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ikemenomegas · 1 year

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Omega!Gojo Satoru x Alpha!Reader

I believe we are fated to do the things we choose anyway*

gege akutami is the kind of mangaka who makes fun of almost all their characters. with utmost affection, gojo deserves to be bullied a bit. we love that he's a little heartless, a little frivolous, that he's powerful as a fact, that he cares a little bit strangely, so doing him a bit of justice, here's the mirror to Getou's youth story

tw: canon character death, spoilers for the manga, gojo's emotional constipation and egotism

Toji Zenin cut so many threads the day he arrived on the Tokyo school grounds, but the one between you and Satoru survived. It's already a miracle that Riko was the only one who died that day. The miracle of surviving should have been enough, but now you've lived long enough to find out how much you could love someone too. You get to see how afraid someone is of loving you. Gojo Satoru had one friend. Gojo Satoru had one mate. That was it, that was all he could let himself have.

Springtime Tokyo is still cold. Not as cold as up north in the mountains, but the winter uniforms are blessedly warm. An assistant manager drops you off at Tokyo Jujutsu Technical School on a milky March morning where you are met by Yaga-sensei, the first year teacher.

This teacher has some kind of idea about building community, which is why he's clustered the four of you first-years in the same building, around a loud blue-eyed boy who barely takes one look at you, squinting around a pair of blackout sunglasses, at your purposeful non-expression, before he is grinning, far too wide and it feels like he gets even louder, movements expansive to pull you into the range of an argument he's having with a tall slim boy with long hair tied at the back of his head.

Yaga-sensei just shakes his head and introduces you to Ieri Shoko, who is physically leaning away from the noise as if to escape some blast radius and has the most distant smile you've ever seen in your life on her face.

It's unsettling is what it is. The dark haired boy is just rolling his eyes at the one who had somehow both dismissed you and pulled you into his orbit. The automatic response is to try and get that attention back, but you have at least a little more self respect than that. You climb the stairs to take a room on the same floor to Shoko-san's and leave them to their snipping. You don't see Gojo fall silent for half a second before carrying on bickering, Yaga now stepping in to separate them.

School hasn't quite started yet. It's a boarding school so everyone is just around, getting the lay of the school, setting up their rooms, exploring Tokyo, running into one another and trying to figure out how their pieces fit together.

Satoru has already sorted you all into neat little piles of adjectives

Polite: the boy with the long dark hair, Getou Suguru, although this doesn't necessarily mean nice he notes gleefully. Self righteous and reactive, as in he can be baited into a no holds barred fight, which is new for him. He hasn't been able to fight someone who could hold their ground for more than a minute since he was thirteen. Subversively irreverent.

Morbid: the shortie with the short hair, Shoko Ieri. She discovered her abilities somewhere and even Satoru has to admit some of the diagrams she pulls up are admirably disgusting. Neutral. Satoru has never met someone else who sticks so close to their own whims before but she isn't like anything he expected, dismissive, meandering, goading. And she can't explain how she does what she does, which is aggravating because he can't do it.

And you, the new one. The last to arrive. Fresh meat. Quiet, wary.

You catch him not following you, but showing up near where you are a little too frequently to feel coincidental while you're making a point to meet the upperclassmen. He adds opportunistic and watchful to the list when he notices you do this, but some of the older students seem to find it vaguely endearing - the clan ones like a small animal they can toss treats, the recruited students who aren't trying to suck up to the clan kids with the cautious familiarity of greeting another outsider.

He tries tossing you a treat, granting you some offhanded attention in the common space of what is now the first years' block. Suguru laughs at him when you mostly look confused and apologetically tell him you've never seen either of the movies he wants to debate before refilling your water bottle and wandering back out onto the school grounds with your umbrella.

School starts regardless with some tentative unspoken agreement between the four of you to try and be friends, or at least classmates. There is after all, no one else to be friends with.

Class is boring, so Satoru watches his classmates. Where Shoko is passive and watchful and Satoru is staring into the air, you're openly attentive and Suguru more casually mirrors your attention. Which makes him want to call you another boring small-town bumpkin

Except you are in the same the advanced mechanics elective he is, and you and Shoko become animated discussing the curse anatomy lectures. Yaga takes you away to practice hand-to-hand with his dolls while he lets Satoru and Suguru pummel each other, which makes him think you must be too fragile to handle the two of them. Most people are, so he doesn't think much on it.

Satoru sometimes goes out alone to train when he can't sleep. He lashes out at the wooden dummies on the practice field, ducking under wooden arms and lashing out to see sections of it spin faster. On one of these nights, a week or two into the first year, he sees you standing outside the track, leaning on a railing, face buried in a thick scarf. He's aware of your vague attention, watching him without any particular interest, like how one might watch water sliding under a bridge, but when he sneaks a glance around the practice dummy, you're just as often more fixated on the sky. The moon is full and you're watching the clouds chase across the deep blue expanse, listening to Gojo Satoru's knuckles impacting on wood. And then at some point, he looks over and you're gone, your weird cursed energy signature fading in the dark.

Satoru only sees your technique the first time a substitute makes you spar with everyone else during training while Yaga is away. Apparently the teacher is someone you know because you get into the first argument he's ever seen before you send a spear flying so fast it hits the center of a target and topples it over.

The same teacher makes you fight Satoru, to already defeated attempts at appalled refusal. He'd usually help you push back just on principle, but he hasn't gotten to go on a mission with you yet and his sometimes oppressive curiosity has settled on whether you actually can keep up with him after all.

You can't, but this is Gojo Satoru at fifteen, not fully realized, and the first time he fights you he amends how he feels about "opportunistic". He flies right at your face and swears he makes contact, but you step back at the last minute and he feels an impending impact from his left that is almost the same strength as his own attack. He tries again and you twist out of the way much faster than he had expected. He tries to throw you and you end up descending slowly to the ground, trying to get the teacher to end the bout. Eventually Satoru overwhelms you and breaks your arm when you try to block too many hits in rapid succession. Shoko fixes it, and you wince with gritted teeth and tears in your eyes but don't cry or sob or glare at him with the kind of face that is calling him names you can't say out loud. The demonstration has him, fortunately or unfortunately, folding you into the energy of your little first year group like you'd been there all along.

He's a shaman clan kid, so it's interesting to see you now as not necessarily opportunistic but curious about the other sorcerers, about other people. What a novelty, to be inconsequentially curious. If he'd been too curious as a child he would be either lectured on responsibility or nearly drowned in related gifts meant to appease his moods

You don't appease his moods and the attention of him, one of the strongest sorcerer of the generation, doesn't appease you.

Satoru tries to bait you and things go right over your head. He tries to disrupt your silent, invisible schedule and you let him drag you away with minimal fussing, especially when Shoko or Suguru is involved, but will wander to the side on outings and either find some accidental trouble or something that makes him a little surprised at the intensity of your focus.

He forces you into a combat-determined wager that demands you stop using honorifics with his name and Suguru's name and Shoko's name (without asking the other two) and there's no way for you to get out of it or win so that forces some artificial closeness that becomes real. Language is very important for creating distance, for creating hierarchy and Satoru somehow isn't interested in a hierarchy between you.

He is however far more self conscious of his omega status than Suguru is. He won't say it, but it's a relief when none of you make a big deal out of it when you find out and also a surprising comfort when you and Shoko who don't have to suffer through the literal additional headache of heats try and make them comfortable

For Satoru this involves distracting him by playing video games with him, watching movies, or tossing balls of paper at him while he tries to stop it with his technique. Mostly he's with Suguru, especially if they sync up, but Satoru doesn't have the same heat symptoms as him. During first year even though he sleeps more than he does as an adult, it's typically less than the rest of you might want. Where Suguru gets tired, Satoru will get cranky and mean because he's bored and feverish and Suguru is too tired to entertain him. His family also was never very comforting during his heats so he knows what to do as far as nesting, but having people around is new for him.

