#Religious school in Los Angeles

[wndaswife]

centre of attention | wanda maximoff & fem!reader

Ex-wife of a church preacher and a member of a popular parent-teacher group, Wanda Maximoff is one of the town’s most infamous figures, but you soon learn that she is much more than she seems.

Word count: 13 783

Tags: smut, fluff, age gap, jealousy, allusions to slut-shaming, mentions of a gangbang, brief cunnilingus, strap-ons, fingering, brief masturbation, hair-pulling, spanking, degradation, mommy kink, power bottom!wanda maximoff. MINORS DNI.

gif credit to vanessacarlylse

Pitchy hums of singing cicadas greeted you the moment you drove into the small northern Californian town you were to spend the next few months in. 

None of it was really ideal for you’d wanted to land a placement as a teacher’s assistant at least somewhere in southern California as you’d lived in Los Angeles your whole life. But the moment you drove further into the town and saw groups of families walking hand-in-hand down the surprisingly-lively streets and children retiring towards their bus stops after their days at school, you knew your stay wouldn’t be as dull as you imagined.

The only thing that gave you pause was passing by the town’s local and only church that was as bustling with people as the schoolyard was.

What you could already tell was that the townspeople were certainly close-knit, valued their communities, and were a rather religious group of people.

In worrying about your interactions with the town’s church, you hadn’t meant to be crass, but rather sincerely concerned for the possibility that you might truly have found yourself stuck in a strictly old-fashioned and highly religious town hours away from Los Angeles for the next several months.

When you met with your assigned teacher and principal of the schoolhouse to go over some extra paperwork upon your arrival the next day, you met Agatha Harkness, a woman you immediately pinned as the town gossip. She was the vice-principal of the elementary school and she was quick and very kind to go over what you needed to know about the town you now resided in — which ended up being everything she knew from secret divorces to scandalous affairs.

Honestly, you were grateful for her warm welcome, even if the way you secretly mused at all of Agatha’s gossip would certainly be interpreted as rather unseemly for such a new resident of the town.

On Saturdays, the church held breakfasts after early-morning mass for there was also a specially-run youth program that was managed by the church every week on the same day. Eager to introduce you to some of the town’s families, some of whom were involved in the school’s particularly active parent-teacher group at school, Agatha took you to the breakfast.

As you expected, the spacious church basement where the breakfast was taking place was bustling. Families that crowded the buffet tables were dressed in their formal church attire, mothers with their hair done and husbands well-coiffed, and children in clothing that looked proper for the occasion though they were most definitely forced into them. 

“Oh, there’s Monica,” Agatha told you before calling the bright-faced woman over.

She greeted the vice-principal then turned to you and stuck out her hand with a large grin. “Hey there,” she beamed. 

“Hi,” you answered with a nervous smile, slightly intimidated by the crowd and in stunned admiration of the charming woman in front of you. You shook her hand. 

“Monica is likely the greatest science teacher one could ever have the pleasure of meeting in all of northern California,” Agatha said with confident sincerity.

The cheery brunette waved her hand at her dismissively. “Oh, please, Agatha,” she uttered bashfully. Then she turned to you with a smile. “Are you new to the church?”

“I just started my placement as a teacher’s assistant here for my teaching degree in LA,” you said.

With raised eyebrows and an intrigued nod, Monica replied and crossed her arms as if impressed, “Is that so? It’s been a good while since we’ve had visitors come up here, especially from the Valley.”

You’d been living in Los Angeles for so long that you hadn’t ever really considered how renowned it was in the more rural areas of California; even Agatha had been surprised when you’d told her where you were coming in from.

“I don’t mean to hold you up,” Monica told you. “Help yourself to any of the food.” She exchanged a few words with Agatha before you were led further into the large room, and for the next forty minutes you stood by Agatha’s side eating and being introduced to the local families.

To your dismay, Agatha excused herself for a moment to greet what looked like a family who’d just entered the dining hall. You were forced to stand alone by one of the tables, busying yourself by looking around and playing with the hem of your shirt in a desperate attempt not to look awkward or out of place.

When two young boys and their father approached the table you were leaning against, you quickly straightened and stepped back to allow them to pull out the chairs. 

You saw Agatha reapproaching when you turned around, but she was walking back with a woman you hadn’t yet met. She looked a few years younger than Agatha, but still older than you. Her hair was wrapped in a neat French twist, blonde strands that’d become loose from the hairstyle curling lightly around her face.

With her perfect done-up hair, the dark brown lip colour, a pair of black flats, and a dark green blouse tucked into black high-waisted straight-legged pants, she was a bit hard to take your eyes away from. 

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice what an obsessive idiot you must’ve looked like for she was busy balancing a few platefuls of food as she approached the table behind you with Agatha. She set the plates down for the young boys and the man you saw earlier, and you then realised that they were a family. 

“This is Y/N — who I was telling you about just a moment ago,” Agatha brought you into the conversation then stepped to your side, wrapping a supportive arm around your shoulders. 

The other woman she was with carefully placed the plates of food in front of who you supposed was her husband and children then straightened to look at you. She brushed the strands of her hair out of her face and smiled at you after taking a breath. 

“Wanda,” she introduced herself then extended her hand to you with a warm smile.

“Hi,” you replied then shook her hand. “Y/N.” You kicked yourself internally for bringing your name up again when you recalled that Agatha had just mentioned it. 

Wanda nodded then ran her palms down her hips. “So I’ve heard,” she said, a tinge of gaiety in her tone as her smile widened. “Are you starting your assistant position at the school on Monday?”

You nodded and attempted to return her smile though you were a little overwhelmed by the crowds of families you were currently standing in the middle of. Wanda caught onto the bashfulness of your tiny awkward smile and thought it was endearing.

“Well, don’t you worry. I think you’ll fit right in,” she reassured, the unbroken eye contact making you take a deep breath that you hoped wasn’t as obvious as it felt. 

Before you could answer, one of Wanda’s young sons tugged at his mother’s blouse and asked in an adorably mousy voice, “Momma, can I please get a ginger ale?”

“Of course, moya zvezda. But just a little,” she answered, reaching down to stroke her son’s chin with her fingers. Then she looked back up at you with a warm smile. “It was lovely meeting you, Y/N.”

You straightened and hoped you were only imagining the way you felt yourself blushing at her undivided attention. “L-Likewise, Mrs Maximoff,” you managed to say. 

It was just over a week until you saw Wanda Maximoff again, much to your disappointment. 

During the first week of your placement, you learned a whole lot of things. Firstly, dull heaps of information that you hadn’t said was anything but wholly interesting when the baker by your new place dumped years and years worth of the small town’s history on you when you were purchasing a loaf of rye bread, then more gossip shared with you from the teachers’ staff, suggestions for where the best hiking trails were around town which you happily utilised, and most importantly that there was a parent-teacher association that volunteered twice a week at the school.

At first that last bit seemed unimportant until you were given a sheet of the association’s members so you could familiarise yourself with them as you’d be seeing much of them throughout your time there, one of which was a familiar ‘Wanda Maximoff.’

Out of all the gossip Agatha had told you since you arrived, the resident she talked the least about was the one you were the most interested in. You supposed it was because they were close friends, and it would make sense that certain things about someone’s life — including their friends — were naturally private, even if not consciously.

But you didn’t think Agatha would mind if you asked about her, so you subtly brought her up while you were helping her clean up some of her things after school, a habit you picked up after the first time when you planned to go out for coffee together after work.

With the sheet of the members’ names in your hand, you asked Agatha as discreetly as you could, “Is, um, this the same Wanda I met on Saturday? At the breakfast?”

“Only one Wanda in this town, bumblebee,” Agatha replied and hung her purse from her shoulder. It was obvious she held her to a high regard, and that the two women were good friends. “Why do you ask?”

Continuing on with your goal to know more about Wanda, you answered, “I was just curious. I don’t know a lot about her compared to everyone else.”

“You’d like to know more?” she asked then led you out of her office, locking the door behind her. As the two of you walked out of school, she offered, “What would you like to know about her?”

The opportunity made you feel a little giddy as you recalled the image of Wanda when you met her earlier that week and thought of all the things you had been curious about since then. But you didn’t want to come off as obsessive or like you’d been thinking about her as much as you had, so instead you simply asked, “Were those her kids? The two young boys?”

Agatha nodded. “Tommy and Billy. They’re the sweetest four-year-old angels.”

The two of you approached her car and slid into your respective sides — Agatha in front of the wheel and you in the passenger’s seat.

“And that was her… husband with them?” you asked, buckling yourself in then tucking your hands under your knees.

“Her ex-husband,” Agatha corrected and started the car. “I don’t know if you’ve been to any of the masses, but Vision’s the church’s favourite preacher, so you’d see a lot of him if you attended regularly.”

So she wasn’t married. 

You recalled calling her ‘Mrs Maximoff’ the last time you saw her and you shrunk a little in your seat in embarrassment.

While you tried to imagine Wanda marrying and divorcing a church preacher, not that you knew much about her to begin with to have anything to imagine, Agatha added, “The divorce was, you know, as scandalous as you’d expect in a small town like this, especially given how important the church is here and that both Wanda and Vision are such well-known residents.”

That was the first time anyone had mentioned any sort of distaste for how traditional the town seemed to be and it felt like your first breath of relief, for you’d felt so different from the crowd here since you arrived.

The weight from your shoulders was lessened exponentially when she also said, “But this town is full of younger families of a different generation, and there were more who offered their support than not.

“Although age isn’t entirely indicative of beliefs, so there are still a few younger parents both in the congregation and the parent-teacher association who harbour some distaste towards Wanda and her personal life.”

Up until now, you hadn’t said very much besides uttering a few hums of affirmation and acknowledgement. 

“You alright over there, sweetie?” Agatha asked after not hearing your voice for a while. She looked over to you.

You nodded. “I’m okay. Just listening,” you told her with a reassuring smile.

She looked back to the road. “If you want to know more about her, I could give you her number and you could send her a message.”

A fervent blush formed on your face and you looked through the window to avert your face from Agatha. Something about being given Wanda’s number from someone else because they’d known you wanted to talk more with her made you feel awkward. “Oh, no, it’s fine. I’m sure I’ll… probably see her again.”

God, you felt like an idiot. 

No matter what you said, it felt like it was only becoming more glaringly obvious how much Wanda was on your mind. And with the two women being close friends, you could only imagine the things Agatha would tell her about how you were acting like a giddy little schoolgirl thinking about her. 

That was sort of what you felt like, anyways.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell her we talked about her,” Agatha reassured and winked at you. “I know you’re a shy one.” 

You were grateful for that, but still pretty embarrassed.

Dottie was the first PTA member you had a real conversation with. It was on a Tuesday, and you were walking your class of twenty fourth-graders to the church alongside their teacher — you were assigned to assist Bruce Banner, an awkward but brilliant science teacher you came to enjoy the comfortable company of. A few times a month, students attended mass with enough time for the service before school ended, after which their parents would pick them up in front of the church.

You ended up sitting beside a blonde woman who immediately started a conversation with you when she recognised your face from the breakfast last week. After introducing yourself and mentioning a few of the people you’d met so far, Dottie seemed to perk up at the sound of Wanda’s name.

“Oh, that woman is trouble, Y/N,” she warned, her voice low as the two of you were still surrounded by churchgoers patiently waiting for the mass to start. 

Though you were well-aware of the things Agatha told you about Wanda and how she’d been interpreted by some people in town, you were curious to know pretty much anything about her. 

So you asked, “Why?”

Dottie turned her head to you so her chin was brushing her shoulder as she kept herself quiet when she said, “What kind of woman divorces a church preacher of her ex-husband’s regard?” She said it with a kind of humour and a small disbelieving scoff. “It just isn’t proper, especially not for a woman with children.”

Suddenly you felt pretty regretful for being so desperate to know things about Wanda, because now you were feeling rather offended and uncomfortable hearing the things Dottie was telling you, even if what she was saying wasn’t at all about you.

As if it couldn’t get worse, Dottie ducked her head and looked at you, uttering, “Have you caught word of her little… expeditions once she got her divorce finalised?”

You bit down along the side of your tongue with your molars and looked up at the altar, silently hoping that the mass would soon start, but the church chatter between students only continued as the congregation waited for the priest to step onto the podium.

“It was all rather hush-hush because of her…” Dottie trailed off with a disapproving shake of her head, seemingly feeling some contempt simply speaking of any form of esteem for Wanda. But she continued after readjusting herself on the pew, “Because of her standing in town.”

She quickly regained her confidence when she picked up her badmouthing of Wanda again. “Allegedly,” she said with a sly grin and a demeaning chuckle, “Wanda broke out into some sort of midlife crisis and had an affair with four younger men. Four men, one of her, one measly hotel room. I mean, we’re both adults here — you do the math.”

You stuttered out an awkward hum and turned your body subtly, making sure no one around was paying attention to your conversation. No one was. It seemed to you that Dottie’s words were a lot louder than they were due to their subject matter.

“Well… Wasn’t she divorced by then?” you asked.

Dottie laughed and waved her hand. “That’s as good as an affair, honey. Marriage is for life.” 

Then she placed a supportive hand on your knee that sent shivers up your arms before advising, “Besides, it’s good you know early which people to befriend and which to avoid, and Wanda Maximoff is nothing but trouble, junebug.”

Though the general consensus was that everyone liked her if not admired her, there were rumours of similar concerns about Wanda as she seemed to be much less of a conservative woman compared to the rest of the town. It wasn’t necessarily that every resident was a traditionalist, but that even those second to Wanda’s independence from the constricting life of an upper middle-class suburban housewife simply lacked the confidence only she seemed to have in choosing to live a life by her own freedoms and little else.

The rumour Dottie had told you was entirely true aside from the missing detail that her expedition — as she had put it — with the younger men could be accurately construed as a gangbang instead of an orgy or any form of tame sex. But Wanda was so cherished by her community that one would become instantly disliked if their suspicions of her scandalous life reflected in the way they came about interacting with her. 

Some were shocked and almost insulted that anyone could take such accusations about the most warm and charismatic woman in town so seriously, and others lacking in the confidence to outright say there was nothing wrong with a sexually-adventurous woman but nontraditionalists nonetheless would come to her defence albeit in slightly ambiguous ways.

Moreover, the men she’d fucked were so proud of their performances and achievements in sleeping with her that the most they did to indicate what had happened between them was walk with their chests out and chins tipped up in public, feeling proud of the accomplished little secrets they had with her. Sharing dirty secrets with a woman like Wanda, and keeping them secret, amounted to a lot more pride received than repeating what had happened in the shared hotel room that afternoon.

The mass was painfully dull and all you’d been able to think of the last few days was Wanda, and that afternoon was no exception. Your thoughts of her only intensified after your conversation with Dottie and to make matters worse, at one point when you looked around at the pews, you spotted that very woman on your mind sitting between her two sons at one of the seats lined up horizontally in front of one of the side staircases leading up to the altar.

With Dottie’s words still echoing in your mind, your thoughts then wandered to Wanda being fucked by a group of younger men, cum adorining whatever gorgeous body you knew she had under all her conservative clothing, fingers wrapped around erect cocks while she took another one down her throat and another fucking her ass, fingers pumping in and out of her wet pussy.

You felt terrible for having your mind travel there, so you looked away from her and readjusted yourself in your seat. But from the corner of your eye you noticed her tuck her hair behind her ear and fix the collar on one of her sons’ blouses. She caught your attention again.

By then it was hard to stop thinking about her, especially when you watched her whisper an inaudible forewarning to her other son that was getting particularly squirmy in his seat. You watched the parting and movement of her lips and you couldn’t help the way you imagined how she’d look with her lips wrapped around a strap fucking its way into her throat, your fingers buried in her soft hair.

Then you imagined unbuttoning her jeans and revealing her smooth legs, pulling her shirt off and uncovering perfect tits that made you shift uncomfortably when you envisioned burying your face in them and kissing up the soft swells, making Wanda moan and grip at your shoulders while your other hand groped one of her breasts.

When you began imagining the view of her sore red ass while you fucked her from behind — her head thrown back as she cried out in long groans and whimpers, her cunt constricting around your thick cock — you forced your thoughts to come to a full stop.

You felt like an awful person thinking such things anyways, for it somehow felt like you were taking advantage of her. Trying to pretend like Wanda wasn’t on your mind was practically impossible, so you just decided to focus on something else.

Wanda was wearing a cozy-looking brown knit pullover. From the angle of your spot on the pews, you could see she was wearing a pair of jeans and butterscotch ankle boots. She had her hair combed neatly and tucked behind her ears and with it let down this time, you could see that its length reached just above her shoulders.

For the most part, she paid attention to the sermons with a still expression unless she was tending to her sons’ squirming and playful whispers, a testament to the impatience of young children.

When another man stepped up to the microphone after the priest stepped down and took a seat, Dottie leaned to the side and whispered, “Wanda’s ex-husband.”

Your attention was suddenly piqued and you looked up at the man. He was slender and tall and had blonde brushed-back wavy hair that swooped around his clean-shaven face. He had a pair of aviator glasses perched on his straight and jutted nose, and he was dressed in a beige blazer, navy blue slacks, a knit vest that was a few shades darker, and underneath, a grey blouse with an orange tie.

By all accounts, he was a pretty decent-looking guy. 

His smooth and animated tone of voice that emanated through the church as he read a parable from a small leather-bound notebook made it clear that he was passionate about the church and his position there, and with his appearance that made him seem friendly and introspective, it was no wonder why Agatha had told you he was the church’s most popular preacher.

Wanda’s expression was ever-still and indifferent with no indication that she harboured any remaining emotional sentiments towards seeing her ex-husband in public nor any hint of being bitter towards him.

The service finally came to an end and it was then time to help the class line up by the church parking lot to have their parents pick them up. 

When you stood up, you looked for Wanda but lost sight of her in the crowds of people filing out of the church. So you said your goodbyes to Dottie and led the class out of the building and towards the parking lot with their teacher.

It was about thirty minutes later waiting by the church’s front doors when only three students remained to be picked up. One of the students’ mothers were engaged in conversation with Bruce, the remaining children were talking amongst themselves, and you were standing by the side, just waiting for the rest of them to get picked up so you could walk back to school with Banner.

“Fancy seeing you here, stranger,” a voice spoke behind you. You turned to see Wanda smiling widely at you as she approached. She stopped in front of you and leaned her shoulder against the brick wall of the church. 

You smiled, feeling happy to see her. She really was charming, and so warm. “Hi,” you said. “Were you here for the service?”

Bruce glanced at you from the corner of his eye as he continued to talk with one of the students’ parents. He was glad you were getting along with people in town so well, and felt a little impressed that you seemed to be so friendly with Wanda so early into your stay. He was a shy and rather soft-spoken man, and the most he’d ever outwardly expressed his thoughts about Wanda was in the privacy of his wife's company. He had friendly feelings towards the renowned preacher’s ex-wife, and if the town had to be divided into groups, he’d certainly be categorised as a nontraditionalist.

Wanda replied, “Tommy and Billy’s father had a scripture reading today and he has them for the rest of the week, so I picked them up early after lunch to spend some time with them. I just said goodbye to them a few minutes ago.”

“About that…” you said and curled a lock of your hair between your fingers nervously. “I didn’t know you weren’t married last time we talked, and I shouldn’t have assumed…”

She ran her hand down your forearm, the one that was lifted so you could play with your hair. Her hand was so close to your face, and you caught a whiff of her perfume. “Oh, don’t worry about it, honey,” she reassured. “I completely understand, and you didn’t offend me.”

Wanda squeezed your forearm gently before her hand returned to her side. She straightened away from the wall and tucked her hair behind both ears. “Anyway, I saw you a bit ago and wanted to come up earlier, but I caught up chatting. I’m glad I could catch you.”

You fiddled with your fingers and perked up a little. “R… Really?”

Wanda hummed in what was either confirmation or amusement from your nervous response. “I was wondering if you wanted to come over for coffee,” she offered. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot since we met on Saturday, and I’d love to get to know you more.”

“Today? Now?” you asked.

“If that works for you.”

“It does,” you told her cheerily. 

She nodded with a wide smile. “Alright then, great. I can wait until you’re done here.”

Bruce, as if partially-listening into the whole conversation, turned and told you, “You can leave early if you want, Y/N. Just waiting on two more students here, so it’s no big deal.”

You asked, “Are you sure?” 

He reassured you it would be fine, and you soon found yourself walking through the church parking lot to Wanda’s car. 

Since Agatha picked you up from home that morning, Wanda only had to stop at school so you could get your things from the classroom before the both of you were on your way back to her house.

Wanda’s house was just off the edge of town, surrounded by farmland. In spite of that, her house was rather modern and of contemporary architecture. A white-picket fence extended down the grove of trees that surrounded the long gravel driveway. From afar where her expansive backyard was visible, you could see a sizable in-ground pool and what looked like a tennis court beyond that. She parked her car in front of the dual parking garage and you looked through the car window at her house.

