#public safety saga

[everyakipanel]

Volume 1, Chapter 3 Pochita.

[versusbecky]

power!!!

[iztyping]

[soapoet]

What are you like as a spouse?

requested by anon.

like & rb if it resonates ♡

01.

Shufflemancy: Stay with me by Anson Seabra

As a spouse you are a little territorial. You trust your partner, but everybody else is under your careful scrutiny. You very easily pinpoint weeds in your garden, and pull them out root and stem swiftly. Your spouse can rely on you to be on the look out for all sorts of dangers, big or small. Security is of great importance to you, both regarding your relationship and your loved ones, and yourself. Perhaps less so yourself, as you seem to have an instinct to protect which sometimes overrules your own safety. You could relate to the knight archetype to some extent, the concept of serving and protecting. There is an intensity to your love that is like a fine wine, and simply intoxicating to your partner. You're akin a guard dog; out in public you are an intimidating presence ready to bark and bite should need arise, but behind closed doors your service is paid for in tender love and care and you melt when your partner dotes on you. And your spouse adores this duality in you, dominance and submission merged into one.

You're observant, and pay careful attention to your partner's wants and needs, and this lends itself to both an intuitive understanding and awareness of your partner's feelings and the shifts that occur, and makes you a great gift-giver too. You're also a great example of the "girlfriend effect" (regardless of gender) because you encourage your partner's authentic self expression and help them daringly try new things, style wise but also in general. It is safe for your partner to take leaps of faith in career and other matters that may come with risks, because you stand watch and are always there to catch them should they fall. It's possible that you're a late bloomer, or have a series of tumultuous relationships before finding your person, which leads you to take things slowly, desire clarity, and develop effective communication skills to avoid misunderstandings with your spouse. You have a deep need for emotional support and reassurance, so your spouse is somebody who you can truly trust and feel the ground sturdy and secure beneath your feet in their presence, and find shelter and comfort in their arms when you need it.

For some, the term spouse is used loosely, as formal marriage may not be of interest to you if you have any qualms regarding tradition, or simply prefer the intimacy of privacy. Some could opt for court house marriage with a lowkey get together with loved ones at a later date, and others none, and simply commit as life partners without legalities or traditions taken into consideration. If marriage does occur, it's likely to happen later once career matters are stable.

If you and your partner have children, you are your child's biggest cheerleader and encourage any interests of theirs, fuel their passions and show up to their activities to support them. Strong likelihood of children who are outcasts of some sort, deemed strange by their peers, bullied, could be neurodivergent, queer, or otherwise experience difficulties growing up, which you are uniquely equipped to handle and care for. Some in this group may simply decide to have no children of their own, or consider fostering as an alternative, but could otherwise deal with children, especially the unfortunate, in their community or on a larger scale in society.

Additional details: oddly specific spotify playlists, swords and daggers, rpgs, tarot, history, psychology, the moon, moths, wolves, pirates, red or purple lips, cherries, citrus fruits, birthday dinner, makeovers (self or room idk??), emails, documents, nintendo, tattoos, kuromi, donuts, fairs or theme parks, escape rooms, the nightmare before christmas, wednesday and the addams family, fate: the winx saga, euphoria, purple, chai, scorpio/aries/aquarius/gemini, saturn/mars/moon/lilith, april/march/november/december.

02.

Shufflemancy: This side of paradise by Coyote theory

As a spouse you are a breeze. A gentle caress of the sea blowing through your spouse's hair on the beach. You're a little bit of an old romantic, and may have an affinity with the classics or period dramas. You enjoy simplicity and peace, breaking bread at the kitchen table and quality time simply spent in the vicinity of your dear. Merely cooking together can be an adventure, as can the clean-up. You're attentive and try to be both a good friend and lover to your spouse. Resting your head on their lap and enjoying the silence, the act of nesting behind closed doors appeals to you, but you're partial to little getaways too just the two of you, slipping away somewhere near or far to see what you may find and get up to.

Physical closeness is important to you, but it is not possessive, suffocating, or clingy, but gentle and warm like a shelter from the storm. Your marriage is airy and light, and even the ceremony that got you to this point may be very cozy and intimate, invites sparce and spaces dimly lit. It's a very solitary life that you lead, with little socialising outside your little bubble. Contact seems restricted to only family and a couple of long-time friends and little else. You could even choose to live in the countryside or farther from the hustle and bustle of lively cities.

Should you have children, you are a very involved parent, as is your spouse. Messes are happy accidents and you emphasise comfort and peace in your child, and encourage them to make good friends, and you may very well come to consider your children's friends bonus children who can trust you as safe adults when they have nowhere else to turn to. Neither of you are very hard on your children, and do not mind if they don't succeed at everything so long as they try and have direction all within themselves. You're forgiving and patient, both with your spouse and children. You would do particularly well raising a child of the opposite sex, masculines doing well at raising feminines and vice versa.

You may take longer to feel ready to date in general, or due to circumstances or personal issues have a delay in romance, but once you do stumble upon love, commitment is sure and stable and long-lasting. Many are likely to marry their first love or first serious partner, and others could experience the classic friends to lovers arc that slowly blossoms but then remains in bloom forever if cared for.

Additional details: paper planes, strategy and simulation games, chess, archeology, history, cartography, geography, museums, genealogy, family events (dinners, birthdays, weddings, baby showers, funerals), babysitting, cats and mice, twitch, youtube, memes, news, acoustic guitar, green, lotus flowers, blankets, sweet tea, conventions, comics, anime, cartoons, arts and crafts, sticks and stones, seaside, countryside, camping, hiking, road signs, numbers, dirt roads, pine trees, virgo/aquarius/cancer/libra, mars/sun/neptune/ascendant, january/march/july/september.

03.

Shufflemancy: Somebody to you by BANNERS

As a spouse you are quite the little ray of sunshine, but also the sudden gust of winds of change. You are collaborative, and may serve as either the artist or the muse. Both, perhaps, as there is inspiration being exchanged between you and your spouse like sparkling water shared between two cups, clear and fizzy, as sharp as it is delightful and refreshing. You're enthusiastic and cheer your spouse on, loud and proud, supporting them in their trials and assure they have your arms to run into when they return with their accolades and treasures. You may easily get flustered, and try to avenge your spouse by attempts to charm and woo them in return, even if just to wipe the smug smile off their face as their bask in the glory of making your little heart flutter.

You may be a little needy, or quick to feel discouraged, but you're just as easily brought back to your feet with kind and reassuring words and helpful hands. You try your best to make yourself useful even in situations that are new to you, especially if your partner could use the help. You're able to laugh at yourself, but also communicate when the stumble actually hurt so that your spouse can kiss it all better. Regardless of your age, you will retain a youthful air about you, which will keep things interesting as you always find new adventures and things to share.

If you have children, you'll let them grow in whichever direction they best find the sun and rain to bloom in their time and their way. You love your freedom, and want to bestow it upon your child too, who will grow up to be very close with you and consider you a great friend and trusted confidante with whom they may share all their joys and sorrows without judgement. Some of you may not have children and instead raise fur babies, travel the world with your spouse, or create an alternative kind of family of misfits and kindred spirits amongst your peers.

You are very bubbly and sociable, and eagerly introduce your partner to your friends and make merry with theirs. You could really rejoice in the merging of your individual friend groups for the sake of building a community to call home. You enjoy exchaning favours, and have the mindset and desire of managing tasks between both you and your spouse and your community so that different strengths get utilised to combat defeat should somebody have to face big challenges they're not equipped to handle. So, though you may be called chaotic from time to time, you're still a good taskmaster and collaborator, who does not keep score, and manage your spouse and groups of people well even though things aren't colour coded and organised from A to Z.

Additional details: daydreaming, dream journals, streaming, paperwork, paint, coffee stains, red and blue, strawberries, avocado, live chat, chopsticks, van or camper or truck, packages, identity crisis, illness/medicine, learning, waiting, theatre, pets, money, siblings or cousins, slurpees, sushi, suburbs, small towns, interviews, phone calls, sneakers, broken windows, kpop and jpop, manga or manhwa, lore, toys, polar bears or bears in general, empty playgrounds, twitter/x, instagram, lost and found, wooden trinkets, herbs. capricorn/sagittarius/leo/pisces, jupiter/venus/uranus/vesta/chiron, march/june/august/october.

04.

Shufflemancy: Dandelions by Ruth B.

As a spouse you seem to be a jack of all trades, the scales of justice perfectly balanced. Your diligence and the ease at which you tackle tasks, the perseverance you show despite life's challenges, and how you always get back up again when you get knocked down, all makes you a wonderful partner. You are goal-oriented, but know when to slow down and relax. You push your partner to chase their dreams, but know not to push too hard and when to offer up comfort and quiet reassurance instead.

You may have a little bit of a saviour complex, as you pride yourself in both your ability to help and your emotional intelligence. You are patient, and know that in life there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all, and you're uniquely able and willing to find missing pieces of puzzles so that everybody finds what works for them, and will be a healing presence to your spouse especially. Your spouse finds you to be a rock, but let's not kid ourselves and pretend you don't melt like butter when they pull you close and tell you to relax, and lull you to sleep with a heartbeat and fingers running through your hair. Your spouse is well aware of how hard you work and how heavy the burdens on your shoulders sometimes become, and insist that you are no Atlas, at least not in the sanctuary you call home where you may rest and recharge.

Should you have children together, you may settle into traditional or otherwise clearly defined roles and assure neither of you take on too much and both get to be involved in the life of your children to an equal extent. You're likely the problem solver and the one to help with the homework, and deeply encourage active and social pursuits to ensure your children grow up healthy and experience relationships with people of all walks of life. With the combination of you and your spouse, your children are likely to grow up gentle but quick to defend the underdogs and fight injustice. Assuring your children have access to options and opportunities as well as a safety net to fall back on should it be needed is something you will both make sure of. Note that this is the only group I have no alternatives for and sense no absence of children, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you really do not want children, take double or triple the precautions.

You may enjoy home improvement or possibly have either you or your spouse working from home. You delegate responsibilities fairly and make consistent efforts to show your spouse your care and affection, especially through acts of service and the kindest of words when they are at their lowest. Though you are responsible and often do things by the book, there is a little streak of mischief and wanderlust that I sense, which keeps things interesting, making you a balance between homebody and explorer. You may have great banter with your spouse and frequently tease each other.

Additional details: car rides, crying, nerves, vhs tapes, siblings, young people, writing and rewriting, praise, headbands, flannels, glasses, family issues, guardian angels, cleaning, mermaids, rodents, deer, letters, arguments, flowers, office (work or the show idk), radio station, static, noise, real estate, architecture, mushrooms, pickles, salads, sleepless nights, muscle pain (or strain), sleepless nights, sleeping on the couch, glasses, hair cuts, lilies and elderflowers, soap, hugs and hand holding, patience, reluctance, overcoming fear, hearing music from another room, virgo/cancer/capricorn/aquarius, pluto/sun/venus/juno/union, june/august/october/november.

05.

Shufflemancy: Slow dancing by Aly & AJ

As a spouse you like to be in charge, or wear the pants, so to speak. Somebody has to tell the waiter your spouse asked for no pickles, right? Though you have a dominant energy about you, you are very nurturing and full of love and care and can be surprisingly sensitive emotionally. You like to stay on top of things and have things to do, places to be, and you could serve as something of a secretary in your relationship. Your spouse can always rely on you to know what to do and to get the Christmas cards sent out on time. You have a taste for the finer things in life and enjoy indulging in these together with your spouse. You likely introduce your spouse to many new things, be it music, literature, politics, foods, or some lifestyle and habits you maintain.

You revel in the quality time spent with your spouse, though you're independent and encouraging of them living their life separate from yours too whilst you engage with your own endeavours. You are secure and loyal, and give your spouse no reason to doubt your commitment and you speak as highly of them as they of you, so shenanigans and misfortunes stay at bay. You may have only few but close friends, but keep them for life and they enjoy the company of your spouse. You may frequently host dinner parties or other intimate get togethers in your home with the few privileged to know the two of you.

As a parent you would raise well-mannered and good children, to whom you would teach many of your own talents and push them to hone and master their own abilities and take both their interests and responsibilities seriously. You have a close bond with children even if you do not have them, which for many may be the case, and you could instead together with your partner be very involved with the children of your friends or family and serve as godparents or the cool aunts/uncles. You may still teach these children valuable lessons and be an important adult figure in their lives, and possibly lend your talents to teach them new skills.

You may also work with your spouse, be it through a mutual or related field, literally sharing the same workplace, or by joining up to start a business together or works as collaborators on separate passion projects. You're highly encouraging of them and push them to pursue their goals and even wildest dreams because with you in their corner there aren't many places in the world they couldn't go.

Additional details: co-op games, cookbooks, bullet journals, weddings, calendars and memos, perfect timing, awkwardness, dogs and canines in general, horses, rapunzel, children, phone calls, electric guitars, drums, men and fathers, streetlights, stalking, power outages, doctor's appointments, pedagogy or social work, education/school, stage fright, long distance travel, reunions, road trips, ice cream, spicy food, alcohol, orange and pink, pearls, grapefruits and blood oranges, hot chocolate, lgbt+, anxiety or depression, archery, sleepovers, libra/taurus/leo/cancer, mars/mercury/pluto/descendant, april/may/october/december.

06.

Shufflemancy: Comethru by Jeremy Zucker

As a spouse you are a natural in many ways, even, or especially if, you worry that you aren't. To your spouse you are a very nurturing and compassionate, gentle lover, who is intuitive and always seems to know the right words that they need to hear or the moment to hug them from behind and press your head against their tense and tired back. You dedicate yourself to being a source of light to your spouse, and tend to be quite romantic, albeit you get shy and blush even decades into the marriage when they return the sentiment. You learn quickly to express boundaries and communicate your needs to your partner if that has been a struggle in your past as they make a big effort to make sure you make your voice heard. You carefully consider their feelings, as they consider yours. You could as a couple have an almost telepathic connection, an inherent understanding and the blue print of each other's soul, knowing each twitch and micro-expression to know when the other requires assistance or wishes to leave a situation, etc.

You may find the role of a homemaker ideal, though you aren't without your own ambitions and occupational ideals. You could for a time be a stay-at-home spouse, or parent, but simultaneously engage with your own projects and end up working from home. You really make home feel like home, and your spouse finds relief and peace every time they return home. You have an eye for aesthetics and a way to make any space feel cozy, inviting, warm, and comfortable. Even though you are more of a homebody and like the solitude, your friends may rejoice in their visits and feel at home in your house and you could occasionally agree to host bigger holidays in your home, because really, nobody does Christmas like you do.

