow the ACA into smithereens on day 1, he would be drowning in issuer complaints and an economic health sector that is essentially bleeding out. You cut off the RVP early? We have half of next RADV stuck in the gears now. You cut off the RADV early? No issuer will get their "risk adjusted" payments for services rendered in the prev benefit year (to an extent, again very complex multi-process system).

The ACA is GREAT for the public and should be defended on that basis alone. However, the inner capitalistic nature of the ACA is a powerful armor that has conservatives + liberals defending it on a basis of capital + market growth. It's not sexy, but it makes too much money consistently for the system to be easily dismantled.

Or at least that's what I can tell you from the money center of the ACA. they don't bring us up in political conversation because we are confusing to seasoned professionals, boring to industry outsiders, and consistently we are anathema to the anti-ACA talking points.

I am already preparing for next year's RVP for this window of open enrollment. That RVP process will feed into the RADV in 2026. In 2025, we begin the RADV for 2024. If nothing else, the slow fucking gears of CMS will keep the ACA alive until we finish our work at the end of the process. I highly doubt that will be the only reason the ACA is safeguarded, but it is a powerful type of support to pair with people protecting the ACA for other reasons.

I work every day to show, defend, and educate on how many diagnoses are managed thru my company's ACA plans. My specialty is cancer and I see a lot of it. The revenue drive comes from the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) rule stating only 20% MAX of profit may go to the issuer + the 80% at a minimum must go back to the customer or be invested in expanding benefits. The more people on the plan using it, the higher that 20% becomes for the issuer and the more impactful that 80% becomes for the next year of benefit growth. It is remarkably profitable once issuers stop seeking out "healthy populations". The ACA is a functional method for issuers to tap into a stable customer base (sick/chronic ill customers) that turns a profit, grows, and builds strong consumer bases in each state.

The industry can never walk away from this overnight - - this is the preferred investment for many big players. Changing the direction of those businesses will be a monumental effort that takes years (at least 2 with the audits). In the meantime, you still have benefits, you still have care, and you still have reason to sign up. Let us deal with the bureaucracy bullshit, go get your care and know you have benefits thru 2025 and we will be working to keep it that way for 2026 and forward. This is a wing of the federal government, it is not a jenga tower like Trump wishes.

[thatbadadvice]

Help! I'm a Perfect Genius, but This Potential Employer Asked Me a Boring Interview Question!

Ask A Manager, 13 Feb 2024:

I was rejected from a role for not answering an interview question. I had all the skills they asked for, and the recruiter and hiring manager loved me. I had a final round of interviews — a peer on the hiring team, a peer from another team that I would work closely with, the director of both teams (so my would-be grandboss, which I thought was weird), and then finally a technical test with the hiring manager I had already spoken to. (I don’t know if it matters but I’m male and everyone I interviewed with was female.) The interviews went great, except the grandboss. I asked why she was interviewing me since it was a technical position and she was clearly some kind of middle manager. She told me she had a technical background (although she had been in management 10 years so it’s not like her experience was even relevant), but that she was interviewing for things like communication, ability to prioritize, and soft skills. I still thought it was weird to interview with my boss’s boss. She asked pretty standard (and boring) questions, which I aced. But then she asked me to tell her about the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career and how I handled it. I told her I’m a professional and I don’t make mistakes, and she argued with me! She said everyone makes mistakes, but what matters is how you handle them and prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. I told her maybe she made mistakes as a developer but since I actually went to school for it, I didn’t have that problem. She seemed fine with it and we moved on with the interview. A couple days later, the recruiter emailed me to say they had decided to go with someone else. I asked for feedback on why I wasn’t chosen and she said there were other candidates who were stronger. I wrote back and asked if the grandboss had been the reason I didn’t get the job, and she just told me again that the hiring panel made the decision to hire someone else. I looked the grandboss up on LinkedIn after the rejection and she was a developer at two industry leaders and then an executive at a third. She was also connected to a number of well-known C-level people in our city and industry. I’m thinking of mailing her on LinkedIn to explain why her question was wrong and asking if she’ll consider me for future positions at her company but my wife says it’s a bad idea. What do you think about me mailing her to try to explain?

Sir,

You have been wronged in the most grievous of ways by a coven of retaliatory, self-aggrandizing women who have failed in the extreme to recognize your brilliance, your talent, and above all, your general superiority.

Of course you should mail this mediocre "grandboss" on LinkedIn to inform her of the deep offense she caused you by interviewing you in the first place, let alone doing so using a boring question — indeed, you have a moral and professional obligation to do so in order to preserve your honor and the honor of scores of men like you who have never done a single solitary thing wrong in their lives, ever.

But I beg you to consider doing more. A single, private message to one incompetent bitch may not convey to the necessary parties the depth and breadth of the situation. Many, many people have important lessons to learn from your experience, and I encourage you to share it widely. Consider making a public LinkedIn post, and ensure that it is shareable across platforms. Depending on your financial resources, a billboard with your name, professional headshot, and contact information could go a long way toward ensuring that everyone in your industry who needs to know just how you handled the way these women treated you, does know about it. I hope that in your continuing job search, you are able to connect with potential employers who have a much better grasp of all you bring to the table.

[yumeka-sxf]

In addition to Yor's epiphany scene, this scene was the other one I was most looking forward to in season 2 - a scene that, in my opinion, is one of the most Twiyor-ish scenes in the series so far 💖

Why is it so significant? Because there was no reason for Twilight to put on any Loid Forger acting in that moment. He wasn't conversing with nor being scrutinized by anyone. So why would he give that soft smile followed by such affectionate, comforting words as "お疲れ様/otsukaresama"? (this can be translated in many ways, but generally it's something you say to thank someone for their hard work).

The answer is because it's something he truly felt...he understood the sacrifice Yor made for Anya's happiness and genuinely appreciated it (if only he knew the sacrifice she made on the larger scale, lol). While he's a bit perturbed at first since some onlookers were snickering at him, it didn't take long for him to soften and then graciously carry his queen and princess the girls back to the ship 😭

But Twilight overall was really soft in this episode and I loved it~ From his blush upon seeing Yor to the several times he gave that same soft smile when talking with/looking at her...I think Anya was right when she called him out on the ship about missing his wife 😅

I liked how the anime conveyed his shock when noticing her bruised face...what must have been his thought at that moment? 👀

The scenes of the family activities translated better in animated form in my opinion. While they were each only a single panel in the manga, they lasted a few seconds each in the anime, plus the addition of the insert song helped the with the comfy, wholesome vibe~ Also the part where Yor inadvertently chucks Anya across the ocean is still hilarious.

Loid's dorky skip at the beginning of the episode translated very well in animated form too 😅

The ending of this chapter in the manga always felt a bit rushed to me...it quickly jumps from the aforementioned scene of them returning to the ship, to suddenly being home, reuniting with Bond and Franky, having a meal together, then Twilight meeting Sylvia, all within a few panels. Even though I wish the anime added more than just some additional scenes of the ship leaving the island, I felt it flowed much better in the anime since, just like the family activities, each scene in the ending lasted a second or two instead of being a single illustration.

But I love how this chapter/episode ends, with Yor, Anya, and Bond napping while Anya draws about her family vacation. This seems to take place the next day or maybe later the same day they got home, so makes sense they'd still be tired from the trip!

By the way, the manga has this additional scene showing that Olka and company are safe. Weird that the anime didn't stick it in at some point.

Also, the anime team didn't have to go so hard with this episode's key visual but they did...and I love it 😍 Might actually be my favorite of the key visuals so far!

I was very happy to see the "surrounded by liars" panel finally animated! This is such a funny scene and a great way to fully wrap up the cruise arc.

I also burst out laughing at Yuri's locker 🤣

Damian is surprisingly laid back in this episode. I think the reason is because Anya's antics aren't directly involving him. He tends to go total tsundere only when she's actually talking to him, lol.

The new scene of Yor getting the keychains for her coworkers was a nice addition! Guess it's canon that Yor and Anya didn't sleep for the entire trip back, lol. Glad they got to spend family time on the ship too! (though I wish we could have seen Yor's reaction waking up in Loid's bottom bunk bed, haha. He must have brought her to his room since he wouldn't know where her room is. Unless she woke up before he even put her in a bed, in which case she would have been super embarrassed knowing he was carrying her around in public 😆)

Looks like next week the anime will be changing the order of things a bit and giving us the Becky home-wrecking and Fiona chapters (the latter of which seems to have some anime original content?) The Becky chapter is one of my favorite stand-alone chapters...I'm already dying of laugher thinking about it 😂

[stxrvel]

absence (1)

series summary. the holy grail of the seven men who ruled the country's entertainment used to be your friends at school. now, ten years later and between successes and failures, what reason would they have to want to come back into your life? pairing. eventually ot7 x f!reader... or not? content. first of all, english is not my first language so sorry for any mistakes! curse words, fangirling a lot and some self-deprecation. no proofread. this is just silly writing, we're on the safe zone for now. a/n. hi guys! i was gonna wait a little bit but i'm really excited about this one so you're gonna have earlier! thank u all for the support and i really hope you enjoy this 🫶🏻

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You met them all at school. Each with their own ambitions, their different dreams, but so similar in the nature of their core. It was almost funny how everyone with their dissimilar personalities fit so strangely well into one school group. There were times when you could still remember how you used to tell them that all together they could rule the world.

Maybe that's why you didn't see them years ago.

Jeon Jungkook was an idol. There wasn't an hour in the day or a screen in the city where you weren't watching him. He was so popular around the world that you suspected that not even one person didn't know him. His voice was on every radio station, on every cell phone of the people you passed on the street and on the buses, his face on the TV sets with the last interview he had done, as if it were a national achievement. You even saw him in restaurants, chefs naming dishes after him, production companies releasing collaborations with his company. There wasn't an object in that city that didn't have Jungkook's face on its forehead. It was impossible to escape him.

He was closely followed by Kim Taehyung and Park Jimin, two of the most promising models of the last decade, a national pride hand in hand with Jungkook. You didn't see them as often as Jungkook, but they still swept the international public and there was hardly anyone who didn't talk about them. Invited to catwalks in Paris, choosing their contracts and collaborations, wearing the most expensive clothes that you wouldn't even think of buying, wearing beautiful matching jewelry, expensive enough that a single outfit from each of them could buy you five houses in the small town they all came from. Taehyung and Jimin were known as the Siamese twins of modeling. Wherever one went, the other always had to be. Their exclusivity was incomparable.

In levels of recognition, Min Yoongi followed them in line. A great rapper who was well received by the general populace. Yoongi had managed to captivate a large audience thanks to his incredible command of the production of his music and his ease and gift for writing his own lyrics. His growth was gradual, but when he touched the sky he never went down again. His popularity was not low even though his presentation to the public was not that high compared to the other three. Still, Yoongi had enough charisma and talent to stand out, especially when his fans were obsessed with highlighting the duality he had when he was on stage and when he did those seventy question interviews with Vogue or whatever… that had made him one of the best rappers of his generation and probably of the last century.

Kim Namjoon was the owner of the company that made Jungkook's debut and welcomed Yoongi with total creative freedom. If he were not solely focused on music, he would surely also be Taehyung and Jimin's agent. Namjoon had inherited a company from his parents, but the success he had turned it into over the past few years, into one of the most profitable businesses in the country, was entirely to his credit and effort. His popularity was also high, because everyone said he was too handsome to be a mere businessman; not knowing, of course, that everything involved in maintaining such a business required much more than a pretty face. Of Namjoon the public didn't know too much, not probably like the other guys and you, if he was still half the person he was before.

Hand in hand with Namjoon were Jung Hoseok and Kim Seokjin. Hoseok was and still is to this day a national pride as he passionately played tennis since school and turned professional, reaching to participate in major international tournaments representing his country and winning one of them. However, two years after that great feat, an accident involving one of his hands prevented him from continuing to play. No one knows exactly what happened during the more than a year and a half that he almost completely disappeared from the public eye, but when he returned with his huge smile he announced that he would dedicate himself to dance, opening his own academy throughout the center of the city. Although he was not a recurrent teacher, his academy was one of the best in the country, and of course, it was financed by Namjoon's company. At one time Hoseok became Namjoon's associate.

Seokjin, on the other hand, was the one who kept the lowest profile. He was a great doctor, cardiovascular if you were not mistaken. In addition to being an amazing surgeon, his research projects were the ones everyone looked forward to the most at the end of each year. You didn't know much about the subject, but he was almost like the guru of medicine in his field specifically. The only reason he was so much in the public eye being a doctor was because he was regularly seen in the company of Namjoon, Hoseok and Yoongi. The four of them made up the holy grail of dilfs.

They had all had incredibly successful careers and you were glad that they had been able to accomplish everything they once talked about on the rooftop of Namjoon's house, with sneaky steps so their parents wouldn't scold them when they sneaked out in the wee hours of the morning.

You didn't know exactly what it was - or you didn't want to acknowledge it - that succumbed inside you every time you saw or heard about any of them on the news or on social media. Because yeah, no matter how low media exposure any of them had, always the faces of all seven appeared on your TikTok every week.

It was amazing how they had all moved on and you… well, you-

“Weren't you supossed to leave?”

You lifted your head from your phone, trying to hide it with trembling hands as you let Taehyung's face next to Jungkook's plunge into the darkness of your apron pocket.

“Huh?”

You tried to look distracted, returning your gaze between your boss and the notes next to the cash register. She had a soft gaze, between amused and sisterly. Her brown eyes shifted from your eyes and hot cheeks to the notes you held upside down in your hands, pretending to work as if she herself hadn't seen you completely frozen and gawking at the pair of the country's great casanovas.

“I thought you were leaving earlier today,” your boss shifted, settling her trench coat and long brown strap bag over her shoulder. At that moment she was leaving to walk around to each of the locations she had in town, just to do follow-ups. “Don't tell me you forgot.”

You followed her index finger until it landed on the red circle you had drawn on the calendar placed in your little cubicle a couple of weeks ago, with hearts surrounding it and exclamation points. Yes you remembered, of course you remembered, but at the point where you were at the time no one was going to miss you if you didn't attend.

“I didn't forget…” your voice trailed off as you looked down, your fingers finding the tips of the pages more entertaining than your boss's worried expression.

“y/n, you asked me to leave earlier this day from four months ago,” her high-pitched voice echoed in your head, reminding you how excited you had been a while ago for this day to come. “You can't just give up like that. Come on. You still have time.”

You began to shake your head, releasing your grip on the woman who was looking at you with the same worried eyes of a mother. Your boss had been one of the most encouraging people you'd ever had in your life, besides the handful of friends you had stored in your phone's contacts.

“It was a bust last time. I don't plan on going through that again.”

“But hadn't you told me afterwards that you weren't going to let that stop you? You said… what was it? I can't drown in this glass of water.”

You grudgingly resisted the urge to roll your eyes. Really you of four months ago was a deluded fool.

“I had no idea about life at the time.”

Your boss clicked her tongue, dropping her hands on your shoulders, giving little squeezes whose familiarity stole your breath.

“I'll leave Patrick waiting for you in case you change your mind.”

You shook your head, evading the memories. The man outside the store shook his head in greeting as the two of you turned to look at him, as if he knew you were talking about him.

“Don't miss this opportunity because you're afraid. It may change your life.”

You watched her leave, the clacking of her low heels drawing the attention of everyone in the store, earning every possible stare as she did every time she entered any room. Her chauffeur, Patrick, greeted her with a similar nod of his head as before and stood leaning against the black car parked right where he could get a perfect view of your nervous face.

You, unlike the great and successful lives of your high school friends whose company you still used to miss like a fool, had not had such a great and successful life.

You were a writer. Well, an attempted writer and, worse, part-time. The other part-time was this job behind the cash register at the largest pastry chain in the country. Or sometimes as a waitress, it depended on the day. There was good pay, mind you, at least it allowed you to make up for the losses you took every time you tried to sell a book and then had to market it on your own, only to have five purchases once every seven months and three of them were from your parents and brother. The other two were from your friends.

Four months ago you had been invited to a sort of convention for readers, how they had found you and why? You had no idea, but the idea of being considered in that way drove you crazy at the time. You were so excited that you had more copies of your failed books printed and prepared your booth several days in advance to present them to the horde of people who, you were sure at the time, would come to meet you.

Only one person came by to ask you about the bathroom.

You never recovered from that.

Even with all that failure, that same day you were invited to another convention and, for a while, you were excited to attend. Everyone goes through those kinds of bumps at some point in their life, right? You have to work hard to earn that kind of fame, you kept telling yourself. But as time went on and your networks didn't grow and your videos didn't get more than ten views, or fifty views at most in a week, you began to lose that spark of excitement you held for your dream. Your parents had never turned your back on what you wanted to do, but it was too demotivating and discouraging to have spent so many years at it, so many headaches and tears invested for you to just keep losing and losing money.

That was why you were sure you wouldn't go to that convention if you had to go through that mockery again. You hadn't even bothered to go and fix your booth so surely they already knew you weren't going.

“Have you seen them yet??????”

The female voice coming from the wine cellar made you jump up on your chair.

“Jesus, Yuna, you almost killed me here.”

“I don't care! We could die right now for all we care!”

“Wow, speak for yourself.”

“Haven't you seen theeeem?”

Yuna held up her phone, the screen at full brightness blinding you for a moment. The blurry dots you saw from the proximity of the device told you nothing, as your friend jumped excitedly beside you.

“God, hold still.”

Grabbing her wrist, you leveled the phone to see her TikTok and a picture of three men.

Namjoon, Yoongi and Jungkook coming out of a building. From Namjoon's building.

“They look amazing, don't they? They just came out! That means their car will pass in front of us any minute!”

Yes, Namjoon's building was just a few blocks away from your boss's place. In fact, your boss knew him and many times they would prepare large orders for parties at his company. You had never seen him set foot in this place or any other in the country, but every time he went to celebrate something he had to dial your boss's personal number and you would work until your backs burned because everything had to be perfect for the big businessman.

“Are you going out to greet them or what?” you frowned, letting go of her wrist and returning your gaze to the notebook next to the cash register.

Yuna let out an excited exclamation.

“Ohhhh~, should I? Should I?”

You grabbed her by the collar of her uniform as she tried to pass behind you.

“We're still on business hours.”

“I'm sure Sol wouldn't mind,” her almost heart pupil eyes stared down the street, her hands moving in front of her like she was a zombie. She almost seemed possessed by her fanaticism. Though of course you didn't blame her, if you didn't know any of the seven knights of the underworld you would surely be as excited as she was.

