#I THINK YOU LOST YOUR MORALS GIRL. — 𝖍𝖊𝖆𝖉𝖈𝖆𝖓𝖔𝖓𝖘

[ssincielo]

LOURDES + childhood (friends).

hi again. an overdue-ish post relating to some random childhood / social headcanons that i’ve come up with over the past three years — exacerbated by the film waves (2019) living in my head all the time rent free & emily’s life paralleling so much of lolo’s life that i can’t breathe sometimes. enjoy!!!! (& indulge me in more childhood bff’s <3)

i kind of briefly described her upbringing in this headcanon post from 2021, but it was moreso focused on the entire santino family as a whole. so this one will be more specific to lourdes. let’s get into it!

lourdes is a premie baby. it’s glossed over briefly in the first headcanon post on how this came to be, with lucia being jumped in her thirty-second week of pregnancy by a few vengeful ex girlfriends of alonzo’s — but our baby was built different! that being said, she did sort of have a more restrictive experience growing up. she didn’t even come home until she was about a month & a half old, and she had like, lots of issues with feeding, breathing, & her immune system in general. she was a very teeny toddler, but eventually developed pretty normally around age two. the real issue that still persists to this day at her big ol’ age is 1. she sometimes gets easily out of breath / requires a nebulizer at night during dry air months, and 2. that her immune system is still shit. so if you give her any kind of sick bug, she will want to kill you.

i also imagine that she literally has doctors’ notes approving her for weeks off for colds / flus. very awful times. how does she care for herself when she’s sick while living alone. no one may know.

lourdes is also very shy. which i’ve also mentioned, yes — but i don’t know how much i can emphasize this. her shyness also comes from how restrictive lucia was when lourdes was still a baby. grandparents & aunties / uncles literally could not hold her until the age of two, and even then, lourdes eventually realized she didn’t like being held or even looked at by extended family members. she has a couple of aunts that got really fed up with her because she would whine & run away from greetings, or just straight up ignore those very distant members that swear they’ve known you for your entire life but you have no recollection of them whatsoever. you know the type.

as she got older, was able to go out a little more, and got some more interaction, lourdes didn’t ignore or hide away from greetings that much anymore — but that’s usually all you got. pre-school & playgrounds were a literal fight for her life, because her siblings were able to wild out with other kids no problem, but her? if you had a toy she really wanted, she wouldn’t ask to play with you. she wouldn’t play with something else. she wouldn’t even take it from you. she would stare, very sadly & wistfully, while sitting next to whoever her caregiver was. real shy girl shit.

this is also the reason why lourdes prefers staying in & watching sit-coms as a way of bonding. at a certain point, she didn’t enjoy going outside to playgrounds unless she had to in school or if she was with one of her older siblings who were able to integrate her into games & conversations far more easily. even as a grown ass adult, if she wants to hang with you, she won’t suggest a bar or a club or even a cool restaurant (unless she really wants to try their menu or discovered a small little place & wants to show you as an Act Of Love). she’ll either take you to a botanical park, or she’ll have you watching re-runs of martin & the proud family. your choice!

lourdes truthfully was at her social peak while nearing the end of middle school, around ages twelve / thirteen. by that point, her sister was too old & temperamental to do things with her without being forced to, and ramone was slightly more willing but would rather not have his baby sister around the corner boys he sold with, so she learned to develop a “social mask” of sorts. lourdes honestly didn’t give a shit about majority of the trends that her schoolmates were into, but she started cheerleading around this time so she at least had that shared in common with other girls her age.

but twelve & thirteen were also the ages where her life becomes very, very different than other girls in her class. she didn’t get talks about dating or the birds & the bees. (i mean, she did, but lucia was alone in that fight & beatrice was not great at giving boy advice aside from letting them buy her things and running their pockets.) she was learning how to aim & shoot glocks perfectly at targets, identify the different neighborhood safe zones, & helping count garbage bags full of money on the weekends. all hands on deck, chi chi, alonzo would say — and sure, it was fascinating, but it was not something you share with the girls at a sleepover.

by fourteen, she’s immersed in cheer & science. a little more guarded, but also comfortable with expressing her interests. the friends she had between then & sixteen are the ones that she remembers fondly — the ones taped on her bedroom walls, the photobucket pictures from parties & concerts & outings to manhattan & brooklyn, the memories in the box under her bed that she doesn’t quite show to anyone. but the peak ends during her junior year of high school...we all know why.

i think that lourdes attracted a lot of opposite personalities in her childhood. she’s the shy, reserved, bookish girl who knew really obscure facts about chemistry & music and things on tv, and her foils were almost always the wild, carefree, skinned knee kind of kids who constantly dare her to jump from the swing set & promising her that she needs to live a little. i also think lourdes attracted people who shared the same niche as her — the quiet kids, the passionate kids, the kids who were constantly outside on walks to give themselves a break from whatever went on in their house, the kids who asked her at random to hop on the train to central park or a museum & she wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. curious kids. those were her kids. but in the same breath, if she was around a kid who was a lot more lonelier & softer than her, maybe even bullied? lourdes was that loud kid. don’t fuck around with her or her friends. yes, she’s calling her brother & his friends and her daddy & her uncle and all their friends, so yes you better think twice before bullying me about my bottom teeth or my pudgy tummy.

so who are her childhood friend connections? right now, it’s just @vihilum​’s beautiful tommy jarvis. she met him when she was six. their mothers were friends who visited each other often, their sisters were pre-teens who would play music really loud while chatting about classmates, and tommy was showing lourdes some cool mask he just made while lourdes cartwheels, or they’re helping their mothers cook, or sitting on park swings in their later years with coco helados, or her favorite of just. leaving out to get pizza & stay out really late until ramone came & got them to take them home. really attached at the hip. but he moved away when they were twelve & she just doesn’t hear from him again! so that’s fun :c

who are her other childhood friend connections? IDK YOU TELL ME

in conclusion: this woman is a baby & you need to be lifelong friends w/ her thank you

