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Mastering Guest Posting: Your Ultimate Strategy for Boosting Online Presence
In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, guest posting has emerged as a powerful tool for building a robust online presence, improving SEO rankings, and driving targeted traffic to your website. Suppose you're eager to harness the potential of guest posting to amplify your business's visibility, increase traffic, and enhance your brand's credibility. In that case, you can just read on to find out the strategies, benefits, and opportunities that lie within.
Understanding the Art of Guest Posting
Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, involves creating and publishing articles on other websites within your niche. This practice serves multiple purposes: it helps you establish authority, build quality backlinks, and drive relevant traffic to your website. The process is a mutually beneficial one, allowing host websites to enrich their content while you tap into their audience.
The Essentials: Crafting Compelling Guest Posts
When crafting guest posts, quality reigns supreme. Content must be unique, engaging, and informative, resonating with the host website's target audience. Effective guest posts offer real value, sharing insights, tips, or solutions that demonstrate your expertise. The aim is to create a win-win situation where readers benefit from valuable information while you gain exposure and backlinks.
Identifying the Right Platforms: Guest Posting Sites and Blogs
Finding the right guest posting sites is crucial. Look for websites in your niche that accept guest posts. Conduct keyword searches to uncover relevant platforms that provide opportunities for guest contributions. Notable platforms like HubSpot, Ahrefs, Outbrain, and Ezine Articles offer a range of topics and accept guest submissions, helping you secure a place among industry leaders.
Unlocking Outreach Opportunities
Outreach is key to guest posting success. Reach out to website owners, publishers, and bloggers to propose your guest post ideas. Building relationships within your niche opens doors to guest posting opportunities, expanding your reach and building valuable connections. Remember, a well-crafted outreach message is essential for securing approval.
SEO and Backlinks: The Backbone of Guest Posting
Guest posting is a powerful strategy for generating high-quality backlinks, boosting your website's SEO rankings, and enhancing your online visibility. A guest post on a reputable website with a high Domain Rating (DR) can significantly impact your website's authority and ranking on search engines.
Guest Posting Services: Leveraging Professional Expertise
For those looking to take guest posting to the next level, guest post services provide a viable solution. These services offer a range of options, from crafting well-optimized content to securing placements on high-DR websites. While some services charge for their offerings, others may provide opportunities for free guest posts.
Measuring Success: Monitoring Traffic and Rankings
The beauty of guest posting lies in its traceability. By monitoring website traffic and tracking changes in your SEO rankings after guest posts are published, you can gauge the impact of your efforts. Tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs provide insights into the effectiveness of your guest posting campaigns.
Conclusion: Unleashing the Potential of Guest Posting
In the world of online business, leveraging guest posting is an invaluable strategy for expanding your reach, building backlinks, and establishing your authority. Whether you're a seasoned writer or a business owner seeking to enhance your online presence, guest posting offers a range of opportunities to explore.
As you embark on your guest posting journey, remember that authenticity, quality, and strategic outreach are paramount. By creating and submitting compelling content to reputable platforms, you contribute to the digital community and reap the rewards of increased visibility, traffic, and credibility. So, take the plunge into the world of guest posting and position your business for success in the digital age.
#guest posting#guest blogging#backlinks#SEO strategy#online presence#content marketing#traffic generation#digital outreach#niche authority#link building#SEO optimization#guest post opportunities#guest posting benefits#guest post services#content strategy#online marketing#website rankings#brand credibility#outreach tactics#domain authority
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Effective Email Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
Did you know email marketing can give a big return on investment (ROI) of $52 for every dollar spent1? With 4.48 billion email users worldwide, it’s a strong, affordable way for small businesses to reach their audience, boost sales, and grow their brand. In fact, over 40% of B2B marketers see email as key to marketing success1. As a small business owner, you can use email marketing to build…
#Automated email sequences#Conversion optimization#Digital marketing tactics#Email campaigns#Email marketing strategies#Email marketing tools#Personalized email content#Small Business Marketing#Subscriber engagement#Targeted email outreach
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unfortunately social media puts the activist meeting, the bitching session, the public outreach, the group therapy session, the silly blow off some steam gossiping about people private chat, and the group d&d session all in the same place, and so people mistake, for example, an outpouring of legitimate grief and rage as somehow a public-facing political statement, or a carefully edited and tactical political statement as a reflection of a person's most deeply held private feelings, etc
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DP x DC AU: Danny desperately wants to find the explosion guy. Tim is really good at covering his tracks... he didn't account for ghosts.
The explosions make it onto TV as purported terror activity and most people haven't heard of that part of the world much less ever given a second thought to care about it. The only real reason it gets reported on has something to do with the Justice League and... Danny knows too much.
He's been in training for Clockwork's court (which he's suspicious of- feels like kingly duty bullshit- but Danny is playing along out of curiosity for now) and he's learned a lot about how the living and non-living worlds collide. That means learning about CW's usual suspects- one of which just happened to have a ton of bases around the area Danny was seeing on the news.
It didn't take long for Danny to try to piece together that whoever blew up Nanda Parbat was trying to fuck with the League of Shadows, and was doing it successfully. Less green portals in the world the better, same goes for assassins. But it gets Danny thinking... Maybe he can employ similar tactics on the GIW Bases that keep spawning on the edges of Amity Park. It would at least set them back while he and his friends navigated the help line desk to request Justice League intervention. None of them can leave Amity Park, so outreach is going to have to be creative.
So Danny figures he'll just find the guy. Call up some ghosts who were there, or er, came from there and get a profile and track him down. But the ghosts keep saying it was The Detective. Annoying!
Danny goes full conspiracy theory, gets Tucker and Sam involved, and begrudgingly asks Wes Weston his thoughts.
He hadn't expected Wes to garble out a thirty minute presentation (that had 100 more slides left to go before he cut it off) about how Batman totally trained with a cult and so did his kids. Danny kind of rolled his eyes but... hey, new avenue of searching in the Infinite Realms at least.
The ghosts confirm that Bombs is for sure not Batman's MO- But maybe his second kid would know? The second kid was already brought back to life though, so no way to easily reach him... Danny starts to realize that this might be the work of a Robin now. Wasn't the red one known for solving cold cases? (Sam provides this information- its a social faux pas to not know hero gossip at Gotham Galas- everything she's learned is against her will).
It all comes to a head when Danny goes about the hard task of opening a portal for the guy to come through at just the right time, explain the infinite realms so he doesn't panic and then describe what the fuck was going on with the GIW. It takes months, just over a full year, of random (educated guesses) portal generating- Finally, Red Robin drops into the land of the dead.
"So, you're the guy I've got to talk to about explosions right?" Danny enthusiastically asks.
Tim thinks he's died and landed in the after life following 56 hours of being awake and plummeting off the side of a building into a Lazarus pool. Nothing makes sense about the kid in front of him.
"Yeah, I got a guy for munitions." Tim answers cooly.
"How do you feel about secretly sanctioned government operations that violate protected rights?"
"Gotta get rid of 'em some how. Need me to point you in the right direction?" This might as well be happening.
#dcxdp#dpxdc#dp x dc#dc x dp#danny phantom#long post#tim drake#red robin#tim and danny team up to blow up the GIW au#Tim being known as the explosion guy is my favorite and i will not let this part of his lore go ignored#Jason is the munitions guy obviously and the ghosts go crazy over the gossip it enlights when he helps in amity park#Danny one hundred percent is living for this working relationship- what a weirdo -danny hasn't met someone stranger than himself in a min#tim bartering his services for a few more years of life and danny just pikachu facing him#Tim wants to improve his relations in the afterlife be he still completely thinks hes dead#danny: dude ur still alive#Tim: yeah thats the goal but i'll help you meet your goals first and then we can negotiate#Danny decides to make the guy super ghost rich (thinking big Haunt real estate) and send him home#Tim blows up the GIW with no remorse and with all the data back up for proper justice to be served court side#tim returns from the dead and this is how the bats learn that he's the one who blew up nanda parbat all those years ago#it takes danny so long to find tim bc tim was spiralling and only after bruce got back did he get into a normal routine enough to get got
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Warm Shadows - Carving Through the Dark (3/4)
Collection: Warm Shadows Title: Carving Through the Dark Characters/Pairings: established Alpha!Bucky x f!Omega!Reader, Alpha!Steve x f!Omega!Reader Word Count: 14.4k Summary: Worse than a nightmare because it's real, Bucky has to track down his kidnapped omega and the man - the super soldier - who had been his closest friend turned into the dark, rival alpha, Captain Hydra.
Content Warnings: DARK, a/b/o dynamics, angst, explicit smut, vaginal intercourse, consensual forced orgasm
Logistical Notes: Shhh - yes this was the final story update I had planned for the Dark Forest Fest and it's the first week of January! But. Well. The word count. But we're here now, okay? Title taken from Hozier's Who We Are.
Additional Notes: Okay, I know that I did a poll asking last month if folks wanted the final chapter split into two parts or just one long chapter and - er - I kind of did both. I did not split this chapter, but a couple of days ago I realized we needed a fourth and final part. Lastly, @biteofcherry has been an absolute lifeline during the composition of this chapter - thank you for putting up with my conjectures and letting me piece together some of the elements. And even a little thank you to @rookthorne for cheering and bullying me over how long this got.
↠ Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest
“I can’t help you,” Shuri states, though there’s the flicker of it almost being one final question of it in her eyes.
“No,” Bucky confirms. “No more than you already have.”
He knows she says it as one last opportunity for him to change his mind, but also in acknowledgment that he must do this on his own. They clasp hands and then he turns to walk up the ramp of the aircraft.
“James,” she says when he’s nearly gone. He turns back to look at his friend, one who has seen him at the best and worst of times. “Whoever he is now, he knows Bucky, he knows the Winter Soldier, he will have learned everything about the Soldat from their archives, so you must truly be the White Wolf. She knows the wolf, but he does not.”
He nods and then walks further into the aircraft, leaving Shuri behind.
After you’d been violated and taken from him, Bucky had lain in anguish until just before dawn, raging over the loss of his world and everything he’d worked for, built, found, cherished. He would find you again – when he’d sworn, “There’s no corner of this earth you can go where I won’t find you,” it had been a promise to you as much as a warning to the monster – but none of you three were the same after that night.
To be the White Wolf…
It will take all the tactics he learned in the army, that he was forced to acquire as Hydra’s finest assassin, and since he escaped and then truly reclaimed his freedom. As angry as he is, as desolate as he feels, he holds the emotions at arms’ length, he needs to be at the eye of the hurricane so he can maneuver the way he needs to.
Bucky hasn’t been able to feel you. His desperate hope is that it’s because you’re sedated and unconscious and not … not anything else.
In Wakanda he and Shuri hadn’t been able to find even a sliver of a trace of the jet that had come and gone for Steve to enact his plan. It was a statement that whoever he was now, Captain Hydra was utilizing every ounce of knowledge Steve had and blending it with whatever Hydra hat put in him.
Bucky won’t leave a trail either.
It will take Steve time to figure out how Bucky left Wakanda – on foot, ground transport, or air transport – if he can figure it out. But Bucky was the untraceable ghost over fifty years of missions for Hydra, and he didn’t have the motivation he does now.
Bucky devised that going on the already-scheduled aircraft to the Wakandan Outreach Center in Oakland gave him the best options. He assumes Steve would have managed to get into the networks used by the Avengers and SWORD, and since he flew an aircraft in and out of Wakanda undetected and Bucky won’t be able to use Wakandan technology to best him either, so landing in Oakland also puts him in proximity to the hardware, software, and network resources he would need to build his own tech. During his convalescence in Wakanda before the Infinity War, it had been days of goats and technology research and development in the most advanced science facility in the world. He is not the expert that Shuri is, but he knows enough. His aversion to much of “modern” technology has always been due to how primitive it was compared to anything from Wakanda.
It takes weeks, but Bucky acquires the hardware he needs, modifies software, creates the network and protocols he needs to start Hydra hunting, and puts it all to work. He knows what to look for – the patterns, the seemingly innocuous inconsistencies – and he knows it because he was running data point for the team of analysts dedicated to Hydra hunting before this. He had taken more responsibility at the base of operations and fewer and fewer field assignments to be home and build his life with you.
Bucky doesn’t hesitate in ignoring any ethical limits whatsoever for his surveillance protocols. When he was working within the system, they had established some lines they weren’t willing to cross.