He likes to call and text you if you're on missions during these times, which is typical given his clan's sensitivity to him being around alphas at these times.

So even when you're on campus, you and Shoko only spend a few hours with him at a time. Sometimes you play games and the heat makes him almost slow enough to beat on a DS link game. Sometimes he makes you do his homework. Sometimes he likes to throw throwing things at you to see how you use your technique to deal with it.

He adds "sentimental" to the list of adjectives when he realizes he can so easily pressure you in these times into revealing more of yourself to him than you usually do. He's bored and there's only so many things to talk about before you start telling him about an encounter with one of the rare cats that will tolerate living around the cursed energy of the campus, when you grimace and tell him about a terrible noodle stand in Yamanashi province that you still crave somehow, when you tell him about saving fallen leaves in a heavy dictionary you use for that purpose, or the one time you reveal that you've kept every pair of shoes your parents bought you to wear on the first day of school. You tell him these things and it makes him feel like maybe, someday, he might want to tell you things too.

It's not soft but there's a softness to it. A genuineness in the four of you together, in Satoru's and Suguru's growing strength and self surety. Satoru tries to make himself the center of the world, because it's fact that is where he has been all along. But he's not so easily the center of your world. You didn't come from his world.

Satoru doesn't fall. He doesn't think hard about why it becomes so. He barely thinks about it all. He just knows at some point that you're one of his. You're one of his and he wants you to pay him the attention he' accustomed to as center of the world (except he doesn't maybe. He'll be able to say it one day that what he loved was you treating him like he was as human as he could be)

He's terrible at acknowledging whether this possessiveness is anything in particular. After a sparring session, you watch Shoko patch a cut on Suguru's arm with so much longing and a pang of something worms its way in Satoru's chest. He crowds in next to Suguru before Shoko's done, draping over Suguru's shoulders. You don't see the way Satoru's eyes flicker from Shoko's steady hands to your wide-eyed gaze.

He's jealous the way a child is jealous of a favorite toy, hooking his arm around your neck if any omegas outside of school talk to you in the street. If you brush him off when he's trying to use you as a tool for self-affirmation, he sulks around until you acknowledge him in some other way and he will not admit to a single soul why it matters. When he's forced to go home for holidays like oban and returns in a terrible pique, you may fight with him if he lashes out in the worst, most personal ways. You push back and talk to instead of around him or through him and you also don't realize that is why he backs off.

He realizes slowly that he has to be careful with you. He forgets sometimes that you're more fragile that Suguru, that you need help Shoko doesn't need. On what you call the "worst school trip in existence" and Shoko calls "lucky we didn't all die" and Suguru smiles and calls "well we all made it out in the end", even Satoru got injured, yet he feels invincible, like he caught a bullet and threw it back.

When Toji nearly kills him and everyone he ever cared about, he awakens with the power to keep it from happening ever again. He thinks he can carry the world for all of you, for everyone, reveling in his power. He doesn't realize that his presence, the gravity well he made in the monster class's lives, doesn't exist the same way while he's not there because he has a tendency to think everything will be easy for him to fit back into when he returns, or not to think on the fact things could change at all.

Then Suguru leaves and the center of Satoru's world, his reference point, collapses

You're there in Shinjuku the day it happens. It's getting cold again. You're there to meet Shoko. Suguru has gone missing, Satoru is... away. Again. Still. He's been absent whenever he is around anyway. The jujutsu world doesn't have the resources to devote to hunting curse users in particular so the effort to find Suguru has been halfhearted at best and even if he's on your minds, you have jobs to do still.

You're there in Shinjuku and when you don't find the person you're looking for, you find someone else, It shouldn't happen, but it does. You run into Satoru, mind reeling at Suguru's betrayal. You nearly don't see him and he nearly doesn't see you except he sees everything and he's been walking around the district like a ghost.

He appears like a ghost too, tall and pale and ridiculous eyes. You'd tried to see if the world reflected in them once, but now it's more obvious to you than ever that it's just him, nothing more and nothing less.

"Let's go back," he says, and for the first time in months, you return to the college, side by side on the train, feeling like there should be more people in the near-empty car. You get as far as you can before you get to a station that's closed where you can no longer transfer and then you get out and walk in silence.

You walk like there's another person jostling for space between you. When you get to the school, Shoko meets you at the red tori gates. When you get to the mostly empty dormitory building, now a little emptier, Satoru looks at you. And looks and looks and looks. This time, he feels like you might disappear in the pre-dawn light casting your faces in blue.

Maybe it's because he's already lost one precious thing long before he noticed it was gone that he grips your shoulders tight, so tight you almost wince, but turn into it instead, tilting your head as though, were you less careful people, you might brush your cheek against his hand. Just for a little bit of comfort, for a little familiarity.

Then Shoko makes a noise at the top of the stairs, the scuff of her foot, the tap of her palm on the banister. What a terrible day it must be if Shoko is interfering. And you step away.

Satoru doesn't go to bed. For the first time in his life he feels like he doesn't know who he is. He watches your light come on and then go off. He doesn't see you stand at the mouth of the hall leading to Suguru's room with a blanket around your shoulders until eventually you turn away and fall asleep on one of the common room couches, near to where a year of his body in the same spot had left an indent. He doesn't think about the world where you aren't here, where he never sees you again, because he can't quite fathom it.

Because even when he was gone, he never felt like he had let any of you go

It makes him feel sick to his stomach, the closeness of someone else, but it feels worse to push you away so you sit shoulder to shoulder with him some time in the morning. He pretends not to see the new dark shadows in your eyes. You sit and watch the mist burn off and pretend his warmth can hide how the world is a little colder.

*I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you ― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars

#gojo satoru x reader #gojo satoru #a/b/o #a/b/o dynamics #omegaverse #alpha!reader #omega!gojo #reader insert #gn #i'm sorry this is so much longer than the getou one #I changed styles to write something else and couldn't get back to the broad strokes style of the getou bit #i want to expand on both #this show is really good and the potential here is too much to resist #the quote came to mind because the six eyes user has a specific kind of fate #but the idea of fate has a lot of interesting discussion around it in between religions #jjk plays a lot with buddhist/shinto/christian imagery including the idea of a fate thread tangled between certain power centers #i was raised in a christian centered culture which has certain beliefs about predetermination that can get incredibly depressing.#fate is generally defined as a predetermined and inescapable path of action or consequences #you can't escape it no matter what choices you make #which seems glum #karma on the other hand has something more to do with tendencies - the things you do to yourself/by yourself that lead to consequence #karma is separate from fate. even if you escape the cycle of karma or samsara you cannot escape fate #little interaction with fate are common - seeking explanations of future fortune or charms to pull you in the direction you want to go #ultimately there is a tension between the human ability to act at will (karma/free will) and fate #How do you justify acting if everything is predetermined? one can trap themselves in ontologic questions about purpose and actions #there is an inevitably and circular in accepting that maybe we can't escape fate but that fate also can't escape us #our actions were always going to matter #io.omegas

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allgremlinart · 2 months

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re: lrb sorry I didn't rb that dutch addition on that post but it was like. TOO funny for me to take seriously. and it's something that SHOULD be taken seriously!! "globalization" is often another word for "destruction of localized language and culture/neo-colonialism" so like. very much on page w that post.

