#third stage: bargaining | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

leaderwon · 9 months ago

Text

come back i still need you

paring : nonidol!jungwon x reader

warnings : character death, ANGST left and right, mentions of being depressed

word count : 1.5k

luna's diary : kinda shed a tear writing this

IT HAD BEEN, 3 weeks and 6 days, since you left him.

He was stuck in the endless loop of the 4th stage of grief. Depression, and was left wondering if he'll ever move forward to the next stage and accept your death.

Oh how cruel the world was. Taking away his lover and the plans for the future you guys had carefully planned.

You guys were walking on the street on the day it happened. Giggles filling the both of your bodies as a silver band of ring with a small diamond shined on your ring finger. He had just proposed to you, with promises of giving you everything he had to offer, of staying by your side until his last breath, to grow up even more and have little yous running around. Maybe you could get a dog and a cat and live in a beautiful home.

And then it happened.

He still remembers the way you shoved him to the side as a car came speeding towards you. Your yells still ringing in his ears from the past 3 weeks.

He remembers slowly walking to you trying to take in what just happened. In the corner of his eye he could see the once silver, shiny ring now covered in blood. Your blood. It was everywhere. He felt sick to his stomach. He cradled your face as he broke into sobs. "No no this can't be happening baby wake up" He called out for you as his sobs turned into a breakdown. He saw the light in your eyes slowly disappear. He saw the love of his life leave him, even though you were right there.

2 days later, it was your funeral. As everyone showed him sympathy and gave him hugs. He was still in denial. The first stage of grief. He couldn't even count the amount of times he heard "let me know if you need anything, Jungwon". He needed you back in his arms, but none of the people could give him that. There's no way you could have just left, right? What about the promises? The home? The dog and the cat? mini yous?

Few days later, he slowly slipped into the second stage of grief. Anger. He was mad at no one but himself. He should have been the one to die, not an angel like you. The car should have hit him. Not you. Or maybe he was mad at you too? why would you sacrifice yourself and leave him alone?

Then came in the third stage of grief. Bargain. He prayed and prayed that this would be a long painful nightmare. No way the world could have been so cruel on him. He was just 20 wanting to see life with you by his side, there's no way his fate was written like this.

After realising that this wasn't a dream, and you really were gone, entered the 4th stage of grief. Depression. He was an empty void as he laid on his bed all day leaving all his friends worried. He only got up to eat, which was very rare by the way. Leaving the texts his friends sent him on delivered, he read the last conversation you had with him. Where he mentioned the date and that he had a surprise for you and your excited text messages as a small smile crept on his lips. How he wished he never took you out.

Come back. He still needs you.

It was a new day as the sun shone through Jungwon's curtains. Today, was your one month anniversary, of you getting engaged and also since you left. Today was the worst of all days. It had been a month? no way. "i wish i could turn back time and change everything" he mumbled.

"Time" he jolted up as he remembered something you said about turning back time. Hope rushed through his eyes as he swiftly got out of his bad and rushed to take a shower and get ready. He could not believe he did not think of this sooner. Getting dressed, he rushed out of his home. Coming back taking the ring you once wore in his hands and heading to his car.

"I'm going to get you back, my love"

20 minutes later he reached your apartment. He did not have the courage to step into your apartment after your death. Opening the door he smelled your familiar scent for the first time in a month. Not wanting to waste time, he got in and rummaged through your belongings. "Where is it, god damn".

Finally spotting the shiny wooden box. He picked it up seeing a necklace with a tiny clock in it. Wearing it, he saw as it started to glow.

"How may I help you today?" a voice spoke out as he looked at a beautiful woman in front of him.

"Who must you be? you're not one of them" The voice continued referring to your blood line. "I'm Yang Jungwon, I lost my lover in a car accident, exactly a month ago from now"

"You wish to bring her back?" The voice questioned him. "Yes I need to please. She mentioned about this pendent to me a while back. You need to help me" He replied begging. "Jungwon, I'd suggest you move on. You'll lose yourself if anything goes downhill, and there are less number of chances of it going good and it going bad." The female figure said showing sympathy. "Please, miss. I don't have anything to lose anymore, she was my everything" He said breaking down into a sob.

Sighing, she touched the pendent on his colar. "What time do you want to go to?" she asked giving in. "Exactly a month ago" He said as the necklace started to glow again. "Goodluck, Jungwon" she said.

He was going to make sure you were alive. But at what cost?

In a blink of an eye, he was back. On the street, with you. "I honestly didn't expect you to do it today" Your voice said. Oh how he missed your voice, to see your face in front of him again and to hold his hand. He suddenly remembered why he was here as he became hyper-aware of his surroundings. He knew the car would be coming your way any second. Before he could think of changing your position, it was too late. The car was already coming towards you at an increasing pace. There was no way he could save the both of you.

So he did what he initially came back for.

He saved you.

Shoving your body to the side, he felt the car hit him as he lost consciousness. The last thing he saw was you standing and looking at him in utter shock. Atleast you were safe and alive.

"Jungwon? baby hey, wake up" you cradled his face and broke down into sobs, the same way he did, in another time line. You left a peck on his forehead as you left him there rushing to your apartment.

I'm not going to lose you Jungwon. Not like this.

You rummaged through your belongings, the same way he did. Wearing the pendent, you wished to go back 20 minutes from your present.

You were back with him, on the same street, holding his hand as you listened to him talk to you. You knew the time was near as you walked faster looking for a turn that could divert you form the path in which it was about to happen. Before you could find something, you heard the car's tire screech behind you. There was no way you could save the both of you.

So you did what you initially came for.

You saved him.

You shoved him to the side as the car came in contact with your body. The last thing you saw, was him. Atleast he was safe and alive.

He slowly walked to you trying to take in what just happened. In the corner of his eye he could see the once silver, shiny ring now covered in blood. Your blood. It was everywhere. He felt sick to his stomach. He cradled your face as he broke into sobs. "No no this can't be happening baby wake up" He called out for you as his sobs turned into a breakdown. He saw the light in your eyes slowly disappear. He saw the love of his life leave him, even though you were right there.

Fast forward to him wishing of going back to a month prior to save you. He managed to save you, but lost his life. Not being able to manage with the grief of him gone, you tried to save him. You managed to do so, but you lost yours in exchange. And this continued.

The woman was right afterall when she warned the two you.

Trying to save eachother, the both of you were stuck and lost yourselves in an endless time loop.

@leaderwon 2024. Do not copy, translate,alter or plagarize in any platform.

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dragongirlpoet · 2 months ago

Text

Corrupt

Sylus x reader (not mc)

I changed the title fyi

Synopsis: Feared, ruthless and agonisingly attractive, Sylus infuriates you like no other. Yet, you work for him. As you immerse yourself in a life of vice with the Onychinus leader, you soon uncover secrets darker than the shadows he wields. Perhaps, just perhaps, you got more than what you bargained for…

Themes: Enemies to lovers, angst, sexual tension, slow burn, violence I Words: 2.1k I Semi made-up lore/cultural facts

“Drinking on the job? Tsk, that’s the third infringement on company policy you’ve made tonight, kitten.”

He took a sip of his whisky — aged in sherry cask, distilled just right with spherical ice. It was how he liked it. I knew, because I was having the exact same drink — his choice of poison at every revel, every meeting, every reclusive night alone.

Sylus threw me a derisive look, cherry eyes surveying me over the glisten of his glass.

“Intentions become more blatant, after a drink or two. Or in your case, five.” I challenged the man who’s kept me hired for the past year.

I was grateful. My work at the Hunters Association had turned trite. Clockwork really, — detect Wanderers, eradicate them, aid the wounded. Righteous, lawful, and so…moral.

My heart had staged a mutiny long before my mind resolved for change. And so I left my woe of comfort and dived into the hellfires of felony. He had found me scavenging for Protocore fragments in the N109, attempting to make my mark with abysmal self-made weapons.

Trinkets — Sylus had called them. Indeed I was a stray cat vagrant in the dominion of vultures.

The leader of Onychinus circled me as I downed my glass, eyebrow cocked at my words. His handsome face gave nothing away — a classic Sylus signature.

“Dance with me?”

A loaded question. One with threat and agency lurking beneath.

I took his outstretched hand and let him whisk me into the centre of the dapper nightclub — exclusive, accessible only to the most premier, and despicable, of criminals.

Sylus was one of them.

With expert grace, he spun me into an embrace, one gloved hand intertwined with mine, the other at my waist. Our steps fell in harmony with each other at once, like missing chords finding solace in a melody.

“So? What have you heard? You seemed thoroughly engaged with that halfwit over there…” his words trailed away as his gaze dipped to my silver dress. Being his right hand had me acquainted with his quirks — sometimes endearing, more so disturbing.

The subtle smirk dissipated as soon as it came.

“They have ties with the Ever Group. Something about a nitrogen spectrum…a capsule��Kenshi and his men have been on the hunt for it for a whi…”

“You look divine in this dress. I had it picked out just for you. Do you not like it?” his impertinence interrupting my mid-sentence.

