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It was a beautiful, hyper-passionate romance that everyone in your close-knit surgical department joked about because of how utterly, shamelessly clingy you were. Despite your high-stress career cutting into human skulls, the moment you stepped through the door of her villa in Pedralbes, you transformed. You were the girl who would wrap herself around Alexia’s back like a koala while she tried to cook dinner, the one who would crawl into her lap on the sofa and refuse to move for hours, burying your face in her neck until she laughed that rich, raspy laugh and held you against her chest like you were the only solid thing in her world. Alexia loved it. She matched your energy completely, her powerful athlete's arms locking you against her body with a fierce, possessive warmth that made you feel utterly invincible.

But that beautiful reality came with a shadow: it was completely, entirely secret.

Alexia was a global icon, her every movement tracked by the media, her private life an endless source of public speculation. At first, you didn't mind the shadows. You were a busy woman; you had a department to run, a residency program to oversee, and a never-ending rotation of complex craniotomies. You didn't need the flashing cameras. You didn't need the red carpets.

But hiding a three-year relationship required a heavy tax. It meant deleting your digital footprint, leaving her house through the service elevator, and sitting in the stadium stands three rows behind her family, pretending you were just an acquaintance from the medical consultant staff if anyone looked too closely.

You had tolerated the sacrifice because you believed the foundation was unbreakable. Until the night the structure gave way.

It was a late Friday evening, following a massive Champions League victory at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys. Alexia had hosted a small, private gathering at her home for a few childhood friends from Mollet and a couple of influential sports executives who had helped manage her commercial image. Because you had just finished a grueling twelve-hour surgical shift removing a complex glioma, you had arrived late, slipping through the back entrance into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

As you walked down the short, tiled corridor leading toward the auxiliary lounge, you heard voices through the partially open oak door.

"Come on, Ale, we saw the way that doctor looks at you," a prominent sports agent scoffed, his voice dripping with casual, elite cynicism. "She’s been at almost every private dinner this month. The media is starting to ask if she's more than just a medical advisor. Is she the reason you haven't been linked to anyone else? Are you actually dating her?"

You stopped in the shadow of the hallway, your hand freezing against the cold glass of water. A soft, hopeful flutter bloomed in your chest. You wondered, just for a fraction of a second, if after three years, Alexia was finally going to claim you out loud in front of her inner circle.

Then, Alexia’s laugh echoed through the room. It wasn't the warm, genuine sound that usually vibrated against your skin when you slept. It was sharp, cold, and laced with a defensive, dismissive armor.

"¿Qué dices? No, por favor," Alexia said, her tone carrying an air of total indifference that made your blood instantly run cold. "Y/N is just a neurosurgeon the club utilizes for head trauma consultations. She's great at her job, sure, but she's completely exhausting to be around outside the hospital. She's way too needy, constantly hovering around me like a lost puppy because her own life is just boring charts and operating theatres. She’s just convenient company when I need to decompress between training blocks, guys. It’s nothing real, I promise you. I wouldn't date someone that high-maintenance."

The world simply stopped spinning.

The air in the corridor felt like liquid nitrogen as it rushed into your lungs. Exhausting. Needy. Lost puppy. Convenient company. The words didn't just pierce your heart; they completely, surgically dismantled your entire reality. The very clinginess she had spent three years encouraging, the affection she claimed kept her grounded, was suddenly reduced to an embarrassing, high-maintenance nuisance she mocked to protect her precious privacy. To save herself from a moment of uncomfortable scrutiny from a sports agent, she had completely rewritten your entire love story into a pathetic joke.

You didn't cry. You didn't storm into the room to demand an apology. When a neurosurgeon encounters a catastrophic, uncontainable hemorrhage on the operating table, her emotions freeze into total absolute zero. Panic is a luxury for people who don't hold lives in their hands.

You quietly set the glass of water down on the console table, walked out of the back door, and drove your car back to your small, empty apartment near Vall d'Hebron without looking back a single time.

The silence began the next morning, and it was absolute.

When Alexia woke up, she sent her usual morning text: "Woke up and my koala wasn't here :( Did you have to go in for an emergency surgery, mi amor? Call me the second you're free, I miss you."

The message was marked as read. But no answer came.

By Monday, the silence had transformed into a terrifying, unyielding wall. Alexia had called you twenty times, each attempt dropping straight into the void of a standard corporate voicemail. She sent endless messages, watching the grey ticks turn blue instantly, but the screen remained entirely blank. The complete, sudden withdrawal of your presence felt like the sudden loss of oxygen in a room.