. .. but the dutch thing was TOO funny sdhshs

#LIKE. HELP. IDK WHAT TO TELL U. SHOULDNAE HAVE COLONIZED MANNAHATTA.#THE FOUNDING OF 'NEW AMSTERDAM' AND ITS CONSEQUENCES #like. I think with Western Europe the whole 'holy shit wait OUR language and culture can get wiped out too ? 😟 not just everyone else ??' is #a little like. a rather belated Monkey's Paw of colonialism. or less Monkey's Paw more unintended yet inescapable retribution.#does this make sense ? like I still agree w Europeans who want to resist Americanization its just. I have an iota less sympathy for them.#especially cus haha hey! now you're just like me! (3rd gen white immigrant) like losing your language ey ? to assimilate ? womp womp #comes for us all looks like

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silo1013 · 8 months

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ascension is like the one situation i can’t get behind fix-its for because everything is so dread-inducingly unchangeable. we talk about how no matter what mulder did differently he wouldn’t have been able to save scully but it’s literally like that for everyone in the equation. all the events are on a completely fixed path. it’s so evil. this was always going to happen this was set in motion from the beginning there is no version of this scenario where everything turns out alright 😁

#they still would have been able to find scully if she hadn’t scanned the chip #mulder goes to skyland mountain alone and dies in a car accident #the consequences of challenging the syndicate are clearly stated so god forbid skinner or krycek or ANYONE tries to do the right thing #it’s so awful to watch but in a way that sucks you in #i <3 inescapable tragedy i <3 seeing bad things coming knowing there’s no way to stop them i <3 ‘there is no other version of this story’

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vivribbon · 6 months

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& btw i am a fucking Champion.

#glad i've inescapably become a funnyman again. and by glad i mean kinda bewildered and a bit saddened #and also a lil paranoid but whatever. consequence of using the internet with a somewhat public presence

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fstbmp-a · 1 year

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Good morning I barely slept-

#My Kingdom ;; OOC #the consequences of my actions are severe and inescapable-#i'm eepy and crave eepies but i need to be awake sooooo oop

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arctasy · 2 years

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me going into s5: oh this'll be fine, all the statements are gonna be about physical fears like death and darkness and i'm generally only scared of existential concepts

jon: lmao bitch you thought

#tma be like 'this episode is about meat ^_^'#then examine the consequences of an inescapable capitalism system that forces you to evaluate your self worth based on usefulness #like damn you kinda got me there #tma

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queerfables · 8 months

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I wanted this post to be more coherent but I am coming apart at the seams. Listen. Listen to me. Listen look no look me in the eyes and listen LISTEN.

Crowley and Aziraphale know. They're in love, and they know. Their love is requited, and they know. That's why it hurts so much! They don't say it. They can't say it. The consequences for both of them could be disastrous. But they know, they know, they know.

This is forbidden love at it's absolute pinnacle. This is centuries of dancing around an unsayable, inescapable truth. Loving someone this way is intense. It's a fiercely romantic headrush, because everything is high stakes fantasy and it's you and your beloved against the world. It's a soul crushing nightmare because the thing you want more than anything is always there, just out of reach. It's passion and yearning and stolen touches and desperately hoping the other person understands all the things you can't say.

It's also just unbelievably stupid. You have a sizzling moment of intimacy with someone and then three days later you're trying to act like business associates.

This dynamic has been present since season one, and sometimes the atmosphere between Crowley and Aziraphale becomes urgent and surreal enough that they almost name it. There's the bandstand, where Crowley suggests they could run away together. There's Aziraphale in 1967 saying, maybe one day we'll dine at the Ritz. These aren't the words of those unsure of another's feelings. These are declarations made in the clearest terms they dare.

The clincher for me is Aziraphale's face when Shax says she wouldn't have thought he was Crowley's type. It's a nasty comment meant to play on Aziraphale's insecurities: "If you're anything to him, it must be something sordid, and I'm surprised you can even offer him that." And she completely misses the mark! Aziraphale disregards her words without a thought. That eyebrow says he knows exactly how Crowley feels about him, and Shax's insinuation is laughable. He is uniquely Crowley's type.

It's less definitive for Crowley, and it makes sense that it would be. For the most part, Crowley is the accelerator and Aziraphale is the brakes. It is hard to hold faith that someone wants you when all they can tell you is "slow down". That doesn't mean he's unsure of Aziraphale's feelings. It means that he's unsure how much he's allowed to say. Aziraphale wants him to push right up until he doesn't, and it hurts them both when they go too far and have to walk it back. Even so, Crowley's confession makes it pretty clear that they're both in on this unspoken thing between them:

"you and me ... group of the two of us ... and we've spent our existence pretending that we aren't"

And then he kisses Aziraphale. And he doesn't do it carefully or tentatively. He doesn't wait for Aziraphale to be ready. Because that's how this dance goes, isn't it? Aziraphale wants him to push, and it's going to hurt and they're going to have to walk it back but fuck it all because Crowley is going to give them the thing they've spent their existence pretending they didn't want.

#good omens #aziracrow #ineffable husbands #good omens meta #fable talks good omens

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jamminvroomvroom · 2 months

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die for you.

ln x driver!reader

in which you can’t stand each other, or so you say…

this took waaaay too long for me to hate it sm but she’s here! and she’s long! love this concept so much, thank you for this request. so many feels so many vibes, tell me what you think <3

loosely inspired by die for you by the weeknd

warnings: 18+!! minors dni!! smut, language, slight glimpses of she fell first, he fell harder, rivals to lovers/enemies to lovers, choking, hate sex? bar fight, mentions of blood

8.3k words (oop)

it’s rare that you miss a podium, so when you do, it tastes bitter and stings like a bitch.

the car has been on fire all season long, a thing of beauty in your calculated hands. so, the string of bad luck you’re enduring, small mistakes with big consequences, it’s quite the pill to swallow.

out of the car you jump, teeth grinding hard out of frustration. you could see the commotion ahead of you, members of the papaya team celebrating their driver. your eyes roll so hard in your head that you feel a lasting ache. you side step members of your team, dodging every single person that tries to talk to you, your comms officer knowing better than to try and engage with you. you know you’re being unreasonable, it was a p5 finish! but it isn’t a podium or a win, so quite frankly, you aren’t interested, and you certainly don’t have any energy left to hear how amazingly well he had driven.

lando fucking norris.

what was once quiet disdain had grown into fully fledged hatred and you fear you’ll be violently sick if you catch a single glimpse of him on the podium. sure, he’s talented, and sure, he’s beautiful, you suppose. that doesn’t mean you have to like him. not anymore. he lives under your skin, inescapable.

you struggle through every interview in the media pen, most of which dissect your recent fall from grace, your mouth forming a hard, unimpressed line every time they mention the orange goblin and his recent streak of podiums and good luck. you wish the journos would bring up his string of women and the probable plan b receipts that went with them. that, you would love to talk about.

you drive in silence back to your hotel, leaving the track as soon as possible, and quickly find solace in your bed for the night. the idea of seeing the inside of a club makes you nauseous after your epic downfall. as your eyes are drooping, your body going limp under the thick duvet, a knock sounds from the door.

“no.” you shout flatly, but the only response you get are giggles from the hallway. for fuck sake, you mutter, groaning as you shift out from beneath the covers and trail apprehensively towards the door.

george and alex appear before you, and you throw your head back is exasperation.

“mate, it’s 9:30.” alex laughs, taking in your fancy attire; pyjamas that you’ve had since you were 17.

“what’s your point?” you croak, glaring up at your obnoxiously tall friend.

“why aren’t you getting ready to go out?” george questions, leaning against the doorframe. he, too, was obnoxiously tall, you thought, feeling the strain in your neck as you move your glare onto him.

“if it wasn’t obvious, i’m not going.” you deadpan, crossing your arms over your chest. “i thought that was clear after i ignored all 77 of your texts.” you smile sarcastically, rubbing sleep from your eyes.