With seven billion humans in existence and him alone looking for two, lines to cross no longer exist.
He knows he will never get his life back, but he will not let anything prevent him from getting you back.
He puts every piece into play immediately as he builds, sleeps only the bare minimum. Truthfully he had only indulged in more than the minimal sleep a super soldier needed these past years because it was time spent blissfully with you. Without a reason to rest, he didn’t have any problem cutting back to short sleep allotments to keep him operating at peak condition.
In putting his own tap into the Avengers’ database, he studies the work that had gone on while he was gone for his annual retreat away with you. He discovers that Steve and Sam followed leads in Europe.
“Damn you idiots,” he murmurs.
The reports show his two friends go dark after losing comms nearly a month ago. A team went in after them and their debrief says they found only their communication devices. ‘Search ongoing…’
That was a month ago.
He knows the status of Steve.
Sam could be a live asset in play, an asset still being trained and molded by Hydra, their prisoner for torture, or he could have been eliminated already.
It takes him sixteen days from the beginning of his build to finish – he’d been collecting intelligence, but once everything is in play and he continues to hone in on incoming results, things progress systematically, satisfyingly, in a foreign familiarity that evokes memories of this time hunting as the Winter Soldier.
Two more days and he’s got enough evidence in the intelligence to confirm you’re somewhere in Europe. Within two hours Bucky recalibrates calculations based the new findings, conducts new searches, gets confirmation of a face on a traffic camera in Gdańsk that looks like Steve, and when he’s able to piece a clear trail that follows him through the city and then to an aircraft that he’s further able to track until it disappears over northern Italy. He knows this for what it is – a trail tempting him closer to the trap. A challenge, an invitation, but only if he can put together more pieces to find you. How many times did he set beautifully complex traps for some of his prize targets when he was the Winter Soldier? Breadcrumbs to entice, to drive his opponent to work harder, to put their prowess to work, to make them feel confident so he could trick, trap, and kill them in the end.
This monster of a man tricked him in Wakanda. It will be the only time. Expert and intricate traps of this sort are something his opponent has been playing with for a few weeks. Bucky has more practice and expertise, infinitely more motivation, and no distractions.
He travels under cover of transports between Wakandan outreach centers from Oakland to Washington DC, and then from Washington to Bilbao. When he touches down in Bilbao, his information relay device has a new lead based off a visual of Steve in a bookshop in Turin twice in the previous week.
He takes the train to Turin. Within twelve hours he finds the location of the Hydra facility, and Bucky makes enough noise to reveal to Hydra that he’s in the city and trigger the personnel to raise the facility to its red alert security status. He plants a false trail indicating that he’s given up and gone further north, all the while watching every aspect of the base, making plans to infiltrate, and ensuring sure none of the vehicles or teams moving in and out look like they’re transporting you somewhere else. They drop to an orange threat level, and then yellow – standard caution and operating procedures.
Bucky would have been floored that they believed he’d missed them in Turin and moved on to search somewhere else, but it spoke to one of the weaknesses of Hydra’s organization: the arrogance. Instead, Bucky hacks into their base network as well as their external communications channels.
This observation, research, recon, and analysis Bucky does not rush. Everything he cares about is at stake. If he’s going to be successful in getting you back there can be no room for error as he’ll be up against Hydra and the only other super soldier on the planet who could potentially match or outmatch him.
And as the weeks wear on, the other thing he cannot deny, that he’d known from the beginning of this nightmare even if he’d wanted to try to ignore it, it that he isn't in this to rescue only you.
When all is said and done, the reality is he has to get Steve back, too.
Bucky knows the longer it takes, the more dangerously close he gets to your next heat. He knows an omega being in a distressed environment will affect the heat cycle. It could bring it on early, or potentially also push you to the extremes of a dry heat depending on the conditions they are keeping you in, and how you’re feeling. Once he determines he knows enough to start putting together a plan of extraction, he also determines it’s too close to when your heat might hit, and he can’t risk trying to extract you if you’re in heat – it becomes an element he can’t predict and ensure that his plan will still be successful.
His own senses are strained with the tenor of your unease in a way that’s different from before. It’s driving his alpha side mad, and he wants to storm the facility and reclaim you, and that’s one more element contributing to the volatility of the situation. He knows he can’t gamble on so many unpredictable elements.
He must wait.
But when he sees Captain Hydra leave in his jet right when Bucky is certain you are close to your heat, Bucky is stunned.
It might be too damn close to your heat, but clearly you’re not in heat yet or the other alpha would not leave you. This was not his plan, but it is a prime opportunity he can’t ignore – not if he can get to you alone and save you from a heat away from him. His heart can’t deny this unexpected opportunity.
After Bucky had hacked into the Hydra base’s network, he’d discovered that the small jet Captain Hydra had exclusive use of had been excluded from all navigational tracking and that the man only communicated by radio with one individual whenever he left. He’d further discovered that Captain Hydra was a weapon still cloaked from most of Hydra, with nothing about him other than his existence as a new asset available on the network. Even his former identity was not yet disclosed or recorded anywhere digitally.
This means Bucky has no idea where the man is going or when he will be back, but he hears Captain Hydra and his liaison discuss and confirm his time of arrival and his estimated time of return. Bucky must work quickly, but there is a window.
As he had not anticipated infiltrating so soon, he still has to finish putting things together for the actual extraction – like transportation, supplies, and thoroughly planning out three escape routes and destinations – and while he works quickly, he does not rush those final preparations, and so that takes him a significant amount of the window of time he knows he has.
But he only needs long enough to get you out.
He will have that.
He ambushes the delivery truck bringing in the week’s food shipment with no trouble and drives it right into the base as he has all the proper credentials on his person and its still pre-dawn hours, so lack of light works in his favor to get through the first gate.
But of course when he doesn’t follow delivery procedures once he rolls up to the shipping and receiving dock, that’s when his limited time really begins. The first decision he must make is whether or not to take out a man of average height but portly build that approaches the truck – one of the cooks, Bucky has studied the personnel files for everyone registered on this base – and Bucky evaluates as he steps out of the truck. He could kill him, but this man should probably be spared. Bucky doesn’t want unnecessary blood on his hands. So with lightning fast moves and a choke hold, the man goes down. But next are two security personnel, and them Bucky shoots point blank, taking each of them out with single shots. He leans down to lift the comms off one of them, putting the piece in his ear so he can hear everything as it unfolds across the base.
He yanks open the first door and moves down the hallway. And then there’s a frantic message over the comms, “Code Red! Winter Soldier, loading docks, two personnel down, in pursuit!”
Bucky growls and turns back down the hallway and swears when he sees the man putting comms in his ear and squaring up a gun he’d clearly lifted off one of the security guards was the cook he thought he’d put out cold. Apparently the man had more in him than Bucky had accounted for, and so now Bucky takes aim and shoots him once he’s close enough to secure the kill shot, only having to dodge two close but errant bullets himself as the cook had tried to run him down.
Lethal force for everyone it is, he thinks.
He’s irritated he wasted extra time on this man trying to keep down the body count.
He does not make that mistake again, killing everyone who comes across his path. The silver lining working in his favor is that this base in Turin is a science facility, not a military facility, so he has fewer muscle personnel to deal with than other places you could have been kept, and he can hear over the main comms that scientists and researchers are being given orders to shelter in place while there are instructions given over the security comms in Bucky’s ear that prime-level scientists are to be evacuated. It’s the directive he expected, which benefits him as the security personnel are split between pursuing him and evacuating those individuals deemed indispensable.
But dealing with those who are in pursuit of him is simple. When he’s out of ammunition, he makes quick work dealing what should be lethal wounds with his knives. Every man or woman down is one less he will need to contend with while trying to safely get you out, and while he’s reasonably sure he’s dealing death to everyone, there are a few he thinks may survive.
He has studied every aspect of this facility while making his preparations, and he sends a message to Captain Hydra that he was prepared by shooting glances cleanly into every camera he knows he passes.
There’s a flash of fear that ripples through him – it comes from the bond he’s tried to keep dormant between you since you were taken, but this is too powerful, and it’s a barb he can’t ignore. It flares and then dies out, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing. He squares his shoulders and moves more quickly.
As Bucky reaches the quadrant they’ve been keeping you a few moments later, the words, “The Omega is secured, sedated, and ascending to the roof with team Foxtrot, thirty seconds until air evac.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He knows he can’t make it in time, but Bucky still races down the hall to the stairwell, launching through the door and then hurtling up the stairs, taking them three and four at a time. His super speed isn’t enough to scale four flights of industrial facility stairs, and he bursts out on the roof to see the coaxial helicopter already twenty meters up in the air and navigating away to the north.
He wants to shout until his lungs bleed because he was so close, but he knows he can’t afford to indulge in emotions that strong in this moment. Instead, he takes huge gulps of the fresh air, pulls the door from its hinges, and hurls it across the roof before going back down the stairs.
He does not engage with anyone but comes across few through his retreat. Instead, his focus now is decimating what he can of the facility without wasting time or going out of his way as he escapes the base, rigging explosives quickly in key areas on his way out.
While he left destruction in his wake, and he leaves alone, he was precise in how much damage he dealt. He left the area of main logistical operations intact because he didn’t want to destroy their network and communications, eliminating his ties to tracking their next moves.
Bucky immerses himself in tracking and monitoring everything the second he’s back in his hideout with his tech. He sees the Captain return. He watches the final evacuations. They send him to Geneva, and Bucky is ready to follow, knowing exactly where the Swiss facility is located since he’s fully infiltrated the Hydra network of information. He can’t travel as quickly since he doesn’t have access to any Hydra aviation, but he makes it there by sundown.
He wouldn’t risk trying to disrupt your heat now, not with everyone moved and on high alert, it would be dangerous for you. Instead, he works on setting up his new undercover observation point in Switzerland. He fine tunes his information tap into the Hydra system. As he works, he notices the rise of an anxious feeling pulling at his hind brain. He’s felt the press of you trying to reach across the bond while you’ve been apart, but this is different – there’s a frantic, wild tug, and while it’s insistent, it’s more erratic, like the flickering of a flame, as if you aren’t even concentrating on the connection to him.
He knows so much of you that he knows you have to be on the brink of your heat but that you must desperately be trying to fight it. The discomfort he can sense continues to ebb and flow. It morphs. It becomes tinged with more discomfort. Then there’s a lick of desire that is almost imperceptible. That’s followed rather quickly be a flare of adrenaline – or is it fear? Another shift a few minutes later, and tone of this is pure arousal, the feeling he’s shared so much of with you, and the thought that you…
He grits his teeth, shuts his eyes, and abruptly stills every muscle in his body. You are his omega. Another alpha bonded you. Your heat is undeniable. His brain knows that – it’s one of the things he’s been focusing on, acknowledging the various scenarios that could play out for this heat, he just did not want this, nor was he prepared for what it might feel like. And so, with forced, measured breaths, he does everything he can to concentrate on shutting down the connection, to put his alpha side to sleep, because he can not bear this. He has suppressed so much of everything since losing you, only holding onto the faintest tether, but he cannot endure this – not and keep his rationality and do what he needs to do now, which is to formulate the next steps, the things he needs to figure out and watch for now that this cruel game has changed. Emotion will distract him, but there’s also the flow that could go the other way and throw you off, and he swore to keep you safe.
Diving into the network databases of this new Hydra facility, Bucky notices something he noticed in Turin: there are no records that contain any of your names on file – not you, not Steve, not Sam. He thought it was strange before, but he had a theory it could have been the nature of secrecy around all the projects at the research facility in Turin – there were very few data files on the science being explored on that base. But in transferring the Turin personnel out, with a contingent of them going to Geneva, he pours over all the documentation and the only he finds is the transfer of a high-level asset referred to only as Waffe SR4718. He easily knows the German word for weapon, and without missing a beat Bucky knows the letters and numbers are supposed to seem random but clearly refer to Steve Rogers whose birthdate is the fourth day of the seventh month in the eighteenth year of the previous century. It’s innocuous to anyone coming across it, but abundantly clear that it’s specific for those who were supposed to know.
With all Bucky knows of his own time with Hydra, how there were always layers within layers, secrets buried, hidden, withheld, he’s certain the acquisition of Steve and metamorphosis into Captain Hydra is as dark and as quiet as his own existence as the Winter Soldier.