On Tuesday evening, completely beside herself with an uncontainable panic, Alexia drove straight to Vall d'Hebron. She knew your schedule by heart; she knew you were finishing a grand rounds presentation at 7:00 PM. She waited outside the secure glass doors of the neurosurgery administrative wing, her hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets, her heart hammering against her ribs.

When the doors finally slid open, you walked out, flanked by three senior residents and an attending physician. You were wearing your navy blue scrubs beneath a perfectly pressed white lab coat, your hair pulled back into a sharp, professional twist. You were explaining a complex ventricular shunt procedure, your voice carrying that effortless, funny, and brilliant spark that always made your students adore you.

"Y/N!" Alexia called out, her voice cracking slightly as she took a step forward, completely forgetting the hospital staff around you.

The residents stopped, their eyes widening as they recognized the legendary Barcelona captain standing in their hallway.

You stopped too. But your face didn't change. Your hazel eyes, which usually filled with an absolute, radiant joy whenever she appeared, were completely blank. Looking at you was like staring at an unyielding pane of surgical glass.

"Ah, Captain Putellas," you said, your voice entirely level, professional, and completely devoid of a single ounce of warmth. You turned to your residents with a calm, clinical smile. "Go ahead to the ICU and prepare the post-op orders for bed four. I will join you in five minutes."

The doctors nodded quickly, sensing the sudden, suffocating drop in atmospheric pressure, and hurried down the hall.

Once they were out of sight, Alexia took a desperate step closer, her hands reaching out to grab your arm. "Y/N, thank God. Why haven't you answered my texts? I’ve been going out of my mind for three days. I went to your apartment, but you changed the entry code—"

"Please do not touch me in a professional environment, Captain," you said smoothly, stepping back just enough to keep a definitive, unyielding physical distance between you. You didn't raise your voice; you didn't look angry. You looked like an attending physician speaking to a stranger who had lost their way in the corridor. "If the club requires an evaluation for a head injury or a neural consultation, please have your athletic department submit a formal request through the administrative portal. My schedule is currently entirely booked with actual medical emergencies."

Alexia felt the air leave her lungs as if she had been hit by a stray tackle. The coldness in your voice was a physical strike. "What... what are you doing? Why are you calling me that? Y/N, please, it's me. It's Alexia. What happened?"

"I am simply maintaining the boundaries you require," you replied, your gaze fixed somewhere just past her left ear, completely refusing to lock eyes with her. "Out of sight. In secret. Like an exhausting, high-maintenance puppy that doesn't actually exist in your real life. I wouldn't want to overextend my welcome as your 'convenient company,' Captain. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a craniotomy to perform."

Before she could form a single word, you turned on your heel, your white coat billowing slightly behind you as you walked through the secure double doors, the magnetic lock clicking shut with a heavy, definitive thud.

Alexia stood frozen in the middle of the sterile hospital hallway, the realization crashing down on her like a physical weight. The hallway. The auxiliary lounge. Her mind raced back to Friday night—the careless, defensive, arrogant words she had thrown out to a sports agent just to avoid a moment of personal vulnerability, to keep her world locked in its safe, sterile box. She had forgotten that you were in the house. She had completely forgotten that you were coming from a twelve-hour shift just to see her.

"No," Alexia whispered, her hands dropping to her sides as a sickening, suffocating wave of guilt flooded her stomach. She had built a fortress to protect her privacy, but she had accidentally crushed the only woman who made the fortress worth living in under the rubble.

The next two months were a brutal, agonizing descent into absolute hell for Alexia Putellas.

An elite athlete is trained to handle adversity. When a match is slipping away, Alexia knew how to double her efforts, increase the intensity, and force a victory through sheer strength of will. But you weren't a football match; you were a brilliant neurosurgeon who had completely erased her from the architecture of your life.

You blocked her personal phone. You blocked her on every digital platform. When she sent massive arrangements of lilies and white roses to your private office at Vall d'Hebron, you quietly told the nurse to distribute them to the pediatric oncology ward, never keeping a single petal. When she waited outside the hospital parking garage at 2:00 AM in the pouring rain, hoping to just see your face, you drove past her car without a single glance, your eyes fixed straight ahead on the road.

The complete, total absence of your warmth was destroying her.

Alexia couldn't sleep. Her performance on the pitch began to suffer; her passing was uncharacteristically sloppy, her presence in the midfield distracted and hollow. During a training session at Joan Gamper, Mapi León had finally grabbed her by the training bib after Alexia missed three consecutive tactical runs.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Ale?" Mapi demanded, her eyes full of genuine concern. "You look like a ghost. You've lost weight, your head isn't in the game, and you look like you’re about to collapse. Is this about Y/N? What happened?"