“don’t be boring! you’re an f1 driver, you’re in a cool city, you’re rich and, let’s face it,” he sasses. “you need to get laid.” alex says, like it’s the most causal thing in the world. your eyes bulge out of your head at the utterance of the last bit. george bites back laughter.

“choosing to ignore that.” you hiss. “i’m sorry but i refuse to go out and celebrate that arrogant, whiny little bitch.”

they both know exactly who you’re talking about.

you and lando have simply never seen eye to eye. your karting days were spent pushing one another off the track or into a muddy puddle if things got a bit heated out of the car. sure, olive branches were extended, and maybe adolescent feelings were secretly harboured, but he never gave you any reason to tell him that. you’d grown out of the childish violence when you graduated into formula 1, but you hadn’t been able to shake the rage he made you feel.

it didn’t matter how many dinners you attended where others had conspired and forced you to sit next to each other. it didn’t matter how many times you turned up to play padel and were met with the same lame excuses of ‘oh, did we not mention lando would be here?’ it didn’t matter how many times you’d hugged it out on the podium while adrenaline and tensions were running high.

it didn’t matter how many times he’d watched you from across a crowded room and you’d found his eyes, watched him back. it didn’t matter how many times he’d smirked at you at the start of a race weekend, made you blush. and it certainly didn’t matter what happened last time you found yourself in a club with him.

you just don’t like him. not anymore. you sleep better at night when you lie to yourself.

~ the last time

you sink shot after shot, cocktail after cocktail; the taste of fruity liquor stains your lips and burns your throat. you feel electric, sizzling with ecstasy and the heat from the flashing lights above your head.

it’s approaching 4am and you can’t recall a time in your life where you’d felt so fucking good. the high of your first win is indescribable.

you’ve lost track of the guys, alex and george have packed it in and gone back to their hotels with their girlfriends. pierre and kika are somewhere in a corner, you’re certain. you’re pretty sure you’ve even seen lewis with his entourage and a brick wall of a bodyguard trailing behind him. and at the bar, a set of eyes watch you.

lando isn’t even listening to oscar anymore, no. he is too entranced in the way your hips move to the beat, lost in the carefree lines your body makes in the crowd. he’s itching to go to you, put his hands in places that would stay between you, him, and god, but he doesn’t think a broken nose would be good for business.

everything changes when you spin around, facing his direction. then, it begins: the same thing that happens every time you end up going out in the same group. you watch one another, pretending you’re not both achingly desperate to find out how the other tastes.

but lando is feeling bold. he tells oscar he’ll see him in the morning, and then, egged on by a moscow mule and a few too many shots, he makes his way towards you. it is instinctual, magnetic, the way he is drawn to you.

hands on your hips, lips on your neck. the song changes. you recognise the weeknd’s voice. you are disappointed in yourself but it feels too good to stop.

you know what i’m thinkin', see it in your eyes you hate that you want me, hate it when you cry you’re scared to be lonely, 'specially in the night i’m scared that i’ll miss you, happens every time

the lyrics sober you up. you’re in the first taxi you can see when you finally get outside.

alone.

as much as that memory makes you shiver, for several different reasons, you find yourself putting on some makeup and raking through your suitcase for something to wear. george and alex are waiting downstairs for you at the bar, and when you finally make your way down there, they have a martini waiting for you. they watch in impressed horror as the alcohol disappears from the glass mere seconds after it touches your lips.

“let’s get this over with.” you sigh.

it could have been worse, you suppose.

the club is packed, hundreds of faces blurring into nothing. you feel better knowing that there is a one in a million chance of running into lando.

you’re tucked into a booth with alex and george, carmen and lily, a few faces you can’t quite place, and charles and pierre. you’d conspired to sit on the outside, prepared to make a quick getaway at the first sign of tension.

you’d been in a state of fight or flight since your last run in, nails bitten down every time you thought about his hands on you, how good they felt on you. it scared you more than anything had in a long time, how your desire had festered.

you go to take a swig from your glass, only to find it empty, aside from a few sad ice cubes. you watch jealously as they melt into nothing, wishing they would take you with them, shoving your glass across the smooth table top when your frustration boils over.

you’re on edge, ridiculously afraid of bumping into a curly haired man. it wasn’t him you were scared of, per-say, more yourself. god knows what you’d do if you felt those warm, calloused hands pulling your hips into his again.

“you okay?” pierre calls across the table. he and charles abandon their conversation as soon as your glass goes flying towards their side of the table. you’re broken out of your trance, caught off guard like a deer in headlights.

“tired.” you reply, shrugging it off like it was nothing. it’s clear immediately that they don’t buy it.

“she’s hiding.” alex chimes in from beside you, and your elbow goes straight into his ribs. he feigns pain for a moment, cackling at your reaction.

“from who?” charles inquires. you roll your eyes, blush spreading down your neck already. you hate everything about the conversation, and yet you need to see where it goes. you’d planned your escape, and now was the opportune time to make it, but you seem to be glued to the leather of the booth.

“lando.” george smirks into his drink as a he speaks, wiggles his eyebrows.

“oh yeah, we know all about that.” pierre laughs, his head tipping back in amusement.

“what?” you spit, eyes wide with confusion.

“don’t think me and kika didn’t see you two before the summer break. that night you won? we thought you’d finally cave.” pierre explains, his grin conveying pure evil.

several “what?!”’s sound from around the table, and now all eyes are on you.

“nothing even happened.” you mumble. “he came over to me and then i left.” you look away, twisting your hair around your finger. you are sweating.

“you looked like you were minutes away from being arrested for public indecency.” pierre smirks. you almost launch yourself across the table, intent on strangling him, and then perhaps throwing yourself in front of an oncoming uber outside.

“well, well, well. i fucking knew it.” alex is giggling beside you.

“come on guys, leave the poor girl alone.” lily winks at you, but even she has a twinkle in her eye. “there’s obviously feelings there.” and just like that she betrays you. her sympathetic smile doesn’t make you forgive her.

“i think you guys just need to get it out of your system,” charles starts, pausing to take a sip of his drink. “just fuck.” he waves his hand, like it was the most causal thing in the world.

the table erupts in laughter and you decide that you are well past the end of your tether. you shake your head, declaring that you need another drink, or ten, and strut away from the table. a chorus of ‘love you’-s and ‘get some’-s sound from behind you. you reply simply by raising your middle finger and refusing to look back.

the bar is in sight, just about in your reach when your evening goes from mildly bad to aggressively worse.

“fuck sake.” you sigh.

“and good evening to you too.” lando replies. he’s blocking your path, materialising before you out of nowhere.

“get out of my way, lan.” it sounds like you’re pleading and you cringe internally.

“don’t you wanna congratulate me?” he feigns a pout and you almost swing for him.

“no, not particularly.” you say dryly. “all i want is a drink, so if you’d just…” you gesture for him to move. of course, he doesn’t.

“haven’t seen you in a while, though. thought maybe you’d missed me.” he takes a step closer; goosebumps litter your bare skin.

“you are such an entitled prick.” you spit, moving to step around him but he catches you, gripping your wrists and pulling you in. you feel heat radiating off of him, expensive cologne overwhelming you in the best possible way.

“and you, honey, are such a fucking brat. but you don’t hear me complaining, do you?” lando whispers, cool breath hitting your face, minty, laced with champagne and cockiness. you almost fold, thighs clenching so tight that he must have noticed.

“move.” you grumble through gritted teeth. you are crumbling painfully, embarrassingly fast.

“make me.” your underwear is damp, but you are fuming.

“don’t fucking test me, lando.” something in your chest sets on fire and you’re over him and his bullshit, and the way he makes you feel.

“i know you want me.” he dips his forehead down to rest gently against yours. his grip on your wrists tightens, thumbs swirling circles into the flesh, right where your pulse is.

you lean in, mere centimetres separating your lips. his eyes darken, the assumption of victory over you tugs his lips into a smirk.