When the two of you stepped onto her porch, Wanda told you, “The property used to be mine and Vision’s, but after we divorced I kept it for myself and he moved into town.”

“It’s a really nice place,” you complimented as you followed her lead, placing your shoes by the door and setting your things down on the table in the foyer.

“Thank you,” she said, looking over her shoulder at you. “I’ll make us some coffee and I can give you a tour?”

You nodded and Wanda smiled at your leniency. She had you sit at the kitchen island counter while she made coffee with a pretty-looking French Press.

“So, darling, how are you liking it here so far?” she asked, setting up two mugs by the steeping coffee. She turned and leaned back against the counter, her hands resting against the edge. 

“I’ve really been enjoying myself,” you replied, sitting up in your chair.

Wanda appreciated your almost innocent enthusiasm as she regarded you with a smile. Then after a second, seemingly momentarily distracted by whatever was running through her mind as she stared at you, she inquired, “Have you made friends with anyone yet?”

“I talk to Agatha a lot, but this is my first time seeing anyone out of work or anything like that.”

There was a glint of pride in her smile when you said that as if she felt satisfied that she was the first person you were truly getting close with. It was almost territorial.

She turned back to the coffee once it finished steeping and you watched as she slowly pressed the top of it down, separating the grinds from the coffee. She poured it into both cups and discarded the grinds and rinsed out the press as the drinks took a moment to cool. 

“How do you take your coffee, sweetheart?” Wanda asked. It made you feel sorta giddy when she used those kinds of names on you. She then placed the mug in front of you when she made it how you liked it. 

As promised, she gave you a tour of the house which ended up feeling more like a casual stroll as you were outside with her more than not, walking the expanses of the tree groves out by the gardens and through her sizable backyard together.

You were largely an occasionally-stuttering and slightly-embarrassing mess with Wanda, but she didn’t seem to mind at all and led most of the conversation with you. In fact, she found your shy demeanour rather attractive, and she was delighted every time she caught you blushing or stumbling over your words.

Talking with her was so simple in spite of how awkward you felt, and if you didn’t have anything to say, it was just as easy to listen while she did the talking. She was different from other people you’d met thus far, because she was bold and not at all shy about being honest. She was adept in balancing the weight of being a single mother to two children while also being a leading figure in both the church community and in the school’s parent-teacher association. But she was also radiant and warm, and most especially, a huge tease.

When the topic of her divorce came up, Wanda made a joke about how her sex life with Vision was dull and how she’d been indulging in leaving her husband to get properly fucked months before the divorce papers were ever served, and though she did promptly say she was joking, you had an inkling that she was being at least partially honest. She made no further effort to convince you that she was simply jesting.

She then told you more seriously that her marriage with Vision had simply become less passionate over the years and that they confessed to each other that neither of them would feel particularly anguished if they ended up divorcing, which was reason enough without their other existing troubles. Essentially, their divorce was amicable and they still worked well enough together in order to raise their children.

Additionally, Wanda confirmed your impressions of her ex-husband from the service earlier, that he was the sensitive type who was reflective and intelligent. She told you she was impressed by how proficient you were in reading people.

The compliment flattered you, but you were secretly a bit insecure as you thought about her and Vision’s marriage. You knew fully well that they were divorced, but you couldn’t help comparing yourself to him and wondering if Wanda had a type — more precisely, if you were her type.

Another thing that you distinctly enjoyed about Wanda was that she was a very physical person. When she thought something was funny, she laughed in a rich way that crinkled the corners of her eyes and pulled her lips back into the prettiest of smiles. She touched you when she felt like it, without hesitation, running her hand down your arm or squeezing your shoulder. She was expressive with her body language and facial expressions and never made you feel for a moment that she was doing anything else but listening with undivided attention when you were speaking. She wasn’t very much withdrawn at all; she was a very sociable and confident woman.

“And you, Y/N?” she asked, placing both mugs, empty of coffee, into the sink once the two of you made it back into the kitchen. 

Wanda turned to you and leaned forward against the island counter you had sat back down at. Her hips were pressed against the edge of it and her forearms rested against the countertop, her hands folded in front of her. Her sleeves were pushed up to her elbows from earlier when the two of you had been walking out under the sun for a while.

You stuttered under her focused gaze, “M-Me? What about me?”

“Do you have a special someone?” she asked with a teasing little grin, resting her chin in her palm and looking straight at you. 

Discussing the topic of your love life with Wanda made you feel flustered and you looked away from her, fiddling with your fingers and looking down at your thumbs. “No, I don’t,” you answered.

“But you have someone in mind?” Wanda playfully pressed, raising her eyebrows at you curiously.

You looked back up and told her honestly, “Not really.” You attempted to be more honest with her given that she’d been so open and warm with you. “I haven’t had much of a chance to meet anyone.”

She straightened and ran her hands flat down against the counter. “Oh?” she questioned. “But you’re such a sweet girl.” Wanda rounded the island counter until she was standing behind you and laid her hands on your shoulders. “I figured that you would’ve had boys all over you, honey,” she whispered.

You knew she was teasing, or at least that was what you kept telling yourself when you found yourself slightly overwhelmed and rather overheated with Wanda’s hands on your shoulders, her thumbs slowly sliding up the sides of your neck.

“I’m just poking fun at you, sweetness,” Wanda giggled and squeezed your shoulder before stepping away from you. She walked out of the kitchen momentarily and came back with her purse. She laid it down on the counter and pulled her phone out.

“I’m sorry, Y/N, I let the time get away from me,” she apologised. “I have to meet Vision and the kids for dinner in about an hour.”

To avoid thinking of Wanda getting all ready and dressed-up to see Vision, although it was for a dinner with Tommy and Billy, you stood up from your seat and answered, “It’s no problem at all. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you more. And the coffee was really great. Thank you.”

Wanda led you to the door, a gentle hand on your lower back. “I’d love to have you over again,” she told you. Her hand slid up your back, making you straighten immediately before she took her hand away from you to unlock the front door.

Though you looked away to hide the way your cheeks flushed at the contact, Wanda caught sight of your embarrassed expression and felt a flurry of adoration for you.

After saying goodbye to each other, Wanda called you back before you could step off her porch. “Would you be able to put your number in my phone?” she asked, holding her cellphone out to you.

Sounding a little too excited, you walked back over to her and answered, “Sure!”

For the next little while since you exchanged numbers that late afternoon, you’d had a few conversations with Wanda over text message. She was a busy woman though; she was always the most free to talk in the evening or rather early in the morning when you weren’t often awake. 

You talked a lot about Tommy and Billy, your assistant position and how you’d been finding things, what Wanda did on a day-to-day basis, and a few other leisurely things when you both had time to discuss things like recent movies and favourite books. 

It was incredible what Wanda took on in a day. Sometimes she was organising the youth church events or in meetings with the parent-teacher association — during which you sometimes passed the meeting rooms they were in, but never got the chance to see her because they were always so busy. 

She went out of town a few days a week for any sports or clubs either of her sons were in outside of school as there wasn’t much availability regarding extracurriculars in town, which was also something she’d been trying to bring up to the municipality.

If she didn’t have to tend to the PTA, the church, or her sons, she had errands. She was always doing something from dropping something off at someone’s place to picking something up, going out of town to get something fixed, or doing one thing or another for someone else.

She always apologised for it as she’d told you that she wished she had more time to talk with you or at least be able to make a plan to get lunch together.

Though you also desperately wished to see her again, you didn’t mind at all. In a way, you really admired her drive and how capable she was, and  how readily available she was to those who needed her while also being the most friendly and warm woman in town. 

Plans to see each other again either fell through or never had the chance to be made for the both of you were beginning to have busier schedules. 

Wanda was virtually always busy, but for you, since the season had begun to reach some of its warmest temperatures, there were more school events being organised from field trips to sports’ days which took up a majority of your time as you planned with Banner both during and out of class. 

The next time you saw Wanda in person was on a Thursday, nearly three weeks since you had coffee with her. But in spite of that, you felt a lot more excited than the last time, for you now had three more week’s worth of having been able to get to know her. In fact, you were almost certain Wanda considered you a friend.

She was friendly with a lot of people. Nearly everyone in town knew her and held her in high regard. She’d take on extra work just to cover for a committee member who couldn’t make a meeting or cut an off-day short to do errands for anyone who’d ask her to, but from what you knew, she was only really friends with Agatha.

And now, you hoped she felt she was friends with you too.

Today was one of the hottest days of the season so far and also the day of the biggest school event. In association with the church, the sports festival equally divided their earnings from the festival and put it towards the school, church, and municipal government. 

It was perhaps one of the biggest events in town for local businesses would also set up their stands and sell their products and services, and along with the carnival games and freshly-cooked food that stretched all the way down the expanse of Main Street under the sunny warmth of a budding summer, the festival was an attraction that had the small Californian town bustling with both locals and tourists alike.

Needless to say, the planning for the festival was extensive and it was one of the primary reasons both you and Wanda had become so busy over the last few weeks, planning completely different portions of the festival at the same time.

The festival was teeming with families and couples and it reminded you a lot of home; you felt a bit nostalgic. But mostly, you felt proud for having taken part in such a successful turnout. You looked around at the game and food concessions and small-business booths that extended down the long stretch of the lively street. 

On one side of the street, a grassy clearing with a large playground and plenty of picnic tables served as a seating area, mostly. People ate and chatted with one another, watched their children as they swung around on the playground, and were overall just enjoying spending such a cherished event under the sun in the charming town. 

Some that occupied the grassy plain were sprawled out under the sunny green expanse, some were sitting together with loved ones on picnic blankets they’d brought, and some, including a familiar woman sitting with a group of less-familiar women, were sitting at the picnic tables.

You approached the table of women after spotting Wanda and saw that her hair was tied back and that she was wearing jean shorts that revealed smooth legs, tennis shoes, and a white blouse that she had rolled up to her elbows.

By the time you’d gotten to the picnic table you felt a bit regretful, for you didn’t know any of the other women she was sitting with and you felt rather awkward walking up to the group of women, some of whom were sitting with their husbands.

But Wanda had already caught sight of you. She turned when you came into her peripheral and called out your name cheerfully, waving you over so you really couldn’t walk back now.

She stood from her seat and wrapped an arm around you. “Hi,” she then said after pulling away from the embrace to meet your eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

You nodded with a smile. “Yeah, it’s been pretty nice,” you answered. 

Her eyes ran over your face for a moment longer before she stepped back and allowed the rest of the picnic table to see you. With her hand resting on your shoulder, she introduced, “This is Y/N. She’s moved here from Los Angeles for the time being to work on her teaching degree.”

While you and the table exchanged hellos with each other, Wanda turned to you and said, “This is the school’s PTA. Most of it.”

Then she offered, “Why don’t you come and sit here with us, honey?” She sat back down and moved over to the side, one hand on the empty space beside her. 

You quickly looked over the picnic table of couples and single mothers as they’d resumed their conversations, then over at the empty spot. 

“Oh… Well, I wouldn’t want to bother any of you, and I think Vision is around here somewhere looking for a seat,” you answered and looked around for him. 

Wanda then stood from her seat again, enough to be able to reach over to you and take your hand. “Nonsense, darling. Come here,” she told you. She pulled you to the table and took the small plate of food from your hand before setting it down on the table. She sat you down beside her.

Discussion around the picnic table continued and Wanda poured you a glass of water from the pitcher at the middle of the table. You smiled gratefully at her and she was quickly reined back into the table’s conversation.

Unsurprisingly, she was pretty talkative with the table. You’d known how open and social Wanda was, you’d seen it yourself, but you hadn’t seen her interact with other people yet. 

She was as charismatic as ever. She told jokes that everyone laughed at, and when she spoke, everyone at the table listened with their full attention. She was actively part of every conversation that took place between the table of mothers and their husbands. 

It was comforting in a way, because with Wanda leading every conversation, you didn’t have to feel pressured to do anything but sit beside her and listen to everyone talk. You spoke when you were spoken to and felt completely content sitting beside Wanda, eating your food and occasionally participating in discussion. 

Wanda was rather happy to have you sitting beside her. She looked at you with an adoring smile every time you answered a question or voiced your opinions on something, and she rewarded you by running her hand down your back or squeezing your shoulder, and a few times, she even grazed the back of her fingers against your thigh. 

A voice called your name from behind and you turned to see Bruce waving you over. You stood from your seat and Wanda looked up at you.

“Come right back when you’re done, honey,” she told you.

You promised you would, then threw out your empty plate of food to head over to Banner.

From the picnic table, Wanda eyed you as you dashed around doing favour to favour, first starting with you being asked to bring back some papers from the classroom, which was only just down the road. She was eager to have you back the moment you handed Bruce his paperwork, but you were soon caught up being asked to run around only further by people who suddenly needed your help, from parents who wanted to talk with you to being asked to fetch things from inside the church.

“Wanda?” a woman at the table said, trying to get her attention. She waved her hand in front of her face and Wanda looked away from you, blinking out of her concentration.

With a superficial laugh, she replied, “Sorry. I must have zoned out there.”

Tommy and Billy came from playing carnival games with their father to settle down for a moment and sit on their mother’s lap. With her arms wrapped around her twins’ waists securely as they drank from her cup of water and ate from her plate, they told her how eventful their day had been and that soon their father would let them help one of his friends run his game booth.

After filling their bellies and hydrating themselves, they slid off of their mother’s lap and were nearly about to run back to Vision before Wanda took hold of their wrists and had them stand still while she reapplied their sunscreen in spite of their whines.

When she was finished, they ran back over to Vision and were practically hopping around anticipating the chance to help with the ring game.

Later, Monica came up to Wanda and tapped her on the shoulder. She was holding a clipboard in her arm and looking a tad flustered. “I’m so sorry to ask this of you, Wanda, but one of the booths are about to run right out of food, and normally we’d just have them close for the day but there’s a line for it right down the street, and—”

“I understand,” Wanda interrupted her frazzled rambling with a warm smile and stood from the picnic table. “What do you want me to do?” she asked with a supportive hand on the brunette’s upper arm.

“Oh, thank you.” She breathed out a sigh of relief. “There’s a rice cooker and a few vegetables they need diced in the church basement’s kitchen. Would you be able to cut a few of them and get some rice going? That’s all, and I’ll be down in a little to bring it out for them.”

Wanda nodded and squeezed her arm gently. “Of course,” she said and reassured Monica again when she was a flurry of apologies again. She excused herself from the table and walked over to the church, which was just across the road. 

As she walked, she looked for you, hoping that perhaps she could get you for herself, even if that meant just dicing some vegetables in a church basement.

When she caught sight of you with a particular blonde standing by an inflatable bouncy house Dottie was put in charge of to watch the kids, Wanda felt a wave of scorn come over her. She watched from the church steps as you conversed with Dottie, the wide grin on her lips as she discussed God knows what with you.

What business could she possibly have with you?

Did she even have anything interesting or intelligent to say, anything that warranted the friendly smile that formed on your lips as you spoke with her?

Dottie never liked Wanda, which never concerned her too much until she began to question what kinds of things Dottie must’ve said about her to you. Wanda was self-assured in her reputation and confident in the relationship she’d developed with you, but the image she created in her head of the blonde’s snarky little smirk as she got in close to you made Wanda’s blood boil.

It’d been hard to make plans with you for the past few weeks and Wanda couldn’t help but wonder how many times you’d seen Dottie, and for the first time, Wanda felt strongly remorseful for how much time she put into things other than her personal life.

Have you ever visited her house for coffee? 

Did you have her number too?

Tearing her eyes away from the two of you, Wanda continued up the stairs and into the church, where she felt her teeth clenching tight against each other in irritation. She headed downstairs and into the kitchen where she took out the refrigerated vegetables and set them out on a cutting board. 

Then she looked through the cabinets for the rice cooker and immediately became increasingly vexed when she couldn’t find it. She knelt down by the bottom of the shelves where a mess of boxes and tupperware made it impossible to find the rice cooker if it were hiding there on the shelves somewhere.

Unbeknownst to her, Agatha had come in following behind her when she saw Wanda heading into the church in hopes of finally taking some time to catch up with her friend. When she went into the basement, she saw Wanda crouching down beside one of the kitchen cabinets, arms deep in a clutter of plastic tupperware and storage boxes.

She was making quite a mess, chaotically sorting through the cabinets with less of an intention to find whatever she was looking for and instead with the intention of simply taking out some form of anger on the poor boxes of plastic spoons and serving napkins.

“I can’t find this goddamned rice cooker,” Wanda hissed when she saw Agatha standing by the kitchen door frame. 

“Cursing the name of the Lord in a church,” Agatha said in feigned disapproval then whistled.

Looking over her shoulder, Wanda shot her friend a poisonous glare then went back to searching for the rice cooker. After a moment, she stood up and slammed the cabinet door shut. “It’s not in here,” she snapped and brought a hand up to her forehead as she sighed out.

“I’ll look. Just cut the vegetables,” Agatha told her and looked through the kitchen while Wanda began rinsing the vegetables. She had no luck with finding the rice cooker either.

From behind her, Wanda was dicing a carrot slice especially aggressively and Agatha turned to see it practically diced to a sad little orange paste. “Honey…” Agatha muttered, leaning against the counter and staring at her. Wanda didn’t respond as she continued to dice the carrot slice into mush. “Wanda.”

She snapped her head up and bit, “What?”

Agatha pointed at the half-paste, half-solid pile of carrot. “I think you got it,” she said, her nose scrunched up. 

Wanda looked down at it as if really seeing it for the first time then flicked it off the cutting board and into the sink. She continued dicing the rest of the carrot.

“Something on your mind, sweetpea?” the brunette asked and pulled off a bit of washed broccoli from its head before sticking it in her mouth.

“No.”

Agatha hummed, unconvinced. She continued to watch Wanda dice up the carrots and move onto the bell peppers with startling focus as if she was revenge-chopping the poor things. Then, feeling the need to tease her, she said, “I saw Y/N and Dottie talking outside.”

Wanda visibly bristled and she cut down particularly hard on a slice of yellow pepper so the edge of the knife met loudly with the plastic cutting board. “Did you now?” she asked with a steady voice.

“Have you gotten a chance to speak with her today?” 

“I did.”

“And?”

“And what?” she asked and looked up from the cutting board.

Slightly amused by seeing her friend so occupied by the thought of someone, Agatha admitted, “I was just wondering, because a few days ago Y/N asked how you were doing.”

“She did?” she inquired, untensing for a moment. Then she looked back down to the bell peppers and continued slicing them. “And what did you say?”

Agatha replied, “I said that you’d been busy. She said that she’d been texting with you but she wanted to know how you were.”

After some silence, Wanda asked, “Has she ever asked you about Dottie?” 

It’d been such a long time since she’s seen Wanda behave like this. Repressing a little laugh but not being able to hide her grin, Agatha insisted, “You’re jealous.”

With a scoff and a mockingly amused smile, Wanda replied, “I am not jealous.” Then after a moment she added, “Who would I be jealous of? Dottie? Please.”

“I’d understand if you were. They seem to be quite close.”

At that, Wanda visibly tensed and set the knife down before saying, “How about you pick things up here, and I’ll head back home to fetch a rice cooker? I think I have one in my kitchen.”

It was more of an instruction than a suggestion, for she immediately rounded Agatha before waiting for her response and stormed out of the basement and out of the building.

When Wanda stepped outside, you were no longer standing around with Dottie but instead chatting with one of the teachers from the school’s staff. But Wanda was impatient and now set aflame by Agatha’s purposefully-baiting words, and she walked towards you until she could place a hand against your lower back.

“Hi, honey,” Wanda greeted with a soft smile when you turned your head to look at her. She looked over to Pepper, who you were in the middle of a conversation with. “I apologise, but I have to steal her away from you. I’m afraid I need Y/N’s assistance with something.”

Pepper was more than understanding and bid you a goodbye before Wanda circled her hand around to your hip, bringing you against her.

“Busy, are we?” she asked, looking at you as the two of you headed down the sidewalk to where Wanda’s car was parked.

Not picking up on what she was implying, you replied with a smile, “Not too busy, so I can help you. Where are we going?”

“Back to my place. There’s a rice cooker I need to pick up for the church and I need someone to help me look,” Wanda answered and let go of you to round the car and unlock the doors. She slid into the driver’s seat.

You buckled yourself into the passenger’s seat and immediately felt more comfortable having a break from the bustling crowds of people. And you were finally able to spend some time with Wanda again. 

“Let me get you a drink,” Wanda offered when arrived at her house and passed by her kitchen. “It’s hot out there.”

You didn’t decline, for when you ran your tongue against the roof of your mouth you realised how thirsty you were, especially after doing not much else but talking with people the whole time.

While Wanda poured what looked like homemade lemonade into a glass, she said, “I wasn’t aware that you were so popular, Y/N.”

You looked up, but her eyes were focused on the pitcher of lemonade. “I’m not popular,” you said, laughing a little at the mere suggestion. You stepped into the kitchen in front of the island counter where Wanda was pouring your drink.

