#Raine McCarthy

[honeyxmonkey]

Sarah McCarthy, Daughter of Vameus

[lgbtqreads]

October 2023 Book Deals

Adult Fiction Sunday Times-bestselling author of A MARVELLOUS LIGHT Freya Marske‘s SWORDCROSSED, pitched as Ellen Kushner’s SWORDSPOINT meets LEGENDS & LATTES; a second novel pitched as Grey’s Anatomy meets A DEADLY EDUCATION; an untitled novel; and an untitled novella, to Ruoxi Chen at Tor, in a six-figure deal, in a four-book deal, for publication in fall 2024, by Diana Fox at Fox…

[elektroblues]

Nitzer Ebb - I Give To You (1991)

[flamingoroadalbumphoto]

[principiumindividuationis777]

Doeth (Supernatural Drama)

("Doeth" has two meanings: In English, it is an archaic third person form of "to do", but in Welsh, it means "wise".)

"Doeth"

Chapter I

George Root, from a small town in the ceremonial county of Shropshire, England, not far from the Welsh border, was little regarded by his neighbors, which is not to say that they thought poorly of him, but that they thought little about him at all, and such was to his liking.

Root, 42 and for some fifteen years an accountant, would drive a beige car to work and back, take a regular Saturday walk, and otherwise, saw no company of any kind. A frugal man, his wardrobe consisted primarily of hand-me-downs from his father, uncle and grandfather, which Root, having some knowledge of stitching and alterations, had made presentable despite their age.

George's life would have been so routine as to be outside the routine were it not for troublesome neighbors. Oliver S. Allen was pitied by those who vaguely knew him, and despised what few had the misfortune of knowing him well. For purposes of finance and any slight legal difficulties, he spread a story that his wife had died, leaving him alone to take care of his daughter, Kelly.

In truth, Oliver and his wife, Elizabeth, had divorced, with his wife receiving custody of their other daughter, but they were in London, so few locals knew of this. Given the emotional turmoil and an unscrupulous father, Kelly, about thirteen in age, had become much like her father, repeating his bogus tale of Elizabeth's death, and finding particular amusement in pelting George Root's windows with debris to disturb his peace, which the local police dealt with lightly, given that they too believed Oliver's canard.

Root considered contacting a solicitor, but soon, the Allens became the least of his concerns.

Chapter II

Their small town was given a bit of a stir by the arrival of a film producer of some note, the ambitious Terence Mathis, who, hearing rumors that a coven of witches, perhaps dating back centuries or even millennia, lived in the area, wanted to make cinema, or rather, make money, from the legend.

With a loud, colorful outfit that resembled the gaudiest men of the 1970's, the contrast between Mathis and the quiet Shropshire locale could not have been greater, and he was not well received, least of all by Helen Ford, a very religious woman, head of the choir in the town's only church.

"Excuse me, ma'am. Where do the locals say the Simmer lives?" asked Mathis, referring to the name of both the rumored coven and its leader.

"What business have you with the devil, city man?" asked Helen Ford, very sternly.

"Why, profitable business, of course, but there is no devil, and the only magic is the British Pound."

"Turn to God or you will perish. Simmer knows your mind. She has many times placed hexes on our church, and she has powers like the evil one himself."

"Rank superstition, ma'am, but how about you let me take the risk for you? I'll get Simmer away from you for a while."

Noticing telltale signs from Mathis's fingernails, which she had seen in recovering addicts in a larger city, Ford shook her head.

"You're into drugs too, I see. I cannot help you. You are lost."

Scoffing on the exterior but a bit rattled deep within, Terence, on foot, very quickly and against the lights darted out into traffic. As the Fates would have it, at that moment, George Root was driving homeward from accounting, and in his effort to veer away from the reckless Mathis, struck a pedestrian on the sidewalk.

The pedestrian, Agnes Patala, originally Agni Patala, of Indian heritage, beloved among the townsfolk, passed away at 38 of her injuries.

Root was too stunned to express anything. He continued his routine, but now his eyes were dead. Someone, someone preying on the weak, sensed George Root's state of mind and sought to take full advantage of it.

Chapter III

When word reached the Shropshire town that, less than ten miles away, Terence Mathis had passed away of an overdose, Helen Ford again shook her head sadly, telling the congregation that, "She whose name we do not speak took down this wayward soul. Be sober before the LORD."

Helen referred, of course, to Simmer, and soon, dressed in black, with a black star on her forehead, Agnes Amber, the one called Simmer, walked into the town, and everyone, even the police, even the dogs and cats, fled at her approach. A full-figured woman of about five and thirty, she walked briskly until she stood in front of the home of George Root, and Root's pet cat fled, causing Simmer to laugh in a cruel tone.

Simmer would again and again approach Root's home, ring his doorbell, then leave, until finally, Root reluctantly opened his front door.

"I am of the earth. My card."

A card, decorated with pentagrams, read, "Resh Annwn", which read as gibberish to Root but was a mix of Hebrew and Welsh.

"Birch tree, do not fail me…"

Simmer pointed a wand, evidently of birch, at Root's forehead. The next he knew, George, a teetotaler, was suffering the effects of a hangover, and was quite certain that he had been intimate with the stranger.

George managed not to miss work, nor even be late, but his haggard appearance was noted by coworkers as highly unusual for the normally neat, disciplined Root.

Meanwhile, the chaos continued in the once sleepy town: Oliver S. Allen had died, of unknown causes, in his sleep. Helen Ford again asserted before the congregation that it was Simmer's work. Oliver's death, in turn, devastated his already troubled daughter Kelly, who ran away from authorities and became the town's first homeless citizen.

Chapter IV

By this time, George Root, unable to face the outside world anymore, had taken to working remotely, via computer, his sole comfort in life now being his cat, Tao, so named because his fur resembled the Taijitu. George, like Tao, now spent most of his time sleeping.

After three months time, George finally found it in him to step out his front door again and go for the Saturday walk by which townsfolk had one literally set their clocks. The town he saw was not, however, the little town he had known. Police had lost control of the now unruly traffic, and the first to interact with Root was Kelly Allen, who tried but failed to pick his pocket, having become a street urchin and thief.

As George mournfully sauntered onward, a man of considerable stature and dignity, and eccentricity also, being dressed in Victorian gentleman's clothing, seemed to be awaiting him on the sidewalk.

"Do you want something?"

"I know of you and Simmer, but I bring hope."

"What has hope to do with anything?"

"You do not realize the seriousness of what happened," said the strange man, "For Simmer is with child by you, and for reasons you cannot bear to know, the child could be the son of perdition, the scourge of the world."

"You mean the Beast or something?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. But the hope is in this bottle."

The mysterious man took out a bottle of liquor.

"I hardly think that becoming an alcoholic would lessen my troubles, sir."

"No, it is not to drink. It is firewater, an Americanism, or so we must call it if it is to work. You must destroy the bottle, and your child will be like any other, not the one to fear."

With nothing to lose, George Root ambled back home and bid the stranger enter.

Chapter V

"The conditions are not right yet, but if my friends… ah, there it is…"

The stranger seemed pleased that, from the sound on the windows, outside it had begun to rain quite heavily. He directed Root, the latter unsure of what to make of any of this, back outside.

Kelly Allen, dirty and barefoot, was just then running off with a gnome statue from Root's front lawn.

"Pay that no mind. We must focus," said the Victorian visitor, who began to say something in Latin, of which Root understood very little.

The man then directed Root to hurl down and break the bottle of "firewater" on his front walkway, which George did.

"It is done."

"What is your name, incidentally?" asked Root, drenched from the rain and from the "firewater" on his shoes.

"Raphael."

Though George asked nearly everyone he knew, none of them knew who Raphael was, nor did anyone know of a man matching his description, neither among the locals, nor among regular visitors.

Chapter VI

Two years later, George Root, having recovered such that he was back to his old routine, was one day astounded to see who appeared to be Agnes Amber pushing a stroller, but Amber was not Simmer, but a commonplace citizen just pushing a stroller.

Root parked his car, and approached her on foot, trying to settle in his mind what his eyes were seeing.

"Excuse me. Sorry to trouble you, but I believe we may have met," was Root's stumbling introduction.

"I don't think so…" replied a confused Amber.

"You see… there's no easy way to say this: I think I am this child's father."

"That's possible, seeing as how I have no memory of that night, and you do look like him in the eyes at that."

It became obvious to George Root, the more he spoke to Agnes Amber, that she remembered nothing of whoever and whatever she had once been. This, thought Root, must have been the effects of whatever Raphael did.

Little by little, the two, with Agnes as nothing sinister, just a struggling, single mother, reached an understanding, and genetic tests proved that yes, Root was the father of the sixteen-month-old boy in the stroller, Angelo by name.

Agnes Amber wanted to move into George's place, along with Angelo, but Root was reluctant.

Chapter VII

As Root and Amber discussed their future, torrential rain beat on the roof of George's home, as Tao slept soundly. curled up in a corner.

"I want to do the right thing by Angelo, but I am very fixed in my habits. I may not be what you are looking for in a husband."

"Who said 'husband'? We could just live together."

"After what I have been through, if we were to live as if married, I would, for my peace of mind and soul, need to have us under the sign of the Cross."

"All right, then, will you marry me?" asked Agnes in reply.

"I hide nothing. I am not one for intimacy. It is not part of my routine," explained Root, "My one foray into it, which was rather too grotesque to describe, was most unpleasant, but even if not for this, no, I cannot."

With further terms, such as no alcohol on the premises, thus began an unlikely Marriage: Unlikely for George Root, in that he was a likely lifelong bachelor, and unlikely for Agnes Amber, up to then a woman of far from abstemious habits, now living as the Shakers once had.

More improbable still, Agnes Amber was fully accepted now by the townsfolk, who no longer feared her, as only George Root seemed to have any memory of her ever being out of the ordinary.

While the small Shropshire gathering mostly returned to its tranquil norm, Kelly Allen remained homeless and, by seventeen, a feral one, with several crimes of violence by now. She often looked at Amber and Root's home in bitter envy, wishing she could have such a home, and a family once more. To Kelly, the rain George now loved was a curse, given that she lived outdoors, and her mischief always escalated when the weather was less than fair.

On the first anniversary of his Marriage to Agnes, George found, to his astonishment, a photograph, lying on the floor, of the man he knew as Raphael, the one who had, so far as he knew, broken some dreadful spell. Agnes, however, did not recognize the man, nor did anyone else in town. Tao, the housecat, though, seemed, in his own way, to recognize or acknowledge something about the photo, or perhaps the man.