I huffed a breath. “It works similarly to a Protocore, quite li…”

“Damask rose, isn’t it? With a hint of honeysuckle…out of all my spies…” he lowered his head, “you’re my favourite scent.” A roguish smile accompanied the wanton glint he cast into my eyes.

It had always been like this. Sylus would send me on missions, most times by his side. I was never granted the elucidations of tasks, only that I’d to “act as good bait…suss out whatever information you can…kill if you have to…”

I would probe, and he would reply with a curt, “Not safe. Just do as you’re told.” It was in those moments where I thought I’d witnessed fragility in his demeanour. He would catch on, and he would put on his mask of aloof and asshole, like right now.

I rolled my eyes, vexation apparent on my features. Sylus seemed content that he got under my skin. Not giving me a chance to reply, he twirled me around, the warm velvet of his coat now a flaming singe against my bare back. So that’s why he chose this dress…

“Come on, don’t look so incensed. I heard you. You’re doing a fantastic job, kitten. Always giving me what I need.” The last word came out huskier than intended beside my ear.

The club was cold. Sylus was conceited. It was a perfect match. As much as I abhorred his arrogance, I welcomed the warmth of his body to mine.

I remembered defrosting at my fireplace after I’d been caught in a snowstorm. I had sat there for hours, letting the crackling heat appease my frozen limbs. It felt nice, comforting. And with Sylus’ arms now wrapped around me — he was my fireplace.

“I’m just trying to make this spy business enjoyable for us both. Even if you’re unhappy, at least act it. After all, you’re good at pretending, right?”

There was an edge to his words.

“I saw how you brushed his hand… that spineless leech….unless you were thinking of fucking him tonight?” His hiss was loud enough for the crowd close to us to hear. They turned, throwing us looks of disdain and outrage. I doubted Sylus realised how hard his fingers were digging into my skin.

Cheeks flushed both from the whisky and his risky display of assertion, I shot him a warning glance. “You’re insane, Sylus.”

“So quit then. But do it later, not now, not while everyone’s watching. I don’t want an audience I didn’t ask for.” He was taunting me again, wholly unfazed by the almost furore.

How much did he drink tonight?

Maybe it was the alcohol, but I was in no mood to counter his transgressions. Instead, I snaked my arms back, cradling his neck, fingers threading through his silver head of hair. Sylus stiffened at my touch, likely taken aback by my insolence.

Soulful, sensual beats reveberated through the club, patrons — descendants of the devil themselves, wives, mistresses — all caught up in the fervour of the music. Couples were fondling and kissing on the monochrome floor. And well, I didn’t find a reason why I shouldn’t join the hedonistic heist.

So into his body I pushed mine. Gripping my hips with his right, his left hand slipped down to my abdomen, tracing the lining of my underwear. As I let my head fall back into his chest, his own came lower to nudge my face, burying his nose in my temple. A flutter flushed in my core.

There was a sort of courtliness to the way Sylus moved, a kind of elegance you could find only in Kings and Queens. Yet the way he was guiding my hips to sway in rhythm to his held such lewdity. To the frolicking outlaws here, we looked very much the part of reigning besotted lovers — timeless, transcendent.

Enthralled by the song and how Sylus was spooning me like I was his revered ruby, I ground myself indulgently against his leather pants. He grew hard at once, length prodding at my back.

Our combined excitement was short-lived, though. The silver dress he gifted me caught in the buckle of his belt, hiking the silk up. My black panties were exposed in wondrous glory, earning hungry looks from the men around.

The Onychinus kingpin tugged my dress down immediately, struggling slightly at the fabric fastened to his metal. His reflexes were swift as the time I aimed a loaded gun at him.

A loaded gun, one that was now hoisted towards the crowd. He really was insane.

“Look away, or I won’t hesitate to blow your brains out.” His decree thundered over the booming of the speakers.

Several men smirked, others pretended to ease back into their cavorting. Assault, drugs, murder — it was just another night here at the N109. Being threatened with a revolver? — A mere parlour trick.

But perhaps that was what Sylus wanted to let on. “Never reveal your hand. Remain powerful by appearing meek.” That was the first lesson he had taught me.

“Sylus…careful…you could’ve put us in jeopardy…” I cast a concerned glance his way, only to find him polishing his pistol with his coat, his face a nonchalant calm.

His tone however, was one of annoyance, as if reprimanding a child. “I wasn’t fond of the little show you just put on.”

I put on a show? He was the one who…I sucked in a breath to abstain from an outburst. He was getting on my last nerve.

Pretending the best I could, I instead riposted, “Oh no, it’s not for them. I put these on just for you.”

Two could play at that game.

I watched the silver-haired devil pin me with his gaze, the dark of his pupils rising up to swallow me whole.

“I ought to punish you for violating company rules. Seems you’re breaking many of them tonight.”

“That’s why you hired me in the first place, isn’t it? I don’t play by the rules.”

There was a pause. The music seemed to fade out into a distant void, drowning the chatter along with it. Strobe lights danced around his face, illuminating the reds of his eyes. His right iris appeared to…glow?

A faint disorientation overcame me. In between blinking and regretting what I said, though, I thought I noticed Sylus inch closer — as if a subtle act of want. Only I had the privilege, or burden, to be sentient of his every complexity.

I regarded his stare as they roved over my eyes, my lips, closing the space between us…

“I want to go home.” I muttered.

Sylus straightened himself. If he was peeved, I couldn’t tell.

—

The ride on his motorcycle was spent in silence, save for the roaring of his modified exhausts. I refused to hold him, choosing instead to grab onto the fairing of the tail. So was another night of ambiguous motives and aimless flirtations, one in which I had grown increasingly restless.

“Why is everyone looking for the spectrum?” I asked at a traffic stop.

Silence.

“How is it even related to a Protocore? What’s so danger…”

“You really should hold on to me. I can’t risk my best spy falling off…” once again disregarding my questions, crimson eyes glaring at me through his side mirror.

“What is wrong with you? It’s been a year! And yet you don’t trust me enough with details of your dealings?” I yelled over the muffle of my helmet, my own voice ringing in my ears.

A low rumble sounded in the distance, quite like skyscrapers being blown apart by covert dynamites. The loud whirring of Sylus’ motorcycle remained, the combined knells throwing us into a pit of trepidation.

“Kitten.”

I knew that tone.

Drawing out my gun, I swung myself off the bike and fired. The Protocore-infused bullet buried itself in the recesses of a Wanderer, shredding its power source, erupting shards of alloy projectiles. Some of the pieces lodged themselves into other Wanderers, causing them to convulse violently, teetering on the brink of destruction.

Behind me, Sylus fended off several monsters, his Evol wrapping ominous tendrils around their form. In a mere furl of his hand, they disintegrated into dust, leaving clouds of ash in their wake.

My weapon was formidable enough, having been altered with a Zenith Core — a deviant design forged by Sylus himself. “I made this just for you,” he had surprised me in my first month of training. “It’ll keep you safe. Though you’ll always be so long as I’m around.”

Another shot was fired, this time by Sylus, barrel of his gun aimed over my shoulder. The creature at my back let out a piercing snarl before it crumbled into pieces. Our eyes met at once, the animosity from earlier now a muted thrum.

Hostility, however, chose to emerge in a different form — more Wanderers. Hoards of them. I spotted Foulwings and Magma Knaves, both species not known to spawn here.

I unsheathed my blade, but we were ringed in. Their screeches and grunts enveloped the night, like a fathomless blackhole draining all levity.

“There’s too many of them. We need to leave now.”

In a swift grab of my arm, Sylus tugged me into a whirl of nothingness. Red and black sworls engulfed us, and the last thing I remembered was being thrust in such nauseating force that I blanked out.

—

“Kitten. Kitten, wake up.”

I’d have recognised that voice anywhere.

Sylus was staring at me, hints of distress plain in his electric eyes. I was propped up against his arms in the middle of an empty street. It looked familiar, but not quite. Dim streetlamps cast an unearthly glow to the pavements, their shadows prostrate like spindly entities on a night prowl.

The buildings were far from towering ones in Linkon and the N109, carved instead, out of bricks and stone no more than five stories tall. Rickety signboards flickered on and off, as though a visual alarm to caution that we were not welcomed here.

“Sylus, where are we?”

A deep sense of rue loomed over his face.

“N109 Zone.”

“120 years in the past.”

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jolenes-doppelganger · 8 months ago

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hiii!! i just read your works about ilsa and rose. could you possibly write about lady jessica x fem! corrino reader? where they meet at the final scene of the movie…

[Hi Anon! Thank you for the request. I had some fun ideas with this one, enjoy. :3]

Phantom Frequency

Reverend Mother Jessica x Fem! Corrino Reader

Summary: Following the overthrow of House Corrino’s monarchy, few things are certain. The Bene Gesserit’s power over the throne, political stability and spice production seem to be uncertain, but on a more personal level, the Corrino household can only fear for their lives. But not all is lost for the two eldest daughters of the former Emperor Shaddam. With Irulan married to Paul and the Reader secured as her primary advisor, a third party strikes a bargain to maintain her security.