There are quarters assigned to Waffe SR4718, and Bucky tags it track all status alerts – comings and goings, services, requests. He also puts the cameras for that hallway up on a constant feed monitoring protocol with the AI he’s adapted to bring up the imagery if there’s any movement in or out of the door.
Knowing you’re in heat, Bucky concentrates on new extraction tactics and mapping out escape options from this new facility.
But at three in the morning during the second night in Geneva – the second night of your heat – the door movement alert goes off, and Bucky immediately turns his attention to watch as Steve slowly emerges.
Why would he have any reason to leave you during your heat? He knows he could order food, clothing, bedding, medical personnel if absolutely necessary…
A quick check of the log shows that there have been no such requests.
And then he sees the unthinkable.
You’re right there behind him, following as he starts to make his way down the hall, dressed in darker clothing as he is. He has a small tactical pack slung across his back.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The question is only uttered out of frustration and disbelief because he could immediately decipher what is happening.
As precarious as it is to interfere with your heat, the two of you are clearly on the move.
The other alpha has no intention of staying at this base.
But why?
His mind begins deciphering even as he’s pulling up security cameras as the pair of you move through the facility, tracking your movements and actions.
The calculated risk is to get out when you’re supposed to be in heat. Bucky did see that status reported on the log – omega in heat. The protocols were to leave alpha and omega Hydra personnel undisturbed unless a priority one situation developed – typically reserved for life or death and rarely anything less urgent or pressing. It meant no one would think to check after the asset immediately. Even if an alpha skipped regular ordering for a meal or two to the living quarters, that wouldn’t be taken as out of the ordinary, merely unnecessary or forgotten due to being otherwise occupied, or deciding to make do with the food already with them.
The movement logically progresses toward the transportation hangar under the building – intending to employ ground transport.
On the way, the two of you duck into a room and close the door. Bucky accesses the schematics to discover it’s a data analytics workspace – cooperative computer sharing area. There weren’t any goons to hide from, so Bucky works quickly, trying to pull up the specific workstations in there. He sees the log in for a science officer. The user accesses the personnel transfer files for everyone from the Turin base submitted due to the evacuation. Four names are brought up on the roster and their locations are changed from Turin to the other the other bases anyone from Turin was reassigned to – a pair of them to Odessa, the other pair to Trondheim.
Subterfuge. He’s displacing security agents – or at least their location statuses.
Bucky frowns.
The rest of your course takes you directly to the vehicle hangar. Moving in the dead of night has capitalized on as few people as possible moving around the base for you to encounter, and it paid off. The other alpha selects a smaller SUV, loads some readily available weapons and supplies from the nearby vicinity into the back and then – faster than lightning – he withdraws something from a pocket near his chest, presses it over your mouth, and Bucky can see you seize up and then slump into his arms. He tucks you in amongst the supplies before throwing a canvas over everything and closing the hatchback.
Clearly you had been cooperating with this escape, so why was it necessary to knock you out?
Then he leaves the vehicle, leaves the hangar, goes back up two floors to the security personnel floor, and knocks on one of the doors.
Bucky accesses the database to see who’s assigned to that room as he watches this man converse briefly with whoever answers the door.
The two names assigned to the room match the two names reassigned to the Trondheim base on the evacuation transfer records.
“What larger game are you playing, Captain Hydra?” Bucky murmurs.
Because it’s back down to the hangar and the SUV with you stashed in the back, but then he waits.
And within five minutes, two men in full tactical gear get in the vehicle as well, and only then does he start up the car and leave. There’s a tracking device on this vehicle, so Bucky starts to pack up his tech, and pulls up the tracking on his smartphone.
He’s about to shut and pack away his laptop when he thinks of doing one more thing. It will take time, and this is why he knows Captain Hydra didn’t do it, but it will be worth it. But after his time in Wakandan labs and building up his own robust systems, within twenty-five minutes, Bucky has gone through the security camera system and successfully removed all footage of you and the captain moving throughout the base, rewriting it with the empty hallways from just before and after, effectively erasing the evidence of your escape. This will buy more time. No one may have thought to look for any movement in and out of Waffe SR4718’s quarters, but now they won’t find it when they ultimately go back and try, extending Bucky’s time to tail you without Hydra in the mix. They will assume the alpha and omega are still in heat seclusion now without any reason to doubt it.
Bucky leaves his temporary Geneva hideout with the essentials he arrived with. He chose this location because it was two streets down from one of the larger private car services in Switzerland. Bucky knows he can pass as a mechanic with his clothing, and the service staff works overnight to keep up maintenance for the large fleet of vehicles that provide VIP transportation, airport pick up and drop off, limousine transfers, corporate chauffeur services, ski transfers, and event chauffeuring. Acquiring a non-descript vehicle is as easy as he hoped, and it’s more than simple to de-activate this car’s GPS tracking system.
Within half an hour, he’s comfortably in pursuit. The vehicle he’s tracking has maintained its course and is an hour out of the city now, but an hour ahead is reasonable.
When the Hydra vehicle is three hours outside of Geneva, it makes its first stop. Bucky presses a button on his phone to pin the location. The stop is for less than five minutes, and then it continues, but Bucky will stop there as well to assess the purpose and glean any information he can.
Bucky is an assertive driver, making up speed, but not at a point to draw attention. When he reaches the pin he’d set on the route for the stop your vehicle had made, it’s on a bridge.
There’s only one reason Bucky can think of to stop on a bridge.
A reason that could make Bucky’s heart stop with devastation, but he must continue to operate under the assumption it wasn’t your body dumped into the river. Anything else wouldn’t make sense.
Unless the other alpha has become completely unhinged and all of this is an elaborate game to drive Bucky beyond all limitations of his own reason.
Within the next two hours, he sees you pass the border into Germany, and then another stop is registered on the GPS tracking near the city of Albstadt. Bucky has made up a significant amount of the head start the other alpha had had. When he arrives in Albstadt, he finds the SUV. It is most likely that this vehicle had been abandoned for another, but Bucky has to stop at this point and tap into security feeds for the city to see whether you’re here or not. He picks a spot that advertises wifi with their sandwiches, refueling his body while setting up his tech in a spot most won’t question him to hunker down for some serious work on a laptop. He gets into the city’s street cameras, sees Steve steal another vehicle, pulls the license plate, and then he programs his algorithm to watch for the number to track the route now. He won’t be able to smoothly follow the route of a GPS-tracked vehicle anymore, but Bucky knew this would grow more difficult. As long as his goal was to draw out the Soldat, Captain Hydra will still leave a trail of breadcrumbs, but it will be scant if he’s trying to evade Hydra.
While Bucky has questions of intent, he has no question that it’s what the Captain is doing now.
Bucky is able to pick up the trail with license plate tracking and route mapping into Stuttgart. All the way to the train station. But this is where the other alpha shows incredible skills for blending in. It’s a busy station. Bucky will have to run thorough security camera assessments of the Stuttgart station, figure out when – or if – they got on a train, and then continue tracking from there. If the alpha and omega got on a train, Bucky can at least narrow his search to that route and its stops for that schedule, but Bucky used train stations to cover his tracks as well, and sometimes that involved never boarding the train but leading anyone tracking him to believe that he had.
With that much information, he writes new coding into his overall system, sends it back to the larger machine he left in Oakland to do the heavy computing so it can start the work he’ll need to fine tune once he can settle in a more permanent stopover, pays for his meal, and then drives to Stuttgart. The hacking into facial recognition has been so enhanced beyond boundaries though – especially because he can tailor it to look for only two faces he knows as well as his own – that he sees the two of your board a train headed west, targets the route, sets up the watch parameters for the schedule, and catches you getting off in Paris.
Another smart move blending into the vibrancy of a large city, but Bucky is sure it’s not the final destination either. But Steve knew enough French to blend into the country, as well.
It takes Bucky and his systems six more days, but he confirms three separate facial recognitions for the other alpha in a town outside of Bordeaux small enough to be off the beaten path but big enough to blend in and go unnoticed by its people.
Bucky travels there as quietly as possible. He does not want to tip his hand. He’s too close now to have you slip through his hands again.
After two more days and with the assistance of satellite imaging, he has found the small house in a forested area outside of the town.
Bucky grips the edge of the small desk he’s been working at, grounding himself. Adrenaline had immediately surged through his veins, but he must keep everything contained. He has practiced so much control and restraint that if his heart betrays him now, he’ll carve it out himself and leave it behind. He cannot compromise this delicate situation.
He drives out to the area and leaves his vehicle well-hidden a kilometer out from the house and approaches on foot, circling at a large perimeter and slowly moving further in, cautiously, taking in everything. He doesn’t want to trip anything the other alpha may have set up to alert him to intruders.
What he discovers is minimal, and all old tactical elements – things they’d done as
Cap and the Howling Commandos back in the old war.
Effectively things that would have worked on anyone from this day and age but that only Bucky would know to look for.
He doesn’t trust it.
This is another trap.
But he has to walk into it and fare as best he can.
That’s what Captain Hydra had said was his plan from the beginning – draw out the Soldat.
The White Wolf would enter the trap but would need to control it and come out on the other side with his omega.
He can’t even think those words without his pulse racing now, and he digs his vibranium fingers into the trunk of the tree under his hand, splintering the wood while he closes his eyes and stamps down everything that wants him to sprint to the house he can see, break down the door, and launch himself into your arms.
He timed his approach when he’d seen the other alpha leave – likely for more food and supplies – but he knew the time alone would be limited.
Bucky takes measured but determined steps to the green wooden front door of what’s essentially a little cottage.
Straining his ears and focusing on his enhanced hearing, he doesn’t pick up anything beyond ambient noises – and your soft, slow breathing.
He takes a deep breath, slowly twists the doorknob, and opens the door.
There you are, curled up in a cozy armchair, dozing, hand pressed up against the spine of a book that has fallen to your chest after you clearly fell asleep reading, and this.
This simple scene nearly knocks him to his knees.
The way you’re there, feet away from him, it’s the most beautiful sight of his entire life.
But still, he is quiet, cautious.
His entire chest aches for you.
He shuts the door softly behind him, then crosses the small living room and kneels next to you. He eases the book out of your hands and puts it on the small side table. He’s done this before so many times. You make a slight hum through your sleep.
Brushing his fingers over your cheek is almost enough to make the nightmare of the last six weeks vanish as if it really had only been a nightmare.
He almost doesn’t dare to breathe.
But the warmth of his hand against your skin evidently reaches in to stir something in your subconscious, because you shift slightly, sigh, and tilt your head into his touch and murmur, “Bucky…”
The stutter of his chest is both painful and euphoric at once, and everything wells up in his chest, everything he’s been holding back.
He drops his hand from your cheek to your shoulder, gently trying to nudge you awake.
Coming back into consciousness, you take in a deep breath before blinking your eyes open. Your gaze drifts to him, and then your body seizes up one moment, and the next you’re scrambling up and away from him, whipping over the back of the armchair you’d been curled up in.
“Bucky?” your voice comes out in a wounded whimper of a tone that pierces him, confounds him.
“Yes, it’s me,” he answers, brow furrowing. He hadn’t allowed himself to think over what this moment was going to be like – he knew the fixation would have been too painful to hope over – but it was not supposed to be this, with you looking at him with caution, with hesitancy, with your guard up.
“Omega?” he questions tentatively, rising from where he’d been crouched on the floor.
You don’t move your position, but you draw yourself up to your full height as well.
Bucky maneuvers around the furniture, wanting to remove the barrier between you, but he changes his position slowly, allowing you time to retreat if you feel compelled to. You hold your ground but do keep yourself squared off facing him as he moves. He does what he hasn’t done since this ordeal began and definitively opens up the gateway of the bond between you, tentatively reaching out, trying to read you.
Your mood is hard, and it doesn’t fluctuate. There’s a steady mix of fear, doubt, and what he thinks is exasperation there.
No, it’s more than that.
“You’re angry with me?”
“I’m more than angry with you!” you hurl the words at him and cross your arms over your chest. “I’m livid.”
“I came to you as fast as I could!” He steps closer, and now you step back. He moves closer again, but with a smaller step.
“It’s not that, I know you worked as hard as you could–“
“Then what else could you possibly be upset about, Omega?” His tone is desperate, earnestly seeking the answer, but also tinged with a warning he can’t help from bleeding into the question.