“Don't put words in her mouth. You'd better tell me if the lady's batch of cakes is out yet-”

Commotion erupted throughout the room. You almost saw in slow motion how all the people in the premises got up and running in the direction of the glass doors when you heard the screams coming from far away.

“They're comiiiiiiiiiiiing!!!”

Sometimes you wondered how they dealt with this level of fanaticism.

The ground almost shook with the amount of people running after a black car, where the three men who were causing such a furor so early that day were most likely to be, and the commotion was not tiny inside the venue where the screams erupted.

Having to deal with that on a daily basis would easily turn someone into a hater. Not that you were one... strictly...

“God, for a moment we breathed the same air,” Yuna plopped down on the table, her body doubled over with her eyes lost. You resisted the urge to smack her forehead.

“Their car windows were up.”

“So you saw them, right?????”

“Argh.”

You had to drag her back to work as the excitement in the store dissipated. You attended to another batch of consumers while Yuna fixed the display case and, in a moment of lapse you could almost tell, her back suddenly straightened and she turned to look at you with her eyes a little too wide. You passed the change to the man in front of you, who barely sent you a confused glance before continuing to claim his order at the other corner of the store.

“What's wrong with you?”

“You shouldn't be here.”

“Don't say that with that face. You look creepy,” you pulled out the bill to tuck it under the cash register as Yuna approached, leaving the frightened face behind.

“Wasn't that convention today?”

You sighed. “Yes.”

“Then why aren't you there?”

“Do I look like I want to be there?”

“Y/n! It's a great opportunity. You should-”

“A great opportunity for what, to be a laughingstock again?”

Yuna pursed her lips, looking almost pained that you would remember in that way the experience that was supposed to change your life. She had been one of the ones who had accompanied you to set up the booth and she was sure she had never seen you smile so much during all the time the two of you had known each other. Yuna was aware of how over time you seemed to have lost interest in this new convention, but she didn't think you would finally decide not to go.

On the sly, she had prepared your booth with the help of your mother and Sol, your boss.

“You were never a laughingstock! Don't say that,” Yuna patted your forearm harder than necessary. “Besides, I recently logged some purchases on the site! How do you-?”

“I know it was you and mom,” you raised your voice to interrupt her, stepping archly away from her body.

“What the… Of course not, ha, ha!”

“You're the only fools who would write down celebrity names to register purchases. Besides, the addresses don't even exist.”

“Fuck, I told her that wouldn't work.”

Under your heavy gaze, Yuna had the decency to look embarrassed.

“Okay, I'm sorry! We wanted to motivate you to go to the convention.”

“Can't you just let me do my own thing? If I don't want to go, I won't go.”

“Even if you leave Patrick waiting there?”

You followed his gaze, watching the man pull an umbrella out of the trunk of the car as the slightest breeze brushed against his body and the water droplets were smaller than a dew that the two of you had to squint to see them on the glass of the entrance.

“Whatever it is, I'm not going.”

“y/n…” Yuna pleaded, coming closer with her puppy dog eyes.

“No.”

“y/n, please…”

“No and stop doing that. You look weird.”

“I don't,” Yuna pulled away to frown at you. “I once heard you agreed with Seoyeon about my puppy face being cute.”

“I never agreed with that!”

“Seojun told me so!”

“Your first mistake is believing Seojun.”

“Do you blame me if the reason is your demonstration of love for me?”

“That was your second mistake.”

“Y/n!”

_____________________

That day you arrived home a little later than usual. Since Patrick had been waiting for you all day in the sun and mini rain and refused to let you take a cab on direct instructions from Sol, you asked him to take a ride downtown so you could buy the teokkboki your mom loved and incidentally bought some for him, even though he didn't want to accept it at first.

“y/n, dear, how did it go?”

Your parents were in the living room when you arrived playing Go. Your father left the table when he saw you carrying the bag of food and came over to take it from you.

“What does our little writer bring here, a contract by any chance?”

You watched out of the corner of your eye as your mother tried to get your father's attention by wildly waving her fan, while the man rummaged through the bag to find something warm and delicious smelling.

“Oh, it's teokkboki.”

Your mother stopped waving her arm to stare at the bag with sparkling eyes.

“The ones from the center? From Mrs. Wang?”

You nodded in her direction, taking a seat in their midst on the floor. Your parents started a pitched battle to see who would break the bag first to try the first batch of teokkboki and you could only watch them with a smile on your face. The day may have been difficult, but being home at the end of the day always made you feel so much better.

Amidst laughter and anecdotes, trying to avoid the elephant in the room because you knew your mother's furtive glances weren't for nothing, the three of you ate teokkboki until you were bursting at the seams. You organized the kitchen with your father while your mother grumbled from the living room whatever he said about her. You watched the three of you favorite soap opera on the fixed schedule and finally got ready for bed.

With your body more relaxed and lighter, you let yourself sink into the softness of the sheets, completely ignoring the messages Yuna had sent earlier and the stupid questions your brother asked at the most inopportune moments.

How do I unclog a bath?

Do I add salt to the rice???

Where do I get the kimchi mom makes?????

His independence was probably one of the worst things that could happen. You being the older sister thought you would leave home first. Even according to your twelve year old diary, you should have been married by then or at least planning your amazing, mega giant wedding, complete with helicopters and puppy dogs carrying drinks through the reception. You didn't know what kind of crazy dreams you had when you were younger, but up to that point you hadn't been able to fulfill any of your inner child's desires except to study for a career you were passionate about.

Still, what good had that done in the end? Maybe you should've listened to your grandparents to study medicine. Maybe your parents should've been a little more conservative instead of libertarian, which your grandparents always complained about when they had the chance. If you were a disgrace to anyone in the family, it was to them.

Ah, what a long day.

You didn't know at what point you fell asleep, but the incessant sound of your phone vibrating next to your pillow woke you up. With a grunt, you moved your hands to put the device in front of one of your half-open eyes to find Yuna on caller ID. Your eyes moved upward.

It was one in the morning!

“What the fuck are you doing calling at this hour? It better be an emergency because-”

“WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING THAT YOU DON'T CHECK YOUR MESSAGES?”

“WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT? IT'S ONE IN THE MORNING! WHY WOULD I BE DOING ANYTHING ELSE BUT SLEEPING?”

“I'VE BEEN TEXTING YOU FOR A WHILE NOW, Y/N!”

“YUNA HOW CAN I NOT FUCKING SLEEP-?”

“Well, whatever!”

You let out an exasperated snort, giving her time to say what she had to say.

“You're going to fall on your ass.”

“I'm lying down.”

“Your books have sold a thousand copies in the last hour!”

Silence. Absorbing silence…

“Yuna, if you really woke me up to play a fucking prank on me I'm going all the way to your house to pull out every single one of your hairs with a fucking tweezer.”

“First of all, gross. Second of all, I'm not kidding! Get on your fucking Instagram! What's worse is that's not the most shocking news. Well… depends on how you look at it.”

“Yuna, I don't think I'm following you.”

“Fucking Kim Taehyung was at the reader convention and he took a picture of your books and UPLOADED IT TO HIS INSTAGRAM STORIES!!!!! AN HOUR AGO! The damn shopping notifications woke me up and I think I took too much time trying to process what was going on because they already tripled!”

“What the fuck are you talking about, did you start smoking weed?”

“Ugh, why are you so insufferable? Just look at fucking Instagram!”

You didn't want to believe Yuna, but a part of you was vibrating in anticipation. You'd already seen her text messages, her exclamations and voice notes, you'd barely processed the images she'd sent you. You logged on to Instagram. The first thing you noticed was the exorbitant amount of notifications and direct messages.

You had to search for Taehyung's account because you weren't following him.

There was the colorful arc around his profile picture. The story.

You clicked on his picture on the screen.

Your books were all over his story, with his hand holding one of them.

It jumped out at you that there was a stand of your books that you had no idea where it had come from.

A description loomed between the image.

One of the best fantasy books I've read in recent years. And by one of the best writers I've ever met in my life.

Your user was next to the description. You had no idea how fucking Kim Taehyung had gotten your user when it wasn't even something related to your name. You hadn't even uploaded pictures of yourself once in all the time that account had been open.

“Did you see it?? Can you see I wasn't lying?”

With Yuna's malevolent laughter in the background, you felt your mind escape into an unknown mental space.

“You're going to be rich!!! And I'm going to meet Kim Taehyung!”

Your mind was racing a thousand miles an hour trying to make sense of what your eyes couldn't credit. His story was replaying on your screen. So many things you could say and just…

“What the fuck?”

--

tag: @rinkud @futuristicenemychaos @pastelpeachess @parapiop7

[bobohu4eva]

Hitched (M)

Characters: Baekhyun x Reader

Genre: arranged marriage au, acquaintances(?) to lovers, smut

Summary: Can great sex make an unwanted marriage less shitty? Yes. Yes it can.

Warnings: explicit unprotected sex, semi public (outdoor) sex, edging, Baekhyun has a Big Dick, alcohol consumption

WC: 9.8k apparently I don't know how to keep things brief anymore!

A/N: The majority of this is extremely self-indulgent smut. Oops? You're welcome? It is (mostly) pretty soft though.

Masterlist

“Smile!” 

The cameras flashed, and you put on a show for your friends and family. Your new husband kissed you, and from the outside, everything seemed perfect. 

The perfect dress, makeup, hair, a rich and handsome groom, and everyone you cared about right there with you, celebrating you and the man who was supposed to be the love of your life. It was a lavish ceremony and even more opulent reception, but you couldn't enjoy it at all. 

There was nothing wrong with him, but you and Baekhyun had never even dated, and you definitely never pictured yourself marrying him. You didn't exactly have any reason to dislike him, you'd known him since you were a kid and he was undoubtedly an attractive guy, but marrying him had been your parents idea, not yours. 

As a kid your family had everything you could've imagined, foreign sports cars, numerous vacation homes, a yacht, nannies, tutors, and the list goes on. Your parents' companies had been doing well, and life was easy. 

But that didn't last forever. Now in your early 20’s, you watched as the fortune your family had built for generations was slipping away. 

You were still a teenager when it started and couldn’t fully comprehend what had happened, but it seemed like some combination of bad investments and unpaid debts. Slowly the vacation homes, yacht, and cars were sold off one by one just to pay the bills. As the years passed it seemed that the walls were starting to close in, but on the surface your family, especially your mother, made sure it didn't seem that way. 

The good family name was pretty much all that was left now, and your mother would do anything she could to keep it strong. 

Growing up with generational wealth, your family always associated with others of similar standing, and one of the families you'd grown up with had been particularly close; the Byuns. 

Their only son, Baekhyun, was someone you'd grown up around, but at seven years older than you, you hardly knew each other. He was the perfect rich kid, smart, handsome, and polite, but you still would've much preferred to marry someone you actually loved, or at least were close with. 

“Y/n, you're doing it again.” He whispered in your ear, and you realized that your smile had once again fallen as you zoned out, and his mother was right there in front of you, looking concerned. 

You perked back up, and saw her face flood with relief. You looked at Baekhyun, and he was still smiling for the pictures as well, but you noticed the slightly apologetic look he shot you. 

You really did try to play the part, for the sake of your families, but it was hard. This was supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life, but instead you were putting on an act, hiding how miserable you felt under the facade of it all. 

The worst part was just how happy both his and your families were. Both moms cried, and even your dad teared up a little. You couldn't even blame them, either. It had been a beautiful ceremony, and you and him both looked the part so perfectly. It was everything a high society wedding should be, and on top of that, it was the only thing saving your family from bankruptcy. 

Once pictures were done with it was time for the first dance- in a gazebo decorated with fairy lights and at least a thousand fresh white roses. All you could think was how incredible this would have been, if it was a real wedding, between two people who actually loved each other. Every beautiful thing was a cruel reminder of how you would never get to experience that for yourself.

Baekhyun did a better job than you, and if you hadn't been so depressed, you might've even gotten flustered a few times. He looked incredibly handsome in his tux, smiling sweetly at you as he led you through the dance, a painfully romantic song filling the spring air. He was the picture perfect groom. 

You so badly wanted to hate him for agreeing to all of it, but knew it was more complicated than that. Despite not knowing him very well, you did know how close knit his family was. If his parents really wanted him to do this, he would have a tough time refusing. 

You were closer with his parents than you had ever been with him, and they adored you. Despite not being related, you almost thought of them like your own aunt and uncle. Baekhyun, on the other hand, was like your mysterious older cousin. He always seemed preoccupied with his studies, or later, his job. You'd been around each other at holidays and various parties throughout the years, but he never felt approachable. 

To act so romantically with him felt unbelievably strange. On top of your disappointment at the whole situation it was also just very awkward. The kissing and touching, the dancing, the “loving” looks you shared, they all made your chest feel tight. Baekhyun was obviously very handsome, but the nature behind all of it still got to you. 

Before the wedding Baekhyun had asked you if you would rather not kiss or touch at all, not wanting to make you uncomfortable, but you'd assured him that it was fine. Aside from the parents and those closest to you both, most of the guests had no idea this wedding had been arranged just a few months earlier. If this was going to be believable, you had to make it look real. 

Eventually the dancing ended and the reception began, relieved beyond belief to finally get to have a drink. The champagne made things much easier, and as distant friends and family asked you and your new husband about your love story, you lied with increasing confidence. Baekhyun, too, was leaning into the act more heavily after a few drinks. His arm around you and the way he looked at you made everyone oooh and ahhh, giving them the same story you'd told minutes earlier, about how the two of you realized one day that all of those years you'd been hiding your love for each other, and when you realized that the other felt the same, you couldn't marry quickly enough. 

It was all bullshit of course, but they ate it up, and that was the important thing. You didn't want to think about how embarrassing it would be if an acquaintance or extended family member found out your parents had orchestrated everything. 

Several times people gushed about how lucky the two of you were to have found each other. The bitterness you felt was so intense you hoped dearly that they couldn’t see right through your smile. 

The relief you felt when the guests finally started to clear out, leaving the lavish ballroom for their hotel rooms, was monumental. Eventually the last of them were gone, and since both families insisted, you and Baekhyun retreated to your shared suite. 

Both you and him knew that your families were hoping for a grand baby soon, but that wasn't something you could even consider at the moment. 

“I don't mind sleeping on the couch.” He told you once you were alone with him. 

As nice as the room was, it didn't make sense for him to sleep on the couch. The bed was huge, and the couches weren't long enough for him to fully lay down. You shook your head. 

“Are you sure?” 

You smiled a little at his sweetness, “There's plenty of space for both of us, don't worry about it.” 

And so you and Baekhyun shared the bed on your first night together as husband and wife. You stayed on your side, and he stayed on his, not once touching, even a little. 

It was expected that eventually you and him would buy a house together and live there, but in the meantime, you stayed at that suite together. His parents owned it, and they hoped that living together would help spark something real, not to mention sharing a bed. 

Life after marriage wasn't that different, aside from your living space. You didn't have a job yet, having only graduated college a few months earlier, so you spent much of your time out with friends. As nice as the suite was, it reminded you of your loveless marriage, so you took every chance you could to get away. Baekhyun mostly just worked, keeping to himself, although he always asked you about your day when you’d get home. To his disappointment you kept your responses short. He wanted to try and get to know you better, but you didn't seem interested. 

The truth was, every time you saw him and he tried to talk to you, it made you feel worse. He did absolutely nothing wrong, but he, like the suite, was a painful reminder of your unfortunate fate. The result was you essentially avoiding him, even in your shared space. Baekhyun, however, wasn’t willing to live that way. 

A few weeks passed with hardly any words exchanged between you and him, so he decided to try something different. That evening when you returned to the suite, you were met with a generous dinner spread, the entire room meticulously decorated, and your husband sitting at the center of it all, looking at you bashfully in the candle light.

You were surprised, to say the least. 

He noticed the way you froze up, getting up from the table and taking one hand, guiding you to the table. He pulled out your chair for you, leading you to sit. 

Soon Baekhyun was seated across from you, looking back at you with a slightly unnerving intensity. 

“Why are you doing this?” You asked. 

He took a deep breath, “I want to try to make this work.” 

You raised an eyebrow. 

“I can tell how much you hate being married to me, and I’m sorry. I think we should at least try to make the best of it, though.” 

“Make the best of it?” 

“Well, yes. I mean it could be worse, right? Am I really that bad?” 

You sighed, annoyance taking hold at his nonchalant attitude. “No, Baekhyun, that's not the point, this whole situation just… sucks. Maybe it's stupid but I always thought I'd marry someone I was actually in love with, and it would be one of the best moments of my life. Instead I’m married to someone I barely even know.” 

“I'm sorry, and I know how you feel, I really do. But don't you think we should at least try to get along?” 

After a week of keeping your discontent to yourself, it came bubbling up and you no longer bothered to hide how you felt from him. You let it out, finally letting out what had been plaguing your mind since the wedding.

“Every time I see your face or even this suite for that matter, it makes me feel like shit. I really didn’t want this, and I don’t understand how you seem so unbothered. I mean, are you really not that upset about all this? Why did you agree to it so quickly?” 

“I didn’t have much of a choice either, you know how my parents are. A couple years ago when I still wasn't in a serious relationship of any kind they started floating the idea of setting me up with someone. Your name got mentioned a lot, so I've had more time to come to terms with it, I suppose.”

You scoffed, “So you've known for years that this would happen?” 

“Well, no. It was always just a suggestion, until a few months ago when they told me that they discussed it with your parents and actually wanted to go through with it.” 

Not sure what else to say, you shifted your focus to the plate of food before you, and he did the same. An awkward silence filled the dining room, though you still preferred the silence to his rationalizing of your miserable arrangement. Much to your dismay, however, it wasn’t long until he was again doing just that. 

“A lot of our parents' friends started out like this too, you know. To be fair most of them at least got to date for a while before getting married, but they’re happy now, so why shouldn’t we be able to do the same?”

He wasn’t wrong, this kind of thing wasn’t exactly rare, though you still hadn’t planned to turn out that way yourself. Still, you just stared back at him with a look of annoyance. 

“What I really wanted to talk to you about, the reason I made this dinner for us, I thought maybe, if you would be interested, we could go on a honeymoon. I know that wasn't originally part of the plan, but I think it could be good for us. Anywhere you want to go, I'll make it happen.”

His offer was extremely generous, but still didn’t exactly sound appealing. Being alone with him for days on end wasn’t your idea of fun, you worried that it would even become quite depressing, not to mention awkward. 

“I don't know….” 

“It can be as long or short as you like, and if you decide you hate being around me that much you can come back here anytime. You're my wife now, and I want to be able to make you happy, to make this whole thing work out for us. If there's anything I can do to help us get there, I’ll do it, whatever it takes.” 

