#dictator's dilemma

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

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

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

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

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

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

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

#pluralistic #habsburg ai #self censorship #henry farrell #digital dictatorships #machine learning #dictator's dilemma #eddie yang #preference falsification #political science #training bias #scholarship #spirals of delusion #algorithmic bias #ml #Fully automated data driven authoritarianism #authoritarianism #gigo #garbage in garbage out garbage back in #gigogbi #yuval noah harari #gubbish #pkd #philip k dick #phildickian

[you-have-been-frizzled]

i’m debating changing my url (again) because

i can’t go back to my old one because the whole turning 20 thing

i had wanted something frizzle themed but couldn’t think of one (until now)

the one i have was literally a spur of the moment “oh what about this instead!?”

the one i wanted originally can’t be used because it’s too long (rude)

the idea i had is adorable and funny

reasons i’m hesitating

i don’t think it’s even been a month since i changed it

people might get confused?? (i’m the only person in this fandom who has a frizzle theme)

✨change✨(i think)

#look at me thinking though my mental dilemma #and realizing i’m just not doing it because it might possibly make problems or confusion for other people #don’t let how things might possibly effect other people dictate your decisions Frizzle - me to me #it’s my blog anyways #i’m not gonna change it until the afternoon #because more people will see it #frizzle’s frazzled thoughts

[hellguarded-moved]

≥ MORAL ALIGNMENT TEST_

Lawful Good ( 97.5% good — 39.2% lawful )

People who are Lawful Good believe that an orderly, strong society with a moral government can work to make life better for the great majority of the people. When the laws are fair and the people respect them and try to help one another, humanity as a whole prospers. Therefore, people who are Lawful Good strive for a social order that will bring the greatest benefit to everyone and cause the least harm. Lawful Good personalities may sometimes find themselves faced with the dilemma of whether to obey the law or do good when the two conflict. For example, when upholding the law of the land would lead to unfairness or harm or when there is a conflict between two orders of what is right, such as between the ways of their community and the law of the government.

#notes. ( “CERBERUS” ); #// STOP THE GOOD BOY METER CANNOT BE CONTAINED #// but........... hey........ u know what questions got me? #// 'i often forgive others that have wronged me even if they may not deserve it' bECAUSE GOD TRUE #// ig cannot hold grudges it is literally impossible for him #// and i love him. i love him for that. i love that he can extend kindness and forgiveness to anyone #// i mean ok fine there might be some exceptions BUT THOSE ARE RARE AND I DIGRESS #// BUT ALSO. 'i frighten others to get what i want' beCAUSE HE DOES #// FEAR AND INTIMIDATION IS HIS MAIN TACTIC THAT'S THE MOST EVIL THING HE'LL DO #// partially he can't help it ok!!!!! it's a hellhound thing #// BUT GOD GOD GOD THE SECOND HALF OF THE DESCRIPTION IS JUST!!!!! UGH THIS HAS ME BY THE THROAT #// BECAUSE GOD IF HE ISN'T OFTEN CAUGHT AMIDST THE DILEMMA OF WHAT HE SHOULD DO. IF HE SHOULD DO WHAT HE *THINKS* IS RIGHT #// OR WHAT THE HIGHER LAW *DICTATES* IS RIGHT #// WHICH IS FURTHER DISPLAYED BY THE FACT THAT HE DIDN'T SCORE A WHOLE LOT ON THE LAWFUL PART #// ANYWAY!!!!!!!!!!! I HAVE A LOT OF EMOTIONS ABOUT MY SON'S MORALITY THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

[the-town-of-twix]

My switch is showing early signs of being on its deathbed, so I ended up ordering a new switch to be safe. It won't be here until later this week, which gives me, an animal crossing player, time to ask myself a crucial question:

Pros to starting over include:

My old game still works for now, and honestly I suspect I'm jumping the gun on assuming my old switch is 'on its deathbed' - so I can have two places to work with, and can always revisit my old stomping grounds

Now I can use some amiibos I ordered to populate the new one, because I'm getting really attached to the current crew lineup on the old one.

If someone threatens to move off of the old one I can potentially now move them to the new one that way, if I decide to let them go.

A big pro - now I actually know how to play the game the way it's meant to. For a long time I didn't consider full island decoration and made choices to my layout that I now regret but either are too involved to bother changing, or now I don't even know what to do differently after it being that way so long. Starting fresh, I could implement my knowledge and layout my island with more intentional consideration and streamline the decoration process a lot more.

Pros to transferring the old island include:

I am Painfully sentimental and, as mentioned above, I'm getting pretty attached to my island lineup. If the old switch did die with the old island stuck on it that'd probably hurt.

I have logged over 400 hours on this file - 355 on my main account and then a bunch more on side accounts to have themed houses with. That's not the most anyone's put on this game, but it is a sizeable chunk of time to risk losing

Despite my gripe of my layout struggles above, I am getting the island closer to something amazing. Maybe not my ideal image, but the work I've put in has led to it really shaping into something nice, and I feel lately like I'm closer and closer to realizing some visions I've had for it. Since I've never had the chance to ask myself how I'd shape a fresh island, I wouldn't be missing out on fulfilling a dream layout either.

If I start a new island I'm likely starting with an entirely new player if possible - but I will lose access to a lot of diy and furniture catalogues and the like if I do that lmao. Museum progress and the like will also be reset regardless of player transfer, which may make the donation process confusing.

#I think I'm leaning in the direction of new island but it doesn't hurt to weigh my options! #because I have a leaning this poll won't dictate my final choice. but I am curious how others would (or have?) handled such a dilemma #and it never hurts to bounce ideas off of people! #if you have any experience with this or have input feel free to weigh in! #also if having side accounts just to have themed houses is any indication - being able to have numerous places for themed decoration helps #so part of the draw of Two Islands is I'll have more room to showcase all the themes and collections I want haha #acnh #animal crossing new horizons #polls #blablablah

[ozzgin]

Hii I was wondering if u could do a yandere Kazuya x yn x yandere Daitou I’m not sure if u do character x yn x character tho

Yandere! Yakuza x Reader Spinoff

Two yakuza men who have fallen in love with their new foreign tenant. A what-if spinoff to the original story for that love triangle spice. Happy Valentine's Day!

Content: female reader, NSFW, organized crime, obsessive behavior, violence, BDSM themes (choking), threats

Credits: My boyfriend for giving me the Daitou smut idea

[Main Story] [General Headcanons]

Kazuya is sitting on the sidewalk, checking his watch occasionally and tapping his foot. The cigarette seems to have been forgotten, hanging lowly from his lips.

"Sorry I'm late." Daitou speedily makes his way towards his friend, smiling awkwardly.

"Where the fuck were you, man? We don't know how much time we have before the cops arrive."

"Uh uh, leave it to me." The cheeky grin doesn't leave his face as he pulls out his gun and carefully but swiftly inspects the barrel and safety one final time. "(Y/N) needed some help with the mailbox. I couldn't just say no, ya know?"

The blonde man's eyebrows raise for a second, but he quickly recollects himself.

"I see. That's good."

"She asked me to show her the area tomorrow, so I'll be working extra hard tonight. Hehe."

"That's good."

Daitou glances at Kazuya, somewhat wary.

"You okay?"

Stupid question. What's he supposed to answer? Yeah, he loves waiting like a dumbass while his friend flirts with the new tenant, who conveniently happens to be a cute foreigner, who's been unexpectedly nice and relaxed around them despite them explicitly stating they're part of the Japanese mafia. Fucking hell. It doesn't help that this idiot is as obvious as a blaring, blinding cluster of ads smack in the middle of Kabukicho. He can tell from miles away that Daitou's completely fallen for her. Just like that, in an instant.

They've been partners and best friends for years now, so the natural reaction would be happiness, right? Daitou has always been one scary motherfucker. Even the seniors scramble when he's in the room, let alone women. For him to find someone that isn't bothered the slightest by his appearance or background should be a celebratory occasion. Kazuya should be rooting for him. Except, well, he fell for you just as hard. Tough luck.

The Bushido moral code, often used as guidance within their own lifestyle, covers matters such as loyalty and honesty quite extensively. A true warrior remains fiercely faithful to his master or companions. And yet, love interests are more of a grey area, especially if they happen to overlap. Who dictates the proper etiquette for this dilemma? To whom is loyalty directed towards? Truth be told, Kazuya couldn’t care less. He’s always been a man of vice, impulsive and greedy. If he wants something, he takes it.

The trouble starts when the other person is of the same mindset. Two ferocious predators eyeing the same victim.

***

You fiddle next to the tall, dark-haired man. Similarly, Daitou is avoiding eye contact, looking around in hopes of finding something to focus on. It’s the first time he’s come over since the incident. After his little mission with Kazuya, he was tasked to “interrogate” some of the remaining members to get even more names for the hitlist. He’d completely forgotten about his promise to show you the neighborhood. Hands sticky with blood, he was in the middle of his signature act of benevolence, putting the lad out of his misery.

It was around that time you decided to be the one picking him up instead, for your grand tour. Your knocks on the door remained unheard, however, so you decided to politely make your way in.

“Sorry, I hope I’m not-”

You froze in place. A man (you assumed at least based on the few visible traits left), tied up on the chair, canvas bag roped around his head. Daitou’s hands were secured around his throat. In the few seconds of silence, you could hear a muffled wheezing, as the stranger’s chest heaved in short convulsions.

“-intruding.” You mumbled, regaining your speech.

He messed up, didn’t he? Daitou sighs and slicks his hair back. He can’t blame you if you’re now terrified of him. He had to come over for some tenant checkups and you’ve been maintaining a safe distance from him during his entire visit. What can he possibly tell you? “Hey, I know I threatened to chop you up and you’ve now witnessed firsthand I’m a legit murderer, but, uh…I have a crush on you? Dinner at seven?”

You’re terrified alright, but not of his deeds. Rather, your newly discovered perversion as a consequence of the gory scene. It’s not that you relished in the torment of another. It’s the other details that left you reminiscing. Daitou’s imposing frame, the unbuttoned shirt revealing his traditional tattoos glistening in beads of sweat, his flexed, brawny arms, and large hands. You’re scared of your shamelessness. It can’t be normal. Yet you can’t stop thinking about it. Just a glimpse into this memory and your cheeks become burning red.

“I’ll be on my way then”, the yakuza announces politely.

Though he immediately stops in his tracks, and you realize you’ve unconsciously grabbed onto his sleeve. Uh oh. What now? You mumble an apology without releasing your hold. Being this close to him makes your heart drum inside your chest.

To hell with it.

“I might say something terribly inappropriate right now, but…”

“Sorry?” He stares at you, dumbfounded.

“Do you have anything planned after this?” You ask quietly.

“N-no?”

“Would you mind staying over?”

“Huh? Sure…w-what for?” His mouth is dry, and he searches your eyes in confusion.

“You know…” Choke me until I pass out and such, you think to yourself sarcastically.

He turns to face you, lips pursed awkwardly.

“You’ll have to be clear with me, Miss (Y/N). I’m not good with all this tiptoeing around and I might get the wrong idea.”

Your ears perk up hearing his final words, a deep blush now spreading over your flustered features.

“What wrong idea?”

Daitou fidgets with his glass prosthetic nervously.

“Well, uh, a man can only dream, ya know? Especially around a cute girl like you.” He reveals with a stutter.

“Suppose I’d be willing to go along with anything on your mind. What then?” You twirl your hair, gazing shyly at the floor. Not even you can believe the audacity leaving your lips.

The tall man steps before you, towering above with a certain gleam in his eye. It’s yearning. Your knees weaken.

“Don’t tease me, please. I can hardly control myself around you as it is.”

You release his sleeve and instead cling onto his shirt with both hands, looking up through your lashes.

“I’m dead serious.”

He ponders his next move with a click of the tongue, then cups your cheeks between his hands and lowers himself until his hot breath tickles your nose.

“Are you? There’s no going back after this. Can you handle it?” His voice is suddenly deeper, raspier.

Before you can respond, you feel yourself lifted and you yelp, surprised, instinctively wrapping your limbs around the yakuza. In between the greedy kisses that leave your lips bruised and swollen, you don’t notice the movement back towards the seating area.

As you pull away to gasp for air, he throws you onto the couch, flipping you over in the process so that you’re kneeling away from him. Your nails dig into the soft fabric of the sofa. You hear Daitou unbuckle his belt and you squeeze your legs together, heavily aroused. He presses his palm gently into your back, arching it. You sense his fingers grazing over your core and you whimper.

“G-go on, please.” You beg, swaying your hips tentatively. “I really can’t wait anymore.”

“As you wish, Miss.” He reassures you with a grin.

He adjusts himself and carefully makes his way in. You don’t have time to enjoy the feeling; following almost instantly is his belt looped around your neck, tightening under his grip as he pulls the ends towards him. Your head is forced back, and you groan. You can hear the leather stretch and creak over your assaulted skin, the constriction briefly cutting your oxygen intake. Hot drool trickles down your chin and your eyes almost roll back in pleasure.