You are very clever and learn quickly, and your curiosity takes you on quite a few adventures in just one afternoon, and you enthusiastically share these wonders with your spouse and coax out their own adventurous and speculative side. You could spend hours talking and never seem to run out of things to speak of, but also find comfort in enjoying the silence. You're affectionate and like to be close to your partner, but eventually slip away as your mind begins to wander and take you in different directions. You have a youthful and ever-curious energy that your spouse delights in.

As a parent you would truly dedicate yourself to parenthood and rejoice in even the little steps and achievements of your little ones. You are doting, but not a doormat and find that your children trust and respect you without being told or taught to. You encourage your children to think for themselves because you value logic as much as feelings. Good reasoning skills and the ability to judge things on a case by case basis is something you will instill in your children. Your children are likely to grow up very independent and just the right balance of kind and clever to be an asset to society. Both you and your spouse share a deep distaste for the state of the world and are dedicated to raising children who know wrong from right and don't blindly follow anyone or anything and have the wires between head and heart connected. You and your spouse may both do a lot to improve your community and work to eventually leave the world better than how you found it.

Additional details: tears, keys, incoming text messages, psychiatry, therapy, home, teaching or writing, good luck, headaches, cramps, horror movies, haunted side of youtube/tiktok, conspiracy theories, stim toys, minecraft, rabbits, birds, cats, hoodies, grey and blue, energy drinks, vitamin water, winning, brownies, pancakes, soup, winnie the pooh, lion king, 2000s cartoons/music, fuzzy socks, beaded curtains or string lights, green or hazel eyes, candles, intuition, dust, sleet or snow, cold/grey/dreary weather, iron and vitamin d deficiency, water colours, astrology, vanilla or coconut scent, bubble baths, gemini/cancer/virgo/scorpio/libra, jupiter/neptune/moon/lunar nodes, february/may/june/october.

[midnight-pluto]

yk I was hoping for fun silly bsf Damian right?? NOT WHATEVER THAT WAS 😭😭

(I would 100% love another post elaborating on this if you want to make one. I eat up bsf Damian content)

WHITE LIES — headcanons, damian w.

well i mean since you asked— here’s some elaboration on my small facts and crumbs of my bsf!damian saga, series, whatever

contains: bsf!damian x gn!reader, angst, definitely not fluff, mentions of murder/sacrifice but in a symbolic way

a/n: this goes against my own rules for this blog, but who the fucks gonna stop me? n e ways pls read the ending a/n 🫶

there isn’t much you know about bsf!damian’s parents relationship except that his dads a whore

what he has told you is that his mom raised him abroad which was why bruce seemed practically unaware or unknowing of his existence before then, which seems to check out since he only came into the public eye only 2 years ago

due to both of his parents living in separate countries with different laws and with him being a minor, it’s hard to deduce when and where he’s gonna be at times

bsf!damian told you that the agreement his parents settled upon was that his dad gets to keep him for the majority of the school year but goes to stay with his mom for the majority of the summer

however, his mom is allowed to spontaneously pick him up only a few times during his school year which doesn’t seem quite right on your part but apparently his moms also loaded and his dad can’t really do anything about it

of course, it’s merely a cover up whenever he has to go on missions that take longer than just a free weekend

it's a hard lie to keep up, but as time goes on it gets easier to keep up and even harder for you to try and decipher anything that could potentially be wrong with bsf!damian’s stories

it'll be worth it in the end, won't it?

he tries his best to not listen to you when you talk about yourself, the less he knows about you the easier it is deceive you and eventually cut you off

but he listens

it's middle school, why should he take anything that happens here seriously? that includes you, bsf!damian doesn't see himself continuing to talk to you three years from now and he highly doubts that possibility

so what if he secretly wants to know you for eternity and onwards? despite his life being full of wealth bsf!damian still can’t afford being able to keep you in it for long

bsf!damian could barely scrape by deceiving you with an overly elaborate tapestry of all of the lies he’s ever fed you, but it’s for the better

it’ll be worth it in the end, won’t it?

his wants weren’t needs, and both as an assassin and robin that rule applied — except this time around he placed the average civilian’s life over his own

the universe never seemed to allow bsf!damian enjoy things for long, for you were merely a civilian he wanted to be by his side, wanting for your lack of expectations on how to present himself, but he didn’t need it

but it was for the better, for your safety and everyone else’s so you would be away from all the danger and destruction bsf!damian never failed to bring with him

it’ll be worth it in the end, won’t it?

it has to be

it has to be worth something, anything, for bsf!damian’s time being by your side to be cut short by his own hands, because if it isn’t then he just wasted his only semblance as a normal teenager, a child, away

you had bsf!damian and bsf!damian had you, if he let go of that without your safety from the countless revenge plots and villains that had it out for him ensured then he didn’t make a sacrifice, he committed a murder

and that was something damian had sworn off

a/n: no, this wasn’t made out of the multiple asks and comments asking for more bsf!damian content, i had already had this in the works when i made my last post about holding off on updates so for the month this may be my last actual post on bsf!damian, for the month.

[hatsukeii]

冬に死ぬの方がいい (I'd rather die in the winter) / denji x reader

genre(s): strangers to friends to lovers??? not fully lovers yet because it’s at the end so it's like kinda ambiguously romantic ig, angst with a not too angst ending!! hurt/comfort SO heavy on the hurt/comfort omg... also despite the tldr there is no death here like for the most part

warning(s): spoilers up to the end of public safety saga, canon divergent and timeline inaccurate at points because i haven't read csm in AGES, explicit depictions of SA and like near-death poverty because denji actually cannot catch a break um????? no explicit nsfw tho also not fully and completely proofread i will be editing as i go when i spot mistakes

wc: ~6.6k

tldr; dying in the winter doesn't seem so bad after all

Do you know what it feels like to die?

In the seventeenth winter of Denji’s life, he thinks he does, as the planks of termite-infested wood and sheets of metal collapse into his shed without warning in the dead of night, the blizzard of winter snow unrelenting in its advances. He dreams of the coldest winter he’s survived, a splinter of decayed, rotting wood knocking him awake from his half-slumber, before crumpled rubbish attacks him from all directions. His arms scramble around Pochita to hunch over his motionless, sleeping body as boulders of wood and rusted metal hammer at his back. Purpled, blistered fingers swat and claw at the rough patterns etched into the planks, skin ripping as Denji crawls into a foot of snow. 

In the seventeenth winter of Denji’s life, he curls up against his temporary home- the glass window of a convenience store, too afraid to enter. People come and go, crinkling bags of plastic shrugging into protective arms, parents tugging a little harsher at their children, who point and slobber at his ghastly figure, partners who hold each other’s waists a little closer as they pass.

“What a poor guy.”

“Fuck, that scared me.”

“Is that guy dying or something?”

Dying. Do they know what it feels like to die? 

Denji’s head is hung low when plastic wrap lands on the back of his skull. His fingers, frozen stiff, swipe at the glossy packaging, before a fleeting moment of warmth graces his frozen fingertips. He doesn’t look up to the sound of plastic ripping, or to the hand that slips a heat pack into his arms. He doesn’t look up when someone kneels to his level, and his vision trains further into the ground when they offer him half of a steaming red bean bun in a paper packet beside his body, their eyes peeking through the gap between his knees. 

“Sorry, that’s all I have.” 

He doesn’t make a sound when a bottle is twisted open, doesn’t move when they grab his hands and begin trickling water from their thermos onto his fingers. He only winces as the blisters begin to thaw, steaming as the remnants of wet snow melt beneath his feet. 

“I hope we never meet again.”

Denji only looks up as you turn to depart the store, etching into his mind the person that moves further from him with each step, and the eyes that meet his own, but only between his knees, and the fleeting touch that may have just saved him that night, in the seventeenth winter of his life. The person who had to see his shrivelled, curled up figure, and had to feed his dried, crusted mouth with half a red bean bun that still sits on the ground beside him, and had to touch his bleeding, puss-filled, blistering fingers to thaw them.  

He too thinks he would rather die in the cold of this winter than meet you again.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Die, Denji does, but only in the eighteenth spring of his life, when the blisters on his fingers have scarred into hardened skin, and he has found himself a new shed to spend his nights in. He dies with a chainsaw cord through his chest, and it’s a million times less painful than he once believed, at least until the dying pump of Pochita in his heart almost begs for mercy. Suddenly, his chest feels just a little too heavy, and he realises he’s never known how warm blood was until it drowns him in pools of sticky, metallic red. When two strong arms reach out to hold his collapsing body, he’s sure that he knows what it feels like to die. Denji’s limp figure hangs motionless in your grasp, and you frown at the mess of dried blood that paints his toothed head in specks of brown. This is not somewhere safe for him.

Denji opens his eyes with his head in someone’s lap, bumpy roads jolting him awake from his unconsciousness. He stares into the back of the front passenger seat, warm fabric beneath his cheeks as he inhales the air freshener of the car and raises his hands to his eyes. The hardened skin of his fingers seems to have scabbed and fallen off, leaving him with hands more akin to that of a teenager. A normal teenager. He senses something else, something toying with his matted strands of golden hair. Fluttering touches stir and spread on his scalp, a whole palm nuzzling into the top of his head and eliciting a satisfied sigh from his lips. 

“We’ve got another hour to go. Sleep more if you need to.”

There it is, the voice that haunts him in his sleep and chases him in his waking hours. The voice that tells him he did a good job after every hunting gig, snickers with him when he cheats the yakuza out of a sleazy hundred yen coin, lulls him to sleep at night with the promise of bread, and butter, and honey, even some jam. The voice that he remembers all too well, and can’t seem to run from, no matter how hard his mind races. 

His mind freezes, but his body betrays him as his head turns in your direction, vision meeting the full face that hid behind the cover of his knees on that winter day, when he swore he knew how it felt like to die. He once envisioned his death to be silent, frozen in his final breaths into the winter sky. Then, he thought of it as a mess of red, putrid blood flooding his orifices as he drowns in a dumpster of sliced up human remains. Now, by some miracle, he lies in the lap of a familiar stranger, staring back at their gaze that remains unchanged from the one they shot at him between his reddened, shrivelled legs, exactly one hundred and fifty four days ago.  

Denji isn’t completely sure if he knows what dying feels like anymore.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

There is vomit in Denji’s mouth. There are mouthfuls of grainy, soured bile that barge through Denji’s lips as he sits on the ground of a restaurant, arms pulled into his chest. Himeno’s grip on his jaw is unshakeable, no matter how hard he thrashes and gargles, doing anything he can to separate himself from her. She pulls him closer to her as she continues spewing all the food she’s consumed throughout the day into his throat, and his eyes dart toward you, who grimace in disgust at the horrific scene that ensues before your very eyes. 

Do you know what it feels like to die while still breathing?

Denji wants to die. He wants nothing more, than to really die here on the ground, somebody else’s vomit spilling from the corners of his mouth. Yet the way your eye twitches at his pathetic attempts to free himself, and the wandering of your gaze between Himeno, who just refuses to let go, and Denji, who can’t seem to force her off, sends him to the depths of hell before he’s even lost consciousness. There is no empathy in your gaze, only disgust. Denji once thought that having to touch his frostbitten, rotting body in the winter was the most shameful thing that he could put you through. He thinks this is tenfold worse. He glues his eyes shut, praying for this all to be over, and just misses the slam of your soda can into the wooden table, and the shuffling of your feet towards the combined bodies of himself and Himeno. The weight of Himeno’s suffocating grip lightens, and Denji is just able to wriggle out of her grasp, before he’s falling again and his head hits the ground. 

You watch the pool of puke that spreads beneath Denji’s cheek, seeping into his hair and sticky with bile and spit. Himeno babbles on, half a jug of beer in hand, and eight empty ones in front of her. You wince, tugging at Denji’s sleeve. He is motionless, blacked out, and you can’t help but feel a pang in your chest. How did he, of all people, end up here? You look around at the people that surround the table, all of which bear lines of jagged scar tissue beneath the rolled up cuffs of their shirt sleeves, across the skin of their faces, along their huffing chests. You touch the scar on your shoulder through your shirt, scratching at it through the fabric. The itch does not fade, gradually becoming more and more intangible, yet so obviously present. This is not a place for people like Denji, or you, or anybody with half a will to live. If eighteen years of training and living under the public safety sector has taught you anything, it is that you never want to be near this place. You did not save Denji’s life last winter for him to let something as wretched as this line of work ruin it once again. You did not reminisce about him on the way home, half a red bean bun in hand, praying that he might find solace in this perverted world, only to have him return to the root of all things depraved. You did not scream for three days straight, the speech devil clawing open the skin of your esophagus at every breath you took, just to watch him jump into the stomach of another devil, giving up whatever little shred of sanity he had left. 

Your hands come up to form shapes, fingers twisting and jabbing at each other in sentences of sign. 

Makima, should I take him home with me to Aki’s?

“I’ll taaaaaaaake him…!” 

For somebody who is clearly far gone, Himeno is quite perceptive of what others around her are planning. Makima smiles, waving you off, and you frown. Grabbing your soda, you leave the restaurant without a word. Nobody else follows.

In the eighteenth spring of Denji’s life, he wakes up in a bed for the first time. His body sinks into the soft, linen sheets that cover the plush mattress, and there’s a weight that sits comfortably above his chest. He isn’t sure what it is, yet it wraps around his sweaty body like a cloud, threatening to lull him into slumber against the midnight that settles in a blanket of blue and ribbons of silver through lidded blinds. He does not want to die here. For once, Denji decides that he will bask in the rare warmth of a quilt on his chest, and the smoothness of silky fabric beneath his arms, his body finally relaxing after eighteen years of endless running, reluctant hunting, cold slumber on planks of wood and chewed up, moulding mattresses. That is, until, a familiar body crawls onto him from where his feet lie.

“Hey… Denji.” He freezes, the bed transforming into a bed of nails and pinning him down like needles that stab through fragile, fluttering wings of butterflies on framed planks of wood.

“Wanna sleep with me?” Himeno’s hand comes up to hold Denji’s cheek, creeping impossibly close to his flushed chest. 

This is what he wanted, right? Every night, as Pochita drifted to sleep on Denji’s shrivelled chest, he would tell him that getting laid would be the greatest honour of his life, wouldn't he?