“I couldn’t feel you.” The anger gives way to let the anguish of your words bleed through, and they sweep over both of you. “You cut yourself off from me. I was desolate and scared and alone, and you withdrew any hint of our connection.”
He steps forward once more, finally close enough to reach for you, and as he continues to close the distance, you unfold one of your arms and backhand slap him. “I needed you!”
Bucky staggers a step back from the raw force you hurled at him, but it only takes him the space of a breath for him to recover enough, and he surges forward and pulls you into his arms, uttering your name the way one pleads in a fraught prayer. You try and push against his chest and squirm out of his arms, but he only secures you more firmly, holding you dearly and desperately to him.
“I needed you,” you sob out. Instead of continuing to try to struggle away from him, to hold your hurt at bay, he feels you stop fighting and the turn as you let everything out. He holds you, soothing you, but not trying to quell any of this yet. He knows everything you’re feeling is warranted, can feel now that you held back as much as he did while you were apart. Endured as much hurt as he did – more in many ways. He won’t tell you to settle down, because the hurt needs to be acknowledged and not minimized.
Once your chest is no longer wracked with sobs, when your crying has abated from steady streams of tears to the small sniffling, he gently wipes the tears from your cheeks. Then Bucky decisively nuzzles his face down into the crook of your neck. Slowly, tentatively, he presses his lips to the place he claimed and bonded you as his omega, his mate. You whimper, but your hands clutch at his shirt, and the immediate flood of relief, of love, of devotion, washes over you both. He can feel it, he knows you feel it.
His large hands are planted firmly on your back, one at the curve of your spine, and one between your shoulder blades, pressing you as close together as he possibly can. He plants a longer, more concentrated kiss to the mark, and your right hand slides up to thread your fingers into his hair and press him closer.
The more he kisses into your neck, the more whole he feels. He had ignored the hollow, empty feeling in his chest, had truly rejected all feeling, as cold and empty as he’d operated while being the Winter Soldier. He’s feeling human again. Himself again – or at least it’s all coming back to him now.
He doesn’t even realize when your body has fully melted into him, too caught up in the mending of the connection, but then you’re urging his face up away from your neck, but only so you can press your forehead to his, and you say, “I need you, Bucky.”
He nods, and then you kiss him. In a movement familiar to you both, his hand moves down, curving over your ass and to the back of your thigh, and he picks you up. Your legs wrap around him as you deepen the kiss, nipping at his lips. He carries you across the big open space to where there’s a bed in the far corner.
He sets you down gently on your feet, and his hands are already reaching for the hem of your shirt, and you readily lift your arms so he can pull it cleanly off your body. You’re reaching for his belt, and he’s pulling his own shirt over his head. Your lips eagerly seek each other as much as they can. You push his dark jeans down, and he huffs and sits down at the foot of the bed so he can hastily unlace and yank his boots off, so he can shuck his pants off all the way. When he raises his head, you stand before him in nothing but your simple underwear, one hand pressed against your torso, biting your lip.
You’re so damn beautiful to him, his heart aches again at the sight of you nearly naked before him again after so long torn apart.
He reaches for you, and though you don’t hesitate to take his hand, as he tugs you into his lap, your thighs straddling either side of his hips, he doesn’t miss the slight tremble of your body, and it kills him but there’s a deep part of him that resonates, recognizes the feeling. The separation had been hell on an alpha and omega level, and this is still too much, overwhelming, and altogether not nearly enough to soothe the deep loneliness he had pushed beneath the surface. His arms wrap around you again. While your left arm wraps around his neck, your right hand roams over his bare skin – shoulder, arms, chest, neck, face – questing to rememorize him.
He wants to be inside you, but having your chest pressed into to his chest, it’s like your heartbeats are syncing back together, and he almost needs this more. The side of your face rests against his, and the way he can hear you breathe in and out right next to his ear, can feel the warmth of every exhale, it’s yet another inimitable balm he didn’t know he longed for.
He murmurs your name softly against your shoulder.
“Mmm?”
He knows you can tell he’s working out something to say. Every season you two had been together had been time you had worked to only continually knit your souls more tightly to each other, not only to love each other more, but to understand each other, to work together, to support and lean into each other as true partners.
It had made the separation all the more painful.
He squeezes you more tightly for a moment, then inhales to speak. “I need to tell you why I put up the walls I did.”
He feels you tense slightly in his arms – of course he does, there’s no way for him to miss it any more than there was any chance for you to try and hide it when this intimately entwined. He bestows a soft, light kiss to your bonding mark, and you whimper, but turn your head to brush your lips over his cheek, and then both of you draw back just enough to look at each other.
“I’ll never know if it was the right or wrong thing to do to you, but it felt like the only way I could hope to survive navigating back to you. Immediately I knew I couldn’t allow the anguish of pain and anger I was feeling to flood to you when I knew you were living your own nightmare. When I held that back, the way Hydra had conditioned me to repress all feelings when I was their fist resurfaced, and I knew shelving the emotions would leave me to focus and be more effective in everything I was doing to track you and find you.”
“Bucky,” you start, but he shakes his head slightly, his eyes pleading for you to let him continue. You give a little huff. “Okay.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, and he pecks your lips before going on. “When I was closing in on where they were keeping you, I didn’t want to alert you and have you have to worry about how to hide that.”
“That’s a fair strategic tactic,” you grudgingly admit.
He grins at your tone, but it abates quickly. “I also…”
He pauses for half a beat and takes a breath to steel his resolve because you deserve his raw honesty as it’s still a concern in play.
“Also what?”
“I didn’t know how much of our bond he would feel. I didn’t want to tip him off, but I – I didn’t want to feel what might go the other way and bleed from him through you either.”
“Oh, Buck,” you bury your head into the crook of his neck now, nuzzling against the bonding mark you’d given him. “Our bond is ours, not his.”
“It’s not?”
“No, no,” you press quick successive kisses against your bonding mark on the juncture of his neck and shoulder. “You might feel the wake of what I feel from his bond to me, but the ties to each of you are very distinct within me. I’m especially sure of it now that ours isn’t dormant anymore.”
He holds you close while he sorts through this revelation from you. “I didn’t know – and I was worried if I felt him it would either devastate or enrage me and either way make me overrule logic and slip up, do something rash.”
“Now I understand,” you speak right into his ear. “Concentrate though, what do you feel right now?”
He breathes in. Breathes out. Another breath in. Out.
“Only you,” he says, no question.
Your lips drift back down his neck, and you press an insistent kiss to your claim on him this time, then you open your lips and suck over the spot.
Bucky shivers and groans, and you wince and laugh when his arms flex around you so tightly it actually hurts. Because he reacts so strongly, it doesn’t shock him in the slightest that you’re spurred on to seek more, but now he’s ready, so when you’ve satisfied with your initial torment and he feels you slot your teeth over the mark, he bares his neck, ready when you bite down to renew your claim on him, and he shouts – euphoric, flooded and overwhelmed with the way everything opens in such a raw way when a bonding mark is refreshed.
It drives you to rock your hips against him. You’re both still in those last pieces of underwear, but the friction of your cunt against his cock is glorious, and he can’t help the satisfied rumble in his chest in answer to the simple action.
His hand clamps on your plump, round ass, and he pushes you hard against him and holds you there – he doesn’t want the rocking, for a moment he just wants the intense pressure, the reality that you’re here with him.
You crash your lips to his desperately. He slants his head and works his tongue along the seam of your mouth, which willingly parts for him, an open moan passing between you both, your tongue inviting him into your mouth, stroking against his. Both of you fiercely hold onto each other, keeping that close chest to chest contact while you kiss more than you breathe. When you ultimately have to break off from each other to get air back in your lungs, the heaving expansion of your ribcages against each other is such a simple but intense intimacy, breaths mingling – another moment that adds to the replenishment for how much his soul had been depleted without you.
“Need you inside me,” you plead.
He nods while turning and tossing you onto the bed.
As he climbs up to join you, you quip, “No more clothes, Alpha.”
“Bossy Omega,” he chuckles, but complies in pushing his boxer briefs down and tossing them away.
You quirk your lips. “Give me what I need, and I won’t need to be so demanding.”
He growls, but it’s teasing, the feeling in his heart is a light one, a feeling he feels echoed in you, lines of it running through the overwhelming need.
Bucky moves up the bed, hooks his fingers beneath the band of your underwear, and you lift your hips so he can remove them immediately. He leans down and presses a broad flat lick of his tongue over your hip bone, causing you to squirm – desire and a sensitive spot of skin he discovered on your years ago. “I know what you need, Omega.”
“Yes, Alpha,” you nod eagerly, and he flips you over onto your stomach
He hears your breath hitch. He knows you love roughness and to be handled as often as you love softness, but the latter isn’t what you need right now. He crawls up over you and plants his left arm up by your shoulder while he slots himself between your legs. Your left hand finds his, twining your fingers together while he lines up his cock with your slick entrance, and the sigh of ecstasy that escapes you as he pushes his length in sings in his ears. The feeling of your warm channel gripping him is better than he remembered – or at least it feels that way – and he tries to push in as slowly as he can to savor coming home to where he belongs inside you, but it’s not nearly as slow as he wants it to be.
Once he’s fully sheathed in you, he kisses your shoulder, then nips along until he’s at the juncture of your neck, and you keen and bare your neck to him. He licks over his bonding mark, then bites down, reclaiming you, and you cry out, body thrumming beneath him. He starts to move behind you, pulling his hips back before thrusting back in. Your right leg hitches back to tangle up and over his, urging him on. He grips your hip, and then he fucks you. It’s the most primal it’s ever felt with you, the force of it rocking the bed to knock against the wall, and he almost worries about whether or not it’s too much, but you rock back against him, meeting his thrusts as much as you can in your prone position, eagerly taking all of him.
“That’s it, darling, take my hard cock inside you,” he urges you both on.
You sob out a breathless, “Yes,” that makes his chest rumble in satisfaction.
He can feel your cunt fluttering around him, can feel you on the edge of ecstasy, but it also feels like you’re refusing to fall over the edge.
“Come on, darling, let go.”
“No.”
That shocks him but doesn’t slow him down.
He maintains his pace and slips his hand down between you and the mattress, cupping your pussy and finding your clit. “Yes.” He starts to rub quick, concentrated circles over your tight bundle of nerves.
You shake your head desperately. “No, I don’t want it to end,” the words tumble out, and he hears the sound of you crying again.
“Omega, I will give you more. I’ll give you as much as you need, but I need you to give in to this, surrender and fall over the edge with me again.”
“Bucky!” you cry out as you’re unreservedly flung over the edge. Your cunt clamping down on him was the last of what he needed to reach his own climax, and so his shout echoes your own, and he exerts those final thrusts to pump his seed deep within you.
He stays sheathed within you but rolls both of you to your sides, brackets his arm around your waist, and keeps you close, nuzzling into your neck. You sink back against him, resting your arm over his and threading your fingers together.
“That was…”
He nudges your chin for you to turn your head back so he can kiss away the tears that escaped during the emotions that came through there at that end.
“Intense?”
“Yes.”
“We both needed it, Omega. I need you as much as you need me. Do not doubt it.” You shiver in his arms, and he swears, “I’ll make sure you never question it again.”
“Never let me go.”
“Never again.”
You shift and turn over to face him. He’s just as content to wrap you in his arms this way. You tangle your legs with his as you have so many times before. This is so familiar.
You brush your fingers over his face, retracing the lines and angles that define him, and he watches your face as your eyes drink in his features.
“I’m yours, Omega,” he says in a quiet, low tone.
A soft smile lifts the curve of your mouth. Your hand cradles his jaw and beckons him in to kiss you, and he is happy to acquiesce. The kisses he shares with you now are slow, solemn promises of lips and tongues, heated but not demanding.
When you eventually come up for air, you tuck yourself more closely into his chest, humming with contentment. He’s half hard again, and the frantic last moments of the sex he shared with you flashes back to the forefront of his mind. “I promised to give you more. What do you need from me? Tell me how I can please you, how I can love you.”
You reach up and press your fingers delicately against his bonding mark. “Just this. Hold me. I only need to be with you.”
He can feel how true it is as your fingers stroke lightly over the place where you claimed him all those years ago, reclaimed him here in this bed, flooding him with more peace. His brushes his lips over your forehead. “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
There’s a little chirp that bubbles up out of you when he calls you sweetheart again, and it makes him just as happy as it does you. He slowly caresses your back, hand moving up and down, up and down, in a soothing motion, soothing himself as much as you.