Warnings: Drugging, abduction, dub-con ‘arrangement’, dub-con medical examination, Jessica being Jessica

A/N: I know I said this might have been spicy… So I hope you’re hungry! For nothing.

Word Count: 2.8k

You’d heard the whispers before you stepped foot off of the ship onto Arrakis. You were the middle Corrino princess. Your sister, Irulan, deciphered truth, your younger sister wielded the Voice, and you had mastered complete control over your body. Each of you played a key role in the Corrino household. Irulan and your younger sister Addsham played direct roles in controlling the affairs of the household. You held a different purpose. While the two of them occupied the Bene Gesserit with their development and tasks, you lay in the shadows, collecting information and rumors out of the mouths of those around you with uncanny accuracy. But the whispers hadn’t helped you to prepare for the direct interest of the Reverend Mother Atreides.

“Abomination!” the sisters of the Bene Gesserit cried, all momentarily caught up in hysterics as Paul Atreides commanded Reverend Mohiam to silence.

The Fremen warriors stood clustered around the Muad’Dib, the Lisan al Gaib of their fables. But from your perspective, they were really clustered around her. Of all the people she could have fixed her eyes upon, she’d chosen you. Not your frightened sister Irulan, not the pale face of your father, Emperor Shaddam, but you. Small, unassuming, clustered and partially veiled amidst the throng of Bene Gesserit sisters. Quiet, resolutely collected and observant. Jessica Atreides had picked you to focus on. Why?

“... All these years, and I have the pleasure of finally meeting Lady Anirul’s successor.” a voice squirmed through your head. “You don’t carry her name, or her features like your older sister, but you do have her eyes, and her bearing.”

Jessica’s blue eyes bore into yours as the voice drew uncomfortable waves through your ears. You weren’t really hearing her voice. Her lips were barely moving… This was the Voice. Jessica was using some ventriloquy variant of the Voice to talk to you, and you alone.

“How?” you whispered, your brief murmur coming out like a soft gasp, indiscernible from the rest of the Bene Gesserit gasps.

“When you’re my pupil, I’ll teach you.” Jessica eerily stared, eyes sliding off of you and back onto whoever her next victim would be.

<——————->

Paul Atreides had won. The way Irulan clutched your arm as you exited into the safety of the Emperor’s ship made that clear. You’d watched your father kiss the ring of the boy warrior in a haze of disbelief and fear, your emotions scrambled alongside that of the women surrounding you. Walking into Irulan’s private chambers aboard the ship was like walking behind a stage curtain. She broke down, clutching at your shoulders, burying her face in your neck and sobbing.

“No, I can’t do it.” Irulan cried, chest heaving and voice cracking. “I can’t do it (Reader), I can’t face him again. Or his mother.”

You were numb. The kind of numb that slid into your bones whenever trouble struck. It left you with a clarity that was always sort of peculiar; an emotionless outlook on the problems you faced, the ability to tackle dilemmas with the unfeeling scalpel of logical next steps rather than the blunt phalanges of emotional wallowing. You cupped your sister’s head, resting your foreheads together.

“Who said you have to face him right now? No, you have time. You get three days to sob and sit in your self-pity, behind closed doors naturally, but then you will not cry any longer.” you found yourself instructing.

“I hate him.” Irulan whispered. “I fucking hate him.”

The very concept of Irulan swearing was a bit funny. She didn’t use these words. You’d doubted if she ever had them in her vocabulary.

“I believe it was you who held me against the bathroom wall and scrubbed my tongue with soap when I used those words.” you joked.

Irulan let out a tearful laugh, wiping her eyes and nodding.

“Sorry. You were twelve. And someone could have heard you.”

You nodded. It was a funny memory in hindsight. It had caused no lasting harm, quite unlike the predicament Irulan faced. All of the potential marital arrangements she’d been discerning for years, all of the suitors with varying levels of financial and diplomatic aptitude stripped from her in one fell swoop. She’d been damned to a sandpit with the worms and the Fremen. No respite from the Bene Gesserit would be given. No safety net should things go awry.

“I’m staying with you.”

“No.” Irulan shook her head. “What about Daddy?”

“Daddy has Addsham. You have no one. You need my skills, you need my council. You need someone to bear the burden with you.” you said, clutching your sister’s hands. “I’m not asking. I will stay. And you will not be alone.”

Irulan’s eyes filled with tears all over again, and so did your eyes. But you didn’t let them fall. You’d never cried since the night your mother had died. Now would not be the day the six year dam broke. An attendant broke you away from your sister, urgently vibrating in the way most servants did when they carried important news.

“The Reverend Mother Jessica Atreides requests your presence in meeting room six.”

No time was given. It was a direct order. Veiling yourself once more, you walked towards the specified meeting room.

<——————->

The room was empty. To your eyes, at least. A cup of tea, a Gom Jabbar needle. A test of some sort, or perhaps a warning. You kept your distance from the objects, breathing in the smell of stale incense. A large tapestry hung from the wall, a beloved favorite of yours. Lady Anirul seated alongside a younger Emperor Shaddam. Three little girls that bore varying ratios of similarity to the two parents. You smiled, observing your family. Something was off, however. You knew something about it was off. It wasn’t Emperor Shaddam, or any of the three little princesses, it was your mother, Lady Anirul. Was it her hands? No. The neck… Not that either. Her face was odd. Maybe it was seeing her countenance in the format of the tapestry. Maybe it was just seeing her again. But the more you looked, the more you realized that it was her face. All blended together, all seamlessly woven, except for the life-like eyes. The blue, glistening, life-like eyes of someone that was not your mother, that had never been your-

Hands sprung out from the tapestry, encircling your neck and pushing you backward into the table. The slits of the tapestry, the slits in your mother’s eyes went blank, and the face that replaced your mother’s sent chills up your spine.

“Let this be your first lesson.” Mother Jessica whispered, grip tight over your windpipe. “When the gut screams that something is wrong, you listen.”

She released your neck, and the fright combined with the released pressure on your airpipe made you dizzy. You slid to the floor, head spinning in shock and fear. Tears collected in your eyes, and your hands shook. All of these reactions were without your consent, and you couldn’t gather the necessary strength needed to reverse these processes, to engage the parasympathetic nervous system to undo the shock of the deceitfully devised strangulation attempt.

“Oh, child.” Jessica scoffed. “You grow too comfortable in your house.”

“You cut out my mother’s eyes!” you found yourself whimpering, like a scared child.

Jessica laughed at this, a cruel sound mixed with a certain degree of disdain.

“You have thirty seconds to collect yourself.” she ordered.

You found yourself rising, turning away from her to collect yourself. You stopped breathing like a hysterical adolescent, instead forcing slow breaths in through your nose. You gripped the edge of the table, righting the dam against your conflicting emotions. Then you turned, making eye-contact with the woman behind them all.

“I am not a traditional mentor. Your mother never was, hence why she was never allowed to mentor another following me.” Jessica coldly recounted. “But she taught me more in six months than the rest of them did in sixteen years. Still, she teaches me. From beyond the grave she sends me lessons, ones that hurt to learn. And now, she’s sent me you. The middle child, the forgotten one, the little rebel that bides her time in the shadows. You.”

Jessica adjusted her loose veil, grabbing the Gom Jabbar needle.

“What would this be used for?”

“The Gom Jabbar test. I passed it at fourteen.”

Jessica nodded, setting the needle down. But then she fixed her piercing gaze on you once more.

“But that’s not the only way you know it.”

Anger flashed through your veins. How dare she!

“My mother was a strong woman, she was sick. And no one helped her, so don’t you dare throw her death in my face-”

“Silence.”

Your teeth clacked shut, clipping your tongue in the process. The taste of iron filled your mouth

“Did your mother kill herself with the Gom Jabbar or not?”

You reached behind you, gripping the table with ferocious intensity, channeling the rising tide of emotions into another action other than crying.

“She did.” you croaked out, breathing in through your nose so fast the air whistled.

Jessica nodded, picking up the cup of tea. It was still hot, you noticed. A product of the heat conducting coil at the base of the cup.

“Do you know what this tea is?” Jessica asked, a rhetorical question. “It was the only thing found in your mother’s system following the autopsy. And you’re going to drink it.”

You screwed your eyes shut, silently praying to any higher power that would dare listen to make this nightmare stop. But then you opened them, not allowing yourself to succumb to despair.

“Take it. Before I make you.”

The cup was hot in your hands. The liquid a murky brown. It was a derivative of spice, notes of chamomile and citrus laced in with the pungent scent of spice. You swallowed down the beverage, doing so with mechanical detachment.

“Close your eyes.” Jessica murmured, taking the cup from you.

Her fingers grazed your with startling gentleness. It was a tad bit sensual, but perhaps you were making that bit up.

“Feel.”

The pregnant bump of Jessica brushed against your stomach, her hands resting on your lower face. Her nose brushed yours, a brief motion. Then her lips rested on your left ear, her breath tickling the hollow cavern of your ear canal.