Alexia buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with a quiet, broken sob that shocked her teammate. "I broke it, Mapi. I said something horrible to protect the secret, and she heard me. She won't look at me. She won't speak to me. She looks right through me like I’m made of glass."

"Then you don't stop fighting," Mapi said softly, her hand resting heavily on Alexia’s shoulder. "A neurosurgeon spends her whole life fixing things people think are impossible. If you want her back, you have to show her that you're willing to throw away the whole damn box just to hold her hand in the light."

But while Alexia was dying of heartbreak in Pedralbes, you were dying of sheer, unadulterated exhaustion at Vall d'Hebron.

Burnout among surgical chiefs is a silent killer. To cope with the gaping, agonizing void in your chest where Alexia’s warmth used to be, you had thrown yourself into your work with a terrifying, self-destructive intensity. You took every on-call shift. You volunteered for every emergency trauma surgery. You spent forty-eight consecutive hours in the operating theatre, living on bitter hospital coffee and stale vending machine crackers, completely refusing to let your mind rest for even a second. If you stopped working, the memory of her laugh would find you. If you slept, you would dream of her arms around your waist. So, you simply refused to sleep.

Your colleagues noticed. Your chief resident, a close friend named Dr. Lucas Méndez, had tried to intervene multiple times. "Y/N, you look grey. Your hands are steady under the microscope, but you’re running on pure adrenaline and spite. You need to go home. You’ve done four craniotomies in thirty-six hours."

"I'm fine, Lucas," you had muttered, your voice raspy and thin as you stared at a set of MRI scans. "The department needs me."

The breaking point arrived on a rainy Thursday afternoon, precisely nine weeks after the night in the corridor.

You had just finished a grueling, five-hour emergency surgery to repair a ruptured aneurysm in an eight-year-old child. The procedure had been a complete success, but the physical and emotional toll was the final straw your system could bear. As you walked out of the scrub room, tearing your surgical mask from your face, a sudden, violent wave of dizziness hit you.

The sterile white walls of the corridor began to spin rapidly, turning into a blur of fluorescent light. A high-pitched ringing filled your ears, completely blocking out the sound of the hospital alarms. Your knees felt like water, your lungs refusing to expand as a cold, clammy sweat broke out across your forehead.

"Dr. Y/N?" a nurse called out, her voice sounding a million miles away. "Doctor, are you—"

Before she could finish the sentence, your vision went completely black. Your body collapsed like a deck of cards, your head narrowly missing the metal chart trolley as you hit the linoleum floor of the surgical ward, completely unconscious from sheer physical exhaustion, profound dehydration, and a heart that had simply run out of fuel to pump.

At the Ciutat Esportiva, the afternoon training session had just concluded. Alexia sat on the wooden bench in the locker room, her head bowed, staring blankly at the floor tiles while her teammates showered around her. She felt a heavy, suffocating dread in her chest all day, an unexplainable weight that made it hard to breathe.

Suddenly, her phone, resting on the bench beside her, began to vibrate violently.

An unknown, corporate landline number flashed across the screen. Normally, Alexia ignored unsaved numbers during training, but an instinct older than her career made her slide the screen open instantly.

"¿Sí?" she said, her voice raspy.

"Is this Alexia Putellas?" a sharp, authoritative voice asked. The background noise was a chaotic symphony of rhythmic bleeps, rushing footsteps, and overhead pages. A hospital.

Alexia’s blood turned to ice instantly. She stood up from the bench, her hand gripping the phone so hard the plastic creaked. "Yes. Who is this?"

"This is Dr. Anna Torres from the Emergency Department at Hospital Vall d'Hebron," the voice said, urgent but professional. "We have Dr. Y/N here. She collapsed outside the surgical theatres twenty minutes ago due to severe physical exhaustion, acute dehydration, and a critically low blood pressure spike. She’s stable now, but she's completely unresponsive to standard discharge protocols and is currently on an IV drip in ER Bay Three. Before she lost consciousness completely, she had her phone open to your contact info from an old chat archive. We need an immediate family member or designated contact to come down here, sign her medical leave forms, and take her home. She cannot be left alone in this state."

The locker room completely vanished from Alexia’s field of vision.

"I'm coming," Alexia choked out, a cold, violent wave of terror gripping her throat. "I’m ten minutes away. Please... please take care of her. I’m coming right now."

She didn't change out of her training kit. She didn't grab her bag. She threw her car keys into her pocket, ran out of the facility in her slides, and tore down the highway toward Vall d'Hebron like a woman running out of a burning building. The speed limit didn't exist. The traffic didn't exist. The only thing that existed in her universe was the terrifying image of your brilliant, funny, beautiful face lying pale under a harsh hospital sheet.