“Look at my little Miss (Y/N), taking it like a champion.” He bends over and bites your earlobe playfully. “Does that mean I can be as rough as I want?”

You nod erratically.

The grip around your throat intensifies and your vision becomes blurry.

“Hey, don’t pass out now.” He inserts two fingers in your mouth, pulling you by the cheek and tilting your head to look him in the eye. “Not before you show me that you understand your situation. You’re mine. Is that clear?”

He drags his fingers downwards, aiding your response as you struggle to contract your muscles.

“Attagirl.” He concludes, satisfied.

In the morning you wake up with a dreadful soreness, and you can quickly see why. Your body is peppered in bruises. Daitou is smoking by the window and promptly flicks his cigarette out once he realizes you’re no longer asleep.

“Are you okay? I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” He begins, remorseful, and squats in front of the bed. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

“I will need a day or two to recover before the next time, but otherwise I’m fine.”

He beams with delight upon registering your words: next time. You can’t help but snicker at his childish enthusiasm. It’s a mystery how Daitou can switch between ruthless killer and cute partner with such ease.

Although it’s no secret, really. It’s you.

***

“Thanks for driving me home, Kazuya.”

You smile and unbuckle your seatbelt, reaching for the door handle. Daitou has been busy with work for the past days, so Kazuya took his place in looking after your needs.

“Huh?” You rattle the grab handle one more time to make sure. “It’s still locked.”

The blonde raps the wheel impatiently with his fingers. Is he to silently accept his loss? Does it even count as a loss when he hasn’t even had the chance to present his piece? Daitou has been quiet about it, but he can read that bastard like an open book. Something definitely happened between the two of you and the mere thought drives him insane.

Ah, this is so unlike him. There are few things he cares about. His pride, his Family’s honor, his freedom. Women aren’t exactly on that list, yet somehow, you’ve snuck your way to the very top of priorities and he’s realizing it just now. It’s becoming harder to ignore his maddening urge to have you. Out of all the things…He’d give Daitou the world. But not you. He can’t. He can’t.

“Kazuya? Are you listening? You forgot to unlock the door.”

“Say, (Y/N) …ever fucked in a car before?”

“What?” You ask, baffled.

“Come here for a moment.” He swiftly slides his seat all the way back and pats his thigh.

“Are you out of your mind?”

He answers your inquiry by pulling out his handgun and lazily pointing it towards you.

“I’m only going to ask once.”

You clumsily climb over the center console, straddling the yakuza with a slight pout.

“Someone’s in a sour mood, that’s for sure”, you complain. “It’s not even loaded.”

“Even I’m not crazy enough to risk shooting my Princess.” He smiles apologetically, throwing the gun on the backseat. “I thought it’d be more threatening that way.”

He removes a strand of hair from your face, gazing at you intently. His hand lingers for a second, before sliding its way down, tracing the side of your body. You shiver.

“Can you truly blame me when there’s such a pretty girl right before my eyes?” The blonde exhales and focuses on your shirt instead. “Won’t you let me prove myself?”

From this distance, despite the dim lights, you can discern his features in agonizing detail. His long lashes, his fleshy lips, currently parted, the luscious locks of hair casually thrown back. Kazuya has always been effortlessly handsome. It’s not just his good looks, but his overflowing charisma. He always knows exactly what to say and do. A devilish power to have over people, and you’re presently his victim.

His slender fingers play with your first button and cheekily undo it. You can only observe it, entranced. Your legs are weak, and your arms are stuck in place, resting limply over his broad shoulders.

“May I?” He glances up at you with a pleading expression. “I won’t be able to hold back afterwards.”

You bite your lower lip, distracted. Whether or not this is a wise choice, you can’t currently tell. You squirm in his lap and suddenly feel the pressure coming from below.

“Go ahead.” You finally confess.

He doesn’t hesitate and slithers his hand underneath your shirt, popping the rest of the buttons open. Like a hungry animal that has stumbled upon a feast, he sinks his teeth into your neck, leaving mean, wet kisses on his way down.

One hand is greedily kneading your curves, encouraged by your soft whimpers, while the other strokes your thigh in anticipation. With a bit of readjustment, he finds the right spot between your trembling legs. You jolt at the sensation of his cold fingers.

“My, you’re already dripping. How lewd.” He whispers between breaths. “Do you want it now?”

He nonchalantly slips out and undoes his own pants. You lift yourself expectantly and let a moan escape your lips upon feeling the erection throbbing right below.

“Well then, can’t forget our manners, can we?” He announces, visibly excited. “What should I do?”

You glare at him, feverish.

“Stop teasing me.”

“Come on, be a good girl. Tell me what to do and I will do it, Love.”

Why, this…You lower yourself to his ear and answer in a lulled whine.

“Isn’t it obvious? I want you to fuck me.”

Words enough to send the blonde man over the edge. He abruptly clutches your thighs for support, easing himself in before continuing with increasingly aggressive thrusts. Husky whimpers roll out of his mouth, desperate and starved.

“Oh, I’ve waited so long for this. My darling, perfect little (Y/N).” He presses his forehead into your chest, indulging in the moment. “Now say that you’re mine. Please. Please say it.”

“I’m…ah…I’m all yours, Kazuya.” You manage to blurt out, growing dizzy.

“That’s my girl. Such a good girl.”

Once the deed is finished, you flop your head over his chest, trying to catch your breath. Kazuya smoothens your clothes meticulously, holding you with one arm for support. Can’t leave a lady all disheveled, after all.

“Won’t Daitou be upset?” You point out, somewhat anxiously.

His muscles are tense for a second and he furrows his brows.

“That’s one strange way to thank me for making you come at least twice. Mentioning another man’s name.”

“I’m just…” your words trail off.

“What? Worried? You think I can’t handle it or something?”

Far from the truth. Both Kazuya and Daitou are violent, dangerous men. Given their stubbornness, you’re rather certain they’d end up killing each other. Not your favorite outcome.

“I don’t want either of you to get hurt.”

He sighs loudly.

“I’ll tell you what. Under normal circumstances, I’d probably dismember whoever had the guts to even entertain the idea of meddling with you. But…just because it’s Daitou, I might be willing to share. Nothing more than that.”

Kazuya ruffles your hair and chuckles.

“Aren’t you glad I’m such a diplomat, Love?”

“More like batshit crazy, both of you.” You retort, stretching.

#yandere yakuza #yandere #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere x darling #male yandere x reader #yakuza x reader #mafia x reader #yandere mafia #yandere imagines #yandere scenarios #yandere smut #yandere fic #male yandere #yandere oc x reader #yandere oc #oc x reader #yandere original character #original work #smut

[innaillus]

Drawing Ryōmen Sukuna

Development notes

This post has been in the making since last year, before the manga has reached its current arc. My aim was to respond to comments that pointed out that my version of that time didn't look like the one in the anime. I calculate everything I do and the way I do it. My current goal is to share my thoughts on the development of my take on him - simply because I'm a nerd when it comes to anatomy and I love figuring things out. It involves a lot of thinking, questioning, analysis, dissecting information and building theories. So I totally understand if it's not anyone's cup of tea.

MANGA SPOILER WARNING

The very beginning

I used to have a serious case of lack of self-confidence. My earliest art of Sukuna dates back to 2021, but it always felt like my skills are not worthy of this particular character. I never shared my art. I was also struggling to find my artistic voice. I was obsessed with the idea of semi-realism, but even if I managed to pull it off after weeks of stylisation practices, I didn't like the results.

Due to personal reasons, I stopped trying to draw him for a long time.

The development of "my" version

It was an entirely conscious decision to draw him differently.

The top reasons for the change was that I didn't want to sexualise him in his host, Yuuji, who is a minor. Back then I thought he inflicted the deformation on himself (extra limbs, eyes, etc), for the sake of efficiency, and I was curious what he looked like before that - or what he would look like in a civilised environment.

During the process, I considered a number of factors:

the beauty standard of the other JJK men - I wanted him to fit the lineup - his original appearance made him stand out quite much

in a setting where he adheres to the rules of society, more or less, I believe his MBTI personality type (ENTJ) would dictate a lot of his choices when it comes to appearance, at least to a certain extent. I thought he would choose to have an appearance that fits the beauty standards of the era

I kept his tattoos because it's a very distinguishing feature of him, but I also exercise freedom in the way I draw them, to make them as stylish as possible

Reincarnation

I used to believe once he reincarnates, his proportions would be closer to that of a "normal" human, even if he has some extra limbs. However, his size and features are above and beyond of what we are used to, and even the story emphasises their malformed appearance. So a a whole new era of Sukuna started in my art. I chose my favourite manga panels of him and mix-and-matched the most attractive features into a figure that I consider on the fine edge of monstrosity and unconventional handsomeness.

Even when I draw him with a regular number of limbs, I keep his usual mass and proportions. I dubbed this form "true gains" form.

I also realised that some of the tattoos Yuuji's body displayed was a product of the partial reincarnation stage, like we see it on Tsumiki's forehead.

NOTE: Did anyone notice that Sukuna is getting progressively more and more human/handsome in the manga? When he took over Megumi's body, I also noticed that as the story progressed, he started to look older and more mature. I'm curious of it was a conscious decision.

Twin dilemma and speculations

According to the Japanese wikipedia page, the mythical figure Sukuna could have been a conjoined twin. Despite my extensive digging in the matter, I was shocked by the recent lore drop.

My question: what does Sukuna look like in a universe where he did not absorb his twin in the womb during development?

It hasn't been confirmed, but I find it very possible now that he was born with his extra limbs, eyes and mouth, as well as the deformed, wide features. (...as opposed to my first theory about him altering his own body for the sake of efficiency)

This, however, would mean that in a universe where both him and his brother are born healthily, he would look different. There is the obvious lack of extra arms, eyes and mouth - but I believe he would also be closer to the JJK beauty standard of men, as far as proportions go (eg. more narrow face, anime-esque nose, larger eyes).

At first I was hesitant to accept this idea, as I'm very attached to the 4-arm hulk / "true gains" form now, but then I realised: this would mean that "my"version of him actually has logically explainable place in at least an alternate universe.

Thank you if you got this far.

I may edit this post later. Let's see where the story takes us.

#ryomen sukuna #jjk art #jujutsu kaisen

[bblovetarot]

{𖥔} What in your life needs your attention?

ʚ ═══･୨ꕤ୧･═══ ɞ Pick a Pile ʚ ═══･୨ꕤ୧･═══ ɞ 

. ༄. paid readings . ༄

。°⚠︎°。follow your intuition when choosing a pile. if you're drawn to more than one pile, that's okay! you may have messages in more than one.

。°⚠︎°。tarot readings are not 100% accurate, and do not dictate your future. please keep in mind that you have free will. these readings are also general and aren't specific to one person, so please take what resonates and leave what doesn't! 

Pile 1

Pile 1, it seems that there's a crucial aspect of your life that needs attention—how past family treatment affects your present. Hurtful family beliefs or traditions may have shaped you into someone who lacks joy, hesitates to explore the world, and tries new things. There's a sense that you may have become cynical, losing belief in yourself and the possibility of miracles. Short bursts of inspiration often don't stick, and family might have led you to believe that your true dreams are unattainable, pushing you towards what's considered traditional and normal. However, these beliefs aren't serving you well, Pile 1. They've turned your perspective on life negative, making it challenging to find meaning in even the small things. You may be accustomed to doing what's perceived as normal and easy, but for growth and progress, stepping out of your comfort zone is necessary. There's a message, perhaps for some of you about moving out of a family home, but the fear of the unknown and the comfort of the familiar holds you back. It's essential to recognize that you might not be taking the right steps to get what you truly desire. You may have grand ideas for yourself but believe you can't implement them, thinking they're impossible or that you don't deserve them. It's crucial to understand that you, more than external factors, are the one holding yourself back. Bringing happiness and peace into your life will provide clarity and help you move forward. What brings you joy? What inspires you?Pay attention to your mindset and surroundings that might be hindering progress. Don't let internal doubts rob you of the opportunity to be truly happy in this lifetime. Spirit advises you to prepare for what comes when tackling these issues—it won't be easy, but it's a necessary transformation for your growth, much like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Trust that the universe will be with you every step of the way, guiding you through the darkness of uncertainty. Remember, everything happens for a reason.

Pile 2

It seems that there's someone in your life, Pile 3, who demands your attention, possibly a family member or someone you share a lot of happiness with. This person may exhibit characteristics of laziness, depression, reckless spending habits leading to financial burdens, or an excessive obsession with money. Whether describing someone else or reflecting aspects of yourself, take what resonates. This person appears to be ungrounded, potentially battling mental or physical illnesses, and displaying reckless tendencies. If this doesn't directly apply to you, it seems you feel caught in a dilemma about deciding whether to keep this person in your life. While you share many happy memories, you could be weary of their actions and arrogant behavior. There may not be direct rudeness or abuse, but a sense of unhealthy coping mechanisms. You might be contemplating whether to cut ties with them, desiring peace, calmness, and a journey towards happiness and healing. The universe advises you to listen to your intuition and heart, assuring you that you're supported in your decision. It's undoubtedly a tough choice, but prioritize your own well-being and happiness. You don't necessarily have to completely cut this person out, but creating some distance might be beneficial. If you resonate with the described person, it's crucial to focus on gaining control over impulsive actions, understanding that your current behavior is throwing you out of alignment. Strive for balance in various aspects of your life and tap into your intuition for true happiness. Check your level of confidence and assertiveness, ensuring it doesn't come off as overly pushy or arrogant. Reflect on how you present yourself to others, how you treat them and yourself, and where insecurities might be affecting your life. This can guide you towards a healthier and more balanced existence.