But Denji wants to scream and cry, until his throat goes hoarse and his ribs crack under the pressure from the sheer exertion of his lungs. Himeno comes even closer now, and he can smell the bitter beer and putrid puke that laces her mouth. He doesn’t move. He can’t move. He can’t speak either, as her lips begin to pepper across his face, and along the shaft of his neck. Her kisses send his throat in a frenzy, panicked wheezes and groans vibrating into her mouth as she takes his Adam's apple in an open-mouthed kiss. He can’t breathe, and his legs won’t move to save him as her saliva dribbles down his neck, into his frantically heaving chest. Denji is frozen in place as Himeno peels off her sheer shirt, and he almost chuckles dryly, the concussion from before throbbing at the side of his skull. Safety? Comfort? A roof over his head, a house that won’t collapse even from the strongest of winds, a place to sleep in that won’t end up twisting his back? How audacious. Who is he kidding?

Denji thinks he should have just chosen to die when he woke up in this bed. 

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The day that Makima catches wind of Denji’s incident with Himeno is the day that he is moved to Aki’s residency. At the click of a key turning in a lock, you walk out of your room groggily to see a figure in the dark, who drops a half-empty duffel bag onto the ground at the doorway. Denji shrugs backwards as you flick the lights on, arms coming up to cover his eyes. The flat is warm, smells that he doesn’t know wafting into his twitching nose as he removes his hands from his vision to look around. You stare at Denji, who wanders around the kitchen counter, eyes searching every surface for something, anything. 

“We have leftover curry, if you want it.”

There’s that familiar voice again, calling out to him, offering him food, and safety, and a roof over his head. He turns to you, and you nudge your head towards the fridge, hands in the pocket of your hoodie. His eyes are bloodshot, and he doesn’t make a sound, or say a word. He simply glides towards the fridge, pulling it open and rummaging the racks for a plate of leftover curry rice. The clanks and clinks of glass dishes on plastic stirs the Hayakawa residence awake, Power swinging the door to your shared room wide open as the handle slams into the wall with a thud. Aki’s room remains closed, but you hear an abrupt hiccup from the other side of the door.

“What is this thing doing here! Why is it taking my food!”

“He needs food, Power. Plus, it’s not even yours. Go back to sleep.”

“No!”

Power huffs, and you forcefully shove her into the room, shutting the door behind you and flicking the lights back off. Denji unwraps cling wrap from the dish, balling it in his fist and tossing it aside as he searches for a spoon, metal utensils clashing against each other in wooden cabinets as his impatient fingers sift through forks, and knives, and chopsticks. Upon finding one, he travels to the couch, where you are sitting with your legs manspread lazily. The black screen of the television reflects the two of you on the couch; Denji’s tired arms reeling spoonfuls of cold curry and meat into his mouth, and you watching him eat, hands clasped and elbows propped up on your thighs. He lets each bite linger on his tongue for a little longer than it has to, savouring this new sensation of proper food in his mouth. Then, he wipes his mouth on his rolled-up sleeve, and sniffles at the realisation that his stomach is no longer throbbing and growling dully.

“Do you want to sleep?”

Denji doesn’t respond. He thinks you have hidden away the last two words to that question. He would rather die than hear confirmation of it.

“You can take my bed if you want. I can take the sofa for now.”

He doesn’t get up from the couch. Instead, he drops the spoon onto the empty plate, and feels his body tip sideways. His head lands in your lap again, the same way it did in the company car, on the day that he died for the first time. Your arms shoot up to accommodate him, body tensing as his hair hits your leg. He sighs, small snores eliciting from his nose as he passes out on you, still clad in his work suit. You tug the windsor knot of his tie loose, before running your fingers through his blonde locks, and rolling your head back over the edge of the couch. You can only take a guess at what happened with Himeno the night before that rendered him so unresponsive. So unlike the brash, boisterous version of him that beamed at Himeno’s offer of a french kiss, before having puke forced into his mouth. You cringe at even the thought of it, taking note of Denji’s little hums in his slumber, limp arms hanging off the couch and feet dangling off the edge. Swiping a thumb across his lip, you collect the curry that remains around his mouth, and he jolts unconsciously in his sleep, before relaxing against you again. Wind whistles past the glass windows of the living room, and it’s almost as if Denji shivers at the sound of coldness, even if it is blocked by the four walls that surround him. Your hand on his head moves to cradle his jaw, which shifts periodically as he breathes in, and breathes out. You hope that he can stay like this forever.

Another hiccup sounds from Aki’s room, Power kicks and flails at blankets in muffled thumps.

You bring your other hand to your mouth, parting your lips against your thumb to take a first taste of the untouched plate of curry that was supposed to be your dinner.  

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

“She even touched my shoulder! My shoulder, guys!”

On a windy night of Denji’s eighteenth autumn, he beams at the dinner table, grains of rice spewing from his stuffed mouth as his chopsticks wave and swing in the air. He hits you in the face, a piece of limp spinach slapping onto your cheek from his utensils, and Power screeches, jagged teeth bared in her maniacal laughter. You side eye him, picking the vegetable off your face and silently shoving more rice into your mouth. You’ve noticed the skip in Denji’s step upon his return to the Hayakawa residence, the dusty blush that lines his cheeks as he grabs at the fabric of his shirt around the shoulders, and sniffs it, the bashful giggles he gives himself when he waves you off for asking him what’s got him in such a good mood. Knowing your line of work, that won’t last, no matter how hard you try to speak it into existence. 

“Yeah, she touched your shoulder. We get it.”

“No no no, you don’t. I think she likes me! Like, really likes me!”

Denji slams his hands onto the coffee table now, shooting up to defend his proclamation of love on behalf of some random girl. You sigh, opting for a piece of beef from the plate in front of you. On your tongue is soft meat, savoury sauce, sour, putrid dread. Aki shoots you a glance from across the table. He watches your eyes widen for just a glimpse of a second, and nods, a mutual understanding clearly reached between you two. You take a fistful of Denji’s shirt, yanking him back down to ground level, and he pouts as you shove bundles of spinach and ladles of sauce into his bowl. He bites his thumb, gnawing and nibbling as his chopsticks pick aimlessly at his meal.

“Stop biting your finger, Denji. That’s gross.” You grab his wrist and pull his thumb out of his mouth.

“Nah, I made a promise to Makima.”

“Makima?”

Aki chews on his rice silently at your question. Denji stares at his nail, jagged and peeling from biting on it constantly. 

“She’s the one for me. That’s why she told me to remember how it feels when she bites my thumb.”

At that, your palm makes contact with the back of his head, knocking it forward. Denji wheezes, the wind knocked out of his windpipe at your sudden attack. Aki shovels individual grains of rice into his mouth, clearing his bowl. Power joins in your antics, hands chopping at his body even after you’ve stopped to glare at him. She gets bored of your inaction quickly, scratching her ass as she leaves the table for the shared room. Denji’s eyes are trained onto his bowl, the food looking less and less appetising by the second. 

“She did what?”

Denji stretches his palm in front of his face, inspecting it as if it was some antique object. His chest sinks, feeling your eyes burn holes into the side of his head. Makima promised him love, and sex, and everything he has ever wanted. He isn’t sure why it seems so wrong to you. You once told him you wanted him to find someplace safe, no? Where do you think he would be, if not for Makima bringing him in on that fateful spring day?

“Well, she let me cop a feel because she cares about what I want. Even said she’d grant me any wish if I got the gun devil.”

“She does not care about you, Denji!”

Denji scowls, hands waving erratically as he searches for his words. Aki leaves for the kitchen sink silently, the sound of running water serving as a backdrop to your wordless fury. You slam your hands onto his shoulders, shaking him back and forth. His eyes meet yours, and he sees something that Makima, that other girl from today, Himeno, Power, Aki, none of them have shown him before. Desperation. Fear. Worry. 

“You know what? Go back to that girl you met in the phone booth. Do what you want, just don’t get me roped into your shit. And remember, I told you so.”

You shove him away, retreating into the shared room. That night, Denji sleeps on the couch instead of you. He doesn’t think about the girl from the phone booth, or Makima. He dreams about the day that you thawed his frostbitten fingers outside a convenience store, the day that had him thinking he knew what it meant to die, but really had no grasp on it. 

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Denji learns the taste of flowers in the eighteenth autumn of his life, when he shoves an entire bouquet of them into his mouth in a cafe. The petals turn into mush on his tongue as he chews and swallows them. He waits for some girl that tried to bite his tongue off and murder him two days ago, sitting alone on a bar seat in a bustling coffee shop. Stares and murmurs ensue behind his back, couples and friends alike glancing at his pathetic figure that waits for a fabricated promise, flowers stuffed in his mouth. He tastes the bitterness of the flowerbuds, the type of bitterness that seeped through his veins when she kissed him, and ripped his tongue from his mouth. The type of bitterness that he can’t seem to fully carry, even after she tried to blow him up. The type of bitterness that is covered by the sweetness of flora, which somehow still makes its way through to his sinuses. Like recollections of how she showed him how to swim, laughed at his awful jokes, taught him to read and write, and turned all shades of red and pink at his flirtations. Rose-tinted recollections of a military trained spy, whose very purpose was to blush on command, laugh on command, lure him into emotional investment, before biting his tongue off, slashing his wrists open, and ripping his heart out of his chest. 

He doesn’t like the way these flowers taste. He throws the half-eaten bouquet onto the ground of the cafe, and pushes his way out of the shop. 

When Denji returns home, you are squeezing whole bottles of throat medicine into your mouth on the living room sofa. He points at his throat, and pretends to pull a pin from his neck. You nod, clawing at the air around your throat. He shoots you a thumbs up, unsure what to say as he faces the consequences of his fortunate victory against the bomb hybrid from the night before. You wave him off, eyes never meeting him as you mouth, it’s fine, I’ll be good. From across the living room, he catches the blood that coats your entire bed of teeth, the dark, deadly shade of crimson splattered across your lips. He hears your screams again, and again, and again, as he stands in the doorway. Blood curdling commands coming one after the other, he can almost feel his throat rip open with every word, taste the blood that you cough up after finishing the bottle of throat medicine. 

Walking towards the couch, he plops down beside you, his weight creating a dip in the soft fabric. You pretend to pull a pin at your throat, and point at Denji, who sighs hopelessly. You falter, brows furrowing at his disappointment. For the weeks leading up to today, Denji had not removed himself from Reze- some unknown girl he met in a telephone booth. He had beamed about his advances to you- namely regurgitating a saliva coated flower from his mouth magically, and you had listened patiently, fists gripped by your sides. He told you he wanted to run away with her, after all this mess and carnage was over, only for her to become the root of another senseless massacre. Your hands move to form shapes, sign language that Denji has picked up on throughout the past months of living and working alongside you. His skills are scarce, yet he just makes out what you are asking.

Beach, girl, run?

He shakes his head, back hunching in defeat. She didn’t care about his heart, only the Chainsaw devil’s. Even her blushes and laughs were rehearsed to perfection. 

“She didn’t show up to the cafe anyways.”

You frown, hitting Denji’s chest with the back of your palm, eyes still not meeting his own. He bites his thumb, and you slap his hand away from his mouth without even looking. Signing furiously, your fingers contort into a flurry of shapes. Shapes that Denji can barely decipher, but understand just enough to feel your disdain. 

No biting… unbelievable. Makima, Reze. Gross... 

Denji smiles weakly, wiping his thumb on his blood-stained uniform. Your teeth are bared until the tips of your canines just peek through the opening of your lips, before you retract them and gnaw your bottom lip meekly. He takes in the corners of your worried eyes and irked brows, and he thinks that even Pochita feels a little guilty in the way that his chest seems to beat agonisingly with every pang, like a nail burying itself into his heart at each pump. You punch his shoulder, finally taking a good look at his haggard figure, before reaching for another bottle of medicine and twisting the cap open with a click. You gargle and cough at each swallow, splatters of blood spitting into a white tissue from your throat at each sound you make. Suddenly, Denji wishes he didn’t throw the flowers away at the coffee shop. Maybe a few petals could ease the pain too, because he’s sure it’s the petals he ate that are making him feel a blooming warmth in his chest right now.

“You don’t have to be sorry. Plus, you saved my life out there yesterday. So, thanks.”

You smile at him with your lips pursed, and Denji hopes that he doesn’t die before you find your voice again.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

In the beginning of Denji’s eighteenth winter, he slashes a chainsaw through Makima’s body. He watches her cut up, mutilated organs fall to the ground, throwing the chainsaw next to them. There is no pity, or rage, or overwhelming sadness. All he can do is stare, coated head to toe in her blood. He takes her skin, and bones, and organs in a plastic bag, inhales blood that smells akin to rat shit and bile. He walks into a new apartment, devoid of the Hayakawa name that was once engraved into the tin mailbox of his old home. It is empty, no one greets him on the couch as he walks in. 

He throws the bag of remains onto the counter of his new kitchen, bought with the money left in Aki’s will. He’s sorry, he thinks, because he doesn’t feel anything right now. Not anger, not worry, not fear. Aki is dead. Power is dead too. He should feel something, at the very least for you, who was wheeled onto an ambulance as he picked up the remains of Makima with his bare hands. 

Denji eats dinner alone at his new coffee table, also bought with the money from Aki’s will. He shuts his eyes, and pretends that Power is bickering with him. He can almost hear her frenzied shouts, feel her hands slap his back, and his head, and his chest. Aki should be sitting across the table, sipping his tea mindlessly, or lighting a cigarette and filling the room with nicotine. He shoves Makima’s flesh into his mouth, swallowing without so much as chewing on it. The idea that he is shovelling human flesh into his stomach while fully human makes his skin crawl and stomach flip. He wants to throw up. His eyes water at the grooves and fibres in the meat that etch themselves into his tongue. 

He squeezes shut his eyes even harder now, instead envisioning you beside him. You, who force strings of vegetables into his meals at dinner. You, who speak only when needed, and rarely in sentences that drag on for more than you deem the need to, and showed him how to live on with half a red bean bun and a thermos. He has never known the curves of your body like the rest of his prospects, never thought to try and learn them either. He doesn’t know of your past, or your present either, really. 

Despite that, you know the shrivelled figure of his past, his habit of thumb biting, his fear of sharing a bed, his disdain for spinach over any other vegetable. And when you spat at him, I told you so, you were right. Himeno wanted him to fuel some petty, one-sided feud. Reze ripped his tongue out of his mouth, only to apologise, before snapping his neck and leaving him in the dust. Makima, the one who swore to give him sex, and love, and safety, and purpose, everything he could have ever wanted, binded him in a dog’s collar so he could watch as she tore Power in half from the torso. All Power wanted was to give him a cake. 

