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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago

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The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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

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

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syoddeye · 9 months ago

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the warren, part two

price x f!reader | 2.9k words

part one (prologue)

CW: blood (mentioned), dead animals, stalking

One bedroom. One bath. A screened-in porch. A carport. A woodshed. Fully furnished.

The old cabin in the woods is perfect.

No one answers the first call to the number on the ad, and the voicemail doesn't offer a clue as to who ought to answer. You leave a message anyway. After calling upwards of fifty places in the last week, you're desperate. The end of the month's coming up. Since you turned the motel manager down, he's wanted you out.

You fill out the rental application before hearing back, thank the gods there's no fee, and send it off with a sugary-sweet note and signature.

A woman calls back when you're in the middle of the supermarket. Congratulations, you want the place? You got it. It feels quick and surprising, but who are you to look a gift horse in the mouth? For the next four months, the cabin's yours. The landlady launches into details, forcing you to jot down directions on the back of your list. No GPS up here, she explained. The forest is too thick. Too many trees? Not a bad thing, in your opinion.

"Sure you're alright with sight unseen?"

"Yeah, I trust the pictures in the ad," You don't. "I'm itching to spend the summer in nature."

"Grouse Bay is a good spot for a getaway. You might not want to leave when the lease is up."

The sentiment makes you smile. "Sounds perfect."

There is no welcome sign for Grouse Bay. No indication you're close until you're right up on it, or rather, over it.

A thick quilt of pine, fir, and cedar hugs the gravel roadway. Asphalt disappeared some ten miles back, and you pray your car and its ancient tires stick out the descent into town. You're careful not to lean your full weight against the overlook's worn wooden fence. Below you, the road carves a series of switchbacks until it sweeps through a dozen or so lakeside structures. Thin tendrils of smoke curl up from more properties hidden by trees. With the blues of the lake and mountains on the horizon, it's a regular postcard.

Your teeth clatter, and the car shakes the whole way down. You pass a few gated forestry roads and private drives with quirky names before the road curves a final time and spits you out onto the main street. The only street.

We are not in Kansas anymore.

You don't miss a single building, crawling along at the posted speed of 15 MPH. There's a motel, a veterinary office, a grocer, and a water and sewer utility building, and where the road splits to continue along the lake or further up a hill into the woods is the Foxhole.

A rough-looking pub, your lip curls at the horrifically taxidermied fox in the window beside the door. You pull into a makeshift parking spot next to an old Ranger, collect yourself, and head inside.

Three heads swivel in your direction, two patrons and the barkeep. The men's expressions are unreadable, but the woman behind the counter offers a thin smile.

"Sit where you'd like."

The stale air smells like heat and cigarette smoke, and the ceiling fans do little to dissipate either. "I'm actually popping in to pick up a key? To a rental?" Your eyes flick to the men at the bar, not wanting to state precisely where you're staying in front of them.

The woman's smile turns knowing. "Right. We spoke on the phone. I'm Kate Laswell. I own the cabin."

"Owns half the town," One of the men snorts, pinching the neck of his bottle for a swig.

"Ignore him," Her hand disappears into her vest pocket and produces a carabiner with one key. "You got the check?"

"Yes," You pull out your billfold, carefully slide the folded paper slip out from between cards, and exchange it for the key.

Kate inspects it briefly, then dips her head. "Need me to wait to cash it?"

Your face heats at the implication. You hadn't listed employment on the application but assumed the bank's letter spoke for you. After all, she accepted you. "No. Cash it whenever you'd like."

"Alright then. Know where you're going?"

"Yes ma'am, I do."

"So polite," she chuckles, glancing at the men who grin at you. "Well then, enjoy. Call me if you need anything or have questions."

You hightail it out of the bar, and try to ignore the weight of three sets of eyes on your back.

The engine clicks as it cools, the only sound louder than the birdsong. Wedged between the open driver's door, you stand, feet firmly planted, yet feel like you could float. You made it.

The cabin is a deep red oxblood, faded by weather and time. The carport sags more than in the pictures, and the woodshed is nearly cleaned out, but it looks like a dream. Sunlight drapes over the front half of the structure, and a breeze catches a wooden wind chime over the exterior door of the porch.

Hauling your bags out of the backseat, you trek up the gravel drive. The key slots in easily, like the hardware's brand new. The door inches open, and the smell of musty, trapped air leaks out. Here we go.

You exhale a shaky breath. So far, so good. The pictures continue to match reality. The door opens to the dining and kitchen area with a honey oak table draped in a checkered runner, coordinating cabinetry, a towering glass-doored cabinet on the wall, and the back entrance dead ahead. To the left are a couch and armchair, with a low table and a padded woolen rug beneath. The door to the screened porch also sits to the left, with the entrances you presume leading to the bedroom and bathroom ahead.

Wood paneling lines every room. Others might think it tacky, but you find it charming and warm. It makes it a bonafide cabin, one you've pictured a thousand times. The bedroom is sparse, with a simple furniture set including a dresser, a nightstand, a lamp, and a vintage brass bed frame.

You make quick work of settling in. The space is tidy enough, though it's clear that Kate probably hasn't stopped in since you signed the lease. You open the windows for fresh air and do a little dusting. The dining table swiftly becomes the catch-all, with the miscellaneous other belongings you brought scattered over its surface, including the prehistoric laptop you handed a middle-aged woman a wad of cash for in the parking lot of a Walmart. You'd left in a hurry but planned meticulously. Aside from a few necessities and groceries, you have everything you need.

In the screened porch, you discover a glider and ottoman needing new upholstery and a lacquered wooden sign with lettering spelling out The Warrens. It rests on a windowsill, covered in a thin layer of grime. You think it must be from the former owners and leave it out of an odd sense of respect.

An hour later, the place aired out, you shut the windows, clip the car and cabin key together, and hesitate at the door. What's the protocol out here? You've never lived anywhere that didn't require multiple deadbolts. The town's simplicity and the woods' peacefulness - you can't even see the end of the property's driveway from the step - make you think it's probably okay…But then you think of the men in the bar. They didn't look bad, but the bad ones rarely did.

Mind made up, you lock the door.

The walk from the main thoroughfare to the cabin is ten, maybe fifteen minutes uphill. Sandals weren't the move, a reminder you tuck away for the next trip. Your focus stretches back to Grouse Grocery and its shopkeep, and you swallow hard at your naivete.

"Aw, I didn't know you could feed the deer like this."

"It's bait, sweetheart."

Lingering humiliation propels you up the slope to your newfound sanctuary. It doesn't help the grocer's handsome. His eyes are the same color as the lake, his face framed by a beard and mustache, punctuating the mountain man look. Tall with a broad chest and shoulders that taper into a trim waist. Burly arms dusted with hair, chest too, far as you could tell through the open uppermost buttons of his shirt. Your mind fills in the blanks of what his bootcut jeans and flannel covered. Something peculiar to him, though, and you can't put your finger on it.

I'm overthinking this. It's a small town. I'm not used to it, yet.

Not weird, just different.

The four words become your mantra when odd things start within days of your arrival.

As you told the good-looking grocer, you are an animal lover through and through. The child who toted frogs home from the playground pushed their nose to the glass outside pet stores and braked for ducklings. You dabbled with a vegetarian diet, failed, and overspent at farmers' markets in weak absolution. But you had never been a pet person. Life never allowed for it.

Which is why the cats are bewildering. Within the first week, three feral cats traipse about the property. By the end of week two, you count nine. Lounging in the woodpile, hiding beneath your car, or sitting on the step like they own the place. They skitter and hiss when you approach and don't touch the scraps of food you leave out to curry favor.

Then there are the 'gifts' they leave you. Headless birds, mice, and other small mammals. Entrails and viscera steaming on the cement step in the high noon sunlight. The Internet says it's normal, you say it's disgusting.

You read cats leave dead animals when they believe their human is helpless. That they see humans as big, furless, and inept hunters whose survival is in peril because they lack the innate ability to track, pursue, and kill.

Scraping the latest offering off their altar, you shrug off such notions. They're probably upset that their favorite place to squat is now occupied.

Then, the carcasses quadruple in size. One early morning, you decide to walk down to the lake to read with a cup of coffee, only to drop the mug and book into the dirt. A gutted doe is not fifteen feet from the front door beside your car. Black eyes lolled skyward, pinna flopped over its skull, and legs akimbo. After sprinting and vomiting into the kitchen sink, you call Kate.

"Sorry that's happened, I can send someone up to remove it in the next half hour. You ought to know that you might see more stuff like that, kid. Area's rich in wildlife - bears, cougars, bobcats, wolves, hell, even eagles drop half-eaten marmots from time to time."

You remain on the kitchen floor, repeating your new mantra, and not fifteen minutes later, tires on gravel announce someone's arrival. Mercifully, no one comes to the door. Whoever it is doesn't even kill the engine. You hear footsteps crunching on rock, the doe's body hitting the bed of a truck, the slam of a door, and the person pulling away.

Mustering the courage to stand, you stare from the front door, eyes transfixed on the blood left behind. You pray for rain.

It doesn't come.

The front light won't turn on. You swap the lightbulb with a spare from the cupboard and zip. Nothing. You call Kate, whose patience seems a deep well. She promises to send the local handyman and gets off the phone in a hurry. Annoyingly, you don't get a name or a time.

It's noon when a red pick-up arrives the next day. You're on your feet, off the glider and its ottoman on the porch, and barefoot when the door to the truck swings open. The practiced smile you wear falters a little when a familiar cut of a man steps out, sizes up the cabin in a glance, and then turns to grab a toolbox from the bed.

You meet him at the door.

"You're the handyman, too?"

The crow's feet by his eyes tighten with a smirk. "And the locksmith." His chin lifts to the sconce. "This it?"

"The one."

"Right, I'll get a stepladder and it'll be in working order within the hour. Mind shutting off the power in the meantime?"

"Of course. Need anything else from me?"

His smile's a waxing crescent, mouth twitching like he's got something clever to say. You've seen it before on the mugs of men trying to get fresh with you, but he keeps whatever it is locked behind his teeth.

"No. I'll let you know when you can turn the power on."

The hum of the refrigerator dies with the electricity, leaving the cabin completely quiet. You return to the glider and book, thumbing through to find your place. Convenient, the screened porch catches the fleeting hours of direct sunlight that hits the cabin. It also allows you a chance to watch and listen to him work.

"Name's John, by the way," He says after a while, voice clipped, meeting your eye through the screen when you look up. "You didn't ask."

It's off-putting, the way he speaks. It wasn't as if he conducted himself with overt kindness at his store, but you hadn't expected him - John - to take a tone with you, a stranger. A newcomer. Your smile is eager to smooth things over, a beat faster than any instinct to fight, always has been. "You're right, how rude of me."

His focus returns to the light, giving a slight roll of his shoulders as if your apology lifted a weight off his back. "S'alright, reckon you're learning how things work 'round here."

You want to return to Winterson in your lap, but the poorly disguised condescension fans a spark of annoyance. "You haven't asked for mine."

"I know yours," He responds, pulling a rag from a loop on his pants to wipe at something. "Kate talks."

The paperback spine creaks in your grip. "I suppose that comes with owning the watering hole."

He chuckles, exchanging the rag for a pair of pliers. "Something like that."

You don't ask. Handsome John may be, but he is definitely weird. Best to avoid the bad side of the nearest grocer, handyman, and locksmith. You return to reading, and another half hour slips past. You don't notice until the hum of the refrigerator restarts, practically jolting you out of the chair.