“Your mother drank a spice cocktail, a depressant based blend to promote bliss and a sense of euphoria. She died happy.”

It was too much for you to bear, and in between the soft caresses of her hands, in between the stress of the last twelve hours, in between all of the emotional heartache you’d experienced, a sad, neglected child sat crouched in a corner, wondering where her mother went. You broke down, hands fisted in the Reverend Mother’s robes as she collected every stray tear you cried with her lips, collecting the water of your body and storing it in hers.

<—————->

Distant voices blurred together the longer you were in that room. You called it ‘that room’ because you were unsure of where it was. Your routine was set. When you came out of the drug coma, you were fed and given water, and then the bitter drink was administered. As you came out of the coma again, more voices were clear.

“Leave me with her.” a raspy voice.

“But Reverend Mother, you gave birth only three days ago-”

“Leave me.”

The voice. Quick footsteps, silence. Hands encircled your face, sweet smelling breath ghosting over your nose.

“I’ve had you inspected.” she murmured. “You are in perfect health, fertile and strong. A strong vessel, this is important.”

You opened your eyes, meeting the tired, slightly bloodshot eyes of the Reverend Mother.

“I cannot teach someone weak. I will not teach someone weak. But you are not weak, daughter of Anirul. No, you are good stock.”

Her hands crept over you, exposing your skin, pulling off your robe.

“Still… I do not necessarily trust the Imperial physicians I had brought to you. I need to see for myself.”

Jessica started at your lymph nodes in your neck, checking pulse, fingers prodding the skin. She pressed over your belly button, your appendix, watching your face for signs of discomfort. Her touch slid down to your feet, your ankles. She carefully checked all the joints of your arms and legs, paying special attention to your hips.

“Strong body, good heart, your lungs sound clear and full. But are you suitable for breeding?” Jessica asked herself.

Both of her hands encircled your breasts, probing and caressing, checking for any potential defects.

“Not as vessel filled as they should be. You need more blood flow to the glands. Daily massages should help with that.”

It was humiliating, being touched so callously. It was medical, sure. And the Reverend Mother was a sister of the Bene Gesserit, but this was hardly protocol.

“The womb…”

Her hands slid down to your pubic area, probing and prodding just above the pubic bone. She did this for sometime, more carefully examining this area than anywhere else.

“It’s safe to say that you are fertile. Not as fertile as you should be, however. Estrogen rich foods, daily boric acid suppositories to help with pH balance… Yes, most certainly.”

Jessica gripped your thighs without warning, pulling them apart, exposing your vulva to her view. It was a quick look, she merely skimmed over you with her gaze.

“Aesthetically pleasing. Hmm.”

The Reverend Mother dropped her grip, tying the robe over you once more. To say that you were shocked was an understatement. Humiliation, confusion and flattery all brewed together in a jumbled mix, and you found that every possible response you had to the examination dried up in your throat.

“What?” Jessica smirked bemusedly. “You are very aesthetically pleasing, not just there, but everywhere.”

Propping yourself up on your elbows felt like the only correct de-escalatory measure. Tightening the robe over you felt necessary, covering yourself from her gaze. Jessica eyed you carefully, her hands cupping your cheeks and jaw.

“Let me make one thing clear. I do not explain my methods. I will not explain my methods. Once the desired outcome is made, there will be no room for discussion over my methods. I am the teacher, you are the pupil. Criticism will not be tolerated, neither will disobedience.”

A thousand questions raced through your head. Who had given her this authority over you? Why had she drugged you? How long had you stayed in a timeless state of unconscious bliss while the world worked around you? What if Irulan had needed your help while you were gone? What if your father had left with the rest of the Bene Gesserit, and you’d never gotten to say goodbye?

“I have questions.” you rasped, voice crackly and hoarse from not speaking for several days.

“I don’t have the patience to answer them. The only thing you need to know at this point is that you are not permitted to leave my side without my consent. That means you eat with me, you attend all meetings alongside me, you tend to my affairs when instruction is given and you sit quietly when I have nothing for you.” Jessica listed, getting closer, cupping your face more forcefully. “You sleep alongside me, you dress alongside me, and you most certainly do not hide yourself from me.”

Jessica slid a hand down your back, her other hand gripping the back of your head. Her lips pressed right against her ear, wet, hot air tickling at the sensitive flesh.

“And what we do when it is just us, what we do in those quiet hours once I am healed from labor, that you will never speak of.”

You looked up at her, eyes wide and troubled. Was she… Propositioning you for sex? Was this even a proposition or just a straight up demand. You wanted to open your mouth to protest, but Jessica was faster.

“Get up.” Jessica said, exerting control over you using the Voice.

Your body obeyed unwillingly, standing before her.

“Kneel.”

Your knees buckled, and her hands were quick to jerk your face up, glaring at you with intent.

“Never, ever attempt to speak without being spoken to again. Especially to tell me what I can and cannot do. Arrakis is under Emperor Paul’s jurisdiction now. What I do to ensure House Corrino remains subjected will be none of his concern.”

The fire in her eyes died down, replaced by a soft amusement.

“It won’t be bad, dear. None of it will be bad. You won’t ever worry about being forced into a diplomatic marriage without good warning. And if you do well, if you are a good student, I will have very little incentive to send you away.”

Jessica finished her lecture, amusing herself with the soft baby hairs that clung to your forehead.

“And from now on,” she continued, voice soft, “You call me Jessica.”

#lady jessica x reader #lady jessica x you #reverend mother jessica x you #reverend mother jessica x reader #rebecca ferguson x you #rebecca ferguson x reader #lesbian #wlw #dune #lady jessica #reverend mother jessica

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tswiftupdatess · 8 months ago

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Songs Taylor Swift included on her 'Am I Allowed to Cry?' playlist as the third stage of grief of heartbreak, bargaining:

The Great War this is me trying peace The Archer Cornelia Street Soon You'll Get Better Afterglow I Wish You Would Say Don't Go Come Back…Be Here Better Man The Story Of Us Haunted Come In With The Rain If This Was A Movie Renegade

#taylor swift #5 stages of grief #bargaining #the tortured poets department #playlist #apple music #april 5 #ttpd #taylorswift

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icantthink-ofagoodname · 2 months ago

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Y'all hate on Yukio way too damn much, hes 15, has been seeing demons since birth and always knew Rin was one, "but Rin protected Yukio as kids why would he be scared?" Lets see, he's only really been around aggressive demons (and familiars but they had tamers and could be dismissed easily), and Rin was still human at the time, because what if the demon got unsealed and just went feral. This fear probably doubled down when Rin drew kurikara, sure hes an exorcist but would he be able to stop Rin if kurikara broke? Could anyone? It's not an irrational fear, and anger can extend from fear, and did we all forget the stages of grief? Second stage is anger (self explanatory) and third is bargaining, which can include 'what ifs' and a few would definitely center around Rin, like "what if Rin wasnt a demon? What if Rin died or went with satan?" Blame is also a really common part of grief, and because Shirou dies because of Satan, and Rin is the one with his flames he was definitely the easiest to blame.

All in all: stop bullying a scared, grieving child.

#ao no exorcist #blue exorcist #yukio okumura #rin okumura #Shirou Fujimoto #y'all so pissed because he had a normal reaction to a life-changing event #smh im disappointed

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kaipaedyn · 2 months ago

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these represent the five stages of grief so well

denial

anger

bargaining

depression

acceptance

the progression in the first two scenes where cardan goes from smugly writing letters, like he knows the whole exile thing is a joke and jude would understand and come back soon bc he's in denial. to the third making him a bit angsty grabbing his crown with his wine glass is beside him bigger than before. in the fourth he's far past angsty and his crown is long forgotten with the glass of wine replaced with a full bottle; now half empty bc he drank it all. in the last he's begging bc he cannot take it anymore, he has also given up in his mind thinking he lost jude forever and that she won't spare him another glance

#cardan greenbriar #cardan's letters #jude duarte #jurdan #judecardan #tfota #books #holly black

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darkaviarymc · 11 months ago

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Inspired by this post by @mumblesplash

5 Life Series Winners as the 5 Stages of Grief

Grian: Depression.

Scott: Denial

Pearl: Anger

Martyn: Acceptance

Scar: Bargaining

I can see Pearl and Martyn and maybe Scar and Grian being swapped, but hear me out first.

First, we have Grian as Depression. "I don't feel so good," anyone? He even killed himself at the end, the only winner to do so. It's his game, both in universe and out. He had the power to just leave, but he ended it the only way that felt appropriate to him.

Second, we have Scott as Denial. Literally denying the Boogyman curse was one of his defining moments in LL. In the end, he was sort of in a daze, unbelieving for a moment that he (and Binky) actually won. And in every season following, he is openly NOT trying to win again. There's an edge of reluctance in his voice every time he mentions having won.

Third, we have Pearl as Anger. It wasn't until after she was dead that she let go of the grudge she'd held against Scott all season. She repeatedly hurt herself to hurt him and killed with a kind of glee that can only come from enacting revenge.