The end.

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Donald O'Connor (Singin' in the Rain, I Love Melvin)—Cosmo Brown in "Singing in the Rain" is literal perfection and Cosmo, Don, and Kathy are #polygoals. such an insanely talented dancer and just full of the vibes [clips below the cut]

Vincent Price (Laura, Leave Her to Heaven, House on Haunted Hill, The Masque of the Red Death)—svelte, stylish, horrifying, beautiful, wickedly funny, camp and gorgeous and evil. he was an art connoisseur who advocated passionately indigenous art, he was an actual literal gourmet cook, he was so liberal he got greylisted during the mccarthy era for being too rad, he's my favorite muppets guest of all time

This is round 2 of the bracket. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage man.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Vincent Price propaganda:

Submitted: this fancam

Submitted: this entire Tumblr page

Donald O'Connor propaganda:

"he's so brilliant in singing in the rain it genuinely makes me so furious he didn't get more awesome leading man parts (or at least more parts playing off gene kelly—they go together like chocolate and peanut butter I swear)"

[shelbgrey]

My MasterList of Stories

Master List part 2

~request are open

Grey's Anatomy

The Sopranos

Codes:

Smut=❤️‍🔥 Fluff=💕 Angst=💔 Funny=💖 Horror=🫀

🔬Bones💀

Dr. Lance Sweets:

Smut Alphabet❤️‍🔥

Caught in the act ❤️‍🔥

Dating Lance Sweets HC💕❤️‍🔥

Adventures in babysitting💕

You belong with me💕

Lance Sweets as a Dad headcanons💕

Dream Warriors💔🫀

Bones Halloween Special🫀💖

Code baby Part 1 💕

Let me take your pain away💕💔

Dr. Jack Hodgins:

Can't buy me love💔💕

Jack Hodgins Having a little sister💕

What's it gonna take to get you out of his lab?❤️‍🔥

Agent Seeley Booth:

Dating Seeley Booth Headcanons💕❤️‍🔥

Being Seeley Booth's Best friend HCs💕

Friends to Lovers Headcanons💕

The day we met💕

In the name of love💕

Agent James Aubrey:

Falling in love with James Aubrey after losing Lance 💔💕

Falling in love with James Aubrey after losing Lance Sweets part 2💕❤️‍🔥

Smut Alphabet❤️‍🔥

Unspoken desire❤️‍🔥

Dr. Wendell Bray:

Witchy Squintern HCs💕

Dr. Camille Saroyan:

who broke the coffee pot?💖

The Squinterns:

Adventures in babysitting💕

Being Hodgins sister and being a goth Squintern💕

Dr. Zack Addy:

I've got your back💕

Who's got him smiling like that?💕

❤️‍🩹Grey's Anatomy🩺

Dr. Derek Shephard:

Halloween special💖🫀

Injured💔

The Ballad of Jayne💔

Stuck in the middle💔💕

Stitches💕

This is Why I Don't Go To The Gym💕

Baby on the brain💕

Dating Derek after he broke up with Meredith💕

Love at first sight💕

Dr. Mark Sloan:

November Rain💔

Faithfully💔💕

We are family💕

Christmas Special💖

Dr. Owen Hunt:

Trauma 101💖

Dr. Jackson Avery:

Love Story💔💕

Dr. Alex Karev:

Heaven💔

Dr. Miranda Bailey:

Your my favorite💕

Dr. Nick Marsh:

Secrets out💕

🗡️Once upon a time🍎

August W. Booth:

Hidden secrets❤️‍🔥💕💔

Killian Jones:

Smut fic with Killan Jones❤️‍🔥

Prince James:

Hysteria💔💕

🩸Twilight🌲

Cullen family:

Fire safty💖

Going to the zoo💖

Cats in the cradle💕

Being Carlisle and Esme's daughter and having the Volturi wrap around your finger. 💖💕

Cullens:

Emmett McCarthy Cullen:

Next to me series💖💔💕❤️‍🔥

Forever now💕

Being Emmett and Rose's daughter HCs💕

Carlisle Cullen:

Being Carlisle and Esme's youngest daughter HC💕

Carlisle as your husband HCs💕

Jasper Whitlock Hale:

Jasper dating Bella's sister HCs💕

Edward Anthony Mason Cullen:

Dating Edward Cullen HCs💕

Crushing on Edward Cullen HCs💕

Rosalie Lillian Hale:

Being Emmett and Rose's daughter HCs💕

Denalis:

Eleazar Denali:

Glory of love series ❤️‍🔥💕💔💖

Dating Eleazar HCs❤️‍🔥💕

Garrett:

Voice of an Angel💔💕

Being Carlisle and Esme's youngest daughter and dating Garrett HCs💕

Wolf pack:

Seth Clearwater:

Perfect 💕

Volturi:

The Volturi:

Being Carlisle and Esme's youngest daughter and having the Volturi wrap around your finger💕

🧫Ghostbusters👻

Peter Venkman:

When unspoken rules are broken💔💕

Dr. Egon Spengler:

Hold on, I love you💔

Two Nerds falling in love headcanons💕

Ray stantz:

Dr. Jelousey❤️‍🔥

Something strange💕💔

🦁🐍Harry Potter🐦‍⬛🦡

Draco Malfoy:

Say Something💔

Dance the night away💕

Just keeping an eye out💕

The truth doesn't always hurt💔💕

George Weasley:

Welocm to Gryffindor💔💕

You belong with me - part 1💔💕

Fred Weasley:

Being a Potter twin and falling for Fred💕

Neville Longbottom:

Your Breaking My Heart💔

Weasley family:

Being adopted by the Weasleys💕

⚔️Supernatural🌘

Gabriel "the Trickster":

Hyper girl💕

The Winchester and the Trickster💕

Love of a lifetime💔

Dean winchester:

Dating Dean Winchester Headcanons💕❤️‍🔥

Castiel:

Being in a love triangle with Dean and Cas💕💔

🎶Elvis Presley🎸

Austin!Elvis Presley:

Love me tender💔💕

💥Marvel🦸

Scott "Cyclops" Summers:

Dating Scott Summers💕❤️‍🔥

A not so White Wedding💕

Clint "Hawkeye" Barton:

Secrets out💖

Whatever it takes💔💕

Tony "Iron man" Stark:

All of me💔💕

Bucky "winter soldier" Barnes:

Treat you better💔💕

Howard Stark:

Time In A Bottle💕

Dr. Stephen Strange:

I won't say I'm in love💔💕

Avengers:

Ohana means family💕

Six avengers and a baby💔💕

[dostoyevsky-official]

I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.

[...] I don’t pretend to understand women,” McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in 2007, commenting on the lack of them in his novels—despite the fact that he was married three times. And for decades, readers took him at his word.

Upon McCarthy’s death, however, the mystery of his personal life has drawn close enough for us to unravel assumptions into their opposites: Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

[...] It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.

[...] Britt says she lived a normal life until the age of 11. That year, and for reasons she never quite understood, her family moved from the snowy plains of North Dakota to the border town desert of Tucson. This is where the muse’s novelistic question mark emerges. An origin story beginning on an ellipse. Something hideous happened to her in the desert. Something traumatically violent. Something that destroyed her family.

Every time she was hit, whether by her father or a foster parent, she would disappear inside herself. It could take weeks, months to reemerge. It got to the point where if it happened again, she didn’t know if she’d ever come out. And she could no longer live like that.

“So I’ve decided I’m not going to be hit anymore,” she told McCarthy at that motel pool. Here she pauses, and you must imagine the sweetest voice you’ve ever heard—a sweetness that isn’t afraid to pull triggers first and ask questions later. “I’m just going to shoot anyone who tries.”

“ ‘Well,’ ” McCarthy said, “ ‘That would explain the gun.’ ”

“And that was so Cormac,” Britt laughs. “And I thought, Thank God this man gets it.”

Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print. Your novels so far have circled around dark Southern characters who do dark Southern things. You’re stalled on the draft of a fourth novel, called Suttree, which features an indeterminately young side character named Harrogate, not yet written as a runaway. You’re sitting by a pool at a cheap motel when a beautiful 16-year-old runaway sidles up to you with a stolen gun in one hand and your debut novel in the other. She reads in her closet to stay out of violence’s earshot. To survive her lonely anguish, the wound she’s been carrying since age 11, this girl has only literature to turn to: Hemingway, Faulkner, you. She flickers with comic innocence yet tragic experience beyond her years and an atavistic insistence on survival on her own terms. She has suffered more childhood violence than you can imagine, and she holds your own prose up to you for autograph, dedication, proof of provenance.

[...] After learning Britt wanted to be a nurse, McCarthy also introduced a character named Wanda to Suttree, an underage love interest Suttree meets in the month of August. Wanda reads stories about nurses and steals away to Suttree’s tent in the small hours of the night. She is also Britt’s debut death, crushed under a rockslide.

[...] Posting an essay on my favorite writer to Substack on April Fool’s Day, receiving a cryptic comment from his secret muse, and now driving with her to see her horses feels more miraculous than fate. And yet there is something so natural about spending time with Britt. There is a shimmer of recognition with her, an intimate equidistance. After all, I’ve been reading about her for half my life. And now here she is, in the flesh.

[...] The first thing you notice about her, leading Scout and Jake up a dormant streambed to their stalls, is how novelistic she is. She is a woman of compelling themes, tragic patterns, hooks, plot, question marks. She says things like “Cormac warned me I couldn’t hide forever” and “That was back when we had one eye out for the law.”

[...] That’s the muse for you, full of equine wisdom, horse sense. And while she certainly has a way with words, words also have a way with her, as McCarthy found out in 1976. As do landscapes.

[...] He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.

[...]One measure of fame is how suddenly cognizant one becomes of the looming biographer, archivist, or graduate student peering over posterity’s shoulder at your personal correspondence. But McCarthy began writing his love letters to Britt when he was out of print, and they brim with an unusual voice—that of Cormac McCarthy in true love’s perfect candor. They’re less like sketches for a painting and more like confessionals. They are written by a man infatuate.

For the first few days of my stay in Tucson, the letters sit in the same Converse shoebox they’ve been stored in since the ’70s. I’ve been giving them a wide berth. To a McCarthy fan, they’re like the Holy Grail. It somehow doesn’t feel right reading the blue ink meant for her blue eyes. What will they be like? Joyce’s encrusted epistles to Nora? Nabokov’s letters to Véra? Or more like letters to a Lolita?