“No?” She looked up from the glass and set the pitcher down. She chuckled a little and did away with your suspicions that she was upset with you. “It looked like everyone was lining up just to talk with you.” She slid your glass of lemonade over to you. “You didn’t notice?”

“I, um… Well, I guess not.”

Pleased with your simplicity, Wanda leaned against the counter and rested her cheek against the heel of her hand. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” she reassured and watched you take a drink of the lemonade, her eyes focused on the way your lips parted around the rim of the glass. She felt far more comfortable than she was before now that she was alone with you, having you to herself and not having to worry about the next time you might be stolen away from her.

After a few moments of watching how cute you looked sitting at the island complimenting how good her homemade lemonade was, Wanda said, “Shall we start looking for the rice cooker? I believe it’s in the storage closet.” 

You set the glass down and Wanda led you forward to the storage closet, which was just by the doorframe of the entrance to the kitchen. You searched through it then crouched down to start digging through the set of boxes on the floor.

Wanda’s phone buzzed with a text and she turned to take her phone out of her purse on top of the kitchen counter. The text was from Monica that read: ‘Agatha and I found the rice cooker!! I’m so sorry that you had to drive all the way back home.’

Keeping her expression still, she tucked her phone back into her purse then turned to you as you continued to dig through the lowest shelf of the storage closet. Her eyes were trained on your ass as you had your back turned to her unassumingly. She leaned back against the kitchen counter, watching you from behind.

“I found it!” you said and carefully manoeuvred a box out from the back of the closet. The rice cooker was still in its box, likely having been used about a handful of times since it was purchased. 

To Wanda’s dismay, you stood back up and closed the closet door. But when you turned around with the most eager little smile on your face from having found what she was looking for, she felt warmed.

“Thank you, honey,” Wanda cooed and took the box from you. She set it down onto the kitchen counter by her purse. She turned back around and her breath hitched when she felt herself fueled with a twinge of adrenaline at the sight of you. 

After weeks of being away from you and a chaotic day of watching you talk with nearly everyone else but her, Wanda reached out and wrapped her fingers around the corner of your shirt, gently tugging you towards her.

Your face flushed and you looked away from her, but the closer she brought you, the more difficult it became to do anything but look into her eyes that were trained on your face.

“Y/N, there is something I’ve been meaning to give you. It’s upstairs,” she whispered when you were close enough to hear the quiet hush of her voice. The tip of her tongue peeked out when she ran it across her bottom lip and she asked, “Would you mind coming up with me?”

You swallowed and felt yourself nodding, but you weren’t entirely sure if you really did nod or if you just imagined it; you sort of felt a bit lightheaded.

A ghost of a smirk formed on Wanda’s lips and she let go of your shirt before she led you towards the staircase and up to the second level of the house.

Your heart began beating faster in your chest as you continued to follow behind her nervously. You hesitated a moment when Wanda opened her bedroom door and stepped in, but eventually you forced yourself forward and followed her to the closed closet.

She turned around suddenly and asked, “Can I ask you a question, Y/N?”

“S-Sure,” you stuttered, feeling out of place.

Wanda stepped forward so her face was just inches in front of yours. “Have you ever been with a woman before, sweetheart?”

You felt no need to lie, and you felt no need to be embarrassed around Wanda although you felt that your face was warm and flushed.

When you nodded, Wanda added, “More than once?” She seemed increasingly interested at your second nod as she raised her eyebrows in piqued interest, a small intrigued smirk forming on her lips. 

“You enjoyed yourself?” she asked, now overtly teasing you as her fingers ran down the collar of your shirt. 

You nodded once more, and she was appreciative of your willingness to answer her questions with little hesitation. Then her eyes flickered up from your shirt to your face, curious juniper irises sinking into your focus. “And men?” she inquired with a slight tip of her head. 

This time you shook your head and Wanda’s breath seemed to hitch, her interest now at an all-time high. 

Her fingers tightened around the collar of your shirt and she pulled you towards her, crushing your lips against hers. She was quick to take control of the kiss and tip her head to the side. Her hand let go of your shirt and she wrapped her fingers around the back of your neck, releasing a soft moan in the form of a warm exhale into your open mouth.

She pulled you backwards with her as she reached for the knob of her closet door. She opened it and pulled you in then momentarily disconnected from your lips to search for something. 

You were distracted by the sight of her lips that were parted to allow her to pant softly. You leaned forward and pressed kisses up her neck, causing Wanda to stumble back slightly and hum out with pleasured appreciation. Her fingers ran up the back of your head and were interlaced with your hair, encouraging you to continue kissing her neck.

Her head pulled back enough to uncover your eyes and she lifted an all-black silicone cock already attached to its harness up to your face. Your eyes widened at the sight of the toy and Wanda leaned down to press her lips against your ear so she could whisper, “I want you to fuck me.”

When she read in your expression that you were more nervous than shocked that Wanda had brought the topic up to you, she reassured, “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, honey.”

“B-But I want…” You raised your head and looked at her with a determined look in your eyes. “I want to. I want to make you feel good.” 

Wanda grinned and she kissed you. “That’s sweet of you, but I want you to enjoy yourself too. We can go as slow or fast as you’d like. How about you start whatever speed you’re comfortable with, hm? And we can work from there.”

“I know you’ve had better…” you said quietly, bouts of your insecurity evident in your soft, unsure tone of voice. Though you didn’t explicitly mention it, the both of you knew exactly what you were referencing. 

Wanda wasn’t surprised and instead just grinned and asked in a teasing way, “Who told you about that?” 

You looked away, embarrassed. You hadn’t meant to bring it up. 

She leaned forward and kissed the corner of your mouth before grinning against it and saying, “Does that make you jealous?” She was looking up at you mischievously. Then you look away again, the other way so she disconnected from the corner of your lips.

Wanda walked forward so you were forced to walk back out of the closet and into her bedroom again. She closed the closet door behind her and nudged you backwards so you were forced to sit at the edge of her bed. She placed the strap down by your hip.

“Does that interest you?” she asked and began to unbutton her blouse as she looked down at you sitting on her bed with the most innocent little eyes. “Thinking about how I had a cock shoved down my throat while I jerked two more off with my hands, watching them stroke their dicks to how I was getting my ass fucked underneath them, cum in my hair and on my tits, being violated by all those braindead men just so I could get off until I was — almost — just as fucked stupid as they were.”

She giggled when you were in a deep stupor, eyes following her fingers and listening to her every word. She slipped her blouse off her shoulders and let it slip to the bedroom floor before working on her shorts, unbuttoning the top then unzipping it, revealing a maroon pair of panties that matched her bra.

“Well, you don’t have to think about that anymore,” she said when she was now only in her lingerie. She held your chin in her hands and tipped your head up to look at her. She stepped forward between your legs so your face was perhaps only an inch or two away from her tits. “Because what’ll be far more interesting is what I’m going to do with you.”

Wanda leaned down and kissed you, and with her other hand, began undressing you. You helped her and she couldn’t help but blush seeing how eager you were to have sex with her. She kissed down your body as she continued to undress your body. 

“Besides, honey, it’s different,” she muttered against your shoulder as she kissed up to your neck. “It matters to me who I’m having sex with. Sex isn’t just a thing you do. It’s more than that. It’s about connection and passion, though sometimes it can be purely shallow. Like it was that time.

“But it’s far sexier doing it with someone you connect with. Don’t you feel the same?” 

You met her eyes when she lifted her head, her hair coming loose from the hair tie that had been holding it back neatly through the day. “I agree,” you said to her.

Though you spoke little sometimes, overtaken by feelings of nerves and overwhelming libido, Wanda understood you completely. She liked how soft-spoken and sensitive you were. She couldn’t wait to have someone so delicate and gentle rough-fuck her from behind. How terribly she wanted to have you moan in her ear, telling her how much you loved her pussy.

She ran her hands up your sides, caressing your body with gentle admiration and affection. She kissed the swells of your breasts. “You’re such a sweet girl, Y/N,” she cooed and stood up once she fastened the harness around your hips. She brought your head against her chest and kissed your temple. She was so affectionate and was full of so much passion. Her touches were so soft as she led you further up onto the bed and climbed on top of you. Her hands rounded her body and she unclipped her bra so she could discard it onto the floor. 

“Wanda, you’re so gorgeous,” you uttered as you ran your eyes up her body.

She allowed herself only a moment or two to blush at your compliment before she ran her palms up your chest and rubbed her still-clothed centre against your cock. “Are you just going to lay there and talk about it the whole time?” she questioned.

You gripped her hips harshly and pulled her down onto you so you could reach her lips and kiss them. Your hands adjusted their positions and you flipped her around and got on top of her, eliciting a tiny giggle from the older woman.

Moving down her body, you gently flicked your tongue across one of her erect nipples before you suddenly bit down on it, causing her to yelp and reach up to cradle the back of your head. You kissed the plain of her stomach, nipping at the soft flesh and running a flattened tongue over the stretch marks over her hips. She made a noise of appreciation and continued petting your head, watching you cover her body in your delicate traces of adoration.

Her hand moved to the side of your face and lifted your head, allowing her to turn onto her stomach and lift herself onto her elbows. When you straightened onto your knees, she lifted her ass into the air and pressed back against your strap.

Wordlessly, Wanda looked back at you over her shoulder with eyes that dared you to go further and an ass that stroked the length of your cock in the most mesmerising way you’d ever seen. 

With shaky fingers, you pulled her panties to the side and found her wet cunt sticking to the fabric, pink folds glistening and sticking out from between gorgeous smooth thighs. Not being able to help yourself, you leaned down and ran your tongue through her pussy, making Wanda shudder. She tasted unbelievably good. 

Your own cunt throbbed and you knew you had to do more. You parted from her sticky mess and pressed a kiss to the hood of her clit before straightening again.

Wanda hastily dug through the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out a clear bottle then reached back and handed it to you. Quickly, you squirted the lube into your hand then lathered your cock in it. Wanda took the bottle back and discarded it somewhere on the bed, uncaring of where it ended up for the time being. 

She whimpered when you ran the length of your cock along her cunt, especially when you took her folds between your thumb and forefinger and ran it right through. The lubed strap slid beautifully across the delicate pink and Wanda felt herself trickle down onto her throbbing clit.

Wanda encouraged, “Don’t rush if you don’t want to. That makes me feel really good.” 

Her panties threatened to slip back into place and you became impatient and pulled back a bit, tugging her panties down her thighs and from her ankles.

“Someone’s impa–” Wanda was cut off suddenly when you shoved your cock into her without warning, making her gasp and flinch forward, eyes squeezed shut as she was forced to adjust to your size. It didn’t help that you immediately began thrusting into her, making Wanda nearly lose her balance and fall forward. But she kept herself up with her ass in the air for you. 

She didn’t have time to think of how shocking it was that such a quiet and docile girl like you had such fire brewing within her, for she was immediately overtaken by her desire. 

“Pull my hair,” she instructed between groans and you obliged, reaching forward and taking a handful of her shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. “Tighter,” she said, and you tightened your fingers into a stern fist, pulling Wanda backwards and watching as her back curved into a beautiful arch.

“Oh, that’s right, Y/N!” she yelped as you quickened your hips against her. “Perfect.” Her eyes rolled to the back of her head as you watched her ass redden and bounce from the harshness of your thrusts. 

Wanda reached back to get your attention. “Spank me,” she told you.

Following her instruction, you brought your hand up and back down to deliver a harsh spank to her ass. You truly couldn’t believe the effect it had on her. She lost balance and laid flat against the bed, her arms being unable to hold herself up as she squealed out. 

You spanked her repeatedly like she wanted, each time eliciting a tiny whimper from her with half her face buried in her blankets. You pulled your cock out of her and rubbed her throbbing clit with the pads of your fingers. She groaned when you left her and she looked back at you, watching as your eyes ran over her pussy. 

Her cunt was swollen and so beautiful, the trimmed tuft of dark hair and the shade of soft pink glistening from the juices dripping from her hole that squeezed around nothing, desperate for more of your cock. 

Her pussy was so, so perfect.

“Y/N,” Wanda said, speaking with a gentle rasp to her voice. “I can only be patient for so long. I need your cock.” She said it with a soft smile on her lips, and although her shoulder partially-shrouded it, you could see her cheeks were tinted a soft pink as she’d watched you look her over with such overwhelming admiration. 

You pressed a kiss to her opening then straightened back up, repositioning yourself against her. You were distracted momentarily when you looked down and saw her looking up at you, green eyes still so full of appreciation for you. 

Then suddenly she repositioned herself and turned onto her back. She sat up for a second and wrapped her arms around your waist before pulling you down onto her. Her lips met yours in a gentle, passionate kiss.

Wanda was amused by how distracted you were by her and she kissed your cheek while she reached down and entered your cock into her opening herself. Her legs wrapped around your hips and she tightened them around you, moaning into your ear as you slowly entered her again.

“Say that I’m a desperate slut who loves to get fucked.”

“W-Wanda,” you panted. “You’re a desperate slut that wants nothing but to get her pussy fucked.”

“That’s right,” she purred, her thighs tightening around your hips. “Mommy’s just a dirty bitch who’s nothing without a cock filling up her filthy fuckholes. Ah… Don’t you like that, Y/N?”

You squeezed your eyes shut and focused on fucking her how she liked, and a part of you almost felt bad for the way she degraded herself for no other lover you’d ever had has ever spoken like that. But fuck, Wanda was right — it was hot. 

“I-I like that, mommy,” you confessed.

“Oh, I know you do.” She pet the back of your head. “Make mommy come, angel. I’ve had such a hard last few weeks, baby. Doesn’t mommy deserve to feel good? She does, doesn’t she?”

You opened your eyes and nodded, the sincerity in your eyes as you agreed that Wanda needed to feel good after the last few weeks making her melt. “I wanna make mommy feel good…” you mumbled. “Make mommy come.”

Wanda groped her breast then twisted her nipple between her fingers. You leaned down and wrapped your lips around her other hardened bud, making her moan out and arch her back up against your body.

Feeling her lower stomach tighten with a familiar, beloved pressure, Wanda wrapped her legs around your firmly and crossed her ankles against your lower back. She manually fucked herself up against you, bringing her hips up and meeting yours repeatedly in desperation. It was a messy out-of-sync attempt at first as you continued to thrust into her, but the both of you soon found a rhythm with Wanda fucking herself and you pounding her back into her bed.

“Fuck, Y/N,” she mewled into your ear. “I’m–”

She was cut off when her orgasm was wrenched out of her, and she arched her back up and clung onto you, her arms wrapping around your torso and pulling you close. Her fingernails scratched down your back and she cried out loudly, throwing her head back and exposing her neck.

You released her nipple and kissed up her neck until your lips reached her cheek and you could watch her orgasm come over her, your other hand cradling the side of her head as her eyes clenched shut and her jaw was slack, a guttural cry being pulled out of her.

Then finally she slumped back down onto the bed tiredly, her body a sore and sweaty mess of weak limbs. She shook with the tremors of her orgasm’s aftermath and you fell to her side, hugging her around her waist and burying your face in her sweet-smelling hair. She reached up and intertwined her fingers with your hair, fingernails gently scratching at the back of your head.

“That was the best sex I’ve had in a very, very long time,” she huffed out. She’d forgotten how good it felt to have sex wanting to have every string attached. 

Wanda turned her head and looked at you. “Y/N,” she said seriously. She cupped your cheek with her hand and stroked her thumb against your soft skin. “I want to commit to you. And you only.”

You perked up and lifted yourself onto your elbow. “So we can… date?”

She laughed and pulled you down so she could kiss your cheek. She spoke against it, “You are the most unassuming, sincere person I have ever met.”

“I-Is that a yes?” 

“That’s a yes, honey.”

You practically beamed and Wanda could only laugh again, feeling such a warm burst of joy spreading through her at the sight of you and how happy you looked.

“I’ve never started dating someone right after having sex with them,” you said, looking down at her with your head above hers. Your hand was on her stomach, drawing gentle shapes against it.

“Does that bother you?” she asked quietly, lifting both her hands to either side of your face.

You shook your head immediately, the happy smile reminiscent of a small puppy. 

A large smile pulled at Wanda's lips. “You are a terribly, terribly lovely girl, Y/N,” she said then kissed you. When she laid her head back down and looked up at you, the both of you exchanged a silent stare in which every hope for your relationship was conveyed in the silent fondness you shared looking at each other.

Wanda turned her head and looked at the clock on the nightstand. “I think we can get away with making me come one more time before we have to go back.” She moved herself closer to you and had you lay down beside her. “Make me come with your fingers.”

She spread her legs and rubbed her fingers against her wet folds while she tucked her other hand between your legs and met your cunt with them. She slid two manicured fingers into her pussy at the same time she entered you. 

Eventually after a few moments when she’d become bored of herself, she pulled out and took your wrist, placing your fingers against her warm pussy. You started fingering her while Wanda continued with her own hand still tucked between your thighs, gentle and smooth and ensuring you could follow her lead, feeling with your tight walls the way she carefully fucked her fingers in and out of you.

“You feel amazing,” she uttered against your lips. “So wet.” She leaned forward and tugged at your earlobe with her teeth. “I wanna see you come for me.”

Wanda quickened her fingers and you did the same, following her obediently. Soon, the both of you were exclusively reliant on each other for your releases, mutual pleasure tying the two of you together in the sweaty meshing of your bodies amongst Wanda’s soft bed sheets and heavy exhales from your mouths.

Finally, with Wanda holding herself back until she felt you near your orgasm, the both of you came together, tightening around each other’s fingers and for a moment making it seem like you shared a body, crying out against each other and feeling the other come around their fingers as they felt themselves riding through their orgasms. 

A few minutes later, the both of you were a cluster of two warm bodies, limbs entangled with each other. Your head was on Wanda’s chest as she stroked your hair and held your hand, your other idly running its thumb across the stretch marks that went up the side of her stomach.

The strap had been removed and was laying by the bottle of lube Wanda eventually found so she could be reminded to clean it properly later. 

“Why all of this so suddenly?” you asked, looking up at her from her shoulder. “I mean, bringing me home and then confessing and everything.”

Wanda hummed and circled a lock of your hair around her forefinger. “I’d just had it on my mind for a while, and it’d been so long since I last had you to myself,” she explained. “So I suppose when we got time alone, I just couldn’t wait anymore.”

“Agatha said you were jealous earlier.”

Her face contorted and she looked down at you as if she thought she hadn’t heard it right the first time. At the sight of you and realising you were serious, she looked away and attempted to conceal her embarrassed expression with a laugh. 

“What? Why would she–” She tried to chuckle, but it came out sounding nervous. “Agatha doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” she insisted with a shake of her head.

Then after a moment, more seriously albeit still hesitant, she asked, “Why did she say that?”

“She said you looked jealous.”

“I wasn’t jealous,” Wanda asserted. “I wasn’t.”

You smiled, and for the first time, Wanda didn’t catch onto the subtleties of your expression because she was occupied trying to obscure her own. It didn’t take long for you to catch onto the fact that she truly had been feeling jealous earlier.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re mine now, so…” She looked over at you and pulled you close so her body was against yours. “No reason to feel jealous anymore, is there?”

With a grin, you climbed onto her lap and Wanda placed her hands on your hips. You leaned down so your foreheads were pressed against each other. “No reason at all,” you answered.

Wanda kissed you and you felt her grin widely against your lips. 

“Good,” she said.

Neither of you realised nor would you care if either of you remembered that you’d both been expected back at the festival nearly forty minutes ago.

[icemankazansky86]

Jewish Tom “Iceman” Kazansky Headcanons

(Yes, I fiddled with Ice’s age because I headcanon him as a bit younger than he is in canon)

Tom’s legal name isn’t “Tom” at all, it’s actually Tomer (תּוֹמַר) or Toma meaning palm tree.

Tom was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on the 5th of August 1963, and moved with his father, Ivan, mother Katherine, and sister, Ana, to San Diego, California at age five. In Los Angeles, California he began attending Yavneh Hebrew Academy.

Tom wears a Magen David tucked into his shirt at all times, and even while religious articles and jewelry are not to be prohibited from being worn in accordance with the criteria of AR 670-1, Tom does not wear it openly out of caution.

Tom’s mother, Katherine’s, father and grandparents perished during WWII, having been rounded up and taken to the camps shortly following the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto in March of 1943.

Tom’s mother’s father’s name was Yaakov Horowitz, a factory worker from Łódź. Tom’s great-grandparents were Mordechai and Miriam Horowitz. Miriam was a seamstress and Mordechai a musician.

His father’s mother, Feodora, was born in Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky) Russia and married her husband, Georgiy Kazansky in 1926. Georgiy was from Rostov-on-Don, Russia. He passed away March of 1973.

Tom is fluent in English, Russian, and Polish. He can read and hold a conversation in Hebrew.

Every Friday (when he’s not deployed), Tom drives over to his parent’s house for Shabbat.

In 1976, Tom and his family traveled to Jerusalem to visit cousins and friends. There he also had his Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall.