Pile 3

It appears that there's a childhood dream or a creative aspiration that once brought joy to your inner child. However, over time, it seems you've given up on this dream, possibly due to the challenges you faced when you attempted to pursue it. Fear of others' opinions, especially the potential for competition or tension, might be holding you back. If not competitiveness, it could be concerns about how others perceive your dream. The message emphasizes the importance of standing up for yourself and not letting others' opinions hinder your pursuit of happiness. Pay attention to your soul's calling and drown out the external noise. Embarking on this dream might induce stress, especially as it involves taking on significant responsibilities. However, you're not obligated to carry the burden alone. There's a suggestion to examine how you might be overwhelming yourself with unnecessary stress on this journey. Consider taking on responsibilities gradually rather than piling them all at once. Be mindful of your pacing and avoid rushing into things. It's essential to find a balance that allows you to move forward without burning yourself out, regaining motivation, and instilling discipline in pursuing this dream of yours.

#tarot community #tarot pick a card #pac tarot #tarot pac #intuitive readings #tarot #pac reading #pick a card tarot #tarot reading

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

i just have to say this. she-ra was a weak hero.

don't get me wrong, adora was a very compelling protagonist. she was flawed, relatable and had good character growth (until s5, at least). but she-ra, as her superhero form? i feel like she was just lost potential. i mean, sure, she lifted tanks and stuff. but she never did anything truly mind-blowing as she-ra.

in her fights with catra, i guess you could say catra had the upper hand because she was adora's abuser. but in general, there were very few satisfying fight scenes involving she-ra. most of the “fight scenes” were just catra repeatedly and remorselessly torturing adora, all while berating her.

i mean, come on, i get that adora didn't want to hurt catra. but she couldn't even dodge or block catra's attacks? she couldn't figure out a way to restrain catra without hurting her? even a simple punch from catra seemed to really hurt she-ra, so what was the point of the she-ra form? if just seems to me that she-ra was a regular person who was taller and slightly stronger.

even in s4, where adora finally got tired of catra's shit, there were very few instances of her fighting catra as an equal or defeating catra. i guess some of it had to do with the fact that catra didn't want to face adora and sent double trouble in her place instead.

she-ra didnt really do much for the plot, she certainly didn't make adora's job any easier, since adora got her ass beat whether she was in the she-ra form or not. she was taller and stronger but the strength didn't really matter.

if she-ra was really created as a weapon, you'd think that the first ones would make it more durable and strong. but the outfit was flimsy and easily torn through, the sword didn't seem too different from a regular sword and there wasn't much improvement to her agility. it seems like all that's needed to defeat the legendary invincible warrior is a teenage catgirl who slacked off during her training and had only her claws for weapons. doesn't seem like a very powerful weapon to me.

and honestly, i feel like adora herself was mostly reduced to the dumb blonde jock stereotype after a while. i've mentioned this before how in s1, adora was shown to be very diligent, strategic and a capable fighter. but all of that is thrown away in the later seasons and her only strength seems to be her physical strength, which she doesn't use much of.

what's even more disappointing is that adora never faces off with hordak. hordak is literally the leader of the horde, adora is trying to bring down the horde. you would think that she would have some sort of animosity with hordak. you would expect to see fight scenes or at least a confrontation.

especially after the revelation that hordak was the one who adopted adora and took her into the horde, you would think that this would bring up a new dilemma. in any other story, i wouldn't be complaining. but this is literally a story about a war, where the chosen one is fighting the army led by an evil dictator. you would think that she would have a direct relationship with said dictator.

but no, the only person adora really seems to be opposing is catra. we're supposed to believe that there's a war going on, when the only rivalry that matters is adora vs catra (which is reduced to “oh they were just exes who couldn't get over each other haha silly lesbians” in s5).

(this isn't hate on adora btw it's a criticism on the crew-ra who had to go and make a regular catgirl stronger than the literal warrior goddess being.)

#spop rant #spop critical #spop salt #spop criticism #anti spop #spop discourse #spop #she ra #long post #i think there were some other powers that she-ra held? #but i honestly forget because of how underutilized they were

[chaos--gremlin]

It's everyone's favorite parental figure!

...hey, has anybody seen Janus?

I got this idea from @deostyx 's wonderful post! (Thank you for the free brainrot <3!!)

Just being a nerd under the cut 💛🩵

I love the idea of a Patton and Janus fusion that seems mostly like Patton, except some things are just off, and Virgil would definitely be the first to notice.

Patton and Janus are foils because of how they mirror each other in their actions and values: honesty vs deception, altruism vs self-preservation, innocence vs "the snake in the garden" (that was the best way I could put it). Janus can impersonate Logan almost flawlessly but it was very interesting to see how he impersonated Patton in his reveal episode- exactly like how I imagine their fusion to be: Patton but wrong. Patton but not so innocent, Patton who enjoys impossible moral dilemmas, Patton sitting in the director's chair and dictating how the scenes should go.

"Patton" who lies to cover his identity, who's gloves conceal rough, scaley skin. "Patton" who's smile is a little too wide, who's forked tongue threatens to perk between their teeth. "Patton" who gaslights the other sides into thinking it's just him, who plays with Virgil's emotions until he almost gives up on discovering the truth.

And this one's kinda funny, but- "Patton" who suddenly drinks wine!

I just love the idea of this because maybe they would be great at being Thomas's morality, steering him in the right directions (as Patton would have it). But there's always something wrong in how they go about it, their roundabout arguments, letting the other sides come to a conclusion instead of taking the straightforward Patton way of saying "THIS is the right thing to do." Regardless, perhaps this "Patton" isn't so bad. After all, when has he ever steered Thomas wrong?

ONE LAST THING - the extra floaty hands!! No other side can see them, but they represent Janus's control in a "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" way. Except the hands act entirely out of self-preservation: they usually cover "Patton's" mouth ("speak no evil") to prevent them from revealing their identity. I will definitely be drawing this in the future!!

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #patton sanders #janus sanders #character thomas #my art #i am so normal about this character #moceit #<- just because <3 #seriously go check out deostyxs gorgeous art #extra tags because the sanders sides fandom has so many tags: #ts virgil #ts patton #ts janus #character!thomas #sanders sides fanart

[justanotherrpmeme]

Chaotic Good starters

"Rules and order, they're like shackles on a free spirit." "I'll do what's right, not what's written in some rulebook." "Freedom means doing good without being tied down by laws." "Justice is important, but don't expect me to follow your rules." "Sometimes you have to break a few rules to make things right." "I fight for what's good, not for someone else's version of order." "I believe in people's freedom to choose, even if they make mistakes." "I'd rather be an outlaw fighting for justice than a pawn in their game." "My moral compass points to good, not the legal code." "Laws are made by flawed people; I'd rather trust my own judgment." "Freedom without goodness is chaos; I aim for both." "I won't let anyone dictate how I should do good." "Sometimes the right path isn't the one everyone else is on." "I'm not against authority, just the misuse of it." "Goodness comes from the heart, not a rulebook." "I'll fight for a world where people are free to be good." "I'm not anti-establishment; I'm pro-freedom and pro-goodness." "I'd rather break a few laws than see someone suffer." "My rebellion is for the greater good, not chaos for chaos's sake."

[REBEL] The sender defies an unjust law, openly challenging authority. [DEFEND] The sender risks personal freedom to protect the innocent. [IMPROVISE] Faced with a dilemma, the sender takes an unconventional action. [DISREGARD] The sender ignores orders that go against their moral compass, benefiting the receiver. [LIBERATE] The sender leads a movement to free the receiver and others from oppression. [CHALLENGE] The sender strives to bring about positive change for the receiver. [EMANCIPATE] The sender frees the receiver from unjust captivity or control. [DEFY] The sender openly resists authority when it conflicts with their sense of justice, benefiting the receiver. [PROTEST] Standing up for a cause, the sender refuses to follow an unjust directive. [RESCUE] Ignoring protocols, the sender rushes to save the receiver in danger. [CHAMPION] The sender rebels against the exploitation of the receiver. [RECLAIM] The sender takes back what rightfully belongs to the receiver. [OUTLAW] The sender operates outside the law to bring about positive change for the receiver.

#rp starter #rp ask #starter meme #roleplay meme #sentence meme

[mariacallous]

“How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world.

In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe.

Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.

Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.

A DIRTY GAME

Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course.

In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game.

Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts.

In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name.

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified.

That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge.

In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again.

IDEAS MATTER

Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms.

The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.”

The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault.

These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins.

Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew.

CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS

Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule.

In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others.

Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021.

Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront.

THE DECISIVE DECADE

First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble.

Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes.

The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside.

Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.

So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go.

When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme.

Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place.

Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top?

DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed.

It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage.

During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well.

This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them.

Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceivedhypocrisy are very real.

RULES FOR RIVALRY

Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help.

First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections.

The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what?

Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West.

Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places.

Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight.

Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be.

By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends.

The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend.

Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether.

This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist.

Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose.

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

[femmefatalevibe]

Femme Fatale Playbook: How To Deal With Insecure Friends/People

Make differentiation a top priority: Even after doing the necessary inner work to have a healthy sense of self, this reminder is sometimes needed. Do not internalize other people's problems like they're your own. They never become your problems just by listening to others' complaints. You can choose whether to allow these external emotions to dictate your mood or inner world. Think of their constant complaints like you're watching a TV show or reading an engrossing book: You're emotionally drawn to the characters, but always a voyeur – not an active character in the plot.

Establish, communicate, and uphold your boundaries: Be direct and remain calm when communicating the topics you're willing (or not willing) to discuss when you're available (or not) to speak/meet up, when you need to end a conversation, etc. You cannot maintain the capacity to support others without first prioritizing/taking care of yourself.

Remind them of their strengths and capabilities: Using this tactic is a great way to be a supportive friend without internalizing an insecure person's baggage. Insecurity is a byproduct of low self-esteem. While it will take some effort on their part, highlighting the person's strengths can be a motivator for them to start working on some of their goals independently or check in a little less frequently. Encourage them to take immediate action on a project, new hobby, conversation, new career or course opportunity, etc. they're discussing with you. Frame it with a script that includes sentiments like "you're so good at/talented with "x" skill or subject matter, you should consider enrolling/emailing a contact/updating your resume, right away to take advantage of this exciting opportunity."

Provide them a chance to self-reflect: If the previous strategy is unsuccessful, feel free to kindly help them self-reflect on their struggles. Calling out someone's bad behavior directly must be done with tact and compassion, so make sure to use a "compliment sandwich" (positive remark, constructive criticism, positive remark, or likely positive outcome that results from taking action on said criticism) and only call out the missteps in someone's actions. Never personalize the person's bad behavior as a flawed personality trait (e.g. Behavior callout: Your constant messaging is draining my energy while I'm studying/at work. I don't think I'm the right person to help you. Maybe try to research "x" matter to ideate some creative solutions first. vs. Personality callout: You're so clingy. It's so draining and unbearable. Why can't you learn to manage your dilemmas by yourself?). Encouraging someone to analyze their behavior can lead to a new level of self-awareness for a person. Criticizing someone's character is both antagonistic and unproductive – you're making their insecurity seem like an inherent, unfixable trait rather than an opportunity for growth, evolution, and acquiring a new skillset.

Offer them a resource for support: Send them a quick link to a website or social media page to redirect their attention and provide them a chance to help themselves. Guide them towards becoming more competent – it's the key to self-confidence, as you probably know through your healing journey.

Don't reach out: Plain and simple. Out of sight, out of mind (unless for some reason you have reason to believe they're a danger to themselves, of course).

As a last resort, make it a "it's me, not you" situation and part ways: Once you've established boundaries and attempted to redirect their attention or promote self-reflection, you've done everything you can as a supportive friend. If they overstep your stated boundaries and expectations more than once or refuse to stop asking you to overextend yourself, let them know that their demands are past your personal limits, and you cannot take the weight of their frustrations. A nicer way to frame this is to communicate that you need to take some space from the relationship as you're heavily focusing on certain goals in your life at the moment.

#friend advice #friendship #interpersonal relationships #relationship advice #boundaries #self awareness #self reflection #self help #note to self #femmefatalevibe #femme fatale #dark femininity #dark feminine energy #it girl #higher self #self growth #dream girl #queen energy #high value woman #high value mindset #social skills #successhabits #loa success #success mindset #female power #female excellence

[eddies-house]

The Under-Ground (18+ ONLY)

Chapter Two - Baggage

Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 |

Modern!Barista!Eddie AU - As you continue to train Eddie, words are exchanged. Your life is in shambles and he only adds to it.