[ssincielo]

a while back, i made a headcanon post on my multimuse about my muses & what they were like as lovers + what they look for in love. it was a hot commodity in my brain & in the notes, so i figured what the fuck, let’s do one here too. (this is mostly a long ass timeline of her relationships & romantic life and doesn’t follow the structure of my old ‘the muses & love’ post that gave me this idea in the first place until the very end, but u guys will induldge me anyway <3)

just to pre-face: i’ve actually been sitting on this for a year & some change because up until recently, the idea of love made our chubby cherub feel sad & icky + i actually value her platonic relationships more than the possibility of romantic ones, but anyways! here’s LOURDES and LOVE.

(a head’s up that on principle, this briefly mentions one of my longest writing partners / favorite writer ever, @hoodspeare​’s gianni oversacce-knight. love & miss u, bby!)

lourdes’ earliest exposure to love came from her immediate family. alonzo santino loved the fuck out of lucia quiñones-santino — heavily. they had been through what normal couples would perceive as almost impossible circumstances, and even when their ideologies differed & they had beef, lourdes knew at a young age even that her father had the utmost respect for her mother. he wouldn’t have admitted it so shamelessly if this were the 80′s still, but he’s smitten by her. 

(he still is, to this day. sure, she’s very hot & cold with him since the death of ramone & the loss of lourdes. but sometimes, he stands behind her in the kitchen while she’s cooking; hands on her waist, chin on her shoulder, rocking her side to side. it’s little. it’s a lot.)

she knew that her parents’ relationship wasn’t always sunshine & rainbows, however. there were arguments, there were petty fights, there were even moments where she thought that her family could’ve been broken apart at any moment because lucia & the kids were threatened one too many times & she was fed up with their lifestyle. but there was always respect. hell, alonzo would talk lucia up to people so much, you’d think she was god sent directly to earth. he’d dote on her during their good days, treat her with dates when she reached her personal milestones, flirt with her like it was still 1986 and they weren’t married with three kids at home, embarrass the hell out of the siblings with overly public displays of affection. she knew from a young age that she didn’t want the exact same circumstances that her mother shared with her father, but lourdes knew she definitely wanted a man who held similar values to alonzo when it came to love.

she also saw & felt love from her grandparents — except, she related this form of love to loss instead. her maternal grandmother spoke often of her deceased husband. his pictures & their wedding photos were still up in her apartment. she still kept her wedding band on her finger. some of his clothes still remained in the closet. her paternal grandparents were a little more dicey & in it for the sake of longevity, but he never spoke ill of her & she kept his secrets. only when she turned thirteen did she realize that the relationship grew sour once he was sent to prison on major offenses for twenty odd years.

all of this into consideration, lourdes never acted on romantic love on her own. growing up, she was terribly shy. she took longer to warm up to others than ramone did, or even beatrice. she wasn’t ugly or mean about her shyness — but she wasn’t anybody’s first choice to ask to the movies, either. 

that’s not to stay that she hasn’t had some action, however minimal. she had her first kiss in middle school at a friend’s party during seven minutes in heaven with a cute boy who honestly didn’t seem all that into it, thought about it for exactly three weeks, then realized it wasn’t that deep to him so it shouldn’t be that deep to her. all of her friends got to experience the standard middle school relationship rites involving holding hands between classes, texting, and changing their relationship statuses on facebook, sure — but the reputation of her father and her brother often preceded her while she was still in school & during formative years. because of this, lourdes was stuck with two evils: either no one wanted to date her because they didn’t want to deal with the wrath of alonzo & the streets if things went south, or some shithead kids only tried to get close to her in order to try & get in with the gang she was affiliated with. so she just chose not to date for a while.

she did get her very first boyfriend during her junior year of high school, despite the hassle. a boy named ja’marcus brooks. it was a typical high school romance, & she even planned her college locations around his & actively wanted them to be together. — but she turns sixteen, her brother dies in her arms, and after many tense conversations & passive aggressive arguments about her attitude, she gets broken up with via text. because in her mourning, he didn’t think she was the girl he wanted to be with anymore.

(he asked for his $50 pandora bracelet back & scrubbed her off of social media. on top of everything else she’d been going through, lourdes literally wanted to die.)

from that point on, lourdes swore off dating seriously. this is also around the time that she drops out of school during main verse & chooses to get jumped into the street gang her family’s affiliated with, so she really had no time for a steady love life in between trying to discreetly run hefty amounts of drugs throughout the city. by the age of eighteen, she definitely isn’t interested in dating anyone when she spends over eight hours a day in a cramped, hot basement with three other half naked women cooking heavy narcotics all night.

she did indulge herself in situationships & meaningless hook up’s from time to time, though. — if only to fill the void of her loneliness & failures. she loses her virginity at the age of nineteen to some random hot stranger on the bathroom floor at a party & drinks herself stupid after that. she had one or two guys she was seeing (see: texting & sometimes fucking) off and on but wouldn’t consider them her boyfriends or even people she’d been dating / mildly interested in otherwise. occasionally, she’d spend the night with someone, a friend of a friend she’d met at a kickback or a charming street ball player at the courts, only to come back to her parents’ apartment early in the morning with vague shame and annoyance. but none of these encounters were acts of love, and none of these people held any weight in her heart.