While in High School Tom participated in a production of ‘Fiddler on The Roof’ that was put on by the Drama Department. He was cast as Perchik. Emotionally Tom has always related to Tzeitel and her inner struggles.

Tom attends Congregation Beth El (located in San Diego) when he can, but always tries to attend High Holiday services.

Every year on the anniversary of Goose’s death, Tom goes to the cemetery and places a small stone on top of his grave and says the Mourner’s Kaddish.

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with the Los Angeles Times (2024)

“This is where all the cruising happened.”

Jonathan Bailey and I are standing in Pershing Square on a bright, blustery spring afternoon, nearing the end of a homemade queer history tour of downtown L.A.: One Magazine, Cooper Do-Nuts/Nancy Valverde Square, the Dover bathhouse, the Biltmore Hotel and this, the city’s former Central Park, a haven, since before World War I, for “fairies” and “sissy boys,” servicemen on leave and beatniks on the road.

“Is it still happening now?” he asks.

“Probably not as much,” I venture.

“Well, you let me know if it’s happening,” he teases, a mischievous smile lighting up his face.

Bailey understands the uses of the charm offensive. As Sam, the handsome Lothario of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s delightful pre-”Fleabag” curio, “Crashing”; Anthony, the romantic hero of “Bridgerton’s” second season; and John, the jerk of a protagonist in Mike Bartlett’s love triangle play “Cock,” the English actor, 36, has swaggered up to the precipice of superstardom. With roles in such studio tentpoles as “Wicked” and “Jurassic World” on the horizon, he may just break through. Yet he delivers career-best work in Showtime’s queer melodrama “Fellow Travelers,” as anti-Communist crusader-turned-gay rights activist Tim Laughlin, by leaving behind the self-assured rakes and tapping a new wellspring: soft power.

Tim may be, as Bailey puts it, “an open nerve,” but as it turns out, the devout Catholic and political naïf — who falls for suave State Department operative Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy tries to purge the federal government of LGBTQ people — is formidable indeed.

Stretching from the Lavender Scare to the depths of the AIDS crisis, in scenes of tenderness, cruelty and toe-curling sex, Bailey’s performance communicates that little-spoken truth of relationships: It takes more strength to submit than it does to control. The former demands discipline, courage, trust; the latter requires only force.

“In ‘Bridgerton,’ [Bailey] is like a Hawkins Fuller character — he is very sexy and has lots of power, has that kind of confident charisma that absolutely is not Tim at all,” says “Fellow Travelers” creator Ron Nyswaner.

But any doubt about Bailey’s ability to mesh with Bomer, who boarded the project early in development, was put to bed with the actors’ virtual rehearsal of a meeting on a park bench in the pilot. “‘Well, that’s a first,’” Nyswaner recalls an executive texting him. “I cried in a chemistry read.”

‘Am I inviting people in?’

Bailey grew up in a musical family in the Oxfordshire countryside outside London, and this, coupled with an appreciation for the morning prayers, choir practice and Mass he attended as a scholarship student at the local Catholic school, fed his precocious talents. (“I loved the performance of it,” he laughs. “Not to diminish the celebration of religious process, but I did love the idea of wearing a gown.”) By age 10, he’d appeared in the West End, playing Gavroche in a production of “Les Misérables,” an experience he now recognizes as an encounter with a queer found family — albeit one shadowed by the toll of the AIDS crisis, which peaked in the U.K. in the mid-1990s.

“When I’m asked about my childhood, there’s so much I don’t remember, and I think that’s true of anyone who’s been in fight or flight for 20 years,” he says. “I would have been in a cast of people whose friends would have died in the last seven years. I think of where I was seven years ago. I had all my gay friends then. It’s only retrospectively that I can retrofit a real gay community around me [in the theater], that I just wasn’t aware of [then].”

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, American and British culture presented queer adolescents with a bewildering array of mixed signals. As beloved celebrities came out in growing numbers, and the battle for marriage equality became a central locus of LGBTQ political organizing, the media continued to propagate harmful stereotypes of gay men as miserable, lonely, perverted or worse — and, Bailey remembers, callously turned George Michael, arrested on suspicion of cruising in a Beverly Hills restroom in 1998, and Irish pop star Stephen Gately, who revealed his sexuality in 1999, fearful he was about to be outed, into tabloid spectacles.

No wonder Bailey, like many LGBTQ people of his generation, should feel the “chemical” thrill of “validation and acceptance” during London Pride at age 18, then embark on a two-year relationship with a woman in his 20s.

“Dangerously, if you’re not exposed to people who can show you other examples of happiness, you think that’s the easiest way to live,” Bailey says. “It’s funny. You look back and you can tell the story in one way, which is that I always knew who I was and my sexuality and my identity within that. But obviously at times, it was really tough. I compromised my own happiness, for sure. And compromised other people’s happiness.”

Disclosures about his personal life have become particularly thorny for the actor since the premiere of “Bridgerton,” the blockbuster bodice-ripper from executive producer Shonda Rhimes.

“The Netflix effect does knock you off center completely,” he says, recalling the experience of finding a paparazzo waiting outside his new flat before he’d even moved in. “Suddenly, you do start having nightmares about people climbing in your windows... Even now, talking about it makes me feel like, ‘Am I inviting people in?’”

He is also critical of the media for churning out headlines about the smallest details of celebrities’ private lives, often detached from their original context. In an interview with the London Evening Standard published in December, Bailey described a harrowing encounter in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop in which a man threatened his life for being queer — and, in recounting the experience, offhandedly mentioned the “lovely man” he’d called, shaken, after it happened. Although Bailey acknowledges that the original story handled the subject with aplomb, he felt dismayed that more attention wasn’t paid to the intended warning about rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment: “The only thing that got syndicated from that story was that I had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t true,” he sighs. “It was kind of depressing, if I’m honest.”

Still, Bailey, who once turned down a role in a queer-themed TV series because it would have required him to speed along revelations about his personal life he wasn’t ready to make, is prepared to embrace the power of vulnerability when it feeds the work. Although a member of his inner circle expressed doubts about “Fellow Travelers’” steamy sex scenes, for instance, the actor intuited that they were what made the project worth doing: “I was like, ‘I’m telling you, they are the reason why this is going to be brilliant.’”

‘He’s changed my trajectory in my own life’

To those who would complain about the state of sex in film and TV, “Fellow Travelers” is the perfect riposte. All of it matters, from Tim’s first flirtation with Hawk to the finale’s closing minutes, because the series, at its core, is about the importance of soft power: the strength required to bend, but not break; to adapt, but not abandon oneself; to survive without shrinking to nothing in the process.And depicting that through sex, specifically gay sex, makes “Fellow Travelers” radical indeed.

Bailey understands that baring so much comes with certain risks. When I tell him that research for the story has filled my algorithmic “For You” feed on X (formerly Twitter) with speculation that his onscreen relationship with Bomer has a real-life element, he notes that “shipping” fictional couples and costars alike has long been part of Hollywood fantasy. But he bristles at the implication that he and Bomer are anything but skilled actors at work.

“I would love for people to know that the success of our chemistry isn’t based on us f—. It’s actually about us leaning into the craft,” he says. “It’s a vulnerable situation to be in, talking about it on record. I don’t want to rob people of their thoughts. But I do have a set of values, and as an artist, you don’t need to be f�� to tell that love story.”

Underlying that craft, Bailey adds, is the confidence to speak up, as with one scene in “Fellow Travelers” that was adjusted because he said, “I don’t want to be naked today.” He learned to use his voice the hard way: In his early 20s, he recalls, he was once “bullied” on set when “someone was threatened” by him and vowed to himself, “I’m never going to do that to someone. I’m never going to allow that to happen.”

This impulse to direct his influence in support of others has blossomed further with “Fellow Travelers.” On the day of our interview, Bailey enthuses about an upcoming meeting with legendary gay rights activist Cleve Jones and shares his idea for a docuseries recording the stories of elders in the LGBTQ+ community while they are still here to tell them. He describes lying in a hospital bed on set on World AIDS Day, in character as Tim, surrounded by gay men who had lost friends and lovers during the crisis, and finding himself thinking, “What do I want to leave behind?”

“I think he’s changed my trajectory in my own life,” Bailey says.

This is, perhaps, the most common reaction I know to diving deep into queer history — the understanding that we, like our forerunners, are responsible for shaping the queer future, whether in politics, society or art. No one is going to do it on our behalf.

As we stand on the nondescript corner now named for her, I relate the story of the late queer activist Nancy Valverde, who was arrested repeatedly while a barber school student in the 1950s on suspicion of “masquerading” because of her preference for short hair and men’s clothing, and later successfully challenged her harassment by the police in court.

“What a hero!” Bailey exclaims, wondering at Valverde’s bravery. “The thing that’s so interesting with power battles is, ultimately, identity is the thing that gives you the most strength and power in your life, isn’t it?

“Because that’s one thing people can’t take away from you: who you are and how you express yourself.”

Source

[tropes-and-tales]

A Bit of Color (Redux)

Day 7: Virginity (Ray Merrimen x F!Reader)

(For the 2023 Kinktober event that I created on my own because I am boring and basic and am trying to keep it simple this year...found here!) 

CW:  Light angst (implied attempted SA, but nothing graphic); loss of virginity; smut (Fingering, PiV, protected); 18+ only.

Word Count:  4448

AN:  This is a sequel to this, and it was requested for Kinktober by @chemicalalice)

After the debacle of the Christmas gifts, and after Ray apologizes, he tries to do better.  After learning about your similar childhoods—growing up in difficult military families—he finally feels a kinship to you.  It’s a commonality he never had before.  You with all your color and light, you baked goods for the crew, your care for them.  Ray’s never known anyone so much his opposite, yet that common facet of childhood give him an in to understand you.

He tries to do better by you.  He tries to not be such a dick all the time, tries to remember his home training and thank you when you do something nice for them.  He tries to tell you when you do a good job; he tries to offer one of his small smiles when you make a joke.

He doesn’t tell you:  when LA has an unseasonable cold snap, he uses the quilt you made him for Christmas.  He doesn’t tell you that when his insomnia plagues him that night, he runs his fingers over the small, neat stitches of your handiwork, over the small blocks of soft cotton you cut and sewed together. 

He doesn’t tell you that months after you gifted it to him, months after he hurt your feelings and then clumsily apologized…months after all of that, he finally realizes how much time and energy you put into this quilt.  For him.

It doesn’t make him cry or anything like that.  Ray has no outsized flood of emotion at the realization.  It simply knocks something loose in his chest, scores a microscopic crack in the flinty wall around his heart.

-----

Your secret reveals itself after a heist.  You hacked the security system of a club, the guys robbed it, and now there’s a celebration out at Bosco’s house.  It’s low-key, just a laid-back thing.  There’s plenty of beer in the backyard strung up with lights against the Los Angeles dusk, music playing on the speakers. 

Everyone is loose, relaxed.  The guys start to reminisce about their glory days in high school, and by the time there are through their first case of beer, they shift to reminiscing about their high school conquests, their first times.

Ray sits back and listens; he barely participates beyond the occasional grunt of acknowledgement or chuckle when someone makes a joke.  He thinks back to high school, his football days.  Holly had been a cheerleader, and they’d been each other’s first—and Ray slips back into those memories.  The chatter and laughter around him fades, and he thinks back to how young he’d been then, how his future seemed to stretch out in front of him—

He's yanked out of his memories by Lavoux’s bark of laughter, then Bosco and Mack joining him. 

But not you.  Whatever joke Ray has missed, you’re not in on it.  Which makes sense—you didn’t go to high school with them, so you’ve been quiet for most of the night.  But when Ray sits up and looks at you closer, you’re slouched in your seat.  You look…discomfited.

It takes a long moment for Ray to catch up, but he does.  Amongst the memories of the guys’ respective first times, they asked you for yours—and when you told them you don’t have a “first time” story yet, the guys reacted with incredulity.

Ray just watches at first, his eyes bouncing between the guys and then you, their questions, and your squirming discomfort as you give sheepish answers.  The guys don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Ray guesses, but you clearly are.

“Are you religious or something?”

“No.”

“You waiting for marriage?”

“No.”

“Are you one of those…what are they called?  Asexuals?”

You shake your head at that, and it makes you stammer out an explanation:  that you want to, you’ve wanted to for a long time, but it’s complicated now that you’re older, that guys aren’t kind about it—

“Do you have any experience at all?”  It’s Mack who asks the question, and you drop your gaze into your lap.  You give a halting explanation about some moment in college at a party when a lacrosse player tried to…well, you hedge around it, you don’t say the word of what that guy tried to do to you, but you’re clear that he failed, that he’d been unable to get it up enough to do that to you, but that the moment made you fearful, and now you’re stuck, and it seems like only Ray can hear the edge of tears in your voice, the wobble in your words like you’re about to cry.

“Leave it,” he cuts in, but when you glance up at him in surprise, Ray is looking at Mack and Bosco and Lavoux.  “Leave her be.”

They do.  There’s a moment of awkward silence, but then Bosco shifts the conversation to the Lakers, and within a moment, everyone seems to have forgotten it.

Not you.  Ray catches you staring at him from underneath your eyelashes, and when he meets your gaze, you tip him a slight nod. 

Then you mouth a grateful, “thank you.”

Ray tips you a nod back.  He doesn’t acknowledge the feeling in his chest, the dull ache:  another knock against that flinty wall, another hairline crack in his defenses.

-----

Months pass.  If any of the guys remember that night and the revelation of your virginity, they don’t mention it to Ray.  You obviously don’t mention it either.

Ray doesn’t forget it.  It surfaces in his thoughts when he has a quiet moment, when he’s lying in bed during one of his bouts of insomnia.  His imagination pulls together that moment in college with the lacrosse player, and it makes Ray sick to think of you:  sunny, colorful you.  Young but already so steeped in tragedy with the death of your father.  The universe was cruel to put you in the path of a drunken rapist, so much larger than you.  Even if you escaped before the worst could happen, you didn’t escape unscathed, and here you are years later, wanting to be intimate with someone but too scared to do it.

You need someone you trust, Ray thinks.  Someone you feel safe with.  Someone who will keep your confidence, who won’t tease you.  Someone who will take you seriously and understand how important losing your virginity must be for you.

Sometimes, when he’s lying sleepless under your quilt, he wonders if he might be that someone.

-----

More months pass.  The crew is laying low since Mack got busted for a bullshit parole violation.  They go semi-straight, work in the garage working on cars and trucks.  They spend their evenings on their own, in a fallow season until Mack gets sprung in a few months.

You pick up work bartending, and Ray stops by a few nights a week.  He sits at the corner of the bar and usually stays silent, but when it’s quiet in the bar, you’ll come and talk to him.  Which with Ray mostly means you talk to him and he listens as he sips at his beer.

But the bar isn’t in the best neighborhood, and soon Ray finds himself there every night you’re scheduled.  He stays until closing time, and it isn’t long before he goes from walking you to your car to just driving you home outright.

It isn’t long before you go from sliding out of his truck with a thank you and a wave to inviting him in for a beer.

When he notices that you’ve started stocking your fridge with his beer of choice, he doesn’t mention it.

If you notice that he lingers longer each night he drives you home, that he nurses that beer a little longer, you don’t mention it either.

-----

Mack’s release date keeps getting pushed back.  It’s the legal system and its red tape at its finest.

You and Ray fall into a rhythm.  He drives you home after your shifts at the bar.  You give him beer, but you also feed him a late-night dinner.  It’s never anything spectacular, usually just reheated leftovers, but he likes the cozy domesticity of it.  Eating your food while he sits on your couch, you eating beside him.  Nearly close enough to touch.

A long time has passed since the last heist.  A long time since your reluctant admission to being a virgin, but Ray has never forgotten it.  He’s mulled it over like it’s a problem to solve; like the complex blend of your past trauma and societal expectations are, say, the schematics to a bank vault.

“You need someone you trust,” he blurts out one night.  You’ve been chatty all evening, telling him about some friend of a friend who got engaged.  You’re a little down on yourself—the news of the engagement has sent you into a minor tailspin.  You think you’re so far behind everyone that you’ll never catch up.

“Huh?” 

“If you want to lose your virginity,” he clarifies, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the bottle of beer in his hand.  “You need someone you trust.”

“Oh.”  He feels the tension seep off you.  He winces inwardly to have made you uncomfortable, but he plows forward.  It’s a problem he wants to help you solve, and he doesn’t examine why he wants to help you so much.

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” he continues.  “You just need someone you feel safe with.”

It takes you an entire month more when you finally ask him.  You don’t meet his eyeline when you haltingly tell him that you trust him.  That you feel safe with him.

You’re so quiet, so unlike yourself when you tell him.  He can feel the fear and hesitation in you, and he can feel his own response to you trusting him enough to consider this:  the hairline cracks in his stony heart growing wider, fault-lines nearly wide enough to let you slip in entirely.

*****

You keep expecting there to be a reveal, a moment where the guys jump out and make fun of you.  You keep expecting this to have been an elaborate put-on by Ray and the guys, a cruel joke at your expense.

You’ve never been more wrong in your life.

Ray plans everything, which is pretty much Ray’s thing.  You wonder how much difference there is between planning a heist and planning the loss of your virginity, in Ray’s eyes. 

You don’t have enough experience with men to catch the way his gaze falls on you, turns soft by a degree or two.  You don’t notice that he gifts you with his rare, small smiles more than ever.  You don’t notice—how could you? —that Ray has fallen in love with you, a falling of miniscule moments, of quiet instances where you creep into his heart like groundwater finding its level. 

How could you notice that?  Even Ray hasn’t noticed it, and he has far more romantic experience than you.

He plans everything.  He sets the date.  He comes to your house, paper bag in hand, and you guess it’s condoms, but you notice that he’s put effort into himself:  he’s cleaned up his facial hair.  He’s put on a nicer shirt, and when he walks past you, you catch the scent of a recent shower—the slight spice of his body wash, the clean smell of his shampoo.

He brings a bottle of Moscato for you, but he’s clear—stern, in fact—that it’s just to take the edge off.  It’s just to smooth out the rough spikes of your fear.

“You need to stop if you feel yourself getting tipsy,” he tells you as he pours you a glass.  “You are in control tonight, so you need to be in control of yourself first.”

When your hand trembles as it grasps the wine glass, Ray’s eyes turn soft.  He reaches out and lays one of his big hands over yours, steadies you.

“Everything is fine,” he tells you, low and soft like he doesn’t want to spook you.  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, okay?”

-----

Ray has thought of everything.

The realization of how much thought and effort he put into this makes you flush from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.  Ray Merrimen, your favorite grump.  The stone-faced, unsmiling behemoth who glowers from the shadows and leads the crew like some grouchy demi-god.

Who thought he could be so gentle?  He takes his time.  He leads you carefully, but he checks in with you at each new step.  From sitting together on the couch, his palm gently laid on your bare knee as you sip at your wine.  From when he eases the glass out of your hand, then carefully tilts your face towards his.  From when he studies your expression before he leans in and presses a plush kiss to your mouth.

From when he builds up the kisses:  from closed-mouth to open, to teasing you when he sucks against your lower lip, when he slips his tongue against yours.  When he chuckles at the first low, involuntary moan you loose just from his mouth against your neck.  When his hands find your breasts and palms them softly through your shirt, when his thumbs find the pebbled nipples even through your shirt and your bra, and when he breathes in your ear how much fun he's going to have drawing your pleasure from you.

When you shiver at his words, he draws away and studies your face again.  There’s a question in his eyes, so you nod at him.

“I’m okay,” you say.  “I’m fine.”

He studies you a beat longer, then nods back.  He smooths his big hands down your arms, then reaches out and grasps your waist.

“Bedroom?” he asks.

You swallow hard, and you hope he doesn’t hear the gulp that sounds so loud in your own ears. 

“Bedroom,” you agree.

-----

You know from working with Ray that the man is meticulous.  He never rushes a job; he always takes his time.

He takes his time with you.  His patience for your insecurities feels infinite:  he strips you, he eases a thick finger into you, and he stills when you gasp, when you freeze up.  When you tell him to keep going, he doesn’t—instead he kisses you, works his hot mouth against your face, your neck, your breasts.  He kisses you until he feels you relax, and only then does he keep going.

He works his finger in you.  He adds another, kisses you through the stretch of it as he scissors his fingers to help stretch your tight channel open.  You can feel where his erection presses against your leg, and sometimes he presses himself against you hard, an involuntary reaction to whatever lust he may be feeling.  But he never rushes it, and he mumbles shy words of praise in your ear, and he takes his goddamned time.

He makes you come with his fingers first, the blunt end of his finger stroking some inner part of you, his thumb circling your clit.  You’ve masturbated plenty, but this feels like nothing you’ve been able to coax from yourself before:  his hand works you like a finely tuned instrument, but his other hand works against your breasts, pinches lightly at your nipples, rubs the pad of his thumb over the curve and swell of you until goosebumps prickle against your skin.  His mouth breathes out low-voiced orders in your ear, his breath hot against you as he commands you to come for him, to let yourself go, and you do.