Enemies to Lovers, Modern!Barista!Eddie AU, Eddie x Fem Reader

12.1K Words

Warnings - Eddie is an asshole, eventual smut, mentions of drugs and drinking, I don't think there's anything else but please let me know if I missed anything

Author's Note: This story has been lingering in my mind and it took me so long to write this chapter because I want to do it right and I had the worst writer's block but now I am flooded with inspiration. Pls let me know how you feel about it so far

Masterlist

Prev | Next

The biting cold of the morning nipped at your skin, little pins and needles feeling like they were burying themselves there.  The streets were glimmering with puddles, the rain from the night before leaving them behind and the moody clouds still lingering in the sky.  No matter how long you’d lived in Hawkins the changing of the seasons would always sneak up on you like an unwelcome visitor.  Gone were the days of walking around downtown with an iced coffee on your day off, the summer sun beaming down and flowers in full bloom while the trees were leafy and lush.  No more lounging around on a bench outside of the college to complete a few assignments under the shade of a large oak tree in desperate need of a change of scenery in comparison to your shitty apartment.  At least not until next Spring.  

Hawkins Community College was a historical building that used to serve as the town hall but has since evolved into the college after the council elected to have the town hall relocated to a more practical location.  The building was settled just south of downtown and was deemed ‘too out of the way’.  Its bricks were a faded brown, weathered down over the years and not a high enough priority to keep maintained, though the sidewalks were freshly paved and the grass was as green as ever, the morning dew blanketing over it like a fresh coat of paint.  The campus wasn’t very large seeing as Hawkins’ population wasn’t very impressive and the majority of its residents would travel elsewhere for college. 

The front steps of the building were scuffed and scattered with various footprints from students and teachers who walked with purpose to their destination.  On the very top step, front and center sat a disoriented Dustin Henderson, face scrunched up in perplexity.  Though he was still attending Hawkins High as a current sophomore, he enlisted himself in one of the programs offered where students could take classes at Hawkins Community for college credits.  Fingers desperately ruffling through the several papers in his dense binder, he argued with his mother while his phone was clutched in the other hand on speaker.  Something about “I swear it was on the kitchen counter!” followed by the word ‘mom’ being shouted into the phone repeatedly as if it would solve his dilemma.  When she apologetically let him know that there was no such mystery item, he only cursed as he facepalmed, ending the call with a defeated “Okay, love you.  Bye.”  

A heavy sigh escaped the boy as he slapped the binder onto the step beside him, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, agitated.  Dustin was ironically your only college friend, not a best friend but you knew him well enough to gather that he’d definitely left his assignment at home and that this was going to dictate his mood for the entire day.  His eyes resembled emeralds as his focus shifted from his dirty sneakers up to you, a hint of excitement swimming in the deep green of his irises.  

“Rough morning?” You suggest with a sympathetic smile.  He bites his lip in frustration as if he’s holding back every distressed thought racing through his head.

“Mhmm.” He squeaks, still refraining from word vomiting all over your peaceful morning, hands now resting on his denim covered knees.  

“You forgot your essay, didn’t you?” You know you’ve poked the bear but you could feel how anxious he was to blow up about everything that went wrong that morning leading up to this moment and who were you to deny him?  Henderson had a special place nestled in the corner of your heart, always loud and boisterous but also kind and delightful to be around.  

He sucked in a breath before releasing every word that was prodding his brain.  “All because my mom had to clean the goddamn house!  She was all ‘Dusty, this is why we don’t leave our things around!’” He mocks his mothers voice with a high pitch, face twisting in dramatics.  “I left it right on the counter where I could grab it on my way out but apparently, a ten page essay WITH MY NAME ON IT IN BIG BOLD LETTERS was thrown in the garbage.  On its way to a landfill.  Gone.”  His shoulders tensed and all you could offer was a supportive hand to his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Dustin.”  You say carefully, the kid was a ticking time bomb sometimes.  He waved you off, his way of saying ‘don’t worry about it’.  

“And THEN, fucking Will made the dumbest move last night at our campaign.  Completely tanked the whole thing.”  His hands were thrown up in misery as he recalled the memory.  “Eddie had the whole thing set up perfectly, we’ve been playing this campaign for weeks!”  Dustin’s eyes shifted back and forth erratically as the whole thing played out in his mind, your eyes rolled at the mention of the metalhead.  “Oh he was so pissed.  You shoulda seen him, he was throwing dice, screaming at Will, screaming at Mike, screaming at ME!  I finally talked him off the ledge but shit, he was revved up.”

Eddie hosted their DND club a majority of the time per Dustin and from what he tells you about those nights, Eddie is always a sadistic maniac.  Dustin also swears that he’s like his big brother, next in line to King Steve although Steve took on more of a dad role.  There was no way to imagine Eddie embodying the role of a big brother let alone displaying any kind of pleasant behavior.  You cringed at the mere idea of him, knowing you’d have to endure him at work this evening.

Dustin continued his rant passionately.  “And I’m sorry, I know you hate when I bring up Eddie for whatever reason but dude was not having it.  My special edition dice are now lost in the abyss underneath his couch.”  You shake your head in disapproval.  “I told him I’d let it slide though cause he said he’d let me go with him to a concert.” He concludes with a shrug.

At this you nudge the boy’s shoulder, disappointed.  “Dustin!  He can’t bribe his way out of losing your dice after chucking them when he has a temper tantrum!  If those dice are important to you then you need to stand your ground.”  You instruct him.

He lets out a long sigh before responding.  “Socks, respectfully, this is how our friendship with Eddie works.  We piss each other off and then we move on.  Like a few weeks ago, he kept making sexual sounds while I was on the phone with my mom so I hid his shoes from him after he got really stoned.”  At this you can’t help but release a laugh.  

“Good on you, Henderson.” You praise.  “I guess I won’t need to step in when I see him at work later then.  Sounds like you can handle yourself.”  You begin pulling your binder from your bag in preparation for class.  

Dustin shakes his head in confusion, waving his arms in front of him like he’s missing a piece of the puzzle.  “Hold up, Eddie’s a barista now?”  His tone is humorous, on the brink of cackling.  

“Uh huh.”  You answer nonchalantly while opening your binder and shuffling through a few papers, making a note in your planner for some homework you just remembered off the top of your head.  “And our dear Stevie knew about it before me and just decided it’d be a good idea to see my reaction when he walked in the door for his first shift yesterday.”  You chew on your pen as you attempt to remember any other assignments you may have forgotten to write down.  

“Eddie?  Eddie Munson?  Metalhead, former drug dealer, thought it would be funny to piss in Steve’s beer, Eddie Munson?  That Eddie?”  Dustin gapes at you in disbelief to which you nod.  “I’m sorry but–there’s no fucking way!  A barista?  He doesn’t even drink coffee, he hates trendy little cafes, and there’s no goddamn way he would apply for a job where both you AND Steve work.  Sounds like his own personal hell.”  The boy is laughing, clutching his stomach.  

You hang your head and giggle along with him.  As awful as the situation was, it did sound ridiculous enough to laugh.  “I thought the same thing, Dusty.  The universe just has it out for us.” You refer to you and Steve.  As much as you had a rivalry with Eddie, Steve had his own beef with the guy.  This posed as an issue seeing as Steve practically mothered Lucas, Mike, Will, Dustin, Max, and El ever since he was in high school when he dated Nancy Wheeler.  The way Eddie and Steve fought resembled a divorced couple exchanging their kids in a Walmart parking lot.  And to Steve’s disadvantage, Eddie always ended up at the notorious parties he threw since one of the kids always ended up blabbing after he distinctly told them not to.  It always put a damper on your night when he showed up, giving you flashbacks to that one party years ago that you swore you’d forget about but it still lingered in the back of your mind.  

“I hope you know this means that everyone’s going to be placing bets on who ends up dead first.”  Dustin raises a brow at you, throwing his arm over your shoulder, shaking it playfully.

Standing up as classes were about to start, you shot him a glare.  “I can definitely take him.”  You state, holding your hand out to help him up.  He takes it and shrugs, a grin on his face that tells you ‘I don’t know about that’.  “Dustin.  Please don’t tell me you think Eddie is going to get to me.”  You scoff as he opens the heavy metal door leading into the building, the hinges creaking.  

His face indicates that he’s bouncing a thought around before answering.  “Well…” he begins.  “You don’t know what he’s capable of.  The guy is a menace.  He can play games for as long as he needs to.”  He further explains.  

“Okay, you know what?  I’m done talking about some asshole who doesn’t even matter to me.”  You decide, the mostly vacant hallways echoing your footsteps as you step into the heated building. 

“Ugh, it’s like having three parents who don’t get along.  I know Eddie is a lot but maybe if you, I dunno, hung out with him you’d realize he’s actually also really cool.”  Dustin has the audacity to suggest.

Huffing out a breath and holding your binder to your chest, you give him your final piece of mind.  “Munson is never going to even get the time of day out of me let alone a besties hangout sesh.”  You snap bitterly.  Dustin’s hands raise in surrender, you’re done with this conversation and he knows better than to try and change your mind.  

“Anyway…” he sighs, dropping his shoulders while you both make your way through the beige halls.  “Max and Lucas are back together again.”  He nudges your shoulder with his, causing you to sway as you walk.  The couple were always on again, off again.  One week Lucas would do something dumb like stand her up by accident to go to the mall with Mike and another Max would invalidate his feelings.  It was something they claimed they were working out but after every breakup, everyone always reacted with an eye roll, knowing full well that the routine would repeat itself.  You truly did root for them but if they were going to keep hurting each other, there was no reason for them to continue the relationship.  

Glancing at Dustin, your face tells him that you’re not amused.  “Tell me something new, Henderson.”  You deadpan.  He nods, exhaling as he racks his brain.

“Holy shit!”  He sounds as if he’d just had a revelation.  “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you!”  His feet stomp on the linoleum floors in excitement, sneakers squeaking against the surface.  “But you have to PROMISE not to tell anyone.”  A finger is pointed at you in warning as you nod for him to continue.  Dustin was very bad at keeping secrets.  “Steve has a girlfriend.”  He chirps.  

Stopping dead in your tracks, shoes screeching against the floor, your eyes widen.  Steve told you everything so if Dustin’s accusations were true you were going to have some words for him for not telling you.  “Who?!”  You inquire, full attention on the curly headed boy.  “You’re lying, Steve would’ve told me!”  You whine like a child.

“That’s the thing, he hasn’t told anyone.  I saw some girl getting out of his car the other night in the mall parking lot.  I didn’t get a good look at who it was cause it happened so fast.”  He explains.

Your excitement drops at his words.  “Dustin, that doesn’t mean he has a girlfriend, that means he’s messing around, he does it all the time.” You remind him of his reputation as King Steve.

“Well pardon me for being an optimist.”  He sasses you, the two of you approaching the class.  

“You’re really bad at gossiping.”  You finish before stepping into the room, leaving him offended in the hallway.  

–

Class was as bland as ever, your professor, Mr. Randall lectured about marketing the whole two and a half hours and you nearly fell asleep six times, Dustin jabbing the eraser end of his pencil into your side each time you started slouching as he caught up on his calculus homework.  The closer to the evening it got, the more on edge you grew knowing you wouldn’t get to work the peaceful closing shift you were once used to but instead suffer a stress-inducing nightmare while training the local terror of Hawkins.  Life sucked all the way around at the moment.

Bidding Dustin a ‘see you later’ while you were walking in sync just outside the building where you always parted, he flashed you a grin before begging you to snap him a photo of Eddie at work to send it to him later.  More than likely for blackmail reasons for the next time they were pissing each other off.  Their relationship was something you couldn’t quite get a grasp on however you didn’t attempt to even understand it past the fact that for some reason Dustin admired the man child as well as despised him sometimes in that brotherly way.  

“Dustin, fuck off.”  You tell him with a playful tone.  

“What!?  You don’t even like the guy.  I’d venture to even say that this would be benefiting you in the long run.”  He clasps his hands together in front of him in a pleading motion but you don’t seem to budge which his face falls at.  

“I don’t need to be involved in your little war, I have my own!”  A dramatic wave of your arms is enough to stop him from prodding.  

With that you departed from the campus and headed straight to downtown a few hours shy of your shift to lounge around and chat with Robin.  It was either that or go back to your shitty apartment and sit in the freezing stale air, at least this way you could revel in the warmth of the shop and sip on a hot chocolate which happened to be your favorite and the only hot drink you would ever order.  Every other option had to be iced or it was a no go.  

It was around two in the afternoon so there was time to be killed until five.  You figured you’d grab your hot chocolate, gossip with Robin and Steve for a little, maybe work on some assignments, and then take a little walk through the park at the center of the square, a solid plan.  The morning chill was long gone and it was now a tad warmer with the sun sitting high in the sky.  The sidewalks were vacant since everyone was either at work or still in school which was a plus in your book, you liked to keep to yourself and found it especially annoying when you had to stop to interact with random patrons and were expected to indulge in stupid small talk that was lost on you the second you walked away.