in between the five years of her dabbling & her direct involvement in drug running and cooking, she signs her contract to become a full time narcotics cook for the oversacce cartel for a period of sixteen months, and she has what is arguably the closest thing to a ‘crush’ that she’s had in years. except, there were a few problems with her in-house crush. — primarily, that her feelings were towards gianni oversacce-knight, one of her many employers and technically her boss. the family she worked for had more money, more power, more connections than she could possibly imagine — she was just a girl who happened to get lucky. plus, twelve hours in a four million dollar lab built just for her, monitored through a security camera and the occasional visit in person, and looming knowledge that she would be replaceable in just a year & a half didn’t exactly scream workplace romance.

how she dealt with this crush? being the absolute worst version of herself, rejecting her own feelings, being a huge bitch to everyone around her & eventually running away from the crime family. to this day, she still has a sore spot for gianni & struggles to cope with the intensity of her feelings for him.

with her (abysmal) history taken into consideration, it’s slightly easier to understand why love makes lourdes feel icky. she’s seen it given to other people, but rarely has it ever been directed towards her — at least, not entirely in positive situations or with the right kinds of people. realistically, her parents’ relationship still holds first place as her healthiest exposure to what love, romance, and relationships are like.

starting from the beginning of her main verse (age twenty five) to now? i feel like lourdes, to this day, has never been in a long term romantic relationship with anyone. she’s very avoidant of hook ups & dating app culture, because she knows better and knows that these kinds of interactions aren’t fulfilling to her. would she like to have a romantic relationship at some point? absolutely! but she’s still very icy, and it would still be very weird for her all at once. if she rushes into a relationship with someone, she brushes away hugs or unprompted touches. she stiffens at kisses. she squirms at the idea of having sex with someone she’s romantic with for the first time — because at this point, she hasn’t had a sexual encounter in years, and certainly not while sober!

on the contrary, if sex is the only way she’s able to be intimate with someone initially, she becomes wary at displays of affection that take place outside of sex. like...why are we holding hands right now. why are you being nice to me. why do you have feelings for me. it will be even more difficult to woo her romantically, because the only established connection she makes in her brain right now is us = sex, not us = romance. maybe it’d be different in like, a friends with benefits situation? but even still, she treats her friends almost like extensions of her family, so it would just. be weird!!!

hypothetically, what does she give as a lover? warm hues of pink. she’s physical affection — soft touches, light kisses to the knuckles or shoulders, leaning body weight against yours and running fingers through hair. she’s cooking for you, she’s bathing with you, she’s pulling you into her very little bubble and trusting that you won’t burst it with cruelty. she’s a deer in headlights & uncertain with a lot of things in the beginning — for your comfort & for hers. once she’s comfortable? the shit talking is unreal. the banter is endless. the sun is rising before you both realize it because you were up laughing & smoking & going back and forth with each other. when she loves you? it’s deep. really deep. it’s devotion. she doesn’t do shit in halves. it’s alonzo’s passion & lucia’s gentleness. it’s pink spilling into red, and the simple idea of being able to write that is very exciting. i’m excited for u all fr

basically, what it boils down to is something i wrote a few weeks ago: she wants to be loved by someone other than her dead brother. she wants to be loved by someone other than her dead brother. she wants to be loved by someone other than her dead brother.

(i also feel the need to add — these last three bullets? get real fucking confusing in the final girl au. i’m not even sure she would even be capable of being a romantic partner in that headspace. i’ll bet u guys three quarters that she sucks at it & if u change my mind, those quarters are yours baby)

so, that’s that. i know it’s long, but i still have things about this post that i hate despite rewriting it? i think i just spend so much time on who lourdes is & how she thinks / how she handles certain situations that i never even contemplated what romance for her would even be like. like, she is a lover, yes — but surprisingly, i have never really written lourdes in romantic love before. i got an anon here back in 2020 asking about her first love, and i literally lost my shit because she honestly...doesn’t have one??? she’s never been in love. it’s so unfair :/ she wanna be me so bad

but thank u guys for reading. love u all. i’m cool w/ any dynamic, but if this lit a fire in you & you wanna explore going There with lourdes....come chat ;) we can pre-plot some things or we can wing it ;) ;) ;)

[ssincielo]

oh another thing!!! while lourdes shares most visual similarities with kiana as an fc, i wanna make it clear that lourdes is a chubby girl. most pinchable cheeks you’ve ever seen. love handles galore. her tummy rolls & thighs squish when she sits and that is ok with her. she might’ve been a little slimmer when she was in high school due to cheerleading, but that was like ten years ago!

so yea, she a lil thicc. huggin her is a dream :’)

[ssincielo]

hi cuties. let’s get into some details abt lourdes’ shiny new slasher verse, bc i’m impulsive & we all love that for me. <3

so for the most part, lourdes’ early life & family dynamics are relatively the same as they are in main verse. there are some minor differences between the two, however — alonzo’s criminal dealings are now way more discreet than they are in main verse. to most people, alonzo simply runs a mechanic shop / junkyard. ramone is still affiliated, but it’s less about alonzo & more about tagging along with his friends.

another big difference is that lourdes does not drop out, nor does she become affiliated herself. she actually makes it to her senior year without much incident. gasp! everyone applaud our chemistry nerd & cheerleader!

so anyway, here’s how it all went down. an eighteen year old lourdes, still shy but much more social in this verse compared to her main, decides to give in to her friends & attend a graduation party for her class in long island. at first, she was very much on the fence about going — the invitation had been sent via group text by an unsaved number, so she wasn’t sure who the hell was hosting. still, it was sort of a last hoorah for her graduating class, and someone was gonna throw one anyway, so...why not a big blow out house party the saturday before graduation?

in little to no time, the party was raging. it was held at a rather large house, which lourdes doesn’t immediately recognize as a friend or acquaintance of hers personally, but her friends easily brush it aside. it’s fucking huge! it has a swimming pool! no parents! it’s like every single cliche suburban teen movie she’s ever seen on television, and she actually loves it. it took a lot of convincing for her parents to even let her go in the first place, so lourdes was going to make the most of it. the deal was, she was going to be home before midnight — no exceptions.