It's not like anything you’ve felt before.  It’s the sudden release of tension.  It’s the hard snap of a rubber band pulled taut, then loosed.  It’s a flood of heat and light, its epicenter right where Ray’s hand skillfully works you, and it courses outward like shockwaves that make you tremble and whimper as you give yourself over to the sensation.

“That’s it,” Ray whispers in your ear, and you feel the brush of his lips a beat later against your cheekbone.  “Just like that.”

-----

Then comes the main event, and Ray slows down even more.  He checks in with you, props himself on an elbow to peer down as he interrogates you.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks, and his stern face is softened by his low, quiet voice.  “Do you want to stop now?”

You lay a hand on his shoulder and study his tattoos as you answer.  “I’m sure,” you assure him.  “I don’t want to stop.”

“I’m gonna need you to look me in the eye when you answer, sweetheart.”

You take a deep breath, then you do as he tells you.  You feel shy, suddenly, exposed at the realization that Ray Merrimen—grouchy Ray, the leader of your crew—has essentially fingered you, wrung an orgasm out of you.  Shy too that you want to keep going, that you want him to be your first.

“I’m sure,” you repeat, and you look him square in the eyes when you say it.

The corner of his mouth twitches into his version of a smile.  “You’ll tell me if you want to stop, right?”

“I will.”

His small smile falls, and he hesitates before he adds, “I won’t hurt you.  I promise.”

You can’t know that he’s thinking about the man who hurt you all those years ago.  You can’t know that Ray is uncomfortable to be so much bigger than you, so much stronger.  You can’t know that Ray worries that something about this moment—him looming over you, you defenseless underneath him—will spark against your trauma and cause you anxiety.

If you knew any of this, you’d be able to reassure him:  that other guy is so far from your thoughts, he may as well not even exist.  Nothing about Ray’s care and attention conjures up the specter of that unhappy memory.  You feel safe underneath Ray.  You feel safe with him.

He takes a long moment to roll the condom onto himself, and then another long moment easing himself between your legs.  He props himself on one forearm and then presses forward, the tip of his cock brushing against your slick and swollen folds.  He pauses and looks down at you.

“I’ll stop if you tell me to,” he says, and for the first time, he sounds uncertain, even a little shy.  It strikes you all at once that maybe he’s nervous too, so you lift your hands and cup his face, draw him down to you.  You gift him a sweet kiss, then you deepen it.  You tilt his head and suckle against his lower lip as he had done to you earlier, and the groan that breaks free from him is sudden and loud.

“I trust you, Ray,” you tell him.

He drags the thick length of him along your slit, coats himself in your arousal before he pushes forward, breaches your entrance with the crown of his cock.  He never looks away from you, and his unflinching, unblinking stare feels almost unbearably intimate.  Like he can read your thoughts, like he can see into your soul.

He pushes forward, draws back.  He works himself into you, but he pauses to kiss you, to whisper in your ear how well you’re doing.  It doesn’t hurt, not really—it’s just the sense of pressure, of stretching, and you can see how it might hurt with an inconsiderate lover, but Ray takes his time to let you stretch to his invading length, so there’s no pain.  There’s only the overwhelming sense of being taken, claimed.

You realize he’s fully seated when you feel the press of his hips flush against yours, and he lowers more of himself onto you.  You feel the hot flush of skin on yours, slick with sweat, and his hot breath pants against your neck.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.  His voice sounds strained, but he lays a trail of kisses along your collarbone.  He doesn’t move otherwise—doesn’t pull out, doesn’t thrust.  He’s letting you get used to the feeling of him being inside you.  He shifts his head and gazes down at you.

“Good,” you mumble.  “I feel good.”

“Need your eyes on me, sweetheart.”

You do as he says.  There’s tension in his face, and you reach up to brush your fingertips over the lines in his brow, the two deep lines between his eyebrows.

“I’m good,” you repeat. 

“I didn’t hurt you?” he asks.

You shake your head.  “No, it’s…”  You trail off, try to focus.  You’d heard the term ‘cock-drunk’ before, had always scoffed at how stupid it sounds, but having him inside you, thick and hot and throbbing leaves little room for intelligent thought. 

Ray dips his head and kisses you deeply, licks against the inside of your mouth.  He kisses you until you’re breathless then breaks away.

“Gonna need you to use your words too,” he says, and it comes out gruff except for the smirk curving his lips.

You smile back up at him.  You lay your hand on the back of his head, run your fingertips through his close-cropped hair.  “It’s good.  It’s better than good, Ray.”

“Ready for more?”

You nod.  “Yes.”

Another long, lingering kiss and then he starts to move.  He pulls out halfway, pushes back into you, and his thrusts are smooth.  No jarring, no rough jolts as he reseats himself over and over.  The motion renews just how big he is; the tight walls of your pussy grip him, the friction of it knocks the wind out of your lungs.  You cling to his broad shoulders, and you feel the flex and tension in his muscles as he fucks you gently.  But he’s big, he’s so fucking thick, and you gasp each time his hips settle against yours.

“Still okay?” he grunts out, and you whisper that you’re fine, you’re perfect, but that he’s so big, so goddamned big like he might split you in half—

“No,” he groans.  “Fuck, don’t.”

You freeze underneath him, suddenly terrified you’ve said something wrong, but then he groans in your ear before he lifts his head and stares down at you, clarifies.

“You can’t…. shit, you can’t say that, sweetheart.”

“S-sorry—”

He shakes his head to interrupt, quirks his mouth into that half-smile he has.  “You can’t look at me with those goddamned puppy-dog eyes and say stuff like that.”

“I’m sorry, Ray—”

“I’m already on a hair-trigger,” he grits out, and you’re too inexperienced to know the warning signs of his impending orgasm, the erratic way he’s thrusting into you, like he’s trying to hold back but his body is working independently of his will.  “Fucking jacked off twice before I came here…shit, want to make it good for you…”  He groans again, drops his head beside yours.  “Fuck, you feel so good, I can’t—just don’t—”

But he’s passed the event horizon of his pleasure, it’s too late to stop himself, and you’re bewildered for a beat as he groans out a string of curses, as he deals you a couple of shallow, rapid thrusts…but then you feel the throb of his cock inside you, his body rigid above you before he sighs and sags against you.

“Shit,” he breathes out.  “Shit, shit, shit.”

*****

Ray would be ashamed, but you don’t let the feeling take root in him.  Once you realize what has happened, you soothe him.  You kiss him, you stroke your hands over his arms, his shoulders.  You tell him everything is fine, that you enjoyed yourself.

Only you.  Sweet, sunny you.  Only you could turn your disappointing first time into a loving moment for him, and after he cleans you up, he grumbles as much to you. 

“But I’m not disappointed!” you protest.  “Not at all!”

“You didn’t get to come.”

“I did,” you point out.  “And it was amazing.”

Ray rolls his eyes.  He’s trying to argue with you; he wants you to yell at him for failing you.  “You know what I mean.”

“It still counts.  And I’m not a virgin anymore, so…mission accomplished.”

He sighs, and he makes one last attempt at wallowing in his failure.  “You want me to leave?” he asks, and he doesn’t know what scares him more:  you sending him away, or you asking him to stay with you.

“No!  Not at all.”  You look at him with those big doe-eyes, like some anime baby animal, and it’s made worse that you have no idea the effect you have on him.  “Will you stay?  Please?”

And maybe getting a lousy lay under your belt gives you some courage because you hook your chin on his bare chest, cast those sad eyes on him until he’s staring back at you…then you drop a kiss on his chest.

Then you bare your teeth and nip him there, light as air, but enough for him to feel the indent of your teeth against his skin.  And then your tongue on him, laying wet line along the line of his tattoos, and the whole while you bat your eyelashes at him.  Ray’s cock twitches at the sensation.

You goddamn menace.  Has he created a monster?

He stays.  Ray gets his hands on you, manhandles you until you’re underneath him again—your squeal of surprise makes his cock twitch again—and he cages you in with his arms.  There’s a split second of worry that you’ll react badly to him being a shade rougher than he has been all evening, but there’s a gleam in your eyes, and your lips are parted as you gaze up at him.

He opens his own mouth to tell you he’ll stay, that he owes you after his embarrassing premature ejaculation, that he intends to make you come on his cock more than once, but maybe he has created a monster after all. 

You don’t let him get the words out—you arch up towards him, you surge up and kiss him hard.  It takes far less time than usual for him to recover, and when he finally slides into you the second time, he’s able to make the first time up to you—he makes you come twice before he finally joins you on your third orgasm, and when Ray comes with you, it’s not like any orgasm he’s had before:  sparks of color explode behind his eyelids, and it’s damned near percussive—enough to finally bring down the stony remains of the fortress ‘round his heart, leaving him defenseless to you.

[dullgecko]

Some moments between the bad kids and the other parents

(Freshman) Sklonda seeing Fig sitting on the curb at like 11am and offering to take her home, but Fig doesn’t want to go so she lets her spend the night. Sklonda did end up calling Sandralynn and found out what was going on at home. Fig was allowed to come over whenever she wanted after that.

Sandralynn taking Gorgug with her to see some griffins that have been resting in the mountains it was a long hike and Gorgug let it slip that he wanted to be Druid at one point, Sandralynn was so supportive. The griffins were probably the coolest thing Gorgug’s seen.

Hallerial and Adaine having an elvish dinner together, it gets really deep and they start talking about existential stuff, like how they’re both gonna outlive their friends and family, Hallerial lets it slip that she’s not ready for Fabian die because she wasn’t there for a lot of his childhood.

(Freshman year) Kristen asking Gorthalax a lot of religious stuff. Like did he think falling was worth or if he knows any deities that he thinks would accept her. Gorthalax want to get emotional because he used to be angel questions stuff divinity.

Riz going to the Thistlesprings to help him modify some of gadgets and he leaves with things like smoke bombs, poisonous bullets, and coming to realization that the Thistlesprings are bad ass as fuck.

Fig doesnt want to go back into the appartment with Gilear, and she doesnt want to go home to her mom, so she just sits outside of the Strongtower appartments in the middle of the day on a Sunday with nowhere to go. Sklonda is on her way to work, spots this kid that she knows is in her sons adventuring party (which only three weeks ago got attacked by a horrific corn monster at school), and offers to drive her home on the way to the station.

Fig is clearly upset about something but she refuses the ride so Sklonda gives her her house keys and says to at least stay inside her apartment if she has nowhere else to go. Riz is in there passed out asleep on the couch anyway so its not like she'd be left to her own devices in her apartment while she's at work it's fine. Coincidentally this is also the first time any of the bad kids see Riz actually asleep so when the conspiracy theories start up among the rest of the bad kids later that goblins dont sleep Fig is able to refute the claims. With proof. She took pictures. Mostly because it was also the first time she saw him wearing anything other than his suit (he had actual pajamas on).

She eventually goes back to Gilears appartment to get her stuff when Sklonda comes home later that night, and her and Riz have their first sleepover (even though Riz was asleep most of the day already).

--------------------------------

Sandra Lynn agrees that Gorgug should look into being a druid. Baxter clearly likes him so he has a bit of an affinity for animals, and their party really needs one if they're going to be doing any sort of adventuring in the wilderness. She gives him so many pamphlets when they get home. She's a bit disappointed when he ends up multi-classing as an artificer because thats two strikes she's had trying to help a kid be a ranger (Fig is so terrible at it she's banned from using projectile weapons). Oh well, she still has four other bad kids she could try converting... maybe she'll try the goblin next time.

-----------------------

Fabian is there for the beginning of the dinner but his mother and Adaine start getting so philosophical that he ends up excusing himself. Honestly he can't stand the whole you're dying so fast talk full elves tend to devolve into whenever talking about him. It makes his chest hurt in a way that he cant quite work out why. Its probably the fact that his mother and grandfather seem to have both been mourning his death from the moment he was born (his mothers favorite coping mechanism being drinking herself senselees) rather than enjoying the time they still have with him.

---------------------

Kristen has a lot of questions, and is constantly doubting herself, so having Gortholax there to get at least SOME answers is very comforting. Gortholax does get a little quiet with a far off look in his eyes when she asks him if he ever doubted the convictions that lead him to falling, and he can only ever give her half answers. He doesnt doubt that what he did was right now because he likes how his life has finally panned out.

----------------------

Riz really likes visiting the Thistlesprings. Other than the fact that Gorgug is there the Thistlesprings are so nice, and their house is full of furniture actually scaled for a creature his size (his apartment and office are furnished with human-sized furniture simply because its cheaper to buy second hand). There's still a lot of furniture for Gorgug too of course, they wouldnt force him to sit in gnomish sized chairs, but its nice getting to just sit and chill in a world thats his size while his friends parents tinker with his weaponry. He's pretty sure half the stuff they give him isnt stricktly legal, but they just pat his head and tell him not to let anyone find out about it and he'll be fine.

Plus, they seem to be on a mission to overfeed the hell out of him every time he visits which is always awesome.

[beardedmrbean]

When Sara Tasneem started high school, she dreamed of joining the Air Force and attending law school. Living with her mom in Colorado, she participated in JROTC, attended basketball games and had a boyfriend her own age.

But while visiting her dad in Mountain View at age 15, she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man nearly twice her age. Because her father believed she had broken the rules of her strict religious sect by having a boyfriend, she was married without her consent.

Her dad introduced her to the man who had been chosen for her at a coffee shop one morning. By that night, they were married in a spiritual ceremony in a Los Angeles hotel room. Six months later, she was legally married in Nevada.

From the day of her forced wedding, Tasneem said, her life became unrecognizable. She was withdrawn from school. She was forced to become pregnant with her first child at 16. She was taken out of the U.S. to her husband’s home country for six months.

“I was basically handed to this stranger,” Tasneem said. “All of my reproductive rights were taken from me that night, all of my bodily autonomy was taken from me. My entire childhood was taken from me.”

Tasneem, who is now 43 and lives in El Sobrante, was trapped in her marriage until she was 23, when she was finally able to initiate divorce proceedings after eight years and two children. She had to leave her children with their father while she figured out her next steps but was eventually able to get them back.

In California law, there is no age limit to marry. A minor must get the permission of at least one parent or guardian and approval from a judge to obtain a marriage license or domestic partnership.

Now, Tasneem and other survivors of child marriage are drawing attention to a bill in Sacramento that could ban all child marriages in California by setting the minimum marriage age to 18 — a bill that stalled in a committee controlled by a South Bay legislator.

Tasneem is not alone in her experience. California is one of only four U.S. states that does not set a minimum age for marriage, allowing individuals of any age to marry with the permission of a parent and a judge.

AB 2924, which would strike existing legal language that allows provisions for marriage under 18, was introduced by Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Orange County, in February.

The bill received opposition from Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Northern California, ACLU California Action and the National Center for Youth Law, which argued that it would drive abusive relationships underground and limit the rights of those under the age of 18 who willingly want to marry.

In April, the bill’s hearing in the judiciary committee was canceled at Petrie-Norris’ request, according to the bill’s legislative history.

However, anti-child-marriage activists blame Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the chair of the judiciary committee, for the bill’s withdrawal, stating that he supported amendments that would gut the bill.

These amendments included banning marriage under the age of 16 but allowing the court petition process for 16- and 17-year-olds and emancipated minors, Petrie-Norris said.

Though she said she believed this would be a “meaningful step” that would have made California’s marriage laws stronger than 37 other states, Petrie-Norris said that she ultimately decided to pause the bill because the survivors she was working with believe there should be no exceptions.

“I have tremendous respect for the lived experience of the survivors and advocates who I was working with on this bill,” Petrie-Norris said. “After considering our options for this legislative session, I decided to pause the bill rather than move forward with a compromise proposal that they do not support.”

Kalra declined an interview request from the Bay Area News Group. ______________________

Was looking for a non paywalled version of this, when I ran across this one

California, a solidly Democratic state, was on track to be the first to pass an absolute ban on marriages for children under 18. But the legislative proposal was met with opposition from liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Children's Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. The pushback comes out of concerns that imposing an age requirement could set the stage for a slippery slope when it comes to constitutional rights or reproductive choices, specifically that an age requirement could impede a minor's ability to seek an abortion.

Now they worry about slippery slope.

Main article keeps going under the cut, archive link here

No exceptions

A California law passed in 2018 added stricter restrictions for minors to obtain a marriage license or domestic partnership, including separate interviews of the spouses and parents by a judge and family court services to determine if coercion, child abuse or trafficking are a factor, according to its text. The law also implemented a requirement that counties track and report the number of marriages involving minors.

Petrie-Norris’s bill would remove the ability of minors to marry at all, setting the minimum age to 18 with no exceptions. The bill had 20 co-authors across both parties and houses. Petrie-Norris began work on the issue in 2021, she said.

“This was a wildly popular bill,” said Fraidy Reiss, the co-founder of Unchained at Last, which provides direct legal, social and financial services to survivors and those escaping forced marriages and advocates to end child marriage in all 50 states. The organization worked with Petrie-Norris on the bill for more than a year to build a coalition of support, Reiss added.

The U.S. signed onto a United Nations pledge to end child marriage by 2030, but only thirteen states have made marriage under the age of 18 illegal since 2018. According to a 2021 study by Unchained at Last, 300,000 minors were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.

California’s child marriages

In 2021, more than 8,000 minors in California between 15 and 17 years old reported becoming married during the previous year, according to Unchained at Last’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. In 2022, the number increased to more than 9,000, according to Unchained at Last. About 86% of these marriages involved underage girls marrying adult men, according to Unchained at Last’s 2021 study.

California state data collected since 2019 has reported fewer than 15 children marrying each year, according to Unchained at Last. Currently, only marriage certificates that are returned to counties with a court order are required to be counted.

The discrepancy in data is interpreted differently by Unchained at Last and the organizations opposing the bill.

The data collection mandated by the 2018 law regarding child marriage is unfunded, and many counties are not complying, Reiss said, leading to inaccurate data. Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and National Center for Youth Law said in a letter of opposition that they believe that the numbers indicate that minors are marrying in spiritual or extralegal ceremonies instead of through the legal process.

Since Unchained at Last was founded in 2011, “more and more” girls under the age of 18 have been seeking assistance, Reiss said.

“We realized there’s almost nothing we can do for someone who is not yet 18,” Reiss said. “The only thing we can do for them is change the law.”

Girls who get married as children often have worse economic and health outcomes. Child brides are more likely to experience domestic violence and less likely to stay in school, according to UNICEF. Pregnant teenage girls are more likely to have complications during pregnancy and childbirth. There are also negative mental health impacts due to isolation from family and friends.

“Child marriage destroys almost every aspect of a girl’s life,” Reiss said, calling it a “nightmarish legal trap.”

The stalemate at the statehouse

ACLU California Action, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the National Center for Youth Law wrote a joint letter to Petrie-Norris opposing AB 2924, arguing that a ban on marriage under 18 would drive abusive relationships underground, and limit the rights of minors willingly entering marriages, according to the text.

The three organizations each sent the letter in response to interview requests from the Bay Area News Group.

“We support what we believe are the intentions of the bill, to address the harms of coerced and abusive relationships on young people and protect them from abuse,” the letter reads. “However, we also strongly believe in and support self-determination and bodily autonomy for all people, including young people who are pregnant and/or parenting.”

Petrie-Norris pointed out that the International Planned Parenthood Federation supports legislation setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage.

“Forced child marriage is a practice that strips children of their autonomy, sexual and reproductive freedom, forces them into adulthood prematurely and shields rapists from criminal charges — so I find opponents’ arguments a bit ironic and misplaced — particularly when they have supported the same legislation in other states,” Petrie-Norris said.

The letter cites protections put into place by the 2018 law, including that marriages of minors are screened by a judge and Family Court Services counselor. It also points to California law that considers relationships with a “very young teen” or a “significant” age gap to be child abuse, adding that this should “prevent any such marriage from passing the existing legal test.”

Unchained at Last critiqued the safeguards provided by California law, saying in its “Reality Check” document on child marriage in California that “when an individual is forced to marry, their own parent almost always plays a crucial role in facilitating it.”

Reiss said that allowing abusive parents to marry off their children or allowing children in abusive relationships to marry their abusers provides no benefit to the child.

Tasneem added that a child marrying an adult “in and of itself is abusive because one person is holding power over another.”

The organizations also argue that removing the ability to marry under the age of 18 would have consequences for minors who “willingly enter a marriage,” according to the letter, especially young parents.

“Denying these young people the right to marry — without compelling evidence that it will solve an existing problem — further stigmatizes their circumstances and does not allow them to make health decisions for themselves and their families,” the letter reads.

The opposition letter adds that, because the nationwide right to get an abortion was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson, it is important to invest “in approaches that expand, not remove, access to care and resources for young people.”

Both Tasneem and Reiss, who spoke about how their own reproductive and bodily rights were taken from them when they were forced into marriage, said that this argument is unfounded and that marriage should be treated as a separate issue from reproductive rights.

Reiss added that 96% of minors who enter into marriage are 16 or 17 years old.