There is still so much ahead for you both, but this – your connection to each other – he can feel that again so strongly. He never doubted it, but after being deprived, the return of how powerful it is engulfs him. This will anchor him through what’s coming.
“Buck?” you murmur against his neck.
“Mmm?”
“I can tell your brain is beginning to work away from here.”
He sighs. “Can you blame me?”
“No, but talk to me, take me with you if you’re going to think.”
“There’s so much to think through.”
“Start with one thing.”
You’ve done this with him before – late nights, afternoons, mornings, on a drive, on a walk, sharing a meal – you could always feel when he started to get tied up in his brain with his thoughts, and you’d listen, ask questions, sift through with him. He was perfectly capable of sorting through things on his own, but sharing with you made it altogether different. It was one of the best parts of having you as his mate.
“Why…?” He frowns and trails off. “No, nevermind.”
“No, Buck. I worked hard to soothe and relax my alpha. I want this gift of respite with you, however brief it is, and whatever string you don’t want to tug on first clearly is one that’s important.”
He nips your shoulder. “My gutsy omega.”
“Alpha,” you press, also literally pressing a finger insistently against his chest.
“Alright…” His tone turns serious. “Why didn’t you try to escape – especially here where he leaves you alone sometimes?” From the way he’d found you, it was clear this wasn’t an anomaly.
You cluck your tongue impatiently and roll your eyes. “First, how was I reasonably supposed to outrun him, hide from him, and try to find you? I don’t have any of the tactical skills or training you two do.”
“Fair enough. And second?” The first point is obvious now that he’s asked it and heard you answer, but he wants to hear the rest of what you have to say.
“Second,” you continue, your tone altering to something more somber, “he took me to lure you to him, so the most logical thing was to stay and wait for you.”
“Ah,” Bucky nods, the smallest of smiles taking over his mouth. “My smart omega.”
“And third,” you continue, though your words tone is cautious now, and you drop your eyes to his chest.
“Yes?” he urges you to finish the thought.
“He’s my alpha, too.”
This isn’t news – he’s known it from the second he witnessed that bite to claim you, he thought of it frequently while he was hunting for you both, he knew it would be the new reality, you’d even discussed the two bonds together in this bed – and yet having to think about it yet again in this light is still straining on him.
Clearly you feel his unrest, because your hands come up to cup his face and basically attempt to soothe him with gentle but insistent strokes along his jaw. “Bucky, I’m always going to be yours.”
He sighs and angles his head down to touch his forehead to yours. “I know.”
And it’s not jealousy that drives his unrest – it’s the not knowing what this means, not right now and not for the future. He’s started thinking about possibilities, but he’s limited until he can confront the other alpha. So, he decides to concentrate on what it has meant so far.
He makes sure his tone is soft but serious when he asks, “Did he hurt you?”
You’re quiet for a beat, then say, “I don’t know how to answer that.”
Bucky starts to sit up, but you pull him back down to the mattress, trying earnestly to soothe him. “What he did hurt us both, and it was meant to hurt. It was absolutely calculated. But they broke him, Bucky. They tortured him and tried to make him comply for weeks. They were experimenting on Sam, trying to pull the science they could from old records on you and what they could pull from analyzing Steve’s blood, but they weren’t having success, and so they enacted their last use for Sam – and they killed him in front of Steve. It destroyed him.”
Bucky’s own chest aches as he listens, throbbing painfully at this reveal, and his vibranium hand fists the sheet.
“And when he was at his most devastated and spent emotionally, what I have been able to piece together is that that’s when he couldn’t stand to feel anymore, shut off his emotions – or his humanity more like, and it’s his humanity that made him Steve. That’s when they were able to take over and mold him into the fist they wanted in Captain Hydra.”
Hurt, anger, the horror of his own past life as the Winter Soldier, it’s surging through his veins, but you continue.
“So that night in Wakanda? That was Captain Hydra at his height of cruelty. I haven’t seen that iteration of him since that night. It’s been slow, but he’s different now. He’s not our Steve, but he’s not Captain Hydra.”
It’s a few moments before he registers that you’re done – at least with that piece of sharing.
He cups your jaw and looks into your eyes. “Do you trust him?”
He sees you clearly put thought into your words before answering, worrying your bottom lip. “The heat he and I shared was intense in every way. It changed things fundamentally between us, but since the heat our connection has still been very tenuous. We’ve both been very guarded with each other. I know he’ll keep me safe, but I’m still wary of him.”
He nods.
“Where is he right now?”
A wry laugh tumbles out of your chest. “I don’t even know where we are right now, Bucky. I know we got off a train in Bordeaux, but then he moved us here while I was in one of my heavy end of heat sleeps. From the food, books, and supplies he’s brought for us, I know we’re in France, but that’s it. There’s not a lick of technology kept in here while I’m alone. We don’t even a radio.”
Bucky grunts at this news. He doesn’t like this, but other than being kept here cut off from the rest of the world and having claimed you and separated you in the first place, it seems you’ve been appropriately cared for.
“Wait, no radio?” He growls. Bucky had looked away to consider the new information, but his eyes snap to you again. “Have you had any music?”
“No,” you groan, and he can feel the pained irritation.
“That won’t do.”
He quickly rolls off the bed to a small whine of protest from you, but it was so rare that he’d ever been in a space with you and there hadn’t been music playing – loud for you to sing, or low in the background keeping you company – and this is something he can fix easily.
He fishes the small communications device he had put together out of the pocket of his discarded pants, then comes back to sit on the foot of the bed and begins typing away. You’re quick to crawl up behind him, and you wrap your arms around his chest and settle your chin on his shoulder while he works. You don’t see the smile that breaks across his face as he feels your excited impatience radiate off you, having figured out what he’s doing. It’s so palpable he wouldn’t have needed your emotional bond as alpha and omega to sense it.
Once he’s modified his device to play music, it doesn’t take him much longer to hack into your music account. He pulls up the list of your most-played songs, picks one that he thinks will be perfect for this moment, and hits play.
You croon with joy and then fall back on the bed, arms spread out in pure rapture. He beams and then crawls up next to you, handing you the device. You hold it close to your chest with one hand and pull him in for a kiss with the other.
You break off the kiss so you can sing along to the chorus, and he laughs. He knows exactly the last time he felt this happy: the last day by the river with you in Wakanda. When the chorus is over, you actually kick your feet in delight, grinning at him. You kiss his nose, scoot your body as close to him as possible, then settle back into the mattress and pull his arm to rest over your stomach.
The two of you talk, sing, and continue to hold each other for a while. A string of two or three softer songs play, and you and up drifting into sleep, late afternoon sun pouring over both of you, its warmth too much for you to ignore after the physically and emotionally exhausting afternoon. He watches the rise and fall of your chest, his hand over your heart, no thought for time. He doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to take his eyes off you. How did he survive without you for all those weeks?
A flare of light across the room pulls his focus though. It’s a repetitive flashing coming through the window to the wall.
Morse code. His blissful mood evaporates.
C-O-M-E O-U-T-S-I-D-E
The other alpha is out there, summoning him.
He identifies which window the light is being directed into, then pads over, and releases the drape to cover the window, pulls it back, covers it again, and then secures it back in its open state. The other alpha will know he’s received the message.
Bucky has referred to him as the other alpha for so long now, but he’s ultimately about to discover who this man is. You say he’s no longer The Captain Hydra that he was, but not yet his Steve either.
He doesn’t hurry getting dressed. The other alpha isn’t going anywhere. He’s waited this long. He can continue to wait.
Bucky takes a long look at you from across the room before he leaves.
He’s relatively sure he will come back to you. There’s only one outcome that will keep him away, and now that he knows the potential danger, he won’t let this man ambush him ever again.
Bucky stalks as carefully to the tree line where the signal had come from as he had when he’d first approached the little house. He can smell the other alpha on the breeze that rustles through the trees. He tracks him in a kilometer or so – not in the direction Bucky had left his vehicle, but that works fine for him because if he needs to cut and run, he’ll be able to get to you in the house and then continue on to get to the getaway without having to double back and without the other alpha being able to cut off the route.
Bucky will think through every possible scenario as each moment of this unfolds.
His brain got him here.
His brain can get him out.
He will keep you safe.
The scent he’s known nearly his whole life grows stronger, and when he reaches a small pocket of the forest devoid of trees – not quite large enough to be called a clearing – instead of slipping silently out of the shadows, the other alpha steps out unabashedly to meet him.
“What took you so long, Buck?” he has the gall to ask, his voice barely covering notes of anger.
Bucky roars and hurls himself at the man standing before him, taking him to the ground easily, and they scramble against each other. They’re so closely matched in skill, prowess, and power, and the energy they’re both exuding is raw, primal, and angry. Bucky is incredulous that the other man is angry with him.
His own rage lands him a punch. He takes a blow to the ribs, and the other alpha gets a hand on the collar of his shirt, resulting in a tear, but it allows Bucky to grab his wrist, twist him around harshly, and pin the arm behind his back as he decisively thumps him into the ground, pinning him there.
The man beneath him only makes two attempts to struggle and shift out from under his hold, but then he sighs and sags into the tall grass they’ve been tussling in.
Is he feinting?
Bucky honestly doesn’t know.
“Who am I talking to?” he asks – the same line of inquiry Steve used on him in an abandoned warehouse outside of Berlin.
He knows it, letting out a guffaw beneath him. “I’m not him anymore.”
“Not who?”
“I’m no longer their Captain Hydra,” he pauses before adding, “but I’m not the kid from Brooklyn either.”
Bucky knows they’re not going to stay like this forever, and he needs to see this man’s face and look into his eyes if he’s going to be able to sort out any of this, so as swiftly as he can, he releases the alpha, pushes himself up, and takes a wary stance a few meters away.
Steve remains on the ground, but rolls over and sits up, planting his feet on the ground, and leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. It’s almost a casual.
Bucky will have the advantage of already being up on his feet if the man before him tries anything.
Bucky needs to know how to read whoever this is, so he decides to go with a different line of questioning – things that are more cut and dry.
“When you left the base in Geneva, there were two Hydra security with you. You stopped over a bridge two hours into your journey, and they weren’t with you when you switched vehicles in Albstadt. Who were they, and why the elaborate ruse only to drop them in a river so quickly?”
Rather than being surprised, it seemed he was satisfied that Bucky knew this much about what had played out. “Alright, we can start there. Leaving under the initial guise of a mission on security footage was supposed to be helpful when they started looking for me.”
“And why move the records of their transfer files to other facilities with two others?”
“I’m glad you picked up on that, too. Buying more time for some missing personnel before it was suspect and they figured out they really didn’t know where they were.”
“And why them?”
“Arbitrary.”
“Bullshit. You’ve gone on solo missions as Captain Hydra and you didn’t buy enough extra time by leaving with a two-man team to make it worth the set up only to drop them in the river without a reason.”
Steve’s brows knit together, and he chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment before answering. “One was arbitrary. He just happened to be the roommate of my target. The one I was after? He was part of the extraction team who took our omega out of Turin. Specifically, he’s the one who handled her so roughly she had bruises from his casual brute strength. I watched the footage to figure out who hurt her.”
Bucky cocked his head and studied the man before him.
“I had only been an alpha to her for a month and I was willing to kill someone who harmed her. What are you going to do to me, Buck?”
Bucky turned and paced way, running his hands through his hair. He didn’t want to show this much unrest in front of the other alpha, but he was thinking and feeling so much, trying to read and decipher too many pieces.
He lets out a long exhale and just speaks the truth. He can’t try and take any other angle. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Before all of this, if there had ever been a situation in which Bucky would have needed to trust someone else to keep you safe, Steve would have been his immediate answer.
Steve waits silently.
There are so many questions he wants answers to, and so he starts asking them. The answers don’t shock him, and he can see that even when Steve doesn’t tell him the full truth, it’s a cautious guarding of information, but he detects no lies in any of it. That Steve has some guards up also seems tenuous, possibly temporary, like if he can only ask the right question, the tide will turn.
But it couldn’t be that simple with Steve, could it?
And when did he start to think of him as Steve again?
Bucky deals out one of the questions he’s had the longest, since the very beginning of this. “What you said that night in Wakanda – you did all of this to draw me out. Why?”