...except, lourdes (among the rest of her friends & peers), became rather wasted. she’s an absolute wreck and misses her 11:30 train back to harlem, and subsequently her midnight curfew. because of this, her older brother ramone decides to drive out to long island & go get her himself since she made sure to text him the address in case anything happened.

while ramone was on the way, things started...getting weird. some of her friends were just. straight up disappearing. at first, she brushes it off — she’s drunk as hell & very high, as were her friends, and there were a lot of cute seniors in their class. so maybe they went to hook up. but more party goers were disappearing, too. kids going upstairs but never coming back down. hunting for more alcohol hidden in the basement or the garage, but the bottle supply wasn’t being restocked. calling her friends and getting sent to voicemail in return. it got eerie, and her ass sobers up real quick once one of her close friends doesn’t come back from the bathroom.

at some point after midnight, her brother crashes the party to come take her home. she’s belligerent at first, because where the fuck are her friends. she’s not leaving without them, they were raised better than that. of course, because this is his baby sister & she’s freaking out while tweaking, he agrees to look for the group she came with and make sure they were good or on their own way home before heading out — he even promised to hide the fact that she was shitfaced & would tell their parents that she was late because she wanted to make sure they were all safe. unfortunately, she never gets the chance to actually look for them.

12:30am, a video gets sent to the same group text that the invitation came from. multiple videos. the videos? bodies. — at first, some of the remaining partygoers thought it was some elaborate senior prank. they’d view the video, have a nice laugh, and see their friends come back downstairs covered in ketchup & parading around about how everyone fell for it.

12:35am, the livestream starts. cameras in every room. and in one of the upstairs room, the first live murder happened. the killer never showed their face, nor did they kill on camera — lourdes had to watch a large amount of the senior class basically walk into their own gruesome deaths. then follows the rules of every slasher movie ever, partygoers dropping like flies either defending themselves in overestimated glory or making stupid choices trying to escape while drunk. lourdes stays close to ramone the entire night, uses her head to keep most of her surviving group safe, and realizes that whoever’s behind the slaying clearly had beef against the graduating class as a whole, being that some deaths were almost intentional for certain people.

it’s 5am when her group dwindles down. the killer starts getting personal, and outright attacks anyone left surviving or trying to escape before sunrise. ramone, hoping to use the killer’s distraction to help his baby sister climb out of the window, ends up dying right in front of lourdes before narrowly escaping the window with a few deep stabs & cuts to the legs. up until that point, she was certain that the killer(s) had been targeting her graduating class only — but clearly, it was a fucking free-for-all now.

emphasis on killer(s), because once lourdes cuts through the backyard to get to the front, she’s ambushed. attacked & stabbed multiple times in the face, torso, legs, and a near fatal slash in her abdomen. what saved her was stealing ramone’s phone beforehand & sending a picture of the house to his groupchat of friends — HELP, LO HERE, DYING. his friends were competent enough to get the message, and EMTs & police finally arrived to find lourdes dying next to a body holding a knife. she bludgeoned the fucker in the head with a rock. go, lourdes!!!

the aftermath was shit. lourdes was in the hospital for weeks, underwent numerous surgeries to try and repair internal organ / nerve damage, and required a few blood transfusions to keep her stable before undergoing months of physical therapy. she also finds out that more than half of her graduating class had died that night, and the school & law enforcement thought it best to skip a ceremony & mail the diplomas out to the families — because those who did survive, were barely hanging on. even worse? in this verse, the santino family unit still implodes. alonzo & beatrice blame lourdes for ramone’s death. he wouldn’t have died if you would’ve fucking come home like you were supposed to. lucia, as thankful as she had been to at least have one of her kids make it home to her, still was very clearly Not the same towards lourdes, and could barely speak to her without choking up. so six months after the fact, lourdes moves out on her own.

for what it was worth, lourdes did try to move on with her life. she moves out to the bronx, enrolls in some classes at bronx community college, tries to get a job. unfortunately, her PTSD & night terrors took a huge toll on her — even worse in this verse than it is in main verse, as lourdes now very publicly experiences episodes in unfamiliar settings & around unknown people. not to mention the amount of people that gawk at her & ask questions about literally the most horrific night of her life, because nobody wants to be asked ‘so what was it like?’ unprovoked, thank you very much. she drops out almost as quickly as she enrolls, and while she’s not full blown agoraphobic, it’s going to take a fucking lot to convince her to leave the house.

in this verse, i place her age at around twenty three. in interactions, it’s been roughly five years since the party, and she’s a lot more worse for wear. aside from the mental scars, there are lots of physical ones as well — deep scars along her cheeks, shoulders, legs, and a very nasty scar across her abdomen from where the girl was nearly gutted. she experiences frequent pain, nightmares, anxiety attacks, and will literally only leave her house if she runs out of groceries that delivery apps don’t cover.

with that being said, i’m calling all the horror cuties. since this is an au for her, i’m open to interactions & connections that normally wouldn’t make sense for her — like, i’m really digging a “i survived a mass murder” support group for her, cause she needs one!

i also winged all of this based on various slasher tropes, and these may / will definitely change soon. lolz.

in conclusion: support me <3

[ssincielo]

one day lourdes will talk to someone (either a friend or her brand new therapist) about the fact that a small part of her deep down really hates herself...because her first reaction to ramone’s death was to hate him for leaving her. and a piece of her still hates him for leaving her.