[...] We can expect a writer to be different in person than on the page, but Cormac was very different on the page to Augusta. He was clearly in love, clearly “gone on the subject” of her, from the start. He ends each letter with an “I love you” or something synonymous. (He ends the ones after their romance cooled the same way.) But what we appear to have with lines about pressing “my face between your thighs” is a writer with his nose pressed into the pure perfume between the open thighs of a book.

Then, sometime in the ’80s, McCarthy sends her the manuscript for All the Pretty Horses. “The first thing I see, obviously, is the title. And I thought, Oh my gosh. I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days. And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?

“I was trying so hard to grow up and to fix what was broken about me. I still thought I could be fixed. And this felt the opposite of fixing me."

[hells-plaid-angel]

Dean Winchester: Reading Recommendations

Because I headcannon Dean as a reader, here is a list of books that I think he would like. Some are directly referenced in the show, others are odes to America and a life on the road complete with horror, satire or complicated family issues. And, of course, some books manage to meet at the twist of the mobius strip where toxic masculinity and homoeroticism collide.

Books of Blood - Clive Barker 

Imajica - Clive Barker 

The Complete Poems - Hart Crane 

Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter 

Our Share of Night - Mariana Enriquez 

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller 

Iliad - Homer 

Jesus’ Son - Denis Johnson 

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

My Heart Is a Chainsaw - Stephen Graham Jones 

On the Road - Jack Kerouac 

Christine - Stephen King 

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

Survivor - Chuck Palahniuk 

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock

A Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud

Crush - Richard Siken

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut 

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Time is a Mother - Ocean Vuong

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman 

Butcher’s Crossing - John Williams 

[deadboyfriendd]

I Hope This Letter Finds You Well.

Summary: It is already so hot that it burns. The sheriff had faced many things. He had killed men with his bare hands, he had been covered in so much blood that he couldn't decipher theirs from his own. He had known starvation, heatstroke, and tragedy. Though, he had never known this.

A culmination of letters shared between family and new friends turns into a stand-off at the tarmac of Tucson, Arizona.

Warnings: Fem!Reader, Sheriff/Wyatt Earp!Steve Harrington x Reader, wild west/Tombstone AU!, Sherrif!Steve (he has a mustache), guns and gun violence, death of minor original characters, death of a spouse, period-appropriate death, drug use, angst, fluff, save a horse, ride a cowboy, feminine rage embodied (I couldn't give her a gun this time because, if I did, everyone would be dead), eventual discussion of The Civil War and the politics that came from it.

My content is 18+ Minors DNI

Word Count: 4.5k

Author's Note: This is it. Bisbee is here and it feels like I'm breathing life back into my cowboys through my sheriff. This is so, so special to me and @dr-aculaaa, and I cannot wait to tell you all their stories.

Find the series masterlist here!

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.” Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Nellie, 

I believe that the face of death is a woman, and that she is beautiful. 

I believe that she may have loved my betrothed, at least as long as there was breath in his lungs and a thrum in his chest. I believe that William looked into her dark eyes and followed her into that unknown place, and I know, there, he might finally find something to still his mind. 

I believe that she kissed him good and hard, Nellie, in a way that I could not have done– that she danced her spindly dance clear across the desert, through the plains of the midlands, and splashed in the bayou of Louisiana until she found him. 

I believe that death is a friend to our family, that her sinewy arms loom over our men in an embrace that we can not provide, and I believe that she is warm. Much warmer than you or I have been created to be. I believe she walks alongside us, whispers into the ear of our husbands, and laughs as they dance their troublesome dances. 

I believe she is kind, much kinder than us, for why else would our men leave the safety of us for her? I cannot fathom it, Nellie. 

I no longer believe that death is cold and harsh, for I know that no man could be as cruel as she. 

We were always cut from the same cloth, in life, and now in death. 

Signed, your cousin. 

+

He could have said that he never wanted any trouble, and he could have said he didn’t go around picking fights, yet both seemed to find him with speed and vigor. He sought them out, begged for the metallic heat to seep from behind his teeth and drip down his lips like ambrosia. The boy could not read nor write, yet also harbored a taste for mindless violence– his gangly teenage frame a harbinger of death. 

The monsoon was fast approaching, dark clouds filling the sky in an apocalyptic haze, though the Lord knew this land needed it. The rain came down in heavy sheets, droplets weighing deep against the flesh and warm in strides. The powder dust beneath it stirred and settled in waves, and he prayed for no wind, for the wall of dust that would overtake them in the future just might suffocate him. He cried out in thirst, having mistaken this anguish for freedom. All he could do was turn his mouth towards the sky and hope it would wash away the rawness in his throat.

This heaviness did not go away with time nor age. The boy-now-man sifted through the powder silt of the remnants of his life the same way he sifted through these crises as a child, though with more sure steps and a heavier hand for subtlety. He no longer craved ambrose violence gilded in the candied sheen of shed blood, though it did not stop searching for him. 

He was out with lanterns, in search of himself. 

There used to be nothing here but a broad expanse of mirage, the heat rising from the sand and warping the distance into a false lake like a sick joke. He remembered the settlement. The miners came first, then the saloons, and dance halls. The cattle drovers and thieves would follow suit to reap their fortunes, but the plume of the mines came first. 

Still there is hope, an old miner had said to him, for I know of two Bibles in town. 

Though men of God and men of war both have strange affinities, it would seem. 

War, much like God, was here long before man. It crouched its ugly pose and waited for his arrival. The ultimate trade awaits the ultimate practitioner. 

Today, the oak planks, rotted from years in the sun, groan in the same anguish beneath his boots and he ignores it as much as the God he prayed to ignored his own cries. The bright orange of globe mallow presses its way between the planks, soft resilience even in this heat. When he reaches down to touch it, it crumbles between hardened finger pads. 

This township felt like a tunnel, a vignette blurring the Gaussian edges of its structures that settled like graves. His boots sunk a lowly sulk through the banks of the roads where wagon wheels had pushed them from their packing. He still felt the nothingness here, vast openness in which he awaited a tomahawk crowning, sinking into the same sand on his knees, candy-coated in that gilded red gloss. 

Through the nothingness there was a stirring, his eyes fixated on the microburst brewing along the mountain's edge in the distance. 

Thunder fades to wheels along tracks.

You’d watched the land turn from green to brown and back again. You’d watch the sun wick the water from the soil and feel it warm your skin. There’s a certain disdain that fills your chest like liquid when you picture Nellie on this trail. There was no train west to take. There was no railway. 

Did Nellie still look like her mother? Had her mouth begun to crease with a perpetual smile? Was her hair still long and did she still let it fall in ringlets down her back? Surely, she had not sounded the same in her letters, though, this sullen stranger had still signed the letters with the same swooping motions. 

As the trees became sparse and turned into gangly, reaching boojums, you realized just how far from home you had been. You had never left the great state of Louisiana but, had run those riverbeds and marshes ragged with bare feet, had run heels hard against the hollow tomb of that old paddle boat. Could you be as wild as the West? Would it love you in the same way the marshes had? Wrap you in its mossy embrace and let you sink beneath stagnant water in wait?

But for what? 

The sharecropping had been a logical by-product of everything your father had fought for in the war, rock salt and nails and hand over first for years under the lead of General Benjamin F. Butler, though no one could foresee the way the plantation had hemorrhaged money after he took on nearly ten hired men, or the way the land had would have dwindled to nothing had you not taken that ghastly, ugly burden against your back, one heavy enough to spur you west. One heavy enough that even the sting of the sunburn did nothing to quell the ache that you still felt in your chest against it. 

You watched the life drain from this land, music and the lush green of the coming summer turning to sweltering, daguerreotype daydreams. You pressed your palm against the glass and sighed. 

It was already warm enough to burn. 

When you pressed your face against the glass, you could feel the rumble of the hardened earth beneath the sodden tracks. The dried parchment of letters scraped against themselves where they pooled in the makeshift reservoir of your dresses ruched into your lap– just high enough so that your ankles could feel any movement within the waning stagnation of air in the train car. 

You tore the one on top open with your thumb– the last one to remain unopened. Its straight edge was too sharp and angled perfectly as you pulled at it, the edge of your thumb already pooling cherry beads of blood where it rippled. 

“Shit.” you cursed.

Gilded eyes peered towards you, slicing through the silence of this welling heat like ice. Had it been dark, they would have glowed. Ladies in Parisian hats tailing the woeful gazes of their well-tailored merchant husbands turning towards the spectacle that was you. Young. Unmarried. Unaccompanied and profane in your lack of grace aboard the train to the lawless lands. Maybe, by God’s hand, you had been cut from the same cloth as this lawless place– the rumble of the tracks a song to the listlessness that stirred in your chest like silt in distant waters. 

You dismissed the judgment, the venom of it all sliding off of you like that same water against a duck’s back, turning your attention back towards the product of your own disdain: Nellie’s letter, signed, sealed, and delivered to your last known location. 

Cousin, 

Your father has sent word about your arrival in Tucson, and I will meet you at the train depot in due time. I do hope that, in time, the heat of this land may dry your tears in the same way it has mine. 

I fear that you may not recognize me upon your arrival to Tucson, my face has grown harder and my body less soft. You will become this way, too. I am tough. I am afraid this place has weathered me like old leather. 

I have asked the sheriff to accompany me to the train depot in Tucson, and he has happily obliged. I didn’t think you would mind much, either. 

The sheriff is a nice man, as I am sure you have come to find, however, this land has hardened him in the same way it has hardened Edward and I. In the same way, it took Wilhelm as payment for some grander, more horrendous scheme.  I do not ask you to excuse his shortcomings– or mine– but I do ask that you try to understand us. 

Though it is better now than it has ever been, this place is still not like Louisiana. This land is lawless. This land is tough. This land does not make promises or send prayers. It exists as it is, rough and unbinding– blistering for all it is worth. 

We are the law, here. 

If we lose our morality, we lose everything. 

I will see you soon. I love you. 

Nellie. 

It was an unspoken truth that there was something broken much deeper within them that they had shared some form of solidarity within. Somehow, in some way, Nellie and Steve had shared something they never wanted you to see, but, even now, something was different about her in more recent letters that you couldn’t quite differentiate. 