When he put it like that, it was hard to argue with him. 

“Anywhere I want? And you’ll really fly me back if I don’t like it?” 

He nodded, “I promise.” 

Though you still had your doubts, you reluctantly agreed. A couple days later you were packing your bags, flying first class to Switzerland, where you'd stay for two weeks at one of his family's vacation homes in the mountains near Lucerne. 

Baekhyun grinned when you told him you wanted to go somewhere with mountains, “excellent choice.” 

The flight had been surprisingly nice. You’d expected that Baekhyun’s family would fly first class, but you were still surprised by just how nice the Swiss airline he’d booked was. You and him essentially had an entire bedroom, and while it was spacious for a plane, that was the closest you’d ever been to him in bed before. Maybe it was just hormones and general touch depravity, but you were all too aware of the way he occasionally brushed up against you as he slept.

When you finally arrived at the house you'd call home for the next couple weeks, walking into the main living area, you understood his excitement at your choice to stay in the mountains. It was nothing short of breathtaking. 

The house itself was beautiful, modern, and impeccably decorated, but you'd seen plenty of nice houses. It was the view that made it so special. The sprawling green valley surrounded by snow capped mountains looked like something out of a fairy tale. 

“My wife has awesome taste.” He said, not missing the way you grimaced, cringing at the word ‘wife’. 

“It still feels super weird hearing you say that.” 

You kept your eyes fixated on the view, and after a moment he was taking your hand and leading you into the master bedroom. Inside on a small table stood a bottle of champagne as well as two glasses, and beyond the sliding glass doors you could see the patio, fit with a hot tub and infinity pool. The king sized bed stood at the center of the room, covered in rose petals. 

You let out a short exhale of a laugh, mostly in disbelief at the sight in front of you. 

“Not bad right?” 

“Oh God, you really are trying to make me fall in love with you. Rose petals and everything…” 

He laughed, shaking his head. “I don't think two weeks is long enough to fall in love, but if you did, that would be great. I guess the staff went a little crazy with the romance since my parents told them this is our honeymoon.” 

He opened the bottle of champagne, pouring each of you a glass and handing one to you. God knows you needed it.

“Cheers.” You clinked the glasses together, each taking a sip. “By the way, I can sleep in one of the other bedrooms, if you'd prefer that. I know the rose petals on the bed are a little much.” 

Maybe it was the alcohol, but it looked like he was blushing ever so slightly as he said it.

Your immediate reaction was relief, that you'd get your own room, but then again that wasn't why you'd traveled all this way together. You were used to sleeping in the same bed with him by now anyway, so you shook your head, hoping you wouldn’t end up regretting it. 

A long sigh passed your lips.“You didn't take me here for us to sit in different rooms all day, we can do that back at home.” 

There was a faint smile on his lips and he nodded, cheeks still a little pink. You both knew what your families were hoping would happen in that bed, and you couldn't help but blush a little as well. For a second you wondered if you and him would ever get that far. He was perfectly fuckable, in theory, but the nature of your arrangement sucked all the excitement out of it for you. 

It was still early in the day, and once the champagne glasses were empty Baekhyun called a car to take the two of you into town. 

“You already seem less bummed out than you've been the last few weeks.” He commented as you headed into the city. 

“Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m still sad about everything, but you're right. It's better to at least try to make this work out. I'm trying to be optimistic.” 

He was smiling again, and you couldn't deny how gorgeous the sight of it was. He reached for one of your hands, giving it a light squeeze, holding it for the rest of the car ride, and then again as you walked through the streets together, window shopping.

The city of Lucerne really was like a fairy tale. The old buildings, the crystal blue lake, and the mountains in the distance were the perfectly romantic setting for your time with him. In front of that amazing backdrop, he truly looked like a prince. 

As sad and angry as you'd been the past month, now that your hand was in his, on this beautiful honeymoon, just enjoying the scenery, you couldn’t find the energy to harbor any resentment towards him. Although you still had a lot to learn about each other, you realized you could enjoy his company more than you expected. Either that, or it was just hard to be mad when you were in such a lovely place. 

You'd been walking together in comfortable silence for a while, just appreciating the city, when he told you, “If you see something you like, tell me and we can go inside for you to try it on.”  

As nice as it was, you knew you weren't actually going to go inside any of those shops. They were all high end designer outlets, the kinds of places you hadn't been to since your family was actually doing well. 

Baekhyun saw the way you shook your head, turning your eyes to the pavement in front of you. You felt him abruptly stop, your hand still in his. 

“What?” 

“Now that we're married, you don't need to worry about all of that anymore. Your family wasn't so insistent on you marrying me just so that they could finally pay off their debts, you know. They want a better life for you, too.” 

“Yeah well they have a funny way of showing it.” You mumbled, not even trying to hide the bitterness in your voice. 

“Did you tell them you didn’t want to get married?” 

You scoffed, because of course you didn’t, and he should know that. You gave him a bit of a bitchy side eye and he seemed to get your point. 

“They know I would’ve much rather chosen my husband myself. But I wasn’t really given a choice, just like you.”

He mustered up a surprisingly sympathetic look, sitting you down with him on a nearby bench. 

“I’m not saying this to call you ungrateful, really, but I think we should remember how lucky we are. Because of our parents we got the best educations, grew up in nice homes, get to travel the world, and so on. Money isn't something we'll ever have to worry about. When they asked me to marry you, I didn’t fight them, because I know how much they’ve done for me.” 

You understood perfectly where he was coming from. However, despite it all, you still couldn't deny your disappointment. 

“I know it would've been selfish to refuse, and of course I am grateful to be this fortunate. That doesn't make it feel any less shitty, though. I always had such big dreams for how I would meet the love of my life and get married, and they know that. When they told me I should marry you, they knew it would be heartbreaking for me, they just didn't seem to care. They didn't even want to acknowledge it.” 

“I'm sorry. I can imagine how hard that would be, I want you to know that I don't blame you at all for being upset. I just want to do whatever I can now to hopefully make this better for you.” 

When you didn’t respond his hand was pulling you back up with him, “Come on, there’s a really great ice cream place nearby.” 

He was relieved to finally see you smile again, even though you rolled your eyes at him. “I’m not a little kid, you can’t manipulate me with ice cream.” 

“I’m not manipulating you! I just want to cheer you up.” 

At least the ice cream really was fantastic. 

Eventually you returned to the house, deciding to finish the champagne in the pool together, enjoying the view. You'd seen Baekhyun shirtless in the past, but it had been years, and you couldn't deny how great he looked as he joined you in the water, holding both of your glasses of bubbly. 

The mountain air was chilly on your upper half, and you sunk deeper into the warm water as he handed you your champagne. Steam rose from the water into the cold air creating a wispy fog, the sun barely peeking out from behind the mountains as it set. 

You said cheers, clinking the glasses together, giving Baekhyun a funny look at how intently he insisted on making eye contact before bringing his glass up to meet yours. 

“You know why Germans are so insistent on eye contact when cheersing right?” He asked before taking his first sip. 

“No..?” 

His eyes widened ever so slightly, surprised, to say the least. 

“Oh… uhh, never mind.” 

“No, tell me!” 

This time, he was definitely blushing, “Ok but don't get mad at me! I was joking… I didn't think I'd have to explain it..” 

“So..?” 

He sighed, ready for you to scoff at his lame attempt at flirting with you. “In Germany, it's said that if you don't make eye contact while cheersing with someone, you'll have seven years of bad sex.” 

To his surprise, you actually let out a small laugh, again meeting his eyes and holding his gaze intently as you clinked your glass to his one more time. 

It had to be the atmosphere, both of you barely clothed in your swimsuits, the alcohol, the sunset, and the view of the mountains. That had to be it, that had to be why you were going along with everything he said so easily. Because at the end of the day, you both knew well what he was implying. He was your husband, and you his wife. Unless you both planned on cheating, which to your understanding still wasn’t acceptable despite the nature of the marriage, he would be the only one you'd be having sex with anytime soon. 

You kept slowly sipping on your drink, enjoying the calmness and beauty of the landscape. This time, the silence between him and yourself actually felt comfortable. 

“Do you really think that it's possible for us to eventually be happy, like any other married couple? You know as if we'd actually chosen this for ourselves?” You eventually asked. 

“Yeah, I definitely think it's possible.” 

“You really mean that?” 

He shrugged, and nodded. “I don't want this to sound too forward, but that's part of why I wasn't too upset about the marriage. I would've liked to marry someone I chose myself, just like you, but in our situation I think we still have a good chance at making it work. Even though we've never been particularly close, I feel like I know you fairly well, because of our families. I know that we had similar upbringings, share the same basic values, things like that, and those things really matter in a partnership. You're beautiful too, which definitely helps.”

“Thank you… I've never really thought about it like that.”

‘You’re beautiful.’ Those words had a greater effect on you than you expected.

His eyes had been fixed on the sun setting over the mountains, but slowly he turned back towards you. “Do you find me attractive, at least physically?” 

His sudden question left you dumbfounded. The answer was so obvious but the way he asked you truly didn't sound cocky at all. You had to stop yourself from making a dumb joke considering his abs were currently glistening in the light of the setting sun and his face looked like something out of a magazine. 

“Baekhyun, you know you're a good looking guy.” 

“Well, some women are more into big muscles, or really tall guys, or a more rugged “manly” look. I could still not be your type.” 

You shook your head, feeling the way your cheeks burned, knowing they were probably bright red. You kept your eyes glued on the valley below, avoiding the way you knew he was looking at you. “You definitely are my type, at least when it comes to looks.” 

You expected him to say something cocky and smug but instead he just smiled at you when you finally met his gaze again, seeming genuinely happy and relieved by your answer. 

“I appreciate that.”

It occurred to you then that despite the champagne, his words and eyes on you made you quite shy. He was simply an extremely handsome guy, and you found yourself having to fight the urge to downright ogle him. 

His broad shoulders and strong chest looked so inviting, the water on his skin adding a gorgeous sheen to his entire form. You wanted to touch him, to feel his skin against your own, and know how his slender hands would feel on your body. 

The view of the mountains was nice, but as the minutes flew by, your eyes kept traveling back to him. It didn't go unnoticed, as he felt himself slipping into similar thoughts as well. 

Maybe you really were just that easy to read, but it surprised you nonetheless when he stepped closer, taking your hand in his, before placing it on his chest. 

“Wh-what are you doing?”

Your eyes were stuck to his torso, heart beating rapidly at the knowledge of his eyes gazing down at you, his heartbeat under your hand a comforting reminder of the shared tension. His gentle touch on your chin triggered a small gasp, and he finally guided your face up towards his own where he could look at you, and you at him.

Being so close now, you noticed the scattered moles painting little constellations across his face. Each one appeared to have been placed with purpose, further adding to the near perfect harmony of his stunning features. 

When his eyes shifted downwards ever so slightly, gaze falling to your lips, you stopped breathing. You could smell him, so sweet and inviting, every minute aspect of his presence pulling you in. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

His eyes bore into your own again, and you could feel the magnetism between you both. All you gave him was a small nod, but that was enough, his lips meeting yours. 

This was so different, so much better than when you'd kissed before at your wedding. His chest under your palm felt warm and firm, the taste and smell of him surrounding you, easily letting you melt into him. His lips were soft, and the lack of clothing, the feel of his wet skin against your own, made you shiver despite the hot pool. 

Growing increasingly overwhelmed, you pulled away, red faced and genuinely a little embarrassed to have given into him so quickly. You quickly grabbed your glass and downed the rest of your champagne.

Baekhyun, however, saw right through you. He gave you a knowing smirk, he knew you were still skeptical of him and the marriage, but that didn't mean you weren't attracted to each other. Being half naked in a pool with a view definitely helped set the mood, too. 

“What? There's no reason to get shy now.” 

Still, you turned away from him, bracing both hands on the edge of the pool as you fixed your eyes back onto the mountains and valley below. 

“Hm? What's wrong?” 

His breath on the back of your neck sent a shiver down your spine, surprised by the proximity. Gently, he brushed your hair aside, giving himself access to whisper in your ear. 

“As odd as it might feel to be married, as husband and wife, there's no use in denying that we're attracted to each other.” 

He didn't miss the way you whimpered when his lips gently grazed the sensitive skin just below your ear, turning your head to grant him more access. 

He took that as his sign to continue, leaving a trail of kisses along the side of your neck, his lips growing bolder as the minutes passed. Soon he was sucking and biting at the spot on your neck that made your knees weak, and his hands slowly came to rest on your hips, leaving you every chance to stop him, but you did no such thing. 

Maybe it was just how pent up you were after not having sex for so long, and barely even having an opportunity to touch yourself, but you found yourself squeezing your thighs together, trying to relieve some of the ache that was starting to form between them. 

When one of his hands left your hip, instead coming to your jaw, turning your head to grant him access to kiss you again, you easily let him. The kiss was nothing sweet, desperate and hungry as you both fought for dominance, though Baekhyun quickly took the upper hand, not that you minded. 

“Can I touch you?” He asked the second your lips parted. 

“You are touching me.” 

“That's not what I mean.” 

His hand moved slowly down the front of your body, the soft touch making your head spin, until his delicate fingers began to play with the waistband of your bikini. 

He resumed the movement of his lips on your neck, soon coming to whisper in your ear, “May I?” 

You nodded, breath shaking, and let out a soft moan when his fingers finally pushed beneath the wet fabric. His first touch against your clit sent a jolt through you, and you didn't miss his soft chuckle before pressing his lips against you for the nth time. 

The way he nibbled and sucked at the skin of your neck combined with the soft circles his fingers made on your clit, were nothing short or euphoric. You leaned back into his chest, quiet moans and whimpers filling the air. Being touched like this from behind had always been a big turn on for you. He already made you feel so weak under his touch. 

Baekhyun was obsessed with all of the delicate sounds escaping your lips, sounds that proved how much you were enjoying what he did to you. The more he listened, the more he felt himself grow needy for more.

A breath got stuck in your throat when he pushed his hips forward, letting you feel his hardness against your ass. Even through his swim trunks, you could tell he was big. 

With his cock pressed to your ass and his fingers moving perfectly between your thighs, you were already losing any rationality you’d once possessed. When his other hand untied the knot of your top and began to tease your nipples, you couldn’t bring yourself to worry about how exposed you were, outside in the open. You knew you would be pushed over the edge sooner rather than later if he kept it up, and he did. 

“Are you gonna come for me, baby?” He whispered in your ear, the smirk on his lips apparent in his voice. 

You nodded frantically, warmth bubbling up inside you, turning into a searing heat. 

“Good girl, let go, I got you.” 

His fingertips slipped across your clit just right, one hand pinching and twisting the sensitive nub on your chest. Your whimpers grew into delighted moans, the craving for even more growing almost unbearable. The promise of eventually having his length inside you was what pushed you over the edge, shaking and twitching in Baekhyun's arms as you fell. 

“Fuck.” He whispered into the crook of your neck. “You're really sexy, you know that? Can't wait to be inside you.” 

The combination of his words and breath against your heated skin prolonged your pleasure, nodding to show him just how badly you wanted him, too. 

As soon as his hand withdrew from between your legs you turned towards him, throwing your arms around his neck to pull him into a heated kiss. It was messy, desperate, communicating the urgent need you both felt for more. His tongue greedily licked into your mouth before biting your lip, coaxing another weak moan from you. His hand on your thigh quickly had you wrapping both around him, and the feel of his substantial length and girth against your center, even through your bathing suits, left you panting, desperate for more. 

He put some pressure on you, pushing you against the edge of the pool, letting you feel even more of him. 

“Do you wanna go inside?” He whispered into your ear between kisses, but you didn't have the patience for that. 

You shook your head, “just fuck me right here.” 

His cocky smirk somehow had even more moisture flowing out of you, “as you wish.” 

With that, he undid the string of your bikini, and pushed down his shorts. 

You reached for him, intimidated by the size, hoping you would even be able to handle him. He was hot and hard in your hand, and you felt the telltale throb of his own arousal. 

Anticipation hung thick in the air as he positioned himself, his tip nudging against your clit, and you swore you were about to lose your goddamn mind. 

“You ready?” He questioned with an unexpected softness, forehead resting against your own. 

“Yes.” 

“You sure?” 

“Yes, Baekhyun, please.”

As soon as he pushed forward, however, you understood his desire to double check. His size presented quite the challenge, your eyes squeezing shut at the discomfort of being stretched so much. He could sense how you struggled to take him, hands digging into the skin of his back, legs squeezing involuntarily around his hips.

“Fuck you're so big.” 

“Just relax, I'll go slow. Tell me if it’s too much.” He said before pressing another kiss to your lips. 

You couldn't remember ever feeling so full, and he was still only halfway in. Slow, shallow thrusts carefully let you get used to him, going deeper with every roll of his hips. Soon tears pricked at your eyes, the new sensation of being fucked by such a huge cock leaving you awstruck. 

When he finally fit himself all the way inside of you, his hips meeting your own, you felt his head pressing firmly against your cervix. The slight pain of it heightened the already intense moment even further. 

“Oh my God.” 

He pulled almost all the way out, sinking himself all the way back inside, and you swore he had to have the best cock you’d ever fucked, by a mile. Any unpleasant thoughts surrounding your marriage to him were long gone as he set a steady rhythm, each thrust pulling gasps of pleasure from you. 

The water splashed wildly around you but you might as well have forgotten it was even there, too overcome with Baekhyun’s length as it pleased you in ways you never knew possible. The way he filled you so completely was unlike anything you’d experienced with another man, blissed out by his incredible size and precise thrusts. 

“You’re so perfect, take me so fucking well.” 

His lips crashed into yours, hot and greedy as you moaned into one another. You were certain you’d never felt anyone that deep inside you before, and it was addictive. 

“Think you can handle more?” He muttered, now that you’d gotten fully acclimated to his substantial length and girth. 

You nodded, greedy for anything and everything he could give, and Baekhyun wasn’t going to deny you. 

His lips swallowed more moans and cries of delight as he picked up the pace, thrusting harder, faster, feeling you clench down on him as you got closer to your release. 

Every time he sunk into you completely, he felt your body tremble in response to the intense sensations. As much as you wanted to keep your eyes open to look at him, you simply couldn't. The force with which he pounded you and how deep he reached left you an incoherent mess. Your eyes rolled to the back of your head, desperate whimpers and whines leaving your parted lips. 

“Will my beautiful wife let me feel her cum on my cock? Hm?” 