When she arrived at Vall d'Hebron, she didn't care about the people recognizing her in the lobby. She sprinted through the sliding glass doors of the Emergency Department, her chest heaving, her eyes wild as she scanned the signs until she found the high-security entrance to the treatment bays.

"Emergency Bay Three!" Alexia gasped to the triage nurse, slamming her palms down against the desk. "Dr. Y/N. I’m Alexia Putellas. They called me."

The nurse looked up, her expression softening with a mixture of recognition and gravity. She pointed down the long, chaotic corridor. "Bay Three is on the left, Captain. The attending doctor is waiting for you."

Alexia threw the curtain aside, her breath catching in her throat as she stepped into the small, sterile cubicle.

The sight broke something fundamental inside her soul.

You were lying on the narrow hospital bed, looking incredibly small beneath the coarse white blanket. Your face was almost translucent, your lips dry and chapped, with deep, purple-grey hollows beneath your closed eyes. A clear plastic oxygen cannula sat beneath your nose, and a thick IV line was taped to the back of your pale hand, pumping fluids into your exhausted system. The brilliant, sharp, hilarious Chief of Neurosurgery looked entirely deflated—broken by the very world she had tried so hard to cure.

Dr. Anna Torres, an older physician with a stern, no-nonsense expression, stood at the foot of the bed, reviewing a chart. She looked up as Alexia entered, her eyes dropping to Alexia’s sweaty training gear.

"You're the emergency contact?" Dr. Torres asked, her voice clipped.

"Yes," Alexia whispered, her eyes never leaving your face as she walked slowly to the side of your bed, her knees trembling so badly she had to grip the metal guardrail to stay upright. "What... what happened to her? She’s a doctor here. How did nobody see this coming?"

"Doctors are the worst patients, Miss. Putellas," Dr. Torres said with a heavy, tired sigh. "Your girlfriend has performed fourteen complex neurosurgical operations in the last three weeks alone. She has taken every night shift, skipped every administrative break, and according to her department’s cafeteria logs, she hasn't eaten a proper meal in days. Her body simply ran out of glucose and fluid. She didn't faint; her nervous system literally shut itself down to prevent a cardiac arrest from sheer stress and fatigue."

Alexia closed her eyes, a hot, agonizing tear sliding down her cheek, burning her skin. She did this because of me. I drove her to this.

"She needs absolute rest," Dr. Torres continued, handing Alexia a clipboard of medical leave documents. "I have signed her off from the surgical department for the next three weeks, effective immediately. Her keys are in that plastic basin. If you are going to take her home, you need to ensure she drinks fluids, eats solid food, and does absolutely nothing but sleep. If she stands up before tomorrow morning, her blood pressure will drop again. Can you handle that, or should I admit her to the observation ward?"

"No," Alexia said fiercely, her voice thick with emotion as she signed her name across the bottom of the forms with a shaking hand. "She’s coming home with me. I will take care of her. I swear to you, she won't lift a finger."

The drive back to the villa in Pedralbes was conducted in a heavy, fragile silence. You had partially regained consciousness when the nurses moved you to a wheelchair, but your mind was entirely hazy, your body feeling like it was encased in lead. You hadn't even had the strength to protest when you saw Alexia lifting you carefully into the passenger seat of her SUV, wrapping a thick fleece blanket around your shivering shoulders.

When she pulled into her private garage, she didn't let you try to walk. She reached into the car, sliding one powerful arm beneath your knees and the other securely behind your back, lifting your slight frame against her chest in one smooth, protective motion.

Your head automatically rolled into the crook of her neck, an ancient, instinctual habit your body refused to forget even through the fog of your exhaustion. You inhaled the familiar scent of her skin—laundry detergent, sweat, and that deep, intoxicating warmth that had always meant safety to your tired brain.

"Alexia..." you mumbled, your voice a tiny, dry scratch against her skin. "Let me down. I can walk. I have to go back to the ICU..."

"Cállate, mi vida," Alexia whispered fiercely, her voice breaking as she carried you through the private elevator straight into her massive, sunlit master bedroom. "You are not going back to any hospital. You are staying right here."

She laid you down on the giant, king-sized bed with an tenderness that felt almost holy. She carefully stripped off your stiff hospital scrubs, leaving you in a soft, oversized cotton t-shirt, and pulled the heavy, down comforter up to your chin.