Perhaps it was the way she told you she loved you. She hadn’t written those three words since writing of Wilhelm’s death. Maybe she said it then in search of the love she had lost, had looked for shreds of it to mend herself back together. Maybe Edward had done that for her, and maybe now she had some left to give. You hoped that much for her.

Edward was an entity unknown to you– a phantom in his own respects. He reaped his own form of morosity in the way he loved Nellie. He did so in a way that was devouring, in a way that encompassed her in every respect. You had been well past the persuasion of beautiful faces, for a face much like his was the face that launched a thousand ships. Another puppet wielded by The Devil, he was. That holy shape becomes a devil, best. 

It was an unholy thing, to resurrect the dead. And, you supposed, Edward had done just that. Nellie’s letters came to an abrupt halt after the announcement of the Death of Wilhelm. Your family, the only remaining kinship to her lineage, had not received a letter from her in over a year. 

You’d thought of all of the ways she could have died, but the most plausible cause was a broken heart. Even now, as rolling hills turned to planes and back again, as you watched the horrors that this land reaped, you could not see any of them taking your cousin. No, she was a force to be reckoned with. Not even this land could break her will. No, if she were to die here, now, it would have been by her hand. 

And then, by some unforsaken force beyond even your father’s control, Nellie breathed once more. Her letters were flowery, her writing curling into crashing waves of stories told. You watched as this solemn stranger breathed life back into Nellie, something as cruel and unusual as beauty in this place unseen and unheard of for years, beauty unseen to Nellie since Wilhem was killed. 

You knew of only unholy things that fed upon the dead– that breathed an ugly, hot breath back into their lungs and pulled them from the sodden earth in which they lay. Edward was not entirely truthful, that much you could tell. 

You supposed you and Edward had shared that sentiment, in some way. 

+

The Whispering Sands was still not the ritzy bar. That was still located in the lobby of The Grand Hotel, just footsteps from where The Sheriff stood now, planks still singing their groaning songs of protest beneath his legs, still stiff with sleep or nerves or years of failed prayer. 

His footfall fell heavy against the hollow floors, the weight of him reverberating against the early hum of the bar. The dealer was still as straight as a Christmastime wreath, though, now, he knew that this one could at least shoot in the right direction. You no longer needed to carry when you walked through, your spare now confined to below the counter out of sheer caution and the guiding hands of ghosts alone. The doors didn’t hang crooked anymore, the dealer making fast work of fixing all of the things Nellie had pushed to the back burner in relentless disembowelment of her own self-preservation that she so readily gave to him in the form of softened twine and spoken promises tightened around ring fingers. 

The Sheriff would not be so easy. His self-preservation ran deeper than that. 

Nellie knew it, knew that his roots were wrapped around something vital within him, something deeper than hers– something from a time before her, before this town, and before the West was wild.  

The echo of him reverberated off of the walls of the bar, bounced off of the piano, and rattled the windows. It demanded her attention long before the brass bell of the front door rang and the heavy oak clattered against the frame. 

8:50. Like clockwork. 

In the times before, just after Wilhelm, he would stop in and buy a cigar, though, to this day, she had never seen him smoke. She never inquired it, and he never inquired her. 

There was a solidarity in their grief, and it never quite, even now that she felt happy more times than not. She had a sneaking suspicion he was there for something other than a cigar every morning, but she pulled one from the humidor and took his money anyway. There had been a time where she insisted it was on the house. It wasn’t worth the fight, now. 

He looked different today. Still sullen is his strange, tortured way, but there was almost something beautiful about it, about the way he ruminated in this state of torture. Even in the way his stagnation had turned into just that with time, something seemed to still sit there in wait, leaden in the pit of his chest. 

He looked like the face of a handbill like this, enveloped in all black. Square-toed boots with black trousers that made him look ganglier than he was, made him loom over Nellie more than he already did. His black frock coat dusted his calves at a three-quarter length, and a black bolo tie covered as much of the stark white high-collar as possible. On the hat rack by the door sat his usual wide-brimmed Stetson, and, from just behind the plain silver of his belt buckle, the Colt Burtline Special shone in the light. 

He looked fit for a funeral.

He walked like he beckoned the apocalypse in clouds of rolling thunder behind him. When his heels pressed into the softened sand, the earth quaked beneath it. The weight of him made the stagecoach groan on its hinges– leaden and heavy with the weight of something bigger than settled silt within his chest, kicked up like the sand behind horse hooves and stagecoach wheels. 

Parchment sat like lead in his lap, curdling there and souring something that had sat too long. Cracking fingers curled around your words like poison, sweetened with sasparilla whiskey, golden ambergris letters seeping into him and warming his throat like bile and molten gold. He opened the first one with a nimbleness unlike one he had ever known, and read it once more:

25 April, 1894

To the Sheriff that this letter finds, 

I am afraid your letter has found me in a state of disrepair. I have never been one for niceties and I am afraid I do not have it in me to start now. 

My betrothed had never known peace in life, and I am afraid that he may not ever know it in death, wherever that plane Hell may be. 

Maybe it is I that has died, and maybe it is I that walks across this Hell. Maybe it is my own doing that brought me to this. Maybe I am the creature of my own undoing. I am not a nice girl, Steve. Not the nice girl you think I might be. 

We were raised like leather, stretched and scraped to be tough in the way that our mothers were, unbending and unbreaking as they had been. They were not forgiving, nor were they kind. Nellie was once that way, too. Though, I fear that your desert sun has softened her. That it changed something deeper within her in a way that she may be someone I no longer recognize. 

I plan to arrive in Tucson by train on the first of October. Maybe this sun will soften me in the same way it has softened my cousin. Maybe I don’t want it to. 

Though I hope for my tomorrow to be kind, I have an inkling that it never will be, for this life had never had a kindness to offer. 

I’ll be the one in white. 

I will see you then, Sheriff. 

He pictures the way you will step off the train, white linens spilling over the threshold of it by some sickened grace of the hand of an unkind God. He both relished in it and could not bear the thought. He thought of linens hiked over knees and rucked up under the fabric of itself, a  depiction of the implosion of his world. 

He had already lived this, soft hair against soft legs and white linens shed in a dustbowl around shared space and soft, breathlessness passed between lips. He had felt this kind of softness before– had known this tender touch of a woman outside of the mother he never had. 

It was the first time he had ever been touched gently. 

Even Nellie’s hand seemed gruff as it gripped his shoulders in a grounding movement, his eyes slowing with the movement of reading and dissipating into blankness an indicator that he had gone somewhere that even she would never be allowed to see. It was a look she had known all too well.

“I’m afraid she might not like me much.” He whispered, low enough for Eddie to not be able to hear– or, at least, low enough so he could pretend not to. She knew what he meant by this, another feeling chased after her own reanimated heart. 

Nevertheless, she avoided the philosophical nature of it all, answering him with the only thought she had: “I’m afraid she might not like anyone much, Steve.” She starts, and the questioning gaze he gives her urges her to continue. 

“It wasn’t easy for her, either, Steve.” She starts with another sigh, now more like the weight was being pressed out of her lungs from the weight that she felt, “Most of the time, it was out right hard.” 

“We’ve all had it hard, Nellie. Nothing about this life has been particularly easy.” Steve says back. He didn’t mean it to be as harsh as it was. She knew that, though it didn’t stop that initial sting of his dismissiveness.  

“William wasn’t a nice man, no matter how much she loved him.” She tells him, louder this time and too fast. Eddie couldn’t help the the way his eyes are drawn to her from where they are fixed to the periscope of landscape before them, “Forgive her if she isn’t welcoming.” 

+ 

To the Lady that may find this letter, I hope it finds her well

Tucson still radiates heat at this time of year, the mirage at the end of town makes the expanse of land between here and the mountains feel both endless and right in front of you at the same time. It warps like the heat is melting space and time itself. Nevertheless, the first blooms of orange mallow have begun to open in a patch where the stagecoach stopped. 

He doesn’t know what comes over him, but he was inclined to plock them from the ground and brush the dirt from their roots. 

It seems the desert knew you would board the train in New Orleans and set west for us, and wanted to welcome you with its kindest hello. The desert is not kind, but she would make an exception for someone like you, I would suppose. 

The wheels screech along the wrought iron of the track as they slow to a halt– and he swears, just for a single, fleeting moment, his heart stops with them. There is a stream of people that step down. Ladies with large hats and square-shouldered men in frock coats not unlike his. He wonders if you will know your face before Nellie does– wonders if he knows who you are just from the curls of your letters. 

And then, you were there. 

You were unremarkable in every way possible, though, at a closer glance, you had chosen to forego a bustle and corset. Instead, the pliant lines of your body undefined against a white buttoned shirt and a long dark skirt. A plain, flat-brimmed stetson sat against the crown of your head, just enough to obscure your face from his view. 

Your cousin is very kind. I like to think that you are kind like her, though, I also hope that you are tough in the same way that she is.

He steps forward, his hands sticky with sweat or the sap of the stems of the orange mallow crushed beneath a pressing grip, he isn’t sure. As he steps on to the tarmac, he remembers his manners– remembers that he isn’t an animal and you are not inherently dangerous, and pulls off his hat, pressing it to his chest as he holds an arm out stiffly towards you without any further introduction. 

You see the star against his chest, pressed silver pinned there like a placard on the spectacle of the man before you, and know that this is him– that this is the entity whom has spilled his heart to you over parchment and ink and blood, “Well, now, those are awfully pretty, sheriff.” You say to him, looking down at the crushed orange matter in his hands. They have already begun to wilt. 

“I have an affinity for pretty things.” 

He flirts shamelessly with you, and something deep within you stirrs. It is not the schoolgirl crush you harbored with William. It isn’t even akin to love, but something worse and something ugly. His letters and flowery words and then his backtracking and condolences meddle into one ugly mass of insult. No, this thing that rose in you was not love, nor was it even a cousin. It was hate. Blinding, furious hate.

“And I have an affinity for men who can make up their minds.” You nod towards him, reaching towards the tarmac for the cracking handle of your green steamer trunk, especially now that the gangly, lean man you presume is Edward reaches for it. 

There is a moment in time where everyone freezes. Both Nellie and her husband, as well as the sheriff before you. They are walking a thin line, one akin to the silver thread between life and death. The tension is palpable, and Nellie shatters the thing you cling to for resolve like glass:

“Now you’re being outright childish–”

She sucks in a breath when you snap, the wild dogs that live within your chest writhing and pulling against chains as you release whatever hurt and pain you held in your heart towards her. Everything you had wanted to say, everything you wanted to scream back at her once she had resurrected. You weilded them now as weapons against her. 