Frantically, you nodded. With only a few more pumps into your dripping core he made you cum, so hard that you just about forgot your own name. 

Baekhyun let out a deep groan at how tightly you squeezed him when you came, the pulsating of your orgasming pussy bringing him to his peak soon after. His hips fell out of pace, eventually slowing to a stop as he emptied his cum deep inside.

It wasn't until you slowly started drifting back to reality that you realized you were still outside in the pool with him. 

You continued to cling to him, feeling him gradually soften and slip out of you. When his eyes found your own you both stared, panting, basking in the afterglow. 

You finally stood back on your own two feet, leaned back against the edge of the pool, and couldn’t fight the fit of laughter that came over you. 

Baekhyun stared at you, confused, unnerved, and slightly bewildered at your sudden outburst. 

“Jesus fucking Christ Byun! That might be the best sex I’ve ever had. No, it definitely was. I can’t believe you...” 

A relieved sigh escaped him, grinning at your admission. “Go on. I’d love to hear all your thoughts.” 

“Oh shut up you don’t need any more ego stroking with a dick like that.” 

He leaned in closer, bracing both hands on the edge of the pool at your sides. “Well you’ll be happy to know that this dick is all yours, till death do us part.” 

A genuine smile graced your lips, and this time as you looked at him, your new husband, you actually felt a little excited for what your future with him could hold. 

You leaned in, giving him a quick kiss. “It's only day one and you already succeeded at seducing me. I have to admit I feel a little pathetic.” 

“I didn’t seduce you.” 

“Oh yes you did! You got me half naked and drunk and started kissing my neck. That has to count.” 

“You only had one glass of champagne and we're in a pool, what else would we wear?!” 

You rolled your eyes. “Okay fine, but you still seduced me. Not that I mind, that was fucking incredible. I hope no one saw us, though.” 

Baekhyun just shrugged. “I doubt it, but if they did, we put on a pretty good show.” he smirked. 

“You’re unbelievable.” You laughed, enjoying the way he admired you. 

“I asked if you wanted to go inside, but someone was too impatient.” 

“You’re awful cocky, you know that?” 

Again, he shrugged, moving away from you to find his glass of champagne. He finished it, and since it was getting late, you both finally decided to get to bed. This time, the rose petals just made you giggle. Once you'd both settled in, you even found yourself inching closer to him, until one of his arms pulled you closer, wrapping around you. It was easy to fall asleep like that, in his embrace. 

~

The first night in a new bed was usually pretty rough, and the jet lag didn’t help. When you awoke in the early morning, you knew you wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. 

Baekhyun had detached himself from you at some point during the night, the blanket bunching up around his waist. He seemed to still be resting peacefully, and you shamelessly enjoyed the view of his bare chest and sleeping face. Everything about him was just so gorgeous, it didn’t really make sense to you how you’d ended up with him like this. You’d been so pissed about the marriage for so long, but now a small smile crept to your lips as you watched him, his chest slowly rising and falling with every breath. 

You turned to fully face him, shifting around for a bit before settling into a comfortable position. From that point of view you could enjoy the profile of his face as he slept, taken with the seemingly perfect outlines of his jaw, nose, and lips. 

Minutes passed, dragging on painfully slow, and the sight in front of you definitely didn't help you get back to sleep. Images from your time in the pool with him kept resurfacing, along with the memory of how incredible he'd made you feel. You couldn’t understand how you hadn’t always wanted to touch him, even when he was more of a stranger to you. He was way too attractive to just ignore, you thought. Every cell in your body seemed to gravitate towards him, now that touching him was allowed, and even welcomed, holding yourself back was nearly torturous. 

You and him could nap during the day. Right now, you needed him to wake up. 

Carefully, you moved closer, molding your body to his, leaning in to press your lips to his neck. He stirred a bit, but didn’t wake up, so you went on to plant more kisses, moving down towards his chest. When you gently sucked on his collarbone, his eyes finally fluttered open. 

Much to your delight, he didn’t question your actions, or why you’d woken him up. He just took hold of your waist, pulling you on top of him, and into a kiss. You ended up straddling him, lips still locked as they moved together lazily. 

“Goodmorning,” He hummed, looking around at the dark bedroom. “Awake already? What time is it?” 

“Four? Five? I don't know.” 

“Why'd you wake me up?” He half groaned, half whined, voice rough due to the early hour. 

Instead of replying, you just kissed him again, kissing down to his jaw, then neck, moving your hips a little to make your intentions clear. 

“Ready for round two? Already?” 

“Shut up.” 

He chuckled, “Why don't you make me?”

You moved to bring your lips to his once more, but he stopped you, one finger pressing to your lips before they could make contact. You pouted.

“I have an even better idea.”

“Oh yeah?” 

A mischievous grin lifted his cheeks so prettily. 

“Sit on my face.” 

You froze, “Huh?” 

“You heard me. C’mere” 

He hoisted you up, eliciting a small shriek from you, but you didn’t let him take you all the way up the bed, instead settling atop in chest. 

“Are you serious?”

“Hmm I’m a hungry boy. Now come here.” 

His hands on your ass attempted to push you further up towards his face, but you stayed put. 

“I still have underwear on, dummy.” 

He looked down, narrowing his eyes when he spotted the lace that was, in fact, covering you. 

“Do you like this pair?” 

“Kinda? They’re a little old I guess, why do you-” 

Before you could finish his hands were taking hold of the flimsy fabric, easily ripping it and tossing it to the side. 

“Baekhyun! Are you out of your mind? Why-” 

He cut you off again, hoisting you up by your ass till your thighs were on either side of his head. 

“Don’t worry baby, I’ll buy you new ones.” 

With that his arms circled your thighs, pulling you down, until your center met his hot tongue. 

You inhaled sharply, bracing your hands against the wall as he licked and prodded at your clit. It was soft, teasing, wanting to warm you up before showing you what he was really capable of. When you would start to whine and plead for more, he would pull away entirely, instead leaving kisses on your inner thighs, letting the anticipation grow until it was nearly unbearable. 

Until then you'd still been hovering, not wanting to smother him, but when you once again began to whimper and ask for more, he told you, “I’ll give you what you want if you just sit.” 

“But-” 

Without giving you a chance to protest his strong arms, still wrapped around your thighs, yanked you down roughly. At last you got the kind of pressure you needed, putting some weight on him, no longer caring if he could breathe or not. His hums of pleasure made it clear that either way, he was enjoying this as much as you were. 

He lapped at your clit with greed, happily drinking you in. Every gasp, sigh, and groan he drew from you egged him on, eagerly awaiting your release, wanting nothing more than the taste of your delight flooding his tongue. When he transitioned from mere licking to sucking your bud past his lips, he felt your thighs shake, gripping them so tightly you almost wondered if it could bruise. In your ecstasy, however, there was no place for such thoughts. You were too preoccupied with your building orgasm. 

His fingers earlier in the pool had been fantastic, but his tongue and lips were on a whole new level entirely. The way the warm muscle flicked at your most sensitive spot was absolutely perfect, and when combined with the suction of his lips, you almost couldn’t handle it. He could tell you were getting close when you began to rock your hips against his tongue, silently begging for even more, and he was eager to deliver. 

He picked up the pace, suckling harder, licking faster, and he reveled in the increased volume of your moans as you got lost in it. When the moans were silenced, replaced instead with sharp gasps, he knew you were on the precipice. He didn’t falter, if anything, he gave you even more. 

Seconds later you fell apart, twitching and shaking while he still didn’t stop, the sensation flooding your body with relief and joy until it slowly became too much. Baekhyun still had a firm hold of your thighs, and he moaned with delight at the taste of your orgasm on his tongue. He kept lapping at your tired pussy, not wanting to let a single drop go to waste, until you basically begged him for a break. 

When his hold on your thighs finally weakened, you sat back, your ass landing on his chest eliciting a grunt from him. You looked down at your husband's face and he was beaming, lips and chin still wet with your arousal. You grinned right back, watching as he wiped his face with the back of his hand. 

Again, all you could do was laugh, and this time he happily joined you. 

“You know, I really hadn't expected all of this to happen on our first night here.” You told him. 

“Neither did I.”

He was still smiling up at you, now just watching, admiring you, and when he still didn't look away after several seconds had passed you started to feel shy. 

You rolled off of him, one arm covering your eyes as you basked in the unexpected comfort of the moment. Eventually you felt him move your arm away and his face was hovering above your own, slowly moving closer until he was kissing you. It was slow, relaxed, just enjoying the closeness as you gradually recovered from the heated moment. 

You felt him shift, realizing that he was adjusting himself beneath his silk pajama pants, and your hand followed. His eyes fluttered shut when you palmed him, and he took the hint, discarding the shirt you still wore before stripping himself. 

Wet lips met the sensitive skin of your neck as he positioned himself between your thighs, the heat and weight of him above you somehow making your heart race even more. His fingers entered you first, stretching you out to get you ready to take him. He started with two, soon adding a third as he leaned up slightly, watching your flushed form squirm and whimper beneath him. It was a sight that didn’t help his patience one bit, throbbing as he thought about getting to be inside you again so soon. 

It wasn’t long until Baekhyun assumed you were ready, that or he just didn’t want to wait any longer. Both of his hands found yours, lacing them together and pressing them to the bed above your head. His eyes were on yours, dark with lust as you felt him push inside, the stretch again making you wince, though you easily powered through, too enticed by what was to come to even consider stopping him. He rocked into you, getting deeper with each push, until he was burying himself into you entirely with each roll of his hips. 

This time, he was slower, savoring the way your tight walls hugged him, in contrast to the frenzied passion of the evening prior. You sighed gratefully each time he hit that spot inside you, appreciating the unhurried pace he set as he continued to thrust. Your previous orgasm left you especially sensitive, and you seemed to be floating on a cloud of pure bliss while he steadily fucked you, the euphoria of it reaching even greater hights than before. 

His size was one thing, but Baekhyun was also just good. He knew how to angle himself to make you feel just right, keeping a steady pace to allow the pleasure to build. 

“You feel amazing, so tight and wet for me.” He whispered into your ear, and your knuckles paled with how hard you gripped his hands. 

Normally faster, rougher sex was what you preferred, but now, with him, you couldn’t help but think that this slower, more relaxed approach was even better. Maybe it was because it was so early, and you were still a little tired, but this felt nothing short of perfect. Baekhyun was taking care of you so well, listening to your body, and giving exactly what you needed. 

Your orgasm was getting close again, warmth growing into a burning heat in the pit of your stomach, but as soon as you started to clench around him, about to let go, he pulled out. 

He chuckled softly at the way you whined in protest, but assured you, “Just trust me, this will be even better.” 

He stood on his knees and straddled one of your thighs, bringing the other leg over his shoulder before pushing back in. With the same leisurely pace from earlier he continued on, the new angle making you feel him even deeper. 

When you started to whimper and ask for him to go faster, he just shushed you, pushing his hips into you slower, but harder, leaving you with little room to protest. Either way, it was divine, and you knew he’d easily get you there in the end. After a while you decide that whatever he had in mind, you would happily accept it. He made you feel so damn good, you trusted him to take you however he saw fit. 

His thrusts were steady, letting you chase your orgasm, but when you started to get close he pulled out again, leaving you shaking and whining and clenching around nothing. 

One hand came to rest on your cheek and his forehead met your own, prompting you to open your eyes and meet his. He stared for a second before pressing a quick kiss to your lips and whispering, “Turn around for me baby.” 

You obliged, rolling onto your stomach, and you felt him straddle you, leaning down to leave a trail of kisses along your shoulder. Without any warning he filled you once again, and this time when he bottomed out, the increased pressure against your cervix made your stomach tighten, the pain almost too much for you. 

His moans and grunts made it clear that he, too, felt the added pressure, making sure not to press too hard, to be gentle as he continued working his way in and out, his eyes fixed to the view of your ass and his length plunging in and out of you. Every time he sank himself inside completely he felt the way his tip would reach the bottom, savoring the feeling while doing his best to not hurt you in any real way. 

Little did he know, you enjoyed the intensity of it, and your high was approaching even quicker than before. He’d been edging you for so long, all you cared about was getting your release. He could’ve fucked you as fast and hard as he wanted and the pain still wouldn’t have stopped you from cumming all over his length. 

But Baekhyun was cautious nonetheless, filling you in the same relaxed manner, wanting you to feel as good as possible, to prolong your pleasure, without bringing it to an end just yet. He, too, was enjoying himself far too much to rush this. 

However he soon felt the same tell-tale throb that your orgasm was quickly approaching, so he pulled out once again. 

Once he’d turned you over, settling back between your thighs, he took in your fucked out expression, eyes softening at just how desperate you looked. 

“Does my baby want to cum?” 

You nodded, frantic. “Please, Baekhyun.” 

He placed a tender kiss to your lips, then your forehead, before pushing forwards to fill you up. This time as he kept moving you could feel the difference, and you knew he was getting close to his own release. His thrusts were less consistent, and he became shaky, gasping and moaning more freely than before. 

For you it came as a relief, knowing that it wouldn’t be long until you finally got your long awaited high. You weren’t sure how much more you could take, more than ready for him to finally just fuck you through your orgasm, and let you feel his release, too. 

The push and stretch of his length inside you, the angle of it, and his entirety surrounding you, the heat and weight and smell of him, they all became too much. When he finally let you reach your peak it was strong, blinding you and making your skin tingle with the intensity. Every time he’d denied you he’d built the tension to such a degree that when it was finally released, it was otherworldly. Broken versions of his name passed your lips, though you weren’t conscious of it, the wave of pleasure leaving no room for coherent thought, only gratitude for the incredible feeling after having been deprived. 

He didn’t stop when he felt the obvious pulsating and twitching of your orgasm, he continued to chase his own high, which came soon after. He’d been holding himself back, so when it finally hit him, the burst of euphoria was explosive. As he shuddered apart his lips crashed into yours, hungry and rough as they sought greater contact, something to communicate how much it affected him. 

The kisses became more relaxed as you both slowly drifted back to reality, until he finally collapsed on top of you, burying himself in the crook of your neck. Gently kisses were peppered across your skin, each one paired with some sweet words, “So beautiful, so perfect, so good for me.” 

After some time his weight above you lost its charm, turning sweaty and uncomfortable prompting him to roll off you, though you still desired some contact. Your head rested atop his chest, and the feeling of his hand on your waist was a welcome comfort. 

Something about this just felt right to you. Your marriage to him, now, came as more of a relief than anything else. You knew that after having him, nobody else would ever be able to compare. As sure as you’d been that the jet lag would keep you up until daylight, his embrace ended up luring you into a peaceful sleep in mere minutes. 

As it turned out, your honeymoon ended up being a beautiful experience full of gorgeous scenery, plentiful laughter, and amazing sex. Most days were spent strolling through town, enjoying the spa and pool at the house, and in bed with your new husband. 

He was fun, maybe a little cocky, but you couldn't blame him for that, everything considered. At the end of the day, he was always sweet to you, and never acted truly arrogant in any way. Confident, that was how you would describe him, and that confidence came as a comfort for you. He was confident in himself, yes, but he also showed a lot of confidence and optimism towards his relationship with you. 

The initial awkwardness disappeared completely after your encounter in the pool. The sex had been great, but more importantly, it brought your guard down. You quickly became far more comfortable around him, and as the days passed, he started to feel like a genuine friend. A friend, who also gave you the best sex of your life. 

While it may have still been early in the relationship, by the time you were flying back home with him, you felt confident, too. 

You'd make it work with Baekhyun, your new husband. 

[janumun]

A Lemurian’s Guide to Love (LaDS Rafayel – General NSFW Headcanons) 

Rated: NSFW/18+

Tags: oral and vaginal sex, body worship, fingering, praise kink, facial, hand kink, Rafayel shenanigans, allusions to spoilers for Rafayel’s myth dates, certain ASMRs and his character story

Words: ~3k

Author’s Notes: The chokehold this man has on me (!!!) has led me to exploring Rafayel’s sexual foray as well as smidges of how I imagine his relationship to progress with his beloved in these headcanons. 

Please take careful note of those tags and rating and proceed at your own discretion!  

With that said, I hope you enjoy your read. 

Rafayel has stood by and waited for you; over the course of several years — from that fated meeting and the result: a promise borne and broken — and through the descent of the sands of time.  

And while he likes to consider himself a patient man — and to a degree, he has been just that; endurance incarnate over the course of those long, arduous years without his beloved at his side — when he does finally come across you, Rafayel finds his resolve ripple, and then gradually implode, into paper-thin fragments of yearning and fond desire.  

From how Rafayel oft presents his public persona to the world — cool and dispassionate; a tepid smile on the ready for strangers who wish to garner his favour or attentions, one wouldn’t even think to scratch past that surface. The task of avoiding unnecessary engagements, especially since his return to Linkon City a few years prior, preceding his debut as an artist, is one he finds particularly cumbersome.  

But during intimate moments, reserved for just the two of you, you see that exact same Rafayel — that handsome, charismatic artistic talent plastered, glossy, across covers of magazines and billboards — mould into silly scowls. A flair for the dramatics the minute he senses your attentions are not his alone for the taking. Ridiculous and feline-like in his excuses of demands from his ‘bodyguard’, to allow him her company.  

After an endurance survived this incredibly long, he finds that in certain matters, he can no longer wait.  

Great Lemurian entity he may be, but his habits fit firmer akin to a cat’s rather than any fish you’ve kept as a pet.  

He likes to tease and prod at you, wind you up and then, burst into subdued laughter the moment you take his bait. He’s frighteningly adept at stringing you along to his whims, a certain boyish charm you’ve never seen him utilize on any of his vast majority of fans in public. 

He loves to drag you out to impromptu sea-shell collecting ‘dates’ along the shores of Whitesand Bay, to capture the perfect pearlescent pink and silvers, to grind into paint on days he moans of “not having enough inspiration to paint’.

Tows you along for long drives in the vermillion convertible he was provided by Thomas, purchased from Rafayel’s private funds [the correct color he insisted on getting for the car before a poor Thomas was finally able to fulfil his request].  

Had you both stranded miles away from home once, when he had a punctured tire and ‘forgot’ to ensure he had a spare to change, in case of emergencies.  

And when you biked him back the rest of the way on a rental bicycle, you had the very nagging suspicion he wasn’t too upset about the mishap as he hummed an odd tune, seated behind you. Bodies close enough you felt the gentle vibrations of his voice deep within your bones, along with the steady movement of the tires hitting the paved road.  

Truly a feline more than any amphibious creature. 

A wondrous man, a delightful dissonance of character.