“I’d rather you pass nothing than make it 16 or 17, and then wash your hands and say, ‘Wow, we solved that problem,’ ” Reiss said. “Why would you even bother passing a bill that’s going to help approximately 4% of the people it’s supposed to help?”

The path forward

Tasneem testified about her experience with child marriage in Sacramento in support of AB 2924 and met with Kalra about the bill.

She recalled Kalra being “upset” by her experience with child marriage but said that he told her that she needs to come to the table with Planned Parenthood because they should be on the same side.

“To me, it’s Planned Parenthood that’s standing in the way,” Tasneem said. “I just don’t understand — we really should be on the same side in this situation.”

Tasneem is one of several advocates who has met with Planned Parenthood multiple times about this bill, she said.

“They have kind of seemed to dig their heels in a little bit and made this a little bit more of a political issue versus looking at this as an actual issue that affects children,” Tasneem said.

Petrie-Norris said that the bill will not move forward this year due to the legislative calendar and committee deadlines, but she is “confident that the issue is not going away.”

“I like to believe that there is always an opportunity for compromise,” she said.

Tasneem and other survivors plan to continue to push for change at the statehouse — through legislation and protest. On July 18, Unchained at Last hosted a “chain-in” protest outside Kalra’s San Jose office, dressed in wedding gowns with chains around their wrists, calling attention to the bill and its stall.

“I want to protect the people with the smallest voice in this process, and that’s the minor,” Tasneem said. “Nobody looks out for them — not their parents, not the law, not lawyers, not politicians. Nobody..”

[thislovintime]

Photo by Matthew Asner:

“First day of school in 9th grade. I am nervous as hell because it is my first day of high school and it’s all new. I walk into my Social Studies Class and am greeted by the teacher who just happens to be Peter Tork of The Monkees. A guy I watched goofing around on TV religiously as a child was teaching me about the world. He was a tough teacher. We had a thing in his class where he would always think that I wasn’t paying attention. He would always make a point of stopping what he was teaching and say to me, ‘What did I just say`’ I would always answer him correctly and it always seemed to frustrate him. He was very smart and loved to read from Mao’s Little Red Book. I was truly happy for him when The Monkees started touring and he found success again. I took this picture in our schoolyard at New Dimensions High School.” - Matthew Asner (Ed Asner’s son), Facebook, July 1, 2023

“Since September he has been teaching English, math, drama, Eastern philosophy and ‘Rock Band Class’ at Pacific Hills, a private secondary school in Santa Monica, Calif. A college dropout, Peter got the job on the strength of his interview with Dr. Penrod Moss, the school’s director. ‘I like to hire people who are independent and creative,’ Moss said. ‘I was impressed by his personality and his ability to speak.’ […] While Tork the musician still has dreams of one day returning to the rock circuit, Thorkelson the teacher is happily planning his next course, ‘Mao, Marx and Mama.’ ‘I’m doing something important,’ he says. ‘I never do anything less than important.’” - People magazine, April 5, 1976

“For some time, [Tork] said, the students in his high school classes had trouble forgetting their teacher was once a teen idol. ‘Until I gave out a few F’s,’ he added, grinning.” - The Clarion Ledger, November 1, 1979 (x)

“I was a schoolteacher in Southern California, and I taught music as well as academics, and I really very much love to teach, and, and I think that if circumstances show me that I am not to entertain anymore or my entertaining career per se winds down, I would very, very much love to coach young entertainers.” - Peter Tork, Headquarters radio, September 1989

“[A]s a teacher, I realized that in order to teach something well you need to understand what your student is going through as they try to learn.” - Peter Tork, The Journal Times Online, August 12, 2005

On a 2018 blog post at the Monkees Live Almanac, one former student, Mark, commented: “Best high school teacher I ever had […]. Tremendous empathy.” (x)

“I taught English and social studies. And sure, the kids probably saw me as a Monkee, but they got over that in a hurry. Once I lost my temper at the kids, they’d see I was just like all the others — and I probably lost my temper too many times, since I was in an angry state back then. I have a life now, that’s the difference. I have a spiritual core. I’m not Shirley MacLaine but I believe in greater or lesser worlds and consciousness. Most people think of themselves as cut off from each other; others know there’s a connectedness that can be tapped into.” - Peter Tork, The Boston Globe, August 10, 1989

“In the mid-’70s, Tork got jobs teaching English, social studies and music at two private schools in the Los Angeles area. The first job, which he enjoyed, was at ‘a radical progressive school in Santa Monica.’ The second was at a school he describes as ‘a holding tank for budding fascists. I couldn’t hack it. I found more integrity in being a singing waiter’ — his next job.” - Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1992 (x)

More about that next job here.

[orionchildofhades]

steddie swapping soulmate au part 2

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | Ao3

---

for a year, and more, Eddie doesn't swaps.

he wakes every single day, perhaps not morning given his late nights spent working on campaigns and his guitar, but he wakes every day in his own bed. in his own body.

his entire freshman year is spent seeing people meet and learn about their soulmate while waiting for his own to show up.

in private, Eddie isn't worried. he expected to swap soon after his birthday, to finally see this other person meant to be his, but he figured soon enough that his soulmate must be younger. he can wait. it's alright. at the end of the road he'll have someone by his side and who cares how long it takes. not him. the sooner the better but... he can wait. Eddie learned to be patient for things that really matter.

but I'm school, it's harder. he doesn't really have a name of his own, he's just the weird kid who lives in a trailer park, with hair longer than a boy's should be and who still haven't met his soulmate.

and teenagers are stupid. teenagers like to play grown-ups and what they think it means so they attack, they judge and they laugh and when Eddie still doesn't show any sign of having a soulmate, whispers start.

Eddie the unloved.

it's a silly nickname first in his grade, no one really cares about a lone kid like him. but then he joins hellfire and the rumour mill start its work. it's only 80 but the fear of the satanic rise is already there, settled over the mind of small, religious town. a club named hellfire about people trying to become other, talking about monsters and whatnot, with strange people joining, who dress weird, who don't have soulmates.

but still, eddie waits, and he's sure he'll find his soulmate soon. he works. on dnd, on his sweetheart, on all the things he'll be able to do in the future, in a big town full of people. with his soulmate. he can't wait to swap and see the world, to discover his soulmates universe. he imagine himself in Germany like Wayne, or in Japan like Sandy. he sees New York or Los Angeles. he even sees another small town, maybe not so far away so be could meet them. a wishful thought.

Eddie waits and waits until he blows another set of candles and jump forward to another year of highschool.

and finally

finally

he swaps.

[butterflyhiptattoo]

Emerging From the Magazines: Bob Mizer's Athletic Models Guild

When twenty-four-year-old Bob Mizer began marketing photographs of men in posing straps in 1946, he was already on a crusade.

He was tired of police harassment in Pershing Square – a well-known meeting spot for gay men in downtown Los Angeles where he socialized with friends nearly every day during high school. They gossiped about their fellow Pershing Square regulars – the effeminate belles, the butch trade, and some in between. But in 1940 he wrote in his diary of a crackdown: "vice clean up is tightening Lillie is really serious about cleaning up the city," using a slang term common in gay circles for the police.

He also made weekly visits to the nearby Los Angeles Central Library and was tired of reading psychology books on the danger posed by "sexual variants" such as himself and his friends. "Anything you could read anywhere showed how pernicious a thing this was... [how] you would deteriorate into a mass of trembling flesh if you did these things," he later complained.

He was also tired of arguing with his Mormon mother, who vociferously objected to his transgender friend Rodney-later known as Daisy -who was bullied at school for wearing pink girls' slacks and having plucked eyebrows. Delia Mizer called Rodney a "pansy" and labeled his sexual proclivities "against all the laws of nature." Her son responded angrily, using a very different vocabulary, one that drew on notions of legal equality and civil rights: "Most people are just obeying their impulses," he retorted. "Should they be denied the right to fulfill their instincts?"

As a young man, Mizer had already identified the many ways society looked down on "temperamental people" like him and his circle of Pershing Square friends. More important, he was also clearly determined to do something about it to confront the legal, medical, and religious prejudices that so viscerally affected his life.

One Sunday night in March 1940 he was on the telephone listening to Rodney describe his sexual exploits from the night before. Someone else on his party line was also listening in a common occurrence at a time when only the rich had private telephone lines. Using vulgar lan-guage, the eavesdropper expressed his contempt for such people. Mizer had had enough. He channeled his anger into his diary that night: "My aim in life will be to create tolerance among mankind and especially to vindicate the decent, spiritual Urning," using a nineteenth-century term for men attracted to other men. He was beginning to articulate the sense of defiance that had been building up inside him. Soon his rudimentary efforts to create tolerance made it into print. "This week I made my column risqué," he noted of his writing in the Polytechnic High School newspaper. "All of my gay friends are included." Even as an eighteen-year-old high school student, Mizer demonstrated a willingness to defy convention and assert his desires. He had also developed the ability to publicly affirm his gay friends if in a coded way that perhaps only they would understand.

Mizer's ambition was to be an author. He was not just a columnist but an editor of his high school's award-winning newspaper – considered one of the top ten in the country by the Columbia University School of Journalism. He had begun creative writing in grammar school and published several short stories. He was also a voracious reader, checking out popular psychology and sexology books like Out-witting Our Nerves and Sexual Power on his weekly runs to the Los Angeles Public Library. He so identified with Boris Barisol's biography of writer Oscar Wilde, subtitled The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, that he labeled his own 1940 diary "Bob Mizer: The Man, the Thinker, the ?" One of his teachers suggested that his skills at writing, shorthand, and typing would easily land him a steady job as a court reporter. But Mizer wanted to write his own book. He would call it "How You Can Help the Homosexualists" and would target younger gay men whose worldview had not yet formed.

Although he never published such a book, writing would occupy much of his life, as he penned hundreds of feisty editorials denouncing censorship, puritanism, and prejudice for his magazine Physique Pictorial, which he published for over twenty years. Not unlike the book he hoped to write, Physique Pictorial offered help and comfort to tens of thousands of gay men in Cold War America. As the editor of the first large-circulation American magazine targeting gay men, Mizer found a way to help the community he had found at Pershing Square. In the pages of his path-breaking magazine, Mizer honed the skills he first tried out in his high school newspaper-thumbing his nose at the authorities while speaking up for his friends.

In postwar America, a commercial network of gay physique photographers and magazine publishers emerged from the contests and magazines surrounding the physical culture movement. Bob Mizer was neither the first nor the only gay man to capitalize on his community's interest in physique photography. But he became the center of a network that served to connect, inspire, and politicize that subculture. He drew on an older tradition of gay photographers marketing their products through an underground market or in the back pages of mainstream fitness magazines. But with the founding of Physique Pictorial in 1951, he opened this tradition to public scrutiny and a new level of visual and discursive engagement. He was joined by Irv Johnson, the owner of a gym in Chicago, who began publishing Tomorrow's Man in 1952, and by Randolph Benson and John Bullock, a gay couple who met at the University of Virginia, who began publishing Grecian Guild Pictorial in 1955. Together they created a new genre of small magazines that would help serve and unite gay men throughout the country. 

The social world Mizer constructed with his gay high school friends at Pershing Square was central to his budding role as a pioneering gay entrepreneur. "The number of faggots cruising around here is legion," remembered the writer Hart Crane. But the number of available sexual partners was only part of the appeal. "Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen," he observed, suggesting how the space also offered an education in gay cultural codes. It was through connections made there that Mizer not only discovered a sense of community and a sense of oppression but also learned about a central feature of gay male culture: photography of the nude male.

While still in high school, Mizer went to a party at his friend Sydney Phillip's place, where three gay friends posed in the nude for "artistic studies" that the host photographed. "It was terribly cute to see them rush to hide in the bathroom whenever a knock was heard at the door," Mizer noted of the models' skittishness. Featured in one of the first entries in his 1940 diary, the night clearly made an impression. A few months later Mizer himself posed for another gay photographer and became "enthused about barbell exercising."3

Weightlifting led Mizer to another formative influence: Strength & Health, the preeminent physical culture magazine published by Bob Hoffman in York, Pennsylvania. Mizer began reading the magazine in high school when he started lifting weights – he purchased his barbells through its back pages. He enjoyed the bodybuilding photos and articles but was particularly intrigued by the monthly "S & H Leaguers' Page," a pen-pal service for those who wanted to exchange letters and photographs. Members often described their hobbies and interests, which included not only bodybuilding and physique photographs but often music, ballet, and theater. In April 1945 Mizer placed the following notice, hoping to connect with other leaguers; he included his home address, which would become the legendary home of his physique studio: "Bob Mizer, 1834 West 11th St., Los Angeles, Cal. is interested in photography and creative writing, and promises an immediate answer and exchange of photos to all who write. He uses a York barbell and other training appliances and hopes that we will allot more space to the league notes, as he enjoys reading this department and writing to other leaguers. "

The response was overwhelming – Mizer received over three hundred letters from fellow S & H Leaguers, some of whom remained life-long friends. Other leaguers reported similar responses from their no- tices. One received such a flood of mail-but to the wrong address – that the Post Office requested he issue a correction immediately. Mizer later praised this service for allowing "lonely bodybuilders and others" not only to correspond but also to form "long-lasting and fruitful" friendships. His positive experience with the S & H Leaguers' Page offered a pivotal lesson, demonstrating to Mizer the desire of men who enjoyed physique photography to connect with each other.

After high school graduation he worked as an office clerk and typist for the Texas & Fort Worth Railroad, but in his spare time he also began to help out at various Los Angeles photography studios, learning how to pose models, position lighting, and develop film. In the summer of 1945, during the final days of World War II, Mizer was full of excitement as he made plans over the establishment of what he was already calling "my business." He was honing his craft by apprenticing at Fred- erick Kovert's Hollywood studio. "I am helping him in my spare time in order to decide whether or not to come into the studio to work." Kovert was a former silent movie actor who had become one of the more daring and well-known photographers of nude men. Mizer was one of numerous young men working for Kovert, doing much of the photography that bore his name. Mizer often brought models there, used his darkroom, and even posed himself. He could do none of this at home, since his mother, who ran a rooming house, did not approve of his interest in photographing nearly naked men. Still, he found Kovert to be controlling and difficult to work with.

Soon he bought his own camera and started to frequent Muscle Beach and bodybuilding competitions to find models. Muscle Beach in Santa Monica-not far from the home he shared with his mother near downtown Los Angeles was the center of the postwar interest in bodybuilding and beefcake. It was the perfect place to meet bodybuilders who were anxious to be photographed. "I modeled for Bob Mizer in 1947, '48," Ben Sorensen remembered. "Bob came down to Muscle Beach and just talked to people, you know? He invites us up. Of course everybody's interested, when they're bodybuilding, in getting some free pictures." It was Bob McCune, another bodybuilding champion Mizer photographed, who convinced Mizer to submit his photos to Strength & Health. Editor John Grimek, himself a well-known bodybuilding champion, encouraged Mizer to submit more work. "Yours are as good as others," Grimek told the budding photographer when they met at one of the bodybuilding competitions in Los Angeles. 

Mizer called his business the Athletic Model Guild (AMG) and offered his first advertisements in Strength & Health in 1946, where they competed for attention with similar advertisements from other gay photographers, such as Alfonso Hanagan, known as "Lon of New York." Hanagan had first become interested in physique photography when he became enthralled with images of bodybuilder Tony Sansone, who marketed his own photographs. After moving to New York in 1936 to pursue a career in music, he met Sansone and began to socialize with and photograph him and his friends. By the 1940s his physique photographs were being featured on the cover of Strength & Health and bodybuilders began seeking him out, hoping to appear on magazine cover. As payment, the magazine gave him free ad space in the back of the magazine. It was this mutually profitable world of photographers, bodybuilders, and magazine publishers that Mizer would enter, then help to transform.

When Mizer began marketing physique photography to a gay audience, he joined a field with deep roots in gay culture. The taking, sharing, and selling of such images had been central to gay culture for well over a half century by the time Mizer discovered it. Wilhelm von Gloeden began selling photographs of nude young men he posed in classical staging in Taormina, Sicily, in the 1890s. He developed a large following in cosmopolitan circles, especially among cultivated gay men. Some of his more restrained images appeared in European journals that were popular within the Aesthetic movement, while his nudes circulated through an underground market. Oscar Wilde and other gay notables made pilgrimages to his studio.

In addition to such high art, images of nearly nude men circulated in the context of the physical culture movement, starting with images of Eugene Sandow in the 1890s. By the 1920s nude photos were widely marketed in the back of both art and physical culture magazines. Physical culturist John Hernic offered nude photos in the back of Art Magazine in the 1920s and Strength & Health in the 1930s. "These photos will be a source of inspiration to you in your training for a well developed body," Hernic's ad promised, providing a small image of a muscled and oiled young man with a prominent posing strap a pouch hanging off a string that covered only the genitals, the most revealing item of clothing a model could wear.

Collector Robert Mainardi identifies Hernic as a "mail-order pioneer," but his Apollo Art Studios was soon joined by others. To earn a living during the Depression, brothers Fred and William Ritter photographed themselves and their fellow physical culturists who trained at a New York City YMCA. They developed their own photos and sold high-quality images for $1 apiece. Film historian Thomas Waugh labels them "the first gay generation of physique photographers. "10

Nude figure studies were only one of the many items available for sale in the back pages of these magazines. There were advertisements for barbells, food supplements, clothing, figure studies, and more. Indeed, most magazines were simply vehicles to sell products. Bob Hoffman founded the York Barbell Company a year before he founded his magazine Strength & Health and admitted the periodical was really a means to sell equipment. Both Hoffman and his main competitor Joe Weider distributed their fitness magazines at a loss, seeing them as a way to sell more barbells. Some of the first famous bodybuilders were similarly engaged in marketing products. Eugene Sandow – considered the world's most perfect man – performed on the vaudeville circuit, published books on physical culture techniques, and marketed postcards of his own image. As much a brand name as a bodybuilder, Sandow opened a chain of vegetarian restaurants, sanatoriums, and hotels that by the 1920s made him a millionaire. Bodybuilding promoter Bernarr Macfadden also constructed a commercial empire around the sport that included health retreats, restaurants, beauty contests, book sales, lectures, and mail-order fitness courses. Right from the start, bodybuilding was a lucrative business, the centerpiece of a network of consumer items.

A legend has developed that Mizer's first business plan was to serve as a referral service between models and the studios that required their services. According to this legend, the talent agency model failed, but Mizer díscovered, as if by accident, that the photographs were more lucrative than the modeling connections. This unsubstantiated story implies that his idea of marketing photos to gay men was sui generis. It cuts Mizer off from the long tradition of gay men taking, exchanging, and purchasing such photographs, beginning in the late nineteenth century. One of the sources of the legend was Wayne Stanley, a Mizer protégé who inherited Mizer's business and who self-servingly asserted that AMG was "the first photographic studio of the young male physique, ignoring Von Gloeden, Hernic, the Ritter Brothers, Lon of New York, Kovert, and many others. Mizer's diaries suggest that photography was key from the beginning and that he considered himself to be part of a field of physique photographers from at least 1946. While a pioneer in many ways, Mizer did not create the genre. 

Although the selling of physique-type photographs was not new, in the post-World War II era such imagery was becoming a much more visible component of American culture. Men had only recently started appearing shirtless in public. While European men had begun going topless on beaches soon after World War I, one-piece men's bathing suits emerged in the United States only in the 1930s. Some called them "Depression suits," suggesting that the shirt disappeared owing to lack of funds. As more and more proud male bathers defied convention by exposing their chests, the media began to talk of a "no shirt movement." Some beach communities such as Atlantic City, New Jersey, pushed back and banned topless male bathing. Responding to the changing beach regulations, clothing manufacturers offered detachable tops for their swimsuits. Representing the shifting cultural sands, their advertisements often featured one shirtless male and another with trunks and a tank top. According to David Chapman, by 1937 the controversy was settled, as most of the nation's beaches allowed men to appear shirtless.

World War II brought images of shirtless sailors and soldiers into American homes and theaters. In covering the war, New York magazines and Hollywood films soon reflected the trend toward displays of the male chest. A cover of Look magazine in 1942 featured a shirtless image of Muscle Beach denizen John Kornoff, the U.S. Army's first physical trainer. Cannon Towel advertisements in Life featured soldiers bathing in the South Pacific wearing nothing but one of its products. Within a year of the war's end, as Mizer started marketing his photo albums, Sidney Skolsky, sitting across town in Swab's drugstore writing his nationally syndicated gossip column, coined "beefcake" to refer to Hollywood's liberal use of Guy Madison's physique. Madison had been discovered by gay Hollywood agent Henry Willson, who also named and popularized gay actors Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson. Skolsky dubbed the bevy of male actors posing in bathing suits a "beefcake brigade," and this new term for displays of young, pulchritudinous male flesh took hold. Willson was a frequent client of physique photographer Lon of New York but was now bringing that same look to Hollywood. So the popularization of "beefcake" imagery and terminology, from their very origins, had a gay inflection.