“all i want is my fucking drink. come find me when you’ve managed to navigate your gigantic, stupid head out of your arse.” you catch him off guard, wriggling out of his grip. you’re shaking when you walk away, thoughts of doing things with him that would get you both fired invading your foggy brain.

you try to disappear into the crowd, finally breathe a sigh of relief when your hands meet the cool surface of the bar. you order your drink, putting it on your tab and drum your nails against the marble top. you’re lost in your own world, watching as concoctions are mixed, as shots are downed. you finally feel at ease, until your evening takes yet another turn, one that was somehow even more unfortunate than all the others.

your attention is rudely stolen by the guy stood next to you.

“can i get that for you?” the random man speaks, in a way that he must of assumed was smooth. slimy, you think. he’s gesturing to your drink, clearly having watched you add it to your bill already.

“no, thank you. it’s already paid for.” you smile politely, turning on your heel. it seems he wasn’t quite done with you. you feel a clammy hand tug on yours, a wave of sickness washes over you.

lando’s hands are bigger, warmer, softer.

“where are you rushing off to, babe?” the sweaty man asks, his tone fake in a way that makes you uneasy.

“i need to get back to my friends.” you try to pull your hand free, but he won’t budge. “can you let go-“

“i can show you a good time. always thought you were kinda hot.” you’re panicking now, looking every which way for a familiar face, a security guard, anyone.

“take your hands off of me.” you snap, still wrestling to pull yourself free.

“one night with me would pull you out of that little slump you’re in.” he leers. you visibly gag, white hot rage blurs your vision.

“okay you piece of shi-“ you snarl, interrupted by a flash of curls and tanned skin.

“she told you to let go.” lando stands in front of you protectively, rigid and furious. you’ve never been so happy to see his annoying(ly beautiful) face.

“and what are you gonna do?”

“hands. off.” lando stands up even straighter, looking bigger than you’ve ever seen him.

“okay, mate, whatever.” the stranger rolls his eyes, shoves your hand away.

lando turns to you, opening his mouth to speak when…

“keep that stuck up bitch all to yourself.”

and then, everything goes to shit.

lando whips around, fists are flying, the stranger topples to the ground, amassed to nothing in the face of the mclaren drivers rage. lando doesn’t stop there, makes sure he is sufficiently dealt with, flat on his back on the sticky floor. you don’t know what to do, calling out for lando, begging him to stop, as satisfied as you are. lando hears your shouts, pulled out of the chaos and back to you. always back to you.

“are you okay?” he has his hands on your face searching for any remaining fear or upset. a crowd has formed and you see alex and george towering above the other club goers, jaws agape.

it’s as if he dj has it out for you, and you realise that the song has changed to something moodier, slower, one that gives you whiplash.

even though we're going through it and it makes you feel alone just know that i would die for you baby, i would die for you

“we need to get out of here. security are coming.” you mutter, keening into his touch.

“i have a car outside.”

“well, let’s use it then.”

you can’t help but stroke over his knuckles mindlessly in the car, an unlikely comfortable silence settling between you. they look raw, cracked slightly and you have an overwhelming desire to kiss them better. your head is fuzzy, and you’re unsettled with confusion, but at the same time, you feel lighter.

“why did you do that?” you murmur, disrupting the quiet that has settled over the backseat of the town car, the question burning desperately on your tongue.

lando turns his head so that he’s looking down at you, his good hand comes up to cup your jaw softly.

“no one can talk to you like that.” he’s staring so deeply into your eyes and you almost squirm at the intensity. you feel exposed, bare.

“but why did you step in before that?” you reiterate shakily. lando hums in understanding.

“i’ve known you since we were 10 years old. i know when you’re scared.” he whispers, breath dusting your cheeks. you almost lean in, then, something about his words pull you even closer towards him. you feel warmth creeping over your chest, sinking into the pit of your belly.

“we’ve arrived.” the driver calls from the front, signalling that you need to get out of the car. it was like an elastic band had snapped, and you spring away from lando, scrambling to undo your seat belt, the moment of weakness long gone.

you sneak into the lobby, on the lookout for any angry PR teams or incognito photographers that are scoping for their next pay check. the coast seems clear, so you manage to scurry discreetly into the elevator. you hit the button for the third floor.

“can you hit the button for five?” lando asks, leaning against the opposite wall.

“you’re coming to my room.” you state, offering no other explanation, even when he raises his eyebrows.

the ding of the lift has lando pushing himself off of the mirrored wall, trailing behind you into the corridor. the lights are low as he follows you to your door, hands deep in the pockets of his jeans. he watches in anticipation as you rifle through your small bag for your keycard. the green light gives you the go ahead to open the door, and he awkwardly follows you inside, peering around the room.

you notice the slight apprehension in his features, eyes blown wide from alcohol and adrenaline. they seem to sparkle more than you’d seen in a while, a hazel-y blue twisting with secrets and unspoken thoughts.

“let me find my first aid kit.” you tell him. you guide him towards the foot of your bed, gesture for him to sit. “make yourself comfortable.”

“you don’t need to do this.” lando replies, sitting down anyway.

“and you didn’t need to get between me and that dickhead but here we are.”

your words elicit a low chuckle from him, and you’re glad you have your back to him while you dig through your suitcase. he can’t see your smile at the wholesome sound, and he doesn’t need to.

random pieces of clothing fall out of the bag as you rummage through it, your attention taken up completely by your mission to find the small box. you don’t notice the pile of garments littering the floor.

“wow, didn’t take you for that kinda girl.” lando teases. your cheeks flame red when you catch sight of the cherry red thong that has managed to get caught in the wheel of your suitcase.

“shut up, i’m helping you.” you grumble, balling up the lace and burying it at the bottom of the case.

“why is it ferrari coloured? something you wanna tell me? do you think charles is… foxy? or is it fred? oh, i bet it’s fred, isn’t it.” he’s laughing now, loud and boisterous, and if it wasn’t for the butterflies erupting in your belly at the sound, you would have throttled him.

“i’ll leave you to bleed out.” you tease back, pointing at the dried up blood across his knuckles.

“of course, i am in urgent need of medical attention!” he exclaims sarcastically, clutching his hand. you roll your eyes.

“you know where the door is.” you stand from the floor, carrying a little square antiseptic wipe with you.

“yeah, i do. feel like staying now, though. i’m just so comfy.”

and with that, he throws himself back on your bed, closing his eyes as he sinks into the mattress.

you stare at him for a second, noticing the way his eyelashes dust the tops of his cheeks, his tanned, thick neck peeks out from in between the undone buttons of his dress shirt. you exhale shakily, moving to sit beside him on the bed.

“give me your hand.” you instruct him, tearing the packet open and unfolding the wipe.

“romantic.” lando snarks. you shove his shoulder in response. he holds his hand out.

“whatever.” you sigh, avoiding eye contact as you run the wipe over his knuckles. you can see how they are already tinged purple, wincing at the idea that it is your fault.

“what is it?” lando asks, noticing.

you don’t respond. this proximity is odd, you can’t quite tell yet if you like it. what you do know is that you certainly don’t know how to handle him now that the alcohol is wearing off and you’re left tending to the wounds of a man that you could have sworn you didn’t like.

“so that’s how it’s gonna be? we’re going back to the silent treatment again?” lando scoffs.

“don’t know what to say.” you mutter, keeping your eyes trained on every line and indent of his knuckles.

“why do you hate me so much?”

“i don’t.”

“yes, you do.” he scoffs.

“i don’t think about you enough to hate you.” you lie. it’s cruel. he winces.

that shuts him up.

“i’m gonna go. thanks for this.” lando waves his hand and you feel a wave of guilt hit.