Fourth, we have Martyn as Acceptance. His boogykill was last minute, but he did it in a very matter-of-fact way. The end fight was the ultimate acceptance of his fate. "You're all going down! This is a death match for a reason!" He knew what he was there to do, and he did it without remorse.

Fifth and last, we have Scar as Bargaining. He made his own persona one of making deals and trades. Nearly every session, he opened by pleading with the Secret Keeper, the Watchers, the Universe, whoever would listen, to let him have allies. Then, in the end, he asked a question. "How did the guy with no friends win?" If you follow the Eyes and Ears lore, He's still trapped in the game, pushing a button in exchange for freedom over and over again.

#trafficblr #grian #scott smajor #pearlescentmoon #martyn inthelittlewood #gtwscar

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nikachansstuff · 6 months ago

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The stages of grief

I’ve noticed this phenomenon happening with GA and I’m telling you, it’s almost an anthropological study.

First, we have the denial phase, here you can find older posts, claiming one of the following:

It’s not Elain’s book. It’s Azriel’s book.

Elriel is never going to happen, they are platonic. Like siblings.

You have no reading comprehension if you think Azriel and Elain are thing. You’re delusional.

Then, moving on, we have the anger phase. Here’s where you find the rants towards Elriel shippers, Azriel and even the author herself:

The BC caught everyone by surprise because they are not supposed to be read as romantic! What the hell was that, Sarah?!

Azriel is just lusting after Elain! That’s disgusting!

Azriel is an entitled incel. He just wants the “third” sister! He’s toxic!

Azriel clearly just wants a mate, and will leave Elain as soon as his bond snaps!

Elain is cheating on Lucien! That’s disgusting!

Azriel shadows hate Elain! They vanish!

Azriel shadows love Gwyn! That’s why she is in the bonus chapter, she is his mate!

Now, we’re slowly moving towards the bargain phase. Pay close attention and you will find posts claiming:

The next book is Elain’s, that’s a fact. It was never a question. But it’s Elucien.

Fine, there’s Elriel scenes in the book, but they are written flat and without chemistry for a purpose! Its supposed to show us that it does not work!

Elain just wants to fool around with Azriel, like Nesta with all those strangers before she got with her mate, Cassian.

Azriel wants to sleep with Elain, so they will eventually have a thing, but they are not endgame.

Okay, Elriel is probably going to happen, but it will be quick, and they will break up and go back to their mates.

Azriel will quickly let go of Elain and be with Gwyn. Once the bond snaps. Because they are mates. Because of the shadows dancing, because of the glow.

Note that grief is not linear, so that’s the reason they vary the narrative from denial, to anger to bargain and back again to denial.

Next phases are depression and finally, acceptance. I’ll take a guess that depression will hit once the book is announced and the ship is made clear. Acceptance will come later on, if people don’t riot and start all over again, blaming the author for their own much nurtured delusions.

Now, compare this to Elriel community. In all these years, the narrative never changed. Because we have the solid ground of books to sustain it. There’s no need to go all over the place, back and forward. There’s only one narrative: the author’s one.

Thank you for your time, please grab a gift basket at the exit!

#pro elriel #elriel #elriel endgame

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jacks-the-flower · 3 days ago

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Do you really think letting the dragons go at the end of the third How To Train Your Dragon movie was right? I think that flew in the face of the first two movies' messages, not to mention it kind of gave Grimmel what he wanted.

on so many levels, no.

the WHOLE POINT of EVERY HTTYD MOVIE OR SHOW BEFORE 3 was that dragons and vikings were capable of harmony, that both people and animals can be good even after a lifetime of doing otherwise.

but httyd 3 taught kids that 'hey sometimes people are beyond redemption and WE have to compensate for that.' THE DRAGONS have to suffer the consequences of other's villainy, fuck the other movies. If it were just berk trying to protect the dragons, then ok maybe i'd be less salty- BUT IT'S NOT. BOTH SHOWS INVOLVE OTHER DRAGON-SYMPATHETIC PEOPLES. THOSE ARE CANON. THEY LITERALLY DELAYED HTTYD 3 FOR YEARS WAITING FOR RTTE TO END.

and the moving berk bit? because of overcrowding?? HICCUP WHAT TF WERE YOU THINKING??? rtte was literally PEPPERED with 'we need to do whats right for the dragons and their natural habits' AND BRO WENT AND FUCKED OVER BERK'S ECOSYSTEM.

and then left. what happened to 7 generations through the dragon wars, hiccup? what happened to the wars with alvin, dagur, viggo, krogan, johann, drago, etc etc. hiccup? did stoick's death change you that much?

httyd contradicted SO MUCH of what the franchise had established beforehand - themes, lessons, settings, people - that you can TELL that they'd been working on it for a while and were just more unwilling to change things as time went on in the project.

the only consolations i can make are if: 1, they didn't consider the shows very canon anymore; 2, they were just trying to follow the books; or 3... i didn't have one for three BUT NEITHER DID THEY HUH

anyways if i ever put something in my rb's as support for that ending then i must be having a moment of insanity or am firmly in the bargaining stage of grief, or both. both is good.

#this being said tho #i'll still reblog contraditory essays if you've got a good enough point #and i think i have before #because i like to try and keep an open mind #but lets not have it be said that i support the ending of httyd 3 #or even httyd 3 in general if you want to go that far lmaoo #httyd #how to train your dragon #httyd 3 #how to train you dragon: the hidden world #how to train your dragon 3 #rant #its probably barely legible my bad yall

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dufferpuffer · 7 months ago

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In continuation of the 'pillow prince/ss/' topic.. Snape sex hcs? I remember you said it's basically impossible to drag him into bed but I'D TRY.

You're just spoiling me, aren'tcha? First Remus now Sev... Severus Snape is devoted to duty. Its the only thing holding him together. How often does he even go to bed…? A full-time teacher, a spy, a death eater, Dumbledore's dark little knight - He probably considers the time he spends marking 'rest enough'.

His self-esteem is dead. So dead he has come to terms with its corpse and uses it as protection. He's been teased his entire life for his looks. By his parents, by his schoolmates, by his teachers, by his cult, by his students... He's proud of how it has hardened him. It's become part of his ego: He's heard it all before - and now the words run off his oily feathers like raindrops.

Having someone say they think him anything less than hideous? Baffling. But while Remus would become a flustered mess... I think Severus would stages-of-grief it. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression… Because his romantic, affectionate side is also a corpse. It died alongside his best friend and he's spent the last decade-and-a-half making sure it stays buried.

To bring it back? That will take a stubborn dedication that rivals his. It takes grit and damn near necromancy. He will fight back, too - because to raise it from the dead is to raise Lily along with it. That is the greatest hurdle: Best friend or love of his life - either way she was the only person he has been affectionate with. He will need to digest that. He hasn't worked through his grief yet, because it is a difficult thing to work through alone. …but he CAN reach Acceptance.

One step, one stage at a time - peeling down each layer of his onion, like an ogre... Things move slowly with Severus - and in the opposite order you might expect. I guess I will go through what a relationship would be like with Severus, in a sorta dot-point fanfic format:

First note: He is allergic to showing weakness - and what he considers a weakness can be... strange. Indulgence. Emotions, affection, touch, company - he has no time for that garbage. He is in control of himself, of his body, of his feelings, of his life. Meticulous, complete control. This man 'tops' exclusively**

He is ashamed of masturbation. It means he has lost control of his emotions - and it grinds against his ego like sandpaper. He almost never does it. Thinking about anyone in particular when doing it is an insult to them - and he hates feeling guilty. He keeps it simple and almost self-harmingly dry. He has more important things to be doing with his time than engaging with this weakness…

You make your interest in him clear. He goes through everything - he belittles and denies your feelings, he gets angry with you for bothering him, he asks you to stop saying such nonsense... and he gets frustrated that even when you've finally shut up, he is STILL dwelling on it. He spends so long just tossing things up, sorting through his grief, imagining it... so, SO sick of jerking off… …when the dam bursts - he fucks. If he is going to be spending all this time obsessing over these stupid feelings he may as well get something out of it. Only sex, though. Sex he is in control of. Clothes on, greedy, not pretty, not nice. 'Thats what you wanted from me, yes? Well you've gotten it. Happy?!?' ((He does not expect the answer to be 'yes'.))

He thinks one time was too many, and did it only to take it off his mind - and to stop having you bother him about it. But it is easier for you to get him to do it a second time. And then a third... fourth... The more times it happens - and nothing embarrassing or bad follows... well, if he has done it once, he may as well do it more, right…? You are evidently trustworthy. '…You may come to my chambers IF I call - at no other times. I am too busy to play silly games.' A casual physical relationship - to solve a problem of distraction and concentration. That's all.

He does start to call. Occasionally at first - and every time he almost shows surprise that you actually turn up. But he gets less and less surprised... and starts getting more and more needy. 'You're late. I sent for you half an hour ago. Do you think I am made of time?!' He doesn't even realize how needy he sounds, because this activity is now ingrained in his routine. He is used to it. And because he is used to it: He touches more. More clothes come off. But never his own. He has gone from 'hands-on-waist' fucking to caressing your naked body - slow rolls of his hips, making his own breathe shudder, enjoying every sensation.