John stands washing his hands in your kitchen sink. You did not invite him in. His head turns, seemingly hearing how your breath stutters, and he nods at the switch beside the door.

"Give 'er a try," He says, wiping his hands on a dish towel.

The light works, and you flick it a few times to be sure. You stare up at the light, listening to its muted hum.

"Y'know," John murmurs, suddenly behind you in the doorway, leaning, supported by an arm, on the frame well above your head. "This is an old place. Doesn't get let often. Probably more repairs hiding around here. Already saw a few holes in the screen. I can take a walkthrough and fix what I can while I'm here."

Your head dips back, neck craning to meet his eye at this angle. It doesn't occur to you to move despite the whole of the front yard before you. You swallow. He's only trying to drum up business. A small-town entrepreneur. Trying to survive just like you. "Maybe another time."

John raps two knuckles on the frame and pushes off. "Alright, I'll gather my things." He brushes against you as he passes and collects his tools and stepladder.

You watch him from the entry and offer a weak smile when he returns, holding a notepad. He fishes a pencil out from a pocket, scribbling a moment, before he tears off a page and holds it out – an old-fashioned carbon invoice.

Not weird, just different.

"Pay when you can. You know where to find me."

You take the invoice. "Not afraid I'll skip town?" You joke, trying to gauge his sense of humor.

He grins and huffs a laugh. It sounds only a little forced. "Not at all. I know all the best spots from the bay to the mountains, for hiding or otherwise." He rubs the back of his neck.

Your brows creep up. "Or otherwise?"

John's eyes widen a fraction, and his hand slips from his neck in a gesture of surrender. "Don't mean anything by that. More like…for food. Dinner, maybe? A hike?"

The sheepishness of his tone does him credit. So what if he's a little awkward or indelicate? Probably as nervous as you are, though clearly for different reasons. In town for all of two weeks and already a local's taken interest. Inwardly, you preen.

"That sounds like a date."

"It does." He concedes.

You start to shut the door on him, stopping when his expression falls into absolute confusion. A laugh bubbles up, and you open the door again. "Well? You didn't ask," You playfully turn his words back on him.

"Smart one, aren't you. Alright then," He muses aloud, smiling. "Would you like to grab dinner later this week? Know a good spot within a half hour of here."

The way he looks at you, eyes crinkling with interest, you don't suppose it's a bad idea to get out, make friends, and immerse yourself in the community. "I'd like that, John."

There's a triumphant glint in his eyes. "I'll be in touch, sweetheart." He dips his head, returns to his truck, and flashes a wave when he pulls a u-turn and drives out.

That night, when you return from a walk to watch the sunset, you flip on the porch light, grinning, thinking about your date.

You do not notice the little red dot within the bulb.

#john price #price x you #price x reader #john price x you #john price x reader #john price x female reader #captain john price x you #john price x f!reader #x f!reader #price x female reader #cod fanfic #cod fic

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maybe-moonchild · 4 months ago

Text

CHAPTER 1

summary: In which a spilt drink leads to a very awkward reunion and a drunken piece of pizza. WC: 6.3k ﾟ ⋆ ﾟ ☂︎ ⋆ ﾟ

The surface of the bar is tacky under your forearms from spilled beer and mixed drinks. You lean up against the surface as others bump into your back, half listening to Aaron's non-stop rambling about the job his uncle set him up at. His company was fine- one of Flash's basketball buddies from high school remembered for being obnoxious in your junior english class. You're barely paying attention and more preoccupied with trying to get the bartender's attention. At least then you would be able to escape the sweaty bodies pressed against your back.

Lazy Dog Saloon, a divey place nestled in Hell's Kitchen, had become Midtown high. Most of the class of 2014 had graduated from their prospective 4 year undergrad programs last week. Some returned to New York for a mini vacation before they began the next chapter in their lives while some had never left at all.

You were part of the second group.

NYU seemed like a safe choice at the time your college applications were due. The program you wanted was there and you knew that it was close enough to Queens that you felt like you'd gotten away, but not far enough that you felt like you were on the other side of the country.

Aaron continues to drone on, the sound of his voice fading with the sound of the eighties song playing over the speakers. Your shoulders sag in relief when the bartender sits down your vodka soda in front of you, sticking a dried out lime on the rim. He takes the $8 in cash you hold out to him and mumble out a thanks but he is already moving to the next person. Not that you care. You had your prize in hand and could finally return to your friends drunkenly lounging in their booth.

That was until Aarons animated hand gestures sent your drink out of your hand down the front of the shirt of the guy beside you.

"Fuck! I am so sorry," you rush out, half turning to reach over Aaron and grab a few flimsy paper napkins. You also shoot Aaron the dirtiest look you can muster at which he grimaces. "I feel horrible- god. I am so-"

Had there not been a steady stream of booze fluttering through your veins, you could play it a lot cooler than you do. Thankfully, Peter Parker isn’t able to play it much cooler either. The second your eyes met his big brown ones, they manage to somehow get bigger, his eyebrows rising towards his hairline before his lips thinned in distaste.

“... sorry…” The word comes out as a breath while his presence seems to be the only thing that you can be aware of. It’s like the sight of him is screaming inside your head.

Peter’s heart throws itself for a loop before dropping down into his stomach. He knows that voice all too well and he hates how much he still yearns to hear it again.

We both seemed to collect ourselves at the same time; he clears his throat while you look down at the spot on his shirt where the gray fabric is dark. With a shake of his head, he waives away your apology with his hand. “Don't- it’s fine, it’s fine.” He tries to mutter the words with a smile that barely classifies as anything more than a wince. “I don’t even like this shirt anyway.”

You can’t seem to get yourself to move. Not even when he gently slips the napkins out of your clenched fists so he can try and clean himself up. That, in turn, just makes you feel worse, but then again, maybe he just doesn’t want you to touch him.

Not after our six years of friendship fizzled out like a burning candle that finally reached the end of its wick.

“Nice one,” Aaron chuckles near your ear, his elbow nudging your arm teasingly. This was not the time for jokes. Not when it felt like I was staring at a ghost. The ghost of someone very much alive. Giving the red head a shove and a scowl, you hiss at him under your breath to shut up before turning back to Peter.

“I am so sorry. Seriously. This was all my fault. I… can I help?” You're clearly apologetic. It’s clear from the concern in your voice and the embarrassed look on your face.

Peter’s eyes find the ceiling so quickly that you can’t tell if the pink on his face is real or just a hallucination from the tequila shot Flash had forced on you earlier. You could’ve sworn you’d forgotten what he sounded like over the past four years. After hearing it again, your memories come flooding back all at once. Except this isn’t a memory. This is real. Peter Parker is standing right there as he wipes at his shirt. Gone is the gangly kid with perpetual untamable hair and skinned elbows from nose diving off his skateboard and in his place is someone he gracefully grew into.

“Seriously. It’s fine. It was an accident.” His hand waves awkwardly again as he drops the napkins into the trash. The smile he gives you is strained and brief but he tries anyway so he can drop the conversation. “No, it’s really alright. I think those did the trick. This shirt has gone through worse.”

You are sure you look as pathetic as you feel. Eyes wide and brow furrowed enough that the crease between them could’ve been a damn canyon. Once upon a time, you knew him better than you knew yourself. Once upon a time, the two of you could have stayed quiet for hours and still known exactly what the other was thinking.

Now? At least you knew that him saying it was fine was a load of garbage.

“Are you sure? I can ask the bartender for a towel? Or-”

He knows that look. It was the same damn look you always used to give him when you felt really bad about something. It would settle on your face when you were going to do any stupid thing you could to try and fix it.

“I’m sure,” he interjects in the hopes that you believe him- or at least pretend to. That you will just let it go, return back to Katie and Flash so you can tell them you dumped your drink on him. The three of you could laugh it up like you did in high school.

“It’s fine. I promise. Just…” he takes a deep breath and glances down at his wet shirt before finally glancing up at your face. He tries to think of something to say. At that moment, the bartender decides to drop the beer he had ordered earlier onto the counter. Peter mutters a thanks, grabbing it in one hand while digging for cash that's shoved in his front pocket to exchange it.

Before you can get another word out, he sighs, “Really. It’s fine. I can deal with it.” Peter's words are short and almost sharp. It was nothing different than how things had been between the two of you for the past eight years.

You open your mouth to protest but he is already slipping through the crowd. Drunk patrons fill the empty space within seconds so they can raise their blood alcohol content. Aaron tries to laugh it off, clapping you on the shoulder while you’re too busy staring at the back of Peter’s head disappearing around the corner.

There are two roads or whatever bullshit.

You blame it on the booze. The white claw you had sipped when you and Katie had gotten ready was the reason that you’d shrugged off Aarons hand. The extremely potent and barely drinkable margarita Flash made you at the pregame was the reason you started to slip through the crowd after him. The reason you burst through the doors of the boys bathroom without a second thought was- okay, so maybe it was also just who you were.

“Please. Let me do something to fix this,” you urge, ignoring the strange look from the man slipping around you to exit the bathroom. You also ignore the shocked look Peter gives your reflection of the dirty mirror in front of him.

“Nuh uh. No.” He practically gasps, spinning around and yanking out paper towels to hurriedly dry his hands. He has to get you out of here before you get yourself thrown out of the freaking bar.

You shoot him a look. You will stay in this bathroom all night if that was what it took… to fix… his shirt.

“Grow up Parker, it’s a boy’s bathroom. There are stalls. I’m not even crawling under one!” Your hands move as you speak while his hands find your shoulders. His touch is gentle but his face is panicked. You don’t stop him from spinning you around, guiding you out the door even when you turn your head back so you can face him.

“Look. I just want to make sure I didn’t ruin your night because I feel like a total asshole. It was an accident and now I feel your night is ruined because you're all damp and smelling like vodka.” Peter focuses on maneuvering you through the crowd. He doesn’t have the heart (or the guts) to admit that his shirt being soaked with vodka is the least of his concerns. It is *how* it got soaked in the first place. That was the real issue.

No. The real issue was you. Your presence. The fact he had to touch you right now as he manages to avoid letting anyone collide with you since you are too focused on rambling.

“Okay, you didn’t ruin my night.” The words are practically a groan of exasperation in the hopes you will just drop this. That you will just return to your cool friends and you could all go and laugh at how uncool he is.

“No?” You ask flatly, your eyebrow rising in skepticism as you try to twist around to look at him better over your shoulder. He is more concerned with keeping any drunk people from slamming into me or vice versa. “Because I feel like I did. I feel like I definitely ruined your night and you’re just telling me that I didn’t, just so I drop it and I don't let it eat away at my brain for the rest of my life.”

Because it will. I will certainly lose sleep over it.

Peter can feel his heart race as he listens to you. He has to bite his tongue to keep himself from screaming that you’d ruined his life, not his night.

”Just-“ he grumbles, rolling his eyes as he guides you around another group of drunks dancing against the wall. Never has he been more thankful for the fabric of your dress to keep his skin from yours. Even with the buffer, he feels like he is burning alive. He wishes he didn’t care that you were upset at the prospect of him being upset.

Afterall, you probably haven’t spared him a second though since high school graduation.

Not in the way he has thought about you.

Even though it’s mid-May, the nights lack the warmth that the days hold. The cool air feels good on your flushed cheeks. The alley is quiet, tucked between the bar and a closed up nail salon seated next door and the space is filled with the muffled hum of liquor filled banter.

You manage to twist around and plant yourself in front of him. He drops his hold on you but meets your wide and earnest eyes.