“no, fuck, i’m sorry.” you apologise, bowing your head. “stay.”

“i’ll stay if you tell me why you hate me.”

“i’ve never hated you, lan. haven’t always particularly liked you but i never, ever hated you.”

“okay.”

that’s all it takes for him to flop back onto the bed. some unexplainable instinct that you loathe has you crawling onto the bed beside him. you wrap your arms around your pillow, watching him watch you.

“i used to have such a big crush on you, you know.” lando says. you stare at him blankly.

“what?”

“yep. i think i was about 15. you were the first girl i ever really liked that way.” he smiles, recalling the memory. “it kinda sucked because i knew you wouldn’t even look at me twice but it’s funny thinking back to that time.”

~ 15

he watches the way her hair gets caught in the breeze as she takes off her helmet. two messy braids are shaken free, and his heart skips a beat or two, or seven, when she turns around with the biggest grin on her face.

she’s just won a race, another one, and he’d be so jealous if it wasn’t her.

he thinks she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. george and alex go over to her, congratulating her, hugging her. he wishes he could do that. he definitely can’t.

she doesn’t see him, the only times that she does are when they argue, when they push eachother off the track and scream at one another across a gravel trap. the times when she plants her pointed finger in his chest and calls him dirty, the times he gets heated and calls her something he doesn’t mean under his breath. and she always hears him. always. he watches her eyes pool with tears every single time.

he wants her, in a way he’s never wanted anyone before. he’s never felt like this, wonders how he can make it go away. she hates him. she must.

he can never have her, so why even try?

“i had no idea you ever felt that way.” you’re quite shocked, really. you knew that you had this intensely charged sexual tension between you now, but you had failed to realise how far back this all went.

mutually, at least.

“i’d say i’ve done a pretty good job of hiding it.” his smile changes slightly. it was now a sad smile, one that conveys disappointment in himself, and that you hated to see. it reminds you of the one you’ve gotten used to seeing on your social media feed after he’d had a shitty race.

you sigh, bracing yourself for what you are about to say.

“you’re not the only one who hid it.” you raise an eyebrow, your face says ‘guilty!’

“no?” lando’s eyes widen at your revelation.

“i think we were 13. you gave me half a cookie to apologise for pushing me off track.” you smile coyly. “it’s kinda sad but 13 year old me died inside.” you laugh.

“so, we’ve both… liked each other.” lando assesses. you nod.

“when did you stop?” you inquire, scanning his face. you take in each detail, each individual freckle, the curve of his lips. he seems closer, all of the sudden, and that’s when you realise you’ve closed the space between you. lando is within reach now, it would have been so, so incredibly easy to shift even closer still; it was like you were in his gravitational field, reeled in by pretty, pretty eyes.

“who said i stopped?”

“oh.” you breathe.

~ 13

he snaps the crumbly biscuit between his fingers, trails towards her awkwardly. he feels bad, feels a strange pang in his chest that he doesn’t recognise.

he finds her around the back of her parents car, arms crossed, eyebrows scrunched, pouting hard. he thinks she’s cute.

“why are you here?” she whines.

“this is for you. i know it doesn’t make up for the race. i didn’t mean to take you out, i swear.”

he sounds panicked, sincere. her tummy turns funny.

he’s holding out a cookie, the children’s equivalent of an olive branch.

her face softens. she accepts it. they bite into their cookies at the same time.

it’s not the worst day in the world anymore.

messy kisses and soft whispers lull you to sleep.

his nose bumps yours every time your lips meet, gentle and plush.

you feel delicate in his arms, treasured. his lips press gently to your hairline. he’s different, softer than you’ve seen him since you were teenagers splitting cookies.

it’s the easiest thing in the world to curl into his side, mould together until you’re part of him, and drift off.

the heat wakes you up.

you stir, eyes fluttering open, searching for the source of the onslaught of warmth. it clicks quickly, and you realise that you hadn’t dreamt the events of the night before.

lando is in your bed.

lando had protected you.

lando had wanted you since you were stupid kids who didn’t know any better.

he is the heater that had woken you up, and suddenly you don’t care that you’re far too hot. you curl back into his side, head rests on his chest. it rises and falls softly, his heartbeat thrums beneath your ear. you are jealous of how pretty he looks when he’s asleep, relaxed and infatuating. you lose track of time, gazing up at him.

a sharp pain in your side makes you groan. you had fallen asleep in your dress, lando in his jeans and his shirt, and now you’re paying for it, your fingers searching for the zipper that was now digging into your side. your movements draw him out of his slumber, and when you look back at him, he’s watching you, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“you okay?” lando croaks, his voice deep and sleepy. it sends shockwaves through you.

“mhm. how did you sleep?” you ask, mindlessly running your hand over his jaw like it was the most natural thing in the world. a smile breaks out across his face, eyes fluttering shut once more.

“really fucking well.” he laughs, almost in disbelief.

“yeah, me too.” you smile at him, shy.

“what’s bothering you?”

“well, a human heater woke me up and now this fucking zipper is killing me.” you joke. it’s weird that this doesn’t feel weird.

“i am pretty hot i guess.”

“yeah, yeah.” you roll your eyes and stand from the bed.

lando sits up, resting on his elbows. his eyes follow you as you walk around the room. you take a bottle of water, drinking half of it before passing it to him. his lips wrap around the bottle and you have to turn away, the ache between your legs that you’d been fighting for months rearing it’s irritating head. you clear your throat, composing yourself.

“need to get this dress off.”

lando pulls himself off of the mattress, stalking towards you. you stop in your tracks and he meets you at the foot of the bed. his hands find your cheeks, thumbs smoothing over your skin in little circles, and then kisses you deeper than he did last night.

it’s impossible not to melt into him, hands running over his chest, his shoulders, and finally finding solace tangled in his curls. if someone told you the morning before that you’d wake up in lando’s arms, you would have cackled, urged them to seek medical attention, and probably spat in their face. how things change.

“i think you should keep it on, look so pretty.” lando breathes, staring down at you. you blush hard, leaning into him.

“but i’m uncomfortable.” you grin coyly. and then, a surge of confidence has you whispering: “i’ll let you take it off if you want.”

“let me make you comfortable first.” lando murmurs, dipping his head down until it rests in the crook of your neck. “want me to get you nice and comfortable, baby?” he kisses up your neck.

you cave, finally.

it takes him all of thirty seconds to have you spread out on his face, laying himself down on the mattress and pulling you on top of him so that you’re hovering over his lips. he mouthes at your panties for a second, getting his first taste of you, and then he drags them to the side, clearing a path. his tongue laves over your cunt, groaning as soon as he gets a proper taste.

your dress fans out over your thighs, and lando has disappeared beneath the fabric. you can tell he’s there, though, by the strong hands gripping onto your thighs, the tuft of curls peeking out, and the feeling of his nose bumping your clit as he buries his face deeper and deeper between your folds.

“lando.” you cry, throwing your head back. the straps of your dress are slipping down your arms, skimming your goosebump ridden skin. he just groans into your pussy in response, pulling you impossibly closer to his mouth, backwards and forwards until you’re grinding down on his willing tongue. you reach down blindly, grabbing one of his hands where it rests on your thigh, and your other threads through his hair, gripping tight as you revel in the pleasure.

lando pulls your clit between his teeth, grazing over the bud and you’re jolting, writhing above him. you feel like you’re going to die, heat pricking all over your skin, your tummy tight from the building orgasm. he’s so eager, sliding his entire face through your slippery folds, obscene sounds falling from his lips that ricochet through your quivering body.

tears prick your eyes when you finally let go, slumping forwards from the overwhelming sensation taking over every single nerve. he lifts you off of him, laying you back on the bed as you come down from your high.