“You sure are one to talk about childish, Nellie. You ran in the other direction when things got hard, and then you up and died on us.” 

“I’m not dead. I was never dead.”

“Well, I have a hard time believing that.”

The Sheriff and the tall man take a step back behind Nellie, shrink away from your thunderous roar as if you might actually bite. The leather of your handle and the steamer dropping from your hand with had resonant patriarchal basso against the tarmac. Time has frozen in place, but people continue to swirl around you in a flurry of haste and posthaste annoyance. Silver tears well against the pink line of her eyes, and you are acutely aware that yours are a mirror image.

Steve had faced many things. He had killed men with his bare hands, he had been covered in so much blood that he couldn’t decipher theirs from his own. He had known starvation, heartstroke, and tragedy. Though, he had never known this– his wife was only ever tender. 

He can see the rage drip from your mouth like hot, molten tar, can see the tears well in your eyes like casted silver against the mold of your face– the way a single one cools and leaves a residual streak against the ashen skin of your cheek. You want to love Nellie, in the same way she wanted to love Edward, and in the way he loved his wife. He can see it, that burning want so bad that it becomes hatred. That kind of love whose flame burns blue. 

He knows Nellie loves you, too, but also knows how dangerous it is to speak it aloud– lest that vile maiden Death may hear it. 

Your eyes stare holes into him, burn against his abdomen from where you fix them. He had heard of women becoming alight with lust born from rage before, but had not though of you to be insane enough to eye him in a familiar way right here on the tarmac. That blue flame affixed to him and warming him from the inside, as well. 

“That’s an awfully ugly belt buckle, sheriff.” You speak, finally, breaking the silence and restoring some semblance of order to this congregation. 

This place is not forgiving, nor is it kind. I hope that your heart is not faint, and I hope that this place is kinder to you than it has been to us. 

With warmest regards, 

Steven Harrington

[mialikeshockey]

mialikeshockey writing

I am also gonna be rewriting some things and putting them onto here too, I might rewrite a lot of things even if they are things that I just wrote but I will always leave the original post up. All (most) of my writings. I try not to use (y/n), I sometimes just pick random names from google but if you send in a request and want a specific name make sure you put the name in. (constantly being edited, credit to all the gif makers!)

ABOUT ME/BLOG (please read)

Requests are always open

HOLIDAY FICS

MINI STORIES

(mini stories of hockey players)

Case McCarthy

NEW KID

MEMORIES

SICK

CASE MCCARTHY GIFS

AS A BOYFRIEND

NEW KID (rewrote)

MEMORIES (rewrote)

YOU LOOK PRETTY

FULL OF LIGHT

Gavin McCarthy

FALL OR FALLING?

SICK

GIFS

MINI STORIES

Aiden McCarthy

GIFS

SWEATER WEATHER

Jack Hughes

WATCH

BLUSHED

WHAT A TIME (rewrote)

THE CLIMB (rewrote)

THE LOVE CLUB

GLARE

H.O.L.Y

THE CLIMB

WHAT A TIME

INSTAGRAM POST

MINI STORIES

KISS ME

PUPPY EYES

Johnny Beecher

LETTERS

DONT GO BREAKING MY HEART

Alex Turcotte

CURLS FOR THE GIRL

AS A BOYFRIEND

Trevor Zegras

FLOUR BATTLE

GIGGLES

INSTAGRAM POST

SOFT

Juraj Slafkovsky

PRETTY

PRETTY (rewrote)

Luke Hughes

BABY SOFT

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO BALL

OLI

JET

SOMETHING SPECIAL

MINI STORIES

Mark Estapa

ADORE YOU P1

ADORE YOU P2

GIFS

Ethan Edwards

MINE (rewrote)

MINE

Nico Hischier

DANCING IN THE RAIN

SICK

Quinn Hughes

INSTAGRAM POST

NERVES

Cole Caufield

CHILLY

[cjbolan]

@deepestphotoshopwonderwomanpaper Even better knowing Melissa was Ursula, now she can do more mermaid franchises !

Emily windsnap dream cast

Melissa McCarthy as Millie

Shay Rudolph as Shona

Liliane Hernandez as Mandy

Rian MCCiriick as Aaron

[homenecromancer]

comic by Tim Kreider; here’s the full text of his Artist’s Statement for this one:

I had already turned in my cartoon Friday afternoon when, Saturday morning, I read the news that Reagan’s health was failing. I began drawing immediately. I have had a rough draft of this cartoon ready for this occasion for years. As the day continued I kept getting e-mails and text messages from friends excitedly anticipating the Gipper’s impending death. Finally Steve, with whom I have planned for over a decade to hold a party on the day of Reagan’s funeral, called me from the track, where he was betting on the Belmont Stakes, to tell me that the old bastard was finally dead. He reported that there had been a perfunctory Moment of Silence, lasting approximately 1.6 seconds, before everyone went back to betting. It was beautiful. As the afternoon went on I got a flood of congratulatory calls from friends around the world—Ben in Boston, Megan and Mike in New York, Berkeley in Baltimore, even Allison in Bulgaria. I e-mailed this cartoon into the City Paper around seven P.M., begging them in the name of our sweet lord and savior Jesus Christ to stop the presses and please run this Wednesday, and then headed down to Baltimore to drink tiny beers and watch The Big Lebowski. The Reagan party will be held at my house this weekend.

Perhaps it may seem insensitive and unpatriotic to some for me to run such an ugly cartoon at this time of national mourning. To those of you who hold this view, I must respectfully say fuck you. Some of my younger readers may not even remember Ronald Regan’s presidency, and I would not want them to be misled by the onslaught of state propaganda they’ll be subjected to this week. Calling him the Great Communicator is like calling Hitler the Great Negotiator, and if we’re going to credit him with winning the Cold War we may as well credit him with the Challenger disaster and the return of Halley’s Comet. Let me tell you what it was really like:

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

as of today, Ronald Reagan has been in Hell for twenty years

[flamingoroadalbumphoto]

[yarrystyleeza]

In A Heartbeat (M.M)

"I loved her, father, and her heartbeat was all it took for me to fall in love with her."

Taglist: @mindidjarin @acharliecoxedfan @v4leoftears @galaxies-and-moons-and-cox @itwasthereaminuteago @chronicoverachiever @mattmurdocks6thscaleapartment @chvoswxtch @bellaxgiornata @bunmurdock @bunmurdock-main @shouldbestudying41 @1988-fiend @xxdrixx @munsonownsmyass @shiorimakibawrites @devilsmurdock @saltedlays @babygirlmurdock @starxlightm

[series masterlist / main masterlist]

[Chapter Two: Fixing Ties]

Word count: 6.8k!

Warnings/tags for this chapter: typical show violence, use of guns, blood, the black suit is wet TWO TIMES (first one is implied, second is direct), "The Devil" grins a lot which fucks me up every time I picture him, big doses of fluff.

A/N: the long-waited chapter is finally up! Damn, it's been almost a year since I last updated this wth (literally July 12th of 2023)!!! It really took me a while to fill in the plot holes (aka sit my ass and think). I hope you all enjoy it, feedback is always appreciated! <333

There stood by the window frame, a male figure, one that this city has marked to be its savior, the masked vigilante that kept the evil hiding in its den. The man in black. The man without fear.

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen.

“This is bigger than you, kid,” the man had his gun imprinted in Madilyn's head. She closed her eyes, prayed for her death to be merciful.

“How about you let her go and fight me like a man?” The Devil walked slowly towards them. “And that's the only option you have.”

“You know she has nothing to do with this, McCarthy. Let her go, now.” Oh, Hell, Devil Boy, he was sure-footed. Although he got beaten to death the last time they crossed roads. But The Devil was certain of how things ought to end this time.

One minute he was here, the next he's gone. The large man looked around, loosened his grip on Madilyn, who took advantage to set herself free and take shelter behind the counter.

Her heart raced out of her chest—though she was safer now, she couldn’t help the anxiety that's crushing her pumper.

BANG!

The man hits the wall. But he's much stronger than The Devil. He pushes him aside, The Devil crashes into the bookshelf. But he gets back up quickly from under the piles of books and uses his weight to ram into the brick wall of a man and takes him to the ground, flipping the couch underneath them.

She rises a little to spy on the scene. A wooden baton shoots and flies over her head, smacking into the kitchen wall. She must stay down, and this is her warning.

“Stay down!” he shouts, confirming her suppositions. She's already a distraction with her racing heartbeat. It's crazy—but he wanted to let all this fight be damned, run up to her and hold her tight. He fears for her, he doesn’t want to witness her going through another episode and not being able to comfort her. But, he knows he is nothing more than a stranger —yes, he’s a savior, her savior, but he’s just... a stranger, and he knows it.

The adrenaline rushed back and forth in her veins like raging fire, almost bursting out of her skin. Her teeth grind, she’s shivering. Her heart raced, and the anxiety crawled all over her like ants running up the hill, numbing her limbs, freezing her body.

The Devil receives a good punch, throwing him off to the wall. He recalls her giggling and laughing in the rain. He smiles. She truly is a distraction. His jaw is slack. He spits blood. “You really wanna do this the hard way, don't you?” The Devil asked with his gravelly voice, gutting a giggle.

The man gets up and walks towards his bag, but The Devil takes him by surprise, strangling him with his wooden batons. The man overpowers him once again, breaking the hold he had on his neck and smacking The Devil to the wall.

The Devil wouldn't stop, he can't. If he was anything, he's a menace, a troublesome, a real pain in the ass—and he has to prove it tonight. He gets back on his feet, his boots thudding on the wooden floor. “I can do this all night...” he chuckles.

BANG!

The room bursted with the loud thuds of the men's conflicted fists, noises of clouts and punches whooshing in the air, combined with agonized grunts and groans—aside from the words they spat over each other.

She trembles. Sweat is running down her skin. Her teeth are grinding and clacking. Her body temperature isn't acting right. Her skin was hot, but her limbs were cold. It was distracting, once again. He listened, almost taking a punch when he did. He dodged it, aiming a blow in the direction of the intruder. He was larger than him, but that wouldn't stop The Devil from taking him down—he had to take him down.

She was scared. No, she was terrified. But what took over her mind was the thoughts of why is this man here, and what is it that she has and he's searching for? She's not registered as an official detective for that case yet, how did he know that she's the one working on it? How could he come after her?