“Peter, all I’m saying is that I want to make it better. Yeah, I know,” you throw up your hands, letting their movements animate your words. “Yes, I’m aware that vodka sodas are only moderately pungent. And -yes. It wasn’t even that much- but still! I feel bad. Really bad. There has to be something I can do to make it right.”

Peter can feel his heart picking up again, his brain desperately trying to comprehend that after all these years - after *six years*, you were in front of him, telling him that you feel bad?

He can’t help but shake his head before quickly interjecting. “You don’t-” with a huff, he presses his palms against his face, like it will give him a moment to try and think clearly. They move up to his hair, shoving it off his forehead as he finally forces himself to actually look down at you. His voice is low and tired. “You don’t have to do anything about it. I promise. It was an accident, alright? Besides, I don’t even like that shirt that much.”

That’s a lie. It is his favorite shirt.

No one says anything for a long moment. You’re too busy studying his face for what is actually going on inside his head. He is too busy trying to force himself not to look away. Too many things hang in the foot of space between your bodies. You either can’t find, or can’t find the courage to pluck something out of the air and say something of substance.

Something that matters.

So your face softens and you opt for the cowards approach.

“You okay?”

A muscle in his jaw tenses which makes his expression look more grim. “I’m fine,” he grumbles, looking away to stare at a broken bottle, not wanting to hold your gaze anymore. He’d spent the past eight years pretending that the you-sized hole in his life had been filled with things like Spider-Man, The Bugle and his Bio-Physics degree he’d obtained last week. But now that you’re standing right here, it felt like it was somehow bigger.

Just like that, you realize that, even if he had been the one to guide the two of you out here, away from prying eyes and drunk chatter, it was your doing. You might well have been the one to drag him out the door by his hair. Your face falls when you realize he likely did it because he doesn’t think you’d want to be seen talking to him in public.

You frown at the floor and wrap your arms around yourself like you’re just trying to keep out the cool air.

“Sorry,” you murmur. It’s the best thing you can think to say. Peter looks at you, peeking up and taking notice of the little movements and gestures you make to try and smooth over the awkwardness. It reminds him of high school. Back in the middle of freshman year when you started on the edge of the circle of cheerleaders, working up the courage to belong before you eventually found yourself in the center senior year.

“It’s fine,” he says halfheartedly. In reality, it’s not fine, far from it, but… His hands curl and uncurl into fists at his side, trying to suppress the urge to reach for you.

“No, it's not.”

You’re not talking about the spilled drink anymore. You’re not even talking about the dissipation of your friendship at the start of high school. In some way, it all comes down to high school graduation four years ago.

There's a clarity to the loud sounds inside the bar as someone slips out the back door, too preoccupied with trying to light a cigarette as they head towards the street. When the door shuts again, it feels even quieter out here. Peter and you don’t say anything as they pass by and out of sight.

But neither of you return inside either.

“I shouldn’t have done that. That was…” you trail off, eyes finding the sky under pinched brows as you think. “Invasive? Presumptuous? Meddlesome?” A strained laugh falls from your mouth and cuts through the quiet. “Sorry. Vodka seriously inhibits my memory of vocabulary words.”

You don’t expect him to laugh. So when he lets out a snort and shakes his head, you find the courage to actually look at him from the corner of your eye. He’s not smiling but the little quirk of his lip might as well be a shit eating grin with how relieved it makes you feel.

“You’re drunk.” It is neither a question or statement, or both. You can't really tell.

Your nose scrunches up in thought before you settle on, “I would go with tipsy.” The toe of your shoe scuffs against the pavement and he shoves his hands in his front pockets. “I’m not sure how that’s legally determined or if there even is a way to legally determine that but…yeah. Sure. Let's go with tipsy.”

“You’re wasted,” he snorts again, only this time it sounds even more like a laugh than before.

Your mouth drops in mock offense, eyes pulling back towards his own. Something on his face catches in the light and he looks like he could almost glow in the dark but he’s forcing it down.

“Drunk is a strong word. More like… very tipsy.”

“I think we can go with sloshed instead.” Peter raises an eyebrow, his mouth curling upwards with amusement.

The roll of your eyes is dramatic and playful. Before you get the chance to shoot back, a vibrating and painful sound of an alarm from your purse interrupts you. He almost wonders if it’s a phone call, but when you retrieve it, press the screen and check the time, it’s almost relieving. Not that it didn’t interrupt the moment anyway.

“Shit,” you frown before sticking your phone back. “I really gotta get out of here. I told myself I’d be home by 1:30 since I’m meeting my parent’s for brunch.”

You’re leaving? It’s the first thought that crosses his mind and it has him on edge. For the first time in years, the two of you are alone together. Just the two of you, hidden away in an alley and having an actual conversation.

And it’s already over.

“You’re taking the train back now,” he asks with slight concern. His fingers fall from his hair so he can rub at his forehead. You were a New Yorker. Everyone took the subway. You were just a New Yorker that was determined to take the subway alone at 1 am on a Saturday while drunk in a short dress.

A skeptical smile tugs at your mouth. His concern isn’t shocking. He’d always been like that. Cautious and worried about the safety of others. It was why he always got his ass kicked in high school.

It just wasn’t something you experienced in a long time.

“Umm… Yeah?” Shrugging, you retrieve your phone from your purse to shoot off a text to Katie and Flash that you’re heading home. Peter opens his mouth to say something before thinking better of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t think you could handle yourself. The last thing he needed was to piss you off in this one moment of a truce.

“My apartment’s not that far anyway,” you continue as a little thumbs up appears by your text in the group chat. The phone returns to your bag amongst your wallet and lip gloss. He is already looking at you when you lift your head up to look at him.

For a moment, he kind of looks like he is 11 years old again. Like you half expect him to smile and reveal his canine tooth is still growing in. That he’ll give you the same grin through the glass of your bedroom window when the two of you were long supposed to be asleep. How he would invite you to crawl out and to accompany him to the subway because he liked it when you watched him try and skateboard in an empty train. At first, you would always hiss out ‘no’s’ which would only make him whine your name from his spot on the windowsill. Eventually, you’d relent because you always did. Then you would spend breakfast with your parents exhausted and biting down on a smile from sitting on the secret events from the night before.

“Wait, you’re taking the subway alone?” he asks, his eyebrows furrowing even more than they already were before shooting upwards. He steps closer but doesn’t actually invade your space.

Alone, intoxicated, and all the way home… in a short dress…

Your own eyebrows raise in challenge. Even if you try not to look defensive, you can't help the way your arms fold over your chest and you settle back on your hip. You’ve lived in New York as long as he has, which is your entire life.

You could easily take the subway alone. It was something you’d done a million times and you were sure he had done it as much too.

A little bit of alcohol wasn’t enough to stop you and force you to waste money on a cab.

“Yeah…”

“Okay,” he sighs and you relax, both of your shoulders sagging in relief for different reasons. “I’m making sure you get home.” The words slip out and he doesn’t even think to hold them back.

You open your mouth to argue, but he continues speaking, his hands raising in surrender. “I’m sure you do it all the time but, I mean… I just…you’re drunk.”

“Not drunk. Very tipsy,” you mutter under your breath but there's no hint of actually putting up a fight. Considering your options, you look up towards the night sky like you’ll find some sort of argument hidden up amongst the stars. There are no stars. Just heavy looking clouds that hang above Manhattan with the umpteenth threat of rain this week. You don’t find one. Making a face, you know he has a point.

Odds were, you would probably be fine walking the few blocks to the subway and taking it a couple of stops towards your apartment. There was always that chance that you wouldn’t be.

The problem was that your apartment was out of the way. How did you know that? Peter lived with Ned. Ned Leeds, the same Ned Leeds that had been following Katie around from the age of five until now like a love sick puppy that rambled horribly in her presence about every detail of his life. So yes, the fact he and Peter were roommates had come up plenty of times when you and your current roommate bumped into Ned. Just like he had, in excruciating detail, explained exactly where he lived in case Katie ever happened to be in the area.

“You’re just going to tag along all the way to East village… at one in the morning… and then… trek all the way back to your place?” You shake your head. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You aren’t asking. I’m offering.”

The prospect of your safety overrides any arguments he could possibly make.

If he stays here and something happens to you, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

A guilty expression flashes in his eyes at the thought, that little *what if.* It had been replaying in his head since he got bit by that spider when he was sixteen. How the thought of where you were and what you were doing flashed through his mind anytime there was a large-scale disaster threatening New York. There were a few times it got so bad, he’d had to swing by your apartment- not in a stalker way! Just so he could know you were fine.

Besides, he only knew because your mom told Aunt May, who then mentioned it to him.

When you don’t say anything, he nods towards the mouth of the alley. “Come on.” He’s already walking towards the street, spinning on his heels and walking backwards. “It’s fine. I’ll take a cab home or something quicker than the subway.”

Something quicker than the subway and isn’t a cab? All you can do is snort as you scramble to catch up beside him. Now you just feel worse as you step onto the sidewalk. Not only does he probably resent you for the end of our friendship eight years ago and the… incident four years ago on the night of graduation, now he has to go out of his way so I don’t get murdered walking home.

“Really Pete,” you urge. The nickname falls from your lips like second nature. “It’s okay. I’m good.”

He shakes his head and turns to raise an eyebrow at your statement. You’re not good. Even if you're not stumbling black out drunk, the pink flush on your cheeks and the wide eyes are dead giveaways of your impairment. As much as he wants to hold your hand, to throw an arm over your shoulders like when the both of you were kids, he doesn’t. But he does let his hand hover behind the small of your back as you manage to find the same pace.

“I’d rather not be worried the rest of the weekend. Think of it as satiating my restless mind,” he jokes, giving you a playful look.

It’s much quieter out here and there is space to take a breath. There’s still people mulling around as they make their way home or to the next stop of their Saturday night. No one pays the two of you much attention as your pace slows to a more leisurely one.

“First of all, not drunk. Very tipsy,” you huff. “And second of all…” Peter stretches his arms behind his head while you try to think of a good point aside from the fact that you feel bad.

For a lot of things.

“You’ll be walking alone too at three in the morning!”

“And I can handle that. I’m a big boy, remember?”

There it is. That stupid lopsided grin he’d always shoot you anytime he knew he was wearing you down. When he knew you had already given in but were hoping he would drop it before you caved. You make a face that screams ‘spare me’ and scoff. The dirty look quickly threatens to be a smile and he knows you’re all in now.

“We’ll take the train, I’ll walk you home. We can even grab a slice of pizza. My treat. For old times sake?” With a shake of your head, the sigh you make is answer enough. Your answer is a yes. Just like it always was.

Okay, and maybe it's more than fine and doesn’t feel like that much of a chore.

He takes the opportunity to grab your hand so he can drag you along. The action is like muscle memory and he doesn’t realize he is doing it until you falter. You note that his hands are rougher but that makes sense considering he’s 23 years old and no longer a 14 year old kid. It’s not like you have to admit out loud that you like it. That you’d missed it. So before he can really realize what he’s doing, you commit to it.

“Only if we can take it on the road,” you say pointedly with a look to match. “I meant what I said earlier. I really need to get home so I don’t oversleep and miss brunch. My parent’s will kill me.”

Giving you a tug forward, he snorts, “Then by all means. Let's go.”

The foot traffic around is nothing like a work week morning. No hustling of business men in suits or bustling women in sharp blazers clicking down the sidewalk. The night holds its own excitement now that the weather is survivable without an actual coat and gloves. Summer is approaching and it seems to stir people out of their homes and out later than usual.