That very same man, when the two of you hold each other for the first time: 

His digits scour a delicate path across your face, your jaw, down your neckline; Rafayel is incredibly, uncharacteristically quiet the first night you are his. Bathed a sterling blue under the watery gaze of the moon. Save for the thick hitch of his breath with the unveiling of bare skin, he is mute.  

His eyes, however, a crisp indigo, seem to set an inextinguishable fire to the rest of your clothes.  

He observes — engraves into memory — first with his gaze, and then, his fingers follow. Long, tapered digits mapping the shape of your breasts, thumb denting gentle at the peaks of them. A grip he tests, firm, against the supple flesh of your waist, flaring outwards into the soft squish of your hips.  

He makes a sound then; incoherent, incomprehensible. Perhaps, an unconscious break of language into his native Lemurian tongue; the hoarse, barely compacted passion of it, however, conveyed to you in feelings.  

You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.  

Your first night is incredibly long, Rafayel shows you truly what it means to be made love to, you nearly weep of joy and pleasure.  

He has waited, oh he has pined and wanted, for so long. It’s a surreal and soul shattering experience for him, just the blessing of you naked underneath his fingers alone, has all of Rafayel’s pretenses unravelling, all masks and facades falling away.  

The first time, there is no teasing, no hiding.

Rafayel is immaculately thorough in his exploration of your body. His fingers; his preferred medium of following the swells and dips of his canvas — your body.  

Unfortunately, and yet so very delightful for you; he takes his time sketching across your body throughout the night, providing no chance of rest or relief from the torrential waves of pleasure he crests through your body. His eyes trained fast on your face, for every slight quiver and break of you, witnessing your response to each single pinpoint of pleasure his fingers brush against.  

Responding obedient to pleas of “oh, there, right there, Rafayel.”  

This very first time, the sounds of you alone, moaning his name, could bring him to completion but he resists. Your pleasure, first and foremost, in his near-tunnel vision. 

When the calls of his name upon your lips become unbearable, with the curve of his index and middle up into your warm wetness, Rafayel caves, like sand carried back into the depths of the sea, underneath the unrelenting break of waves. Long fingers indenting into pliant thighs as he cleaves them up and apart for unobstructed access to your weeping slit and presses a parched tongue to lap up your essence.  

Curling his tongue up into your fluttering walls as his fingers dance against the tight bead of pleasure in between your legs, to the steady compresses of your thighs against the strength of his shoulders.

Rafayel adores and encourages your honesty in bed.

Ready to slow down when and if you tell him how overwhelmed you are. Takes you faster when you beg him to make you come with his mouth. All the while, that dark azure gaze is fixated upon you, the flush beneath them turned a deeper crimson with each sound of satisfaction he triumphantly plucks out of you. 

Lashes descending involuntarily, only when you crest at the peak of your pleasure and flood yourself onto his waiting tongue. The taste of a delectable sea; he laps up every single drop of until he is sated. 

And it is only when you implore Rafayel to put his cock inside you does he startle at the negligence of his body; hard and leaking, soiling the sheets beneath him.  

When you finally, finally connect, painfully slow; the push comes without resistance offered, from how wet he has had you from his ministrations, for a good part of the night.  

Rafayel has to struggle to breathe at the sensation of your warmth around him, tight, herculean control the likes of which he hasn’t ever had to scrabble for, ever in his life. To not just spill the moment he is inside you.  

Her pleasure, I want to feel it. I want to make her feel good.  

Still the sole thought behind that glazed, hot gaze. A moment of odd, emotional vulnerability when your eyes finally lock, your hands wandering now, to cup across his face.  

And when he begins to move, Rafayel needs to feel each and every single part of you with every single fibre of his own. Fingers resuming their trek of their now favorite canvas as you murmur love and praise into his ears. The weight of a breast hefty against one large palm, the other with his fingers intertwined through yours as he propels into you.  

Both of your releases, one and the same; as his eyes remain on the scrunch of your brow, just before he too falls, burying his face against the crescent of your neck. 

Rafayel’s style of love-making is firmly passionate.  

It is emotional, relieving and often times fun. He is incredibly adept at reading your cues and adjusting his pace according to your wants. Sex, in his mind, is an activity, as deserving of time and patience as his art — an intricate worship — and hence he usually requires the two of you have those several, long hours to spare before he gets to undressing you. Quickies, as such then, he isn’t a massive fan of.  

Neither public spaces — a private dressing room at one of his events, requiring the two of you to be out within a certain time period — no matter how desperate or wanting he might be. Silencing your own protests with a long, hushed kiss and a skewed mischievous, flushed smile that has your heart quivering inside your chest. “Be a good girl now and wait,” he remarks before setting your disheveled collar back in order. The graceful sweep of his hand; for you to take, once you are done, ready to escort you out into the venue.  

Open but private spaces, however, where you have time to spare and none to disturb, his private beach behind his home, is where you might find yourself spread wide across soft cloth. The cool waves of the shore lapping gentle at your tightly furled toes while Rafayel’s mouth works at the slick in between your legs. Truly his idea of a well-enjoyed romantic date. 

On the note of basking in the benevolence of seas, Rafayel loves giving oral as much as he enjoys receiving it.  

He isn’t incredibly vocal when it comes to giving voice to his desires, for having your mouth on him, often because he is more than happy [and engrossed] to have his mouth do all the talking (and lapping), while you luxuriate underneath the feel of his tongue and lips, like the [his] Queen you are. He loves servicing you to completion, no matter how much his tease of a foreplay may point to, otherwise.  

It is only when your mouth takes him in for the first time, on your request do you make the delightful discovery of Rafayel’s little give-aways. The quiver of his fingers threaded firm through your hair. The clench of a fine toned abdomen, ripples of tight pleasure splaying across his torso.  

“You’re doing so well, baby— hah, just like that. What have you done to me? You’re so good.” 

The drop of his jaw, the fine, dark dusting of red smeared across his cheeks and ears. His slow, stuttered groans and pants.  A deliberate suckle at his tip has him throwing his head back at the sensation, fingers spasming against the back of your skull. Your own resistance shattering and you take him in whole, the moan that chokes out of Rafayel’s throat in reward for your efforts is heaven enough, you keep returning for more.  

Rafayel is loud and has no shame in showcasing his love and desire for you through the sounds he makes, just for you.  

Part of the reason also why he prefers privacy to public displays of affection or quick sexual encounters. And he encourages just the same for you.  

Be it the sounds of appreciation that leave his mouth, muffled and undulating, into your pussy or while he is inside of you, enjoying every single inch of your drenched, clenching flesh against his length.  

“If you squeeze me that hard, I’m going to—” 

Words fracturing apart into a long, stuttered moan he presses right against your lips. Foreheads slick with the sweat of your desires as he bears down against you. Bright blue gaze meeting yours — the gentle florid fringe of pinks — steeped in pleasure as his fingers curve about your jaw, pleading a kiss from your lips. 

“My pretty girl.” A flushed devastating grin. “Let me come inside you. I want to feel the way your body clamps around me when I do. Gods, please.” 

Rafayel is an immensely flexible lover. No rules are set in stone, no bedroom innovations entirely over-ruled before the two of you knock it at least once.  

There is no sole lead; only the steps you weave in between you two, together. He is receptive to a wide variety of tastes and kinks; ever the most studious, eager participant, save for the rare personal boundary or two, he has set in place (see above: feelings regarding public sex). 

Grasping your hand to fold a kiss against your palm as he moves within you. Bidding on sex-hoarse whispers to entrust yourself to his care while he sets to plunging your entire being into flames, pleasure so exhilarating you’re left grappling for air by the end of it all. All the while, he shapes his marks of adoration against your skin, soothing warmth to set nerves lax from all their previous exertion.  

Or, when you ask it of him, supplicates himself — a willing, grinning participant — loving, puckish desire set to blaze within his dark eyes. Tracking each single move, the delicate fingers that sketch against his heaving abdomen, the hand that moves to enclose his cock in between eager digits and pump, slow: a delectable torture. And he responds in kind to your enthusiasm, if you leave his mouth unbound and able — sings for you as you so enjoy, in that rapturous voice you so adore. Lent a lascivious flavour from how his head rolls back across his neck in the throes of incoming release, the flush of him flooding down across his chest from how aroused he is for you to be doing what you are to him.  

The sight of him in his entirety is enough for your own patience to wear paper-thin, drenched wet from the erotic picture he paints beneath you.  

Rafayel’s house is a mess. 

...Something he often brushes off as personal ‘creative choices’, declaring he finds a certain order to his disarray of things strewn about.

The colors he knows exactly where to pluck off the floor of his studio. A second draft of an upcoming painting, pinned underneath a [fish] magnet against the kitchen cabinet. A spare shirt draped across the arm of a sofa for when he wants to quickly switch out of pigment-stained clothes in between paintings.  

However, he takes special care to keep his bedroom — or at the very least, on worse days, one sofa — in acceptable, spruced order. Especially so, after you start coming over to visit or stay the weekend, accompany him on days he holes himself up in his house, to pore over an artwork. Often so preoccupied, by the time he snaps out of it, several hours later: to a velvet sky outside and you scrunched up in an upright position, with your head coasting sideways at an uncomfortable angle, in your sleep.  

The first and last time that happens as he carts you into his arms and off to his bedroom to tuck you into his bed and insists you retire to his bedroom on your own, the next morning, whenever you feel like dozing off. Making a point, then onwards to always have it ready and at your disposal.  

For sleep and when you’re both not; tangled within each other and the sheets, cooling down from your highs.  

Rafayel craves chaste physical intimacy post-coitus as he drags you into his arms, your breath warm against his chest. He despises being away from your comfort for even a moment’s breath; extra adorable and tetchy in his phase of dramatics if you try and squirm away. 

Has startled you on one particular occasion; hunched, stark naked, by the door of the bathroom as you stepped out of it. A frown knit in between his brow, a disagreeable moue to that beautiful mouth and a simple, “I’m cold, warm me.”  

An amalgamation of just how Rafayel is like and something else; deeper, you suspect it stems from unspoken fears of loneliness. There are nights you don’t quite understand, when his emotions run rampant and his need for physical affirmation and constant connection are strong; the man immediately soothed to rest the moment your hand is across his cheek, fingers caressing down the sculpt of his jaw. Tiring him at last into exhausted sleep. A vulnerability to his visage only you are allowed  to stand witness to.  

There is something so incredibly erotic about his girl when she lets him put his cock against her mouth... 

Testing every single mental fortitude, he has ever had thrown up, walls of iron built over the course of centuries, crumbling at the feeling of your wet mouth against his length. Drawing him in before you swallow him, right to the base.  

Taking his seed down your throat like the damn, amazing girl you are but if you pull back at just the right moment, firm fist bringing him to spill against your cheeks, traversing down the arc of your neck— 

Rafayel’s thoughts frizzle into a numb void, mouth agape and panting. A scarlet flush dashed across the ridge of his cheekbones, his ears, to witness your face dirtied by smears of his cum. The sight truly untethers a carnal, primitive want in him, he isn’t able to fully parse himself.  

Truly imprinted upon as the bride of the Sea God. 

Your sexual sessions are more often than not, kicked off on sensual, fun notes and back-and-forths.  

A stray jibe you might throw his way at one of his odd habits and he’s plucking you right off your feet. Nimble digits feathering down the expanse of your abdomen in retaliation before you’re reduced to giggles; both of your fingers catching at the other’s clothes in an attempt for dominance before you drift, natural, against the other’s mouth in soft, scheming smiles. 

Or, when you reach to strike the firm muscle of his behind, the sweet, silly twist to his mouth right as he startles, an indignant, scandalized gaze he rolls your way. “Why, you—” Before you reach to grasp him by the collar and drag down towards your waiting, open mouth. Lips drawing wide into a smile as you feel his reciprocated urgent squeeze across your ass; the pads of his fingers tracing the lining of your panties beneath your skirt. “Don’t make me return the favor several fold, pretty siren.” 

The bite of restive teeth he sinks into his lower lip as he hauls you up and against his rigid length. Before you reach forward, disengaging his lip, to suckle it into your own mouth. “Try me.” 

The act itself leaning more into the romance of the moment and slow, deep thrusts into your body as Rafayel drifts against you. Mouthing every piece of spare skin in sight, affirmations and assurances as clear and heard as the moans that tumble from his lips.

Link to Master List

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[nocturniashifter]

What makes your dr self so attractive? | PICK A PILE

₊˚๑ How to choose: Close your eyes, take a deep breath and choose the image that caught your attention. ₊˚๑ Disclaimer: All readings are done for entertainment only, don't use my readings as a replacement for legitimate advice. This is a general reading, so take what resonates and leave what doesn't.

Hello, my angels! How long, right? Well, I'm back with another PAP that just came out of the oven. Thank you for the 400 followers 😔🫶. Ready to discover what makes your dr self so attractive? ;)

⊹ ࣪ ˖ masterlist | book a reading with me | tips

⊹ ꒱ PILE ONE ᨦ ♡

"Wow, y/n is just so charming; you can’t help but want to be around them!"

"Every time y/n talks, it’s like the whole room stops to listen!"

"Y/n has that friendly smile that just makes everyone feel at home; it’s hard not to like them!"

Hey, pile one! First off, let me just say that your beauty in your DR is out of this world – so if you scripted that, it’s definitely doing its thing! You’ve got this striking, almost intimidating presence, whether it’s your looks or the way you carry yourself. Either way, it makes you super attractive to a lot of people in your desired reality. Tons of people have a crush on you – especially if you’re a public figure, like an artist, but even if you’re not, the same applies. You’ve got people who would literally be happy with just a glance or a touch, hoping for any little sign of affection from you. It’s like you’ve got a fan club of simps just waiting for your attention, lol. Seriously, people would crawl at your feet, but don’t let it go to your head, LMAO. That said, be careful, because some of these people might be a bit too obsessed and wouldn’t take rejection lightly – if that worries you, I’d definitely recommend scripting affirmations for safety and protection, especially if you’re in the public eye.

People also think everything you touch turns to gold. They see you as this super successful person who just excels at whatever you set your mind to. You’ve definitely racked up a bunch of wins and achievements in your DR, and that only adds to the image people have of you as someone who thrives. Your voice? People find it incredibly attractive – especially if you’re a singer in your DR. You’ve got that kind of presence where the moment you walk into a room, time seems to stop and everything just brightens up, and all eyes are on you.

What really makes you even more attractive is the fact that you’ve been through so much in life, but you’ve come out on top. Your whole life has been a battle for your dreams, and the fact that you never gave up is something people seriously admire about you. On top of that, you’re great company – you make people feel comfortable and at home when they’re around you, which just adds to your appeal.

But here’s the thing, pile one: you’ve probably broken a lot of hearts lmao. You’re like that unattainable halfway crush that a lot of people are into, but you’re just not reciprocating their feelings, lol. People are constantly trying to be friends with you, and it seems like you even start trends without realizing it. You're definitely leaving your mark wherever you go.

⊹ ꒱ PILE TWO ᨦ ♡

"Y/n has this cool, badass energy that just draws people in; it’s impossible to ignore!"

"Honestly, y/n’s style is on another level; it really shows off their strong personality."

"Y/n isn’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in, and that just makes them even more attractive."

Hello, pile two! Let me start by saying that what makes you so insanely attractive in your desired reality is your aura. You’ve got this powerful, badass vibe that screams, “I don’t give a fuck,” and it’s honestly magnetic. A lot of you in this pile are shifting to more intense realities, maybe an anime or one that’s action-packed/dangerous, and your energy fits perfectly. You come off as someone who’s fearless, and that combined with your style, really makes you stand out – your fashion sense is on point, and it doesn’t just reflect how badass you are, but also how unique and authentic you are. People are drawn to you because you don’t try to fit in; you’re unapologetically yourself, and that confidence is incredibly attractive. You radiate this commanding presence that makes people stop in their tracks. There’s something about you that captivates those around you, like they can’t help but be intrigued by you. People are definitely hypnotized by your vibe – whether it’s your intense stare, your boldness, or just the way you carry yourself like you’ve seen and conquered it all. It’s almost as if the world bends to your will, and trust me, people notice that.

Even though you have this tough, badass exterior, there’s more to you. People also see you as someone who is selfless and would do anything for the greater good – this especially applies if you’re shifting to a reality where you’re a hero or someone who fights battles. You stand for justice, fairness, and equality, and that moral compass of yours only adds to your attractiveness. You have this strong desire to make life better for not only yourself but for the people around you, and that determination is something others admire deeply.

For those who are lucky enough to be close to you, there’s this undeniable sense of loyalty you exude. You’ve got that “I’m all in for you, no matter what” energy, and it’s clear to your inner circle that you would go to extreme lengths for the people you love. You’d take a bullet for them, and they know it. That kind of dedication makes you stand out in a world where loyalty can be hard to find. However, with that loyalty also comes your overthinking nature. You sometimes get anxious and worry too much about things going wrong in your relationships, but that just shows how much you care.

On the flip side, you don’t tolerate any bullshit. If someone’s toxic, you don’t hesitate to cut them off, you have no time or patience for people who try to drag you down, and you’re not afraid to remove yourself from harmful situations, no matter how tough it is. You always find a way out, and that resilience is something people admire about you. It’s like you’re unstoppable, and that only adds to the mystery and allure you bring into every space you enter.

⊹ ꒱ PILE THREE ᨦ ♡

"Every time y/n walks into a room, it’s like they own the place; they really know how to grab attention!"

"I mean, with all that charm and confidence, it’s no wonder everyone is trying to get close to y/n!"

"Y/n just has this way of putting themselves first and cutting out the drama; it’s seriously appealing!"

Hey, pile three! Let’s dive into what makes you incredibly attractive in your desired reality. When you walk into a room, heads turn, and it’s as if the world stops for a moment – people can’t help but admire you. You command attention wherever you go, and your popularity is through the roof. Just like in the other piles, you have this knack for getting what you want, especially when it comes to material things – money is not an issue for you, so you can pretty much buy anything your heart desires. It’s as if the world is at your feet, and that undeniable confidence only amplifies your allure.

However, with great popularity, fame, and wealth, there are those who might approach you out of pure interest or ulterior motives. It’s essential to stay vigilant because not everyone has your best interests at heart. Some people may want to be around you just to use you or bask in your glow, so it’s vital to discern who your true friends are. Just like in pile one, many people desire you, but you come across as somewhat unattainable, which only fuels their admiration and frustration when they realize you won’t reciprocate their feelings. You’ve got this vibe that screams, “Someone is going to be heartbroken today, but it won’t be me!” because you know how to prioritize yourself above all else.