Or that's what she thought it was.

She realized how quiet the atmosphere has gotten to be. She peeked her head over the marble counter, stood off her squat slowly. “It's okay... It's over.” The Devil was the last man standing, he assured her with a warm tone, trying to regulate his breath. His gloved fingers shake, and his eyes water beneath the dark fabric.

“You're okay?” she gently asked, the blood on his face glistened in the dim lights. He sighed, thanking God for not testing his limits tonight. He would've killed that man if she got hurt tonight.

“Yeah, don't bother. You just call the cops in.” he demanded, turning his back to her and taking whatever the man was carrying.

“But what are you gonna do with him?” she turned around the counter, arms crossed upon her chest, supporting her towel around her torso.

“I'll take care of him.” he answered, carrying the guy over his shoulder like a camping blanket, “secure your windows better next time.” He left through the window and down the fire escape. She stood still at her place, processing the latter events. She snapped back to reality and walked to her bedroom, got dressed, and immediately called the cops.

Somewhere along the Hudson River shore side of Hell's Kitchen, and in an old, abandoned warehouse at the port, one of the light sources flickered as The Devil of Hell's Kitchen brought the so-called McCarthy in, still unconscious from the beating he took.

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen placed him on a wooden chair and waited for him to regain consciousness, one hand cuffed to a pipe.

McCarthy slowly came back to his senses. With still dim and blurry vision, he turns to look at his cuffed hand and tests it, pulling his fist towards himself. It's locked. There's no escape anytime soon. He looks upwards the light source in the room, only making out something of a shadowy black figure looming from above him.

“Who the hell are you?” he speaks in a fearless deep voice.

“I'm the one asking questions.” The Devil throws a handful of folders on the wooden surface causing a loud and heavy thud. He settles down on a chair on the opposite side of the table. McCarthy recognizes these folders; they were the ones he dropped on his way out of Mr. Lloyd's house.

“I know what happened.” The Devil interrupts the silence as McCarthy stared at the folders stacked under his eyes. “I can help you find whoever is responsible for their deaths and put them behind bars.” The Devil offers.

McCarthy stayed silent for a bit before raising his head with a smirk on his face, “go to hell, kid.” his tone remained sarcastic.

“Well, I might not know exactly what you went through, but I know a friend who did, and I know how hard it is.” The Devil leans forward in his seat.

“You think I'm stupid enough to fall for this sweet talk, kid?” McCarthy shrugs, his voice laced with sarcasm.

The Devil shifts in his seat a little, placing his forearms over the wooden surface. “What do you have to lose anyway, sergeant Nicholas McCarthy?”

He looks up at him. “You think some kid in black pajamas that knows who I am is gonna scare me away? Stop me from taking them down for good?” The Devil chuckles.

“I'm just trying to help you, you're the one serving a couple sentences in jail anyway,” The Devil follows calmly with an even calmer smile, “and for the record, they are a lot, in case you want to know.” McCarthy rolls his eyes and turns his face away. “I have all night long, and I'm not going anywhere,” The Devil leans in closer, his tone turns darker, “and they're already looking for you.”

Meanwhile, sirens were heard racing across the streets, back at the heart of Hell's Kitchen, as Mahoney's team arrived at the scene. He made it straight to Madilyn's apartment where she waited for him at the door, her cat held in her hand and her old Italian neighbor on her side, he embraces her lightly. “Mayfield, you’re okay?” He asks, freeing her.

“Yeah, I am… I assume,” she shrugs, hugging herself, “at least not dead...” she steps aside to allow the cops to start their work. She observes the scene for a moment, recalling the latter events. “You know, I just-- I have this gut feeling that this is the same guy we're after in Mr. Lloyd's case,” Madilyn says, and Brett pulls a face, a little puzzled. “The exact same physical description, same ways of menace, even the way he holds a gun and his choice of words, it's all just so symmetrical that he can't be another person,” she explained thoroughly, “I can't shake that feeling off me, you know me, Brett.”

Brett sighs. “You didn't know what he was here for, did you?”

She shakes her head in complete denial. “I’m telling you. At first, I thought he was here because I'm working on his case, though I was supposed to be officially registered in the morning, and it's impossible that he knew I was applying for this case— it was just assigned to me this morning. Rethinking it now, he could've just threatened me and told me to stop coming after him— but he didn't, he told me he wasn't here for me anyway.”

Brett nods slowly, “and Daredevil?” he asks, he knows that the masked vigilante would never let that slide.

She shrugged, curled her lip. “He took him away, I don't know where— but I assume he's searching him up,” she huffed.

Brett sighs and pats her back. “I'm glad you're okay, Mayfield, and that you’re back.”

“First day on the comeback—” She chuckled, “I suppose we're used to this kinda shit. Thanks, though. I missed this.”

“You think I really care about the sentence? I don't care if they behead me or burn me alive,” McCarthy chuckled.

“I appreciate your high spirits, sergeant, but— unfortunately you won't be able to take one step if you're arrested. As I told you before— they're already looking for you.” The Devil keeps his calm but sarcastic tone. “I help you avenge your friends; you help me put the ones responsible behind bars, we'll be even,” The Devil offered.

“These people deserve to be dead.” McCarthy corrects him.

“Well, death is not always the best option. But rotting in prison is a better one,” The Devil shrugs, “these people don't deserve death, death is merciful.” The Devil stressed.

Silence falls over the atmosphere before a question breaks through the air. “Why should I trust you?” McCarthy asks.

The Devil smirks and leans forward in his seat. “Because I got something you really need.”

The Devil places a file on the tabletop, slides it towards the man on the other side of the table. “This is what you broke into Detective Mayfield's house for—but you were never gonna find there.”

With his free hand, McCarthy reached out to the file cover, eyes going back and forth between the file and what he could make out of The Devil’s face as he unfolded it. Walking his eyes across the page, McCarthy skimmed snippets of some corporations from the paper. “What is this?” he asks.

The Devil smirks, “these are some of the corporations linked to a guy I think you might want to know more about.”

“What does this have to do with it?” McCarthy asked.

The Devil shifts in his seat, “meet Mr. Winston Bennett, one of the funding pillars of the war. He's involved in corruption cases, money laundering, and bribing military officials, for instance. A year ago, he transferred a couple of his main companies’ assets, one of which was to Porter Lewis, his former secretary, he's our key to get to Bennett.”

McCarthy's eyes fall onto his lap, “fuck,” he muttered between his teeth. The Devil could sense the disappointment in his voice, but a man of war like him had seen so much it shouldn’t surprise him anymore.

“I'm gonna make each one of those fuckers pay...” he mumbled.

And that was an oath The Devil took upon himself.

Sounds of evidence bags crunching in the investigators' hands filled the room as they gathered bits and pieces of anything that could be a lead. Flashing lights flickered around the room. Madilyn sat at the dining table and watched as the team took pictures of the scene. A light switched on in her head. “McCarthy...” Madilyn says, “his name is McCarthy.”

Brett turned to look at her, a little puzzle, “McCarthy?” he asked, to confirm.

She nodded, “Daredevil said a name. This name, McCarthy,” she shifts in her seat a little, now completely facing Brett, “now I don't think that's a guess because Daredevil talked as if they met before, and I think they did. Daredevil definitely knows who that guy is.”

“Tech units, file a 6'2" white male dressed in all black with experience in military combat, he goes by the name McCarthy. All operating units, if spotted the suspect with previously mentioned description, arrest immediately.”

“Seriously, Mahoney?!” she exclaimed, angrily standing off of her seat at Brett Mahoney's office, “what do you mean I can't investigate this?—it's my job! You can't force me to stay out of it!” she followed up, almost stuttering for how outlandish this situation sounded to her.

“Mayfield,” Brett responds, pinching the bridge of his nose, too bothered to keep it together anymore, “for the last goddamn time, you can't investigate a case you're involved in and you're fully aware of this. Your testimony may not be valid and even if it is, his attorneys will make sure to use it against you just like what they did with Davis!” he shouted back as he turned to look at her, after trying to keep calm for the last thirty minutes. She remembers this trial very well; it was the downfall of her colleague years ago.

She huffed, sitting back on the chair, “well, I never said I was gonna testify against him in court...” she mumbled, crossing her arms.

“Now you're just being childish, Mayfield! If I don't stop you, the court will! And they might as well take back your license, so don't go reckless, I already have plenty of idiots up to my ears!”

“Brett, please,” she pleaded, her eyes blurred with the tears she fought to keep, “this is my chance to come back. You didn't just call me out of my shift to stop me from doing it—” her voice cracked, “you know I've always wanted to come back.”

“And you know you've already been causing trouble all around while working with the Bulletin. And you also know that you were always a second away from arrest for obstruction of justice—multiple times!”

“Well, that means I'm smart and I can get away with it—”

“That means you never pull your head out of your ass and see that you're a bull in a China shop!”

“For the love of God—”

“I'm not gonna say this again, Mayfield. If I ever find out you got involved in the matter, I'm gonna be the one to arrest you, and that's my final word.” he towered over her as he leant over his desk.

“Fine!” She stood off her seat and walked towards the door.

“I don't wanna hear you talking about this case again, Mayfield!” Brett said before she slammed the door behind her. Turning around with a sigh, she saw her three colleagues standing in the narrow hallway right in front of the door, they're concerned, deeply.

“So?” Foggy started.

“I can't investigate the case,” she shook her head, “but you guys can still take his case! Not Mr. Lloyd's. His.”

“Why take his case? He tried to kill you last night!” Matt countered, scrunching his face.

“He threatened to, he didn't want to kill me, I was never his target and I already told you that!” Madilyn countered back.

Matt sighs, running his hand across his face. “You can't risk it,” he calmly says, “what if he comes after you again?” Matt doesn't want her to get caught up in the mess. She's not made for such things. The things he knows about the case might crush her.

Madilyn shook her head, “he won't, I'm not even his target, trust me,” she stopped. “Look, you just--... you're gonna investigate him, just in case, because I don't think that's a normal case, and I think it's going to have a great impact on the firm. I have this gut feeling and it never disappointed me.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between the three of them. “Karen, say something?” She knows Karen will always have her back.

Karen nodded, “I say we give it a shot?” she stated, looking at both Matt and Foggy next to her. Madilyn sighed with a smile. “I mean she's right, there's nothing we could lose.”

Matt clenched his jaw, “you don't have to support her just because she's your friend.” Matt was worried, and he couldn't hide it anymore.