A thirty minute walk later and you’d finally reached The Under-Ground, the smell of espresso already invading your nose before you even stepped into the building.  As you reached for the metal handle, the door had already swung open with the bell chiming above it, a rushed Joyce Byers stumbling out with two full cup holders of hot coffees nearly flying out of her hands, eyes panicked and a startled gasp escaping her.  

She mumbles your name with a nervous grin, her nose tinted pink from the fall air.  “So sorry!  I didn’t mean to run you over–I just–I was in such a hurry.  I forgot to get the coffee for a staff meeting.”  She further explains apologetically as she gestures with a tilt of her head to Melvald’s.  

Your expression softens, Joyce was always the sweetest person you’d ever met and she was a regular at the shop.  She was one person you didn’t mind engaging in small talk with because she was genuinely interested in your answers and took the initiative to further the conversation, asking how things were and telling you to let her know if you ever needed anything.  You never took her up on the offer, there was no reason to bother her.  Joyce was somewhat of a mother figure but in a quiet manner and you were so grateful whenever she graced you with her presence.  Her boys were well mannered too, she’d done an amazing job raising them as a single mom.  Obviously you’d hung out with Will since Steve was the designated neighborhood mom and that granted you rights to the movie nights, pool parties, and just about anything that Steve hosted which meant all the kids were there too.  Will was a sweet kid, he was shy at first but an absolute menace once he was comfortable enough.  

For some reason you had a connection with him as well as Joyce, they were like family just not by blood.  Will had always comforted you if things ever felt off.  If no one else in the group noticed your shift in mood, Will did and he would approach it graciously, silently nodding at you to ask if you were okay.  From there you would communicate through your eyes and he’d gather what you were feeling from that alone.  It was like having telepathy and somehow you would both silently step out from whatever scene you were in the middle of.  If it was at Steve’s, the two of you would perch yourselves on the front steps and you would just let him know you weren’t feeling that great mentally.  The conversation really wouldn’t go further than that but it didn’t need to, he was just there for you and you for him.  It worked both ways, if Will looked particularly lonely you would nod your head toward the door and you’d both meet outside.  Sometimes he’d hint that he found it annoying how clingy El and Mike were but you knew it meant that he was sick to his stomach that his best friend and his crush were basically making out on top of him.  Jonathan had always made it a point to bring you to the side and thank you for providing that support to his brother and that it meant a lot to him.  You’d always offer a small smile in return.  The Byers held a special place in your heart, they were so effortlessly nice just because.  They had no ulterior motive, just the intention to be good people.  

Taking in Joyce’s disoriented demeanor, you shake your head and help her to steady a leaning coffee that almost escaped the cup holder.  “That’s okay, I almost crashed into you.”  You tell her.

“No, that was my fault!  I really wanna catch up with you but I have to go!”  She says rather quickly, worried as she begins to scurry back to Melvald’s.  Telling her you’ll have to catch up soon over coffee and that she knows where to find you, she agrees and hurries into the store.  You can’t help letting out a small giggle at her antics.

Finally sauntering into The Under-Ground, the warmth wraps around you like a cozy cocoon, something that was all too unfamiliar at this stage in your life given the circumstances of your apartment where you were meant to spend most of your time but did everything in your power to stay away from.  You welcomed the hot air like a big hug, eyes shutting in content with a deep sigh.  The tables are empty save for one in the very corner where a businessman sipped on a latte while putting together a powerpoint on his laptop.  Steve leaned against the counter scrolling away until he felt your gaze on him, raising his brows in expectancy.

“You’re here early…”  He points out. 

Irritably, you set your bag on one of the tables before making your way over to the register.  “So what you’re saying is, you’re not happy to see me, Stevie?”  You ask with mock hurt.

Steve scoffs as he stands on the opposite side of the register as if to ring you up.  “You know that’s not what I mean.”  He explains.  “I mean, you seem to be coming in earlier and earlier.  Can’t get enough of me?”  A wink is offered your way.  

You gag at this, painting disgust on your features.  “No offense but you’re not my type and I think you know that by now.”  You joke.  The chances of you and Steve getting together were as great as the chances of him and Robin getting together, zero.  And it was mutual but you had this ongoing joke.  “Now can you please make  me a hot chocolate?”  You request with a pout.  “Pleeeeease.”  You add, swaying back and forth like a child asking their mother for candy.

All you receive in return is an eye roll as he begrudgingly obliges and spins on his heels to prepare the drink.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”  You tell him in an annoyingly high pitched voice.  

“Whatever, SOCKS.”  He pronounces the nickname loudly, the businessman in the corner momentarily looking up at him in displeasure.  You give Steve a glare while taking a seat at your chosen table in the book corner, mouthing his words, mocking him with a dramatic facial expression.  

Shortly after taking a seat, Robin emerges from the back and claims the chair next to you silently, her hair thrown up in a messy ponytail on top of her head, face indicating business.  “You see, Steve was given one job and that was to ask you how last night went with Munson but clearly he was incapable of even the smallest task.”  She rants.  “So here I am.  Asking.  How did it go?  Is he still alive?”  She pushes, crossing her arms while awaiting an answer.  

Raising a brow at her, you continue pulling out your laptop as planned.  “I’m only gonna say this once.”  You affirm.  Steve’s ears perk up as he rushes over while struggling to fit the lid onto your hot chocolate, face twisted in concentration as he approaches the table.  “He’s the actual spawn of the devil and I have contemplated quitting–”  Robin goes to interrupt you before you hold up a finger, finishing your thoughts.  “But I will not give him that power and I’m going to keep working and will only talk to him when absolutely necessary.  I’m also going to forever hold a grudge against Steve for even letting Munson hear the nickname ‘Socks’.  My tranquil closing time has become my own private hell, thanks Steve.”  You ramble.  “Also, yes.  He’s still very much alive, unfortunately.”  You say in monotone.

Steve looks taken back, a hand flying up over his heart in surprise, temporarily giving up on securing the lid of your drink.  “Thanks, Steve???  I didn’t personally hire him!  I admit I slipped up on the name but give me a break here.”  He whines.

You reach for the hot chocolate, making grabby hands as you frown at a distraught Steve, hoping he’ll at least nudge the cup toward your reach.  He throws his hands up in the air with a scoff.  “Socks, I didn’t mean to rile you up by not telling you he got hired, okay?!  I made a dumb decision thinking it would be better for you and it bit me in the ass.  I’m sorry.”  In usual Steve fashion he stares at you with giant pleading eyes, his long lashes blinking at you while his lips pout, all pretty and pink as if he were a Barbie doll.  

“Really, Steve?”  Robin mocks, a smirk pulling at her lips.  

You finally pipe up, still reaching for the drink across the table.  “Steve, I’ll forgive you if you hand me my drink.”  You bargain, tongue darting out in concentration as you inch your fingers toward the chocolatey goodness hidden in a paper cup.  Steve snatches it up and pushes it into your hands, the warmth of the beverage consuming your palms.  The lid is still barely sitting on top, you gently pull it off to allow it to cool down.  

Triumphantly, Steve strolls back behind the counter.  “So we’re good?  I’m free of my mistake?”  He shouts to you.  You and Robin share a look, her attempting to take a sip of your hot chocolate only to burn her tongue, a series of huffing noises leaving her as he waves her hands up and down in front of her mouth. 

“Hoth, hoth, hoth.”  She lisps.  

You offer Steve a thumbs up from across the room while shaking your head at Robin.  “All good, Stevie.  Until the next time you cross me.”  You half joke.  “Robin, it’s hot chocolate.  Hot.”  You remind her as she pinches her tongue with her fingers, her brows knit together.  She whines in response, rushing away to relieve her scalded tongue with some water.  It turns out, you didn’t get that gossip session with Robin seeing as she was too occupied with soothing her tongue along with a sudden wave of customers.  Next time, you suppose.  You’ll have another chance to rant and rave to each other soon enough.

–

The espresso machine whirs and creates a hum as you craft a macchiato for the customer standing idly by the to go counter.  It’s 5:15.  And you work the shop alone.  Not that you would usually complain, the evening rush was nothing you couldn’t handle on your own but training a new hire wasn’t something you could bypass so either way it would need to get done and the sooner your new terror of a coworker could do things independently, the better.  And yet, he was fifteen minutes late, nowhere in sight, not even the roar of his stupid motorcycle in the distance.

Robin and Steve had taken off at five on the dot, Steve complaining that he was responsible for hauling everyone to Lucas’ basketball game and you grateful for having the night shift.  Sports were a complete snoozefest and although you’d love to support Lucas it just wasn’t your scene.  Of course you’d go when you were free but there was that sliver of relief when you weren’t required to subject yourself to the highschool gym full of sweaty kids and squeaking shoes.

With a polite smile, the drink is gingerly handed to the customer and you are offered a half assed thank you before they exit, no eye contact while they stare down at their phone.  You shrug it off, glancing around at the few people that are lounging around at the tables either working on their laptops or reading.  Everyone seems satisfied and no tables are in need of tidying or wiping down so you return to the hot chocolate you had been nursing, now chocolate milk if anything but still delicious.  Leaning against the counter as you sip, you allow yourself a moment of meditation, breathing in–and out–in—and out, the cocoa taste lingering on your tongue in between sips.

As if god himself had it out for you, your brief moment of silence and tranquility is rudely interrupted by the blaring engine of a certain someone’s dumbass motorcycle, whipping around the corner and into a spot dead center in front of the shop.  You note that you’ll have to have a conversation with him about parking in the back so customers can actually use those spots provided–he won’t listen but at least Ronnie won’t be able to put the blame on you.  Rolling your eyes at the delinquent, he makes his way into the building, pulling his helmet off and shaking his shaggy mane around like a dog.

Knowing that you can’t reprimand him the way you so desire in front of customers, you shoot him daggers from where you lean, gripping the paper cup tight enough to leave crescents from your nails.  If he doesn’t even have the decency to show up for work on time, why should you have to endure closing with him every night?  Why is it that you’re seemingly being punished by the universe?  Haven’t you had enough already?  My apartment sucks, I sleep on a lumpy mattress in the corner on the hard ass floor, my heater doesn’t work even though it's getting cold, hell, even some of my lights don’t work, rent is being raised next month, classes are kicking my ass, and now that actual spawn of satan gets to unleash his wrath on me every day.  The thoughts consume you momentarily until Eddie spins around from clocking in on the computer, delivering a smirk with an amused expression underlying his features.  And you’re having none of it, it’s only his second day and he’s pulling this shit?  Absolutely not.  

Your brows furrow in rage but your voice comes out in a hushed but cruel whisper.  “Were you out rolling with the raccoons again?”  You refer to the time he crashed one of Steve’s parties, maybe it was New Years; he got so wasted that he began befriending some raccoons out near the pool.  He laid on the ground for at least two hours and nearly cried when they ran off, crushing whatever dream he had of either taking them home or whatever he was planning in his drunken state of mind.  In any case, it was something everyone held over him, especially you on the rare occasion that you had to associate with him–so if he wanted to dick around at work and make your life hell (as if he hadn’t already done that) then you would throw anything you could at him to cause him grief.  There was no playing nice.  

The slightest hue of pink makes its way across his cheeks before he straightens his posture in a means to intimidate you.  “Calm down there, Socks.  Don’t get your panties in a twist over lil ol’ me.”  His brow raises as if to challenge you.  Your comment got to him–flustered him.  He’s trying to hide it but you can detect the embarrassment seeping out of his pores, the hatred he has for the fact that he let his vulnerability slip out in his drunken haze that night and the look on your face indicating that you have the upperhand here.  

Taking the lid off of your remaining hot chocolate gone cold, you slurp up the contents of the cup, a layer of the melty whip cream decorating your top lip as you give him a cocky glare.  “Trust me, nobodies getting their panties in a twist over you, Munson.”  You reply, checking around him to make sure no customers are listening in on the exchange.  

His notorious grin takes over his features, dimples on full display and you could just kick him in his stupid teeth.  Leaning in ever so slightly, his breath fans over your face, tobacco evident.  One hand rests next to you on the counter, the other gripping his helmet.  “Nice stache.”  He whispers, tapping the counter twice before heading toward the back.

Nice stache?  What kind of come back–oh.  You gently bring your fingers up to your top lip, feeling the obvious whip cream sitting comfortably there and you feel your blood run hot in embarrassment as well as rage.  What makes it worse is that he had nothing to do with it, it just happened and that gave him the upperhand in return.  The universe or some higher power really it out for you and clearly wasn’t rooting for you in this war.  

Tossing the cup angrily into the trash and wiping off your lip, a quiet groan escapes you, Eddie sauntering in actually wearing an apron today.  Except it's littered in several pins and patches, some room in between to add more later on.  “Do you even care that you’re–” You check the clock.  “Twenty minutes late?!”  You finish, still attempting to stay quiet enough that the remaining customer’s wouldn’t hear.  “And–and your apron.  Do you think you can do whatever you want?”  You whisper yell furiously.  A stupid question, you realize as it tumbles out of your mouth.