[ssincielo]

i’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that 2022 marks almost ten years to the day of ramone’s death / nearly six years since lourdes first became estranged from her family. and while i can’t foresee right now her being full on forgiven by alonzo, i do like to imagine that eventually, he does cave into lucia’s wishes. that with one child deceased and another starting a family of her own, it’s unfair to continue treating their youngest as if she doesn’t exist. and that little by little, things start to happen: lourdes notices that she’s suddenly able to step foot in harlem & noticed without being met with violence / threats of death. that she doesn’t have to carry fear that the short walk from the bus stop to her apartment in the bronx could lead to the unthinkable should any old acquaintance of hers or a loyal member to her family’s known gang ties happen to be in the area at the time. that she’s able to walk into the bodega near her childhood apartment, and actually be allowed inside. that one day, while they might continue to side eye, talk down to her or toss her a glare, they’re no longer allowed to put hands on her because of alonzo’s say so. alonzo begins to acknowledge that, though she’s betrayed him at a point in her life by straying away from the family, that she’s learned her lesson. and that she’s beginning to build a life for herself that’s above ground, and this has earned him far more respect than the idea of her groveling at his feet or flinging herself into a worse situation, because he knows that his daughter had always been good at making herself better.

and when it happens & lourdes recognizes this change? SHEESH.

[ssincielo]

i was in my Feelings at work, so now we’re going to discuss the first born child, RAMONE SANTINO. (there is mention of an underaged relationship, along with the usual trigger warnings of drugs, drug trafficking, & violence. it is never ending with this family.)

ramone was eight years old by the time lourdes had been born, and he was over the moon to be a big brother. every step of lucia’s pregnancy, he was curious about lourdes / how she was doing and couldn’t wait to tell all of his friends that he had a new baby sister. and when lourdes was born prematurely & spent the first two months of her life in the hospital, little ramone was sick! he drew tons of pictures to make her feel better. he won a bet against alonzo to be the first one to hold her when she got home. it was all very sweet.

and while beatrice technically had been there first, ramone actually saw very little of her until he was seven and beatrice was three, as that was around the time beatrice’s mother jennifer had gone to prison and alonzo married lucia. plus, they were so close in age, for a while they just felt like friends before he realized that she was his half-sister. the boy was young & a lil’ dumb!

growing up, ramone took his older brother responsibilities very seriously. sure, he liked to pick at beatrice & lourdes in their youth, but he was always very aggressive behind his sisters. his laid back demeanor would switch up very quickly if he felt they were being insulted, and once ramone started dealing, he never went on walks & store runs with his sisters without his piece on his hip. he’s seldom had to use it in front of them, and unlike alonzo, he took care of bullies away from where they could see it. he didn’t want them to have to experience the same things he’s seen during his time spent alone with alonzo.

the more ramone became immersed in the lifestyle of gangs and drugs & the older his sisters got, the more he wanted to keep them away from it all. he was extremely upset when beatrice began seeing one of his friends romantically — not only because there was a sizable age difference between them (beatrice was only fourteen, his friend was twenty.), but because beatrice was very naive & he knew of the dangers that came with what they were doing. it might have worked for his parents, but it definitely didn’t work for hers. his lectures fell on deaf ears, and unfortunately, beatrice pushed him away & they practically became strangers after he cut ties with her boyfriend and refused to show up for them. it remained this way until his death, something beatrice never admits to feeling regret towards. (she tends to not discuss ramone very much anyway. especially considering after an on-and-off relationship, she’s still with this man six years above her.)

he also became disappointed with himself when he began to realize that lourdes was very much aware of how he made his living, where he went, and at a certain point, knew how to pick up on whether it was a good night or a bad night. she’s about eleven when she wakes up in the middle of the night to witness him in a rage on the phone over a money dispute. he’s both angry and at ease when she’s taken to staying up late for him on weekends and insisting on giving him a lengthy hug before she goes back to bed. he’s even more sick at himself the first time she had to take his drugs into her possession & place them beneath her mattress in case people came looking. the worst of it had been a night when, silent as ramone was, she picks up on his unease and cups her hands expectantly at four in the morning because her brother appeared anxious and jaw clenched, because a sixteen year old girl shouldn’t be making routine out of this. ramone tried to compensate this by walking her to school and stressing helping her study — because he was smart, but his choices weren’t.

lourdes had actually been awake on the night ramone was shot & killed outside of the building. she was the one who woke alonzo & lucia up in the middle of the night, and she was downstairs with them when the ambulance carries him off the stoop in a body bag. she washes the blood off of the pavement after the police leave, refusing to let anyone cross the area, lashing out at the other tenants when they did. (she also had been, after being awakened on a school night by alonzo & driven to an abandoned building, the one to shoot & kill one of the rivals accused of plotting / carrying out ramone’s drive-by. he made her vomit in an empty can so she didn’t leave anything at the scene and held her as she cried. she went to school the same day.) half of his jewelry had been left behind to her — a few rings, bracelets, and his coveted gold / ruby cross chain — while beatrice & lucia kept the rest. she also has a few of his t-shirts & hoodies.

lourdes continues to keep his memory alive, despite her estrangement from the rest of her family. she celebrates his birthdays with his mister softy order. she mourns his death date by wrapping herself in his favorite sweater. she visits his grave every three months to clean / leave flowers, food, & gifts. she seldom celebrates the holiday otherwise, but she puts up an ofrenda in his memory, leaving all of his favorites: black & white + butterscotch cookies from his favorite bodega, a bottle of peach flavored iced tea, a small bowl of horchata made from their grandmother’s recipe, and a bottle of hennessy. she also leaves his favorite jewelry and his cross chain, the only time of the year she doesn’t wear it herself.