“But Matt,” Karen countered, “she's right, there's something off about this case, and I trust her guts.” she explained, tucking her blonde strands behind her ear, “a guy she never knew broke into her house, saying she had nothing to do with what he’s doing, yet proceeds to break into her house and takes something she never knew it existed in her home. Something is off.”

“Foggy?” Madilyn called, asking for his opinion as he stood silently watching the conversation going back and forth.

“Well,” Foggy slowly shrugged, “I can't say I wasn't intrigued by what they're saying...”

Matt rolled his eyes behind his tinted glasses, “I can't believe you're agreeing with them on this, it's dangerous.”

Foggy glanced at him with a knowing look, “it's not our first time involved with such things, buddy.”

They all stared at Matt, waiting for his final answer. He huffed, unclenching his jaw, “we're gonna do it, but...”

“But what?” Madilyn whined, almost comically.

“But none of you put yourselves in trouble. That means no going on investigation night shifts, no playing undercover cop and surely, no participating in dangerous political positions or situations.” he pointed a finger at each one of them. “And because I don't have experience on such acts from you yet, please don't do any of these, it's dangerous and ridiculous and I don't want a third troublemaker on the team.” he directed his speech to Madilyn. It was really funny coming out of his mouth; it was like he was talking to himself. Foggy stared at his feet to distract himself from laughing at what Matt said.

Matt tilts his head, waiting for her answer. She huffed, rolling her honey eyes, “fine.” They all suspire.

“Let's go pick up some coffee and see what we've got for starters, shall we?” Foggy suggested. The girls agreed by taking the lead on the way out. “A fourth you meant,” Foggy corrected in a whisper as he let Matt hold his arm. Matt chuckled. “You should really take your own advice sometimes, buddy. Let's go.”

“I'll meet you downstairs tomorrow, alright?” she asked him, standing at her building entrance, tugging on her purse strap.

“Alright,” he smiled. “Goodnight, Madilyn, take care of yourself,” he fixed the red blinds barely hanging on the bridge of his nose.

“You too.” she smiled back, “Goodnight, Matt.” She said, before turning around and walking towards the stairs.

She took the stairs to her apartment. As she unlocked her door, her cat purred and scratched the wooden surface, eager to reunite with her. “Hello, little one!” she carried her in her arms the moment she walked into her apartment, “did you miss mommy? Oh, did you miss mommy? Mommy missed you too, baby!” she playfully nuzzled her cat's head. Ivy trilled. “Well, I'm hungry too, I'm gonna make us something.” she headed to the kitchen as she cradled her cat. Searching in the pantry, she found a can of soft food. She emptied the can in a bowl and walked across the room to place it at her cat's area.

Once she made sure her cat was indulged in feeding, she headed to her room to change her clothes. In all black outfit and a zip-up hoodie, she sat on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand, waiting for her call to be answered.

“Madilyn?...”

“Hey, dad. How's it going?” she fiddled with the drawstring of her hoodie.

“I'm doing great, angel... Your mom told me you got that job at the... Nicholson and Madock, I guess?...”

“It's Nelson and Murdock, and Page,” she corrected, “it's a law firm, and recently they got into private investigation,” she recalls the latter events, “so I applied for the job, and I got accepted. Mom probably told you all of that.”

“Oh, yeah, these fellas… I heard they had a questionable reputation...” she huffed a chuckle at his comment.

“Yeah, they did get involved in a couple of things lately, but I assure you, they're squeaky clean.” Her father chuckled at her response. It's been almost six months since she last heard his laughter echoing on the walls of her place. “However, that's not why I called.” her chuckles subsided, she had to be straightforward.

“What is it then, angel?” her father asked, he's probably flipping through one of his newspapers, she knows the way he speaks when he's wrapped up in reading.

“There's a guy I met last night, he said his name was McCarthy and that he knows you very well and wanted to make sure if you're okay,” she stared out of her window as the dim moonlight casted upon the floor of her room. Her father went silent for a moment. She mentally made a note of that. He definitely knows him; he was an admiral; he knows all the people he worked with.

“I don't think I recall this name...” he slowly answered, “no... I don't think I know a guy with this name...”

“Yeah, I thought so…” she clenched her jaw, already calculated her next move.

“Alright, angel... Gotta go now... Your mom is struggling with the blender again...” he chuckled.

“Alright, dad. Tell her I said hi. Talk to you later,” she said and hung up, grabbing her boots off the floor to wear them.

Another rainy night, she walks over the forming water puddles, splashing her heavy feet into the spills. Her journey doesn't take long, her destination is only a twenty-minutes-away walk. She took the elevator of a building and rang a bell.

Once. Twice. Three times.

“Who is it?” a guy calls from inside, his voice approaching the other side of the door.

“It's me, Alan. Madilyn.” she answers, “I'm freezing here.”

“Alright, alright, I'm coming...” she heard a noise before he reached the door, “shit...” he cussed under his breath. He opens the door. “Hey, Maddie-- whoa, no hugs,” he raised his hands, “you're soaked, and I might catch a cold.”

“Yeah, you could've answered earlier...” she responded, passing him and into the house, “why is this place so messy?” she grimaced, taking her hoodie off.

“Had a really shitty week at work,” he rubbed his face, his eyes are surrounded with dark circles, “there's a money-laundering scandal going around and it's affecting everyone.”

“Money-laundering? How's that?” she asked, squeezing the water out of her hair.

“The head of the company is suspected to have been laundering money through one of his oil companies,” Alan explained. She hummed. “We still don't know much details about the case, they're keeping it under wraps. It doesn't matter really. What brought you here in this weather, though?”

“Oh, ummm... A guy broke into my house last night,” she started, “and I'm suspecting he's from the military.”

“How can you be so chill about it?” his brows knitted with confusion, “you're talking like you got a gift card from Walmart or something...”

“It was already dealt with,” she shrugged, “not by the cops of course.” she mumbled the latter part.

“Who dealt with it then?”

“Daredevil.”

“There are guards on this floor,” The Devil whispered, hiding behind one of the pillars at the parking lot, next to him was McCarthy, who was visibly confused. “Four.” The Devil confirmed.

“There's two more, they're taking the elevator with him,” he tilted his head to the side a little, “and there's a driver, he's in the car. It's a few minutes away from the elevator, that’s enough time for us.”

“How do you know all of that?” The Devil smirked at McCarthy’s question before rolling to hide behind a car. The man is out of the elevator. He's moving closer with his guards. But The Devil must clear his way first. His dark silhouette moves from one pillar to another. He throws one of his wooden batons at a guard. He's down, and luckily, no one noticed, not yet.

He smells sulfur, McCarthy has taken his gun out of its holster. The Devil shoots his other baton, but it aims for McCarthy's hand, throwing the gun out of his grip, sending it clattering across the floor. “No guns,” he whispers.

“Come on...” McCarthy rolls his eyes.

“There’s noise on the floor, 10 o’clock…” one of the bodyguards talks through the handheld transceiver as he walks towards the source of the latter sounds. The Devil takes advantage of the situation, silently attacking the man from behind, sending him into a short sleep. Meanwhile, McCarthy has taken another one down with the back of his gun. The last one was an easy target, The Devil smacked him with a baton, knocking him unconscious. As he drags the man away, he hears a click behind his back.

BANG!

He dodges the bullet and turns, knocking the gun out of the bodyguard’s hand and blowing him with a punch in his chin. The man falters in his steps but manages to aim a punch in The Devil’s face, The Devil strikes him before he could react further, knocking him to the ground, as McCarthy attacks the other bodyguard with a blow to his head.

The man freezes for a moment before bolting towards his car, but to no avail, The Devil corners him against the car before he could reach the rear door’s handle as his driver escapes the scene.

“You’re not gonna hurt me,” arrogantly, he speaks, “I’m too influential, I can destroy you—” but before he could finish his sentence, he was blown with a fist to the face, McCarthy’s fist, sending his rectangular glasses shattering across the concrete flooring.

“Not as influential as you may think,” McCarthy comments.

“Don’t you know who I am?!” he shouts. They did not flinch.

“We’re not the kind of guys who’d bully a random rich business man,” The Devil smugly smiles and answers after swallowing his desire to punch him in the face, “but I appreciate the effort you put on a show.”

“We believe you have some information that we need…” The Devil starts.

“Winston Bennett,” McCarthy cuts him off offensively, “does that ring any bells for you, prick?” The Devil sighs, rolls his eyes behind his mask.

“You were his secretary, more like his right-hand man,” The Devil continues.

“Then why are you coming after me, bastards? Why not go after him?”

“Where does he keep his files?” The Devil ignores his rude response, still holding him by the collar of his swanky gray dress suit.

“Why the hell would I tell you—” The Devil slams him against the car, his head hits the metallic body.

“Answer the question.” His voice is coarse and dull, “where does Winston Bennett keeps his files?” McCarthy pulls his gun out of its holster and points it Lewis’ head, the muzzle is almost carving a circle in his skull. The Devil tightens his grip on Lewis’ necktie. His neck turns red and swollen with the obstructed air and blood.

“A safe…” he groans.

“Where the fuck is that safe?!” McCarthy snaps, imprinting his gun further into Lewis’ head.

“Diesel…” he chokes, “Diesel Gush… the executive office… a painting…” he coughs and wheezes, “please…” he pants as he pleads. The Devil lets go of his collar enough to breathe before aiming a punch straight to his nose, knocking Lewis down with a bloody nose on the gray concrete floor. As he tries to regain composure, he looks up, but no one is there anymore.

“Did you find anything?” Madilyn sleepily asked, resting her head on the couch arm and her eyes are half opened.

“There are hundreds of thousands of people in the navy under the name McCarthy,” Alan answered, still staring at his screen, “of course I'm not gonna find him, I'm not a digital magician.” Madilyn stood off the couch. “Wait, where are you going?” he asked, turning to look at her walking to the door.

“Calling it a night,” she answered, putting on her boots, “call me if you find anything, alright?”

“You're sure you could go home like that?” he took his headphones off, resting it on his neck, “you can stay the night here if you want to.”

“Nah, I'm good.” she shook her head, already opened the front door, “I can walk home... Or take a cab... Or whatever...” she mumbled, “I'll text you if I find any new info on him, alright? Alright.” she says, closing the door right after.

She walked down the stairs and out of the building. The rain stopped, that was one good thing, at least she wouldn't have to fight both the water and sleep.