One day his summons aren't replied to. At first he angry. How dare you. How DARE you waste his time!? The next time they are alone he snaps at you bitterly. 'Finally tired of me? Got your fill? Met a better man?' When the response is more along the lines of 'I was a bit ill' or 'I was out'... he realizes he has shown far too much of his hand. How embarrassing. He is speechless at his own foolishness. He showed an inch of vulnerability and expects to be raked through the coals for it. ...What he doesn't expect is acceptance, tenderness and respect.

He had forgotten that he wasn't the one to initiate this arrangement - that he was wanted. Desired. In his mind he had taken control: Everything happened when he wanted, where he wanted and in whichever way he wished. To be touched in a friendly way? To he apologized to - for being made to worry? To have make-up sex offered…? '…Yes. Alright.' Its the next layer peeled off. He starts listening to offers, enjoying being asked instead of being answered. It's still a casual affair - and yet seeing them talk to other people no longer makes his hackles raise in concern for his secrets. Running into them in the morning no longer makes his skin crawl with shame and embarrassment for the night before. He feels excited when they pay a visit in the midday, offering an impromptu meeting. It is oddly... comfortable.

Of course it can't always be sex in the midday. It is too much effort, takes too much time, energy and clean-up. It suits him fine when you jump on the chance to put him in your mouth. At first he is a little taken-aback - but it feels nice. He says nothing other than contented hums, but as you get better he groans and arcs his back a little. He doesn't care what happens when he finishes - swallow or not, as long as it is not a mess for him to clean up. …Well, he tries to be that callous about it… but it doesn't last long. There is a tenderness to the act he can't deny. It isn't the mutual-benefit fucking. This is a gift for him to enjoy. That realization settles and festers in him. It creates a soft feeling he doesn't recognize... and a desire not to owe you anything.

So, without much fanfare: he reciprocates. He gets you on his seat, or on his desk, and gets down on his knees... He is a little nervous about it - when was the last time he did this, if ever…? - But he has no need to be. He is a god with his mouth. It's his attention to detail. His devotion to getting things done thoroughly and properly - even this. What starts as an embarrassing action from the weakness of his heart turns into a strong pleasure for him. He LOVES oral. It isn't him losing control: it's him gaining it. Even when his hair is gripped and yanked, even if he is pulled close and suffocated a little on you - HE is making that happen. HE is making you do that. He never expected this to make him so happy, so hot. He never expected to undo the buttons of his high collar so his neck could move more easily, to unbutton and fold up his right sleeve so he could get his hands messy... To have enough fun to start saying some truly dirty things… 'That good, is it~?' 'My-! How delicate you are today!' 'Stop squirming. Too sensitive…? Just grit your teeth and bear it.' ...and he didn't expect to not be laughed at for such things.

He certainly didn't expect to get so into it that he kissed you to shut you up as you came. A shock to both of you… another wall crumbled. Turns out he likes that too. He starts initiating sexual activity with a kiss. He prefers kissing to talking. It is succinct and expressive. Walk into his office: as soon as the door is shut your back is pressed against it, wrists in his hands, his mouth against yours. If he starts losing control of the kiss he gently bites your lip, dragging his teeth along it teasingly. Your tongue invades his mouth before he has a chance to do it first: he just about shoves your hands into his robes, tearing into your clothes... This man lives for kissing now.

But he still doesn't realize this is more than casual, that this is something he needs… Until you chat. Its a quiet moment. You comment on the parchments rolled at the edge of his desk. 'Oh - that is just my own research into the effects of aconite. I had to work with it extensively a few years ago.' You take an interest, and he starts regaling deeper and deeper into his studies: how poorly documented others' research is; how it reacts to other ingredients; how modern brewing processes can draw so much more out of it - 'you know, the plant is often just passed off as toxic when even basic purification charms are enough to-' ...He is blabbering. On and on about a dull topic nobody cares about… yet you are listening. His jaw drops a little. He realizes that, for the first time in two decades, someone cares. Someone truly cares. About HIM. His thoughts, his interests... He never thought he could have this again. He didn't think that for the sex, either - but sex, compared to this, was easy to procure. He wants to kiss you again. But not for lust this time.

Suddenly it doesn't feel so embarrassing to allow his eyes to become wet, to draw a shuddering breathe as he builds the courage - of which he has masses of - to say something important: '…I am afraid I have come to love you.' It is a terrifying thing to say, but he has never once shied away from saying what is important, even if it results in pain. And yet this time, for once… he feels like he can trust that it wont.

** Many times later, he is laying down as his shirt gets unbuttoned, his collarbone kissed... He doesn't feel ashamed, even as he gently strokes his own dick, encouraging it to harden. He pulls his arms from his shirt sleeves, fearless of his dark mark being exposed. For once work is at the back of his mind as he allows himself to be pushed back down to into the pillows, chuckling as he is told: 'Shh… just lay still darling… I'll take care of you tonight…' ...And he does. Control well out of his hands and a smile on his face.

#severus snape #hp #headcannons

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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

79 notes · View notes

angegiarratanawriter · 28 days ago

Text

Too Long

Warnings: Smut, GP!Character

Word Count: 4676

Summary: When you sit on Angela’s lap during a Smosh Live, you end up getting a little more than you bargained for

A/N: Instead of writing for Angela's birthday, I wrote for my own. Happy Halloween everyone!

Five days. It’s been five days since the last time you had sex with your girlfriend. While that isn’t necessarily a long time, it’s well above the average time you go between sleeping together, and it has you frustrated. It doesn’t help that Angela has been teasing you all week, either. It’s just a few sly little comments here and there, nothing that would out your relationship to the rest of the cast or the viewers, but enough that it’s driving you crazy.

Figuring that it’s time to get Angela back for everything that she’s done this week, you formulate a plan that is sure to rile her up in the best way possible. The live stream happening right now is the perfect opportunity, so you head down to the stage where it’s shooting. You open the door and quietly shut it behind you, then turn around to see your girlfriend sitting on the games couch playing video games with Shayne, Chanse, Courtney, and Amanda.

“Hey, Y/N,” Alex says as you walk deeper into the room. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” you reply. “Was just curious about what they were playing this week.”

“Mario Party. Winners version.”

“Nice.”

“You want to hop in?” Alex asks. “They could all use some help.”

“Sure. Do you want me to mic up?”

“Please.”

“Sounds good. I’ll be back in a minute.”

You walk over to the other side of the room, where the sound team is monitoring the live stream. One of them immediately comes over with another mic and helps you put it on, clipping it to the front of your shirt before handing you the transmitter. You slip it into your back pocket as you turn around and head back over to Alex. He waits until Chanse finishes his turn, then nods at you to go out.

“I heard you guys could use a little help,” you say, smiling as your castmates look up from the television. “Who’s winning?”

“Shayne, of course,” Amanda says with a little eye roll. “The rest of us suck.”

“Hey, do not!” Chanse says, half offended. “But I would not be opposed to a team up.”

“Alex, who do you want me with?” you ask, looking back at the director.

“Who ever’s in last place,” Alex replies.

“That would be me,” Angela says with an adorable pout on her face.

“Oh, this is so not fair,” Courtney says, throwing her head back. “She’s a professional gamer.”

“I’m really not,” you murmur, blushing a little bit.

“Really? What’s you CoD ranking again?”

“3rd? But it might have gone down because I haven’t had as much time to play.”

“3rd in the country is pretty good,” Shayne says.

“Uh, I’m not-”

“She means third in the world, babe,” Courtney says.

“Well, we’re fucked,” Amanda breathes out.

“Wait a minute, do we have CoD?” Chanse asks.

“I think we have Modern Warfare,” Alex replies from behind the camera. “Why?”

“What if we played that instead?”

“You’re just saying that because you’re in forth place,” Amanda teases.

“No, think about it. We have one of the best players in the world right here and we’re gonna play Mario Party? I mean, I just think it would be cooler to see if we can beat her.”

“I’m down,” Angela says. “Let’s see what Chat says.”

“They’re down,” Alex says as he scrolls through comments on his laptop. “Alright, let’s switch it over to the PS4.”

When two of the tech guys come onto the stage and get to work on switching the consoles, you decide that now is the perfect time to shoot your shot. You walk over to where Angela is sitting on the couch, but instead of plopping down next to her, you sit on her lap. She lets out a strangled gasp behind you, but she recovers quickly enough to play it off when she catches a couple of confused looks.

As soon as everyone’s attention is elsewhere, you subtly shift your ass back so that it’s pressed directly into Angela’s cock. It’s already semi-hard, which isn’t really a surprise, but as you settle into position, you can feel it getting harder. A flood of warmth rushes to your core, and it takes every ounce of self control that you have to keep yourself from rolling your hips back into her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Angela whispers, leaning in to your ear.

“Sitting?” you reply, shooting a purposely confused look over your shoulder.