aside from her tattoos in his honor, she also watches the videos saved in her icloud, silly ones of herself & beatrice with him that leave her laughing, ridiculous photos and anything that still has his voice & his obnoxious laughter on it. sometimes, she pulls up the video of them dancing at her quinceañera to play on loop. you will very much come across lourdes, fast asleep, clutching her phone with some video playing.

in my head, in some alternate universe where ramone is alive, i would like to think he would still be very close with his sister. at thirty four, he likely stepped away partially or full time from the streets to become a mentor of sorts, involved in the community in some way that reflects how he often helped others in his life. he likely would have a family of his own, giving lourdes rights to being the fine, head ass auntie that she so desires to be. he would be there for the birthdays, holidays, promotions, get togethers, any & everything that he should be here for. ramone would still put all the smoke behind lourdes, same as he did as kids. he also wouldn’t have shut her out the way that alonzo had for her choices at sixteen & twenty, so there’s that.

[ssincielo]

for some reason, i got really passionate last night abt some pivotal moments of lourdes’ life following her leaving new york at twenty one. so to ease my nerves + better help with plotting out her timeline, let’s get into lourdes’ IN BETWEEN PERIOD.

trigger warnings include: very brief mentions of organized crime, drugs / drug trafficking, & violence.

lourdes is nearly twenty two years old when, after ten months of growing increasingly disillusioned with the oversacce-knight family & becoming frustrated with gianni / her underlying feelings regarding him, she breaches the sixteen month contract she’d been under and decides to abandon her position. this was not received well. she chooses to ask for forgiveness than permission instead, promptly removes her things from the apartment given to her, and attempts to return to her mother & father’s apartment in east harlem.

this was also not received well. unfortunately for lourdes, alonzo santino cared more about loyalty than blood family. although lucia was ready to welcome her daughter with open arms, alonzo only saw lourdes as a traitor to his family and his name. he threw all of her belongings into the hallway, forcibly removed her from lucia’s arms, and declared that she was no longer allowed to step foot on his stoop for an indefinite amount of time. this led to multiple jumpings by the very men who once protected her each and every time she tried to enter the apartment complex. she never made it past the entrance to the building.

lourdes often slept at friend’s houses and got by on the pocket change that remained from her tenure with the oversacce-knights to keep her clothed and fed. any portion of the sixty million dollars granted to her from the cartel had been stashed away in bank accounts, and in her paranoia, lourdes promised to never touch any of it if she wanted to remain elusive. desperate & out of options, lourdes resorts to contacting one of her unaffiliated maternal uncles in florida, who allowed her to stay with him for the time being and promised not to disclose her location to her father or anyone that came looking. lourdes spent christmas making a 19 hour bus trip from new york city down to miami.

(she hadn’t chosen miami as her safe place on a whim, or simply on account of her uncle. lourdes made a conscious decision to hide out in the southern states due to a lack of solid oversacce-knight territory — she wouldn’t run the risk of finding them, and they definitely wouldn’t have been able to find her, nor would they be able to move as easily without the protection of the turf.)

lourdes remained with her uncle in miami for a total of two months. it was during those months that she went through a series of heartbreak and a period of mourning — mourning herself, ties to a family that were now broken, feelings for a man that she certainly had no business having in the first place, and most of all, ramone. he’d been the one to try steering her away from the harsh truths of the lifestyle they were brought up in, and in her stubborn grief, she’d dove head first into it all without understanding what it all meant. along with her self-reflection, lourdes used this time to attempt to salvage her education via GED and find long-term living options in houston & phoenix. (she also crossed paths with @steadyclips​‘s braylen for the first time & found a longstanding friendship with someone who knew her life, knew her choices & refused to judge her for any of them. with no dramatics behind the sentiment, braylen very much kept her sane during this period.)

after completing GED courses & passing her exam with high marks, lourdes allowed herself a moment to celebrate by making a pit stop in houston as she prepared to take the day and a half long trip to her new life in phoenix. she knew where she was going, and prepared herself for the tiny one bedroom flat she was made to call home, but she didn’t realize what she wanted to do with her newfound sense of freedom until she spent some time to really experience the city. music festivals, clubs, the culture, the locals — all of it pointed her in the direction she felt most comfortable in. and once she made it to phoenix & enrolled herself in some glasses, lourdes was on her way to a degree in communications and a new career in mind.

while studying in phoenix, lourdes knew that she really wanted to be involved in the inner workings of entertainment, the stepping stone for others to get to their dream. she’d always preferred being in the background and doing the work of underdogs, and it’d been a hell of a lot more satisfying when it’s something legal and something good for a change. she got a job on the campus of her small college working at the radio station, and often was the brains behind the nightly spin show — aspiring artists came to her for requests or to shoot their shot at being played themselves, and in a strange sort of way, it made lourdes feel good to know that she was a connect of sorts. by the time she graduates, she’s twenty three with enough experience to make her stomach the idea of finally coming home.

lourdes is twenty four when she finally returns to new york — only this time, she’s three years separated with no home to come to. she graces that east harlem stoop one final time & finds herself bloodied & bruised, dismissing urgent care nurses with overbearing warnings & decides then and there that she’ll no longer allow herself to break her own heart over love that hadn’t been there anymore. it took months for lourdes to get her shit together, waiting until favors were returned & dues were paid before she uses the last tangible helping of her oversacce money to rent herself a decent enough apartment in soundview. the rest? all towards shopping for an internship that wouldn’t laugh at the sight of her walking through their doors. luckily for her, she finds it in a small talent agency that answers to a larger entertainment company, and it isn’t long before lourdes makes a daily commute to a manhattan office every morning after her coffee runs.