For the next two hours, you slipped back into a deep, dreamless sleep. When you finally opened your eyes again, the harsh glare of the afternoon sun had softened into a warm, amber twilight, casting long, lazy shadows across the white walls of the room. The room smelled of fresh lavender and hot chicken broth.

You shifted your head slightly on the plush pillow, and your breath instantly caught in your throat.

Alexia hadn't left. She was sitting directly on the hardwood floor right beside your bed, her back resting against the mattress, her knees pulled up to her chest. She had finally changed out of her training kit into a pair of worn grey sweatpants, but she looked completely shattered. Her face was buried in her palms, her broad shoulders shaking with quiet, rhythmic sobs that she was desperately trying to muffle so she wouldn't wake you.

The sight of the formidable, unshakeable captain of Barcelona weeping on the floor like a heartbroken child completely dissolved the last lingering remnants of your defensive wall. You were a doctor; you knew when a wound had been cleaned, and you knew when it was time to let the tissue heal.

Slowly, with an immense effort, you slid your hand out from beneath the heavy comforter, your pale fingers reaching out until they gently brushed against the soft hair at the nape of her neck.

Alexia bolted upright instantly, her head snapping around, her hazel eyes wild and completely drenched in tears. When she saw that you were awake, your eyes clear and focused on her, a sharp, choked gasp escaped her lips.

"Hey," you whispered, a tiny, fragile smile touching your dry lips. "Why are you crying on the floor? You look like you're the one who survived a twelve-hour shift."

"Y/N," Alexia breathed, her voice a total wreck. She didn't hesitate. She scrambled up onto the mattress, moving with a desperate, frantic energy, but she stopped just an inch away from you, her hands hovering over your face, trembling violently, completely terrified to touch you without your permission. "Are you okay? Does your head hurt? Do you need water? The doctor said you needed to drink this broth, I have it right here—"

"Alexia," you said softly, interrupting her frantic rambling. You reached up, your hand catching her wrist, your fingers sliding down until they interlocked with hers, your grip surprisingly warm despite your weakness. "Come here."

A loud, broken sob escaped her lips at the simple invitation. The two months of agony, the walls of silence, the terrifying image of you on that ER bed—it all collapsed in a single second. She slid down onto the bed beside you, her powerful arms wrapping around your waist with a desperate, terrifyingly tight grip, burying her face into the crook of your neck as she wept openly, her entire body shaking against yours.

"Lo siento, lo siento, lo siento," Alexia cried into your skin, her voice thick and raw with an unbearable weight of guilt. "I am so sorry, Y/N. I am so sorry for the horrible, disgusting, cowardly things I said to those people in the lounge. I was terrified of the media, I was caught off guard, and I used the worst words in the world to protect a secret because I was a coward. I didn't mean a single word of it. I swear on my life, I swear on everything I am... you are not exhausting. You are not a puppy. You are my entire world."

She pulled back just enough to look down into your eyes, her hands framing your face, her thumbs desperately wiping away the stray tears that were beginning to pool in your eyes.

"I loved every single second you wrapped yourself around my back," Alexia wept, her hazel eyes burning with an intensity that left no room for doubt. "I loved the way you would sit in my lap for hours. I missed it so much, Y/N. I spent two months living in an empty house that felt like a tomb because my koala wasn't here. When the hospital called me today... when they told me you collapsed because you were working yourself to death to avoid me... I felt like my heart was being torn out of my chest. Don't do this to me again. Please. Punch me, scream at me, hate me if you have to... but don't run away into the dark where I can't protect you."

You stared up at her, your chest heaving as the sheer volume of her devotion completely filled the empty space in your soul. You saw the raw, bloodshot truth in her eyes. You saw the physical toll the separation had taken on her own body. She had spent two months fighting a war against the very walls she had built, and she had completely demolished them just to get to your bedside.

"Your apology is structurally sound, Putellas," you choked out through a tearful, wet laugh, your hands rising to grip her forearms. "But your tactical execution during that dinner was absolutely atrocious."

Alexia let out a loud, breathless laugh through her tears, her face lighting up with a radiant, emotional joy that made her look like herself again. "I know. I'm an idiot. A complete, total idiot. But I fixed it, Y/N. I swear I fixed it."

She reached into her sweatpants pocket, pulling out her phone and sliding the screen open with a shaking thumb. She turned the screen toward you.

It was a live post on her official Instagram account—the one with over three million followers. It was a beautiful, candid photograph you didn't even know she had taken months ago, showing you sitting on her terrace in the evening light, your hair loose, laughing at something she had said, looking absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.

The caption beneath the photo was written in large, bold letters in both Catalan and Spanish:

“The most brilliant mind in the world, the finest surgeon at Vall d'Hebron, and the only woman I will ever love.”