Your badass energy comes from everything you’ve been through; you’ve learned to fight and emerged stronger. You absolutely do not tolerate any bullshit, especially in relationships. If someone isn’t treating you right, you won’t hesitate to cut them off. This attitude extends beyond romantic partnerships; it applies to every aspect of your life. You’ve learned your worth and have no problem walking away from toxic situations or people who don’t respect you. For you, life is about enjoying every moment, and you live it to the fullest. If you were to end a relationship, you’d be out celebrating while your ex sits at home, missing you – that’s just the energy you exude – free and unapologetic. You’ve literally built your own empire, which is incredibly attractive. Each challenge you’ve faced has only added to your strength and resilience, and people are drawn to that. Interestingly, you look especially stunning when you wear red; it highlights your confidence and adds to that fierce energy you naturally possess.

If you have a s/o in your desired reality, they absolutely adore you and feel incredibly lucky to call you theirs. They see you as irresistible and find it hard to contain their excitement when they’re around you. Your presence lights up their day, and they think about you constantly, eagerly awaiting those moments together. Expect plenty of passionate encounters because they’ll make it clear that they love you deeply, wanting to show you just how much you mean to them. In their eyes, no one could ever love you as profoundly as they do, and they are determined to prove it every chance they get 😏.

That was it, guys! I really hope you liked it. See you next time! ♡

© nocturniashifter - don't copy, redistribute or edit my content | moodboard

[elsecrytt]

Kinktober Day 6

Threesome | Cock Ring | Hypnotism

Pairing: Sukuna/Reader/Gojo (poly)

Warnings: semi-public sex, situationships.

Sukuna and Satoru fucking hate each other.

It’s no news to anyone. Two powerful sorcerers at Jujutsu Tech – one of them from a great clan, the other from nothing. Both exceptional in a way none of their peers were.

There were a lot of strong sorcerers this year – look at Suguru, or Shoko, or even you – but the two of them had this weird fixation on who was the strongest.

What did that matter, really? They were both strong enough to defeat the most dangerous spirits all alone. What did it matter which of them was stronger?

Satoru would shrug, Maybe it doesn’t matter. But I am.

Sukuna was less generous, That Gojo brat is too arrogant for his own good.

On principle, you’d agree with Sukuna, but Sukuna is a raging asshole, and Satoru’s just an annoyance. They don’t pick on you so much these days, though.

As much as he started out as a self-centered jerk, Satoru’s got Suguru’s calming influence on him, softening out his mean remarks and obnoxious behaviors. You have a shared sweet tooth that means he likes to hang around with you after class and try out new candies together.

Sukuna usually just can’t be asked to speak to you, gruff and shoving his way through the hallways of the classes, glaring as though a blue-eyed menace could pop up from any corner - a sentiment you could relate to.

One day you’d caught him sulking in an empty classroom during lunchtime (from Satoru’s mocking words, he’d given his lunch to his “stupid little brother” who’d lost his), and you’d offered to share.

It was surprising that he took the offer. You’re almost more surprised that he actually splits it with you, instead of taking the lion’s share like Satoru does with your foreign imported treats.

And after your years at the school together you’re hesitant to call yourselves friends – you think of them more as starving dogs you were foolish enough to feed.

Either one would show up now and again for your attention, rarely together. They come to you for food and entertainment, not quite company, you don’t think.

But then, there’s a lot of things you think you know about Satoru and Sukuna. Not all of them are right.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was when you walked in on them making out in an empty classroom.

Lips parted, hands grasping and clawing at one another as if they wish to tear the other apart –

A shove, a shuffle.

Two pairs of eyes, red and blue, wide and staring straight at you.

Open, panting mouths. Flushed cheeks. Red and purple marks littering their throats.

You cock your head. “Oh. Sorry, don’t mind me. Go back to eating each other’s faces, or whatever you were supposed to be doing.”

“Fuck, no – ”  “It’s not like – ”

They speak in unison, only to stop and glare at each other at the overlapping voices.

Satoru is leaning back against a desk, his coat uncharacteristically undone at the top. Sukuna’s collar is always loose, but you catch teeth marks underneath it.

The excuses they make are actually really funny.

They interrupt each other, Sukuna even shoves Satoru for blithe remark about how I wouldn’t even if he paid me, teeth bared as he scoffs and growls, Oh but you sure moaned like you were being paid to, you little porn star –

“Enough!”

You shut the door behind you, locking it, and slide yourself up to sit on a desk. The two of them stare at you while you rest your chin on your hand.

“I told you,” You say, “Don’t mind me. Go back to what you were doing.”

There’s a hint of red that creeps over Satoru’s pale cheeks. It’s just as noticeable on Sukuna’s face, the blush of his hair bringing out the pink on his face.

“Well? I’m waiting. Go on. The least you could do is give me a show.” You lick your lips, “The catfight thing is cute and all but I’m super curious.”

Were they just making out like a couple flighty virgins, or was someone’s dick going to come out at one point? You’re kind of excited to find out.

“I-” Sukuna is cut off as Satoru’s lips press into his mouth. He growls and pushes back on pure instinct, shoving hm right into the desk you’re sitting on.

“Hey!”

Red eyes burn in satisfaction, a wide hand reaching around Satoru to cover your ass.

Satoru moans (oh wow, he was like a porn star), jumping up to sit himself in your lap.

You’re not sure what to think, as Sukuna grabs your mouth for a kiss and you watch Satoru whine and nip at his ear. You’re not even sure what they’re doing with each other.

You know that Satoru grabs your hand, tugs it to the front of his pants where you dig out his long, slender, pretty cock, already hard and weeping.

Sukuna’s comes out too, brushing against your fingertips, his hands with yours clenching their cocks together to jerk them in unison.

Soon you know what Satoru’s pretty pale skin tastes like, sweat-dewed and trembling with his pitiful whimpers.

Sukuna shoves his fingers in your mouth, coated in their cum. He stares into your eyes with a wild grin, pressing down onto your tongue until you drool and Satoru licks it up.

You know how it feels when Satoru sinks down to his knees and slips aside your panties, diving onto your leaking cunt like it’s another dessert he doesn’t want to share.

How hard Sukuna’s teeth dig into your throat, leaving marks just like the ones you’d seen on Satoru’s neck.

Satoru’s hair is as soft as it looks, that the way he moans when you tug on it is enough to bring you over the edge.

It must do something to Sukuna, because he drags your chin, forcing you to hold eye contact while you cum.

You know when Sukuna pulls Satoru up for a kiss, tugging his mouth open to lick it clean, like he's impatient for a taste of you - it sends a thrill like no other dripping down your spine.

You know all these things, but you don’t know what’s going on.

That’s okay. You don’t think they do, either.

Even if the liaison between them came as a surprise, you’re somehow not surprised to find either of them spending more time with you, in the coming days.

Suddenly, it’s not Suguru who’s Satoru’s constant companion, though you see him eye you with a smirk every now and then. Satoru clings to you like a shadow, whinier than ever – but Sukuna can’t seem to leave you alone, either.

It’s hard to tell what you are. A buffer? An excuse? They include you enough. You don’t stand by and watch them dance around you. You can reach out and touch – they’ll let you. They’ll thank you for it.

You’re still working on Sukuna, but his gratitude is silent. Doors held open, extra lunch boxes or vending machine snacks. A coat when you’re cold, a glare at anyone who bothers you.

Satoru is more open about it. People ask if you’re his girlfriend and you just laugh it off, but he’s not afraid to sling his arm over your shoulders and pull you close. Even though Sukuna is glaring harder than ever.

They’re not a team, never a team, not Sukuna and Satoru. The two of them are always in competition.

"Be my girlfriend," Satoru whispers, "Sukuna doesn't take anything seriously, this is just a game to him. But I like you for real, I'll go on dates with you out in public, tell everyone you're my girl-"

"The fuck you will," Sukuna grumbles, wrapping his own arm around your waist, “She’s my girl as much as she’s yours.”

So you date both of them.

And dating them, you learn a lot. Not about jujutsu or how strong they are. About Sukuna, and Satoru, the boys you’re dating.

You learn that Sukuna is actually a cuddler. He’s much better at it than Satoru, too.

Satoru is clingy, long limbs wrapping around anything and everything he can.

Sukuna likes to get into a nice comfortable position, you or Satoru or both of you on his broad chest, arms strewn in an easy, wide embrace.

Perfect for lazy hours spent laying down listening to them bicker, flirt, or complain – often including you too. Kisses peppered in with nips or smacks on whatever place was easiest to reach.

Sukuna’s the quiet type, the type that can enjoy just sitting in the same room while you do things.

He’s not a bad study buddy, all things considered, although getting him to help with anything is like pulling teeth – purely because it entertains him to make you work for it.

But if you want someone to just give in and hand you everything, that’s what Satoru is for.

If Sukuna is a stray cat with his independence and pride, Satoru is a puppy who would follow you to the ends of the earth. Constantly at your heels, making Sukuna frown and growl in envy at the closeness.

He’s too darling, really, your Satoru. If you need someone to talk, to chatter on and distract you or make you feel like the center of the universe, Satoru could do that. Always ready with a kiss or a credit card, eager to help in any way he can, rub it in Sukuna’s face how much better he is. He loves to be used.

With Sukuna, your fondest memories are his little gestures of kindness.

With Satoru, your most cherished moments are you doing things for him. You hand him a candy and his face lights up. You bring him a drink, you remember the homework from last night, you offer to dry his hair.

Satoru drinks in affection like he’s been starved all his life.

You think him and Sukuna are alike in that way.

Satoru learned to give everything he could in hopes of getting something back. Sukuna learned to expect nothing and take whatever he could get.

They’re so alike, and yet so different.

You learn that Satoru likes it when you cum on his mouth. He likes it when Sukuna does, too.

It’s an attention thing, you think, from how he looks up at you when his mouth is on you, fluttering his lashes, moaning sluttily.

He especially loves having his hair pulled, and Sukuna’s brutal with it, shoving Satoru up and down his cock. It’s hotter than you’d imagined – no one should look that hot sucking dick. It makes you nervous to go down on either of them, sometimes.

It doesn’t make a difference, though. Sukuna likes eating pussy more than he likes sucking dick, so Satoru is delighted whenever you go down on him.

For his part, Sukuna’s more careful with you than he is with Satoru, but Satoru’s an insatiable whore who likes to join in, either touching you while you suck Sukuna off or putting his mouth right on that dick with you.

Sukuna likes it hard and rough. He’s brutal with Satoru; they love to maul each other and throw you in the middle, seeing who would back away first.

They love it even more when you watch, when you goad them on, striving to impress you. Sukuna says he doesn’t care what other people think, but you see him lifting Satoru’s face for you to better see (or ride).

When he comes to you, he’s the picture of control, wielding a sadism tailored to your tastes. He’s always eager, always excited to push you to some new ledge, to find your limit and dance exactly on the line and no further.

He’ll let Satoru come between you only to wear him out completely, turning back and taunting him with the sight of you on the precipice, begging and pleading for release.

Satoru comes to you for gentleness. He loves a good fuck but his favorite is classic missionary where he gets all needy and teary-eyed, desperate for kisses and praise.

Every ounce of affection you pour into him is repaid tenfold, with eyes that look at you like you hung the stars, a mouth that worships you with word and tongue alike.

Sometimes the gentleness is slapping him around, shoving him down, dominating him in a way that he doesn’t have to fight.

Sometimes Sukuna’s cruelty warps, demands hastening and sharpening into something more than plain desire, hands clasped against you to do more than just hold you in place.

They both have things they don’t want the other to see.

You learn they have some tacit agreement to leave each other some alone time with you.

The vast majority of your time is spent in both their company, but there are days you get to spend exclusively with Satoru or exclusively with Sukuna.

Whoever got left out always seems ravenous for company after. A little rougher, a little more demanding.

You learn it’ll be a cold day in hell before either one talks about his feelings.

This is another contest, another waiting game they’re playing against one another. Who can win you over, who can fuck you better, who goes weak or slips up first.

If there were a knife to your throat, you couldn’t say who the winner would be.

You don’t think either of them ever will.

Satoru won't stop whining about how the pistachio ice cream is out of stock. It's getting on your nerves - you know he won't shut up about it if you don't change the subject, but you really just want to relax.

"Satoru, get under the table and eat me out if you're so hungry.”

It’s not a full minute before he’s down there, lifting your skirt, kneading at your thighs as he plays with your panties.

Sukuna's nose scrunches up with his scowl, the one you can't call cute to his face for fear of Satoru never shutting up about it.

"What, Gojo whines and you’re rewarding him?" He complains, like a damn child.

It's funny how similar the two of them are when they're not at each other's throats.

Sukuna scoots closer since you can’t move. Wrapping an arm around your shoulders, pulling you against him, nuzzling lazily into your neck as Satoru fucks you with his tongue.

You’re lucky this place isn’t busy, the server doesn’t say anything about Satoru being ‘missing’ – not that either of them would care, anyways.

If you’re stuck flushed and squirming while Sukuna smirks and Satoru licks your cum off the inside of your thighs, nobody else seems to notice.

It's surreal, how easy it is to fall in step with both of them. How easily your life twists to accommodate them in every aspect.

How easily you bend for them, even when you're not trying to.

If it was just a competition, why do all this?

Are they enjoying it? Just doing whatever’s the most fun?

You know the answer is yes, the answer must be yes, that you’ll have them for as long as they’re entertained and not a second more, but –

When you’re sick one day, they show up to your house – separately, one after the other.

Sukuna comes first, actually, knocking on the door and then breaking the lock to get in. Loudly announcing his presence, making himself at home in your kitchen. Bringing you warm soup, water, helping you sit up and stand.

It’s hours later that Satoru arrives with bags of convenience store painkillers, electrolyte water, cooling pads and your favorite takeout.

He rubs it in, too, gets into an argument with Sukuna like it’s an old pair of shoes, the conversation sliding into the air easily. Sukuna pets your hair and he massages your shoulders as they argue over who the better boyfriend is.

Maybe this is just the next step in their eternal contest to be the strongest. They just want to beat each other at something, and you’re lucky to be that something.

Maybe they’re just having fun, and you’re thinking too much about it.

Maybe this is something real, and you’re all too afraid to say it.

They’re all distant thoughts that fade under Sukuna’s strong embrace and Satoru’s grasping hands.

When you fall asleep, it’s with a warm body on either side of you – and you wake up like that, too.

Kisses in your hair, on your neck, a swat and a hypocritical chastisement as you’re offered water, breakfast, an orgasm (“Seriously, Gojo?”) – and a healthy dose of cuddles and companionship for the rest of the day.

“What do you mean, seriously? Of course it’s a serious offer! I’m always serious!”

“Shut it, you dumbass, they’re still napping. Let them fall back asleep, they’ll recover faster.”

“An orgasm would be even better for that – ”

“Well who fucking says you should be the one to do it?”

…you hope they never stop fighting.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

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?

Having 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 big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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[exhaslo]

Corruption Ch18 (End)

(Villain!Miguel x F!Hero!Reader)

Ch1, Ch2, Ch3, Ch4, Ch5, Ch6, Ch7, Ch8, Ch9, Ch10, Ch11, Ch12, Ch13, Ch14, Ch15, Ch16, Ch17

Warning: Minors DNI, mentions of sex, violence, blood, murder, twisted thoughts, experimentation, language, wannabe fluff, established friendship/relationship? SMUT, public sex, creampie, breeding kink

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

D-Day

The weather was chilly as the first heavy snow of the season finally started to flutter. Your eyes sparkled as you watched from Miguel's office window, adoring the view of the city. The city of Nueva York was beautiful before you.

Shivering slightly as you touched the window, you started to wonder if you were going to be okay for tonight. You had found out that Miguel was now Spider-Man. He secretly enhanced himself somehow and was doing who knows what.

"Yet he says I can't be a hero," You said with a soft pout.

Returning to your seat on Miguel's desk, you started to tap away on your tablet. A whimper escaping your throat as you rubbed your legs together. Miguel had been consuming both your body and mind and it was showing.

Trying to focus back on your work, you started to think about how Miguel was at home. He was such a romantic. Always taking care of you, pleasuring you and treating you like a queen. It felt so strange from someone who loved to torture people.

"(Y/N), I have another meeting in a half hour, correct?" Miguel asked as he quickly entered his office.

You snapped out of your dazed state and checked the tablet. Agreeing to his comment, you watched as Miguel cussed lowly and grabbed a drink from his fridge. Jumping off the desk, you approached Miguel and stroked his cheek,

"Are you okay? Do your eyes bother you?" You asked out of concern.

"Hah, still so worried about me," Miguel said with a smirk, "You need to start focusing on yourself."

"Mhm, it's pretty cold today," You cooed softly.

Miguel stroked your cheek before grabbing your hand. He had you follow him to the lab that was destroyed from the explosion a while back. It was being rebuilt rather quickly. To your surprise, Miguel had Lyla activate a tablet that was locked away.

"Until I set up a second location for a secret lab, this will be where I conduct my experiments for our Spider powers," Miguel said in a whisper and showed you the tablet, "Starting with a suit for you that generates warmth."

"Oh! Miguel!" You smiled brightly, hugging your boyfriend, "How long have you been designing this?"

"Since I found out," Miguel said honestly as he pulled out the suit, "You're going to need it for tonight."

You jumped in glee, pecking Miguel's cheek as you went to observe your new suit. It had some subtle changes, but nothing that you truly worried about. Miguel made you this suit and you were going to happily wear it.

-------

Miguel just smirked as he watched you get all giddy with joy. Yes, he included a heating element so you could swing in peace, but he also added so much more. That suit was to represent to the city that you were no longer a hero to them.

You were Miguel's.

"Now, I have a meeting to get to. Why don't you finish reviewing the paperwork of the restorations?"

"Okay~"

The more obedient you became, the more Miguel craved you. It started to become unhealthy and Miguel noticed, but he didn't care. As long as Miguel still got what he wanted, then he believed he was allowed to have everything.

Parting ways with you for the moment, Miguel kept a calm composure. He was debating on telling his idiot father about his new found powers. The reason? To take control of Alchemax and the shareholders.

Miguel had big plans for both the company and the city.

Everything was going to belong to him.

Everything.

---------

Your smile stretched from ear to ear as you wore your new suit. It fit you perfectly. Standing on top of the Alchemax building, you inhaled deeply. The cold weather wasn't bothering you thanks to your new suit. It was great!

"Enjoying the suit?" Miguel asked, appearing in his suit. You gasped, approaching him,

"Wow! I didn't get a good look last night, but you look amazing in that suit!"