You confuse him to no end, but something sits between the two of you for certain. Something that shrouds his heart in a warm glow, one that almost calls out at him to keep it there. A glow that creeps up to his mouth when you can’t speak, threatening to spill out of his lips and into yours so he can heal you, for once. But the glow always seems to turn into poison that leaks back down his throat. He swallows his words, bites his lip, bites his own fingers. He doesn’t know how it feels to die, only because you’ve shielded him from it all along.

The remains of Makima have been consumed. Denji throws the plates and bowls into the sink carelessly, his chopsticks following suit. When he swings open his cabinet to two new boxes of throat medicine, he can’t help but stare at his purchase. He really only had you in mind when he filled the cabinets of his new apartment with the only familiar thing a grocery store could offer. Maybe he should give you a visit soon.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

In the eighteenth winter of Denji’s life, you learn that he is afraid of living. Your backs against the sheets of your hospital bed, the two of you stare at the ceiling light that blinks periodically, just as it has for the past week that you’ve been here for. Its flickers have gradually become more erratic than the days before. You stare at the familiar cracks that spread from beneath the light bracket towards the rest of the ceiling, arms behind your head. 

“Does it still hurt to talk?”

“Just a bit.”

He hums in understanding, continuing his aimless staring. The hospital television whirs in static and vague sounds of people speaking behind the two of you, and you shift in place, the bed sheets wrinkling and shuffling beneath your body. 

“Can I tell you something?”

You nod wordlessly.

“I’m starting to think I can’t live anymore. Like this whole devil thing has made me less…human, I guess.”

“Why?”

Denji clicks his tongue, hissing a sharp inhale through his teeth. 

“I don’t really see the point in touching tits, or having sex anymore, you know? Like, all those things that I thought I wanted so badly, they didn’t make me feel how I wanted to. But then, I’m not sure how to live. Shouldn’t I live so someone can love me? Is that not what everyone lives for?”

You glance at him, the messy blonde hair that presses into the mattress, lousily tucked white shirt that creases around the waist, eyes that once were zealous turned tired, unfeeling. You pull one hand out from beneath your head, the one that doesn’t have an IV drip attached to your index finger. It travels to Denji’s crossed arms, untangling them from each other so you can grab at his hand. His fingers are unresponsive until you give him a squeeze, then another, then a third, and they finally relax against your own. He turns, meeting the eyes that peeked through his knees in his seventeenth winter. Eyes that look at him with worry, whether he is sitting at a dinner table, beaming about some girl whose flirtations have blinded his rationality, or if he is curled up against the glass door of some convenience store at midnight, breath stagnant and frozen in the winter air. 

“Do you think they loved you, Denji?”

His vision travels to the mattress beneath him. He thinks they did, or maybe they didn’t, or it was somewhat in between love and indifference, or whatever that’s supposed to feel like.

“I don’t know. They all wanted chainsaw man’s heart. But nobody wanted mine, you know? Nobody ever wanted Denji’s.”

You give his hand another squeeze, and he feels another pang in his chest. This is what it feels like to die, Denji thinks. Not blood gushing from his chest, or being frozen solid as people walk past his crouched body, but knowing that his efforts to become worthy of appreciation have only amounted to being used for his power. This is what it feels like to die, a hollow boy with nothing left in his chest but a devil that pumps blood for him. Even his heart is a contract that he has to follow. 

“I didn’t save you a year ago today for you to think that, Denji.”

Your weak elbows try to prop your body up to look at him from above, before they collapse back into the mattress and elicit a hiss of pain from your mouth. It’s by some miracle that you’re even alive right now, and that your throat has healed enough to make out short sentences. Short proclamations like this, that you’ve waited so long to make. Denji catches your fall, a palm cushioning your elbow. His hand is still in yours as he shifts to look at you properly. 

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to know?”

He opens his mouth, and his scrambled words get caught in his throat. So, he nods, the bags beneath his eyes relaxing. You let go of his hand, instead running your fingers along his chest and laying your palm flat on his heart. It beats in rhythmic thumps, steadily pulsing on the lines of your hand. 

“What are you feeling right now?”

Denji’s mind is a jumbled mess, yet he can clearly tell what he is feeling. “Warm.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No.”

Your hands move to the back of his head, scratching and rubbing at his scalp with the pads of your fingers. Denji leans into your touch, eyes still trained onto your own. His heart continues to beat steadily, and he feels something building up around it. Something that has his breaths getting heavier, and his vision of you becoming even clearer than it already is. 

“What does this feel like?”

“Nice.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

Your hand makes its advance to his cheek, cradling it gently. Dusty pink scatters across his face, and Denji has to remember to breathe. In, out, in, out. Your thumb swipes across the dark bag beneath his eye. He thinks this is bliss, so unlike the drooling, panting mess he used to be for Makima, or the bumbling, fake persona he played up for Reze. He is more sober than ever, and his hand hovers over your body. He doesn’t want to just cop a feel. He wants to touch every inch of skin that you inhibit, trace over whatever scars you might have accumulated from the trials of time, plant kisses wherever you want him to, whenever you want him to. 

“What does this feel like?”

“Can you stay like that?”

“Sure.”

He reaches for your wrist, holding onto it like a lost boy in a crowd. His fingers feel for smoothed scar tissue in your palm, around your knuckles, on your wrist. He pulls your hand away from his face to take a look at the lines that etch themselves into your skin, lips hovering just above your fingers.

“Can I kiss you?”

You nod. He starts on the scar of your palm, one that you earned during a fight in the early days of your work. He kisses the fleshy scar that slashes across your hand, peppering along its length. 

“Can I keep going?”

“Yeah, keep going Denji.”

His head dips to the faint white lines that decorate your arm, from your wrist to the connection between your forearm and bicep. His hair tickles the sides of your arm as fluttering kisses plant themselves into each poisoned, torn open line of your skin. You squirm, hospital gown coming loose on one shoulder as the cool air of the room hits the scar that reaches from your shoulder to the dip between your collarbones. Denji notices, and pulls your arm away from him.

“Can I?”

You wince, the scar beginning to itch and throb.

“Please, do it.”

His fingers trace along the jagged scar, before he nuzzles his face into your shoulder, and moves along to the centre of the dip just above your chest. You roll your head back to give him space, and he kisses up your neck and onto your jaw. He’s inexperienced, nose bumping into your flesh when he comes up to look at you again. His eyes flicker to your lips, and you answer his question for him as you pull him into you. The glow in his heart rushes from his chest to his mouth, but his teeth bump into yours, and you pull away. It tastes like your blood, the blood that has saved his life more times than he can count as you rip your throat open for him. He wants to taste it again as much as you want him to.

“What does that feel like?”

Denji knows what it means to die now, but he thinks he’s starting to understand how to live too. If this day, in the eighteenth winter of his life, is what dying and being reborn feels like, he would rather die in the winter when his time comes.

“I think it feels like love.”

author's note:

guys this took SO LONG i really do not have what it takes to do a longfic in 2 days anymore after that tsukishima one... but im so proud of this tho like i had so much fun writing it and i love my baby boy denji so much omg also wishi i am so sorry it took this long to come out but i hope you like it sososoosososososos much

anyways tags!!

@wishi-selfships @staraxiaa @kuroppiii @akaakeis @iiwaijime @chuuya-brainrot @fiannee @bailey-reeds @hiraethwa @catsoupki @wyrcan

[aardvaark]

Throughout leverage we see multiple different people driving the team/groups. Parker with the "I was taught to run from the cops", Sophie with the "taxi driver in Istanbul (citation needed)", Eliot with "I am getting us there in 5 minutes or less"... So what is your headcanon for how they decide who drives? Does Nate have a specific set of criteria where he picks who drives? Do they argue about who drives?

well, a lot of places they go, they need minimum two vehicles: hardison's van for tech (i think its only got two actual seats, though im sure people have had to sit in the back & get thrown around lol) and at least one car for other people/general driving. hardison tends to drive lucille so thats one down. if eliot's around to drive, he's probably driving the second car. if not, then nate, then sophie, then parker*. when hardison isn't driving lucille, he's probably as likely to drive as nate or sophie. and when tara's there, i doubt she has driving privileges lol.

in s1, i doubt they're carpooling much. like, they'd drive from their homes to the hq to the job themselves, and only go in the same car to do some quick task. later, they treat nate's apartment as home base and are frequently there for very little reason lmao, so thats when they actually have to plan more about who drives. obviously it heavily depends on how many cars are required and who's doing what. but. it seems like it's often nate driving with sophie as passenger, eliot driving himself or with parker as passenger, and hardison driving himself or with parker as passenger.

*detailed explanation of their individual driving under the cut:

parker is a genuinely great getaway driver, so her skills are useful in that type of situation... but i think 99% of the time, when they're not requiring a quick getaway, she is BANNED from driving. sophie even said so somewhere in s3, i dont remember exactly. canonically she can drive perfectly normally too (eg her driving with tara in the s2 finale) to be fair. she just doesnt want to lol. the stuff she has in her own car (both useful items and "decoration") is somewhat disturbing and very confusing. a lot of it is sharp. or a chemical hazard.

sophie drives sometimes but her driving can be... questionable, occasionally (ie big bang job). the (alleged) fact she learnt to drive from a taxi driver in istanbul seems to imply she didn't learnt to drive later than most, when she was traveling a lot? her attitude of "if i'm doing my job right, the mark just turns off the alarm for me" makes me think she'd apply the same logic here and would've done more hitchhiking & public transport than driving when she was first starting out, but over time got herself a car and learnt to drive because its kinda a safety thing in her line of work (need a getaway). all this to say, she can drive and she might have a nice car but its not her priority, you know?

nate drives sophie, some mix of her thinking its chivalrous and him having some ingrained ideas about male gender roles, but also just personal preferences. and a little bit because hes seen some of her questionable driving choices. once they're together, this changes to a more even split. also nate is def a backseat driver (like, regardless of who's driving/their skill level) and has been kicked out of a car at least once.

hardison is also mostly fine to drive or not drive like sophie. he'll bicker with eliot about who drives but mostly that's just an extension of their ongoing bickering saga. every time one of his lucilles gets exploded or whatever, he has a period of mourning and takes a couple weeks before he'll let other people drive the next incarnation of lucille - and to be fair thats usually because one of them was responsible for killing lucille.

eliot doesn't let other people drive his car (unless its absolutely necessary for a con - see: the boost job). he only begrudgingly lets people IN his car because SOMEONE spilled slushie all over it one time and yes he will continue to bring that up a decade later, hardison. i think being around the team has made him become one of those people who has strict rules for being in his car lol - no food/drink, no leaving anything in the car that doesnt have to be there. obviously the team break these rules all the time.

and the definition of what is a "necessity" and can therefore stay in the car is a BIG ongoing debate. some items of interest on the "necessity" list: gift wrapping paper, one (1) shiny thing, a gaming console, chloroform, a neatly packed bag of spare clothes, at least one dress hanging up with a dust cover, 3-5 CDs (which must be individually approved before being added to the car and only one of which can be christmas-related), spare reading glasses, cables that eliot annoyingly can't veto because he doesn't understand that stuff enough to argue, aluminium foil, and a pack of hair ties.

some things that have been BANNED: food & drink, glitter (there was an incident), nail polish (there was more than one incident), most tech stuff ("that's why you have lucille!"), secret money stashes, anything considered priceless by art experts, "surprises", and live animals.

i would love a road trip episode where most/all of them are taking turns driving and are stuck together in a vehicle for ages. also i now have the urge to go through the series and actually chart who drives.

lol thank you very much for the ask and ik the length is crazy but i hope this is a good answer haha.

[yorshie]

Bayverse Headcanons

Just some headcanons I keep in mind when I'm writing bayverse. Will probably come back and add more as I decide on them.

Leonardo

Height/weight: 6’2”, 670lbs

Theme song : Loyal by ODESZA

Ambidextrous but if he needs to punch someone he uses his right hand

Has a dry sense of humor, more little quips and witty one liners than anything planned

Turns into a bit of a caveman when you’re in danger. He catches you going someplace dangerous? Straight to turtle jail for 1000 years. You don’t wanna be picked up and carried to safety? Too bad, it’s happening

Is the King of small touches. A hand on your back, a nudge of his knuckles to get you moving. Mr. soft eyes and low voice when he wants to get his way

Still gets into arguments with Raph. Sometimes they still dissolve into fisticuffs.

References vines to the horror of his brothers (his fav is “road work ahead”)

No one will play Risk with him because even if he’s losing he somehow bleeds everyone dry

Has a gameboy with exactly one game, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. All his animals have names like "Bob" or "Tilda"

can't cook, is banned from the kitchen, once set water on fire.

reads science fiction, fantasy and sagas a lot, though if you pay attention to his books the covers are sometimes swapped and it's almost always poetry or romances.

Not a big fan of PDA. Will give you a snoot boop or a chaste forehead kiss in public, but anything more is off limits. What’s that? You wanna snuggle? You better hope none of his brothers walk in because this turtle might panic and shove you off his lap in a snap decision instinct. You wanna go to his room? The scandal. What will everyone think? Fine, but he’ll ninja you in there. No one will know or see. Ninja silent. Except- Donnie will know. Donnie will see. Because he was sitting in the chair right next to you two and you both somehow forgot he was there.

Hogs the bed. And the covers. And the pillows. Basically if you want any bed commodity you better be prepared to snuggle

If you want him to watch tv that’s not sports it’s gotta be some older saga or classic that you actually have to pay attention to. Loves black and white martial arts movies. You once caught him hugging a pillow and watching Princess Mononoke with tears in his eyes.

Will just stare at the person who asked him to kill a little harmless spider before leaving the room

Donatello

Height/Weight: 6’8”/ 680lbs

Theme Song: Frequency by Tim Wolf

Left handed

Donnie is THE sarcastic little shit. 

He realizes quickly that while Leo has softness, and Raph is filthy, he doesn’t need to stoop to theatrics to get what he wants. He just has to make eye contact, tilt his head, and tell you in a calm, plain voice what he desires, and it works. 

Can’t keep his attention on one thing for a long period of time, or has to have multiple stimuli going on to keep focus. King of multitasking

The turtle most likely to curse

Can’t sleep without a nightlight and either music or a movie

Listens to filthy music when he’s working. 