after her internship, she’s hired immediately as a full time employee at her agency. her branch primarily gears towards making a space for those within the entertainment industry to get their foot in the door as a small start up label, & she helps provide them with agents that both promote and book gigs. her days are filled with meetings and calls and interviews and booking and ripping her hair out during two hour skype calls & being placed on hold, but hey, it leaves her days feeling lighter. 

she even talks to lucia now. the communications are always in secret — a note left at her door or a container of food. an amazon package she certainly never ordered, an elaborate cafe ruse that allowed her to speak to her mother by phone every month. lourdes would even go as far as to say that for once, she’s actually happy. she might downplay her position every now & then, but lourdes’ work as of today now leans heavily towards a future A&R promotion. (and she’d like to think that if ramone were still alive, he’d be the first person she’d ever sign. she’s thankful for that.)

[ssincielo]

so the past few weeks, i was watching a docuseries on showtime abt the supreme team, and it gave me a lot of inspo regarding alonzo santino & lourdes’ association with organized crime. so here’s a (very disorganized) blurb about the santino family and...well...crime.

trigger warnings for mentions of drugs, violence, and gang activity. bc duh!

the santino family as a whole are no strangers to the streets or to a life of crime. it was especially prominent within her father’s side of the family, and nearly all of the men in her paternal lineage were often associated with known criminals, were criminals themselves, and had felony records in their youth. of course, as a child, she never knew them as anything but uncles and cousins, the siblings showered in affection by their paternal grandparents and family members alike. but the truth was, the santino’s were a menace to new york city.

her great grandmother was a mob wife. she was married to an enforcer, but he was whacked before she could ever have any children with him & his body was found in the trunk of a nearly burned car near the manhattan bridge. still, her title and influence persisted within the mob as his widow, so she was treated fairly nicely by the mobsters in harlem — as nicely as she could, considering she was a black woman in the 1930′s and crime was predominantly run in the area by non-whites. by the time she remarried and had children, heroin was rampant, and bagmen were always needed.

her grandfather was fifteen when he first became an errand boy, delivering cash and other incriminating items under the guise of a paper route. by the time he was in his twenties and thirties, he working among the likes of bumpy johnson and frank lucas, had multiple arrests & prison stints on his sheets, and was actively being investigated by the FBI. by thirty five, he had fathered two sons with a local magazine model, and eagerly passed his legacy onto them. by the time his sons were reaching their teens, her grandfather was in jail for thirty years on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. the rules of the streets were ever changing, and it was a completely different ballpark by the time alonzo and tyrell were welcomed into the lifestyle. he was released on parole when lourdes was four & worked as an electrician, so she knew absolutely none of this.

in their teens, her father & her uncle were far from crime lords or big time names. they committed mostly petty crimes — car jacking, robbery, peddling marijuana and crack cocaine, and gunfights at the height of the 80s. they started out as a small crew of friends that were as close as the brothers themselves, but throughout the years, they quickly realized that strength was not only in numbers, but in organization as well. together, alonzo and rell were the bane of the NYPD’s existence, committing a sling of crimes and making alliances with other street gangs in exchange for heavier narcotics plugs. they were even taking out hits and robberies against opposing gangs, and very quickly rose from selling weed on street corners to pushing cocaine and weapons throughout new york state. every person had their role. every role was fulfilled with perfect quality, lest they provoke alonzo’s ire or catch the heat of the police. disloyalty was never tolerated, and treated only by death. by the time lourdes & her siblings were born, alonzo’s name struck both awe and fear in the hearts of anyone around harlem &  spanish harlem — an honor mostly attributed to the help of lucia, his girlfriend turned wife. (more on their actual relationship later.)

while at first, alonzo’s goal was to simply make money, eliminate the opposition and piss off police, it was lucia who reminded alonzo to never abuse the community which he came from. through lucia, alonzo often put forth his money into helping his community, starting with his team. baby needs diapers? we got you. just started & behind on rent? we got you. local mom & pop getting targeted by outside criminals? we got you, no charge. alonzo and his crew slowly began to protect each other & the community, and lucia amplified this with donating meals and hand sewn clothing from her boutique to shelters & hosting meal / food drives during the holidays. hell, alonzo would even buy mister softee for the entire block of kids on a good day & threw many block parties.

of course, the santino children were only protected from the streets their uncle & father ran but for so long. both tyrell as well as alonzo were sentenced on drug & gun charges at various points, though they had good lawyers so not every charge stuck. ramone eventually becomes part of his father’s crew and ran multiple blocks up until his death. beatrice followed her mother’s footsteps by becoming romantically involved with a known enforcer, and also pushes drugs herself for the crew. lourdes, despite her initial indifference, was often treated with respect & protection by her father’s crew and this only grew tenfold after ramone’s passing. despite tyrell’s multiple prison stints & alonzo eventually stepping back from actively running things to instead own a mechanic shop, the santino’s and alonzo’s kids continued to remain in a chokehold throughout harlem even though the brothers’ active roles in leadership had dissolved.

after ramone’s death, lourdes was only affiliated for a period of four years. after completing her prospective tasks & passing her initiation, lourdes became an errand girl herself — delivering packages, laundering money through her retail job she used as a cover, even running drugs herself. she hated this though, as she hated drawing attention to herself & running the blatant risk of being arrested during one of her runs as a mule. she eventually goes behind the scenes to instead cut & package cocaine and pills, as well as cooking methamphetamines. not getting into specifics, bc it’s literally in her bio!