“Yes, actually.  I’m a free man in a free country.  What a foreign concept.”  He says tying his hair back into a low bun, a few select pieces framing his face.  “Why don’t you worry about yourself.”  He snaps.  “Also…”  He begins with a point of his finger.  “Who the hell drinks hot chocolate as someone who works in a coffee shop?”  He mocks.  You can’t help but glance at the glint that catches at his earlobe, a little silver hoop reflecting off the lights, something you otherwise wouldn’t notice if not for his hair being pulled back.  You would dare to even call it cute if he wasn’t such a menace, an absolute barbarian that you vowed to never give the time of day to again and yet here you are, giving several hours of your life.

A scoff is earned from you while you cross your arms, leaning on one hip with sass.  The attitude is there but you have no response to counter him.  He stares at you expectantly and you come up with nothing but a mumble under your breath.  “Caffeine makes me anxious.”  He barely catches it, humming for you to repeat it again.  “Hot chocolate doesn’t have caffeine in it, I try to limit my caffeine okay!?”  You snap, still quiet enough to not draw attention. 

Rolling his eyes, he seems to ignore your answer and strolls over to the front counter, reaching over and snatching up a ham and cheese sandwich without a care in the world, immediately tearing into it.  You resist the urge to grab it right out of his hand and launch it across the room, instead opting to massage your temples with your fingers, taking deep breaths.  It was either that or you’d have a homicide charge on your hands.  Sure you also snuck sandwiches from the cooler however you were discrete and no one ever noticed.  If Eddie kept it up, you’d get in trouble for his misbehavior.  

“Do you want this job or not?”  You sigh, trying to reason.  He chews disgustingly on the sandwich, crumbs rolling down his chest.  He shrugs.  A scream is awaiting in your lungs, an unreleased scream of pent up rage for the immature boy towering over you.  It doesn’t escape but it so desperately wants to.  “Munson.”  You grit your teeth, fists forming at your sides. 

“Hmm?”  He hums carelessly, scarfing down the remaining bites and tossing the wrapper into the trash.  

Another deep breath, you try to clear your energy.  “If we don’t at least cooperate here, I am out of a job and I cannot afford to be out of a job.”  You plead with him, eyes becoming the slightest bit watery much to your distaste.  It’s not on purpose, things are really just that bad.  

“What?  Did your trust fund run out?”  He bites, and it hurts.  Though it's not the most vile thing someone could say it pinches you and leaves behind a nagging pain.  Trust fund?  Who did he think you were?

“Excuse me?”  You breathe out, stepping slightly closer to him, still on alert for any customers who might listen in but you’re still in the clear.

“Yeah, did mommy and daddy cut you off?  Welcome to the real world.”  His words are like knives cutting into your skin.  They shouldn’t be, you know that.  His words are meaningless to you–are they though?  Where did he even come up with the idea that you came from any sort of wealth?  Sure in high school you were stable enough but nowhere near Harrington wealthy.  Was he referring to you living comfortably?  If that's the case he would be elated to know that you had close to nothing these days.  But you can’t give him that satisfaction.

Brushing off the interaction as if nothing was said, you grab the clipboard from one of the drawers to find where you left off in training last night and what boxes remained to be checked off.  “So yesterday we learned cleaning procedures and counting the register.  Today we pick up learning drink recipes.”  You suck it up and push through.  His words are nothing, he is nothing.  A certain emotion flashes in his eyes when you glance up to scold him for not paying attention.  You can’t put your finger on what it is but it must be some type of regret for taking this job, there’s something sadder to it though.  He is nothing to me but a warning from the universe on what to stay away from.

–

“Okay so five pumps of caramel.”  Eddie confirms with you, eyes drooping in boredom.  The shop is now devoid of customers, the evening rush long gone as it was now 7:30 and you only expected to see maybe five more customers at most before closing, giving you ample time to stuff Eddie’s dumb brain with all the drink recipes possible so he could eventually do everything by himself and you’d no longer have to convene with him.

An exhale leaves your lungs while you rest your head in your hands on the counter, shaking your head.  “No.  Four.  Four pumps of caramel.  Four.”  You reiterate, patience wearing thin.  At least he wasn’t arguing with every word that left your mouth.  “Let’s take a break from that one and try this one instead.”  You advise, pushing a new recipe card in front of him.  This one was for a simple iced mocha.  “So for this one you start off with three pumps of chocolate and then two shots of espresso.”  You instruct, eyes tired and the bags underneath them giving it away.

Eddie reaches for one of the syrups and before you can stop him, he’s pumping three pumps of hazelnut into the cup, your hand smacking your face in frustration.  “Eddie, do you just not read the labels?”  You question.

He fakes a laugh, shoving the syrup back into its place.  “Do you just not read the labels?”  He mocks in a high voice.  Your patience is wavering but you know you just need to get through this.  The sooner he finishes training, the sooner you will have peace and quiet.  

“Try again.”  You tell him, holding back all of the anger rattling in your bones.  He rolls his eyes and grabs the correct syrup this time.  Except as he pumps it into the cup, you find that his pumps are way too big, not like you taught him earlier.  He’s pushing down too far.  “Too far!  You’re pumping too far, it’s too much!”  You tell him as the bottom of the cup becomes filled too high with chocolate, practically taking up where the espresso should go.

“Okay, you are like the worst teacher ever.”  He states while sloshing around the flavored syrup in the clear cup, coating it around the sides as it maneuvers in his hand.  

A hand drags down your face and you swear you’ve lost years of your life just in the past two nights.  “Train yourself then.”  You slap your hand on the counter, making your way over to the book corner and taking a seat in your favorite spot near the window to gaze at the streetlights.  

His face contorts in confusion as if he had no idea why you were giving up on him.  “Fine.”  He mutters, taking a look at the little card that had the instructions for an iced vanilla coffee concoction.  He can’t stop himself from glancing over to you in the corner, the warm glow of the street lights embracing you like a blanket.  And he can’t shy away from the pang of guilt in his chest.  Yet he continues to find himself at your throat every time, and you at his rightfully so.  At least you have reason to be, he’s just a pathetic excuse of emotions buried under skin that dug himself so deep into a hole over the years there was no way out and all he could do was what he did best–shove people away and just play the part that had always been assigned to him since birth.

The sudden wail of the blender has you jolting and looking over behind the counter only to find Eddie manning the machine.  You were too beyond exhausted to care anymore.  If he wanted to start making milkshakes in spite of you then so be it.  Your sight continued to set on the glow of the streetlights over the sidewalk.  It didn’t rain today or tonight thankfully since you’d have to walk home.  As you close your eyes, you imagine the warmth of the lights engulfing you and bask in the heat of the shop, silently cursing your landlord for not being attentive to your broken heater, leaving you with chattering teeth every night.  If you could sleep in the back room you would, however that would be an awkward conversation with Ronnie and the openers, Max and El who took on the earliest shift from 4:30AM to 8:30AM, when Robin and Steve would relieve them of their duties.  It was funny how your whole group seemed to now run The Under-Ground but you couldn’t come up with a better team if you tried.  Save for Eddie, you could definitely find someone a hundred times better and then you would have the perfect team.  

You continued to wander around in your imagination, the blender coming to a halt but you were too lost to even open an eye.  The sound of cups scattering on the counter had you wincing but not once leaving your mind, not yet.  It was rare that you were able to just sit and not think about the stressors in your life.  That relaxation is shattered when a cup is slammed down in front of you, the noise causing you to jump back in your seat, eyes flashing open only to be meant with a perfectly curated blended iced mocha, down to the whip cream and chocolate drizzle on top.  Behind it stands Eddie with his arms crossed in front of his chest, eyes stuck on the drink and not your reaction.  All you offer is a nod, hand wrapping around the cup as you push it back toward him across the dark wood.  What did he want?  An applause?  He did his job, congratulations. 

“Good?”  He asks for approval, much to your surprise.  

“Mhm.”  You nod again, standing up and making your way back behind the counter, leaving him to stare at his creation.  There was no way you would give him any type of praise even if he did make the drink without any flaws.  

“You didn’t even taste it.”  He continues to stare down at the beverage on the table, his voice monotone.

As you start to mark a few things off for inventory, pen gliding across the paper, you hold out your other hand, paying him no mind in any other manner.  Reluctantly, he scoops up the drink and strides over, shoving it in your hand like a pissed off child.  You take a sip and are impressed that it actually tastes good but rather than give him any kind of compliment, you offer another nod.  He’s starting to hate that response and if he receives another nod from you he may pull his hair out.  The cold condensation stings your palm so you set the drink down, again pushing it toward him without so much as a glance.

“Just admit it, Socks.”  He starts, grabbing the mocha and licking the whip cream from the top.  “I did good and you hate it.  Oh but if King Steve or Robin made it you’d be falling at their feet.”  His tone is low and his gaze is intense as he burns into your side profile.  

Continuing to ignore him, you jot down a few notes on the inventory sheet for some things that Ronnie may need to order more of on the next shipment.  He scoffs, beginning to walk away from you when you decide to speak up.  “Steve and Robin didn’t make me hate myself.”  You remind him.  It’s as if time slowed down the moment you spoke, the way you let the words roll off your tongue so truthfully, as if those words were in the bible.  Eddie wasn’t religious by any means but that’s how disastrous your words felt.  Yet he still finds comfort in playing his part.

“I made you hate yourself?”  He seethes.  “I made you hate yourself.”  He repeats gritting his teeth.  He knows he shouldn’t let himself go any further, it's a bad idea and it's simply not true what he’s about to say.  But he can’t stop himself from assuming his role, he doesn’t know any different.  He shouldn’t venture into territory where he knows he can never return from.  “Babe.”  The name is far from its endearing meaning, its dripping in hostility, soaked in venom.  “I never made you hate yourself, you did that just fine all on your own.”  The moment the words pierce the air he knows he shouldn’t have said them because there wasn’t even the slightest hint of honesty.  The ugliest parts of him jumped out and now he has to suffer the damages.

A swell of tears stings the backs of your eyes and you desperately suck them back, refusing to let him have this.  Your fists clench as you drop the pen from your grasp, your side profile still facing him, him standing in your peripheral.  Suddenly you're gripping the counter with white knuckles, slowly shifting your gaze to the cowardly man a few feet away.  His mouth opens and closes as if trying to take back what he said but he’s coming to realize it isn’t an option.  In all honesty, the way you look right now frightens him.  There’s suddenly no emotion behind your gaze.  And then you fire right back at him.

“I hope you hate yourself just as much as I hate myself.  I hate you more than I hate myself.”  It stings like a deep scrape after you’ve fallen off your bike as a child, the dirt wedging itself into the skin.  Again, his mouth opens and closes but there’s nothing to respond with.  This may be his last shift since you’re probably going to tell Ronnie that he did some kind of fucked up thing just to get him fired and Ronnie will believe you over him–of course he will.  He deserves it.  But it would also mean he’s back right where he started, no one wanting to hire him.  The Munson name really carried its burdens.  He already had a secure job during the day at the auto shop, Jax & Sons but he needed the extra income.  The only reason Ronnie hired him at The Under-Ground was because the owner, Beth’s husband Sam, owned The Hideout and Eddie was at least welcome there with the other rejects most of the time.  While The Hideout wasn’t hiring, Sam referred him to The Under-Ground and assured him he would put in a good word with his wife.  They were too good to him and he was starting to regret their kindness toward him, he deserved to be run over and have the shit kicked out of him.

No further words were spoken the rest of the night.  Eddie was handed the clip board with the checklist for training, a silent demand that he train himself the rest of the shift while you occupied yourself with finishing some inventory, cleaning, and serving the few customers that came in.  He quietly figured things out, familiarizing himself with the ingredients and learning quicker than he thought.  Whenever he had a question, he refrained and decided he’d either ask you at a later time or eventually sort it out on his own.  He should quit but there weren’t any other options if he wanted to keep himself fed and continue saving up to get out of Hawkins.  Nowhere else was going to hire him, especially for the night shift.  He was lucky they even trusted him to close with a girl though Sam seemed to put the rumors about him to rest if his wife and Ronnie had anything to hold against him and he would forever be grateful although now he didn’t feel he deserved that grace even if he was an innocent man that never amounted to the things his dad did.  

–

Night after night for the remainder of the week, the evening shift was filled with tension and bruised feelings.  If you had to so much as speak to Eddie it would be short and to the point, no sugarcoating.  Each time you instructed him to clean something or do a task he would roll his eyes but oblige.  He was the least of your problems and you were going to make sure it stayed that way.  His training was almost complete and he was starting to pick up on a rhythm which meant you wouldn’t have to engage with him nearly as much.  By Friday you’d fallen into a routine and while not in the best of circumstances, it was fine since not a whole lot of arguing happened since the previous incident.

You would attend to the customers with a friendly smile and a higher than your normal octave voice as usual and he would be his sarcastic self while also seeming to charm people with his damn dimples.  Ronnie didn’t appear to be phased by all the pins and patches that adorned Eddie’s apron when he made an appearance randomly yesterday, to your dissatisfaction.  You guess as long as none of them had anything offensive then he left him alone.  Why did you care anyway?  You didn’t.  