“you okay, baby?” he coos, brushing sweat dampened hair from your eyes.

his lips are stained, dark pink and shiny, a mixture of enthusiasm and your slick coating them. lando scans your watery eyes, feral at how fucked out you look all because of him, and tantalisingly licks his lips.

“need you.” you moan, reaching out for him. his shirt is wrinkled where he’d slept in it and your shaky hands find the few buttons that are actually done up. you push the material off of his shoulders, pupils blown wide at the sight of his toned chest, at the feel of smooth, golden skin. you pull him in by the shoulders, swallowing him whole as you kiss him with everything you’ve got left.

lando’s hands find your thighs once more, running his hands over them to push your dress up your hips.

“wanted this for so long.” he whispers into the kiss, pulling away so that he can take the dress off of you. he looks ravenous the more he pushes the fabric up your body.

you feel vulnerable under his intense gaze, watchful eyes taking in every movement you make. you try to pull him back in for another kiss but he resists.

“let me look at you, please?” lando asks. “there you go, baby, let’s get this off, hmm?” he sits you up so that he can get it over your head, and you lay back, bare aside from your panties that he’d left in disarray.

he sucks in a breath, raking his eyes over the curve of your lips, your collarbone, the slope of your breasts. his gaze lingers there for just a second, before continuing further over your belly, the length of your legs. you want to hide away, pull him in so that he can’t look at you like this, or just dive under the duvet and stay there until you need to catch your flight.

“god, you’re so, so fucking beautiful.” he gasps, awestruck. he sounds speechless, and you feel yourself going red again.

“come here.” you whine. “needed you for so long.”

your admission seems to kick him into action, because seconds later, he’s on top of you, fingers grazing the band of your underwear while you fiddle with the button on his jeans.

“gonna be good for me, aren’t you?” lando stares you down, tone sending a shiver down your spine. you nod, batting your eyelashes. “words, my love.”

“yes, lando.” you affirm, arching into him. that’s all he needs to know, kicking his jeans away, boxers too.

“good girl. took care of me so well last night, now ‘m gonna take such good care of you.”

your eyes skim his body, honing in on how hard he is. your hand finds his cock, tentative at first, stroking over it softly. it’s heavy in your hands, red and dripping already. he wants this just as bad as you do. you continue to jerk him off, watching the way his eyes squeeze shut and his lips part, soft pants falling out. a low hum sounds from the back of his throat, and you wet your lips, threading your free hand through his hair.

lando opens his eyes at the sensation, gently batting your hand away. he dips down even closer, resting on one of his forearms. he lines himself up and your legs wrap around him instinctively. slowly, he pushes inside of you, his breath catching in his throat.

“fucking hell.” he groans, deep and guttural, something carnal sending shockwaves through his body. “been dreaming about all the ways i’d get to fuck you.”

your eyes roll back and you go languid in his arms, feeling every inch of him slide against your slick walls.

“want you.” you rasp, clinging to him, your fingernails leaving patterns between his taut shoulder blades as you beg for it.

“you have me, baby.” and then he kisses you, messy and slow, stealing the air from your lungs. you’re dizzy when he pulls away, sitting back slightly to change the angle. you cry out, feeling him even deeper and everything is more sensitive, warm. you roll your hips, meeting his thrusts deliciously, and he chokes out a moan as you clamp around him. “yeah, that’s it. fuck yourself like that for me.” he encourages.

this is all too much, too good. you have whiplash, physically and emotionally, eyes pooling with tears as the man you’d wanted so badly that you hated him for it rocks into you. lando hits the right spot every time he pistons his hips harder, and his nimble fingers slide up your abdomen, applying light pressure to your navel that makes you writhe.

“fucking perfect for me. gorgeous.” lando slurs, entranced by the sight of where you’re joined. he can see just how wet you are and it drives him insane, barrelling into you like a man possessed, drunk on every single way that your body responds to him.

his wandering hand finds your breast, kneading it before he traces your nipple. he watches the way it hardens at his manipulation, wetting his lips. he collapses back on top of you, sucking the bud into his mouth. you’re panting, whining beneath him as his tongue swirls over your chest, switching to the other side. you jolt, a silent scream scratching your throat when he slips his hand between your thighs, working your clit with the pad of his thumb. he’s rutting against you, grinding deeper, faster, uncontrollably.

“come on, baby. you’re so close, so tight for me.” he mutters into your skin. you nod frantically, your words lost on you. he kisses over your collarbone, the base of your throat, until he finds your lips.

“so close.” you sigh.

he stops.

“tell me you’re all mine.” lando growls, his entire demeanour changing. the tone of his voice almost finishes you off but you’re suddenly enraged. you’re too close for him to stop.

“c’mon lando.” you hiss, trying to move your hips but he has you firmly in place.

“need to hear you say it.” his hand slithers over your chest, finding a new home at the base of your throat. it makes you throb, the way his thick fingers wrap around you. slowly, his grip tightens, and you see an opportunity.

you buck your hips hard, whimpering at the sensation, but your plan works and now you hover over him. he’s still buried inside you, and you can feel him pulsing as you steal control.

“for once in your life, honey, shut the fuck up.” you smirk, mischievous in victory.

slowly, you build up your rhythm. he feels bigger like this, deeper, and you almost lose yourself in the small circles you make with your hips.

“knew you’d be like this. you liked giving yourself to me but i just knew you’d need to take back control.” lando teases. his hand is back around your neck, squeezing slowly, and you grind frantically, dizzy for him. “i was right last night, wasn’t i, baby? pretending to be my good girl when really,” he pulls you down so that you’re chest to chest. “you’re just a fucking brat.”

lando holds you close as he fucks up into you, feeling the way you go limp on top of him as the pleasure washes over you like a million electric shocks. you’re crying, tears pooling on his chest, because there is nothing you can do, nothing you want to do, but take it. he’s got you right where he wants you, and you’re loving every fucking second of it.

“yeah, baby, take it how you want it.” lando commands through gritted teeth, and you move your hips in a feeble attempt to match his speed. everything is slippery, everything feels wet and flushed.

the power play, the position, the frenzy he seems to be in as he fucks you, it all has you gushing, spilling all over him. you choke out a sob, shuddering as the elastic band in your belly snaps. lando stops his thrusts, replacing them with small rolls of his hips to help you through your orgasm.

a sharp breath and a string of curses from him give you the strength to muster the last little bits of energy you have left to look up at him. you pull your head up off of his chest just in time to watch him shatter into a million little pieces.

his neck flexes as his head rolls back, sinking into the pillow, his eyes tight. swollen lips part and your name falls from between them like a prayer. you can feel him filling you up, his hands tightening their hold on your hips like he’s scared to let go, like the world will stop if he does.

the world stops anyway, because then you’re looking at each other. really looking at each other.

it only takes a second for you to be drawn in and his hands leave your hips to cup your face. his calloused hands feel your skin, stroking over rosy patches on your cheeks. it’s deathly silent all around you, apart from the breathless pants you share.

swollen lips crash hard into yours and you melt. he’s still buried so deeply inside of you, your hips digging into his, impossibly close. you’re blindly reaching for any part of him you can get your hands on, and his big hands slide down your body until they meet the small of your back. ever so carefully, he flips you onto your back, easing your spent body into the mattress.

lando collapses on top of you, mouthes at your neck for a moment, delicate kisses making your eyes flutter shut. the eye contact almost sends you into cardiac arrest as he pulls out, oh so slowly. tease.

he holds you close in the shower, fingers massaging every part of you. sex and sweat are washed away, almost lovingly. you let the water run for far too long, content in clinging to him. it’s quiet, reflective time for both of you, exactly what it needs to be. you’re both hung up on questions that need to be asked, neither one of you brave enough to take the first steps. you know one thing, and one thing only: something has changed, in a forever kind of way.

your hair is stringy, half dry, and you’re stood in your underwear. your legs are still shaky.