The others gang up on him during trivia night to give everyone else a chance

the adrenaline junkie

one time he got Leo's tea mixed up with his coffee and he spat the substance clear across the Lair.

can cook but it's kinda bland. Can't bake to save his life, despite arguing with every failed cake like it’s out to get him: “it’s science why won’t you work??!”

hasn't opened a real book since the invention of the internet. Has a library of hard drives with the subject matter clearly labeled in alphabetical order. Mikey doesn't know about it and thus it has stayed relatively in order.

Doesn’t use his bed much, so the upside is you always have room to stretch out. Bad news is, if you want this turtle to get any decent sleep, you have to figure out how to keep him trapped enough where he can’t move without waking you up. And he’s a ninja.

Donnie likes to watch informative things. Like how it’s made, or unsolved mysteries. His crack show though? Cryptid hunters. He’ll laugh himself silly over people trying to trap Bigfoot or corner Mothman

The one that kills spiders

Raphael

Height/Weight: 6’5”/ 720lbs

Theme Song: Don’t Get in My Way by Zack Hemsey

Right handed

Turtle has a MOUTH and he is not afraid to open it to to get what he wants. Absolutely filthy when he wants to be.

Will turn into a little melted turtle puddle if someone is sweet to him. Doesn’t really turn to butter over words, but actions will get him every time.

Watches crocodile hunter and golden girls when no one else is awake. Loves animal documentaries, and zoboomafoo

Rough around the edges when it comes to heartfelt affection or feelings. With seduction he’s smooth, but telling someone he genuinely cares for them? Good luck stringing two words together my dude.

Prefers silence or listening when hanging out with someone. He’s slow with his input, careful with what he says. You’re winning if you can make him laugh

in the kitchen he’s either making the most disgusting looking thing that tastes fucking amazing or he’s grilling. Doesn’t tell anyone he learned how to make bread watching Julia Childe.

If he's doing something dangerous or something stupid, the worse thing you could say is along the line of "Leo said-" like, congrats, you just made sure he's gonna do the thing everyone knows he shouldn't. Flip side, he's trying to talk you out of doing something? Just sigh and say "ok, guess I'll go ask Leo-" Boom. Thing is done. Is it healthy? no. Does it work? yes.

Is the most considerate when it comes to sleepy time. He’ll make sure you have your own pillow, own blankets. He sleeps on his stomach and doesn’t move much, and is large enough that you could sleep tucked under the lip of his shell without fear of being squashed

Not the one to call if you see a spider. He will scream

Michelangelo

Height/weight: 6’0”/ 640lbs

Theme Song: Handclap by Fitz and the Tantrums

Right handed but if he puts his mind to it he can use his left equally for everything but writing

Is legally obligated to use cheesy pick up lines, and is a Talker

Uses lollipops and hard candy to keep his focus, bit of an oral fixation

completely ruins heartfelt moments by getting sidetracked. Can be giving the mushiest compliments then in the next breath go "so you gonna eat that leftover cake in your fridge or nah?"

Changes nicknames for you on a semi-weekly basis just to keep you on your toes and to annoy his brothers

Prankster extraordinare 

Can cook, but like the annoying ‘these are the worst ingredients to combine and somehow this tastes good and I'm going to sue you over telling me what's in this’

Is the best with understanding emotions and expressing himself. Yes, Leo might be better reading body language, but Mikey has empathy over why someone might react a certain way, not just 'if I do y then x happens'

Will push buttons to see how much he can bug someone

The one most likely to help you sneak out and get up to shit. Also the one most likely to get you two caught.

Makes up song lyrics when he doesn't know the actual words. Will change them to suit his needs, or how badly he wants to tick off his brothers. Not sure who would get the MOST annoyed by wrong lyrics on purpose, but you just know he has a different set fine tuned for each brother

His bed is basically a storage container for pillows and blankets. Which is good, because he is a serial cuddler, and if you need space to sleep you’ve got plenty of pillows to act as a body double if needs be

Loves soap operas, iron chef, diners drive-ins and dives. The more drama is in it, the more he eats it up. He and Raph bond over Golden Girls once the bigger brother realized he wasn’t going to get teased over it

Will pick up the spider to show you it’s not something to be scared of

[paceprompting]

stars in his eyes✨

week 3 (and a little late, whoops) for @steddiesmuttyseptember. And a continuation in the saga of why can't I write just porn, this is 6K, wtf.

Rough | lingerie | aftercare | sneaking around (and failing so badly at it)

Rating: mature

Tags: mention of rough sex, shotgunning, teasing, fingering, sexy underwear, semi-public sex

~*~*~*~

Steve didn’t quite know what to expect when Eddie invited him to a gig. Robin, Jonathan, and Nancy, too. But that had been offhand, nonchalant—an Invite whoever you’d like to come with. Got to make sure we’re not too suspicious, right?

Suspicious.

Hiding from the wandering eyes of the people who knew them best. Not standing too close, but making sure not to outright avoid one another, either. They could sit on the same couch, but not with Steve’s arm behind Eddie’s head on the back of cushion. Not with Eddie’s legs splayed in Steve’s lap, as if he could get that spot before Robin anyway.

They’d taken to putting a bowl of popcorn between them just to be safe.

There was other little safety measures like that. They never drove each other around unless they were also driving around Robin or the kids. Steve never parked in front of the trailer and came in through Eddie’s bedroom window. Eddie did the same for Steve’s house, except when he stayed over after a movie night.

All smoke and mirrors. To keep everyone else from think they were sneaking around behind their backs. That Steve and Eddie were keeping something secret from them.

Because that was what they were doing. Sneaking around.

He hadn’t even told Robin. Not in such specific terms anyway. She was well aware that Steve had a “secret paramour”, as she called it. He told her he wasn’t in some Shakespeare romance from English, and all she’d shot back with was, well yeah, you’d probably be dead if you were.

Eddie had asked him not to tell. When they’d clearly moved on from that first mutual hands-down-each-others-pants behind the school gym the day Eddie and Robin graduated from Hawkins High. After Steve had kissed him before the ceremony to help keep Eddie from spiraling out of control and running off before he could finally walk across that stage.

Moved on to long make-outs on Steve’s bed.  To sucking Eddie off in the back of his van after band practice. To Steve keeping a stash of mixtapes with Eddie’s favorite bands on them in his glovebox and Eddie keeping a stash of Cola on hand at the trailer, along with a spare pair of Steve’s glasses for his migraines.

Their standing offer that if either of them called in the middle of the night, the nightmares too much, too real, the other went over with no question.

Steve had peeked in at the end of a couple practices, when he was rounding up the group for a Hellfire night. Had sat in Eddie’s bedroom with him while he plucked out melodies and chords on his luscious red guitar with such speed in his fingers, Steve’s head spun just watching.

But he had no clue how a concert would go.

And being a Corroded Coffin concert, led by a wild child of chaos like Eddie Munson, anything could happen.

Eddie hadn’t forced Steve to come. Knew that the bright spotlights and excessive sound from the speakers could easily send Steve into another migraine. If Steve had to bow out, he would understand. Of course, he could hardly meet Steve’s eyes when he had said that, voice colored by how much he wished it wasn’t a variable.

It had been a good morning, the day of the concert. No auras. No nausea. Steve had even slept well through the night. He knew why Eddie came by around noon when Steve was working, his deep brown eyes wide and hopeful before he said anything.

“Excited for the concert tonight,” was all he said and Eddie grinned, blinding Steve with his dimples. One was slightly crooked now from the demobat scar on his jaw, and Steve remembered how Eddie had started to turn his head away or let his hair fall forward to cover it when he noticed himself smiling.

He wasn’t doing that now.

Eddie quickly rented two of his old favorites from the Horror section to cover up the real reason he’d come by and then left, lingering just an extra moment at the counter to touch his fingers to Steve’s.

Part of Steve wanted to grab Eddie by the front of his Dio t-shirt and yank him over the counter to kiss him. But they both knew better.

He didn’t see Eddie again until the concert.

He nursed exactly one beer and stared at the small crowd gathered at the Hideout. Corroded Coffin wasn’t the only band performing—a sort of talent show of up and comers—but they were the openers. As his eyes lazily scanned the crowd, nodding every so often when Robin nudged him in the ribs to do so, Steve  wondered if he might see Eddie somewhere.

This was his crowd. The long hair, the dark clothes and leather. Steve vaguely recognized some of the names on people’s shirts—all said in the back of his mind in Eddie’s low voice, usually bemoaning Steve’s ignorance of music culture.

Steve knew there was no reason for Eddie to be out socializing. He was probably pacing back and forth in the tiny closet of a dressing room the venue had provided, wringing his hands through his curls and making them wilder than they already were.

A selfish part of him, the one that got to have Eddie in small bits and pieces when they could manage it, wanted to find Eddie and try to soak up all that anxiety for him. There hadn’t been any chance to wish him good luck.

Steve hadn’t even thought of it when Eddie had come by the video store.

God, he regretted it.

“Hey, you want to go to front with me?”

Robin’s voice filtered through to the front of his mind, and Steve had to shake his head before he turned toward her. She stared at him, eyes wide and intense, and her face way too close to his own.

“What?”

“Do you.” She tilted her chin down. “Want.” Widened her eyes and leaned further into Steve’s space. “To go to the front.” She blinked twice. “With me.”

Steve would have pulled away from Robin, but he was already at the edge of the booth with him, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan and Argyle all crammed together. And he was half-sure that Eddie would never let him live down Steve “The Former Hair” Harrington falling flat on his face at a metal concert.

“Are you going to have to stand like this the whole time?” he asked.

Robin tsked right in his face, but immediately pulled back. “I would say yes, but your breath smells like citrus and yeast. Now, are we going to the front or not, because if we don’t go now, I will have to use you as a human shield to get there.”

Steve looked far over his shoulder toward the stage. Corroded Coffin’s instruments were set up and waiting, and true to Robin’s worries, as the time drew closer to start the crowd was gathering as close to the front as possible.

“I don’t know, Robin,” he said. Sure, Eddie and his band were performers, but Steve could only imagine how much easier it might be to only see people you don’t even know, who probably don’t even care as long as you play half-decent music. “If Eddie and the band see us, it might make them nervous.”

“Oh, come on. Those stage lights shine so bright they won’t be able to see the end of the stage, much less beyond it.”

“Robs…”

“Please, Steve. It’s our first concert. We have to!” Robin clutched onto his forearm, black-painted nails digging in at the points.

“Alright, alright.” He pried Robin’s hand off him and basically tumbled out of the booth with her following after. He downed the rest of his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. Jonathan and Argyle were engrossed in some personal conversation, but Nancy had noticed them leave.

Strangely enough, she had her brows raised at Robin, who gave her a bright thumbs up and then grabbed onto Steve’s arm again. He opened his mouth to question the interaction, but he didn’t know whether to pose it to Robin or to Nancy. And before he could figure it out, Robin darted for the stage and yanked Steve along behind her.

So, it wasn’t until the house lights dimmed and the stage lights brightened that Steve saw Eddie again.

His first thought was how much he wanted to bite Eddie.

Like he had guessed earlier on, Eddie’s curls were a dark, wild mess around his head. The lights surround him shone on the edges like an aura, and Steve had a flash of terror that a migraine had suddenly decided to burst his lovely, pleasant bubble.

But Eddie was only one. Bathed in the intense, bright light, shining at all of his edges and through the loose curls bouncing as he bounced on the balls of his feet. Wearing a pair of overly-torn up black jeans bedecked with chains hanging from his belt loops and an equally overly-cut up Corroded Coffin t-shirt, his scarred sides and tattoos—old and new—in full view of the crowd. His guitar, his darling, shone its dazzling red now that it was were it belonged with Eddie on stage, and Steve’s eyes caught on the glint of his silver rings as he settled his fingers along the frets.

Robin practically vibrated beside him while the emcee introduced the band. Let out an ear-splitting screech even through the ear plugs he’d bought when the crowd cheered for the band. Which, thankfully, were good enough that Steve only winced from the surprise rather than sheer volume.

The drums—Gareth, he remembered—started first. The three-count that led into the starting thrum of the base. Eddie wasn’t singing on this song, since he wasn’t standing in front of a mic. The other guitarist—his name something starting with a ‘J’—joined the bass with an even, low tenor; mouth pressed close to the mic and giving bedroom eyes to the crowd.

And then Eddie…

Steve knew something was coming. In the way he grinned to himself and tossed his hair over one shoulder, practically thrumming and the stagelight aura around him growing and growing until it burst out when he finally played his starting chord.

It was one chord. Only one.

There was another line of vocals, and then he played the chord once more. The sound tore from the speakers right through Steve, vibrating through his bones and into his veins. The opening chords transitioned into Eddie’s fingers flying across the strings, and he moved—always, always moving, never still his Eddie—with the music as he played.

He saw Eddie look out toward the crowd, squinting for a second like Robin said he probably would. But his gaze traveled across as he played, never missing a note, sweat shining on his exposed skin. Steve moved because Robin did, took caught up in staring at one particular member of the band to remember to actually try jumping or cheering.

Eddie’s dark eyes stopped on a particular spot in the crowd, a lascivious grin  across forming his face. His dimples came out in full force, and still he kept playing his guitar like an extension of his body rather than a simple toll to create strange but intense music.

And he realized…Robin was wrong.

Eddie could absolutely see him.

Because Eddie was staring at him.

He’d migrated closer to one of the speakers at the front of the stage, throwing one combat boot wearing foot onto the top of it, splaying his hips out and laying his guitar across the space. He winked at Steve, he fucking winked and threw back his head as he started a solo—rings sparkling points on his hands as Eddie showed exactly why he and the other boys never gave up even when all they could get was shitty gigs. They worked for it, in every note that Eddie created from his fingers on the strings of his guitar.

The solo finished with a long-held chord like the one Eddie had started the song with—a short break for his hands in the song before he’d start up again. And Eddie found Steve immediately again, smiling like a shark in the water, the point of his canines slightly threatening. The harsh stage lights shining down on him like stars in his eyes, points of light directed at Steve.

There was no way Steve was getting out of there without losing his mind.

He’d make sure of it.

~*~*~*~

Steve knew he was staring at Eddie too much.

He blamed it on the two whiskey shots Robin had tried at Jonathan’s behest and then immediately hated, and which he ended up shooting back as they waited for the band to come out to the bar floor after the show had ended.

That and the three joints that were being passed around now in the dressing room.

He’d had to fight every urge in his body—digging his fingernails deep into palms—to be the first one to greet Eddie when he came bounding out from backstage. But it turned out not to be that much of a problem, when Eddie waved them all to join him, Corroded Coffin and another all-girl metal band in the dressing room for the after party.