The comments section was already a chaotic, exploding waterfall of millions of likes, red hearts, and messages of support from fans, teammates, and the entire sporting community. She hadn't just thrown away the box; she had exploded it in front of the entire world.

Your breath completely caught in your throat, a fresh wave of hot, ecstatic tears blurring your vision as you looked from the screen back up to her face. "Alexia... your sponsors... the club executives..."

"Let them talk," Alexia whispered fiercely, tossing the phone onto the nightstand, completely dismissing the entire global media landscape with a wave of her hand. She leaned down, her face stopping just centimeters from yours, her breath warm against your lips. "Let the whole world write the stories. Out there, I am the player. But in this room, on this bed, I am just a woman who is completely, desperately in love with her girlfriend. I don't care about the cameras anymore, Y/N. I just need you. I need my clingy, beautiful doctor back. Please."

The final wall of doubt inside your soul completely turned to dust.

"Okay," you whispered, your voice thick with emotion. "But I told you... I am incredibly high-maintenance when I'm sick."

"Sé lo que me espera," Alexia murmured with a breathless, beautiful smile, and then she closed the final distance.

The kiss was entirely different from the cold, professional distance of the last nine weeks. It was deep, possessive, and filled with a profound, overwhelming warmth that completely healed every single broken circuit in your exhausted brain. Alexia’s lips parted yours with a smooth, intoxicating hunger, her tongue tracing your lower lip with a reverent sweetness that made your soul vibrate. Her powerful arms slid beneath your back, lifting your upper body off the mattress to pull you completely flush against her chest, holding you so tightly it felt like she was trying to fuse your ribs together.

You let out a soft, satisfied sigh into her mouth, your arms instantly locking around her neck, your fingers tangling into the short blonde hair at the base of her skull, pulling her closer, tasting the salt of her tears and the rich sweetness of the broth she had prepared.

When she finally pulled back, just an inch, she didn't let you move. She shifted her body until she was lying completely flat on the mattress beside you, her long legs tangling with yours beneath the heavy comforter, her arm sliding beneath your head to act as a permanent pillow.

The moment she was settled, the high-key, shameless clinginess that defined your relationship returned with a violent, roaring vengeance.

Now that the angst was gone, your body completely demanded the comfort it had been starved of for months. You shifted your hips, crawling across the sheets until your entire front was pressed tightly against her side. You threw your right leg completely over her powerful thighs, pinning her down, and buried your face directly into the warm crook of her neck, your fingers digging into the fabric of her t-shirt as if you were trying to burrow inside her skin.

Alexia let out a rich, deep laugh—that beautiful, raspy sound you had missed so much—and her arms locked around your waist instantly, pulling your hips even closer until there wasn't a single millimeter of space left between your bodies. She began pressing sweet, lingering kisses into your hair, your temple, and the soft skin behind your ear, her hand rubbing slow, soothing circles across your back.

"Madre mía, te extrañaba tanto," Alexia murmured against your skin, her voice full of a warm, sleepy contentment that vibrated straight into your chest. "My little koala is back."

"Shut up," you mumbled into her collarbone, your voice drowsy but full of an absolute, unbreakable happiness as the warmth of her body finally allowed your nervous system to fully cool down. "You said I was a lost puppy. Now you have to deal with the consequences."

"I will deal with them for the next fifty years," Alexia whispered softly, tightening her grip around you, her nose nudging your jawline affectionately. "Drink your broth first, and then you can sleep for three weeks. I’m not letting you go to the bathroom alone, understood?"

"Understood, Captain," you sighed, your eyelids growing heavy as the absolute safety of her presence finally allowed your brain to drift toward a deep, natural sleep.

Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-buy-your-mom-iphone-doj-apple-complaint-2024-3

How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:

https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability

It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.

But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good.

The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Xinping's. You know, Xi Xinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/18/trump-praise-authoritarians-00132350

US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on server in the EU:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.

Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.

Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help. Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality of their own property.

The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.

If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s companies, has been used to created thousands of nonconsensual “undressing” or “nudify” bikini images—further industrializing and normalizing the process of digital sexual harassment. But it’s only the most visible—and far from the most explicit. For years, a deepfake ecosystem, comprising dozens of websites, bots, and apps, has been growing, making it easier than ever before to automate image-based sexual abuse, including the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This “nudify” ecosystem, and the harm it causes to women and girls, is likely more sophisticated than many people understand.