But if male torsos could increasingly be seen on American beaches and in popular periodicals after World War II, they were still considered taboo in town. Men would continue to be subject to arrest for appearing shirtless on many city streets and in parks into the early 1960s. They were particularly vulnerable to such arrest if they did so in a known gay cruising area, reflecting the tensions in American culture over male nudity and its homoerotic implications. A seventeen year-old Harvey Milk remembered being charged with indecent exposure in the summer of 1947 for baring his chest in a secluded gay cruising area of Central Park, even as men with families did exactly the same on the more public grassy lawns. Being grouped among "the men without their shirts" was one of Milk's first visceral experiences of antigay oppression. 

As interest in the male physique increased during the postwar period, Mizer's Physique Pictorial would catch the beginnings of a cultural wave. Yet he would also feel the wrath of law enforcement that tried to shut his business down, even before it was formally on its feet. He and his magazine would be caught up in legal disputes over the sexual meaning of such displays of male flesh. For the next two decades, Mizer would place himself at the center of this battle.

POSTAL INSPECTOR VISIT

On July 23, 1945, Mizer had his first of many encounters with federal law enforcement authorities. After leaving work as usual at the Texas & Fort Worth Railroad and bicycling by the library on Pershing Square to exchange some books, Mizer arrived home to find postal inspectors waiting for him. They searched his room, found "dirty pictures," and took him to their offices for questioning. Mizer somehow escaped arrest, but a few months later Kovert's studio was also raided, resulting in headlines in the Los Angeles Examiner. Intimately involved in the resulting legal drama, Mizer attended court with Kovert, who pleaded guilty to possession of obscene materials, and drafted a letter for Kovert's customers seeking their support. Not even the intimidating tactics of the Post Office and the court system seem to have deterred the twenty-three-year-old Mizer. "Spent evening on [Athletic Model] Guild calls and letters," he wrote in his diary, just two days after being what he described as "probed" by postal inspectors. Rather than serve as a deterrent, Mizer's encounter with federal postal authorities seemed to increase his resolve and suggests how his struggle with the forces of censorship formed a central component of his business. Mizer would face arrest again in 1947 and 1954 in connection with his business, each encounter with the authorities sharpening his sense of outrage.

Mizer began his business in 1946 by producing and distributing mimeographed "albums" to sell his beefcake photographs, copying the standard operating procedure followed by Kovert of Hollywood, Lon of New York, and many other such photographers.17 He would send customers who responded to his advertisements in Strength & Health a one-page sample of photo albums, from which they could select the models and images they wanted to purchase. However, Mizer's early albums went beyond providing the necessary marketing information. Mizer peppered his albums with news and commentary on the physique world-biographies of models, bodybuilding contest results, and warnings about Post Office crackdowns. As with his earlier writings in high school and his later editorials in Physique Pictorial, Mizer constructed a narrative that drew customers and models into the same enlightened circle of upstanding physique enthusiasts and supporters of free speech, while casting public censors and moralists into the darkness.

Starting with Forrester Millard in 1946 -- the first featured model in his premier "Album A" – Mizer constructed a fantasy narrative about his models that encouraged a sense of identification between them and his target audience of middle-class gay men. At the same time, he cleaned up the description of his interactions to avoid any hint of illegality. Although Mizer would print on almost every mailing and magazine he produced that he neither took nor sold nude photographs, he took nudes of Millard and of most every subsequent model. A native of New Mexico, Millard was only sixteen at the time Mizer photographed him, though Mizer fudged his date of birth to make him seventeen.

Publicly, Mizer lauded Millard as the ideal model who had control of every muscle due to hours posing before a circle of mirrors. Privately, Mizer complained that Millard was narcissistic to the point of being "completely entranced with his own physical beauty." Vanity had led Millard to quit school and be supported by his mother and a girlfriend. "In the album bulletins I try to be truthful – but naturally I must show jurisprudence in what truth I tell," Mizer wrote a correspondent at the time. "I would doom a model's popularity if I announced he was married with two kids.... Most of my models over 23 are married or are permanently shacking up with their common-law wives."

So the biography Mizer constructed for Millard centered on discipline, Horatio Alger upward mobility, and a hint of homosexual camaraderie. "Laughed at because he was skinny, Forrester rapidly developed a magnificently defined body which became the envy of his former tormentors," Mizer wrote. Mizer replaced mention of his real-life girlfriend with "training companion" John Miller, who had won top honors at a recent AAU contest. They posed for Mizer's first duos, a homoerotic format that set Mizer and other gay physique photographers apart from their mainstream colleagues. Dark-featured Millard and blonde Miller looked like the perfect gay couple. They hoped to open a gym together, Mizer told his clients suggestively. The image of Millard and Miller on a settee with overlapping arms, hands touching, appeared in Strength & Health and became a signature AMG photo. Millard was later called "almost the touchtone for AMG's fame".

To counter the perception of both gay men and bodybuilders as degenerates, Mizer's biographical notes gave his models middle-class respectability, highlighting not only their physical attributes but also their alleged intellectual and professional ambitions. Not only was model Johnny Murphy tops in the "muscle game," but his business courses at Woodbury College were preparing him to become a business executive. "In anything he does, he will not content himself with being just average, he must be the best," Mizer gushed.

From the feedback he received to his many customer questionnaires, Mizer had a keen sense of what his audience liked and the "psychological effect" of his photos. As he told a colleague, "A picture is rarely unpopular if the model looks directly into the lens (and hence seems to be looking at the person observing the picture) as naturally they feel identification with him." Not only in his lighting and posing but also in his editorial content, Mizer made sure that his largely middle-class audience could identify with the models he was offering them, assuring them that they were "from upper-level homes." While seeking to bond models and customers in a circle of mutual camaraderie and respectability – what he called "the few... who demand freedom of expression" – Mizer also used his albums to make a detailed and careful analysis of censorship efforts by people he derided as "philistines," "moralists," and "unaesthetic law enforcement officers. " Mizer had gotten nowhere in his attempts to reason with censorship authorities. He and his fellow Los Angeles area physique photographers petitioned the Post Office to allow the use of the mail for nude photography. Postal authorities responded that they were forced to forbid such mail by local civic organizations and church groups that feared such products would fall into the hands of children. Mizer offered a clever countersuggestion: photographers could send nude photographs care of the local postmaster in every city, where they could then be claimed by the recipient with proper proof of age. His proposal went unheeded.

Mizer had been in business less than a year when he was first arrested, but it was not for sending nudes through the mail. Mindful of postal inspectors, he had sold nudes only to walk-in customers at his studio near downtown Los Angeles-what amounted to just 10 percent of his business. But when one of those customers, thirty six-year-old Mexican-born Texan Pasquel Barron, became embroiled in a Post Office obscenity investigation, he admitted to obtaining nudes from Mizer, and the Post Office quickly forwarded the information to the local district attorney. Mizer was arrested in 1947 for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, James Maynor, one of his first models, a seventeen-year-old. The district attorney uncovered a network of teenage bodybuilders centered on Muscle Beach, many of whom had been brought to Mizer's studio by William Petty, a physical education instructor employed by the city of Santa Monica to organize athletic activities and performances. Petty and another photographer were also arrested.

Unable to afford an attorney, Mizer was convinced by a public defender to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge he admitted to photographing Maynor in the nude. But in his plea to avoid prison and receive probation, Mizer insisted that he operated a legitimate business. He stipulated that he had consulted with attorneys and obtained signed release statements from his models or their parents. To distinguish his from previous such enterprises that operated underground, Mizer granted the court access to his meticulous records concerning both customers and models. He freely admitted to being a homosexual and to "attend[ing] several meetings of other types of such individuals in Lafayette Park" a possible reference to gay social or fraternal organizations. Friends and neighbors testified to his good conduct and character – they described him as a photographer and artist who never smoked, drank, or got entangled in the law. The district attorney countered that Mizer's business was "pandering only to the tastes of lustful homosexuals." Several of his models, including John Miller, featured in AMG's early advertisements, confessed to engaging in oral sex with Mizer.

In denying his request, the probation officer emphasized that Mizer showed no remorse for his activities and was an admitted homosexual. He labeled his business of photographing teenage boys in the nude "a vicious and deliberate crime." Mizer was sentenced to six months at a work farm in Saugus, California. As with his interrogation by postal inspectors in 1945, the time he spent in Saugus seemed to steel his will. He felt abused by a legal system that was persecuting him for his lack of shame in being gay and operating a business that catered to his fellow homosexuals. He would later caution his readers to remain silent if arrested and never admit to any guilt, lest they find themselves "rail-roaded to prison" like he felt he was. As he wrote to his mother from Saugus, "I feel more strength now than ever before, but this strength, this driving energy, shall be carefully bridled and directed with wisdom.... ambition is everything." Mizer's tone and focus on the forces of censorship turned darker after his 1947 arrest. By 1950 he reported on a "witch hunt" at Muscle Beach, where one Sunday all the photographers were arrested and further photography forbidden. "Los Angeles and California is in a stage of sex hysteria," he warned, with the state legislature passing sex laws "which only stop short of outlawing the double bed." He chastised "those too stupid and prurient-minded" to understand and appreciate the need for nude art. "These same philistines are mischievously at work to undermine other basic rights of the individual," he wrote. He recommended that readers join the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the American Sunbathing and Health Association, a nudist organization. "The only successful way to fight these frustrated reactionaries is through national organization." Fighting the forces of censorship through collective action was clearly on Mizer's mind.

Mizer closely followed and reported on the legal struggles of other physique photographers, even though raising such issues threaten to scare away more timid customers. Whenever possible, he noted what he saw as rays of hope, such as a "progressive Federal Judge" in Chicago who ruled in 1947 that photographs of nude males by Al Urban were not obscene. He noted that most magazines and photographers "in the field" had almost always beaten their prosecutions, but "only at damaging expense." These small victories failed to establish a clear national legal precedent, nor did they silence the local churches, parent teacher organizations, and other "moralist groups" behind censorship efforts. Mizer quickly identified the pattern of obscenity prosecution that would continue for the next twenty years: censors won at the local or lower-level courts but then lost on appeal. Physique photographers would have to work together to establish a large war chest to fight the censors and establish a national precedent.

PHYSIQUE PICTORIAL

So when Mizer began publishing Physique Pictorial in 1951, he envisioned it as a collective effort – a catalog of merchandise from a variety of gay photographers and other vendors facing exclusion from mainstream fitness magazines. The first few issues were "advertising booklets," offered to subscribers for free – a "gift" underwritten by participating businesses. Like the mainstream fitness magazines, Mizer figured that photograph sales would more than pay for the magazine, as barbell sales financed mainstream fitness magazines. He wanted to bring gay physique photographers into closer alliance and thereby more effectively fight the forces of censorship. First called Physique Photo News, it would take advertisements from the back of Strength & Health and give them a new, safer, and more prominent home of their own.

Under pressure from postal authorities, mainstream fitness magazines were beginning to refuse ads for undraped nudes. Warning that "queers" had "obtained a particularly vicious hold on our bodybuilding game," Iron Man instituted a policy refusing ads with models wearing anything less than swim trunks and threatened even stricter rules in the future. Strength & Health had faced censorship efforts over a cover image that had been taken in the nude and later retouched with a posing strap. The managing editor of Strength & Health warned Mizer that his advertisement photos were becoming "less athletic and more risqué" and threatened to bar him from the magazine. While Mizer pledged to cooperate, he saw the writing on the wall. "We are anxious to get our own magazine strong enough that in a few years time we can thumb our noses at the physique magazines," he wrote to a trusted adviser.

The first issue represented the combined effort of six physique photography studios, but most of the others soon opted out. "Bruce [Bellas] was so frightened that he decided not to be represented in the next issue," Mizer recalled. To avoid postal inspectors, Bellas preferred to travel from city to city selling his images in person to select clients. Russ Warner also demurred, having already been summoned to Washington for an arduous hearing before postal inspectors over his nude photos with inked-in pouches. "The only people who would want photos of men were gay people," the postal inspectors confided to him, and their threat to "get every one of them" left him skittish. Even Mizer feared repercussions since "it will look dangerously like an organization which might effectively resist the postal distaste for physique work." Postal authorities may not have viewed it as a threat, but such organizational power was clearly at the forefront of Mizer's thinking.

Mizer's efforts at consolidation drew inspiration from the most prominent scholar and writer on the subject of sex in America. Like other early activists for gay rights, Mizer had read Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and considered it pivotal for his understanding of homosexuality as a naturally and frequently occurring variation of human activity. "Dr. Kinsey's first book was the most important one in my whole life," Mizer wrote to a colleague, "and for it I owe him a debt I could probably never repay. "

As an avid collector of materials to document American sexual culture, Kinsey became a regular Mizer customer, and the two quickly established an active correspondence that lasted nearly until Kinsey's death in 1956. On his many visits to Los Angeles, Kinsey met with Mizer and conducted sexual histories of his fellow physique photographers and models. Mizer even forwarded his frequent customer questionnaires to Kinsey for tabulation, thereby offering him indirect access to his customer base. In return, Kinsey offered strategic advice about how best to combat postal authorities.

Because of his own struggles with postal and customs authorities over shipments of erotic materials to his institute at Indiana University, Kinsey had developed relationships with prestigious law firms specializing in the First Amendment. It was he who suggested that physique publishers could win at the appellate level if they could find a way to sustain and finance their legal cases. "I have suggested before that all of you photographers should band together and employ the very best attorney that you can in the L.A. area to advise you and to handle individual cases," Kinsey wrote to Mizer in 1951, just as Mizer was establishing Physique Pictorial. Kinsey suggested that photographers of female nudes had tried to do this but never succeeded at forming a united group. While Mizer never formally organized his fellow physique photographers, he and his magazine served as a de facto central bureau of information, connecting customers, photographers, and publishers.

Tapping into an underserved gay market, Mizer's business flourished. As Mizer later remembered, "there was not such a thing at the time as a magazine that showed a variety of young, youthful models – not supermen – which is what most people wanted." Through his customer questionnaires, Mizer knew what his clients wanted: less information on weightlifting and exercise and more models. One twenty- two-year-old customer from Winchester, Massachusetts, remarked how Mizer's models were becoming "more youthful, slimmer and more suggestively posed" and encouraged him to be upfront about it – not to "hide all this under the general category of art photography," a common claim of photographers offering undraped nudes. As he wrote to Mizer, "It appears to me that by the constant polls you all seem to be taking so that you may satisfy your customers, you are catering more and more to the homosexual trade." Models, too, knew what Mizer was up to. "I think Bob was, um, interested more in the gay magazines than the bodybuilding ones," remembered model Ben Sorensen. "I'm straight, but that didn't bother me at all. Everybody at the gym knew what they were doing with the photos."

Within a year of establishing AMG, Mizer reported a gross monthly income of $700-annualized, this amounted to nearly three times the average family income of 1947. Mizer had hired his brother as a full-time employee and had nearly $2,000 in savings. His mailing list already contained customers from "practically every country in the world," according to the district attorney who prosecuted his case. "It grew like Topsy – a little bit each time," Mizer remembered.33 He soon began offering a "Nickle Plan," similar to a monthly book club, where customers would regularly receive photographs from each new AMG album. Wishing to respond to the particular desires of his customers, he allowed them to specify what types of models and photographs they preferred not to receive: "models over or under ages, races, slender or very heavy weights, poses with girls, models in clothing or part clothing such as Levis, models in trunks, portraits." Mizer was already engaging in specialization, acknowledging the particular sexual desires, fetishes, and prejudices of his customers.

Although Physique Pictorial could increasingly be found on select newsstands, Mizer's initial sense of it as a catalog of merchandise for subscribers endured. He recalled that although magazine wholesaler Lou Elson began to distribute it in New York after a year or two on the market, newsstand sales did not substantially increase total circulation. "Its circulation was horrible. It was very hard to get. Most newsstands didn't carry it," remembered Chuck Renslow, then a fellow physique photographer in Chicago. Mizer himself called his newsstand circulation "quiet select." Continually struggling to find a newsstand distribution network, he mostly sold Physique Pictorial by subscription. But he was proud of his independence – unwilling to bow and scrape to distributors or advertisers. In addition to working with a few wholesalers, Mizer sent copies himself to select newsstands. "Tell your dealer about this and give him our address," he suggested to readers, trying to get them actively involved in increasing circulation. When Physique Pictorial did manage to appear on newsstands, it sold out almost immediately.

In 1963 AMG tried to diversify and modernize by offering a large format, color magazine called Young Adonis to supplement the black-and-white Physique Pictorial. It was a sell-out wherever it was sold, but again Mizer had trouble getting it on newsstands. The distributor wrote Mizer a two-page letter describing the magazine's "sins." Although Mizer promised future issues would feature new offerings, including a fashion section handled by model Mark Nixon, it was the only issue Mizer offered.

FROM GUILD TO NETWORK

Mizer's choice of the term "guild" to refer to his business started a trend among physique photography studios. Don Whitman founded the Western Photography Guild in Colorado in 1947 and soon had advertisements next to AMG's in the back of Strength & Health. In Metairie, Louisiana, a group of physique photographers and artists launched the Southern Guild. And in Portsmouth, Virginia, George U. Lyon and Charles E. Smith started Underwood Photographic Guild. The word "guild" could refer to any association of people with a common goal but historically referred to a group of craftsmen or merchants who exerted some control over their trade. As an avid reader, Mizer was probably well aware that medieval guilds were famous for regulating entry into a profession and often exerted considerable power in city government. His choice of words suggests his aspirations to unite, protect, and empower those involved in the physique field. It was the same term Harry Hay would use as he began organizing the Mattachine Society as a gay political group across town a few years later.

In keeping with the spirit of a guild, Mizer cooperated with and promoted the work of other photographers. He would share or sell mailing lists to competitors and alert readers when new physique magazines were launched or studios opened. "Physique Pictorial is not a closed enterprise and any legitimate studio can be represented in it," he promised. By 1954 he regularly included a directory of photographers, artists, and models selling merchandise, a custom followed by many later physique magazines. He was happy to note when individual models offered their own photos directly to readers. When he had a disagreement with a physique artist, he let readers know that the artist's work could now be found in a competing magazine. 

As the number of physique studios catering to gay men proliferated, Mizer's magazine functioned like a Better Business Bureau. Mizer barred advertisements from studios who were known to be unreliable, gave bad service, or sold illegal material (although he included photos with "inked" pouches, indicating the original photograph was in the nude.) He threatened to publicly denounce photographers who were territorial and unwelcoming to new talent in their area, and he was quick to publicly reprimand photographers who did not reciprocate his courtesies. Mizer also warned readers of offers from the "get-rich- quick boys" promising special pictures available only to a few "intimate friends." Given the Post Office's vigilance, he knew that studios selling nudes would not last long. "Every mailing list is peppered with postal inspectors and their collaborators," he cautioned. After sending in an exorbitant fee, the customer might receive nothing. He encouraged readers to confess their stories of being victimized by such schemes.40 Envisioning a constantly widening network of producers and consumers, Mizer sought to place himself at its fulcrum. Soon he was offering a host of consumer items – artwork, slides, viewers, and "garments for athletes" including jeans, T-shirts, bathing suits, and the ubiquitous posing straps. Physique Pictorial functioned as a nexus for finding, producing, selling, and admiring male photos. Other studios described AMG as a one-stop shopping experience: "one of the largest photo guilds in the country and supplies about everything a photo collector or bodybuilder wants: movies, garments, thousands of all sizes of photos, color slides, and many other works of art." 

The network grew increasingly international as Mizer featured photographs by Arax of Paris and models wearing trunks from Vince of London. He soon had agents in Belgium, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Japan. By 1962 Mizer sponsored European tours for physique enthusiasts, "to photograph local athletes, and to visit famous clubs of special interest."

Mizer encouraged not only other physique photographers but a new and growing group of physique artists in his magazine. AMG became a generative center that showcased the work of talented young painters and sketch artists who then developed their own followings that often eclipsed Mizer's own popularity. In 1957 he introduced an unknown artist who "depicts the healthy robust youth of the forests of Finland," who would later reach international renown as "Tom of Finland." But it was an artist from Virginia, George Quaintance, who created what Mizer called a "vogue" that was widely imitated.

Quaintance had begun taking photographs and drawing sketches of male nudes under the tutelage of Lon of New York. He had worked drawing bodybuilding champions for the cover of Joe Weider's Your Physique, but it was when he started painting for Bob Mizer's new magazine that his career took off. Set either at a dude ranch in Arizona, where he lived, or at a bath in ancient Greece, Quaintance's paintings created the kind of playful environment of easy male camaraderie that Mizer sought to foster through his magazine. And like Mizer, Quaintance considered his homoerotic artwork to be "a crusade for the rights of the feelings" of his customers. "I too feel that I crusade in my attempt to supply, or satisfy, a deep emotional hunger in the inner lives of my customers," he explained to a homophile leader. Soon his mailing list of ten thousand active buyers around the world surpassed that of Mizer. He offered not only physique paintings but prints, photographs, and sculptures, expanding his business to a four-man operation. "It grew too fast.... I'm trying to adjust myself to all the confusion," he wrote at the time. Those who met him as he toured the country selling his artwork describe a flamboyant artist who loved wearing western gear, turquoise jewelry, and showing off his young Mexican American lover and frequent model, Eduardo.