“Don’t be fucking smart with me. You won’t like what you get from it.”

“Really? Because I think I’m getting exactly what I want.”

“And what’s that?” Angela grits out, trying to keep her voice low.

“Revenge,” you say, sending her a smirk over your shoulder. “I’ve had to take care of myself the last two nights. I think this is the least you deserve.”

“Wait, what?”

“Sex, Ange. We haven’t had any since Sunday morning.”

“Fuck, it can’t have been…”

“It was.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Angela says, looking genuinely upset. “How can I make it up to you, baby?”

“I have a few ideas.”

Angela opens her mouth to reply, but one of the tech guys comes over and hands you each a controller, and then Alex is getting everything set up. He loads up the game, and from there goes into the multiplayer server. Everyone connects their controllers to the console, and then you all start selecting your weapons. As soon as you’re done with that, you choose one of the easier 6 vs 6 maps and start the game.

Over the course of the next half an hour, you find yourself picking off enemy fighters one by one. It’s easy, none of your castmates play at the level that you do, and neither do any of the other players that are on the multiplayer server. You rack up a number of double and triple kills before deciding to turn it down a notch so that some of your teammates can have the fun.

Once you pull back a little bit, you start manhunting for individual castmates on the enemy team every round. You start with Courtney, who ends up being relatively easy to track and take out from a distance, and then you go after Shayne, who you sneak up on while he’s trying to kill Chanse. After a few rounds of honing your hunting skills, Alex calls for the last round and you decide that it’s time to go after your girlfriend.

Trying to hunt down Angela is a little bit harder than hunting down everyone else, if only because she had played with you enough times to know most of your tricks. She manages to avoid any open spaces, instead posting up inside a building that only has one entrance. You managed to sneak inside while she distracted by an enemy combatant out the window, but she manages to turn around just in time to shoot you at the same time you shoot her.

“NO!” you say, watching the kill screen flash across your part of the TV.

“Holy shit, Angela!” Chanse says excitedly. “You just killed her!”

“I think we might have found the one video game you’re actually good at,” Shayne says.

“If I was actually good at it, I wouldn’t have died,” Angela says, though she’s smiling.

“You should give yourself more credit,” you say, looking over your shoulder at your girlfriend. “You’re only like, the fourteenth person to kill me.”

“Fourteenth?” Amanda asks, impressed.

“Yeah, I don’t die often, especially in multiplayer.”

“That’s impressive,” Shayne admits. “You want to sign us off?”

“Sure!” you say, turning to look at the camera. “This was so much fun guys! Please let us know what you want to see next, or if we should do this again. Don’t forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a live stream. Until next time, bye guys!”

“Bye!” your castmates echo.

The little light that indicates that the video feed is live goes off, and you immediately let out a sigh as you sink back into Angela. She puts her hands on your waist to steady you, but you know that you have to get up within the next couple of seconds if you want to avoid questioning from your castmates. With a heavy breath, you get up and then reach back to offer your girlfriend a hand. She takes it, letting you help her up with a small smile.

“How’d you get so good at CoD, Ange?” Chanse asks. “You and Shayne were the only two people besides Y/N who could play. I expected him, but you…”

“We play together a lot,” Angela replies with a shrug. “Usually we’re on the same team, so playing against her was a little different, but I think it was fun.”

“It was,” you say with a smile. “I’m still major league impressed that you killed me.”

“It was a lucky shot. I just happened to turn around with with my finger already on the trigger.”

“Still, it was impressive,” Amanda says.

“Maybe,” Angela says with a shrug. “Anyways, we should probably head out. The crew is gonna wanna go home at some point.”

“True,” Courtney agrees. “Shayne and I were gonna grab some drinks at the bar down the street, do you guys want to join us?”

“Yeah, I’m down,” Chanse says. “Manda?”

“Sure,” Amanda replies, before looking over at you and Angela. “You guys in?”

“Sorry, but I’ve got a couple things that I need to finish up for a project,” Angela replies.

“And I have a meeting with my agent, so I’m out,” you reply, feeling a little bit guilty for the blatant lie that just came out of your mouth. “Rain check?”

“Of course, any time,” Courtney says. “Well, good luck with your stuff, see you all next week.”

Everyone says their goodbyes, and then you all start heading out towards the main office space. You stop by your desk to grab your bag, then head over to meet Angela by hers so that you can head out together. As soon as she’s gathered her stuff, you walk out to her car together in comfortable silence. You climb into the passenger side as she hops into the driver’s seat, shutting her door as she puts the keys in the ignition. Before she starts the car, though, she turns to you.

“I’m sorry,” Angela says softly.

“Baby, it’s fine,” you reply, reaching over to take her hand. “I get it, we’re both busy, and sometimes we forget about things that are important to us.”

“Maybe, but I never want to forget to take care of you. You deserve better than that. I truly do want to make it up to you, if you’ll let me.”

“Of course I will. I love you, and even though this week has been frustrating, I don’t blame you.”

“So, what can I do?”

“You’re going to fuck me until I can’t feel my legs,” you say, smiling as you see your girlfriend’s eyes darken. “And the only thing that I can remember is your name. Sound good?”

“Definitely,” Angela says, swallowing hard. “Can I add one thing?”

“Of course.”

“I want to wake you up with head every morning for the next week. How does that sound?”

“Fucking amazing.”

“It’s a done deal, then. Let’s go home.”

The drive back to the apartment that you share feels like it takes forever, the tension between you and Angela becoming nearly overwhelming. You spend most of the time in your head, letting your thoughts drift to how sore you’re going to be tomorrow. It isn’t like you mind, you have no obligations past your Zoom meeting with your manager, and honestly, you kind of want your girlfriend to carry you around. It’s incredibly sexy, how strong she is.

Reality comes flooding back in when the car comes to a stop, Angela having just pulled into her designated spot in the underground parking garage. You take a deep breath as you open the door, climbing out and shutting it behind you. Your girlfriend circles the car to take your hand, then she leads you to the elevator. The ride up feels just as long as the drive home, and you can feel your heart start pounding in your chest the higher up you go.

By the time the elevator gets to your floor, you are just about ready to jump Angela. It takes every bit of self control that you have to wait and walk calmly down the hallway to your apartment, but you manage it. You unlock the door and walk inside, immediately kicking your shoes off and hanging your jacket up on the coat rack in the front hall. Angela follows in behind you, getting rid of her outer wear as well.

“I know we need to have dinner, but I really kind of can’t wait to get my hands on you, so-” Angela says, only for you to cut her off.

“Dinner can wait. Take me to bed.”

Angela doesn’t hesitate for even a second, taking a step closer to you and pulling you in for a heated kiss. Her hands move to your waist before traveling down and hooking around your thighs, and you let out a squeak of surprise as she lifts you up off of the ground. You immediately wrap your legs around her and push your chest into hers, wanting as much body contact as physically possible.

As your girlfriend starts down the hallway, you remove your lips from hers and start pressing kisses along her jawline and down her neck. The action is just distracting enough that after a particularly hard nip, Angela tangles her fingers in your hair and pulls you away from the skin that you had been lavishing. Before you have time to pout, she’s kicking open the door to your bedroom and tossing you onto the bed.

You immediately sit up, not wanting to miss anything, and you feel your mouth go dry as Angela slowly pulls her tank top over her head. She smirks as she walks over to you, reaching down and tugging at the t-shirt you’re wearing. Nodding rapidly, you lift your arms above your head and she rips it off before leaning in and attaching her lips to your collarbone.

“Fuck,” you whine, feeling her nip at a particularly sensitive spot that has your hips bucking. “Baby, I need you. Please.”

“Okay,” Angela says, coming up to leave a soft kiss on you lips as she pushes you to lay back against the sheets. “Okay.”

When Angela pulls away, she starts moving down your body, her lips cascading down the valley of your breasts before her tongue traces the soft lines of your stomach. Your hips buck up again, and that seems to get your girlfriend moving, because she reaches down and undoes the button of your jeans before pulling the zipper down and ripping them off. As she works your panties down your thighs, you arch your back and undo the clip of your bra, taking it off and tossing it to the side.

“Fuck, you’re so wet,” Angela murmurs, pressing a kiss into your thigh.

“All for you,” you whine, biting your lip to try to keep your desperation at bay.

Angela hums in appreciation before leaning in and licking a stripe up from your entrance to your clit. A harsh moan escapes your lips, and you find yourself reaching down to tangle your fingers in your girlfriend’s hair, urging her on. She works you up expertly, spreading you with her tongue one minute and then sucking on your clit to bring you to the edge the next. It’s all so much, but it’s too soon to come, so you use every trick in the book to shove your high down.

As Angela moves from sucking to rapid flicks of her tongue, you feel her push two fingers into you. The sensation of being stretched is almost enough to throw you over the edge, but you manage to hang on by a thread. Your self control don’t stay intact for long, though, because as soon as she curls her fingers and hits that spot along your front wall, your thighs are clamping shut as waves of pleasure roll down your spine.

“Fuck,” you whimper, your free hand twisting in the bedsheets. “Baby…”

“So good for me,” Angela says as she starts to work you down from your high. “Such a good girl.”