“It’s no longer a very crude synthetic strip,” says Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert who has tracked the technology for more than half a decade. “We’re talking about a much higher degree of realism of what's actually generated, but also a much broader range of functionality.” Combined, the services are likely making millions of dollars per year. “It's a societal scourge, and it’s one of the worst, darkest parts of this AI revolution and synthetic media revolution that we're seeing,” he says.

Over the past year, WIRED has tracked how multiple explicit deepfake services have introduced new functionality and rapidly expanded to offer harmful video creation. Image-to-video models typically now only need one photo to generate a short clip. A WIRED review of more than 50 “deepfake” websites, which likely receive millions of views per month, shows that nearly all of them now offer explicit, high-quality video generation and often list dozens of sexual scenarios women can be depicted into.

Meanwhile, on Telegram, dozens of sexual deepfake channels and bots have regularly released new features and software updates, such as different sexual poses and positions. For instance, in June last year, one deepfake service promoted a “sex-mode,” advertising it alongside the message: “Try different clothes, your favorite poses, age, and other settings.” Another posted that “more styles” of images and videos would be coming soon and users could “create exactly what you envision with your own descriptions” using custom prompts to AI systems.

“It's not just, 'You want to undress someone.’ It’s like, 'Here are all these different fantasy versions of it.’ It's the different poses. It's the different sexual positions,” says independent analyst Santiago Lakatos, who along with media outlet Indicator has researched how “nudify” services often use big technology company infrastructure and likely made big money in the process. “There’s versions where you can make someone [appear] pregnant,” Lakatos says.

A WIRED review found more than 1.4 million accounts were signed up to 39 deepfake creation bots and channels on Telegram. After WIRED asked Telegram about the services, the company removed at least 32 of the deepfake tools. “Nonconsensual pornography—including deepfakes and the tools used to create them—is strictly prohibited under Telegram’s terms of service,” a Telegram spokesperson says, adding that it removes content when it is detected and has removed 44 million pieces of content that violated its policies last year.

Lakatos says, in recent years, multiple larger “deepfake” websites have solidified their market position and now offer APIs to other people creating nonconsensual image and video generators, allowing more services to mushroom up. “They’re consolidating by buying up other different websites or nudify apps. They’re adding features that allow them to become infrastructure providers.”

So-called sexual deepfakes first emerged toward the end of 2017 and, at the time, required a user to have technical knowledge to create sexual imagery or videos. The widespread advances in generative AI systems of the past three years, including the availability of sophisticated open source photo and video generators, have allowed the technology to become more accessible, more realistic, and easier to use.

General deepfake videos of politicians and of conflicts around the world have been created to spread misinformation and disinformation. However, sexual deepfakes have continuously created widespread harm to women and girls. At the same time, laws to protect people have been slow to be implemented or not introduced at all.

“This ecosystem is built on the back of open-source models,” says Stephen Casper, a researcher working on AI safeguards and governance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has documented the rise in deepfake video abuse and its role in nonconsensual intimate imagery generation. “Oftentimes it’s just an open-source model that has been used to develop an app that then a user uses,” Casper says.

The victims and survivors of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII), including deepfakes and other nonconsensually shared media, are nearly always women. False images and nonconsensual videos cause huge harm, including harassment, humiliation, and feeling “dehumanized.” Explicit deepfakes have been used to abuse politicians, celebrities, and social media influencers in recent years. But they have also been used by men to harass colleagues and friends, and by boys in schools to create nonconsensual intimate imagery of their classmates.

“Typically, the victims or the people who are affected by this are women and children or other types of gender or sexual minorities,” says Pani Farvid, associate professor of applied psychology and founder of The SexTech Lab at The New School. “We as a society globally do not take violence against women seriously, no matter what form it comes in.”

“There's a range of these different behaviors where some [perpetrators] are more opportunistic and do not see the harm that they're creating, and it is based on how an AI tool is also presented,” Farvid says, adding some AI companion services can target people with gendered services. “For others, this is because they are in abusive rings or child abuse rings, or they are folks who are already engaging in other forms of violence, gender-based violence, or sexual violence.”

One Australian study, led by the researcher Asher Flynn, interviewed 25 creators and victims of deepfake abuse. The study concluded that a trio of factors—increasingly easy-to-use deepfake tools, the normalization of creating nonconsensual sexual images, and the minimization of harms—could impact the prevention and response to the still growing problem. Unlike the widespread public sharing that happened with nonconsensual sexual images created using Grok on X, explicit deepfakes were more likely to be shared with victims or their friends and family privately, the study found. “I just simply used the personal WhatsApp groups,” one perpetrator told the researchers. “And some of these groups had up to 50 people.”