Steve lets it hang in the air for a moment, but Bucky can see this is a crux for this conversation with him, too.
“I can’t explain everything that went into that plan – I don’t know if the machine of Captain Hydra was fully in control or if part of the old me was trying to grasp at you as a lifeline, but as the weeks wore on, the strategist in me knew he needed either the Soldat to join him or his best friend to save him.”
Those words sink into Bucky, and he can understand that explanation as no one else in this world can.
“What took you so long?” Steve asks again, but this time it’s tinged only with angst, not anger.
The accusation in it unsettles Bucky.
He’s still not sure how to address the question, but he starts with, “The Soldat is gone. The Winter Soldier? Not who I needed to be to get here either.”
Steve pushes up from the ground but maintains the distance Bucky put between them. “Who are you now then?”
Bucky narrows his eyes. “Depends on who’s standing in front of me.”
Steve looks off into the trees for a moment – in the direction of the cottage.
Bucky’s instincts have failed him less than a handful of times.
They’re telling him now that’s where to start, even though he’s not sure exactly where it will end. “I’ve seen a lot of versions of you – my childhood best friend, the punk who couldn’t stay out of trouble, the stars and stripes symbol, Captain America, the target who wouldn’t let me assassinate him and then refused to finish me off in the hellicarrier, the Cap who went against the Accords, Nomad in exile – but always Steve. You’ll never be who you were before – I never was. Doesn’t mean you’re irredeemable.”
Steve scoffs. “It’s not that easy.”
Bucky gives a wry laugh and shakes his head. “I more than know that. But you’re shades of all those men right now in front of me. She sees it, too.”
“God, she…” Steve shakes his head, puts one hand on his hip, and scrubs over his face with the other.
“If you can be you, if you can be Steve, she will have you.” He’s not sure where the words came from, but he himself believes them as he says them.
“I don’t know if I can be.”
“Do you want to be?”
Steve doesn’t answer immediately. Bucky can see him sincerely work over the question in his mind. It’s a simple inquiry, but one that will define everything, and Bucky knows he will be completely behind whatever answer he gives because that is the core of who this man is and always has been – fully committed to his convictions.
When Steve says, “Yes,” Bucky can hear the heaviness in his voice. Bucky nods.
“What about you?” Steve asks.
Bucky shifts his weight from one foot to the other as he digs back into himself and where his head, his heart, and his gut now sit with all of this. But the answer is clear enough. “Till the end of the line,” he answers.
“Even after I–“
“Stop,” Bucky cuts him off. “I’ve had little more to think about over the last six weeks than us – all of us. And it felt like my heart started beating again when I found her, but you… Before this I never fully understood why you fought so hard to get through to me when I was trying to kill you in DC all those years ago, why you searched for me for years, why you were a goddamn pain in the ass who wouldn’t abandon me in Berlin and believed in me without question, but now I get it. We are in each other’s bones.”
He doesn’t move, but Bucky sees the look change in Steve’s eyes, and he can practically feel the air alter between them. They’ve always had an acute awareness of each other, and Bucky can feel the tentative return of it, like déjà vu even though he’s still figuring out who this Steve is or who he will be.
“When did you start giving Captain America speeches?” Steve finally asks.
Bucky shrugs. “One of us had to do it.”
“What now then?”
Bucky has sketched out many scenarios for how things play out from here, but every stage of this, every new revelation shifts the direction they’re heading. Even in the last two minutes things have significantly shifted again.
Bucky licks his lips and stares at Steve for another beat before he decides to head down a path he hopes is the right one. “You’re always a man with a plan, so you tell me. Tell me where this started, when it changed, where you think it ends. I figured out a lot, I have theories, and I still have questions.”
“We went to Italy to investigate a lead that came up on our radar. We thought it was an innocuous enough whisper about a couple of Hydra scientists. And don’t,“ Steve pauses to pointedly look at him because Bucky was already opening his mouth to argue. “I already know you’re going to say we should have involved you, I thought of it every day they were holding us captive. I thought it the second I heard their boots. It was a week after you left for Wakanda, and Sam–“
He pauses again, and his shoulders fall just a fraction.
“Sam and I weren’t gonna bother you.”
“She told me about Sam,” Bucky says.
Steve closes his eyes for a moment, pressing his lips together. “I told her enough about what happened, but I didn’t tell her everything.” He opens his eyes and meets Bucky’s again. His face is truly haunted, and Bucky nods, his own chest tight. He knows more than enough about that. He had still had to face the demons of his past, but when he was ready, and he had fought to find his way to do that. Steve would find a way, but it would take time, and not likely be the same journey.
“After they killed Sam, they got a raw version of me, shut down, and they went to work conditioning me, shaping me into Captain Hydra. I was too lost to fight anything. I couldn’t save him. I failed us. I didn’t want to be me. It was easy too easy for them to get the version of me they wanted when I was like that.”
There’s a full shift in how Steve lays everything out – and as he shares, Bucky knows it’s still not everything, but he can feel that it’s everything Steve can bear to tell him.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Steve tilts his head and looks off into the forest. “It was and it wasn’t. It will always haunt me.”
“It will, but less and less.”
Bucky walks to the edge of the small clearing and sits on a fallen log. Steve follows him.
“When I was trying to find you after DC and taking down S.H.I.E.L.D. I read everything they had on record about you, how they conditioned you. They used some but not all the same methods on me.”
“I couldn’t find anything on you, and I found more than enough other hidden monstrosities in their networks these past weeks.”
“I think they got smarter after we were hunting them after exposing them – they couldn’t keep everything off the databases, but they have projects now that they keep paper-only, small teams. There was the team that captured us, but after they put us in a holding cell, we were transferred. From that point through the torture, the breaking point, and the conditioning I only saw four faces – three scientists and one officer who became my liaison. When they sent or let me out into the field, I never went with a team of more than four of their men, always the same four. Two of them I ended at that bridge.”
Bucky nods.
Already his mind is calculating – this means they could potentially contain and eliminate all of the people who knew any specifics about Captain Hydra.
“One of the scientists was killed when you stormed the facility in Turin.”
Bucky raises his brows. Even better.
Steve goes on to tell him about how he was sent on a few missions to test his loyalty before he was given the task to bring back the Soldat.
“I didn’t have a chair, and they were very adamant that my point person was my liaison and not a handler, they gave me a fair amount of autonomy. They didn’t want me to drag you in. They wanted you to join me. I think they felt like an asset who had to be controlled could break free as they saw with you the first time around, and this time they wanted operatives who weren’t giving controlled compliance, but allegiance instead.”
Bucky grunted. “A tether rather than a leash.”
“Yeah.”
“But you knew who I was tethered to.”
Steve’s head drops. “Yeah.”
“And you knew I’d be the most vulnerable and off my guard in Wakanda.”
“I did.”
Bucky lets him sit with that discomfort.
Bucky has replayed that night in his mind so many times.
“But your plan changed that night. I didn’t register it in the moment, but everything about you changed the moment you bit into her neck to claim her.”
Steve doesn’t deny it.
“Before you sunk your teeth into her, you were taunting me, dangling her like something to be smashed and discarded, you didn’t even know if it would work, and I think part of you thought it might even kill her.”
Bucky sees Steve’s jaw tick.
“You were in no way prepared for how a bond would change you fundamentally as an alpha.”
“Obviously it didn’t flip a switch immediately, but yes, it altered what I intended to do,” Steve admits.
He goes on to explain some of the things that happened in Turin – missions he went on, how things had developed with you, the clothes, and the books.
“The books were for her?” Bucky breathes. “I saw security footage of you in the bookshop.”
“I wasn’t worried about exposing myself because you were already taking longer than I wanted you to take, but when you didn’t access any of the Avenger networks, bases, or safehouses, I expected you were underground and untraceably hunting for us.”
“What else did you expect?”
“I wanted you to get foolish in your desperation and tip your hand.”
“Not with her on the line.”
“No.” Steve narrows his eyes. “You never left Turin once you showed up on our radar, did you?”
Bucky scoffs. “Course I didn’t.”
Steve nods. “A ploy to see all the defenses of the base.”
“But you left dangerously close to her heat,” Bucky shoots, the disapproving accusation blatant in his tone.
“And that’s when you made your unsuccessful move to get her back. If you’d killed everyone you’d encountered from the beginning, you probably would have made it to her in time.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“No, I know you do.” Steve sighs. “You know, back in 1945, I thought you were dead when you fell off that train.”
Bucky doesn’t interrupt. He knew Steve knew he knew this. They’d touched on it before. But clearly there was more and a reason for Steve to bring it up again now.
“The thing is, when they found you, I know Zola did what he did to you because of me, your tie to me. When they took me and Sam, they tortured him and killed him because of me, again. You were both people I cared about, and you were hurt for it. I was not going to let it happen to her. The sense of responsibility I felt for her had already been growing and evolving, but when I felt that surge of adrenaline and fear through the bond when you attacked the base and they moved her? It had been a slow melting of ice, what was developing there, but that shattered the ice. When I found out they had moved her, I kept my personal weakness guarded, and I knew I would do everything I could to get her out of their web and keep her safe.”
At this admission, Bucky is quiet. So is Steve. Bucky knows Steve is letting him think. There’s so much to consider there – the guilt Steve has still carried for him for years, the fresh hell of Sam, and the fervent determination to keep you from being another victim by association.
He could think over this for much longer, but there are more pieces he still needs context for, so next Bucky asks, “Why did you leave the Geneva facility during her heat?”
“Best cover for time – alphas are given room to take care of their needs during rut or care for omegas if they’re bonded during their omega’s heat.”
It verifies what Bucky had theorized himself.
“But it’s been eight days since you came here.”
“Yeah,” Steve nods.
“And you’ve just…been here.”
“Yeah.”
This is the piece Bucky has been suspicious of now.
“Explain.”
“When I took her to Turin, yes, it was a trap to lure you. When I brought her here, it was to wait for you to find us. I couldn’t find you when you went underground before, and I couldn’t find you this time, and if I tried too hard, I didn’t want to risk Hydra finding us, but I knew if we stayd in one place and I focused on keeping us hidden from Hydra, you could find us.”
Bucky furrows his brow, frowning.
“Simple as that?”
“Simple as that,” Steve confirms.
Bucky studies him for another quiet few seconds, then says, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So, what now?”
“Her,” Bucky replies simply. “We’ve still got a lot of shit to figure out, but we’ve got to do it with her.”
go IMMEDIATELY to part four: The Working of Your Hands
↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest
I do not do tag lists, but FOLLOW @buckets-and-stories and TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS to be updated any time I publish a new work!
Still with me? This was a lot. I hope I've answered some of your questions, and there are some more that have been brought up, but... we're here. We're this far.
This is the single longest story/chapter I've ever published. You can see where I've left off, and there's clearly more story, but Bucky reuniting with his omega and with Steve were the primary objectives, and both of those elements I didn't want to cheat or shorten as they began to unfold. I hope they've truly done justice to these characters and relationships, and we'll see how they can possibly move forward together in the conclusion. These three still have big things ahead.
read more from the Dark Forest Fest
#bucky barnes#bucky barnes smut#steve rogers#bucky barnes fan fiction#captain hydra#aspen wrote something#bucky barnes x female reader#steve rogers x reader#omegaverse#marvel omegaverse#warm shadows au#aspen's dark forest fest
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Workers in Palestine has put together a guide to support #BlockTheBoat organizers with "info on ship tracking, strategic approaches with unions, and more!"
Download the PDF here
[Image description: a graphic titled "What's in the guide?"
Heading one: "Research: find Zim schedules on the Zim website, track the vessel's current location via marine traffic, check for docking schedules"
Heading two: "Outreach and Tactics: building relationships with labor, outreach tactics/how-to"
Heading three: "Blockade and Picket Line"
End ID]
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I have been frustrated with leftists/leftist spaces. A group with an ideology reliant upon mass cooperation and coordination will struggle when so many of its proponents are unapproachable to the average person. There is a pervasive unwillingness to meet people on their level or extend even an inch of grace for those new to leftist ideas--which, frankly, is most people. It's not that the anger is unjustified, but this is a bad outreach tactic. There is so much disinformation and propaganda favoring the status quo that if you we want radical ideas to be actualized, we need numbers. Outreach is vital to the success of leftist goals, so I feel like we are shooting ourselves in our collective feet over and over again.