An aftershock wracks through your body at the praise, and you feel yourself blushing at the visceral reaction. You bring your arm up over your face to cover it, trying to hide the embarrassment you feel as you breathe deeply, trying to steady your rapidly beating heart. It doesn’t work, mostly because you can feel Angela pressing soft kisses to your stomach before she works her way up and ends at your lips.

“Mmmm,” you moan, tasting yourself on your girlfriend’s tongue.

“Good?” Angela asks, pulling away.

“More than. My turn?”

“Not tonight. I don’t want to waste time on something that isn’t giving you pleasure.”

“Making you feel good is never a waste. Please?”

“No,” Angela says, shaking her head. “I still have a lot of making up to do, and I want to be able to give you everything you want. I might not be able to do that if you suck me off.”

“Fine,” you say, pouting. “Can I make another request, then? It’s kind of a big one, so you can say no.”

“What is it?”

“Can we not use a condom?”

“Baby, we’ve never…” Angela bites her lip and looks down. “I’ve never…”

“I know it’s a lot, but I want to feel you,” you say, reaching up to stroke her cheek. “But, hey. If you aren’t comfortable or just don’t want to, we don’t have to.”

“If we do this, I have a condition.”

“Anything.”

“We need to get the morning after pill. I love you, so much, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to have a baby with you. I plan on at least having asked you to marry me before we think about you getting pregnant.”

“Deal. And I love you too, by the way.”

Angela smiles sweetly at you before leaning down and pressing her lips to yours in a gentle kiss. When she pulls away after a few seconds, you whine and try to chase her, but she climbs off of you and stands up. You push your elbows up underneath you, watching as your girlfriend unclips her bra and tosses it away before getting rid of her jeans and boxers. You swallow hard as she walks back towards you, a smirk pulling at her lips.

“Up against the pillows,” Angela murmurs, and you scramble to comply. “Good girl.”

“Fuck, Ange,” you whine. “Stop teasing and get up here with me.”

Your girlfriend doesn’t hesitate to comply, climbing onto the bed and crawling up it until she’s hovering over you. As she gets herself settled, you wrap your legs around her hips, shivering when you feel her hard cock press against your stomach. A new coil of heat forms in your stomach, and you bite your lip as you look up at Angela, practically begging her to do something, anything, with your eyes.

“Are you sure about this?” your girlfriend asks.

“So sure,” you murmur, leaning up to kiss her softly. “I love you.”

“And I love you. Still want it hard?”

“Fuck, yes please.”

With a nod, Angela reaches between your bodies and lines her cock up with your entrance. Your breath hitches as you feel it brush up against your clit, and you end up choking on a moan a few seconds later when you feel her start to stretch you. She leans down and presses a gentle kiss to your lips as she pushes into you slowly, making sure that she’s not going to hurt you. As your hips connect, a soft whine pulls its way from your throat.

The skin to skin contact feels sinfully good. You can feel Angela’s warmth and the slight curve of her cock that makes it hit your g-spot just right, and you can tell by the way she’s already breathing shallowly that she can feel your walls squeezing her, wanting to pull her in deeper. It’s an amazing feeling, one that you could definitely get used to if you both decide that you love it.

“Fuck, can I move?” Angela asks, sounding breathless.

You nod, and your girlfriend doesn’t hesitate to start rocking her hips into yours. She begins slow, but soon she’s worked up to a pace that is knocking all of the breath out of your lungs. Between the friction against your g-spot and the attention that Angela is giving your neck, you feel your high approaching much faster than you would have liked it to. You try to shove it down, push it to the side, but when your girlfriend sucks on your pulse point, you’re a goner.

A harsh moan rips itself from your throat as your entire body shudders, waves of pure ecstasy cascading through your body as white flashes behind your eyelids. It takes a minute for you to come down, and when you finally do, you realize that Angela has stopped her movements and is looking down at you with pure affection in her eyes.

“How are you doing?” your girlfriend asks, pushing a strand of hair out of your eyes.

“Good,” you reply, your breathing uneven. “So good.”

“Can I suggest a position change?”

“Sure. How do you want me?”

“Face down.”

“Doggy?”

“No, I want you laying flat. Is that okay?”

“More than.”

Angela nods and pulls out, then moves onto the other side of the bed so that you can get into position. You roll over easily, laying flat on your stomach and tilting your head to the left so that you can breath. As soon as you glance over your shoulder and nod, your girlfriend is climbing on top of you and pushing back in.

The stretch in this position is different, the fullness that you feel bordering on uncomfortable as Angela starts to roll her hips gently into yours. She knows that it takes you a minute to adjust when you’re face down, and you’re very grateful for the steady pace that she’s setting to get you ready for the real thing. After a minute, you feel things start to loosen up, so you reach up and grab the pillows before looking back at your girlfriend.

“I’m good,” you say, breath hitching as she hits a sensitive spot. “You can fuck me.”

“You sure?” Angela asks, caressing your ass.

“Yes.”

As soon as you give your confirmation, you feel a hand collide with your ass, a harsh smack echoing around the room. You bury your face in the pillows as you feel yourself clench at the sensation, a soft moan just barely managing to slip out. It’s quiet, but you know that Angela hears it based on the way she immediately does it again, this time thrusting her hips roughly into you at the same time.

“Oh, fuck,” you moan, fisting your hands in the pillows.

“Feel good?” Angela asks, picking up the pace.

“Yes, baby. So good. You’re fucking me so good.”

Angela lets out a strangled moan behind you, and suddenly her hips stop moving. You can hear the sound of her breathing heavily, and when you turn your head to look at her, you see that she has her eyes squeezed shut and her hands fisted in the sheets on either side of her. If you weren’t so annoyed that she’d stopped, you would take a second to admire just how sexy she looks right now.

“Baby, why did you stop?” you whine.

“Don’t wanna…” Angela stutters out. “Come yet.”

“Baby, it’s okay. You can come.”

“No. Not yet. Not done. Just…need a minute.”

“Okay,” you say softly, reaching one of your hands down to take hers.

“Sorry,” Angela says after a minute, her eyes fluttering open. “I got really close there, but I’m good now. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

Without so much as a warning, Angela goes back to slamming her hips into your backside at a bruising pace. It feels so good, but it’s not enough, and you find yourself trying to lift your hips so that you can slip a hand between your legs to play with your clit. Angela seems to have other ideas though, because she shoves you back down and then leans her her body on top of you, effectively changing the angle as she starts to roll her hips instead of thrusting.

The difference is immediate, and you start to feel heat coil in your stomach again, building up with every stroke that brushes against your g-spot just right. Your orgasm crashes into you as Angela bites down on your shoulder, and you find yourself trying to muffle your cries of pleasure in the pillow.

This time when you come down, your girlfriend has already pulled out of you and is leaving distracted kisses along your shoulders and spine. A sigh of contentment escapes you as you feel her start making her way up your neck, and you turn your head in time catch her lips with yours, pulling her into a soft kiss as you roll over underneath her. She smiles as she kisses you back, only pulling away when you both need to catch your breath.

“Hey,” Angela says softly.

“Hi,” you reply back, a smile pulling at your lips.

“Can you take another?”

“Yes, but I think that’s going to be it for me. My legs are starting to feel tingly.”

“Good. This position or a different one?”

“This one. I want to be able to see your face when you come.”

Angela blushes lightly but nods, lining her cock up with your entrance and pushing into you. She immediately starts up at a fast pace, and you can already tell that neither of you are going to last long. You can already feel another knot forming at the base of your spine, and she has her eyes clenched shut as she ruts her hips into yours.

As Angela starts to fuck you harder, she surprises you by grabbing your leg and throwing it over her shoulder. This allows her to sink deeper into you, hitting a new spot that you’ve never felt before. The pleasure is white hot, but it’s staying put for now, building higher and higher with each thrust. As it gets closer to snapping, you feel your girlfriend’s hips start to stutter, and then there’s a hand pressing down on your stomach and then-

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” you cry out.

All of your muscles contract, and your body tries to vault you into a sitting position, only to be blocked by Angela. She pushes you back down and ruts her hips a few more times before you feel her spill into you as she goes completely still. Another wave of pleasure rips through you, and you feel tears start to run down your cheeks as your body shudders. Coming down takes a long time, but when you do, you smile as you feel a thumb gently wiping at your cheeks. You open your eyes to see Angela staring down at you with an expression of awe on her face.

“What?” you ask, suddenly feeling shy.

“Nothing, it’s just…I don’t think that’s ever happened before,” Angela says.

“What’s never happened before?”

“Baby, you squirted.”

“Oh, uhm, sorry?” you say, blushing heavily.

“Don’t be,” Angela says, leaning in to kiss you softly. “That was so fucking hot. I can’t wait to make you do it again.”

“Not tonight.”

“I know, baby. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up and then figure out what to order in.”

“Chinese?”

“Whatever you want,” Angela says. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” you murmur softly.

#angela giarratana #angela giarratana x reader #smut

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