The academic research found four primary motivations for the deepfake abuse—of 10 perpetrators they interviewed, eight identified as men. These included sextortion, causing harm to others, getting reinforcement or bonding from their peers, and curiosity about the tools and what they could do with them.

Multiple experts WIRED spoke to said many of the communities developing deepfake tools have a “cavalier” or casual attitude to the harms they cause. “There's this tendency of a certain banality of the use of this tool to create NCII or even to have access to NCII that are concerning,” says Bruna Martins dos Santos, a policy and advocacy manager at Witness, a human rights group.

3. Variety of Skill/Style

Some of Z's pieces seem incredibly advanced: x x

While others have less detail and seem closer to a beginner's art: x

Some are realistic: x x

Others are cartoon or comic-like: x x

4. Lack of Personalization

Most of their captions are short and simple without any mention of what their vision was. Scrolling through their profiles, you cannot see any behind-the-scenes posts. No timelapses, sketches, etc. The only exception is this post, which was uploaded roughly 5 hours before I posted this. The only reason they posted the sketch is because @castielsprostate requested it.

While no artist is required to share their process, I find it especially odd that they don't. Their introductory Patreon post states that their Patreon page is for "finished artwork.... No timelapses, no pressure content. Just the actual art." If they aren't posting "pressure content" elsewhere, why mention it here?

5. AI Artifacts

I am going to share one example of each AI artifact that I feel speak for themselves. I apologize for the lack of image descriptions but I have spent a lot of time on this post as it is; if someone wants to add those in a reblog that would be very welcome.

Hyper-rendered

x

Blurred Brushstrokes

x

Inconsistent Lighting

x

Orange Haze

A lot of their pieces fit the bill, but this one of Sam stands out the most to me:

x

Blending Objects

(notice how Cas's head seems to sink into the cabinet door)

x

5. Miscellaneous

These are some things that I would not necessarily look for as "proof" that a fan used AI in their art process, but contribute to the bigger picture.

Patreon Text Posts

While some of their pieces make me scratch my head and do look to me like human-created art, I have no doubts about their Patreon text posts. Each post and caption is clearly AI-generated. I am not going to get into all the reasons why, but if you are familiar with AI-generated writing, you will recognize it on their Patreon. Here is an example from January 9* (emphasis mine):

This one started as a Bi Pride piece and then very quickly spiralled into me getting completely lost in lighting, colour, and soft, stupidly emotional nonsense. I wanted this to feel warm, intimate, and a little unreal. Like they’re standing inside the colours instead of in front of them. The bi flag tones aren’t just in the background, they’re actually lighting them. Touching them. Wrapping around them. Dean was always the obvious choice for this, but it didn’t feel right without Cas there too. So this became less about “a pride drawing” and more about closeness. Connection. That quiet moment right before a kiss where everything feels loud and silent at the same time.

*This post is included in their "free" tier.

Requests

Comments under the Instagram post of Dean and Cas on a Ferris wheel ride indicate that Z accepts and fulfills requests very quickly and without discretion.

Patreon, in General

The fact that they started a Patreon almost immediately after they began posting art is also suspicious. It feels as if they are trying to profit off their art right away, rather than posting their art for the joy of it.

Their only Patreon tier is seemingly $17.50 a month, which is crazy high. I have a feeling this changed recently, because they has four paid members and are receiving $24.22/month. The math isn't mathing on that one.

And to clarify, the math isn't the red flag. It's that they are profiting off of art that is most likely not their own.

6. Conclusion

While I've given plenty of examples of art that reads very obviously to me as AI-generated, there are still other pieces that don't. Z has posted a progress sketch. They also claim that all the art is their own and they do not use AI in any part of the process.

x @blanketforcas

While I clearly don't believe that claim, these are three things that make me hesitate to say that Z posts only 100% AI-generated content. My suspicion is that a few of their pieces are actually their own, a few use AI to enhance their work or add detail and coloring, and a few are fully AI-generated.

I truly want to believe that Z is a budding artist who wants to be known in the fandom space and receive recognition for their work. And I hope that they find success with art that they are creating on their own. But at this time, I do not feel that they are being honest with their followers and supporters or the fandom space at large.

Z, if you are seeing this and have made it this far, please hear me: If you share art that demonstrates your true passion and skill, we will accept you with open arms. But if you are dishonest with us and post AI-generated content, you are not welcome in the fandom space. Please reconsider your strategies and be more transparent about your content.

For everyone else reading, please don't take my post as gospel. I am not a fan artist, though I consider myself somewhat proficient in being able to identify AI-generated content. I also consulted other fan artists before sharing this. I post this to share information, raise awareness, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.