Aside from the copious amounts of rain plaguing the past week.

It was nice. Your hands are clasped together so you can keep up and he can make sure he doesn't lose you. At least that’s what the both of you tell yourselves as you settle into the familiar warmth of each other's palms and the sense of comfort they still bring after eight years.

The last time you two had touched was four years ago.

Back when his hands had found themselves tangled in your hair so he could tilt your head back further and-

“How about my treat,” you offer, leaning your head forward to look at the side of his face since he’s a step ahead of you. “Because I’m the one ruining your night.”

Peter just shakes his head and shrugs in hopes to dissolve some of your concern. “Don’t worry about it. My night isn’t ruined. You’re worth it.”

Those words make you stumble, tripping over your own feet like the world was just thrown out of orbit and he doesn’t seem to notice. It’s the last thing you expect him to say. For a moment, you wonder if maybe you were so drunk that you were hallucinating.

But no. He said it.

Your silence makes him squeeze his eyes shut and hold in a curse. It was a stupid thing to say after eight years of distance. Right after grabbing your freaking hand like things were all fine and dandy between you. If he could take it back, he would. Instead, he manages to remain looking unbothered so you wont realize that even just your silence was enough to feel like a punch to the gut.

“As long as you’re sure,” you chuckle lamely, looking down to smooth your dress as you reel in your emotions and stand a little straighter; make your movements as sure as yourself as you can pretend to be. Because the truth is, walking with him, having him tug you along and being in his presence is enough to make you sure of absolutely nothing.

Not when you thought he would still hate you for making more friends at the start of high school. Back when you joined cheerleading on a whim and your classmates started to actually see you. Your classmates actually waved at you when you walked through the halls. They would sit by you in class and turn in their seats so you were included in the conversation. Friday nights were spent at football games before the whispers of an after party in the quarterbacks basement were no longer whispers and became actual invitations.

When you didn’t eat, sleep, and breathe Peter Parker like you had as a child. It wasn’t like you had woken up one day and gotten sick of him. You just slowly realized that maybe you could have more than just one person at your side.

“I am so sure,” he reassures, dropping your hold and slowing to a stop in front of a late night pizza shop. “I’m pretty sure I owe you money for something I broke when we were in elementary school. So yeah, I’m sure.” This time when he smiles bashfully back at you, you mirror him. Somehow that makes some of the tenseness traveling between your connected arms start to resolve.

Peter has spent the last eight years wondering what he did wrong.

Did you just get bored? Were the stories he was telling you just not enough? Did you grow tired of him dragging you into trouble? Was the feel of being seen by the rest of the world more gratifying than his eyes alone?

So many questions without answers.

For eight years they had plagued his mind, kept him up at night and eating at the back of his brain during the day.

The two of you chat in line which is a solid eight drunk people deep. Drunk conversation and the sound of the workers drowns out how easy it is to fall back into joking around. There are stalls in the conversation where neither of you have an immediate response but the recovery is quick enough that there's no suffocating awkward silence.

And it is then that you realize that being in his presence makes you miss him more than you had during the eight years of radio silence. From the way he rocks back and forth on his feet while making sure you order your slice first, you miss him. When you try to pay, he smoothly snatches your wallet out of your hands, not even missing a beat in his conversation with the teenager at the register as he hands him cash.

Once you both receive pizza slices bigger than your heads, grease seeping through the paper plates as you take the long way to the subway entrance.

You happily take a big bite, speaking around a mouthful of dough, cheese, and tomato. “I mean it. You were always horrible at saving money when we were kids.”

He scoffs and rolls his eyes which just makes it harder to chew around the smile straining your lips. There’s really no rush as you walk side by side without paying attention to where you're going. Eventually an entrance to the subway will appear.

“Oh, I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear you over the sound of you being so, very wrong.” Once he makes sure that there is not a drop of grease on his free hand, he playfully gives your head a shove. You make a sound of protest that quickly turns to one of amusement while trying to smooth your hair.

“I am not and you know it,” you shoot back and he responds with a dramatic waive of his hand. “You would always want ice cream or a comic book. Then you’d try and give me puppy dog eyes and promise you’d pay me back. I always gave in”

And he always paid you back. Eventually. Sometimes all at once or by leaving a crumpled up five in your backpack or taping a ten dollar bill to your window.

“I did not try puppy dog eyes,” he protests with his mouth full, chewing in a hurry so he can swallow. “Plus, I was the one funding all of the trouble we got into. And I was cute. Cut me some slack.”

Never had he been so glad to bail on a night of patrol so Ned could drag him to some dinghy bar just to watch Ned botch attempt number five million and six to woo Katie into falling in love with him.

Once we are finished, you dust the crumbs and grease from your fingertips and toss the plate into the trash. He’s been done for a while and you don't hesitate to grab his own plate and send it following mine into the dumpster.

“That’s because I was always better at saving money. If I hadn’t been, how was I supposed to treat you to snacks?”

Peter snickers, “You were definitely not better at saving your money than me.”

“Was too-”

“Nuh uh,” he cuts you off with a sarcastically smug expression. “Remember when you blew all your lunch money on those gum ball machines. The ones with the little rubber pencil toppers inside? You skipped lunch for over a week in hopes of getting that crab one.”

When he looks over at you and sees how your lips curl in an amused smile as you stare ahead, he bites down on his grin but it still feels white hot on his face.

Wherever you two have meandered to is much quieter. Cars are not passing down the road and most people still out at this hour are sticking to the well lit streets with more foot traffic.

“Oh my god. My mom was so mad at me when she found out.” You throw your head back to laugh at the memory. It feels good. It feels right to be here right now. “She found out because you told May that my mom was too busy that week to make me lunch so she’d put an extra sandwich in your lunch box for you to give me.”

Peter opens his mouth to speak but cuts himself off with a look of concentration.

Something is off.

His footsteps slow, yours following when a big burly man in a black fitted shirt steps into your path from the entrance of a long closed restaurant. It wasn’t just a passerby. You can tell from the way his attention is fixated on Peter. The guy's narrowed eyes move to size you up.

Not that you were a threat.

Another man steps out behind you, a third crossing the street and approaching. Muggers. That’s your first thought. It wasn’t terribly uncommon in a city like this, especially given the time and day. You quickly figure out this isn’t a chance of opportunity when the man standing a few feet in front of you speaks.

“Peter Parker?” He tilts his head, features dark from the lack of street lamps but there was no mistaking the glint in his eye. That was enough for Peter to step closer to you. He keeps you half behind him, an arm going out to keep his body between yours and theirs. There was more than one threat to worry about. The other two approach and settle in their own spots so they can circle you against the wall. Peter tries to have his head turned enough to keep the other two men in his peripheral vision.

You tell yourself to stay calm, that everything is going to be fine.

That voice in your head has to scream that at you when you see the flash of the gun dangling in the guy's hand.

#peter parker tasm #peter parker tasm x reader #peter parker x reader #peter parker x you #marvel #the amazing spider man #spiderman

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themotherofblood · 1 year ago

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Hello! If applications for the Bloody Baby series are open, can I ask for an evening of stories? They are all together by the fireplace and the baby asks about their past as she is fond of history. And at your discretion, sex during the conversation.

absolutely yes!! I’m gonna do smut on the next one :) on this one and focus on the fluff, mainly because your prompt will be great for answering some questions about our lovely vamp daemyra! What, How, When? Thank you for the request. Also Chanel exists in Modern! Westeros. Do what you will with that info hehe

Vampire!Daemon x fem!reader x Vampire!Rhaenyra

masterlist | bloody baby series | vampire au

Warnings: mentions of murder, anti!green, mentions of genocide and blood (obviously)

You groaned awake, hearing the birds chirp outside and rays of sunshine bleeding in your bedroom. You stretched out your legs, whimpering at the gentle sting that made itsself very apparent. Patches of bandages stuck to your right inner thigh and left jugular. One on your wrist that only stopped bleeding as of yesterday. You shuffled off the bed, the floor under your feet was warm (heated) as you padded your feet over to the bathroom.

Daemon had ordered the attendants clearly, while he does enjoy your figure prancing around in just a shirt, visually your little human body looked much stirring in the pretty dresses Daemon and Rhaenyra had filled in your closet to the brim. At first you would gawk, terrified at all clothes. You doubted even blood donation for money could afford you such labels. Your newest excitement however was realizing the entire collection of Chanel ballet flats just casually laying at the bottom of the shoe shelf. You had with much joy, slipped on the baby pink pair over your white socks and headed out to breakfast.

Their head housekeeper had informed you that they had not returned yet. Rhaenyra and Daemon had headed out to hunt, while they relished the taste of your blood on their tongue. They could only drain you (safely) so many times, leaving a few days to let you recover and replenish your blood before sinking their teeth in once more. Rhaenyra found it mildly discomforting to be around you while she was hungry, a craving is one thing— hunger is death.

You felt like a kidnapped princess stuck in a castle, very much like Beauty and the Beast but Rhaenyra and Daemon were anything but beasts. While there had been no formal rules around the palace, you never ventured around it much. The first few weeks your anxiety tore at your so hard, if you weren’t awake and servicing the two of them or being fed on. You were sleeping, heart heavy and away in a dream world. You wondered often, what they did about the life you came from?

Your halted progression to a university degree, your part time job at the cafè, your mother—you wondered if she tried to cash out your life insurance yet. Your friends, they might have been the only ones a little worried, it felt like a child being grounded, having all your technology away. There was a theatre, they told you about it and yet you were too afraid to touch it. This wasn’t your home.

Once you had very throughly enjoyed your breakfast of eggs on toast, you would have taken a right from the main corridor back to your wing, instead you walked forward toward the east wing. It felt intrusive to do so but your curiousity began eating at you, living in a palace built nearly a thousand years ago. Every trim on the ceiling had a story to tell.

What you stumbled across was a gallery, of small paintings to giant seven foot paintings, over time you had hunch of who Daemon and Rhaenyra were. Their names so prevalent in history, in a world ages ago when this continent was known as Westeros, if the books were true. You pitied them. There was painting right at the end of the corridor, perhaps the biggest one hung. The fine oil painting, aged and masterful.

You could recognize Rhaenyra in it, sat with a swaddled baby in her arms with Daemon stood next to her. Three boys of brown hair, two boys of white. Two dark skinned little girls and a boy stood next to Daemon and a little toddler girl on the floor. Dressed to nines in gold and fine gowns. Their family.

“Curious?” Daemon’s voice boomed from behind you, making you flinch.

You turned to him sheepishly, shrugging your shoulders as he approached you. “That- that’s you, isn’t it?” You asked. Daemon nodded, turning you back to the painting as he held onto your waist before turning your head to kiss your lips.

“That’s a lot of children,” you said as a matter of fact as Daemon resumed his daily need to suckle a bruise onto the crook of neck.

Daemon chuckled, hiding his face in the crook of your neck as his nose took a long waft of your scent.

“Are they all yours?” your nosiness had you blurting your thought out. You bit your tongue the second you asked it. He nodded, “Rhaenyra birthed them all?” You eyes widened. “Bloody hell.”

Your horrified face was one of much amusement to Daemon, he knew of how little bloodline sentiments meant in this era. He wasn’t super keen into forcing one to have a child back in 120 AC, neither would he now if he could ever have them again. Your eyes squinted to read the little description etched onto the golden frame.

“Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, Royal Consort Daemon Targaryen and their dragon seeds,”

From what you had read about the ancient great houses, they would rather jump off of cliffs than not come up with macabre titles to do with their house sigils. You giggled, dragonseed. A tad dramatic but that was the beauty and irrationality of history, everything was of honour and blood then it seemed.

“You called your children dragonseed?” There was knowing glint in Daemon’s eyes as he quirked up a brow.

“No—no?” disbelief, pure disbelief.

You shriek as Daemon bent down to throw your body over his shoulder. You knocked at your legs “Daemon I wanna know!”

He carried you all the way upstairs, instead of turning left to your rooms, he carried you to his. He dropped you down by the fire place when Rhaenyra was already sat with a book in her lap. You pouted and Daemon, cheeks full as Daemon dropped a thick blanket down where you sat you sat in already a pile of thick furry blankets.

“What’s going on?” Rhaenyra asked, petting your hair and looking at Daemon in a questioning manner.

“I wanna know if dragons were real,” you looked up at Rhaenyra, hope glimmering all over your eyes, a childish dream come true. She looked to Daemon with an odd expression before pointing at a cabinet by the window.

A temperature controlled cabinet with four eggs each on its five shelves, they were the biggest eggs you had seen. You crawled up to go look at them through the glass, eggs of red, purple, white and green. Mouth gaped upon in shock, immortal royalty was cool but this— you could scream from the excitement bubbling in you chest. A wide grin spread across your face as you turned to look at them.

“Silverwing was real!” You chuckled in shock, leg bouncing as the happiness radiated off of you “you rode dragons!” You pointed at them as you waddled over to settle yourself on Rhaenyra’s lap.

“Do you know which ones?” Daemon asked, the ends of his mouth slightly curled upwards. This is the liveliest they had seen you since the party.

You nodded like a teacher’s pet, answering correctly for a piece of candy. “You rode Syrax,” you curled further into Rhaenyra as she kissed your temple. “And you rode the red wormy thing,” you snapped your fingers in the air to try and remember it’s name.

“Red wormy thing,” Daemon repeated, highly amused that Caraxes’s memory would be watered down to a red wormy dragon from the furious behemoth he was.

“Yeah,” you mellowed, still unable to remember his name “he had a wormy neck and a deviated septum, like me.” you told them as if they wouldn’t know.

You looked to Daemon apologetically “but you already knew that…since you know. You rode him.”

“Caraxes,” he helped you “and I do agree, he was a Wyrm.”

“Damn,” you whispered under your breath “so you just had flying nukes for pets. That’s crazy.”

You settled in with them, still blurting out questions as they came to mind. No history textbook or books you found at libraries had this much details about the subject, the world still counted it’s years from Aegon’s Conquest but they were gods, myths and statues rooted at temples. They were real, tangible blood, you were sitting on one right now.

“If they hatch, what would you do? Over throw the government?” you mused “we could use a Queen, maybe get better healthcare, climate change sanctions, and an extra government holiday.”

This time Rhaenyra chuckled, shaking her head. They had thought of it, though Rhaenyra had given up on any hope of those eggs ever hatching. The last of blood magic destroyed taking down the Night King other than what created their immortality.

“We could go back to Dragonstone, preserve their kind this time around.” Rhaenyra said, pulling the blanket up your shoulders. You hummed as a reply, resting your head on her shoulder.

“Nyra.” You whispered. Rhaenyra hummed in reply. “Has my mother checked in?”

Rhaenyra’s eyes scrunched as she looked to Daemon and then down at you. She shook her head, after leaving a very colourful message on your phone after Rhaenyra had texted as you; about going away on a vacation. There was nothing. As a mother she once was, she never understood the callousness of mothers these days, having children move out of their homes and pay rent.

You closed you eyes, body already heavy from the story filled daze you were in. That and the hearth lulling you, you held no expectation that your mother would mildly care, if Daemon and Rhaenyra were to have killed you. You doubted she would have even noticed.

Just as Rhaenyra and Daemon had just each other, the possibility of you having just them grew each day.

Thank you for reading!! I’m having so much fun with this AU.

comments and reblogs are appreciated!

Also lemme know if you wanna be added to a Taglist

#daemon targaryen x reader #daemon targaryen x reader x rhaenyra targaryen #daemon targaryen x rhaenyra targaryen #vampire au #daemyra smut #daemyra vampire au #daemyra x reader #daemyra #rhaenyra targaryen x reader #vampire!daemon #vampire!rhaenyra

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emberdew · 2 months ago

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Be More Ghost Chapter 4: Three Player Game

Summary:

A Be More Chill AU where Danny gets a Super Quantum Intel Unit Processor (or Squip) to help him become cool and win over Valerie, but things don't really go as planned.

Masterpost | AO3 Link | Word Count: 1,906

It’s a three player game so when they make an attack you know ya gotta friend who's gonna have your back!

Danny, Tucker, and Sam sat in front of the computer in Danny’s room, all three intently focused on the screen and rapidly tapping buttons on their game controllers. Ever since the new Doomed expansion came out a few weeks ago, the teens had gotten into the habit of meeting up to play together after school as long as there wasn’t a ghost attack happening.

As Sam’s powerful character, Chaos, landed a finishing blow on the boss they were fighting, Danny leaned back and looked over to his best friends.

“So, what do you guys think about what Kwan said?”

Sam looked at him, incredulous. “It’s obviously a scam.”

“A really weird scam,” Tucker agreed.

“But what if it is real? I just give the jock who bullies me six… hundred… dollars…” Danny really wanted it to be true, but he had to admit it was far-fetched. “No, you’re right. I’m doomed to be a freak for the rest of my life. Afterlife?” Danny leaned back farther in his chair and dramatically covered his face with an arm.

“Halfterlife?” Tucker suggested. Danny just groaned in response.

“Danny, you don’t need some weird technology to teach you how to be cool. Being cool is overrated anyway.” Sam leaned over and flicked Danny’s arm.

“Plus guys like us are cool in college!” Tucker said. “High school may be hell now, but at least we have that to look forward to.”

Danny didn’t feel reassured. “If I can even get into a college with my awful grades. I can’t exactly put ghost hunting as an extracurricular on my college application.”

“You are in a ghost hunting club now though,” Tucker teased.

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” Danny rubbed where his shoulder was still sore from where Valerie had shot him earlier that day. “How would I even get six hundred dollars anyway?”

Danny shot up in his seat as an idea sprung to mind. “What if I stole my aunt Alicia’s beanie baby collection and sold them on eBay?”

Tucker looked at him for a long moment. “Okay, there’s several things wrong with that plan.” He held out his hand and started counting. “One, your aunt lives in Arkansas and it would take way too long to fly there on a school night. Two, beanie babies are worth like nothing on eBay. Three, didn’t you learn from the yard sale debacle with Technus last year not to sell other people’s stuff?”

Danny sunk down in his seat, defeated. “Oh yeah.”

“I have a better plan.” Tucker turned and raised his eyebrows at Sam. “What if we converted to Judaism?”

“You know what?” Sam stood up and slammed a wad of cash in Danny’s palm. “Here’s some bar mitzvah money. Congrats on becoming a man.”

“Wouldn’t it be a boo-mitzvah?” Tucker joked.

Danny ignored him and shoved the cash in his pocket gratefully, knowing better than to refuse Sam when she gave away money. They’d had that argument a thousand times and Sam always won, so he didn’t even bother anymore. “Thanks, Sam. That’s really gender-affirming.”

“You’re welcome.” Sam gestured her game controller towards the computer screen where the ‘Proceed to next level’ prompt was flashing. “Do you guys wanna keep playing?”

“Sure, let’s do another round.” Danny leaned forward in his seat. Tucker nodded in agreement and Sam pushed the confirm button.

They had made it about halfway through the level when a knock came from Danny’s door. Danny was too engrossed in the game to notice at first.

“Danny?” Jack called.

Danny sighed and paused the game, then got up and opened the door. Unsurprisingly, his dad was dressed in his usual bright orange jumpsuit.

“What is it?” Danny took a step back as Jack entered his room.

“The Mansons called. They want Sam to come home right away for dinner.” From out of nowhere, Jack pulled out a gun prototype that was sparking with electricity. “Before you go, want a demonstration of my newest invention? The Fenton Ghost Freezer 2.0 is ready for action!”

“No thanks, Dad!” Danny shoved his dad out the door and closed it.

Sam groaned. “Ugh, I forgot my parents are meeting with some business partner about a trip we’re going on this week. Dinner with them is going to be dreadful.”

“That sucks, sorry Sam.” Danny knew how much Sam hated having to go to fancy dinners with her parents.

“Yeah, well, at least I’ll get out of school for the next few days.” Sam stood up and grabbed her spider backpack off the back of her chair.

“Lucky!” Tucker said.

“Yup. Anyways, cya dorks later!” Sam waved and walked out the door.

“Cya!” Danny closed the door behind her.

As soon as the door shut, Danny turned to Tucker. “Okay so I know it’s probably stupid but what if we went to Payless just to see if Kwan’s story checks out?”

“If it does, would you be too cool for…” Tucker hesitated and looked down at the controller in his hands, “video games?”

“Of course not!” Danny sat back down next to Tucker and put a hand on his shoulder. “You know, you are my favorite person.”

Tucker looked up, brown eyes shining in delight.

“I’m your favowite person?” Tucker asked jokingly.

Danny laughed and nodded. He hoped Tucker didn’t notice him blushing. “Yeah, dude. We’re a team, and we’re gonna get through this high school shit together.”

“Yeah! Team Phantom can conquer anything.”

“That’s right.” Danny picked up his controller. “Before we go, wanna play one more level?”

“Heck yes!”

___

Several minutes later, the two boys high-fived after completing the level.

“Okay, time to go to the mall.” Danny got up out of his chair.

“Yup!” Tucker stood up and Danny held the door open for him.

The two boys walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. Danny’s dad was too busy working on an invention at the kitchen table to notice their arrival. Danny cleared his throat and Jack looked up.

“Hey, kids!”

“Hi. Um. We’re gonna go get dinner at the mall.” Danny tugged at Tucker’s sleeve and started walking towards the door.

“Alright, be back by curfew!” Jack called.

Danny nodded and walked with Tucker out the door.

“Should we fly?” Danny asked.

“Sure!”

Danny and Tucker turned into a nearby alley and Danny went ghost, his white transformation rings lighting up late afternoon dimness.

“Grab on, Phantom Airlines is departing now.”

Tucker laughed and hugged Phantom from the back. He felt a slight coolness on his cheeks as he blushed- he cursed the cold ectoplasm coursing through his ghostly body that made him blush green- when he felt Tucker’s warm arms wrap around his chest. Phantom’s legs switched to a spectral tail as they took off towards the mall.

They flew in comfortable silence for the short trip to the Amity Park Mall. The city below them was also quiet and peaceful as the sun started to set on the horizon. Phantom was glad it seemed like there wasn’t going to be any ghost fights this evening.

He touched down gently at an empty edge of the mall’s parking lot and Tucker covered for him as he detransformed in a flash of light partially behind a tree.

Inside, the mall wasn’t very crowded at this time of day on a school night. Danny saw some A-Listers hanging around as they passed the food court, but none of them noticed as Danny and Tucker walked by on their way to Payless.

As they passed Sam’s favorite goth store, Danny regretted not waiting for her to be free to come with them.

“Sam would probably think this is a bad idea, right?” Danny asked. Tucker was looking in the window of the games store they were walking by.

“Oh for sure. I’m not even one hundred percent sure about this but I’m here for you, man.” Tucker elbowed Danny affectionately.

