The Patrician's stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader
summary: Bucky’s pistol sits cold against your inner thigh as he makes you squirm. He never pulls the trigger—just lets the danger hang between you as he murmurs filth into your ear.
kinks: gun kink (unloaded, intimidation), power imbalance
part of my 2025 kinktober event
authors note: i am not responsible for your consumption during kinktober! the explicit kinks in each of my fics have been shared. if you choose to read anyways and get uncomfortable, that is not my problem nor my fault!!! happy kinktober my lovelies🖤👻🎃
The room smells faintly of gun oil and leather.
It’s not your usual kind of night—but then again, nothing about Bucky Barnes has ever been usual.
You’re perched on the edge of the mattress, breath catching as he circles you like prey. His shirt is gone, the scarred expanse of his chest catching the lamplight, veins in his forearm flexing as he spins the pistol once between his fingers. The weight of it is casual, familiar—he’s done this a thousand times in combat. But now? It’s different. It’s intimate. It’s deliberate.
He pauses in front of you, thumb brushing along the barrel, eyes soft even as his voice drops.
“You remember the rules, right? You give me your color if it gets too much.”
You nod, heart hammering. “I remember.”
“Good girl,” he says, voice low and rough. “What color are you now?”
“Green,” you breathe.
A hum of satisfaction rolls through him, dark and warm, before he steps closer—until the muzzle of the unloaded pistol slides along your thigh. The metal is cold, tracing upward, and your muscles twitch under the touch. You can’t help the gasp that breaks out of you.
Bucky grins against your jaw. “You’re shakin’, doll. Thought you trusted me.”
“I do,” you whisper, the words trembling. “That’s the problem.”
He chuckles, deep and dark. “That’s not a problem. That’s the fun part.”
The gun glides higher, a ghostly pressure at the inside of your leg, just shy of where you ache. He keeps it there, hovering, while his other hand cradles your chin, forcing you to meet his gaze. His eyes are ocean-deep, soft and sharp all at once. You can see it—the duality. Soldier and lover. Danger and devotion.
“Keep your eyes open,” he murmurs. “I wanna watch you fall apart.”
Your breath stutters. He doesn’t move the gun, just presses a little firmer, enough to make your pulse skip. The tension coils tight inside you, every nerve alive and trembling with the unspoken rule: he won’t pull the trigger, but God, he could. That’s the thrill. The trust. The surrender.
He leans in, mouth dragging along your throat, voice a velvet threat. “You know what I think about when I’m at the range?” His lips brush your ear. “How steady my hand is when I’ve got something worth protectin’. How good I’d be if I had to defend what’s mine.”
You whimper—because you know exactly who he means.
“That’s you, sweetheart,” he says. “My favorite target. Always right where I want you.”
The words land heavier than the gun itself. You grip the sheets, muscles trembling as his tongue flicks against your pulse. The weapon shifts slightly, enough to make you shudder.
“Bucky—”
He pulls back just enough to look at you, blue eyes glinting like frost and fire. “Say please.”
You hesitate. He tilts the barrel an inch, smirking when your breath catches.
“Please,” you breathe, half a plea, half a moan.
“That’s my girl.” His voice softens. “You’re perfect like this, you know that? All nervous, tryin’ so hard to behave.”
He sets the gun aside—not dropped, not discarded, just placed carefully within reach—then slides his hand between your thighs, fingers replacing cold metal with warmth. The contrast makes you cry out.
“See?” he murmurs, stroking slow. “Didn’t need the gun to make you shake.”
But you’re already gone, body arching into his touch, pulse thrumming with every word he whispers against your skin. He takes his time unraveling you, never rushing, never cruel—just control wrapped in tenderness, danger laced with devotion.
When you finally come, it’s with his name on your tongue and the ghost of cold steel still lingering on your skin.
He kisses you afterward, soft and grounding, forehead to forehead.
“You okay, doll?”
You nod weakly, smiling. “Still green.”
He grins, brushing his thumb along your cheek. “Good. Next time, maybe I’ll let you aim.”
And just like that—teasing and tenderness, sin and safety—he reminds you what trust really looks like: his weapon unloaded, your walls down, and both of you learning how to handle the power between you.
----
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This is what it looks like when a community stands up to power. When ICE came for workers, this Minnesota neighborhood said: not today. On a freezing day in Minnesota, ICE agents showed up at a construction site in Chanhassen, intent on making arrests.
Two workers fled upward, trapped on the roof of a half-built house as temperatures plunged below zero. No heat. No shelter. Just wind, ice, and federal agents waiting them out.
And then the community showed up.
Neighbors, workers, organizers — people who understood instinctively that letting someone freeze to make a political point is cruelty, not law enforcement. They brought blankets. Hot drinks. Food. They stood outside in the cold for hours, refusing to leave, refusing to let this end quietly.
While ICE agents lingered below, the crowd did what the state would not: they protected human life. They checked on the workers. They shouted encouragement. They made sure those men were not alone on that roof, isolated and expendable in the eyes of a system that treats immigrant labor as disposable until it decides to punish it.
This is what solidarity looks like in practice. Not slogans. Not hashtags. People physically placing their bodies and time between vulnerable workers and a federal agency that has perfected the art of intimidation.
After nearly two hours, ICE left. The workers came down. One was treated by medics. Both survived the cold. No one was dragged away in handcuffs that day.
It’s worth sitting with that for a moment.
In an era when we’re constantly told resistance is futile, that enforcement is inevitable, that there’s nothing regular people can do — a small group of neighbors proved otherwise. They didn’t need weapons or power. They needed resolve, warmth, and the refusal to look away.
This wasn’t about “open borders” or abstract policy debates. It was about whether we accept a country where men are forced to choose between freezing to death or being detained. It was about whether we let federal agents use weather as a weapon. It was about whether community still means something.
Too often, ICE operates in the shadows — early mornings, isolated workplaces, silence as strategy. What happened in Chanhassen broke that script. It showed what happens when enforcement meets witnesses, when fear meets collective presence.
This is the lesson: solidarity works. It slows cruelty. It saves lives. And it reminds those in power that their authority is not absolute when people decide, together, that enough is enough.
In the dead of winter, a community chose warmth. And that matters more than any press release ever could.
Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”
This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.
A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.
Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).
The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.
The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:
Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.
In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:
In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:
Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:
One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.
At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.
A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.
Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:
This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.
Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:
British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.
For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.
Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:
This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.
This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.
But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.
So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?
Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.
But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?
Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”
What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”
Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.
Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.
The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.
Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.
The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.
So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.
In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:
Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”
Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.
[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]