“You know you can't walk home looking like that, detective.” a familiar voice says, before coming out of the dark and revealing himself.

She gasped, pulling her gun out, aiming it at the shadow man. “Jesus!” she clutched her chest, “I almost shot you!”

The Devil grinned as he approached her, “it's too late to walk home alone,” she lowers the gun, “and you're a detective, you should be on alert. Not sleepy.”

“I was sleepy until you showed up and scared the shit outta me,” she mumbled. He barks laughing. “You enjoyed it that much?” she asked, she couldn't hide the smile on her face.

He shook his head in denial, “I never meant to do that…” he chuckled, his gravelly voice is amusing, “I wanted to be gentler.”

She looks down, biting back the smile on her lip; his figure is already distracting more than the sleepy bees buzzing in her head. “So, I guess you're here to walk me home, Mr. Devil. Right?”

He shrugged with a smirk, “you can say that.” she nodded to his response.

“Guess I don't need to show you the way,” she says, “unless you insist,” he chuckled. She made The Devil laugh three times, in contrast to the bluntness he was known for, he sounds gentler. His laughter sounded pretty amusing, too. It’s not like she’d feel the butterflies crowding her stomach whenever she hears it, or is it?

As they started to walk, the sky steadily dimmed, the moonlight softly hid behind the clouds, and the rain droplets bounced off their shoulders once again. She hugged herself tight to keep her body heat, yet the goosebumps rose on her forearms beneath her dark soaked hoodie. She looks at his toned muscles peeking from beneath the wet and stretchy fabric, she’s glad he couldn’t see the red flush on her face, she hoped.

“How did you know I was there?” she broke the quiet pitter-patters of the rain, “I mean…” she trailed off for a moment, shrugging and looking down at her boots as they gently broke the surfaces of the puddles.

“I was overlooking the area when I found you walking out of the building…” he wasn’t lying though, he knew she wasn’t home so he had to watch over her.

“That makes sense…” she shrugged.

The rain continues to softly drop, showering the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. It's warm, it’s calm, it’s safe. She glances at her side, he’s quietly walking, quieter than the rain. The pitter-patters fade into the background, her heart steadily beats in her chest. The anxiety enzyme in her blood is lower than the night before, almost no longer exists. She suspires, calmly, she feels alright. It warms his heart.

“So…” she speaks again, breaking the silence for the second time, “about last night…” he huffs with a smile, “what did you do to him?”

“Well, we’ve come to an agreement…”

“What was he doing in my house? Then he said it doesn’t have anything to do with me?” she speaks her thoughts, “doesn’t make sense to me…”

“That, um…” he sighs, he knows why McCarthy was there, he just couldn’t tell her. “Couldn’t really get it out of him…”

“Yikes…” she muttered, “but thanks anyway, if it wasn’t for you I would’ve been dead… I guess.” He smiles.

“Guess you’re home now.” The Devil speaks.

“I’ll see you around?” She looks at her building’s entrance and then back at him, but he was gone, like he was never there. “Oh…” She sighs and walks into the building, closing the door behind her and taking the stairs afterwards. She unlocks her apartment door and places the keys on the console table.

Kicking off her wet and muddy boots, she takes off her dampened zip-up hoodie and t-shirt, and walks in the direction of the kitchen. She opens the fridge, retrieving a cold bottle of water.

“You keep forgetting to close your windows, detective,” she heard a voice from behind her. She gasped and turned, she finds The Devil standing at her window with a grin. It was so hard for her not to smile back, or, at the very least, not fall for it. She raked her fingers through her dampened hair, biting her lip to hide her grin. “Goodnight, detective.” he says with a smile.

“Goodnight, Devil.”

Knock. Knock. Knock.

He walks to his door as he buttons up his white dress shirt. It's her. She's pulling onto the strap of her purse. She wore a dress today; it's softly brushing again her skin. Her hair is tied in a low bun, and it's a little messy; her dark bangs are straying out of it. But her fragrance was as lovely as always, floral, and sweet like vanilla. His heart smiled behind his ribcage as he prepared himself to open the door.

“Good morning, Matt-- whoa, God! Are you okay?” she exclaimed, her smile disappeared, and her eyes are gone wide, “what's that big bruise next to your eye?” she's hesitant to check it.

“Slipped in the shower last night...” he says, smiling apologetically, “good morning, Madilyn.” He opens the door for her to come in. She walks down the hallway and stands by the end of it. “Please take a seat,” he says as he walks to the kitchen. She sat on his couch as he started the coffeemaker up.

“I called you, but you didn't answer, so... I thought I should check on you,” she said, placing her purse next to her on the leather couch.

“Sorry, It's my fault... I probably left it on silent.” she nodded to his answer.

“Did you apply any ice to it-- I mean the bruise?” she asked, staring at his muscles moving beneath the white dress shirt as he prepared the coffee. He was impressive, she didn't have to think about it twice.

“Not sure if I did..” he answered, too carried away in his search for an extra mug in his cupboard, “I can do it later at the office.” He found one and placed it next to his.

Her eyes darted around the room, “this looks cozy, the place,” she stated, “did anyone help you with the decor? I mean—”

Matt chuckled; her question warmed his heart. He shook his head, “no, I was told it was like this when I first rented it.” she nodded and hummed to his answer. Her eyes fell to the coffee table, it was neatly arranged, his mail was sorted, his phone was aligned with his folded cane and briefcase. It was a pleasing scenery to see.

“Creamer or no creamer?” he asked, her head flies to look his way, he's turning her way with a warm smile.

She knows he couldn't see it, but she smiles back, “creamer,” she says, “two spoons of sugar.” He nods and continues his work.

She picks up his folded cane to inspect it, she's never seen one this close, and it looked interesting. She doesn't notice him placing the mug on the table in front of her. He cleared his throat, “your coffee,” he says as he straightens his back and heads to his room.

“Thanks,” she says, taking the mug off the table and drawing it to her mouth to take a sip. It's sweet, with a hint of vanilla. She hummed contentedly as the dulcet taste swirled in her mouth.

She stood off her seat and walked to the window, the foggy but slightly different in color tiles were beaming with light. She leant onto it, looking outside to make out a mirage of the neighborhood. She could see the windows of her own apartment on the other side of the the street, her cat was standing by the living room window, biting the green leaves off the branches of the plant she left on the windowsill—but Ivy couldn't see her.

In the other room, the heat was rising up his neck, he was nervous, his hands were shaking. The sound of her heels softly clicking on the wooden floor makes his heart tick faster with each step she takes. She takes a sip of her coffee, her heart beats faster and she's smiling. He's jittering with each breath she takes, she's looking outside the window and tucking her stray bangs behind her ear, her earring swings to the movement of her hand, and his heart sways with it.

He regrets not answering the phone, he wouldn't have to shake like a broken blender despite her standing in a completely different room—yet he couldn't leave her waiting downstairs.

He couldn't tie his necktie, no matter how hard he tried, his hands kept trembling and his mind kept straying. “Damn it...” he cursed under his breath, but it was loud enough for her to hear it.

“Are you okay, Matt?” she asked, still giving him privacy. He walked out of his room, necktie in his hand and his face is flustered.

“Couldn't tie it,” he sighed. She approaches, his heart is burning, and the blood is pumping wild in his ears.

“Can I help you with it?” she asks, her fingertips are softly touching his. He nods. She feels his hands shaking beneath her touch. “Are you alright?” she asks with a smile, her voice is warm with worry, “you're shaking...”

He knows, oh Hell—he knows. “I... I don't-- I don't know...” he blurts, “maybe I'm just... Tired... Yeah.”

She takes the black tie and starts wrapping it around her arm. “Learned this trick a while ago,” she says, “you spread the thick part along your arm and wrap the thin part three times around your wrist,” she explains, “then you pull the second loop through the first loop... And we're done. You're just gonna have to put it on.”

She smiled proudly at herself. “I'm just gonna adjust it a bit...” she fixes the length of each end and widens the loop. “Can I help you put it on-- unless you want to--do it yourself—”

He shook his head, “of course—you can... Thank you.” he smiles with his red face as she passes his head through the noose.

“You're welcome,” she responded with a grin, fixing his collar around the noose before fitting it around his neck. “It looks good,” she addressed, smiling, “not because I tied it, of course…” she mutters, he giggles. The sunlight beamed upon his smiling face so gently, the tint of the glass softly shaded his skin with colorful auras. “Is there anything else that I can help you with?” she offered.

He shook his head, “thank you,” he gestured a thumb to his bedroom, “I'm just gonna get my suit jacket.” She nodded and hummed, watched him make his way back to his room and put on his suit jacket. He walks back into the living room and picks up his briefcase, phone, keys and cane— off the table. And without saying another word, they leave the apartment, hands tangled, hearts tied.

[previous / next]

[trashmenace]

Man's Book, February 1973

Man's Book February 1973 Vol 12 No 1

From the dying days of the Men's Adventure magazines before they went full porn. A couple of topless spreads and tons of ads. The texts were very short, maybe four pages worth each at most. Man's Book lasted five more issues.

Savagery in Action - They Prey on Homosexuals by Charles Beach

Broad overview of blackmail against gays.

The Incredible Raid of Italy's Kissing Daughters of Doom by Roy Harper

An Italian sex worker working with anti-fascists sneaks a bomb into a detention center to kill her beloved before he's tortured for information.

10 Weaknesses That Can Doom Your Love Life by L.O. Peterson

Pop sexology

The Monster Vampires Who Lived on Maidens' Blood by Chuck McCarthy

Quick story of Elisabeth Bathory. The torture deaths of her accomplices are a bit more embellished than I've seen elsewhere;

I Pay Off in Lust - Confessions of an Orgy Girl by Lola Bryan

The story of women hired by yacht salesmen to entertain potential clients.

Dance, My Darlings, to the Whip's Evil Song by Lotya Grez as told to Jim McDonald

A woman is forced to play the violin in a concentration camp orchestra while others are whipped.

The Truth About Aphrodisiac Foods

They don't work and are dangerous. Gave a stat about heroin overdoses in NYC that works out to 800 a year - in 2021 there were 2668 overall overdose deaths, a 234% increase against just a 19% increase in population. Also mentions the "regulation" WWII era diet of 3000 calories a day. I looked up the study and it was more like 3600, but that may have been the baseline for soldiers in the field.

It's Raining Fire on Hell's Beach by Cpl. Ben Vetter

Brutal tale of rangers being decimated behind enemy lines in Italy. The highlight of the mag.