“Thanks.”

Danny felt the buzz of a ghost shield as he crossed the entrance of the Payless Shoes store. He remembered his parents had installed one there after the Box Ghost had terrorized the shoeboxes there a few too many times. The store was pretty much empty when they walked in- with the only sign of life being the bored-looking cashier behind the counter.

Danny stepped past the racks of shoes and tapped the countertop to get the cashier’s attention. The cashier’s haircut and sullen face reminded him a bit of Johnny 13. He looked up at Danny with a flicker of recognition.

“Let’s see the money.”

“What?” Danny was pretty sure that’s not how a normal store interaction was supposed to work.

“It’s from Japan. It’s a gray oblong pill- quantum nanotechnology CPU,” the cashier recited. “The quantum computer in the pull will travel through your blood until it implants in your brain and it tells you what to do.”

“How did you know that’s why I’m here?” Danny was starting to get creeped out by this guy.

“Just look at you.” He motioned towards Danny. That was fair, Danny thought. “Do you have the four hundred?”

“Four?”

“Is that a problem?”

Danny thought about Kwan’s sales pitch. “There’s a guy at my school charging-” Tucker grabbed Danny’s shoulder to stop him. Danny looked at Tucker for a second, confused, and then realized why. “Oh, right. Yes, I have four hundred.”

After taking the cash, the cashier led Danny through a curtain to the back of the store. The guy traced a finger past the shoeboxes that lined the walls of the narrow room until he stopped, pulled out a box, and presented it to Danny.

It looked… like a normal shoebox. With a confused glance up at the cashier, Danny opened the lid and saw it was filled with small gray pills. The cashier plucked a pill from the box and held it up with two fingers.

“For your information, this is untested, illegal technology. I take no responsibility for what you might do with it. Or what it might do to you.”

Danny considered the tiny pill in the cashier’s hand. “What it might do to me?”

The cashier ignored him and continued. “You have to take it with Mountain Dew to activate it. Don’t know why. There’s just something about Mountain Dew.”

“Okay…” Danny grabbed the pill and shoved it into his pocket.

“And this is important-”

“Excuse me?” A girl’s voice said. The curtain to the room opened and Ashley appeared.

“We’re sold out!” The cashier shouted. Danny winced.

“Of… shoes?” Ashley pointedly looked at the shelves lining the walls.

“Oh, right. Shoes. Yes, we do have those.” The cashier turned to Danny and ushered him through the curtain and out of the room. “Get out of here.”

“Wait, didn’t you say there was something important I needed to know?”

The cashier, who had already been hovering near Ashley, turned back to Danny. “Oh yeah. All sales are final.”

Danny heard the cashier and Ashley discussing some new shoes as he and Tucker walked out of the store.

“Should we grab some food?” Danny asked.

Tucker looked up from his PDA. “Sure, I could go for some chili fries.”

As they started heading toward the mall food court, Danny kept checking his pocket to make sure the mysterious pill was still there.

#danny phantom #be more ghost #danny phantom fanfiction #my fic #my art

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mathsbian · 1 year ago

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You know what I was thinking about last night?

In the US, we pay into various accounts that are set up by the government to help us out later if/when we need it. These include unemployment insurance (UI), social security retirement benefits, and social security disability benefits (SSDI). These accounts are directly connected to how long you have worked and the amount of money you were paid, and are only for you to access.

We also pay into programs that are for anyone who needs them, no work required to get assistance. These include social welfare programs like SNAP (food stamps) and TANF (cash assistance for families with children so they can buy clothes for their kids and stuff that isn’t covered by SNAP) and SSI, which is another kind of disability insurance but is specifically for poor disabled people who are possibly still working but can’t afford their cost-of-living expenses which are higher than the average person thanks to their disability.

If you want to get money from SNAP or TANF, you have to prove that you need it. The government will be checking if you have a job and how much you get paid, they’ll look at your bank accounts to see how much money you have on hand, you send them copies of bill statements to prove your expenses eat up most or all of your income. Since SSI is a similar program, I can understand why there’s hoops to jump through to get money from that program.

However, if you want money from your UI account or your social security retirement account, you pretty much just have to tell the government you’re in the group that account is for now. For UI, you have to show you’re still looking for new work (at least in my state) but it’s a very lax requirement compared to the requirements for SNAP/TANF. I’m not entirely sure how one goes about collecting their retirement benefits but I assume it involves a similar process of filing with the government that you’ve retired instead of being between jobs, and they’re only check that that admission from you is true.

SSDI, though? You pay into that account your entire career. But then if you suddenly need the money, you have to go through a ridiculously complicated and drawn out process to be approved. UI approval takes a week at most in my state. I assume retirement benefits get approved in under a year at the very most. But getting approved for SSDI when you don’t have one of the limited diagnoses that automatically qualify you (and not even just a diagnosis in the list, a diagnosis with the right stipulations such as mental health conditions having to be present for over two years without much documented improvement despite consistent treatment)? That can take up to TWO YEARS because they can just deny you over and over again and force you to appeal the decision as many as like 5 times, and each appeal has a 6 month waiting period. And on top of that, once you stop working, the account starts counting down to self-destruction. You only have so much time before you lose access to the money entirely. If I am not found disabled on this application (I’m halfway through all the possible appeals), I will not be able to get my SSDI money AT ALL.

It’s fucking bullshit. I paid into that account so I would have money set aside for if I became disabled. I don’t have to prove I need the unemployment money, which I’m no longer qualified to receive, they’ll basically give it to me no questions asked. But when I’m disabled and barely scraping by for years I keep getting told that “actually from our review of your case it seems like you totally can have a desk job, go fuck yourself” despite me constantly including the detail that I cannot sit upright at a desk for more than an hour without needing to lie down completely flat for two hours immediately after. It’s MY MONEY. They’re not saving it for someone else, they’re going to just eat it if I don’t get it, why can’t they just GIVE IT TO ME???

#disability #us politics #ssdi #disability benefits #disabled things #fibromyalgia #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #poverty #vent

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she-posts-nerdy-stuff · 7 months ago

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Don't Go Blindly Into the Dark

Summary:

To hide that he can't read, Jan Van Eck has been forcing his son to pretend he's blind since he was eight years old. Wylan is now attending Ketterdam University, and meeting Jesper Fahey may very well be about to change his life. But is he safe to tell Jesper the truth? And what will Jesper say if he does?

Jesper is struggling to weigh up his life in the Barrel and his life at the University of Ketterdam, and there's a good chance that his growing debt is about to make the decision for him. He hasn't attended class consecutively for months, but maybe that will change when his newest project includes partnering up with Wylan Van Eck. But can he really leave the Barrel behind him? And how long can he keep up the pretence of who he thinks Wylan wants him to be?

Content warnings for this chapter: implied violence, threats, implied sa references

@justalunaticfangirl

If anyone else would like to be tagged let me know :)

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55445686/chapters/140788939

Chapter 3 - Nina

“So just to be clear,” said Nina, leaning back in her chair and studying Kaz across the desk, “All you want us to do is act like students? What the hell kind of job is this?”

Nina had been in Ketterdam for five months, and she’d considered strangling Kaz Brekker with her bare hands about three times in each of them. And considering that she could just stop his heart if she wanted to, it was a particular statement to just how infuriating he was that she would be willing to put in the effort of strangling him. She’d told him that once, and he took it as a compliment.

“You heard me,” he picked up one of the forged papers Nina and Inej had brought in with them, that were now sitting on his desk, “Use your own names, it’s only more suspicious if you get caught not answering to a fake and no-one there should recognise you anyway,”

“You might have told us that before Specht drew the papers up,” Inej sighed, “Will he be able to change them?”

“Should be,” Kaz tapped the corner of the page in his hand against the desk, and Nina caught her gaze flicking to his black leather gloves, “All you need to do is act like you belong and try to get close to the mark,”

The mark. Nina had thought she spoke Kerch when she landed in this Saintsforsaken city, but talking to Kaz and the rest of the Barrel may as well have been learning a brand new dialect.

“For how long?”

“As long as proves necessary,”

Nina really was going to strangle this boy. She sighed.

“You’ll have to subsidise my income,”

“You’ll get paid when they job’s done,”

“That’s not good enough,” she said smoothly, ignoring the glance Inej shot her, “You can’t put me out of work for an indeterminate amount of time and not expect me to need the money for it,”

Nina was scraping by as it was. Her salary from the White Rose wasn’t bad, though it could be better, but her commission from the Tailoring was appallingly low and any spare cash she managed to strap together quickly drained away in the endeavours she was refusing to believe she’d reached a dead end in. Kaz nodded.

“We’ll discuss it,”

Inej leaned forwards to collect one of the papers, saying something to Kaz. Nina couldn’t help but wonder why the girl had been put on this job - this wasn’t her specialty, far as Nina could tell, and it didn’t seem to make any difference to the job whether there were one or two of them working on it. Mind you, Nina was glad to know she’d have company and Inej was about the best company she could have hoped for.

“It’s listed in your application that you’ll require a tutor for written Kerch,” Kaz was telling her, “But I can pull that if you feel you don’t need it,”

Inej glanced at Nina. She spoke Kerch perfectly well, though Nina knew she’d learnt most of it at the Menagerie and there were occasional gaps in her knowledge even of words she would use every day at home - as well a collection of words she only knew in Kerch, that no classroom ever would have taught her - but she was still learning to read the language. Nina had been trying to help her, but she wasn’t convinced that her calling was as a teacher and sometimes wondered if she was actually hindering her.

“Up to you,” said Nina, in Ravkan, “If you think-”

“Excuse me,” Kaz interrupted in cool Kerch, tapping the table, “Perhaps we can keep this discussion in a language we all understand?”

“Perhaps you could bother to learn another language,” Nina muttered in Ravkan, winking at Inej when she saw her smile.

Making Inej smile felt like winning something; she didn’t seem to have reason to smile nearly often enough. Kaz finished giving them the bare bones of the plan, which was really no more information than they already had or could have guessed at, and Nina and Inej left his office with copies of their enrolment papers in hand.

“Will Feliks really be happy to let you go for an indeterminate time?” asked Inej, as they walked downstairs together.

Not a chance. But he wouldn’t have much of a say in it.

“I don’t think ‘happy’ would be the right word,” she sighed, “but it’s Haskell who has the last word on wherever I go, and Kaz’s word is an extension of his. Feliks is just my employer, he’s not the one I’m in debt to,”

Inej’s shoulders squared, perhaps uncomfortably, and Nina cursed herself for not biting her tongue a sentence sooner. But the moment passed quickly, and they continued walking together in easy comfort. Nina checked the time - eight bells. She’d have to get back. Inej walked her to the door of the Slat, and as they reached the front Nina briefly squeezed her fingers before she made to leave.

“Sleep,” she told her.

Inej smiled.

“I will if you will,”

Nina shivered as she stepped into the evening air; even her jumper was not enough to keep the cold away. Ketterdam she thought dismissively, rubbing a hand up and down one of her arms. She sighed. This job was making her nervous - it sounded suspiciously easy. What was Kaz after? And what was he getting them into this time?

“Hey gorgeous,”

Nina looked up to see Jesper crossing towards her, and gave him a smile.

“Hey. How’s the arm?”

She nodded vaguely at the spot a little above Jepser’s elbow, where she’d fixed a bullet graze for him not too long ago. Seemingly unconsciously, his hand found the point on his sleeve that the freshly closed skin was hiding beneath and his fingers ran along it.

“Good as new,” he smiled.