The evening swarm of coffee addicts had arrived and you churned out drinks left and right, earning tips with the help of your perky attitude that you’d learn to put on over time.  It aggravated you that Eddie had no issue charming his way into bigger tips, it’s like he was a professional.  Some patrons would give him nasty looks while others, particularly the older moms who you’d definitely seen with a husband at some point, would pay him extra attention and drop larger bills into the tip jar while flipping their hair and lingering around longer than necessary.  It made your stomach churn.  Regardless, you continued to put on a smile and work through the rush, hoping by the end of the night the tips split up would give you a little bit of extra rent money to save for next month.  It wasn’t like you were in a position to save money, living paycheck to paycheck but something had to give and you needed that cushion so you actually had a place to live.

As the night winded down and people were heading home, neglecting the coffee shop until early in the morning, you took a rag to the tables to clean and straighten up while Eddie obnoxiously banged on the espresso machine that had been giving everyone a hard time all week, periodically getting stuck and then spewing espresso everywhere.  “Fuckin’ piece of shit machine.”  He mutters, trying to pry off the panel to get a look inside at the machinery.  

Not wanting to be responsible for a five hundred dollar machine broken by none other than your jackass coworker, you decide to step in, shouting over to him.  “Would you knock it off?  We have someone who comes in to fix the machines and I’m not going to be responsible–”  A loud clank of metal stops you as Eddie jiggles a screwdriver you weren’t even sure how he found in the machine.  He pries the screwdriver into the machine as if trying to loosen something stuck in the gears, succeeding when a few coffee beans fly out and fall to the floor, a shit eating grin on his face.

“Fixed it.”  He confirms, shutting the panel and running the machine with a test shot of espresso, the liquid coming out smoothly rather than spraying him in the face.  You shake your head, choosing to keep your mouth shut.  If anything bad happens with the machine you didn’t see it and it wasn’t your fault.  You were not an accomplice if it malfunctioned on his watch.

Eddie glances over at you now sweeping up under one of the tables, somewhat disappointed that you won’t revel in his victory over the machine but also remembering the atmosphere he created from the very beginning, never deserving your positive attention in the first place.  It was 8:00PM, only an hour away from closing and the college students who had occupied the tables earlier were no longer around, the only sounds being the upbeat jazz music playing from the speakers.  He sparked an idea.  

Jogging to the back room where his eye caught the music system the very first day, he starts messing around with it, fingers searching in the back where his eyes can’t see behind the wall for a wire.  Biting his lip in concentration, he locates it with a triumphant hum.  

Too overcome with sweeping the floors clean, you only notice Eddie is no longer in the room when a shrieking guitar blares through the shop’s speakers, leaving you covering your ears and dropping the broom with a smack to the ground.  It’s some kind of metal song that you’ve possibly heard before but wouldn’t be able to recall the name.  Before you can map out your next moves, Eddie appears in the doorway to the back, grinning ear to ear genuinely.  “I hacked the stereo, how sick is that?”  He goes back to his spot behind the counter, head banging away.

“Shut it off!”  You yell over the noise.  Either he pretends not to hear you or he really can’t hear you over how loud it is.  Now you’re afraid that some of the neighboring businesses will call the cops or something and it’s on your dime.  “Eddie!”  You shout once again with no reaction from him.  You take the initiative and scurry into the back, finding the stereo system with a wire coming out of it and Eddie’s phone plugged in.  You scowl and unplug it, killing all sound, an offended “what the fuck!” heard from the front of the shop as you soothe your ear drums in the quiet.

He starts to make his way toward the back only to be stopped by you nearly running him over as you walk with a purpose back out to finish cleaning.  “Um, excuse you?”  He gestures your way as if you’d stepped on his ego.  

The broom is picked back up from its spot on the floor and you finish off by sweeping the remaining dirt into the dust pan, not responding.  When you look up again, he’s not there and you know he’s definitely gone to the back to plug his phone back in.  Your suspicions are confirmed when the riff is taking over the speakers once again, drums pounding through the sound system.  A groan emerges from deep within you as you empty the dust pan into the trash.  There was no winning with him, he always pushed back and you had no energy to keep up.  As he emerges from the back again, he doesn’t even look in your direction.  

“Can you at least turn it down!?”  You yell over the music, hoping he would find some kind of humility within himself so you didn’t go home with a headache.  It wasn’t just that it was too loud, it was overwhelming, your anxiety was spiking and no matter how much you breathed and told yourself to calm down, the volume of the song playing had your heart rate beating faster than you felt it could even keep up with.  Eddie continues ignoring you, and you know damn well that he heard your request since you were close enough, standing just a few feet away.  You swallowed hard as you attempted to keep your cool, keep your nervous system in check.  I’m okay, I’m okay, nothing is going to happen.   

And there was no reason to believe anything bad would happen but your brain was screaming at you that the escalation of the metal riff playing was a warning signal and you couldn’t talk yourself off the ledge.  As much as you tried to contain your breathing and keep it steady, it became erratic as you stumbled over to one of the tables and thankfully made it into a chair.  Your elbows rested on the table top while you covered your ears in an attempt to muffle the suddenly overwhelming sound that wouldn’t otherwise bother you had it not taken you by surprise earlier and had the volume not been set the highest the speakers allowed.  

The world around you blurred out while you seemed to fall apart because of a stupid issue you had with loud sounds that caught you off guard.  You couldn’t think straight, you couldn’t even think to just run to the back and unplug it again.  You didn’t even register that there were hands waving in front of you and a pair of big brown eyes worriedly looking at you.  His lips were moving but there was no way to understand what was being said in this state.  And then he was gone from your vision as you choked on a breath caught in your throat.  You were about to make a run for the door just to get your bearings back when the room went silent and suddenly things started to slowly become clear again.  When you turn your body in your seat toward the back, Eddie stands there with a shocked expression painted on his face, mouth dropped open.

“I—I didn’t—I’m—I—“  For probably the first time ever Eddie Munson is speechless.  No quirky comments, no stupid jokes, just stuttering.  Your breathing, while a lot better now, is still heavy as you recover from the sudden panic.  “I didn’t know—I wouldn’t have—“  Before he can continue rambling you save him the energy.  

“Just—leave it.”  You demand, putting a hand up to signal him to stop.  A warning to never mention it again.  He owed you that much.

Then he goes on to do something you’d never expect.  He makes his way to the table you’ve sat yourself at and pulls out a chair, sitting across from you.  “Are you okay?”  He asks, eyes wide and concerned, hands clasped together on top of the table as he fidgets with his clunky rings.  What the fuck did he care?  He’d jump at any chance to see you upset, why was right now any different?

All you can do is look at him in distress, displaying how you felt on your face and in your body language.  “Oka—does it look like I’m okay?!”  You respond, throwing your arms up before they fall back into your lap.  Your outburst quickly dwindles, a shyer demeanor taking over as you both linger in the quiet, in the aftermath of what he believes may have been an anxiety attack.  “I’m—I'm fine.”  You finally decide, standing and acting as if nothing just happened, taking your place behind the counter.  Eddie looks dumbfounded, unsure of any of his next moves so as to keep the peace for once in his fucking life.  He’d experienced lots of trauma before but never had to come face to face with the kind of terror that took over your face, never experienced being on the other end of the turmoil.  While he’s sure he’s gone through what you just had except with other triggers, there was not one idea in his head about how to approach the situation, how he would dare to even console you if that’s all you really needed.  In a sense, he’s a tad grateful that you seemed to snap out of it on your own but that also makes him feel like the most terrible person on planet earth.  What kind of man was he if not some duplicate of his dad like everyone says and like he feels he’s doomed to be?  He had been in your shoes before, experienced the true fear you held in your body and no one was there for him.  So when he was there fully capable of providing some kind of comfort, he did nothing and suddenly he was his dad.  In his mind he was his dad, doing nothing, helping no one but himself.  

Suddenly he felt like he was 12 years old again, sinking in on himself but before he could be pulled any deeper he shot up and rapidly blinked his eyes.  And you were there perfectly normal, trying to sneakily set aside a sandwich for yourself but it didn’t go unnoticed, it’s not like he cared though.  Had he become this big of a fuck up without realizing it?  He was no better than the man that abandoned him at 12, he genuinely believed he was on the same path as the man that single handedly tore his son’s life apart, who raised him in a crack house until things got too complicated and left only to be arrested 48 hours later.  Eddie had to stop thinking, he was pulling himself down again, an anchor might as well be tied to his ankle.  

“I—I need a break.”  He exhales, not listening if you had any protests which you didn’t, you just tuned him out as the bell on the door jingled and he stopped outside for a cigarette.  Who smokes cigarettes anymore?  You wonder.  Well you answer your own question when you remember the hick town you live in, many people still smoked cigarettes out here but most of them were older.  It was now around 8:45PM, almost time to go home to try and knock out in the chill stale air of your room.  The bell above the door rings again and you glance up but don’t find Eddie and instead meet the vibrant blue eyes of Jason Carver.  While not a close friend, you’d known each other throughout high school and had a few mutual friends and even found yourselves in some of the same study groups during finals.  

“Hey!”  He greets you like an old friend, a smile on his face, his bright white teeth glimmering in the light.  

“Jason!  I thought you were away for college in Boston.”  You say, remembering that he was able to escape this small town and move onto bigger things.  Of course he was, his family had everything lined up for him.  He stuck to his plan and it seemed to be going well for him.  Something you wish you could say for yourself but you never even had a plan if you’re honest.

“Yeah, I’m just in town for the week.  I flew in earlier today.  My grandmas sick so you know…” He doesn’t finish the sentence and doesn’t have to for you to understand.  

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”  You sympathize with him.  

“No, it’s okay.  This has happened a few times, it just seems like this might be it.”  He tells you with a sad nod of his head.  “Anyway, is that Eddie Munson outside?”  He asks, changing the subject.  You almost roll your eyes at his name but quickly remember how many fights the two had been in previously, usually Eddie walking away with no more than a black eye or a busted lip and Jason always looking worse.  You don’t want to encourage another here tonight so you just nod, shyly avoiding Jason’s gaze.  “Hey, is that freak bothering you while you work?  Is he harassing you?”  He starts to sound like he’s getting worked up, the opposite of your intention.  Jason was always super forward especially when he was agitated which is why you always gravitated away from him.  He’d always put on a sweet front but then come out with pure anger the moment he heard something he didn’t like.  

“No!”  You blurt out, unsure of why you’re even protecting Eddie in any way.  Maybe it’s the fact that while you do hate Eddie with every nerve ending in your body, Jason only hates him for being everything he’s not.  For not being popular, not engaging in sports, not going to church.  None of those are why you hated Eddie but Jason had this bottled up rage toward him and you had the smallest inkling that he was envious in some weird way of the metalhead.  “No, he’s not bothering me.  He just works here and he’s on break.  He doesn’t even talk to me.”  You try to talk him down.  Jason looks at you with suspicion, not fully believing you.  Why you were even explaining yourself to him was beyond you.  

Reluctantly, he drops it and continues on with the small talk which you find yourself growing bored of.  Jason was turning out to be someone that reminded you of your parents, fairly conservative and tightly wound up.  In high school he was a bit more laid back but it seems that whatever college he goes to has morphed him into another stereotypical white guy.  The conversation couldn’t end soon enough for you as he started getting into a story about his frat house.  You tried to hide your distaste but the air just felt sour.  Not once did he even ask what you’d been up to, immediately going off about himself.  As if he could read your mind, the bell above the door is heard and Eddie slowly walks back in, his face twisted in a scowl.  

Jason looks toward him at the sound of the bell, freezing to stare him down as if it would intimidate him.  Did he forget the several times Eddie handed his ass to him?  If this was going to happen again right now, it was guaranteed that with Eddie being a man now, he’d have no problem taking him down.  Jason was a man now too and while he had muscle from what you could see peeking out from under the sleeve of his polo, Eddie had grit and there was no way to go against that.  

“Munson.”  Jason greets with a nod of his head, a fake smile on his face.  Eddie offers no greeting in return, only a glare as he makes his way back behind the counter.  

“Anyway, it was great catching up with you.” Jason directs his attention back to you.  “We should hang out while I’m in town.  Here’s my number.”  He says cockily, using a nearby pen to scribble on one of the shop’s business cards, placing it in your hand.  

“Oh, okay.  Yeah, um.  Okay.”  You respond with uncertainty.  The number would be tossed aside the moment he stepped out the door but you appeased him the best you could while he stood in front of you.  As he backs up toward the door, he shoots you a wink.  While he thinks butterflies are fluttering within you right now, you’re actually internally cringing.  And with that, he was gone, finally.  You piece together that he hadn’t even purchased a coffee.  The more you think about it, he may as well have pissed on you in an attempt to assert dominance over Eddie.  Men were stupid creatures.

Eddie huffs out a laugh as he doodles on his hand, nothing left to do besides leave and lock up.  You pay him no mind while you begin to quickly count the drawer so you’d be able to leave on time.  “Fuckin’ tool.”  Eddie mumbles to himself.