It was hard to tell if Miguel was smiling at the compliment due to his mask. His attire was different from yours, but also quite nice. It made you wonder how long he was working on this. Giggling at the thought, you hugged Miguel,

"This is so cool. We can work together~"

"About that-" Miguel stopped you, grabbing your chin, "This will be your last night as a hero."

"Wha-"

You were at a loss for words. Miguel's fingers stroked your thumb, unmoving from his comment. You were no longer going to play a hero? There was no way Miguel could take on the role. You were hoping to guide him.

"But-"

"What did I say?"

You gave a small pout, "To do as you say," You said and gasped as Miguel pulled you into his embrace.

"Good girl," Miguel chuckled darkly, "Besides, I'll take over. I'll make sure this city is taken care of."

"Mhm....but....You've never fought before," You whispered, melting against his touch.

"Neither did you when you first started."

Touché. Miguel got you there. Agreeing to his decision, you gently tugged on his suit, wanting to go for a swing across the city. This would be your last time doing so.

--------

Miguel was holding back from laughing. How far you've come from trying to change him, to being his obedient good girl. There was something about tainting you that brought chills up his spine. Miguel enjoyed breaking you.

"Come on~" You cooed, falling off the building.

Like instinct, Miguel went to reach for you. He withdrew as you laughed and started to swing. He let out a soft sigh and followed you, making sure that you didn't go far. There was one last lesson that Miguel needed to teach.

Swinging above some reporters, Miguel just chuckled darkly. He hurried towards you, wrapping his arm around your waist before swinging you onto of the nearest building. You whined softly but stopped as Miguel started to rub against your clit.

"M-Miguel...n-not here...a-anyone could watch," You tried to protest. Miguel just found you cute,

"They won't know it's you. All they will see is Spider-Man giving Spider-Woman the time of her life."

"Mhm~ B-But-" You gasped as Miguel rubbed your clothed clit harder.

Miguel just chuckled as he looked down at the reporters. They were trying their best to get a shot of the two of you. Turning you around, Miguel undid the bottom of your suit. You were already dripping in anticipation for him.

What a good girl.

Miguel held your hips as his suit disappeared only around his dick. With a simple thrust, Miguel had you under his spell. You were gripped the edge of the building, moaning as he slapped his cock deep within you.

"Not so shy now, huh? Did you want those reports to watch me breed you? To have them watch the once hero, Spider-Woman get fucked stupid?" Miguel taunted.

"N-No~" You cried out. Miguel hummed as your pussy fluttered around his cock,

"Could have fooled me."

Miguel grunted as he held you in place. All those reporters could see was Spider-Woman getting railed by Spider-Man. This showed them who was in charge. To show them that there were no more heroes left in his city.

"Mhm~!" Miguel covered your mouth as you moaned, wanting to make sure you didn't say his name.

"I hope you're ready to answer some questions." Miguel said with a wicked smirk.

You just raised your hips and whined as Miguel fucked through your orgasm. With a few more thrusts, Miguel gave you his first load. Unamused by the amount, Miguel made sure to fill you up before your interview.

"Now, you're ready."

--------

You leaned over the building, panting heavily from Miguel's quick sex session. Your mind felt dizzy. Miguel was so mean. Fixing your suit, you shuddered as your body felt full. You were going to get pregnant at this rate.

"Come on,"

Wrapping your arms around Miguel, you hummed as he swung you over to the reporters. You couldn't think straight. All you wanted to do was behave for Miguel.

"S-Spider-Man....W-What...What are you doing here?" One of the reported asked, terrified, "A-And what have you done with Spider-Woman?"

"Hm? She seems fine, don't you?" Miguel said, motioning towards you.

"Mhm, I'm fine," You replied.

"H-How long have...have you two been together?" Another reporter asked. Miguel's hand wrapped around your waist,

"What do you think?" Miguel held you close as he snatched a microphone away from one of the reporters, "Since I have you all here, time to lay down some ground rules."

Everyone could only gasp.

"There are no more heroes left to save you. If anyone dares to confront me, they will perish. Nueva York is my city now and soon the world. Spider-Woman and I shall bring forth a new breed of advance humans to rule over you tiny incest's-"

"There's no way she would agree to this!"

"Oh? Well, what do you think, my dear?" Miguel whispered in your ear, causing you to shiver.

"I belong to him, so I will do as he says," You cooed, trembling as Miguel whispered, 'Good Girl', in your ear.

"As you can see, I have already corrupted your hero."

Humming lowly as Miguel pulled you close, you smiled as he kept speaking to the public.

"Listen to me, and you'll be fine."

A simple ask. Miguel treated you like a queen and all you had to do was listen and do what he says. Nothing crazy. Feeling yourself being lifted, you wrapped your arms around Miguel's neck as he swung away from the terrified reporters.

"Best make do on my promise."

"Yes, Miggy~"

What was once a dream of being a hero and saving both the city and Miguel, turned into nightmare.

The hero was corrupted by the villain and didn't even know it.

But, you weren't complaining. You just stayed as Miguel's good girl...

Forever

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

WOO-HOO!!! I hope you all enjoyed this story!!!! I, for one, will miss it truly!

I didn't hesitate to start my next story, haha! I PRESENT:

Over-Time

@tojishugetiddies @miguelsfavwife @foulsharkheart @club-danger-zone @ivkygirly @jollystrawberrycycle @amber-content @weirdothatwritess @smartyren @mangoslushcrush @nyxzoldyck6 @migueloharastruelove @sukioyakio @killjoy-nightshadow @heyohalie @the-pan-liquid @bokutosprettylittlebimbo @kpopscoups17130000 @pochapo @killerwendigo @barbiecrocs @miss-galaxy-turtle @oscarissac2099 @lazy-idate @lauraolar14 @safixiovi @migueloharacumslut @straw-berry-ghoul @daisy-artfield @sukunash0e @undf-stuff @iamperson12280 @nightingale1011 @reader-1290 @mcmiracles @keepghostly @marlyharper @jadeloverxd @daddyfroglegs @shoukanjo @cicithemess @babyprofessorsharkpalace

[genshingorlsrevengeance]

More Furina asks? You don't need to ask twice :)

How about Furina and an assortment of Genshin/GFL characters taking care of a sick S/O? Thanks in advance if you write it!

Taking care of a sick S/O

(Genshin Impact/GFL/iDOLM@STER/GG:ST)

Genshin: Furina, Chiori, Clorinde, Navia, Shenhe, Xianyun, Xinyan

GFL: UMP45, UMP9, G11, HK416, WA2000, Helianthus, Angelia, Kalina

iDOLM@STER: Madoka

Guilty Gear: Elphelt

Congratulations, dear follower! You have won the lottery of where I write an ungodly amount of characters for no real reason! (Simping is the reason)

(Furina) "Y-You're sick?...Hm, this shall be no problem for me! Worry not, for you are in great hands!"

They were in fact not in great hands.

Furina doesn't really know what to do for someone when they get sick. Hell, she wasn't entirely sure she could even get a cold.

But Furina would try her best, she heard soup would do good!

As for cooking it-

(Furina) "Don't worry, I will get the best soup in the city for you! I will be back in but half an hour!"

She ain't.

Furina manages to get S/O to at least feel happy with her company, even if she had no idea what to do other than pace around nervously.

When she's out of earshot and they're sleeping somewhat comfortably, she takes a deep sigh, thankful she wasn't entirely useless.

(Furina) "Thank goodness they'll be okay..."

Chiori raises an eyebrow the moment she hears her S/O cough violently.

(Chiori) "Come down with something?" sigh "Oh well, guess I can open a little later than usual."

Even if S/O protests that they're fine, Chiori is hearing none of it.

First she makes sure to get everything they need, ranging from food or medicine and looks back from the door.

(Chiori) "I'll be back once I close up shop. Make sure you follow the instructions on that."

She won't baby anyone, since she trusts S/O to take care of themselves.

But should they get worse, she won't hesitate to close up, at least for a little bit, and experiment with her clothing at home with them.

Chiori would much rather deal with S/O's illness than having to deal with illness the customers give her by just breathing the same air.

Clorinde has her duties to attend to, but she reassures S/O with a gentle squeeze of their hand.

(Clorinde) "I will return home as quickly as I can with medicine, until then please rest up."

Clorinde is a little nervous leaving them alone and getting peace of mind once she's actually back and not dealing with the drama of the court or the public in general.

Even though it's unfortunate S/O got sick, she is at least happy to spend the time with them that she can.

And more importantly, that she's here to help take care of them when they need it most.

Clorinde puts a warm towel on their forehead, a small smile forming once she sees their body relaxing.

(Clorinde) "Are you feeling better, S/O? Here. This is from a lesser-known restaurant I enjoy, their soup is quite refreshing."

With a snap of her fingers, Navia already has a gaggle of men under her command fetching medicine, food, entertainment.

Whatever S/O required, they would get it!

As for her, Navia did not intend to leave their side, not really caring about the risk of getting sick.

She hated getting sick herself, and she knew how boring it'd be to rest in bed.

Instead, she regales S/O with tales from her childhood, interesting things she's learned, or even just enjoying the time with them in an intimate silence.

As long as they were smiling and not thinking about how sick they were, it was mission accomplished.

(Navia) "Ah, that must be our food arriving! Allow me to set up the table-...Hm? No no, stay right there! I insist that we have nothing short of an exquisite atmosphere! A better atmosphere is a better state of health, I'd say!"

This was an area of expertise Xianyun was well researched in.

Taking care of her many disciples when they were younger, this really was no problem for her.

There was nothing quite as refreshing like Adeptus Medicine!

...Well, it could actually be too refreshing since it wasn't particularly made for mortals in mind. Especially the taste, according to Shenhe.

Regardless, they could heal the body in no time, but there was nothing better to help with it than a well made soup!

Made by her personally, of course.

(Xianyun) "One has prepared a broth to help with your stuffy nose, S/O. Be sure to drink it all, it will warm both the body and soul!"

Xinyan is rushing around the harbor, grabbing every medicine she knows that always helped her in a pinch.

(Xinyan) "Here ya go, S/O! These herbs taste gross, but they'll pack a heckuva punch for that cold ya got!"

She practices her guitar while sitting next to S/O, keeping in mind of the volume the entire time.

As long as S/O wanted some company, anyway.

Xinyan will constantly check their temperatures and bring them some homemade food, smiling when she sees them laughing or relaxed on the bed.

(Xinyan) "Heh, that herb tastes gross, don't it? I used to have them all the time when I was little, sure as heck don't like 'em nowadays!"

UMP45 would tease S/O for getting sick, with a little bit of a softer expression than usual if they were alone.

(UMP45) "Aw, you got sick? Well, good thing I'm a T-Doll. Have fun with that.~"

She hangs out with S/O on the bed, giving her an excuse to not go out that day.

Depending on how severe the sickness was, she would dial back her usual snarky attitude more and more.

If anything, these kinds of moments is what she wished for, once she no longer had to fight.

But for now, UMP45 would just have to make do with these fleeting domestic dreams.

(UMP45) "...Hm? I'm lost in thought? Nah, that's just your sickness messing with your head."

UMP9 is on the case!

(UMP9) "No worries, you won't get bored while I'm here!"

She immediately plops down onto the bed, giving warmth to S/O if needed! The base was in a colder region after all.

UMP9 would talk about excitedly about all the things she had in mind to S/O, to at least get their mind off being sick!

Plus she didn't really have to worry about getting sick herself. so there was no harm!

She'd also bring all sorts of treats and food from the Cafe, even if S/O couldn't really eat it.

(UMP9) "Here's some soup! Now, say 'aaah'!"

(G11) "...Does that mean you won't be cooking dinner tonight?"

G11 sighs heavily, but whatever.

She knew there was one thing she could help with.

She immediately crawls into bed with S/O, letting herself be used like a giant teddy bear and promptly falls asleep from the warmth of S/O and the blankets.

(G11) zzz

To her credit, she at least makes sure S/O is never freezing cold, but other than sleeping, she doesn't really do much.

Unsurprisingly.

(HK416) "Tch, idiot. I told you, you should have been wearing more layers."

She rolls her eyes, but never really comments on the fact she is making sure S/O is bundled up properly, getting proper medication, and even spoonfeeding them.

Of course she's not babying them, they were a fully functional human, if anything they're wasting her time, making her do such mundane things!

(HK416) "And I'm not blushing, T-Dolls can't blush, dumbass."

Which her flushed cheeks were telling S/O otherwise.

In the end, she'll grumble and mutter under her breath, but never once will she actually hesitate to immediately jump into help S/O, unless UMP9 was teasing her.

WA sighs dramatically, immediately putting the blanket over S/O.

(WA2000) "Tch, don't get it in your head that I'm doing this because I'm concerned! It's so that you can get back to your duties already."

She is yet another German tsundere T-Doll that takes care of S/O perfectly, down to getting them a new towel down to the most precise nanosecond.

WA still attends to her duties, but S/O's room is where she returns the instant she can.

(WA2000) "Has your fever died down already?...Finally, next time take better care of yourself! What would happen if I wasn't here, huh?"

Helianthus has S/O attended to by medical officers, and makes a trip to them in person.

(Helianthus) "I'm glad to see it was nothing serious. I hope that it is a swift recovery, S/O."

In front of the others, she is extremely professional.

But in private, it's diminished somewhat but she is far more prone to getting flustered.

(Helianthus) "...W-Why do you look so surprised to see me? It's not as if we never see each other! Hmph, if you're trying to tease me, then you must be feeling better already. Then hurry up and return to your duties!"

Helianthus is far more comfortable when she knows they're remaining in the medbay and receiving the best care Griffin can offer.

Angelia is pretty neutral on the situation.

S/O got sick? Welp, sucks to be them.

Work doesn't really stop for her, but she'll at least pay a visit or three.

(Angelia) "Hey, still feeling like crap? Thought so. If you need me to grab you something, let me or any of my girls know."

Although her tone sounds dismissive, her real hand ruffles their hair affectionately before she turns to leave.

And if they can spare the time, Angelia orders DEFY to at least keep an eye on S/O until they fully recover.

Kalina pouts when she hears S/O had gotten sick.

(Kalina) "Aw man, now I gotta pick up your paperwork too, S/O! You wound my very soul!"

She's only mostly joking.

Kalina likes to bug them after her shift is over for the day, deflating on their bed and mumbling into their blanket.

(Kalina) "Did you know the Commander just plopped another stack of papers onto my desk the moment I said I was done! It's cruel!...STOP LAUGHING, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE SICK YA LITTLE PUNK!"

Madoka has her work as an idol keeping her busy, but after work she pops by S/O's room, water and medicine in hand.

And as usual, her expression remains stoic.

(Madoka) "Hey, got some stuff for you. Move over for a sec."

She takes care of them without saying much. Her gaze is focused, yet soft.

And once Madoka is finished, she avoids looking at them directly, her voice a bit quieter than before.

(Madoka) "...It's a bit pointless to thank me, it's something anyone would do."

It could be S/O's imagination, but they thought they saw her face getting slightly red after helping them.

She gives their arm a slight squeeze in response, still averting her sight.

(Elphelt) "Just do what I do when I have problems! SCREAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!"

Being a Valentine, she was pretty sure(???) that she couldn't get sick. At least, not in the same way a human could.

But she doesn't like to see anyone sad, her S/O especially.

Elphelt brings S/O all sorts of things to see that smile, such as bush dog plushies, bush dog photos, bush dog songs-

And sweets! Lots of sweets as well!

(Elphelt) "...What do you mean you can't eat cake right now?...Oh, you're right! Duh, I should've brought some ice cream instead! BE BACK IN A JIFFY!"

Before S/O can say anything, else, she's already gone.

At the very least, S/O won't be bored while they're sick.

Did Elphelt make them feel better?

...Even mentally, that was up for debate. But at least they knew she loved them.

[hadesrise]

𝐈𝐍 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄.

summary ➳ you unexpectedly defend barty from your friends.

pairings ➳ bartemius “barty” crouch jr. x hufflepuff!male reader

warnings ➳ sfw content, foul language, sunshine and sunshine protector trope, discrimination, asshole friends, friends to lovers, badassery lol, people are a lot prejudiced in this

author’s note ➳ i headcanon him as ravenclaw, sorry. also i think hufflepuffs are scary as fuck when they’re mad. I DO NOT HATE LILY OR JAMES AND SIRIUS. please don't misunderstand that 🥲

Unpleasant whispers filled the Great Hall particularly from Gryffindor’s table as everyone watched the little-to-no-good trio take a seat on the Hufflepuff’s table and settle themselves there uncaring of the whispers, Barty sitting down right beside you while Evan and Regulus sat on the opposite side. Despite noticing the unpleasant looks being thrown at your company, you smiled at Barty after seeing how comfortable and relaxed he seemed.

“Hey, B.” You softly greeted, eyes twinkling in admiration and cheerfulness. “Nice to see you guys too, Evan and Regulus.” Greeting politely, Evan and Regulus each sent you a small smile before falling into a calm conversation with one another, which made you wonder why they’re here in the first place, but you figured it’s because Barty’s here.

“Well, (Y/n). How’s your potions class?” Barty questioned, starting off with casual conversation while beginning to eat.

The Marauders watched as you respond to Barty with a kind smile on your face and not an ounce of hatred nor distaste for being surrounded by the three most infamous persons in Hogwarts, aside from Severus Snape, Lucius Malfoy, and Bellatrix Black. The softness of your expression didn’t even change. No one understands how a golden boy like you could hang out with people like... them, considering you’re the most kindest, softest, brightest person Hogwarts has ever had. You’re easily approachable and has the heart of gold that is almost impossible to be tainted, treating everyone equally while plastering on that pleasant smile of yours.

You’re practically a walking safe space for everyone. Reliable, trustworthy, loyal, patient, generous, kind, humorous, ambitious, all of them combined is what you are — a perfect person.

Or at least, that’s how others perceive you. Though, it’s not their fault for seeing you like that, you figured.

The way you’ve presented yourself in public is probably why they think of you as this perfect and divine person that is always good and never evil. You’re kind of flattered by them, but it also makes you feel as if expectations are squeezing down your throat hard.

“How the fuck does he tolerate him?” Sirius Black exclaimed in genuine confusion, referring to you engaging in conversations with a guy who clearly meant bad news.

“Language,” Remus Lupin, without looking up from his book, scolded gently. “I’m sure it’s because (Y/n) has more patience than you. He also doesn’t seem to care what other people say about him.”