“Well,” Nina winked, “I am good,”

Jesper smiled. He was wearing a shockingly dull outfit for him - the only splash of colour, the shimmer of the gems in his mismatched gold and silver rings - and he wasn’t wearing his gun belt. It only took a brief glance to realise he was still carrying his prized revolvers, Nina would probably have been concerned for his health if he wasn’t, but they were hidden beneath his jacket and she wondered why.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, before she could get her own questions in.

Nina avoided the Slat and the Crow Club whenever she could; this hellhole was a means to an end and she didn’t need to sink any lower into it than she already had.

“Talking to Kaz about a job. Where’ve you been?”

“Hell,” he said drily, “But as much as I’d love to chat, I have a shift to get to and I want to get changed before it starts,”

“Don’t let me keep you,” she replied, hopping down the last few steps, “I’ll see you soon,”

It wasn’t a particularly short walk back to the White Rose. Nina headed North as she left the Slat, following the canals as she moved from East Stave onto West. Here the world changed. The streets were alive, because they were alive at almost every hour, with tourists and locals alike dressed in every colour under the sun, their faces hidden beneath masks of the Komedie Brute. It was said - and Nina more than believed it - that the normality of the masks gave people confidence like nothing else. They were themselves, once they were hiding. People would come to West Stave looking for oblivion, sometimes even just to watch the crowds more than sample any of the entertainment for themselves. Or at least that’s what plenty of them liked to claim, anyway. Nina was less convinced by that.

She slipped along the edge of a crowd, trying to dodge between patrons clamouring for attention or downing the drink that was finally going to tip them over into too many. Someone dressed as the Scarab Queen dropped an empty bottle and giggled when it shattered at their feet, whilst Nina tried to pick her way through the broken glass and keep moving. On her way back yesterday, she’d found her arm grabbed by a masked stranger and had to panickedly plunge his heartbeat and knock him out before she hurried onwards, but it seemed she would be luckier today as Goedmed bridge came into view ahead and Nina knew she was almost back. She had to catch herself from thinking almost home. It was an easy habit to slip into, when referring to the place you slept every night. But Nina was several long weeks of travelling away from home, and she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to go back.

A street performer was shouting something to a gathering crowd, drawing attention with close-up magic tricks before he made some grand announcement and splayed his hands towards an explosion of glitter. When the purple monstrosity had cleared enough that only a shimmer was left in the air, the crowd gasped and applauded at the apparently magical appearance of an acrobat dangling over the canal. A Suli girl, younger than Nina, hanging upside down from a collection of wires with her slender body barely covered by more purple glitter and alarmingly thin scraps of fake silk, her extended arm revealing the swirling tattoo of the Willow Switch. Nina shuddered, and kept walking.

The White Rose almost looked more like one of the grand townhouses than it did a brothel; tall and slender, with its own dock, a pale facade, and a magnificent collection of white-petaled roses growing up the walls. The smell of the flowers was cloying, hanging over everything and refusing to let go. Nina may very well be stuck smelling of them for the rest of her life, even if she did ever get out of this town.

“My house girls are as sweet as my roses,” Feliks had told her when she first moved in, clapping his hand over her shoulder uncomfortably.

It had been clear even then that it was a line he liked to feed, but Nina had also since learnt that the roses he used - according to Kaz, the only ones that were strong enough to survive year-round in the hardy weather of Ketterdam - were naturally scentless. Every flower was perfumed by hand, on constant rotation, by the boys and girls in white uniforms who tended to food and drink or anything else clients might need beyond what they had really come for. Some of them were indentured; Nina didn’t know how many, but considering the number of the house girls who were thus she guessed it was a good number. Then again, if that was the case then why did Feliks just have them perfuming roses? His facade was thin enough for her to feel certain he’d be making proper money off the kids if he could. It was part of Nina’s job to Tailor them, paling their skin and turning their hair and irises a vague white - in Feliks’ own words, so that all the decor matched. She slipped them cash, if she could spare it, whilst they were in with her, same with the occasional house girl who needed Healing. It didn’t happen often, but it happened.

But the White Rose was undeniably safer than most, if not all, of the other houses on the Stave - for Nina, at the very least, and as much as it gnawed anxiously in her gut she had to keep herself alive and safe before she started trying to do the same for anyone else - and she had not borne witness to anything like the stories she’d heard of the buildings opposite her and down the street. The girls here were safer, even if they weren’t safe.

She couldn't go through the front door looking like this - messy and out of costume and so on - so she slipped down the side of the building. She actually wasn’t sure if she was supposed to use the front at all; she never had because she never left or returned to the building in the fake kefta she couldn’t enter the lobby without. She’d only seen girls use the front door when clients who’d paid to take them from the building were whisking them away or returning them again, arms often slipped through arms, the girls’ fake giggles and batting lashes somehow fooling them. Maybe they were just willing to be fooled, ready to ignore anything that would crack their illusion. That was what they came for, wasn’t it? A pretty lie. Oblivion.

As she reached the back of the building, the ugly outline of the Menagerie came into view on the other side of the canal; taller than most of the buildings surrounding it, structured like a tiered birdcage. It was the largest and most expensive house on the Stave, shimmering even as darkness began to close its heavy blanket over the city like a forest fire reflected by a mirrorball. How long since Inej left that place - six months? Seven? Maybe a little longer; she had already seemed to trust Kaz Brekker - if trust was really the right word - when she appeared through a window at the Emerald Palace five months ago and convinced Nina not to take the deal Pekka Rollins’ was offering her. She probably owed Inej her life, for that. Or maybe Kaz, but that was the far more disappointing option of the two.

Most of it was obscured by other buildings across the canal but where the lower floor of the Menagerie was almost entirely open, held up the columns that became akin to the bars of the birdcage, Nina could see the blurring edge of a girl lying on a sofa. Someone in the red cape of Mr Crimson approached and she slipped her hand into theirs as she sat up slowly, her neckline slipping off her shoulder. The wind picked up and blew goosebumps down Nina’s neck as she turned quickly away to slip through the back door, her mind foolishly concerned that the girl was going to catch a cold in those scant silks.

“Nina,” began Adrian, as soon as she stepped inside.

“I know,” she breathed, quickly hurrying towards the staff staircase, “I’m a little late, but I was with Brekker. I have half an hour, it’ll be fine,”

“No, it’s not that,” he sounded nervous.

Nina turned back to face him. Adrian was about two years younger than Nina, she reckoned, and before she’d started Tailoring him his wide, dark eyes had made him look akin to a doe. Now they were pale and slightly unnerving, but as someone for whom Tailoring did not come as easily as it did others she thought she’d done a decent job. He fidgeted with the sleeve of his white shirt, threatening to mark the cuffs if he wasn’t careful.

“He scheduled you three more clients, this evening,”

Nina resisted the urge to scream. When had she last slept? Apparently it would have to wait. The rich of Ketterdam having their minds relaxed and their emotions altered took precedence over anything else, and definitely her.

“Fine. Who?”

“That might be the concerning part,” Adrian shuffled, “Two folks from the Zelvar District, one who’s been before, one I didn’t recognise,”

Not much of a problem. And if it was a first visit then maybe it would be more of a consultation about what they wanted than it would be actually altering moods. Maybe it would be marginally less tiring. But Adrian still looked nervous, and his voice had trailed away.

“The third?” she prompted.

Adrian bit his lip.

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drabblesandimagines · 2 years ago

Text

Bumblebee

For an anon reader request - please read for a little more detail. Pairings: Rei x you

“I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to stop my precious baby sister from continuing down this path of criminal activity!” Kazuki has tears in his eyes. It’s taking everything in you not to roll your eyes in exasperation, trying to work out exactly how you ended up in this predicament.

Tiredness had made you sloppy and you were furious at yourself. About a week ago, the police had been tipped off to your syndicate’s base. It was petty crime compared to some of the other things you knew happened in the city – pickpockets, shoplifters, occasionally you pulled off a bigger heist but nothing too bad. A disused office building had been home for a good few years, heck, you’d even made one of the old units into what some might’ve considered a bedroom. You’d been out around the regular tourist spots when a text came through from an unknown number. “Base breached. Do not return.” You knew the higher ups would be working on some new accommodation - that is at least if they hadn’t been arrested – and chasing out the rat, but in the meanwhile you had to keep your head down low and put up with sleeping out. Originally, the thought hadn’t phased you – you’d done it a fair few times in your teens on first leaving the orphanage - but the first night you realized how much you’d come to appreciate your office bedroom, knowing you weren’t exposed. The result was patchy half-sleep on cold concrete, arms clamped around the rucksack which held everything you still owned.

You’d been in this particular mall a few times now, taking from different shops to then try and trade things down the market for some petty cash for food. The lack of decent sleep finally took its toll though as you didn’t quite clock the camera right above you as you slipped the perfume into your pocket. It wasn’t long after that than there was the steel grip of the security guard on your shoulder, escorting you to the back office.

“Now, young lady, tell me what this is all about, hmm?” He’s laid out the items you’d secreted into your jacket and bag in front of you. It’s all stuff you can easily resell. “Surely you have a bright future ahead of you that doesn’t involve any of this.”

You realise he thinks you’re much younger than you are and you can work this to your advantage – you’re pushing 24 now, but he’s taken your youthful appearance as a teenager at best.

Cue the waterworks. “I’m so sorry, sir. Please forgive me, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a silly dare and I don’t know what came over me!”

“A dare?” He raises an eyebrow.

“From some kids at school. I can’t believe I let them press me into something so foolish and illegal. Oh, sir, I beg of you, college applications are so soon, I can’t believe I’ve ruined my life before it’s even begun!” You blub.

“Now, now”, he tries to soothe. “I think we can write off this as a youthful indiscretion, but I need you to call your guardian to come and collect you.” He slides over your mobile phone that he’s retrieved from your rucksack that he confiscated whilst looking for stolen goods. “You dial, I’ll speak to them.” Shit. Your mind whirs over who to call. You can’t call your boss – you’d never hear the end of it. You can’t call your parents because, well, they don’t exist… There’s one person you could call.

You load up the contact and slide it back over. “Kazuki Kurusu?” He reads.

“Mm. He’s my big brother.”

It’s been a few months since you last saw him. Life’s been a little busy. He’s not really your older brother, of course, you met in the orphanage when you were four and he was eight and you’d started following him around like a lost puppy. After you’d apparently pestered him enough, he began to dote on you and the pair of you become inseparable, calling each other brother and sister. The caregivers tried to nip it in the bud. Didn’t you want to be adopted? The interested parties didn’t want two children, they just wanted a sweet little girl, but you weren’t going to be swayed. Any and all attempts at fostering you were swiftly quelled due to your incessant crying about ‘big brother Zuki’.

The two of you had stuck together up until he turned 18 and the state no longer had to care for him. Kazuki was dumped out onto the street where he was recruited - as most kids who didn’t end up being adopted from that particular orphanage - by a local gang who offered shelter and food for participating in their grifts and cons. Contact between the two of you became infrequent for a while. Kazuki wasn’t allowed to visit but he’d try and catch you on the way home from school when he wasn’t on the job. He’d spoken about you coming to live with him when you turned 18, that you’d not end up like him and had a solid start to adult life…

But, when the time came, Kazuki had entered into a whirlwind romance. He was married and there was a baby on the way and you didn’t fit in the picture anymore – and that was fine. It was always a bit of a pipe dream. When you turned 18, your then-boyfriend recruited you in with his local gang – they said you had the perfect, sweet face not to be suspected of any wrongdoing and taught you everything you needed to know about surviving on the streets. You kept in contact, sporadically – meeting up every once in a while. There was some radio silence after his wife and unborn child died and you didn’t press him. Eventually, he popped up again trying to mother you but you were fine, you didn’t need it. You knew he’d moved in with someone and had redirected his nurturing elsewhere.