While you agree, you don’t want to give him any satisfaction so you continue counting the money.  Finding that everything is accounted for, you lock up the drawer and grab your bag from the back while Eddie silently does the same.  You meet at the door in some unspoken agreement, him holding the door as you step out into the chill air, turning to shut the door and lock it while he puts his motorcycle helmet on and walks over, straddling his bike.  As you shove the keys back into your bag and start your journey home, he clears his throat.  “Watch out for Carver.  He’s not all sparkles and sunshine.”  He says revving his bike.  Who was he to tell you what to do?  Though you had no interest in Jason whatsoever, you weren’t going to let Eddie tell you what to do, he was the last person on earth you would listen to.  

“Oh, I’m sorry?  I could say the same about you.  You don’t get to tell me who to watch out for.”  You step closer toward the bike, a hand on your hip while the nagging cold pinches at your skin.  If your jaw was tightened it was both out of anger and due to the cold.  

“Listen, Socks–”

“Don’t call me that.”  You snap.

“I’m serious, Carver–”  His voice is muffled under the helmet.

“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve trying to tell me what I can and can’t do, Munson.”  You’re trying to get in his face somewhat but it's hard and a little humiliating when you can only see a reflection of yourself in his visor.

“When something happens you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”  He points a finger at you sternly.

“Oh!  My hero!”  You say with sarcasm laced in the words.  “I don’t need some drop out lecturing me about what I do or who I associate with in my free time.”  The insult shouldn’t affect him, he’s been called every name in the book.  But it does, for some reason it does.  

“Do whatever the hell you want.”  You can’t see his face under the helmet but if you could you knew he’d be clenching his teeth and flexing his jaw by the way he said it.  In seconds he speeds away, bike screeching annoyingly down the street. 

It had been a long day.  A long week even.  The only silver lining was that tomorrow was your Friday and after that you’d have at least one day to not think about work and Eddie Munson’s stupid attitude.  The shop was closed on Sundays and though it wasn’t very enticing to think about sitting in your room catching up on homework, it was far better than having to argue with the equivalent of a stubborn six year old in a man’s body.

Eddie on the other hand was feeling things he’d never experienced before.  There was this persistent worry in the back of his mind that he didn’t know what to do with.  His emotions had been gathered up and thrown into the wind so suddenly and he was struggling to grasp every single one so he could tuck it away again.  And you only angered him beyond comprehension, even if he deserved every venomous word thrown his way, he couldn’t deny that you provoked him in ways no other human has.  The way you had no issue with telling him off but let Jason talk over you made his blood boil.  It was none of his business, genuinely.  That’s what he told himself but deep down he knew it was his business the second Jason flashed that fake smile at him that said everything.   

~end~

Prev | Next

Masterlist

tags - @mmunson86 @haylaansmi @batkin028 @obscureenigmatic

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson fic #eddie x reader #eddie munson smut #eddie munson x fem reader #eddie munson x female reader #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson series

[burst-of-iridescent]

alright, i'm done dealing with this bullshit.

i didn’t want to address this any further but since these people seem utterly obsessed with me & and have now gone on to harass my friends, i have had enough.

first things first, and i can't believe i even need to say this, but aang is a fictional character. he is not tibetan, because there is no tibet in the world of avatar: the last airbender. aang - and the air nomads in general - are the products of two white men's (and a predominantly white writing team's) interpretations of buddhism, hinduism and tibetan culture, interpretations that have themselves been criticized by actual tibetan people.

criticizing, mocking, or even making fun of aang does not make me racist towards tibetan people, just like criticizing zuko wouldn't make me racist towards japanese people, or criticizing toph wouldn't make me racist towards chinese people, because none of these characters are actual depictions of real life groups or cultures. they can't be, because those groups and cultures do not exist in the world of atla. (xiran jay zhao discusses this very topic, and the show's "representation" of asian and indigenous cultures, better than i can in their video essays, if anyone is interested in hearing more about atla from an east asian perspective.)

additionally, even if aang were somehow an actual tibetan monk, i cannot recall a single instance in which i said anything derogatory regarding his cultural practices or beliefs (which, again, stem from bryan konietzko and mike dimartino's understanding of tibetan monks). when i criticize aang (and once again i can't believe i need to say this), i am criticizing the writing of his character and the worldbuilding of his culture and people. not, you know, an actual person and their actual heritage.

i have no problem with aang being a pacifist, or a vegetarian, or shaving his head, or wearing robes. what i do have a problem with is his entire dilemma about killing being brought up in the last four episodes of the show, only to be resolved by a magic rock and a lion turtle instead of character growth and agency. what i do have a problem with is his treatment of katara, and his disrespect towards her cultural beliefs in favour of pushing his own on her. aang is entitled to believe in non-violence and the sanctity of all life; he is not entitled to make that choice for katara, as he tried to in the southern raiders. each of them has a right to their own beliefs, and neither should use their individual beliefs to impose upon the other, or dictate what they should do.

the really ironic thing about all of this is that i love aang. i have said over and over that i believe kat.aang could have worked, that i thought they were cute in book 1, that aang is a great protagonist who had potential for an amazing arc, if only it had been followed through on in book 3. my criticisms of aang's character come from my love for him, because he deserved better than the writers who turned him into their own self-insert fantasy.

so whoever you are that's been endlessly hounding my inbox, and now my close friends', calling me racist because of my opinions on a fictional character: for your own sake, just block me and go on with your life. your social justice crusade against a singular stranger on the internet isn't helping anyone, let alone actual tibetan people.

#the discourse #i really didn't want to bring this up again but given that this has now spread beyond just my inbox i felt i had to address it one last tim #i hope this clears it up for anyone who might have seen what's going on and is confused #further anons will just be blocked and deleted so you really might as well save your breath #anti kataang #aang critical #atla critical #anti bryke

[bluedalahorse]

Young Royals, parenthood, and reproductive autonomy (a meta I guess)

Especially with season 3 approaching, people talk a lot about whether or not Wilhelm will accept or reject the throne. This is often framed in terms of Wilhelm’s love for Simon, as well as his ability to own and express his queer (albeit as of yet unlabeled) identity. We also discuss this in terms of what sort of symbolic leader Wilhelm could be for Sweden.

There’s one question I want to add to the mix, when we consider Wilhelm’s future: to what extent is Wilhelm willing or eager to become a parent someday?

To build upon that a little further: to what extent is parenthood a choice for Wilhelm in a system where he is expected and required to father an heir, and probably a spare as well? What does his reproductive agency look like in that situation?

Now, I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the reproductive mechanics of the line of succession. I know a lot of folks have speculated ways that can or can’t be addressed, and have talked about issues like surrogacy laws and adoption and whatever else. I also know there’s the possibility of the throne going to some relative or another. I’m not interested in that right now! Instead, I want to focus on the practical and emotional aspects of what it means for Wilhelm to contemplate future parenthood.

So let’s ask some more questions: does Wilhelm actually want children? If so, at roughly what age does he want kids? About how many kids does Wilhelm want? If he wants more than one kid, about how spaced apart does he want to have them? What are his views on how to parent? These are all questions that Wilhelm should have a choice to contemplate on his own, but likely won’t as long as he remains crown prince. The social norms of the monarchy likely dictate that becoming a parent happens at a certain time and pace, in a particular manner. Moreover there’s a certain prescribed way it has to all be presented to the public. Finally, Wilhelm knows that by having a kid while in the role as monarch, he would set that kid up for some of the same things he went through as a child, unless he takes extra care to break and dismantle toxic cycles. His child would be an heir to the throne and certain things would be expected of that child, the way they were of him.

The upshot of all of this is that YR raises questions about Wilhelm’s reproductive autonomy and future in a way we don’t usually get to see for cisgender male characters in teen dramas. (I would also say we get an intimations of this with August and Erik, as well—we’ve seen the way the royal court has exerted their influence over both when it comes to relationships and sexuality.) These kinds of conflicts and dilemmas usually only come up when they involve characters with uteruses. So it’s interesting to see the way that YR plays with this idea of reproductive autonomy, and extends the discussion.

Possibly a take that will bug some of my fellow fans, but I’m going to say it anyway: this is why I think Sara having a potential pregnancy or pregnancy scare could be on theme for season 3. I’m not saying it’s definitely gonna happen. What I am saying is that if it did happen, it would fit in with the show’s themes and dramatic questions as already established and would be more than just “drama.” (Drama in a program classified by its genre as a drama? You don’t say!) Sara would have to contemplate some of the same questions that Wilhelm contemplates about parenthood and parenting, and you could parallel their two arcs quite effectively. 

Now, obviously they would also be in very different situations with different things at stake. Wilhelm’s class situation and reproductive organs are naturally different than Sara’s, so they’re naturally going to experience this parenthood differently. Sara would also have to engage with this question on a bodily level, as she’d be the one carrying a pregnancy to term, and that is a nine month process that takes a lot out on the body even in “healthy” pregnancies. (Pregnancy tends to be tougher for people with autism, too.) Finally, Sara will have to think about her own parents a lot, and what she absorbed from them. What does it mean for Sara to contemplate parenthood when she herself is the child of an abusive relationship?

Now, I want to point out that we’ve also seen YR use this strategy of parallels between characters for exploring other issues. Felice and August both struggle with perfectionism and body image, but that plays out differently for them due to differences in gender, race, and family structure. Simon and Sara grapple with similar questions about relationships and being in love and season 2, but experience that differently due to gender, sexual orientation, and neurotype. Simon and August both struggle with trauma around fathers with drug addiction, that causes them to engage with drugs in unsafe ways (August mostly by using, Simon mostly by dealing), but we know they’ll be seen differently by others because of their class. And so on. Part of what YR does so well is the way it shows how human beings can hold experiences in common, but still be divided in how they experience them based on systems that reinforce a social hierarchy. Paralleling Wilhelm and Sara around dramatic questions of future parenthood and reproductive autonomy could be really illuminating.

While I firmly believe that, if Sara has a pregnancy situation/pregnancy scare, Sara herself should be centered in that particular plotline, we also know such a plotline would likely involve August as the person who donated half the DNA of the fetus in question. Which then throws August’s arc into a suddenly very real and frightening place: he’s in a position where he could perhaps in the most basic sense fulfill the “destiny” ordered of him by the Society and by the machinations of the royal court members who want him as Wilhelm’s backup. (We know what that phone conversation he has with Jan-Olof is really about, and again I remain grossed out.) 

And yes, we also know that August has exercised his capacity to seriously harm others multiple times throughout seasons 1 and 2, and that he is about to be in serious legal trouble for leaking the video. Even without that, what would it mean for him to have to think about these questions of parenthood when he hasn’t fully processed the trauma and grief of losing his own father, or had a chance to heal his fractured relationship with his mother? Whether you come at the horror of August fathering a child from the angle of August as someone who has relentlessly hurt others, or from the angle of August as someone with deep, parent-related pain of his own and minimal support to navigate that pain, I think ultimately what we’re being shown here is the ruthlessness of monarchy as it relies on reproduction to keep itself going. Does it matter that an heir to the throne is loved and celebrated for who they are and given therapy for their trauma, as long as the heir exists, reaches adulthood, and one day produces another heir?

Which then opens up another question that I think once again applies to Wilhelm, and maybe Sara as well. If having children is a way to maintain and preserve status for the upper classes, what does that mean for Wilhelm? Can Wilhelm believe his mother loves him, if having children is more a mandate for someone in her position than a choice? This may be a question Wilhelm has to sit with, and it’s possibly something Kristina needs to sit with too. Has Kristina ever considered Wilhelm a loving choice she’s making, rather than a destiny? I think this would be a great opportunity to explore Kristina as a person, and not just as a royal or a mother.

Meanwhile, having children is expensive and consumes time and energy, and someone who is working class and autistic like Sara is going to have fewer resources to deal with this situation. Luckily, as someone who lives in Sweden, she has safe and reliable access to abortion (glaring at my own horrendous country here) which I imagine will be the option she would end up choosing in that kind of plotline. But that doesn’t mean she won’t have to stress over her situation or face gossip or even negative press attention because of it. Not to mention the way Sara’s own conscience may weigh on her, if she’s pregnant with the child of someone who harmed her brother, her (ex?) best friend, and other people so dramatically? Is there a part of her that would kind of want the child anyway, perhaps in another circumstance? What would it mean, to want that child? This sounds like something Sara and Linda could discuss, and maybe come to understand one another on.

Lisa once said one of the dramatic questions of Young Royals was whether or not people become their parents. If we are going to engage with that question, one way to raise the stakes around it is to make the question of parenthood and reproductive autonomy more real and urgent. Again, I’m not saying this will happen. This is not a season 3 prediction post. But I do think if it did happen, it would be in line with what we’ve seen from the series and its exploration of families and privilege.

#young royals #my meta #wilhelm young royals #sara eriksson #august young royals #pregnancy mention #abuse mention #reproductive autonomy in fiction #these ideas have been brewing for a while and I’ve yelled to heliza about them a lot #thank you for reading and being willing to think about this for those of you who read!

[greghatecrimes]

still can’t believe mr robert catholic guilt chase was the one who killed the dictator and cameron is the one who’s having a moral dilemma about it

#6x17 #robert chase #allison cameron #chameron #houseposting #rewatch lb