Eddie had put himself next to Steve, authentically vibrating with so much afterburn energy from the show that it hid the way he tangled his fingers with Steve’s for a quick two seconds as they walked together.

But, just to be safe, they sat themselves on opposite sides of the room once the group had filed into Dressing Room A.

Eddie perched on the back of one of the couches, boots on the cushion like a damn heathen, but nobody else cared. Liquor bottles and red solo cups littered the table, slowly being abandoned now that they’d gotten their hands on the primo shit brought in by Argyle and Jonathan.

At this point, Steve was sure they could just summon the stuff at will.

But he wasn’t complaining.

He sat mainly with Nancy and Robin. Nancy stuck firmly to her second beer of the night, and Robin—only three pulls from a joint into the night—had her head lolled on Nancy’s shoulder, regaling her with a meandering, but thorough recap of the last three episodes of The Golden Girls she’d watched.

Steve made himself stare at the floor as he took another pull from the joint he was sharing with Argyle, but there was only one place his eyes would go as he exhaled, slow and smoky.

Eddie had his head cocked in Steve’s direction when their eyes met again, his pink lips around the end of his own joint as he inhaled. Gareth was talking to him, clearly used to Eddie’s ability hold a conversation without making eye contact, one hand wildly gesturing until Eddie handed over the blunt.

“Please,” Gareth scoffed, pausing to bring the join to his lips. “That move is so tired. Half the time, you can’t even do it right and the smoke just goes all over the girl’s face.” He waved his hand in front of his own face, as half the group groaned (the boys) and the other half nodded in agreement (the girls).

Eddie gave very little reaction. No, his gaze got this very particular glint that Steve had come to learn meant he was about to do something incredibly reckless and Steve could do nothing to stop him. Eddie launched himself forward from the couch to stand, effectively catching the attention of everyone in the room. His cheeks were flushed and his limbs a bit wobbly compared to the usual, but he was focused. Entirely on Steve.

“I bet the deposed king here pulled this move plenty of times in his partying hayday.” He said, crossing from his couch to Steve’s by way of walking right over the table. He jumped down with a dramatic sigh, landing in front of Jonathan—and then promptly plucked the half-gone joint from his fingers.

Jonathan squawked, but Eddie ignored him since he was quickly quieted by Argyle handing him another fresh one.

Steve tried to remain still, remain composed. He was already laid back with one arm across the back of the couch, so all he had to make sure to do was let Eddie come to him and not reach out to Eddie.

Ducking his chin, Eddie pulled from his stolen joint, stepping slowly, slowly toward Steve. He pulled the blunt away, holding the smoke in his lungs and walked forward until his knees knocked against Steve’s.

He exhaled, the smoke curling toward the ceiling along with an offer that burned in Steve’s veins.

“What’dya say, Harrington. Want to show ‘em how it’s done?”

Steve raised his brows, just to play along. He knew his fingers twitched, and if the group was sober, they might have seen him give himself away in just that action. He hummed in the back of his throat, pretending to consider Eddie’s presumptuous question, before he shrugged and ran a hand through his hair.

“Suppose I have some experience,” he said.

Eddie smiled and held out the joint to Steve, waiting until it was in his hand before clamoring straight into Steve’s lap, straddling his thighs with his knees pressed into the cushions on either side. He stumbled, and Steve was sure that it was at least half of a real one, but he took an opportunity where he could find one and placed a steadying hand on Eddie’s hip.

“Bold,” he commented, loud enough for the group to hear. Robin was giggling off the side. Steve ignored her.

“Is there any other way?” Eddie sang, tapping teasing, risky fingers where Steve’s shirt tucked into his jeans.

 He didn’t look like anyone else in the room, wearing a henley instead of a polo, even if it was a dark gray—the closest thing to black in his closet he could find. But he also knew how Eddie liked the look of his arms with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, so he would wear bright pink if it meant wearing the henley.

Steve brought the end of the blunt to his lips while Eddie stared down at him. He could almost swear that the same points of light were in the center of the pinpoint pupils. Like Eddie had carried the stars and the stage lights with him off stage.

He knew they had to be careful. Shotgunning was close contact, but when they had done this before, it didn’t usually end with them separating afterwards.

When Steve had gathered enough smoke, he passed the joint to Robin without looking at her, and then used his newly freed hand to gently hold Eddie’s chin in a cradle of his fingers. Eddie’s lashes fluttered as Steve guided him down. He even had to stop Eddie from going too far, getting too close and just planting one on him.

He pressed his thumb against the point of Eddie’s chin and when he parted his lips, Steve released the smoke in his lungs, soaking into his blood after so long. 

Unlike how Gareth had complained just before, Steve let the smoke go slow, giving out as Eddie took it with his inhale. A few stray wisps curled toward the ceiling, but Eddie breathed in all that Steve had over the course of a dizzying span of time.

Their top lips brushed as the smoke tapered off, and Steve felt it shoot through his spine. He clenched the hand holding on to Eddie’s hip to keep his control, and a couple of his fingers slipped back the waistband of Eddie’s jeans.

He was used to feeling of Eddie’s boxers, the elastic band of cotton. Normally black, but Steve knew for a fact Eddie had a pair of Garfield ones from Wayne that he wore to bed if Steve could keep his mouth shut.

But this…

He felt lace.

“Eds?” he murmured, dipping his fingers lower and finding more and more thin, delicate detail warmed by Eddie’s body heat. “What…”

Eddie planted his hands on Steve’s shoulders and pushed up just enough that Steve would be the only one to hear him. He winked as he mouthed, For later.

“Damn Munson, give the man some breathing room. He just barely made it through his first metal concert,” A loud voice—Gareth—annoying only because Steve wanted to pull Eddie right onto the fucking semi he was now sporting in his jeans, echoed across the room.

Everyone was too drunk, or high, or both to fully take in what the fuck had just happened right in front of them. So Steve was sure it was alright for Eddie to risk another thirty seconds in Steve’s lap to murmur under his breath another offer Steve would have to be dead to refuse.

“Five minutes. Dressing room B.”

Steve nodded, eyes flicking down to Eddie’s mouth. Eddie tutted softly and narrowed his eyes, playful and with a hint of a threat, before he threw his head back and returned to his performed for their audience.

“Stevie here can handle himself pretty well, I think. Knows we’re not all so big and bad.” He slid off Steve’s lap, and did a pretty impressive twirl for how much less sober than he was high. Steve noticed Gareth rolling his eyes, tipping back a drink from the vodka bottle from the coffee table.

He knew he was watching Eddie too much again. And Steve almost didn’t care, until Robin decided that she’d had enough with Nancy and flopped over to lay across Steve’s front instead. He was just glad she hadn’t decided to go for his lap with how incriminating his dick was being in his jeans at the moment.

“M’proud of you, dingus,” she said, voice heavy but not slurred.

He laughed through his nose. “Thanks.”

She raised one hand up into the air, level with Steve’s face. And he honestly should have seen it coming far faster than he did, because then her palm was directly over his nose as she patted her fingers against his forehead. “You did…so good at the concert. Didn’t even complain once that you didn’t understand the music.”

Eddie was the main reason for that. Steve had wanted to know just what about metal music enticed Eddie so much to dedicate part of his identity to it. And, once given the opportunity, Eddie had launched a full-fledged campaign to walk Steve through chord progressions and the actual skills it took to play the chaotic melodies that he loved so much.

There were still some songs that Steve could not hear as anything other than a discordant headache, but, honestly…it was more about watching Eddie talk without restriction.

And, of course, Steve had lost all coherent consciousness while watching Eddie on stage.

Robin had stopped talking, tucking her face into Steve’s neck. He was probably going to have some of her makeup on his shirt, but he’d been covered in much worse before.

He realized he hadn’t been looking at Eddie. Always looking out for him, Robin. Even when she had no idea she was doing it.

Steve looked, and couldn’t find him. He turned to look behind him in case Eddie was doing something strange because the weed had really hit him, but there was no sign of his sexy, lace-wearing metalhead.

While he’d been distracted by a cuddling, giggly Robin, Eddie had slipped out of the room.

He had no idea if five minutes had passed or not.

It was probably better for Steve to be early than to leave Eddie waiting for him when he clearly had a surprise waiting. And the last time Steve had been late, Eddie’s revenge had been swift. Eddie was entirely too skilled with his mouth for his own good.

“Okay,” he said to Robin, easing her off of his shoulder. He’d hoped to pass her over to Nancy, but she had mysteriously disappeared too. A quick scan, and it was clear she wasn’t in the room either, so Steve eased her to lie on one of the pillows. He chuckled when she immediately snuggled into it.

Rising to his feet, Steve turned next to Jonathan and snapped his fingers in front of his face until he got his attention. The dude was blitzed out of his mind, but he wasn’t Steve’s permanent solution anyway.

“Watch her until I send Nancy back here,” he said, pointing at Robin. Jonathan’s eyes slowly followed his hand until they landed, and then he furrowed his brows.

He nodded, solemnly.

“Watch her,” he repeated.

Jesus. Okay.

Steve ran both hands through his hair, damp at his hairline with sweat, and took in a deep breath. They’d all been in there so long, he could taste the acrid smoke in the air, the smell of spilled drinks, a bit stinging when it hit his nose.

If he hadn’t been smoking already, he’d probably have a hell of a contact high.

Cab fares back to the hotel were going to suck.

He made his way to the door and into the hallway, even the stale air of the bar miles above the congested air of the dressing room. He sucked in as much as he could with his mouth open, scanning slowly down the line of three other doors for one marked “B” in large, white paint.

Wasn’t hard to find, and Steve smiled, knowing what was waiting for him on the other side.

“Steve.”

Fuck.

He’d be beelining for the door with Eddie behind it, he hadn’t even noticed another door opening on the other side of the hall.

He’d also forgotten he was supposed to be looking for Nancy.

At least that solved itself.

“Nancy,” he said, too high-pitched. He cleared his throat and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans as she hovered in the hall with him, perfect brow arched high. “Finally sick of the smell of weed and sweat?”

“Just using the bathroom.” She pointed at the door she’d come through.

“Makes sense.”

Nancy glanced at the door to the first dressing room. Clearly behind Steve, and clearly being left for another room. “You going somewhere?”

Steve was in the middle of the hallway, in between dressing rooms A and B just enough that maybe Nancy wouldn’t be able to put the very clear two and two together.

“Just stepping out for a minute. Get some fresh air away from the hotbox back there.” Steve managed a single-second smile.

All it did was tip Nancy off. She tilted her head, getting that thoughtful look on her face that unlocked the secrets of the damn universe. She stared at him, and he couldn’t help it.

He looked at dressing room B.

Nancy stood a bit straighter, her shoulders rising. “I saw Eddie leave, too. Few minutes before you.”

“Not that weird. He’s probably exhausted.” Steve shrugged and stuffed his hands into his front pockets.

“So you’re going to his dressing room to…tuck him in?”

Fuck. Again.

“I—”

Nancy knew. That was the crux of it. She knew and nothing Steve could ever think of would convince her otherwise.

“So,” she said brightly. “Eddie, huh?”

He didn’t care that she knew about him.

Eddie, on the other hand, kept all of himself much closer to his chest. And he’d no say in how someone else had found out about him.

Steve didn’t know how else to answer. It seemed pointless to lie. And he wanted to get to Eddie.

“Yeah.” His voice came out as a croak, betraying his nervousness.

“Curly hair and brown eyes are really your type, aren’t they?”

A laugh tumbled out of him, because damn…it kind of was.

Except, Eddie was somehow able to let Steve give him everything every chance he could. So far, Steve hadn’t yet become too much for Eddie. Sometimes it even seemed like he wanted more.

Steve was still trying to wrap his head around it.

Nancy knocked him out of his head with a gentle pat of her hand on his shoulder. She’d walked closer while he was zoned out, and her eyes were pointed as she looked at him.

“Go get your boy, Harrington. I’m sure he’s waiting eagerly for you.” She shuddered, lowering her hand. “Uck, don’t ever make me think about what you two might be getting up to in there.”

“I didn’t make you the first time,” Steve pointed out.

Nancy just waved her hand, dismissing herself from the conversation and headed for the door the dressing room with the rest of the group. Steve breathed a sigh of relief.

Then remembered one last thing.

He turned after Nancy, finding her with her hand just on the doorknob. She must have heard his feet shuffling on the floor, because she was already waiting for his question.

“Could you keep an eye on Robin, please?”

“Of course.” She smiled, opening the door. “I’ve still got to find out how this episode ends.”

Steve let out a surprised huff of laughter, standing in the hall until Nancy had closed the door behind her. He hovered just a second longer, listening to the sounds of conversation that filtered through the door. No one else was going to come out, not in the time it would take Steve to finally join Eddie in the other dressing room.

He could only hope it hadn’t been five minutes yet.

Turned out, he’d just made it.

Eddie hadn’t been expecting him yet, startled enough to jump when Steve entered the room. His curls bounced and then settled over his shoulders, but that wasn’t the only thing that caught Steve’s eye.

Eddie had taken off his jeans already, standing in the middle of the otherwise empty dressing room in his stylishly cut up t-shirt and…lace underwear.

“Holy fuck,” Steve whispered.

Eddie’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, nervously pulling a strand of his hair over his mouth as Steve stood, dumbstruck, in front of the door. He twisted his hair between his fingers, brown eyes flitting to Steve and holding there.

Even if Steve had surprised him, he’d already put his cards on the table. Teased Steve enough to entice him. Now, fully revealing the whole surprise.

The one thing Steve might have expected: the underwear was black.

They were shaped more like shorts than any lacy underwear Steve had ever seen. Very obscene, very short shorts, the cut of them ending just under Eddie’s butt. The legs went further down on Eddie’s thighs, but each and every bit of fabric was just see-through enough to see a hint of Eddie’s pale skin through the lace detailing.

“You’ve been wearing those the whole time?”

A smirk grew across Eddie’s face.

“That’s right,” he said.

And Steve surged forward, a fire burning in his blood at the very thought that Eddie had spent an hour and a half performing in front of at least a hundred people—all the while wearing lace fucking panties for Steve to find on him afterward.

He crossed the room in four long strides, capturing Eddie’s laugh at his behavior with the fierce press of his mouth. Eddie hummed when Steve placed both hands along his jaw, and shuddered from head to toe when Steve kept going, until Eddie’s back hit the wall.

Steve had to touch. He had to.