“But it’s not good for him to be hanging out with him, don’t you think?” Lily Evans worriedly spoke from beside Remus as Marlene Mckinnon, who sat by her side, nodded in agreement. They knew how nice you are, so seeing you carelessly talk to Barty without hesitation makes them worried, especially when Barty’s practically apart of the Slytherins that are far from pleasant from how much time he spends with them instead of his own house. They knew him, and he definitely cannot be called a good person.

“Uhm... We don’t know for sure.” Peter shrugs, “I mean, it’s really not for us to decide who he should hang out with.”

“Peter’s right,” Remus immediately agreed, “There’s not much we can do if he’s hanging out with them. It’s not our business, and even though (Y/n)’s kind, I don’t think he would appreciate anyone butting their heads into his business. After all, he has his own thoughts.”

Even then, Lily was worried while Sirius did not understand. They returned their attention to you and Barty after hearing your laughter erupt in the Great Hall amongst murmurs and talkings of other students, seeing you playfully punching Barty’s arm and him having an overly amused and proud look on his face for making you laugh. You seem to be fairly enjoying yourself in Remus’ and Peter’s perspective, but of course, those who have a childish disdain towards Slytherin and their associates would rather be blind to it than face the reality.

You’re clearly happy with having Barty as a friend and certainly doesn’t mind who he hangs out with; endlessly friendly and nice to his two best friends, even greeting them with a warm smile. As a matter of fact, it made you seem more matured than anyone else, how you never discriminate, judge, accuse and hate anyone based on their house, rumors, or impressions. You see everyone for who they are, not what people think of them as.

Resting his elbow on the table and chin on his palm, Barty simply admire you as you talk about your day while putting some meals on his plate, making sure none of the meals contained his least favorite food. “Defense against the Dark Arts is such an entertaining lesson, B. It certainly levels up my defensive spells. I’ve been practicing them where no one will get harmed and proudly, I’ve improved a lot.” You told with utter excitement as you finished putting meals on his plate, moving to put some on your plate next. “I could show you later if you want? And perhaps, you can give me feedbacks on what I should work on.”

Barty was almost too busy admiring you, though he was quick to respond. “That’s a brilliant idea, (Y/n). Maybe we could even duel once you’ve mastered it."

You winced, “Can you not go hard on me? I’m still not confident with my duelling, you know.”

“Oh well, confidence is the key!” Barty says with excitement, genuinely wanting to duel with you. “You should try being full of yourself and think, “I can fucking do this” ‘cause it works. That’s how I got pass that bloody awful Divination class.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head, as if it was the worst ever experience of his life.

A giggle erupted from your throat, which made Barty’s lips twitch up to form a smile. It may be unexpected to others, but to you, Barty always smiled and you witnessed every single one of those moments.

“Professor McGonagall will hex you if she hears that,” You joked while still laughing, leaning on him.

He wraps an arm around your shoulder to keep you on his side, grinning. “That’s just an if, you know.” Wiggling his brows, you giggled at his silliness and also wrapped an arm around his waist naturally, gaining a few raised brows and looks from other houses.

Evan and Regulus merely smiled at your interaction before scowling and exchanging eye contact, people’s reactions catching their attention despite being mild. It’s absolutely unpleasant, how they look at you and Barty as if you’re doing something criminal. They look at you with such disapproval that couldn’t help but cause Evan and Regulus to furrow their brows and narrow their eyes — it’s almost unbelievable how everyone loves you when you’re with your own house, Gryffindor, or Ravenclaw, but when you hang out with Slytherin or anyone close to them, you’re suddenly unlikable. As if you were the Public’s property, like you’re supposed to do what they tell you to do. It feels almost as if they want to control who you hang out with.

It’s more than unpleasant, the two Slytherin thought. It’s awful, how everyone seemingly wants you to act the way they expect you to.

Do you even realize the way those people who you consider friends look at you whenever you hang out with Barty? Have you ever looked around to see their eyes screaming disappointment? What would you think once you notice?

Barty seemed to be putting all his trust in you, nearly taking his heart out for you to carry it around; they don’t want their best friend to lose someone who’s literally the safe place and comfort zone. They were worried about Barty, but also worried for you.

Unfortunatelly, worrying made them miss the way you piercingly stared at someone who looked at Barty with disgust when he wasn’t looking, before plastering on an angelic smile to your best friend as soon as the bastard flinched and looked away.

I hope no one attempts to cut my patience off today, you thought with a smile while listening to him talk enthusiastically about the fun time he messed with Lucius’ potion so bad that it exploded on Snape, not knowing you’ll be in for a surprise later on.

“What are you up to later?” Evan questioned as the three of them strolled through the hallway and ignored the obnoxious pranksters with red and gold tie, trying to find a place where peace actually exists and no judgmental look from anyone.

“Studying with (Y/n).” Barty grins, holding up a pile of books. There seems to be little unnoticeable bounces in his steps as excitement bubbles within him.

Regulus gives him a weird look, “Are you pretending to be stupid so you could study with him?”

“What’s the matter with it? It’s not like he’ll know.”

“You are literally a Ravenclaw.”

“Don’t stereotype me, Reg. It’s getting old, you’re old.”

“You’re making it seem as if he’s that stupid enough not to know you’re just pretending.”

An offended gasp was heard.

“No, I am not!”

Evan chuckled at their playful banter.

Despite Regulus seemingly making fun of Barty’s tactics to spend more time with you, Evan knew he was internally happy for their best friend. The heavy expectations from his father has been taking a toll on Barty a lot, which caused some inner doubts to appear that almost always led to mental breakdowns that lasted longer than an hour. He never had been comfortable with anyone besides them and Pandora, and they were truly happy when you accepted Barty warmly without caring about the rumors or how people viewed him. It feels quite relieving to see Barty radiate happiness now.

However, the three of them comes to a halt in the hallway when a voice filled with dislike erupts from the courtyard, asking a particular question to a person no other than you.

“How can you even hang out with people like them?”

Barty, Evan, and Regulus glanced at one another before walking silently closer and peeking at the courtyard, seeing you sat on the cemented bench while playing Wizard’s Chess with Marlene, surrounded by your friends who were mostly Gryffindors. There’s only one Ravenclaw, the same house as Barty, yet he’s the one who questioned it.

You got distracted to his question as you tilt your head, “What are you talking about?”

The trio quickly ducks when the Marauders come running out of other hallways to the courtyard with loud laughters, definitely disturbing other students, and join you by the bench. Quickly noticing the strange silence, Remus tilted his head. “Why is everyone so quiet?”

“Because Leo asked how (Y/n) can even hang out with people like them.” Marlene explains shortly with emphasis, which let everyone know exactly who they were talking about.

The werewolf sighs, covering his face and shaking his head. “We’re talking about this again?”

Barty wondered how much had he and his friends been the subject of your conversation, guts twisting negatively.

“I still don’t know who you’re referring to,” You chimed in with visible confusion, now forgetting about the chess. Silence fills all of them, the Marauders and Lily glancing at each other as Marlene also can’t help but forget the chess, while your other Gryffindor friends look at you as if it’s strange that you don’t know what they’re talking about.

The Ravenclaw — Leo gives you a look, “Are you dense? I’m talking about Barty Crouch Jr. and his little goons.” He rolled his eyes.

You frowned, “They have a name, you know. Regulus Black and Evan Rosier.”

Barty recognized the discomfort and disapproval in your tone, how you seemingly understood quickly that Leo intends to talk ill about them. He didn’t miss the way your shoulders tensed and body language displaying a defensive gesture, which rarely ever happens. You’re always accepting and welcoming of other people with that big smile plastered on your face; when your body language changes, that just means someone had overstepped your boundaries. No one else seem to realize it.

One of the Gryffindors, Beth, rolls her eyes and gives you a disgusted look. “I don’t know how you can be nice to those Death Eater freaks. Slytherins are literally evil, look at their ancestors!”

“Yeah, they also pick on almost everyone.” Karen agreed, crossing her arms. “I mean, can’t you see how much bad influence they are? Barty’s supposed to be hanging out with members from his own house yet here he is, and look how he turned out.”

“I bet his father’s really disappointed and disgusted." Leo snickered, earning laughter from the two Gryffindor girls.

Lily, Marlene, and Dorcas pulsed their lips into a thin line as Remus and Peter frowned, clearly uncomfortable with the insults and comments that crosses the line, while James and Sirius fell silent since even though they had personal dislike for Slytherin, they wouldn’t go as far as your friends were going. Regulus is also Sirius’ brother, and he doesn’t like hearing anyone talk about his little brother like that.

When Sirius opened his mouth to defend his brother, the words end up being stuck in his throat after witnessing how your warm look morphed into an emotionless and expressionless face that made his blood run cold.

“You guys are fucking pathetic,” You snarled with a low and cold yet loud tone that had made the entire courtyard fall into utter silence as everyone — including others who were just around — look at you with wide shocked eyes. Your friends visibly flinched at the piercing harsh glare you were shooting them, calm storms of rage swarming in your eyes that usually displayed warmness and light. They could easily see the way your jaw was clenching, which was definitely a sign that they dug their own graves for strong lightning to strike them until they’re nothing but bones and flesh.

Barty also stops in track, finding himself surprisingly intimidated and a bit afraid. Regulus completely went still as Evan slapped a hand over his mouth in shock. It’s already surprising that a Hufflepuff cursed at someone, but to see you, someone who’s always smiling and accepting and kind and unbelievably patient, someone who’s the Golden Boy and practically a gift from divine beings who seemed as if you don’t even know how to get mad, so enraged? It is beyond jawdropping.

“What—” Karen speaks, but you interrupt.

“Have you ever realized how annoying you all sound when you mind my business rather than your own?” You tilted your head, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance. “It sounds like pathetic cunts who pretend they’re righteous when all they’ve ever been are prejudiced hypocrites who judge others solely on the houses they’re in. You’re much more horrible than the Death Eater freaks you talk about.”

“What the bloody hell is your problem!?” Beth shrieked.

“You and your goons, duh.” You retorted while shooting her a look, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Mistreating Slytherins for what their ancestors did is completely childish and immature, especially when it was out of their control. If their ancestors joined the Death Eaters, then the one to be blamed is not them but the ancestors themselves.” You shifted your cold gaze to Leo and Karen, “Yes, I’ve seen the three of them pick on others and told Bartemius to stop, which he did. James and Sirius pick on Snape and other Slytherins a lot, so why haven’t you barked about that yet? Is this that thing where it’s alright when you or other Gryffindors do it, but it’s suddenly evil and horrible when it comes to Slytherin?”

Karen swallows thickly, trying to hold her head high. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Really?” Your mocking tone implied you believed nothing as you stand up from the bench, leaning closer to her. She avoided eye contact, fearful. “What the fuck did you mean then?” The slow tone made you even more intimidating.

“Why are you mad at us?” Leo asked, intimidated. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

You shot him a side-eye, raising your brows. “Think with your brain, Ravenclaw. Why am I mad exactly and are you certain you haven’t done anything wrong?” You plastered on a fake smile, “Honestly, I’m not actually mad, Leo. I’m enraged. My blood’s boiling within my body. I’m certain you know what enraged means as you’re a clever Ravenclaw, don’t you?”

He bit his lip and looked down in shame.

Barty’s mouth fell agape; what the fuck, he didn’t know you can be so sarcastic like this.

Sighing deeply, you stared at him from head to toe and tilted your head, the corner of your lips twisted up. “Bartemius is clearly wiser and smarter, though.” You shrugged, “At least he knows not to befriend a loser like you.”

Lily steps closer to stop you, “(Y/n)... I think that’s enough.”

“Not precisely, Evans. And don’t think I don’t know about how you think of Bartemius as well.” You look at her, unimpressed.

“We were just worried about you...” She whispered.

“What’s there to be worried of?” You snapped. “You are all treating Bartemius as if he and his friends are cold-blooded murderers. You see someone hanging out with people in green and silver tie and your first thought is they’re horrible. The reason they become evil and horrible is because of people like you. Because you can’t and refuse to believe there’s good in them, because you would rather believe they can be anything but good than actually see who they are. You can’t handle being non-judgmental.”

Remus and Peter couldn’t help but smile at the truth in your words. The others still can’t react to your unusual change.

You sneered at your former friends, “And I hope you know you’re fucking pathetic and disgusting.” Utter disdain filled your expression, “Find someone else to cling onto. I’d rather be with Bartemius than you cunts.” Barty smiles happily at that as he subconsciously slips out of the shadow and into the courtyard. Regulus and Evan follows, standing a couple of steps behind. The Marauders noticed them immediately, eyes widening.

Ignoring the tears blimming in the Gryffindors’ eyes, you turn around only to face them back again, stepping closer with a death glare. “By the way, Leo. You ever insult Bartemius like that again with that filthy mouth of yours and I’ll fucking hex you.” You threatened before stepping back and waving goodbye with a seemingly friendly smile.

Everyone watch you turn around and jump slightly after bumping into Barty, who instantly beamed with happiness and joy radiating off of him, another thing that flabbergasted everyone.

“Oh Merlin! Hey, B!” You greet with the welcoming look now back on your expression, smiling warmly. “How long have you been standing there? And Regulus and Evan too.”

“Since the beginning, although we were hiding before you defended us.” Barty chuckled, his friends smiling behind him. He was trying to seem casual, but everyone noticed how he failed to hide the smile that’s been threatening to spread fully across his face.

“Don’t mind them, B. They’re just bitter ‘cause you rejected Leo three months ago.” You giggle, feeling better and calm now that Barty’s around, shoulders relaxed and body language displaying peaceful comfortable gesture.

Barty felt his heart swell at the realization that you truly trusted him and would never change your treatment of him no matter what anyone says, finally having the confirmation that he, in fact, do like you. Who wouldn’t when you’re this amazing? He was already feeling it, but to actually realize it was the right thing to happen? He can’t fucking contain it.

He can’t help but to shake his head with the biggest smile anyone has ever seen him have, “Bloody hell, (Y/n). I really do like you a lot.”

You froze at that.

Barty widened his eyes, about to take back, when you pulled him by his nape with one hand and kissed him gently. Evan whistled as Regulus let out a chuckle and high fived each other. Barely able to kiss you back, disappointment appears in his face after you pulled away too soon.

A smirk spreads across your lips, “You’ll get more later. You’re a good boy, after all.” You lightly tugged the hair on his nape before walking away and winking at Regulus and Evan.

“What— Wait— (Y/n), come on!” Barty stutters at the praise, flustered, as he immediately rushes off to follow you. His friends both turn around to follow him with their eyes, amusement written on their faces.

Regulus smirks, “Walk him like a dog.”

Evan instantly bursts into laughter. Well, at least he now has someone who will defend him in his name.

© ᴀʟʟ ʀɪɢʜᴛs ʀᴇsᴇʀᴠᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʜᴀᴅᴇsʀɪsᴇ. sᴛᴇᴀʟɪɴɢ, ᴘʟᴀɢɪᴀʀɪᴢɪɴɢ, ᴏʀ ᴜsɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋs ғᴏʀ ᴍᴏɴᴇᴛᴀʀʏ ɢᴀɪɴ ɪs sᴛʀɪᴄᴛʟʏ ᴘʀᴏʜɪʙɪᴛᴇᴅ. ᴀsᴋ ᴘᴇʀᴍɪssɪᴏɴ ʙᴇғᴏʀᴇ ʀᴇᴘᴏsᴛɪɴɢ ᴏʀ ᴛʀᴀɴsʟᴀᴛɪɴɢ.

[rrezshifts]

ᴀɴᴄɪᴇɴᴛ ɢʀᴇᴇᴄᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟɪᴛʏ 𝓲𝙣t𝙧𝖔

Theodorian of Athens. a young man originally born as female. now in a new body, he itches to have any and every desirable and willing man and woman to know how it tastes. that is until the new actor in his favorite play seems to want a taste, and now his itch can only be scratched by one.

multi-million family business? what’s not to want? The Oracle said wHat?? guess it’s what not to want for him…

nestled in Athenian farmland and fertile soil is the estate of Theodorian’s family. where their company’s first grape farm and winery thrives with the help of the god Dionysus (illustrated above by wolfythewitch), who his family has been worshipping for generations.

the farm has made Theo’s family incredibly wealthy, and also celebrities, within all of Greece, who is supplied with the family’s wine. the family lives lavishly in a large house shared by his grandfather, parents, many uncles and aunts, and few cousins. his father inherited the business when Theo was a child, and has been preparing him to take on the business since then. he is said to inherit the family business when his father retires. but since his grandfather retired long before the average age of retirement in greece, he may inherit it sooner rather than later.

the family often hosts and attends luxurious parties for many high end guests within and outside of Athens. celebrities and businessmen of all kinds pray to the gods to be able to attend the parties Theo’s family hosts. a party hosted by a Dionysus devotee is one anyone would beg to go to, big or small.

rumors have circulated greek news organizations on doubts of the heir’s wants to inherit the family business. and what that would mean for the business as Theo is the only child of the current owner. the public has been ensured by Theodorus (Theodorian’s father) that his child plans on taking over, but that won’t be for a while, as he plans to continue the work for as long as he can.

ʟᴏᴠᴇ ʟɪꜰᴇ

the body he had before his transition was not ideal for his desires. when he had acquired it, the perfect body that even he wanted to touch. every high society party he went to, where many there wanted the heir to a multi-million dollar company, he would take anyone he desired. while he had become well known by greek society for being a quick lay, he wasn’t an easy one. he was picky with who he dragged to privacy. which led to very few one night stands and quite a few continuous partners. which has caused some to think they had “secured the prince” only for said prince to cut off contact with those who bragged publicly about their situation and assumed relationship.

Chrysanthos of Athens. a young man getting his start in acting. and a relatively new devotee of the god Dionysus. he began to give offerings to the god Dionysus to ask favors from him when it came to his acting and theatre career. he steps in for the veteran actor playing the lead role in the play Oedipus Tyrannus when the actor can’t perform, getting his big break.

he’s a sweet man, an introvert, but not shy. he just doesn’t go out of his way to talk to people if he doesn’t find it necessary. he’s passionate about what he does, and determined to follow his dreams. he was hesitant to ask the god Dionysus for favor, bc he felt he wanted to get there himself. but Dionysus kept reaching out to him with the desire to help, and he felt he shouldn’t say no. he’s a great actor but a terrible liar, not that he would lie even given the chance. he’s brutally honest… brutally. he’s found it hard to keep friends as a teen, so he stopped trying. though a few have wiggled their way into his life, and he has had no complaints so far. he enjoys his peace, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t be that peace… noise and all !!

read more about chrys and theo’s hot new relationship here!

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