“Hey, bumblebee!” Kazuki’s cheerful voice came down the line and you cringed. Of course he was still calling you that.

“Mr Kurusu?” The security guard enquires down the phone. “I’m afraid I have your sister in the security office here…”

About 20 minutes later, he appears in the office, looking flustered and wearing an apron but still the same old Kazuki. He’s left the house in a hurry and you feel a slight twang of guilt that despite your sporadic contact, he’ll still drop everything to come to your rescue. You offer a hesitant smile, not quite sure how to play this off. He stares at you, distraught.

“I am so sorry, sir.” Kazuki bows his head to the security guard. “Please forgive my little sister. She’s not normally like this at all, I assure you.”

“Yes, well, she seems a bright young girl.” You have no idea where the security guard is basing this assumption on, but you know Kazuki will run with it.

“Oh, she is! Papa and Mama had such high hopes for her career aspirations but ever since they died, her upbringing has rested on my shoulders and I have failed her as her guardian.” Kazuki begins to sob, holding up his apron to his eyes.

“Sir, please,” the security guard places a hesitant hand on his shoulder. “The store won’t be going any further with this – ah, what should we call it? - indiscretion. I trust you and Miss Kurusu here to make the right decisions from now on.”

Kazuki gains control of his sobs and smiles weakly as he dabs his face clear of tears. You need to congratulate him after, this is some A+ acting he’s developed.

“I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to stop my precious baby sister from continuing down this path of criminal activity! Sister, thank this kind man for his understanding.”

You get to your feet and nod politely. “Thank you. I will never forget your forgiveness and compassion, sir. I’ve truly learned my lesson – seeing the upset on my dear brother’s face is punishment enough.”

“Good.” The security guard smiles and escorts the two of you to the front door, watching as Kazuki leads you to a yellow car – typical Kazuki – and opens the passenger seat door. You get in and he goes over to the driver’s side, waving at the security guard before starting the engine and heading out of the mall’s parking lot. You wait until the building’s disappeared in the rearview mirror before you speak up.

“Thanks for that. Just drop me off anywhere, I can find my way.”

He scoffs. “And find your way to where, exactly?”

“Wherever.” You shrug.

A pause. “Are you sleeping rough, bumblebee?”

You roll your eyes, “I’m a little old for that nickname now, aren’t I?”

“Don’t think you can skirt around the question.”

“Just between accommodations this week – I’ll be fine.” You can’t lie to him, he knows all your tells.

“Mm, you look in need of a good meal and a good night’s sleep – both of which you can get at my apartment. Plus, you can meet your niece.”

“My what now?”

“I’m back!” Kazuki calls as he opens the front door to the apartment. You’re not even a step in and you can tell it’s fancy – way fancier than anything you’ve ever stayed. You’ve never been back here before – it’s usually been a café that Kazuki likes to frequent when you did meet in person.

There’s a man sat on the couch, messy black-hair, dressed in shorts and a white t-shirt with a cat on it and he looks pretty cute. He’s absorbed in the video game he’s playing on a wide-screen TV.

Kazuki has his arm around your shoulders again as he enthusiastically introduces you to his room-mate Rei, who pauses his game to stare at you.

He’s easy on the eyes, that’s for sure. “Hi.” You wave.

“You’ve never mentioned a sister before.” He frowns.

“Sure I have! You just don’t listen - bumblebee, remember?”

He stares at you again for a moment then there’s a look of realization. “Bumblebee’s a girl?”

“Yes… Wait, what did you think?”

“I thought it was a bee.”

“You… You thought all those stories I told you about my childhood was me and an actual bee?” Rei nods. “I don’t understand what goes on in your head sometimes.”

“I mean, I’m not really your sister either, Zuki.” You try and shrug out from underneath his arm but his grip remains tight.

“How can you say that? The bond we forged is stronger than any blood ties!”

“Still as dramatic as ever.” You look over at Rei. “How do you put up with this?”

He shrugs, eyes back on the screen. You take a look at what he’s playing and recognize it immediately – Morio Kart. They’d had a games console set up in the communal area in the base – pilfered from a lorry you hijacked and you often spent the night playing. “Ohhh, nice hit.” You compliment as he takes out another racer, sitting down besides him, earning you a smug grin.

Rei goes to pick up Miri from daycare whilst Kazuki fills you in on the last few months, though a little bit scarce on some details. That’s Kazuki though, if he thought you really needed to know, he’d tell you. Miri is a whirlwind from the second she gets home from daycare, but it’s clear Kazuki is in his absolute element with her.

The little girl stares up at you in wonder as Kazuki introduces the two of you. “She’s sorta like Papa Kazuki’s little sister, which makes her your auntie. I called her bumblebee when we were growing up.”

“Auntie Bee!” She squeals.

“Er, no,” you try and correct her with your real name, but now she’s running around the apartment, pretending to be a bee, wanting you to chase her. You know you’ve lost the battle before it even begun and Kazuki finds it hilarious. “Auntie Bee it is, I guess.” But, deep down, you don’t hate it.

You eat dinner together, Miri insists you join her Papa Kazuki for a story before bed and you can’t wipe the smile off the face as the two of you come back downstairs.

“You’ve got a real sweet thing going on here.”

“I’ve fallen on my feet, right enough.” He says wistfully, before his face turns serious. “Are you okay, though?” You know he wants to ask what you’re doing for work, how you’re surviving, but he probably doesn’t want to hear the real answer. He can’t contradict when you both live the wrong side of the tracks.

“I’m fine - promise. You do you, I do me.” You wrap your arms around his waist in a hug. “I have missed you though, Zuki.”

“Mm,” he hugs you back. “Let’s not leave it so long.”

He sets you up with spare blankets and a pillow for the sofa, lecturing Rei not to stay up too late and game when you’re trying to sleep, but you’re already a fair few matches deep with him to care and, to be honest, you wouldn’t mind spending some alone time with the man – he’s definitely very easy on the eyes.

“Oh, and Rei sleeps in the bathroom.” Kazuki calls as he heads up the stairs. “Don’t ask.”

“You do?” You raise an eyebrow at the man but he shrugs, taking advantage of Kazuki’s distraction to shoot by you on the second lap. “Hey!”

The matches are competitive, but between them you still find any excuse to put your hand on him – his shoulder, his arm, his thigh… It gets him a little flustered and you find it cute. It’s often up to the final lap as the two of you switch between first and second place. This time, Rei takes it and he playfully sticks his tongue out at you as he takes the win.

“Hm, you just got lucky.” You cross your arms in defiance.

“Sure I did. Another?”

“I think I need some inspiration – what does the winner get?”

“Bragging rights.”

“Nah, I need more than that.”

“Like what?” He sounds puzzled.

“Like…” you bite your lip, you’ve always been a shameless flirt. “If I win, you take me out for pizza.”

“Oh?” His cheeks flush a little, but he keeps his eyes on the game menu. “I guess I could do that.”

“What do you want if you win?”

“If I win, you take me to the arcades.”

“Deal.”

The next championship is neck and neck. You take the first race, full of determination, but Rei brings it back in the second. The final race is a constant switching of first and second, throwing items at each other. The finish line is in sight when your character slips on a banana peel timed perfectly by Rei, sending you crashing off into the side and three CPUs fly ahead of you. You know you’ve lost then – there’s no item blocks left and there’s no way you can get ahead of them all in time. Rei, however, is about to cross the finish line, so just before he can you yank the controller out of his hands and send his character spinning off into the wall. A CPU goes over the line but that’s the last you see as Rei tackles you off the couch.

You’re trapped between his thighs as he snatches the controller out of your hands and drives over the line in a measly fifth. He glares down at you as you grin.

“Sorry, I probably should’ve mentioned I’m a sore loser.”

He says nothing. You try and sit up but you’re firmly wedged between his legs and there’s no give. “Er, can I get up now?”

He grins, slyly. “I think I’ve changed my mind of what I get if I win.”

“Oh?”

“I think the victor deserves a kiss.”

You feel blood rush to your cheeks at that but you’re keen. “Oh, yeah?”

“Mm.”

“See, I’m not sure if you can just change the rules like that right at the end.”

“You tried to cheat, call it a forfeit.” He sits back, finally allowing you to sit up right.

“Hmm. Well, I guess I did, and we never did discuss what should happen if one of us cheated.” You’re leaning in as you speak, getting closer and closer.

“Are you two still up?!” Kazuki hisses in a theatrical whisper from his bedroom door and you bump heads together in fright.

“Ugh… No, no, just going to bed.” You whisper back to the blonde as Rei gets to his feet, sheepishly rubbing his forehead where the two of you collided.

Kazuki’s door closes back over and you smile at Rei. “Busted.”

“Lucky escape for you.”

“My big brother does always have my back…” You step up on your tiptoes and give him a kiss on the cheek. “Goodnight, Rei.”

“Goodnight,” he smiles shyly, heading to the bathroom. You collapse on the couch and sigh contentedly into a pillow.

You wake up early to your phone buzzing with a text. It’s a location – it looks like either a rendezvous point to be taken to the new base, or the base itself but you know you need to get there pretty quick either way. You grab a piece of paper from Miri’s colouring pile and write down a message for Kazuki, thanking him for putting you up for the night. There’s a moment’s hesitation before you write your phone number down on another piece of paper, before sliding it under the bathroom door.

“Sneaking out?” Kazuki’s voice chimes from the staircase. How in the hell did he do that without you noticing?

“No, afraid work beckons. I was leaving a note though, see?” You hold up the piece of paper in evidence.

“Good.” He walks over and pulls you into a hug. “Promise it won’t take another trip to a security guard’s office until we see each other again?”

“Mm-hm,” you nod, staring at the bathroom door behind him. “You’ll get sick of the sight of me.”

A few days later, as evening rolls in and Miri’s getting ready for bed, there’s a knock at the door and Rei is apparently keen to answer it. Kazuki doesn’t think much of it at first – maybe it’s a game he pre-ordered or something – but he hears more conversation at the door from Rei than he’s used to over the years of living with him.

You’re standing at the door, smiling as Rei puts his shoes on.

“Back so soon?” Kazuki chuckles.

“Actually, Rei and I are going to play some games at the arcade.” You shrug, trying to spin a casual air on things.

“The arcade?!” Miri manages through a yawn, “Can I come?”

“Not this time, kiddo. It’s your bedtime.” Rei ruffles her hair and she pouts.

“We’ll go when you’re more awake, how about that?” You soothe, crouching down to her level and she nods. Kazuki clocks how Rei’s smiling at you and he puts two and two together in alarm.

“Hey, buddy…” he warns, “you are not going on a date with my sister!”

“Mm, not really your sister…” You tease, turning around to head to the elevator. Rei goes to follow you before he pauses.

“It is a date though.” He smirks and the door slams shut before Kazuki can react.

He feels Miri tug at his leg.

“Papa Kazuki, when do I get a sister?”

Please see my Masterlist and Requests Welcome posts if you have an idea in mind too!

#ghostdogwrites #buddy daddies fanfic #buddy daddies #requests welcome #rei suwa x reader #reader requests #rei suwa x you #suwa rei x you #suwa rei x reader #kazuki kurusu #miri unasaka

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