now, within her affiliation, loyalty was everything. leaving was something that was done, sure, but it was often looked at sideways if you left before you even hit the five or ten year mark. plus, upward movement just...wasn’t a thing really — meaning, sure you could get promoted within the crew, but being prospected by a more powerful crew or crime syndicate just didn’t happen. that’s why lourdes being acquired by the oversacce-knight family was such a huge fuckin’ deal. not only was she alonzo’s daughter & the sister of a respected, fallen member, but she joined on her own free will. she then up & left, and did so behind her family’s back. there was no alliance between the two families & no financial incentive on either part but lourdes’, so her excommunication from her father’s crew is less because she was so good at what she did & at being discreet that an international cartel wanted her, but more because of the way she went about it by refusing to be upfront. after six years, she’s no longer on the ‘on sight’ list at alonzo’s wishes, but...yeah, some of her old associates aren’t really fucking with her like that.

now, in an AU i still have yet to write or name? lourdes is still doing crime. still affiliated with her father’s crew. likely still protected throughout the streets. prbly graduated to both cooking narcotics and overseeing drops outside of new york city. she’s very unhappy in the verse. she does not know how to function as a civilian in this verse, did not return for her GED or go to college in phoenix, & literally cannot fathom having any other career ambitions outside of the streets because she doesn’t know anything else. likelier to beat someone’s ass in this verse because she gives no fucks & has nothing to lose. definitely was arrested in this verse too. prbly even did a few months in jail. don’t fuck with her! she won’t hesitate!

anyway, this is just your reminder that lourdes was / is a whole ass criminal and was / is part of a large ass gang. for all her passiveness, she can be very violent & with the shits. cheers!

[ssincielo]

the really cool thing abt having a single muse sometimes is that i can say fuck you to a structured, linear timeline.

like right now, my favorite moment in time to write lourdes in, as i’ve said before, is the in between period — whether she’s in miami hiding at her uncle’s after disappearing from a cartel, a panicky & angry mess because her life just imploded into shit, where she’s still a criminal & has no clue what being a civilian means. (i always imagine this is the make or break moment, bc she either finds a way to do crime again or gets her GED instead.) whether she’s in phoenix, at school, trying to be super normal between classes and socializing and hosting the campus radio show every night. whether she’s back in new york, her new apartment semi-empty and not quite as homely as it is now, and she’s coming home sporting bruises because she ventured too close to harlem. and i think i really like writing her in this period because i didn’t give myself the chance to. i made her whereabouts up from scratch in 2020. there are some things canon to her bio, sure, but every interaction with her in this period is like writing a new muse. it’s so fun!

that being said, i also enjoy writing present day lourdes! but i’m impulsive & contemplating changing her occupation......again. teehee.

[ssincielo]

i’ve had an idea for a headcanon post i wanna write for months, but it’s not coming out the way i want it to so no big info dump today! instead, i am metaphorically bringing out the TV on wheels to provide u all with this. <3

[ssincielo]

@lcvesymbcl​ asked: hc: sitcoms.

when the santino siblings were still young enough that being around each other wasn’t the most repulsive shit in the world, while their daddy was still crowned the god in the streets of spanish harlem and their mami was putting more smiles on their community’s face than the first lady, the main thing that bonded them had been sitcoms. more specifically, rushing through their homework at a mile a minute so that they could sprawl against the couch and the floor of their harlem apartment and keep the TV stuck on UPN.

let lourdes have told it back in the day, she’d say that she and her family reminded her of my wife & kids. in a perfect world, alonzo was nothing more than the goofy but lovable patriarch like michael. lucia was as beautiful and headstrong as jay. ramone could be as dimwitted and carefree as junior, if he could be afforded such a luxury as never having to look behind his back with his hand on his glock while on a street corner at night. beatrice was just as stubborn and stuck up as claire, and lourdes was as innocent and free as katie. in a perfect world, there was no fear of fed sweeps and early graves, of losing her father, mother, brother, sister, her own life to a bullet that might have never had her name on it to begin with. in a perfect world, she didn’t have to bury her friends and cousins and classmates before prom. she didn’t have to bury her feelings out of self preservation. her life could be everything she’s ever wanted and more.

but the world wasn’t perfect, and the TV didn’t always stay on UPN. the santino siblings weren’t always together like they used to be. they were home less, held less of the same interests, saw each other less. then ramone was dead, and for the longest time, lourdes couldn’t stand the re-runs that played on TV or the opening chords of theme songs she used to hum around her parents’ apartment. if anything, it made her angry — what she would give for a 30 minute conflict resolution, for a director to yell cut and for her family to drop the broken family trope of their characters. wow, that scene was taxing. thank god all that familial trauma was just acting.

now, though, she’s a little older and a lot less angry. her free time had been a little less existent than before, but lourdes still made time for episodes of a comfort show or two — she binges episodes of living single and girlfriends and imagines living a successful life with her closest friends. she spends a weekend watching a different world or the fresh prince and gushes over balancing education and blackness. she giggles at one on one and sister, sister and martin and that’s so raven, reaches for her phone to call beatrice and thinks better of it instead. she still watches a frame and wishes her life had been as easy as she used to dream about, but that’s okay with her.

(there’s still one show that she can’t bring herself to watch. even the most ridiculous, light hearted episode fails to keep the heart ache and tears at bay. maybe one day, she’ll get the courage to switch the channel over to my wife & kids.)

SEND ME ‘HC’ + A WORD FOR A HEADCANON. — accepting!