He brought one hand down from Eddie’s face to the soft flesh of his thigh, fingertips grazing the lace. He sighed, sliding across the fabric to cup the Eddie’s pert, round cheek. Eddie pushed onto his toes, his hands already tugging Steve’s shirt from his jeans.

The underwear was rough against Steve’s palm, scrunched a bit when he massaged and pulled Eddie against him. He could feel Eddie’s dick twitch through the underwear where it pressed against his stomach, and Steve dug his fingers in harder to make it happen again.

“Lube?” he asked, although Eddie couldn’t answer right away with Steve licking into his mouth and biting at his lips.

Steve would have loved to lay Eddie out on the couch behind them, push his shirt up and really see the dark black of the panties in contrast with Eddie’s pale skin. How hi cock stretched out the ffront, maybe didn’t even fit because Steve didn’t know if they made these type of things for guys—but they didn’t have the time. Eventually, the band would need to pack up their things and vacate the bar.

Eddie finally turned his head away to catch his breath. And answer Steve.

“Table,” he panted.

Steve hummed deep in his chest.

“Stay here,” he said, patting Eddie twice on the butt before leaving him.

Eddie slumped back against the wall, rubbing himself slowly through his underwear. He watched Steve jog over the table, laughing softly when Steve stripped his shirt. He’d only been with Eddie for a few minutes, and was already overheating, sue him.

He grabbed the little bottle of lube—perched conspicuously in the center of the coffee table—and returned to Eddie. He’d opened his mouth to make a sarcastic comment about Steve’s rush, but he never got the chance for more than a syllable. Not with Steve curling a hand into the thick of his hair, and kissing him hard.

Eddie floundered for a moment, lost in feeling just how Steve explored his mouth with his tongue before his hands landed on Steve’s biceps and he started moving his lips.

One-handed, Steve clicked open the lube bottle. Had to let go of Eddie’s hair since that was his dominant hand, and slicked his fingers. He felt some of it drip onto the floor, but he didn’t really care.

“Give me your hand, babe,” he said, and tipped some more onto Eddie’s fingers. He clicked shut the bottle and threw it to the other side of the room. Eddie laughed as it clattered on the floor, his slick hand bumping against Steve’s bare stomach.

Steve’s head was swimming, he wanted Eddie so much.

“Want to start for me?” he asked, at the same time unbuttoning his jeans with his free hand.

Eddie bit his lip and nodded.

They moved at the same time, Steve getting his hard cock out of his pants and slowly slicking himself with his lubed hand. Eddie arched his back and reached behind him, quickly getting his hand into his pretty, slutty underwear and prepping himself for Steve.

Steve stroked his cock slow, almost leisurely. Watched as Eddie’s mouth parted when he slipped at least two fingers inside, and the tensing of his shoulder while he thrust them in and out. Steve wondered how the lace felt against his hand, getting a little wet from the lube.

“God, as soon as you’re ready, I’m going to put those panties down to your thighs and take you while you’re facing the wall. Going feel that lace dragging against the bruises from my hips on your ass afterwards,” Steve said. His breath caught in his chest when Eddie dug his teeth into his lower lip and stared at Steve through his dark lashes.

His eyes still had that glint in them. The stars from the stage.

“Feeling real frisky there, Steve.”

Steve took in a deep, shaky breath, unable to hold back his smile. “You don’t surprise me unless you want it that way. When you want me to fuck you hard and fast, even if we didn’t have the time crunch.”

“Maybe,” Eddie muttered, arching his spine as he added another finger to whatever his count was. “You still owe me one after this, Harrington. I had to go hours in this scratchy lace while being cooked under those stage lights.”

He was a bit breathless, now. Head tipped back with a soft moan as he hit a pleasurable spot inside him, the sounds of his fingers growing louder. Steve couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward and mouthed a messy pattern at the exposed line of Eddie’s throat.

 “Anything.”

”Okay, then.” Eddie’s voice lilted up, and Steve could hear the trickster idea forming in his head.

Steve was either going to seriously regret this or develop some new kink. Eddie had a way of doing that to him.

“You’re wearing them next.”

“Deal.” Steve bit lightly at Eddie’s throat and then stepped back, dragging his eyes down the line of Eddie’s body, clad in black, lace underwear. “Now, turn around.”

[tomorrowusa]

The increasing weirdness of Donald Trump 🤤 👿 ☢️

While news media in the US often get blamed for "normalizing" Weird Donald, the Washington Post looked at the recent craziness in plain sight exhibited by the GOP presidential nominee.

Some excerpts...

As that saga first unfolded publicly Tuesday night, Trump’s interview with TV’s Dr. Phil aired. The friendly conversation Trump filmed last week turned into another venue for him to air inflammatory claims about his opponents without presenting evidence. “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’s fault,” he said of the attempted assassination against him last month, adding, “They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.” There is no public evidence that Biden or Harris were personally involved in decisions about Trump’s security protections. With pressure mounting to drive a sharper message against Harris, the Republican presidential nominee is delving into distractions and delivering a mix of incendiary and false statements. While such tactics have been on regular display in his third run for the White House, he is now pushing them further, running the risk of alienating key voters. [ ... ] Trump spent Wednesday morning venting on Truth Social, his social media site. He let loose a flurry of reposts just after 8 a.m. There was an image of Biden, Harris,Hillary Clinton, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, former White House medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci and others in prison uniforms. There was a call to jail members of the congressional committee that investigated Trump’s supporters over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trump’s election loss. Another repost used a QAnon slogan: “WWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.” Just after noon, Trump began to claim — without evidence — that Harris was exaggerating her online footprint. “IT’S ALL FAKE,” he wrote. Soon he turned to resharing a video of himself promoting digital trading cards for $99 a piece: Buy enough, he said, and you could get a physical card with bits of Trump’s outfit from the June debate that helped push Biden out of the race.

He's desperately trying to reignite QAnon. We haven't heard from QAnon (except for one probable fake) since Trump left office. Trump is like an aging rock star reminding fans of his greatest hits.

Trump's demented rantings are not difficult to provoke. He will toss aside prepared comments on policy to respond to something unrelated with an unhinged fact-free tirade.

With Trump trying to put QAnon back in the spotlight, maybe he could get some fashion tips from the QAnon Shaman.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds

The saga of the Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.

But there's an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the Supreme Court – yes, this Supreme Court – saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-opioid-settlement.html

The Sacklers basically invented modern, legal dope peddling. Arthur Sackler, the family's original crime-boss, revived the practice of direct-to-consumer drug marketing, dormant since the death of the medicine show, to peddle Valium. An aggressive and shrewd lobbyist, Arthur built the family fortune and, more importantly, its connections:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-sackler-family-built-a-pharma-dynasty-and-fueled-an-american-calamity/

A generation later, the family's business company created Oxycontin, and procured misleading and false research about the drug's safety kickstarting the opioid epidemic, whose American body-count is closing in on a million dead. Armed with inflated claims about opioid safety, the Sacklers' pharma reps bribed, cajoled and tricked doctors into writing millions of prescriptions for oxy.

This scam had a natural best-before date. As ODs flooded America's ERs and bodies piled up in America's morgues, it became increasingly clear that something was rotten. The Sacklers pursued a multipronged campaign to keep the truth from coming to light, and to keep the billions flowing.

On the one hand, they hired McKinsey to find novel ways to encourage doctors to keep writing prescriptions and to convince pharmacists to turn a blind eye to abuse. McKinsey had all kinds of great ideas here, including paying pharma distributors cash bonuses for every overdose death in their territory:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids-settlement.html

When the issue of these deaths came up in public, the Sacklers blamed "criminal addicts" for their own misery, stigmatizing both people who desperately needed pain relief and the people who'd been deliberately hooked on the Sacklers' products. The legacy of this smear campaign is still with us, both in the contempt for people struggling with addiction and in the cruel barriers placed between people in unbearable agony and medical relief.

But mostly, the Sacklers kept their names out of it. They laundered their reputations by donating a homeopathic fraction of their vast drug fortune to art galleries and museums in a bid to make their names synonymous with good deeds.

The Sacklers didn't invent this trick. Think of the way that history's great monsters – Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Ford – are remembered today for the foundations and charities that bear their names, not for the untold misery they inflicted on their workers, their crimes against their customers, and the corruption of governments.

But the Sacklers made those Gilded Age barons seem like amateurs. They invented a modern elite philanthropy playbook that Anand Giridharadas documents in his must-read Winners Take All, about the charity-industrial complex that washes away an ocean of blood with a trickle of money:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

As part of this PR exercise, the individual Sacklers kept their names and images out of the public eye. For years, there were virtually no news-service photos of individual Sacklers. When journalists dared to criticize the family, they used vicious attack-lawyers to intimidate them into retractions and silence (I was threatened by the Sacklers' lawyers).

They also worked their media mogul pals, like Mike Bloomberg, who added their names to the "Friends of Mike" list that Bloomberg reporters were required to consult before writing negative coverage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/29/friends-of-mike-enemies-of-the-people/#sacklerbergs

But Stein's Law says that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As lawsuits mounted, the Sacklers found themselves increasingly synonymous with death, not charitable works. But like any canny criminal, the Sacklers had a getaway plan.

First, they extracted vast sums from Purdue and shifted it into offshore financial secrecy havens:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Even as this money was disappearing into legal black holes, the Sacklers demanded – and received – extraordinary protection from the courts, who aggressively sealed testimony and materials presented through discovery:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

When this gambit finally failed, the Sacklers insisted that were down to their last $4 billion, and, with trillions in claims pending against them, they declared bankruptcy.

When a normal person declares bankruptcy, they are required to divest themselves of nearly everything of value they possess, and then still find themselves hounded by cruel arm-breakers who deluge them with threatening calls and letters:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

But for the richest people in America, bankruptcy is merely a way to cleanse one's balance sheet of liabilities for any atrocity you may have committed on the way, without giving up your fortune.

The Sacklers are a case-study in how a corrupt bankruptcy can be conducted.

Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

First, they converted their victims' right to compensation into "property" that the Sacklers themselves owned. This transferred jurisdiction over these claims from the regular court system to the bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge – not a jury – would decide how much each of these claims was worth, and then what how much of that worth these victims (now recast as creditors) would be entitled to through the bankruptcy.

Thus tens of thousands of claims were nonconsensually settled without a trial, by an administrative judge with no criminal jurisdiction, not a federal judge who'd undergone Senate confirmation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

These "coercive restructuring techniques" are not available to everyday people who are drowning in student debt or credit-card bills – these are the exclusive purview of the wealthiest Americans, who enjoy a completely different bankruptcy system that is rigged in their favor.

Three judges – David Jones and Marvin Isgur of Houston and Bob Drain of New York – hear 96% of the country's large corporate bankruptcies:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

These judges are unbelievably horny for corporations, embracing a legal theory "that casts the invention of the limited liability corporation alongside that of the steam engine as a paradigmatic development in the pursuit of prosperity":

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

Now there are more than three bankruptcy judges in America, so how do the nation's biggest companies get their cases heard by these three enthusiastic Renfields for corporate vampirism?

They cheat.

For example: when GM was facing bankruptcy, it argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem, and got in front of Judge Drain.

The Sacklers were – characteristically – even more brazen. They really wanted to get their case in front of Judge Drain, the nation's most enthusiastic supporter of "third party releases," through which bankrupt billionaires can wipe the slate clean, securing dismissals of all claims by the people they wronged.

Drain is also uniquely hostile to independent examiners, "an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate 'fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851339

If you're the Sacklers, hoping to keep two thirds of your billions and extinguish all claims by your victims, there is no better helpmeet than Judge Robert Drain of the Southern District of New York.

So, 192 days before filing for bankruptcy, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, New York (a company may claim jurisdiction in a specific court once they've operated a business there for 180 days).

Then they filed a bankruptcy in which they altered the metadata on their casefile, inserting the code for a Westchester county hearing into the machine-readable, human-invisible parts of the documents they uploaded to the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system (they also captioned the case with "RDD, for "Robert D Drain").

They chose their judge, and the judge obliged. UCLA Law's Lynn LoPucki is one of the leading scholars of these bankruptcy "megacases," and has written extensively on why these three judges are so deferential to corporate criminals seeking to flense themselves of culpability. She sees judges like Drain motivated by "personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase – very appealing to certain personalities."

Thus, these judges are "willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…"

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/02870w66d

This kind of judge-shopping goes beyond the Sacklers; the cases that Drain and co preside over make a mockery of the idea of America as a land of equal justice. "Prepack" and "drive-through" bankruptcies are reliable get-out-of-jail-free cards for capitalism's worst monsters: private equity firms.

Whether PE murdered your grandmother by buying her care-home and putting each worker in charge of 30 seniors:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/portopiccolo-nursing-homes-maryland/2020/12/21/a1ffb2a6-292b-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html

or poisoned your kids by filling your neighborhood with carcinogens:

https://www.webmd.com/special-reports/ethylene-oxide/20190719/residents-unaware-of-cancer-causing-toxin-in-air

limited liability wipes the slate clean.

30% of America's bankruptcies are private equity companies using the bankruptcy system to wipe away claims for their misdeeds, while keeping a fortune, thanks to the shield of limited liability.

Take Millennium Health, JamesS lattery's fake drug-testing company, which promised to help nursing homes figure out whether seniors were abusing (or selling) their meds by testing their piss for angel dust and other drugs. Slattery defrauded Medicare and Medicaid for millions, borrowed $1.8 billion (Slattery got $1.3 billion of that). He eventually walked away from this fraud after paying a mere $256m to settle all claims, and kept a fortune in assets, including the 40 vintage planes his private company ("Pissed Away LLC" – I am not making this up) owned:

https://prospect.org/justice/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-sacklers-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy/

For the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor – or a noose. This is by design: judges who preside over elite bankruptcies speak of their protagonists as heroic "risk takers" and tiptoe around any consequences, lest these titans be chained to a mortal's fate, costing us all the benefits of their entrepreneurial genius.

PE companies helped the Sacklers design their own bankruptcy strategy, and it was a standout, even by the standards of Bob Drain and his kangaroo bankruptcy court. But now, the Supreme Court has pumped the brakes on the whole enterprise.

The judges ruled that the exceptions the Sacklers took advantage of were intended for bankrupts in "financial distress" – not billionaires with vast fortunes hidden overseas. In so doing, the court threatens all manner of corrupt arrangements, from "the Boy Scouts, wildfires and allegations of sexual abuse in the church diocese — where third parties get a benefit from a bankruptcy they themselves aren’t going through.”