“your flight soon?” lando asks. he’s stood in his boxers on the other side of the room, scrunching the water out of his curls.

“yeah.” your throat feels raw.

“and you’re going back to monaco?” he’s stopped what he’s doing now, staring at you. you can see the cogs turning behind his eyes.

you nod.

“fancy a sleepover?” he grins, boyish and careless. your heart falls to your feet.

you’re giggling when he sweeps you into his arms and kisses you into the freshly made bed. the sheets are on the floor by the time you finally remember you have a flight to catch.

you’re his now, you realise. he’s too beautiful for his own damn good.

“baby?” you hear lando call from his bedroom. you make out the faint sound of his footsteps making their way in your direction. he appears before you can even answer him, and he’s smiling softly at the sight of you bundled up in a blanket, sprawled across his couch.

“what is it?” you ask. the next thing you know he’s on top of you, peppering kisses over every single inch of skin he can get to on your face. “hey, get off, muppet.” you whine playfully, ruffling his hair.

“do you know how much i love having you here?” he murmurs. it’s endearing as fuck and you fight a foolish, dopey grin.

“you’ve mentioned once or twice…” you’ve been here since your flight touched down a week ago. you haven’t even been home to get clothes, not that you needed them in his company.

“we might have a teeny, tiny issue.” he squints, pulling a face.

“and what’s that?” you ask, your voice measuring equal parts cautious and amused.

“so, alex called…”

“oh, shit.”

“we have to go to dinner tonight.”

“we have to?”

“he’s suspicious as fuck. you do realise they’ve been plotting for us to happen for years,” you roll your eyes as if you say duh. “and also, you’ve been in monaco for a week and haven’t seen him once. oh, and also, the last time we saw them, we were running away from a fucking crime scene.” lando smiles sarcastically, and you sigh, defeated.

before you can reply, your phone is ringing somewhere beside you. you root around in your blanket searching for it and when you find it:

“son of a bitch.” you exclaim, showing lando the caller ID. alex is one persistent motherfucker.

“hey girl.” alex singsongs down the phone before you can even say hello.

“hello to you too.” you can hear the fear in your own voice.

“dinner. tonight. although, i’m sure lando already told you.” alex teases.

“why would lando have told me? what?” you choke. lando slaps his hand over his face. your voice has gone up several octaves. not suspicious at all.

“so, you’re at home? you haven’t been at his place since last week?” the playful interrogation begins.

“why would i be with lando?” you try and feign disgust at the implication. it does not work.

“because you hate fucked after he beat up that perv? i have to say, i didn’t think he had it in him but he’s been in love with you since he was like, ten, so, you know-”

“bye alex.”’

“you’re not denying it-“

“bye alex!”

you’re flaming red when you throw the phone to the other end of the sofa. lando, as on brand as ever, is cackling into a pillow.

“he is such a fucking shit stirrer.” you bury your face in your hands, slumping back into the fuzzy cushions.

“well, he’s right about one thing.” lando trails off. suddenly he’s looking anywhere but you and you see him gulp, hard, swallowing his words, like he’s too afraid to bare his soul.

“huh?” you ask gently, sitting up to reach out for him. “what’s wrong?”

“we need to get ready for dinner. that’s what he’s right about.” lando says, standing from the sofa and walking towards his room. you’re suspicious, watching him go with furrowed eyebrows.

“lando, behave! you’re the one making me go to this dinner.” you squeal, batting his restless hands away.

you’ve made it as far as the elevator before he pounces on you, caging you in against the metal walls.

“but you look so good, can’t help myself.” he mutters between kisses on your neck, pressing himself even further into you.

the hand that finds it’s way between your legs, exploring beyond the hem of your skirt, is the one that makes you press the button for his floor. why have plans when you can have sex?

he gets through the door to his apartment at lighting speed and carries you all the way to his bed.

when you’re sweating and breathless a good hour later, half of the bedding on the floor with your clothes, you realise you never cancelled your plans.

lando is drawing shapes into the bare skin of your arm, kissing over your shoulder as he does so. his eyes are dropping from all of the over-exertion and you want to count each and every freckle on his face while he falls asleep. he’s cute like this, soft and yours.

and idea comes to your mind, and as if he can see the lightbulb, lando half raises an eyebrow at you. you giggle, somewhat evilly perhaps, and scramble for your phone on the beside table.

“what’re you doing?” lando groans, pouting as his outstretched arms try to find you.

“getting even.” you state.

with the phone in your clutches, you roll back over towards him, holding the camera above you both. he hears the shutter sound as you snap the picture, and peers closer to see the screen. when he sees the groupchat open, he quickly understands what you’re plotting.

“may i?” you ask for his consent.

“are you kidding? go for it. that’ll shut them up.” he laughs sleepily, muttering something about how this is the most lando thing you’ve ever done

FROM: you

TO: the groupchat

1 image attached

couldn’t make dinner. something came up xx

“alex always thinks he’s right, this’ll teach him for being such a little shit.” you flop back into bed even more satisfied than you were before.

you hear lando inhale shakily beside you.

“he is right sometimes you know.” he repeats his earlier words.

you hold your breath. his eyes say so many things that are too delicate to be spoken yet.

“like… like what he said on the phone?” your voice quivers with anticipation, fear. your heart is thunderous, hammering away like it wants to escape the clutches of its cage.

“yeah. i-“ he stops himself. you don’t need him to finish, you know which two words follow. they can follow in good time, you both know it.

“me too, lando.” you coo.

he’s beaming, eyes half shut. you watch as he falls asleep, the both of you ignoring the way your phones are vibrating so aggressively that they might buzz their way off of the night stand. you lose count of his freckles, but it doesn’t matter.

you’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.

let me know what you think :D

taglist

@boysthatgovroomvroom @thegirlinthefandoms @welld0nebaku @mcmuppet @japanesekel @vinvantae @ggaslyp1 @dr3lover @smiithys @rachstash @infinitebells @fizzpopsnap101 @gaily19 @icecoldtires @mysticalnightenthusiast @thatchickwiththecamera @oyesmendes @disneydaydreameralways @canyouseethesainz @ferrarifwendvale @fcbformulaeri @tony-stank3 @maih23 @nokiaholland @soleilgrec @carolineworld @anthonykatebridgerton @allywthsr @iamasimpingh0e @ophcelia @lovelynikol16 @coffeehurricanes @jennx03 @blueflorals @lqvesoph @sidcrosbyspuck @better-dead-than-smeg @buendiabebeta @pjofics @kovalcin @wintergilmore3 @for-writing-shit @youdontknowmeshh @im-an-overthinker @jule239 @darleneslane @jazzy722 @weasleyswizarding-wheezes @therealone4r @pleasecallmeunhinged @theonlyadrienne @spideylovin

(i ran out of tags omg? whoops) lemme know if you wanna be added or removed <3

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sinvulkt · 1 year

Text

Life hits faster than a soundwave,

And I feel like burning all over again.

#howl into the night #and it hurt and it hurt #an inescapable hurt that poison you from the inside #that reminds you of the pull of your chains #so you remember *you shall never be free*#it lays there within your own mind #waiting for the next time life strike #uncaring of the consequences such a burning hate may create #and yet...#and yet this hurt #and the numbness it brings #sometimes it's the only thing #giving you enough strentgh to push forward #(the truth is that it was made to protect you)#(for you can't burn something already aflame)

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 days

Text

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

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

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

#pluralistic #ai #automation #humans in the loop #centaurs #reverse centaurs #labor #ai safety #sanity checks #spot the mistake #code review #driving instructor

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