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It's time for another outreach post to see if I can get you interested in guild wars 2!!!!! we kinda have to do our own marketing here. So here's some handpicked reasons why you might want to check it out if you've not heard of it!!
you're not the only hero
You're a hero, for sure, but the other characters are given attention and space to shine. They have their own voices, perspectives and flaws. While the game frames this as your story, there's deft character writing that doesn't always revolve around you, which is something I value about a genre that too often falls back on telling the player they're amazing instead of letting them feel at home.
the enormous list of top tier voice talent
all those well-developed characters are nearly always voiced, barring the incidental occasional text box. Their quirks come through, and there's nailed comedic timing. You don't have to read and read and read, even in the open world - all NPCs have voiced dialogue to engage you in your surroundings. (There's even a whole blog about it! @talk-of-tyria) Here are just SOME of the cast!
no subscription, low FOMO
I'm no fan of games that keep you dangled on the hook for more money. GW2 is a buy-to-keep game. It will never have a monthly fee. In fact, the base game, everything that released on launch, is free to own right now.
You can buy the expansions and episodes as you reach them if you want, or you can wait for a half price sale and get the entire, decade long entire saga for about 50 bucks, and that's a lot of game.
There are no missable items or events, everything will cycle back in, nor any pressure to get your money's worth of a monthly subscription. You're in control of how much you want to play, and you can take a break any time.
no gear treadmill
If you've played other MMOs, you might be familiar with an ever-increasing level cap, constant power creep, and the fear of taking time off from the game leaving your head earned equipment outdated. This is the gear treadmill, a tactic to keep you playing for numbers rather than enjoyment. GW2 doesn't have this.
You can earn armours with different stat boosts, and it stays just as useful as the day you got it. The level cap has never increased. Instead, you complete your character's vertical progression and shift onto horizontal - obtaining cosmetics, unlocking more utility for your mounts, or training abilities to help traverse maps with ease. You never need to 'catch up' when you're not playing.
new trailer and new player boost event
having newly launched on epic store, there's a refreshed official trailer to get a better sense of who you'll be in this world!
youtube
To give everyone a welcome bonus, there's a big exp boost in game until Nov 25th, although levelling is quite easy and non-grindy anyways. The game's supposed to be fun, not work.
This isn't even getting into how much I like the map design, the music, the quest overhaul and the sense of community. And the mounts and achievements and the ease of inventory clearing and storing materials. The overall attention to QoL ... did I mention the official, independent wiki with API integration and dialogue transcripts that can even be used in-game?
If you liked the sound of any of this, give it a shot! You can just start playing right now for no money!!! Maybe I'll see you in tyria!
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Rated "R" - Part 4
First 7k here (my blog) or on ao3 here | Skip ahead to the end of my WIP doc/see all updates on patreon (full 11k doc) | The tag i'm using for this fic on tumblr (chronological order)
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His breath picks up, exactly like a little bird trying to keep his respiration even without the cheat of tactical breathing patterns. Giving Jason his-- fuck, his honesty here, not trying to hide behind the training!
“God, I was a little asshole.” Jason says fondly. “Leaning over you, nudging you, teasing just to get a reaction.”
“It was terrfying.” Tim says, lips pursed but audibly fighting a smile. “I was worried you’d find out that I knew. Or that I was so far from home.”
“Instead you showed me a shit picture of the sky—you totally took that right before I landed on the balcony, you little shit—and stuttered through your planned lies and let me talk you into sneaking out to the corner ice cream shop.”
It’s fuzzy around the edges, just another night as Robin before the end, but Jason remembers how easy it was to coax startled laughter and wide-eyes out of the boy, how impressed he’d been when Tim shimmied down the fire escape so easily for his ‘first time’.
“It was the best of night of my life.” Tim says quietly. Not quite wistful, but something… a treasure, here, pressed into Jason’s hands.
Jason had swung the young boy back to the landing, felt his shock and joy even as he was so quiet, not whooping or screaming—Jason wasn’t suppsoed to use the grapple with civilians outside of emergencies, but aside from the stuttering and awe he hadn’t managed to get strong reactions out of Tim.
He'd wanted to.
“I’d have recognized you.” Jason announces. His head thumps back on the pillow. “At the next gala.”
A sharp inhale.
“You… that was only two weeks before Garzonas.”
“And three weeks before I fucking bit it, I gotcha.” Jason blows out air heavily. “I don’t remember the dates, but that was April. Earth Day had already happened, so…The next one would have been, what, the Belmonts’ charity ball?”
Tim disagrees with a little noise of dissent.
“Sophia Starr held a big event in May to raise money for cancer research.” He reminds. “Her aunt died from brain cancer the year before.”
“Better that than fundraising for shitty outreach programs that ended up embezzled, or tax write offs, or fucking—early movie showings.” Jason had almost forgotten the contempt in his heart for all the different reasons Gotham’s elite got together to spend their hoardes of money.
“Mm.” Tim quietly agrees. “You weren’t there.”
Jason squeezes his eyes closed, thinking about where he was instead—and what he would have given up to be there, once the trap sprung.
Shit. He needs a distraction. Galas and balls, little birds dancing around each other.
“If I had been?” Jason tips his chin up, eyes still closed. “What was your plan, hmm? I’d have recognized you.”
A shaky inhale as his reward. Jason grins again.
“Do you think you’d have come, even if your parents weren’t in town? Tim Drake, almost old enough to be chauferred there, to apologize with a smile for his parents’ absense. Schmooze a little on their behalf.”
“I first did that to get close to… well.” Tim lets the words trail off, lets Jason pick up what had really been going on at the time. “It was closer to the end of summer by the time I realized someone had to step in.”
“Let’s not go there,” Jason decides, letting his eyes open, see the lines in the ceiling. “We’re painting a different picture, here, Tim. C’mon.”
“Yeah?” Something soft in that tone, almost breathless. Jason gets more comfortable.
“Mm.” Jason prompts. “The mysterious boy at the gala. I’m… on edge. Fed up with Bruce’s bullshit. I’d latch onto that kind of distraction.”
“Latch onto… me.” Tim blinks hard.
“You were a mystery, baby bird. I was a detective.” Jason clicks his tongue. “Besides, those parties were miserable. You would have been fun.”
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Stanley is the Head of Advertising & Outreach for Vykker's Labs, and the sibling of Dr. Bedtime, Burnadette, and Edwina. He's responsible for the Labs' many successful advertising campaigns. He frequently interacts with Magog Cartel investors alongside his sister Edwina, balancing her icy demeanor with a can-do attitude and desperation to please. Stanley's department is on the cutting edge of advertising tactics, and has done extensive research on subliminal messaging and mind control. Stanley is addicted to cosmetic surgeries, anything he can do to look youthful to the public! He's recently had a face transplant, but his body keeps rejecting it. He has to peel it off and soak it in a stem cell bath every night to keep it alive.
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Would They Have Been Superheroes Without Bruce/The Batfam?
Dick - possibly yes, but not a very good one. He doesn't have great impulse control. He's so angry. (He's ADHD, with all the executive dysfunction issues and emotional regulation problems.) He needed someone to help him build boundaries for himself. He would have created himself a team and a community, but probably would have searched out other teens. I think he'd have a lot of scars from bad decisions and mistakes.
Jason - probably not. Even if he got to a point where his entire focus wasn't survival, young Jason was too much a part of his community. Putting on a mask is a distancing tactic. I can see him helping people when he sees trouble, but joining some sort of outreach program seems more likely than superheroics. He might have joined something like We Are Robin, though!
Babs - She would be doing good. Fighting political corruption, fighting police corruption, working as an information broker - I'm not sure she would have gone for 'superhero' without the Bats (maybe 60/50 odds?), but she was searching for SOME way to change the world. I think vigilantism actually limited her - but it also helped her develop into who she became.
Tim - Very unlikely. Tim would be SUCH a different person without the Bats. And out of everyone, he requires the most things to line up to push him into the spotlight. He doesn't have the same need to do right as most of the others, but he does have a deep sense of responsibility. And a need to be part of something. I think philanthropy was more likely that vigilantism, but I hope he would have found something.
Steph - Definitely. I'm not sure how long she would have lasted. I'm not sure if she could have stayed a good guy if she was on her own - she was SO scared and angry, and had so little training, and making the tough choices requires enough safety and space to think. But most other heroes and teams would have been better for her than the Bats were.
Cass - All she needed was a spark to become a hero. It couldn't have been anyone - they had to show her that helping was possible, and had to carry enough darkness she could see herself in them. It took her until she was 16 to find someone like that. But it definitely didn't NEED to be the Bats.
Damian - It would have been very difficult without the sense of a legacy to live up to. Damian fights against heroism for quite a while. Someone different COULD have taken Dick's place and put in all that work, but it seems unlikely. Like, he's never doing it on his own!
Duke - from what I've picked up about his start, he was going to do something anti-establishment. I think that if there hadn't been a GOOD option, he might have found himself somewhere bad, at least temporarily. But he also has a pretty good head on his shoulders and a strong sense of right and wrong, along with the superpowers ... I can see him becoming a Marvel style teen superhero.
Summary (Saying nothing about non-superheroic world-assisting choices):
Yes - Steph
Probably - Dick, Cass, Duke
Maybe - Babs
Unlikely - Jason, Tim, Damian
#gecko's lists#I'm working from who they were around the time they started#for the later kids#things would have been MUCH different without the bats around#so it's less likely they would have become those people#but that is beyond the scope of this list
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Im sure some of them have been way over a line but if you’re feeling petulant at vulnerable disabled people saying fuck yall to society imagine how we feel to see someone “reticent” to talk about covid issues because “people take it too far”. Sorry that’s probably not entirely fair I’m just so fuucking sick of it. Like of course their exceptions to masking. But don’t tell me how to speak after what I’ve been through. The paternalism makes me want to throw up
Yeah, I think a lot of people think this is about tone policing disabled people who are rightly outraged and despairing, and that's really not what it's about.
This is about the Joe Bidens and Lori Lightfoots of the world blaming covid spread on individuals behaving badly, while systematically dismantling the very social programs that would have made it possible for anyone to behave "well."
There are two conversations happening here that keep getting flattened because of context collapse on the internet. There is the conversation about which feelings disabled and high risk people are allowed to voice. there is no virtue in tone policing that. Disabled people need to express their hurt, hopelessness, and outrage, and no one can stop them from doing that. no one should stop them from doing that. It is not an act of shaming for them to say how they feel. it's important.
There is a separate, more tactical conversation to be had about which kinds of messaging are effective in altering behavior. This is the question for the public health researchers and the activists and the people planning outreach. We have to be able to talk about what works and what doesn't and why.
Just as disabled people who are despairing about COVID have the right to express their pain, disabled people also have a right to discuss how to best movement build and influence public behavior.
I am gonna talk about what the research shows about persuasion and why a lot of organizations are utterly fumbling in influencing people's COVID mitigation behaviors, and I do that because I care about those things changing. I have no interest in silencing my comrades who are experiencing deep grief and terror and outrage and wish to express that, and certainly no one will be silencing me. Even if listening to people who do find masking and social distancing hard and trying to meet them where they are at so that we can practice harm reduction does make you want to barf.
It's understandable you feel that way, and you don't have to do that kinda work. it's work I have the bandwidth for though as someone who also finds doing the "right" things hard here. no amount of people being mad about that is gonna change the fact that strict COVID mitigation adherence is difficult for me. if that fact becomes unspeakable, my behavior wont become perfect, it will just become more secretive.
a person can be angry at me for not being perfect and that's their right but it won't "fix" my behavior. it will just make me feel like a murderer for having pressing, life or death needs of my own. conversely, someone listening to me and caring about me and helping me meet my needs while also reducing my risks helps a whole ton. and so I try to extend that to others as best I can.
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"Why Is It Always Children And Not Elderly Or Homeless?"
Why is it that every time we see someone doing meaningful community outreach, like trans people reading books to kids, the knee-jerk reaction of some folks is to clutch their pearls and conjure up the most grotesque, baseless insinuations about "sexual deviancy"? You want to know why people aren’t lining up to read books to nursing home residents or the homeless? Simple: nursing home residents and homeless adults don’t need to be introduced to basic human decency and inclusivity lessons—they’ve already lived their lives with all the prejudices, biases, and social mores they’re going to carry to the grave. Children, on the other hand, are still forming their worldview, and maybe, just maybe, they could benefit from seeing that gender-diverse people exist in the world and can be mentors, caregivers, and guides just as easily as anyone else. This isn’t about some dark, deviant agenda; it’s about building a kinder, more understanding generation that, ideally, won’t grow up to perpetuate the same hateful rhetoric you’re so fond of spouting.