The case was brought by the DoJ's US Trustee Program, which lost in the Second Circuit when it tried to halt the Purdue bankruptcy and argued that the Sacklers themselves had to declare bankruptcy to discharge the claims against them.

Now the Supremes have hit pause on the bankruptcy the Second Circuit approved, and will hear the case themselves. It's only one step on a long road, but it's an unprecedented one. Some of the country's filthiest fortunes are riding on the outcome.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” tomorrow (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Image: Edwardx (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery,_June_2016_05.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[everyakipanel]

Chapter 3: Arrival in Tokyo

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Ryan Zickgraf

I witnessed All One Thingism in the flesh in Atlanta while reporting on the “Stop Cop City” saga. What began as a very specific protest against the construction of an expensive new public safety facility in a Georgia forest by environmentalists, police, and prison abolitionists got subsumed into “Free Palestine.” After October 7, anarchists marching in the streets of Atlanta increasingly donned keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags, and held signs that said: “From Atlanta to Palestine” (which I believe is a fairly big 6,400-mile line).

There’s no better embodiment of this trend than James “Fergie” Chambers, the wealthy tattooed Left-wing heir in Atlanta. Last summer, Chambers helped bankroll the Stop Cop City movement with millions from his Cox family fortune and attended protests in person. Then, in December, he announced he was converting to Islam. He’s currently living in Tunisia and directing his big bucks into anti-Zionism causes.

And lest you think it’s just blue-haired college baristas with these views, consider the author with the worst book title of all time who recently posted among the most despicable Tweets of all time. That would be courtesy of Malcolm Harris, the author of S--- Is F---ed Up and Bulls--- and veritable Napoleon Dynamite of communist writers.

Earlier this month on X, Harris responded to CNN’s Jake Tapper’s report that the Pennsylvania synagogue he had bar mitzphaed at had been vandalised with a swastika. Harris didn’t condemn the anti-Semitic graffiti but indirectly praised it. The meaning of the Nazi symbol had been reversed from bad to good, Harris said, “from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide.”

America is evil, Hamas is good, and swastikas are now woke. This is your brain on All One Thingism.

[chthonicgodling]

and now… (THE NEXT) ELYSIUM DRAMA UPDATE

continued directly from page 1 HERE, now it’s pages 2-11!!

[in this current saga; you are: one • two • three • four • here • six • seven • eight • nine • ten • eleven • twelve • thirteen • fourteen (the end!) ]

featuring: EeL’s menagerie of intimidating children, + Tory & Maci who have gone to them for help and,

…….😦

oh. Oh no.

RECAP: TaKi Fuego, a delightfully secretive ménage à trois of Tory ‘n’ ELoki ‘n’ Maci, that’s maaaaaybe extended a bit 💞mushier past the typical Elysium hookups if you squint, ending up with EeL pregnant but all well and good — until he freaked out and vanished on them.

•Behold our Canon Convo scene as Maci and Tory turn to his kids for help locating him and. UHHH HAHHA ALT TITLE, TORY AND MACI GET EVISCERATED BY PRETEENS?!?!! WELP…!!!! THIS WENT…. BAD!!!

•First and foremost as ALWAYS a crucial and special thanks to Elysium’s better half the hiatus’d @fenixethekid , who’s responsible for Tory and all this wonderful orange dialogue. I am every other unhinged wacko in this room being thrown at him + Maci having a literal meltdown at his side. Tory Tory Tory I love you. We’ll get your precious pet back don’t worry W.,,, we hope

• EeL’s children are ingrained with Trust Issues + a sense of cutthroat diehard loyalty to him, which is not something he’s cultivated on PURPOSE it’s just what happens naturally when being A Child of Loki DOES actually make you an enemy of the public, as it did long ago on Asgard with real consequences. Despite the safety of Elysium, the generational trauma has been passed down across the whole family and uh, gestures WELL. Hhhere we are! SORRY TORY AND MACI!! One day the kids will realize you desperately love their Parent too!!! today is… nnOt that day.

• AND SO, REELING FROM SHOCK OF HOW VICIOUS THIS REJECTION WAS, MACI AND TORY RETREAT, LOKI STILL MISSING - what happens next?!! STAY TUNED!!

• I am sorry about that one cop out page, but I have SO Much else planned to draw next for this saga of events. The next updates might Uh. be a while I. still have to draw them. fgkfkgkgk bear with me. but enjoy PWEASE! the next parts will come as soon as I can get ‘em together.

xoxo ty for readingggg g gg

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Deconstructing the "Peggy and Molly Friendship" Narrative

Molly the Australian Magpie had been “reunited” with Peggy and the family that stole him as a fledgling and raised him without any wildlife carer license or experience.

Thanks to the Queensland Premier wanting to score some extra points in an election year, he “made it happen.” And legitimised the collective delusion of the public that genuinely thinks that this was a completely okay and reasonable situation. And believed the notion that Molly, a territorial social species of bird that had compromised development and was taken out of his home range, could simply "fly away".

So I went through their Instagram to see how this madness unfolded. It clearly began as a “Peggy” instagram before the stolen fledgling joined in.

These people are so adamant that there were no parents around but I don’t believe it for a second. Molly was a juvenile when he was taken - you always see fledglings around his size and age on the ground foraging for food. Mum and dad are not always around but they are never far away and are critical to a young magpie's developmental period.

They claim that Molly was sick. Yet they never make any mention of taking him to the vet. Molly makes distinctive fledgling feeding calls, the sounds he would have used to beg for food from his parents. It's tragic to see this after seeing how magpies raise their fledglings in my own backyard.

One of their first posts is feeding him what looks to be mealworms next to their pet dog. Aussie Magpie Fledglings at this age are learning everything about how to survive from their parents. They fed Molly WITH their dog. What does that teach? That dogs are not only safe but also a potential source of food/reinforcement.

As Peggy’s Instagram becomes Peggy and Molly’s Instagram, this happens:

Molly gets attacked by other birds. Because guess what? This is a territorial bird who has been removed from his original territory and away from the protection and guidance of his parents.

So, because these people have no idea what they’re doing, they’re Shocked that this would happen and that the wild bird they’re unwittingly conditioning into their pet can’t defend himself.

But yeah I’m sure teaching Molly tug of war with a dog is exactly the survival skills he needs as a wild bird!!!!!!

(I’m losing my goddamn mind)

Another “release attempt” fails because apparently we did a whoopsie and let him fly out in a storm??? Yet again, this poor bird is having traumatic experiences in the wild that he was not prepared for and is, unsurprisingly, seeking humans - which he has now associated heavily with food and safety.

Meanwhile, as they’re “raising” Molly, this insanity happens:

Yeah because that’s why your staffy is spontaneously lactating. She wants to mother a bird. It couldn’t possibly be that she’s had a bird pecking at her nipples and stimulating them or that she might have a serious medical issue. Interestingly, they do take Peggy to the vet. A luxury that doesn’t seem to be afforded to Molly who was also apparently sick (even though he seems to be pretty bright, alert and feeding in all the videos of when he was “rescued”)

Anyway the saga continues with the clear intention of making content now - the socialisation and habituation continues during Molly’s most critical juvenile years. They talk about how Peggy is helping Molly learn how to find food as if they're still intended for him to be a wild bird. But it's clear this bird isn't going anywhere.

At this time, Molly would be learning how to find food, how to socialise with other magpies and he’d eventually be joining a juvenile or bachelor flock where he’d continue to develop his social skills as a social and intelligent bird, wrestling and playing with his flock mates.

But no, he’s learning to mimic barks and is harassing the hell out of this poor staffy. The family just lets it all happen without any sort of support or advocacy for Peggy.

Haha isn't zoonotic disease vectors and a confused bird with no idea of how to interact appropriately with a dog just hilarious? It’s funny because of the silly caption they made, right?

As their "relationship" progresses, Peggy shows more discomfort.

This dog shows multiple stress behaviours. She is not friends with this bird she is TOLERATING this bird as he pecks at her face. She's rarely relaxed in these "play" interactions. She licks her lips, turns her head, yawns and even bares her teeth. But if it has a cute soundtrack behind it, I guess that means they’re having fun, right?

Even the interactions where Peggy's isn't stressed are still uncomfortable to watch. Molly shows immense frustration and confusion, following and wanting to be involved but being ignored or tolerated.

Molly should be with wild birds, playing how they play and not being merely tolerated:

Molly had a chance to be homed with a qualified wildlife rehabber or even get the chance to get to live with other Australian Magpies. But because people fell for the story and the media regurgitated it without questioning it for a second - he'll never get that chance again.

Molly was failed by the Queensland government for not being seized immediately. There were numerous complaints as soon as their story started to become viral that this was sending a bad message to the public and that this bird was not being given the care he needed.

It's too late, now. Molly will live in a confused limbo, not knowing what he's supposed to be and will never get to live with his own species.

And all the people that sent death threats to wildlife carers (who were trying to fix the damage caused) will pat themselves on the back about what a good job they did.

[mariacallous]

NEW YORK — An unindicted co-conspirator, an accused sexual harasser and a high-ranking cop alleged to have beaten a female subordinate were among Mayor Eric Adams’ most questionable appointees, until this week.

The forced resignation of New York City’s police commissioner, following a federal raid of his home, has intensified concerns about the mayor’s staffing decisions.

NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban’s departure — the first high-profile one since the feds seized phones from members of Adams’ inner circle last week — is the latest chapter in a saga that dates back even before January 2022 when Adams, freshly off his election victory, began filling his administration with people whose checkered pasts were almost certain to invite scrutiny.

When assembling his administration, Adams named Phil Banks deputy mayor of public safety, even though the former NYPD chief was caught a decade ago accepting gifts from people ultimately convicted of bribery.

Adams placed his old police boss and personal friend Tim Pearson in a powerful, nebulous adviser role and gave him control over a small new municipal office with unchecked power. Pearson is now facing four sexual harassment lawsuits, and one of his accusers alleged in court papers his behavior had been common knowledge for years.

The city “knew about” Pearson’s “long history of sexual misconduct … but ignored his history and hired him anyway,” one of the complaints reads. Pearson’s lawyer has denied all the allegations.

Now both Banks and Pearson have also had their phones seized by federal agents, alongside Caban.

The probes have raised new questions about the mayor’s judgment, and whether his loyalty to troubled aides has become an insurmountable political liability. Nearly every Democrat challenging him in his reelection primary next year is zeroing in on his perceived ethical lapses.

“Far be it for me to tell Eric Adams who to hire and fire. But it’s clear to me that he didn’t understand the most important part of being mayor,” Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller who is expected to run against Adams next year, said in an interview with POLITICO. “He made poor choices, and it’s come back to hurt him.”

The list goes on.

Jeffrey Maddrey, whom the mayor named chief of the NYPD, was accused of punching a fellow cop he’d coerced into a sexual relationship. A judge threw out the case, but he was docked 45 vacation days in an internal trial.

Adams’ former chief of staff is entangled in litigation over past business interests and his ex-buildings commissioner resigned amid an investigation that led to an indictment on bribery charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

In his personal life, Adams is close friends with twin brothers who pleaded guilty a decade ago to financial crimes. A pastor who has described Adams as a mentor was recently sentenced to nine years in jail for stealing a parishoner’s mother’s retirement savings.

Adams appointed an anti-gay Bronx clergyman as a faith adviser, over protests from LGBTQ+ groups. And one of his community liaisons is under federal investigation involving a visit to China she made with Adams.

Many of Adams’ picks to help lead the city’s sprawling government have been unimpeachable. But the list of Adams associates enmeshed in scandal continues to grow.

“It just raises questions to me as to why our mayor feels so incredibly comfortable surrounding himself with a myriad of unsavory characters,” said Christina Greer, a close watcher of city politics as a Fordham University political science professor and co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast.

“You’ve got people accused of punching people in the face, of sexual inappropriateness,” she added. “The list of grievances is long and getting longer, so why would you invite that into your inner circle?”

Adams prides himself on giving people second chances, and says his door is open to anybody. That comes from his own nontraditional political rise — from a dyslexic Black kid from Queens who got arrested and beaten by cops, to a police officer who courted controversy, to an elected official who would eventually mayor.

“Yes, I’m going to talk with people who have stumbled and fell,” Adams said in 2022. “Because I’m perfectly imperfect, and this is a city made up of perfectly imperfect people.”

The people Adams surrounds himself with — both personally and professionally — have earned him criticism going back three decades, to the dawn of his political career.

Adams’ first run for office, a 1994 challenge to a congressional incumbent, was doomed in part by his alliance with Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader. Soon after, Adams was investigated as a cop for working security for boxer Mike Tyson, who was fresh out of prison after a rape conviction.

After winning a seat in the state Senate, Adams became a friend and the top defender of the so-called four amigos, Democrats who caused chaos in the chamber by defecting from their party. Three of the amigos have since served prison time, for unrelated crimes. The fourth, Rubén Díaz Sr., has become a fierce ally of former President Donald Trump.

Later, Adams got involved in the bidding process for a slot machine contract with fellow state Sens. John Sampson and Malcolm Smith. The arrangement fell apart, and Adams got dinged for “exceedingly poor judgment” in an ethics report. Sampson and Smith both later went to prison for unrelated crimes.

As mayor, Adams’ plan to appoint his own brother Bernard to a well-paid NYPD gig leading his security team raised eyebrows. Adams only asked for ethics guidance after the fact, an internal watchdog reduced his title, and dropped Bernard’s salary to $1. He left after a year.

Adams also tapped nonprofit executive Sheena Wright to be a deputy mayor, a decade after she’d been arrested twice in a day over a domestic dispute. Her friend David Banks called his brother, NYPD bigwig Phil Banks to intervene, and Wright was let out and the charges were dropped.

Wright and David Banks, Adams’ schools chancellor, now live together. They were both among the top appointees who had their phones seized by federal investigators last week — maybe the latest example of Adams’ appointment decisions coming back to bite him.

Adams’ loyalty does have its limits. He cut ties with the pastor he mentored, kept his distance as one of the four amigo state senators, Hiram Monserrate, has attempted political comebacks, and now, pushed out Caban.

“There comes a time when we have to look and see: Is our loyalty to the detriment of the people of New York? And if that point is reached, then you need to make hard judgment calls,” said state Sen. James Sanders, a southeast Queens Democrat who endorsed Adams for mayor in 2021.

“I think that when the mayor comes out of this situation,” Sanders added on the latest raids, “he will have learned many valuable lessons.”