Then there's the redirection tactic of "But why don’t they go help the homeless instead?"—as if the people griping about drag queen story hours are suddenly overcome with a burning passion for solving systemic poverty. Please. Most of the time, these very same people wouldn't lift a finger to help marginalized adults unless they thought it could score them points in some twisted moral competition. This brand of armchair outrage doesn’t come from genuine concern for the homeless; it comes from a narrow, knee-jerk discomfort with seeing trans and queer folks visible in society. It’s the classic “I’m totally okay with the existence of marginalized people—as long as they stay out of sight and don’t interact with my kids.” The irony is rich: the people complaining the loudest about moral decay and deviancy are the ones obsessed with what others are doing with their bodies, projecting their own insecurities and narrow definitions of "normalcy" onto everyone else, while offering no meaningful solutions to the actual problems they claim to care about.
And let’s address the thinly veiled accusation that reading books to kids in an educational setting is somehow a predatory act. This is nothing more than projection, plain and simple. Those spewing these accusations are often the same ones who have internalized a culture that sexualizes and polices everything they don’t understand, reducing every act of goodwill to some perverse ulterior motive. It’s a classic smear tactic: if you can’t actually criticize what someone is doing on the merits, then conjure up the specter of “protecting the children” to justify your own discomfort and ignorance. Never mind that the vast majority of crimes against children statistically come from close family members or trusted adults in traditional community roles (particularly those traditionally most sanctimonious about gender and sex preferences)—let’s conveniently ignore that and demonize the people promoting inclusivity instead, because that’s easier and fits the narrative you’ve been fed.
The reality is, people in marginalized communities engaging in public service, especially around kids, is about as far from “virtue signaling” as it gets. It’s not performative; it’s an act of resilience and generosity that exposes kids to perspectives beyond the narrow, exclusionary views they might otherwise inherit. If you’re so concerned about the moral guidance of children, maybe consider what they’re learning from you: fear of the unknown, contempt for differences, and a complete inability to approach the world with empathy. Maybe, instead of wasting your time policing the identities of people volunteering to make a difference, you should be figuring out how to channel your energies into something actually constructive—like addressing the societal issues driving homelessness or pushing for better elder care. That would be “virtue” worth signaling. But, of course, that wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of othering people who are different from you, now, would it?
#trans#drag queen#lgbtq#lgbtqia#lgbt pride#critical thinking#social sciences#QMAGA#children#story time#reading#reading rainbow#elderly#homeless#inclusivity#pride#trans pride#liberal#progress#we are not going back#vote against trump#vote blue#dqsh#drag queen story hour
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Ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, a liberal Gen-Z-led group has purchased a handful of domain names related to the top Republican primary candidates in an effort to extinguish support from young voters.
“Republicans are not investing in outreach to young people, and we know why,” Jessica Siles, deputy press secretary for Voters of Tomorrow, said in a statement to WIRED on Friday. “Their regressive, radical stances on abortion rights, guns, climate change, and other top issues are overwhelmingly unpopular with Gen Z. Since Trump and Haley won’t accurately inform young people of their views, we will.”
Voters for Tomorrow has bought up new domain names—GenZforTrump.org and GenZforHaley.org—in an effort to sway young voters in battleground states from backing Republicans in the 2024 election. The websites will redirect to another site, GenZvsFarRight.org, which the group says will outline how “out-of-touch” the GOP’s platform is with the needs of young voters. On the redirected site, the group outlines Trump and Haley’s records on the environment, LGBTQ+ rights, and gun safety, among other issues, without explicitly encouraging people to vote for Biden.
To reach them, the group is launching a digital ad campaign across Instagram and Snapchat, hoping to reach at least half a million users in battleground states where they say the youth vote could make a difference for Democrats. “Gen Z will determine our next president,” the ads say, as they ask users to visit the websites for more information on Trump and Haley. Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, and Florida are some of the states where these ads will run, and the group plans to spend as much as it takes to reach at least half a million voters, Jack Lobel, Voters of Tomorrow's 19-year-old national press secretary, told WIRED on Friday.
For nearly a decade, domain trolling, or the act of buying up URLs related to an opposing candidate and redirecting them to unfavorable information, has become a popular digital media tactic for campaigns. In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina had domains related to their GOP presidential campaigns swiped up by trolls before they were able to grab them. CarlyFiorina.org, at one point, displayed 30,000 sad-faced emojis to represent the workers she laid off at HP. In 2020, the Biden campaign bought KeepAmericaGreat.com, the Trump campaign’s reelection slogan, attacking Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
“P.S., If the GOP candidates had invested in young voter outreach efforts like we are, maybe we wouldn’t have acquired these website domains in the first place,” stated Voters of Tomorrow’s press release.
It’s impossible to know whether these domain trolls have the power to sway voter sentiment. But Voters of Tomorrow thinks they do. “Trump is the greatest threat to our generation, and we’re going to continue to expand that belief in our generation throughout this project because the stakes of the 2024 election are unprecedented,” Lobel said.
In 2020, young people came out to vote in record numbers and arguably helped turn the election in Biden’s favor. But a recent poll from the Harvard Kennedy School has shown that the same demographic appears less likely to vote in 2024 than in the prior presidential election, declining from 57 percent to 49 percent. The poll reported that a plurality of these voters distrust Biden and Trump to act on critical issues like climate change, gun violence, and health care, which could dampen their desire to vote in this year’s election. Those same voters said Trump was the better choice to address the current crisis in Gaza over Biden by 5 percentage points.
These numbers could spell trouble for Biden and the Democrats come November. Around 41 million Gen-Z voters will be eligible to vote for the first time in 2024, according to Tufts University. Of those voters, more than 8 million of them will be first-time voters, and could play an outsize role in electing the next president.
“Young voters have historically been left out of the political process, and that changed with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Young voters realized their power. And since then, we’ve been showing up in droves to shape elections,” Lobel told WIRED. “Going into 2024, we have to build on that power.”
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On May Day 2017, anarchists participated in lively demonstrations all around the United States, from the heartland to the coasts. In the Northwest, Seattle witnessed a successful block party at the site of a juvenile corrections center, while in Olympia anarchists barricaded train tracks to oppose fracking and clashed with police. Support arrestees here. Yet Portland, Oregon may take the cake for the most creative and combative May Day. Demonstrators not only defended themselves from unprovoked attacks from police who declared the march a riot—they also introduced exciting new innovations into the aesthetic of the black bloc street presence. Here, comrades from Portland explain their goals with the giant spiders they created for May Day, and offer a helpful guide for those who wish to make spiders of their own.
In an effort to bridge the gap between art and activism, giant spiders were assembled off-site and pushed up the street to the demonstration, stocked with water bottles, snacks, earplugs, and other party favors. The idea was to narrow the divide between “us” and “them” that often exists at demonstrations, and it was a complete success. We performed community outreach, engaged in cultural development, boosted morale, provided crucial supplies, and created an amazing photo opportunity in the process.
The concept is multi-dimensional: it works on many different levels. The idea began from frustrations around attendance at local demonstrations. In Portland, where the majority of citizens seem to be white, middle-class, and apolitical on account of these privileges, they don’t show up unless a demonstration concerns their interests specifically. However, Portlanders are fascinated by their own love of art and “wacky” stuff as well as the commodification of protest as “funtertainment.” We decided to embrace this love of the “weird” to test whether a hyper-localized approach to engaging people could succeed.
Our tactical art enabled us to fill a supporting role for other participants in the march, helping challenge narratives that the black bloc is an “othered” or “othering” tactic. Whether this separation is intentional or not, the fact remains that the general public is often hesitant to engage with us. Bearing that in mind—as well the tendency of the Portland Police Department to brutally shut down demonstrations—we stocked our Spiders with fliers, water, LAW (liquid, antacid, water, the eyewash with which street medics treat pepper spray), ear plugs, and snacks. We also included a few other party favors, because anarchy needs revelry!
We intentionally engaged with the folks around us. A lot of people walked up to ask what the spiders meant! It was inspiring to see so much dialogue between folks in everyday garb and folks in black bloc. We explained the ideas behind our actions as anarchists and the creations themselves: the three spiders representing Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Direct Action.
A word about symbolism. The idea of using the spider as an icon of resistance is that spiders are always there watching, waiting, and keeping the environment free of pesky insects and other parasites that consume resources without supporting their fellow beings. While we may look scary, we’re here with you and for you. We are the spiders, and the insects are the societal ills that we fight against.
The symbolism of the black widow spider is rich with history that guides our work. We want to contribute to that rich history, adding our own interpretations. Mutual Aid, Solidarity, Direct Action are our black widow’s cruses. (Crux? Curse? Cures?)
In regards to developing our own culture, there are many barriers we face in this process. State repression is the biggest threat, of course. The specter of state repression can complicate organizing, planning, and building trust in our communities. Portland has a history of repression and slander, ruining the lives of activists and anarchists; these horror stories reverberate throughout the underground. We can’t allow ourselves to be publicly disparaged and forced into hiding by our adversaries and their culture war, so we create as a political act. Creating is intuitively human: we plan, we build, we think, we conspire, we imagine. It is also an activity in which everyone can engage to some degree while building new skills. It enables us to get to know each other, build trust, and share time and company.
More globally, seizing the Spectacle is a step towards our goals, because it allows us to dictate our own narratives. With the development of Public Relations and Social Engineering, the visage of capitalism has come to define its delusional reality. To paraphrase Guy Debord, lived experiences are now taken in as a collection of representational images. We can tell our own stories and show the general public what these three principles mean in action. We can create our own mythos, speaking out on our own terms, in our own language, with our own symbols. The state and media dictate too much of what we’re allowed to say and how it’s spun—it’s time to spin our own webs to connect and fortify our relationships.
We are building the bridges we need to move forward. The existing connections between art, activism, and anarchism are fiery and well-storied. The new wave of repression under Trump’s regime is still building steam, but it is already proving dangerous. We need to be more careful than ever. Art allows us to demonstrate and show our fangs, and we can use art to empower those around us.
#how-to#guides#and manuals#May Day#Portland#protest#reportback#community building#practical anarchism#anarchist society#practical#mutual aid#grassroots#organization#anarchism#resistance#autonomy#revolution#anarchy#daily posts#communism#anti capitalist#anti capitalism#late stage capitalism#grass roots#anarchists#libraries#leftism#social issues#economics
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What do you think about big companies that have nothing to do with the books or the Acotar universe (like Spotify recently) having spoken out about the shipping war and being team E*riel. Because I would understand Sarah not doing fanservice but now there are very large companies involved that are rooting for the other side. What do you think of this?
It is a marketing tactic for them to gain exposure through commenting and engagement. Whoever runs their social media accounts may just be someone in college on an internship and is aware of current trends. Videos with many likes, sounds with many videos, etc., is a way in which they will gain exposure. You saw how crazy they went for Spotify commenting? Do you not think that Spotify’s usage went up drastically after that? Same with Audible—appearing relatable is how they gain new users.
I worked in political campaigns in college and we did similar tactics to gain younger supporters for our candidates from my campus. I currently work as an architect and we do outreach programs in a similar format to gain new clients. I promise you that the CEO of Spotify is not messaging Sarah back and forth over Elriel, nor does Spotify as a whole care about a ship. If the video had been Gwynriel, Feysand, Nessian, or Elucien and had as many likes, they would have commented on that, as well. I even had the social media team for an SEC college like one of my posts before; it is never that deep.
As for the song that Sarah had posted on her story, that also has nothing to do with ships as she is not an author who lays Easter eggs out for the fandom—she tells it like it is, always. The song was good and one of the few that actually sounded fantastic on the first listen through the album (I love it all the way now, but at first it was rough). A magazine article writing, “fans speculate,” and all of the above. Marketing teams follow trends. It would be wildly inappropriate and unprofessional for a marketing team to use a commercial company’s social media platform to promote something unrelated to their brand.
Audible and Spotify also host Sarah’s books on their platform and use their social media team to engage with fans to encourage them to use their product. That is simply it.
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