What distinguished Quaintance's artwork was not just the invitation to view nearly naked men but the excitement of seeing them looking at each other, as Michael Bronski has argued. One of Quaintance's first cover images for Physique Pictorial demonstrates how groundbreaking those gazes were. "Morning in the Desert" featured four ranch hands around an outdoor bath dressing and preparing for work. One naked bather is standing, his genitals covered only by soapsuds. Another naked man lies below him in a tub of water, looking directly up at the other's body. But for the cover of the magazine, to pass postal censors, Quaintance shifted the man's head to the left, so his gaze no longer fell longingly on his fellow naked male bather. Like his better-known successor, Tom of Finland, Quaintance constructed a "network of looks" that included and invited those of the viewer, furthering the sense of homoerotic identification.

Mizer's growing network of photographers, artists, and other physique-related businesses used a language of friendship and camaraderie that further encouraged a sense of community. Seattle physique artist William MacLean set up a studio and invited new and emerging physique artists to market their work through him. This offer featured a photograph of the very handsome artist hanging images in his exhibit space, noting suggestively that he was "a very eligible bachelor" and therefore "his studio is a gathering place for the young social set and many a party is hosted there." London model Clive Jones sold his images directly and promised to handle orders personally. "Clive would like to hear from his many friends in America" and promised to send a catalog of images of himself and his "buddies" in London.

Mizer offered slides of physique models intended to be projected on a wall or screen for group viewing. One of MacLean's more reproduced drawings showed a group of men admiring AMG slides and imitating the poses of the models. When Mizer began making physique film shorts, he called for readers to submit script ideas, giving members yet another way to participate. He offered suggestions on where to buy a good, inexpensive projector and soon began renting the films at a quarter of the price of purchasing one. In words and images, he encouraged readers to share the experience of watching physique films. "Imagine what a hit these films would be at your next party or gathering of friends who are physical culture enthusiasts!" Indeed, much of the allure of participating in this network, whether as a producer or as a consumer, was the sense of community it offered.

Mizer's own rhetoric helped to solidify that sense of community. Boasting that his magazine lacked "mass appeal," he explicitly signaled his targeting of a minority population, what he called "the limited aesthetic group" who appreciated the male body. Mizer was borrowing a gay discourse developed in the late nineteenth century, a period he knew well from his reading of Boris Brasol's biography of Oscar Wilde. As art historian Christopher Reed argues, "The Wilde trials seemed to reveal homosexuality as the secret behind the enigmatic passions of the Aesthetes, tainting the entire movement, all of its products, and even the idea of aesthetic sensitivity." 

Indeed, the modern identities of "the homosexual" and "the artist" – both considered manifestations of innate predispositions – developed nearly simultaneously in the nineteenth century, as both creating art and committing sodomy moved from activities to ways of being. "Artistic" quickly became euphemistic slang for "queer." Painter Paul Cadmus remembered how the association had transferred to the American scene by the 1930s. "The word homosexual was never used," he remembered. "They just said, 'He's an artist." American psychiatrists, too, described men suspected of homosexuality as "aesthetic in temperament." Thus when Mizer adopted this language, praising Quaintance for his "neo-aestheticism" and imagining his audience as "the limited aesthetic group," he was signaling to and helping to construct a distinct gay identity among his readers.

"THE TV SHOW THAT MADE AMERICA GASP!"

Physique Pictorial's increasing circulation came with its own risks. Its presence on Los Angeles newsstands soon caught the attention of Paul Coates, a conservative columnist for the afternoon tabloid the Los Ange- les Mirror, known for exposing what he considered to be the seamier side of life in Southern California – prostitutes, repo men, drug addicts, and shoplifters. In 1954 Coates used his local television program Confidential File on KTTV to alert his audience to the "unpleasant fact" of homosexuality in Los Angeles. It was the first prime-time television program to broach the topic and helped propel Coates's show into national syndication. Coates featured footage of a Mattachine Society meeting with well-dressed men and women drinking coffee and eating cookies. He also gave his audience a glimpse inside a gay bar. But he ended the show by holding up a copy of Physique Pictorial as a shocking example on city newsstands of the publications catering to homosexuals. According to one tabloid, it was "the TV show that made America gasp!" Working closely with the local Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Coates couched his programming as a crusade to warn families of the dangers homosexuals posed to children. He followed up with three newspaper columns devoted exclusively to the presence of gay maga-zines on the city's newsstands. Although concerned about the homophile magazine ONE, which billed itself as "The Homosexual Magazine," he noted that its editors at least made an effort to avoid the lurid. Physique Pictorial, however, was "thinly veiled pornography" that appealed to sex criminals and sadists. Coates claimed that this "Esquire for men who wish they weren't" featured images of men in chains being beaten and stabbed – a sensational reading of Mizer's photographs with swords and chains as props. He highlighted the case of one of Mizer's teenage models from Muscle Beach-an active church member engaged to be married, he noted-who complained of unwanted homosexual solicitations after his photo appeared in Physique Pictorial. There were dozens of such dangerous photographers, Coates warned. "It's big business in our town."

Leveraging his connections to the powerful Chandler media family, Coates orchestrated an all-out assault on Mizer's business. After Coates's columns appeared, a phalanx of local government officials descended on Mizer's business. Police began to intimidate newsstands where his magazine appeared. City regulators inspected his home, and health officials tested his pet monkeys for diseases. The former model featured in Coates's column sued Mizer for invasion of privacy.

Most ominously, the story brought a plainclothes Los Angeles Police Department vice officer to his door asking to buy nudes. Mizer demurred, offering him only his usual catalogs of men in posing straps. Undeterred, Detective Philip Barnes asked who of the many other photographers featured in his magazine might offer nudes. Mizer again demurred, but Barnes had already visited the studio of Lyle Frisby, a young, up-and-coming Mizer protégé whose images Mizer often included in his magazine. More accommodating, Frisby sold him "inked" nude photos, where the posing straps could be easily rubbed off.

Coates proudly covered the sting operation in a subsequent column. To again sensationalize the threat posed to children, he noted ominously that Frisby's Los Angeles studio was located just 250 yards from an elementary school. Both Frisby and Mizer were promptly arrested for possessing and distributing lewd photographs – a violation of the Los Angeles municipal code allowing Coates's newspaper series to end on a note of civic triumph.

Frisby was easily convicted and spent time in prison. The prosecution of Mizer, however, was more complicated, since the focus of the charge was "aiding and abetting" the sale of lewd pictures. Detective Barnes testified that Mizer told him he could obtain nudes from any of his advertisers, but he failed to note this in his initial report. Mizer denied the claim, testifying that he told detective Barnes that nudes were illegal and unavailable in Los Angeles and that he personally advised all photographers not to deal in nudes. Either way, there was little evidence to link Mizer directly with Frisby's nude photos. Seeing the weakness of the "aiding and abetting" argument, the prosecutor argued that Mizer's own photos were obscene because they displayed both "scenes of brutality and torture" and "the uncovered rump." Mizer's lawyer, Herbert Selwyn from the ACLU, argued that Mizer's posing-strap images were no more lewd than those in classical statuary or in movies such as Garden of Eden, a film set in a nudist colony then screening in area theaters. He called it "the first uncovered rump case" in memory.

But as in almost all trials of physique photographers, the real issue was less the explicitness of the photos than the sexual orientation of their audience. Displaying his real concern, the judge told Selwyn, "These are nothing but pin-up pictures for homosexuals." To feed the judge's suspicions, the prosecutor displayed a copy of Confidential mag- azine at trial with the blaring headline "America on Guard! Homosexuals, Inc." Trying to further associate Mizer with the homosexual cause, he concluded his cross-examination by asking, "Do you also publish the magazine known as ONE?" The judge sustained Selwyn's objection but enjoyed a "hearty chuckle." He found Mizer guilty and sentenced him to ninety days in prison.

Mizer appealed his conviction, telling Kinsey he was willing to put a substantial dent in his bank account and solicit help from nudist and other groups. He convinced a British magazine to publicize the case. "It is odd that when I am one of the few physique photographers who does not deal in nudes that I should be picked out as the one who must fight for their legality," he complained to Kinsey, who thought he was singled out because of the size of his business. Mizer was the aggressive entrepreneur who took the physique business from the back pages of fitness magazines to the cover of his own magazine, openly challenging postal inspectors. Predictably, Mizer's conviction was overturned on appeal. "You have done very well to stand up for your legal rights," Kinsey congratulated him. But Mizer, concerned about the effect such news might have on the field of physique photography, did not gloat. "I am keeping news of our victory quiet because I think some of the photographers in our field need a bit of a deterrent to keep them in line."

Mizer and Barnes squared off again a year later, this time in a televised congressional hearing. Mizer and Frisby became fodder for Senator Estes Kefauver's traveling hearings on the alleged problem of juvenile delinquency in America, part of his bid to enhance his presidential aspirations. Kefauver got Benjamin Karpman, the chief psychotherapist at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., to testify that exposure to pornography at an early age could turn someone gay. Barnes described how he had confiscated pornographic materials from major national distributors Edward Mishkin and Irving Klaw. Some of the material was on display in posters lining the walls of the hearing room.

"Have you had any occasion to investigate cases wherein the use of male models might be used?" Kefauver asked, a delicate way to invoke homosexual erotica. Barnes outlined the case of Frisby and Mizer, pointing out that Mizer happened to be in the audience. Exaggerating the success of his efforts, he claimed he had confiscated $10,000 worth of materials from Frisby, that both men had been convicted of obscenity, and that Mizer's sentence had been overturned only because of a technicality. He highlighted the danger they posed to the public by noting the proximity of the school and the youth of the models.

Kefauver commended Barnes's efforts and noted what a difficult job he had, given how the courts and the legislatures continually failed to provide the tools he needed. Barnes impressed on the committee the need for a national agency to coordinate the efforts of local law enforcement to stamp out pornography. At the conclusion of the hearing, Senator Kefauver offered anyone who had been named the opportunity to correct inaccuracies. Detective Barnes looked squarely at Mizer, egging him on. Mizer contemplated speaking up but, aware of the presence of journalists and television cameras, decided instead to offer a written statement, his preferred form of communication.

In the pages of Physique Pictorial, Mizer denounced the hearings as "the grossest obscenity of public trust" he had ever witnessed. He accused Barnes of perjuring himself in his claims about Mizer's case. Within a year, however, Mizer enjoyed some schadenfreude when he revealed that Barnes was sent to prison for molesting his stepdaughter. He was also delighted to tell readers that Kefauver's chief counsel, James Bobo, was forced to resign after admitting to hosting private screenings of stag films for a Memphis fraternity. It all reinforced Mizer's conviction that the legal system was corrupt and that those who were most obsessed with fighting prurience were hypocrites.

Like many self-appointed guardians of American morality, Coates viewed both the Mattachine Society and the Athletic Model Guild as threats. But the reactions of the two organizations differed markedly. In 1953 Coates gave the Mattachine Society its first negative press coverage by suggesting that it had ties to communism. Coates's accusation caused a crisis in the organization, which led to the resignation of the original founders, many of whom had been members of the Communist Party USA. The organization was restructured and membership fell off. Historian John D'Emilio called it a "retreat to respectability," a turn away from political activism toward internal self-help tactics.

Coates's assault on Mizer was even more aggressive – involving the Los Angeles Police Department, a powerful U.S. senator, and backstage efforts to influence his obscenity trial – yet Mizer changed his operating procedures only slightly. He decided to tone down the "brutality" aspect of his images, eliminating props such as whips or chains. But on the issue of the "uncovered rump," Mizer stood his ground. "Bob has defied them," Kinsey noted of Mizer's refusal to succumb to a Post Office ultimatum barring nudes seen from behind. He also continued his feisty editorials, despite Kinsey's suggestion that he tone them down. "Certain principles I will not back down on," Mizer defiantly told Kinsey. 

Each of Mizer's encounters with law enforcement politicized him, and he, in turn, sought to politicize his readers. To supplement his personal experience, he read widely in popular and scholarly texts on censorship and sought to convey that knowledge to his readers. He noted that those who were opposed to physique magazines were organized into groups such as the National Organization for Decent Literature and had the ear of local and national politicians. He pointed out how local newspapers pressured newsstands and magazine distributors to discontinue all physique magazines. He urged readers to organize. When one reader suggested ignoring the censors, Mizer compared him to the Jews in Germany who "ignored the menace of Hitler."

Putting the issue in the context of human rights, Mizer called for a collective and activist opposition. "The censor is a bully and will back down if we all stand up to him." It was a theme he returned to frequently, asserting that putting one's head in the sand would not make the problem go away. He repeatedly implored customers to join the ACLU. "It's Your America," he reminded readers, and politicians and police were "your servants." He implored readers to write their representatives and local newspapers to defend freedom of expression. Otherwise, he warned, a state-controlled media will emerge that would be the envy of Hitler. According to his alarmist rhetoric, the ACLU was the only thing standing between the status quo and totalitarianism.

Mizer's editorials on censorship even seeped into model descriptions. He described Sonny Star, a lean model lounging by the pool, as being from Fargo, North Dakota, where a federal censorship trial was taking place. He railed against police corruption and governmental injustice so often that readers tired of his many editorials – one counted eight in a thirty-two-page issue and complained of all this "doomsday talk." Many just wanted information on where to purchase forbidden materials.

IRON MAN BETRAYAL

As Physique Pictorial and other physique magazines that emphasized the "aesthetic approach" flourished, they increasingly came into conflict with what Mizer called " 'hard-core' muscle magazines" or "old-school muscle books" that had fallen on hard times. He knew that their harsh critique of new magazines like his had alienated "the great bulk" of their readership. But he still encouraged readers to support these magazines and their veteran writers. "We cannot afford to lose them from the field," he generously noted.60 Mizer had gotten his start through the support of these editors and was not prone to burn bridges.

Mizer had an especially close relationship with Iron Man, founded by weightlifter Peary Rader in Nebraska in 1933. Mizer had contributed enough photographs to be listed as one of Iron Man's "staff photographers" in 1949. Some of Mizer's first catalog advertisements appeared in its back pages, and Rader had even printed the first issue of Physique Pictorial. But under pressure from the Post Office, Rader refused to print subsequent issues. Fearing the loss of his second-class mailing privileges, he then stopped running physique photography advertisements. And in 1956 he published a scathing editorial denouncing the "homosexual element" that had infiltrated bodybuilding and ruined its reputation. He called for a comprehensive "crusade" to clean up the sport, including a ban on nude or G-string photographs, fewer body-building contests, and more manly poses. He attributed the immorality that had seeped into bodybuilding to increasing "commercialism," emphasizing that his concerns were not only moral but also financial. Mizer felt sorry for Iron Man. "I doubt if many copies would be sold to those solely interested in the weightlifting results."

This attack from his former supporter and printer caused Mizer to pen his first editorial on "Homosexuality and Bodybuilding." Claiming to have less familiarity with the subject than the editors of Iron Man and others who seemed so preoccupied with it, Mizer first resorted to a version of the schoolyard taunt, "It takes one to know one." He did so by quoting one of the most famous closeted homosexuals in 1950s America. A London reporter had recently asked Liberace in the midst of a legal struggle with a tabloid that had outed him "Is your sex life normal?" Fully composed, Liberace hastily replied, "Yes, is yours?"

In many ways, Liberace and Mizer were in parallel situations. Both offered the public fairly open representations of gay life, but without the label. But because of their popularity, they had caught the attention of the media and were being tarred with the sin of homosexuality. But Mizer went beyond Liberace's taunt to frame the question in terms of civil rights. "We wonder if really good people show prejudice against any minority group," he wrote, comparing such prejudice to that against a particular religion, race, or political party. This effectively made Peary Rader the one guilty of immorality and repositioned the debate on homosexuality within the realm of minority rights. Most important, he referred readers to the homophile groups Mattachine Society and ONE for more factual information.

Mizer's mailbox must have been full after this unusually frank editorial. He noted that readers clamored for him to reprint letters, demonstrating their desire to connect to each other, to see who else was out there reading Physique Pictorial. Mizer printed only four responses. One called Mizer "naïve" for not realizing that all bodybuilders are in some way homosexual, since they are so obsessed with the male body. Another expressed the opposite view, that such "he-men" could not possibly be sissies. But the most unusual letter came from the mother of four male bodybuilders-three of them married with children, the youngest openly gay. She described his difficult coming-out process, psychiatric consultations, and much anguish. But she then painted the picture of a happy, healthy gay domesticity. "John lives with another young man who shares his interests, both are highly successful in films, are 'accepted' everywhere." She thanked Mizer for his sympathetic attitude.

Mizer could not print any letters from openly gay readers for fear of confirming the concerns of censors. But he gave readers clues that he received many such letters. He noted that many had written in anonymously to "unburden [their] frustrations" and "project [their] own motives to us." Although such personal, confessional letters could not be shared, Mizer assured readers that he would send them to a "psychological research group for study," a probable reference to the Kinsey Institute. While Mizer had to be cautious about the content of his magazine to appease censors, his readers were often more explicit. Mizer considered many of the letters he received to be so salacious or incriminating that he did not want to keep them in his home in the event of a "purge" by authorities.

Art historians have documented the lasting impact that Bob Mizer's physique photography had on Western visual culture, influencing the work of such artists as Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol. British painter David Hockney famously said, "I came to Los Angeles for two reasons: The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was AMG's Physique Pictorial." Dozens of high-end coffee table books attest to the lasting appeal of the artistic vision of Bob Mizer and his fellow gay physique photographers. But Mizer's business model was as generative as his photography. His business acted as a key catalyst for a gay consumer culture network, encouraging and popularizing many other gay mail-order businesses.

Although often portrayed as something of a bumbling loner, Mizer was at the center of an increasingly sophisticated gay network and came to be a leader of an effort to unite and defend the rights of gay men. It was a dream shared with early gay activist Manuel boy Frank, who, through his involvement in an early underground gay pen-pal club, had seen the potential power in gay men's interest in physique photography. Mizer, too, had an early sense of the depth of a gay market, through his work with Kovert's studio and his classified advertising in Strength & Health. He also had a great sense of the dangers involved. Each time Mizer had come under attack, he had come back more determined and open about his intentions. Neither the Post Office, nor the local vice police, nor vigilante journalists, nor mainstream muscle magazines deterred him. Over the course of his career he tried various tactics: reasoning with authorities, cautioning his fellow photographers, fanning the flames of outrage, and encouraging collective action. He had been on a crusade since high school to stand up and make the world a better place for his fellow homosexualists, and Physique Pictorial was his vehicle.

Mizer saw Alfred Kinsey as a hero and collaborator in this crusade because he saw Kinsey's scientific work as a vehicle for increasing tolerance. "One of the greatest values of your present work will be to allow at least the ones who read it to realize they are not uniquely perverse because of either their overt or desired behavior," he wrote to Kinsey. "Many a man will be able to hold his head a little higher and square back his shoulders and know he is not disgustingly 'abnormal' merely because he is gifted with more healthy, vital sex powers than his sanctimonious moral condemner." But what Mizer wrote so admiringly of Kinsey also applied to his own life's work. Mizer took inspiration from his academic friend and advisor, offering the same message of healthy normality in a more visually accessible format, reaching a much wider audience. He provided images to substantiate Kinsey's scientific treatise.

Like his mentor, Mizer was something of a workaholic, shooting still or moving film nearly every day of his life. But his ambitions were not monetary. Although by the end of his life he had expanded his home-studio property in Los Angeles to include several adjoining homes and a pool, it was never lavish. It became a sort of dormitory or homeless shelter for wayward models. Friends remember him in later years wearing glasses held together with tape and string. After his death in 1992, friends found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stuffed in film cans-proceeds never invested, or given much thought. Mizer's ambitions had not changed from the time he was in high school. He took pride in knowing his readers considered the arrival of his magazine like "a visit from an old friend." And since that old friend "always brings new friends with him," he hoped it offered his readers the sense that they were part of a large, welcoming community similar to the one he had discovered in Pershing Square. As he told his readers, he hoped all who read his magazine carefully – who "take the trouble to study" it – would take away a message of "hope and inspiration."

Hope was the message that Noel Gillespie found in Physique Pictorial when he discovered it as a teenager. He remembered it as "a gay-oriented oasis" in a Cold War desert of prudery and macho conformity. He considered Mizer less a salesman than "an old friend and confidante" because of all his "chatty remarks" among the model images. Gillespie praised Mizer's editorials on the "anti-nudity, anti-gay, anti-free speech attitudes" of the period. He recalls how he eagerly antici- pated each new issue for both Mizer's "latest fresh-faced discoveries and his candid and for the period, courageous commentaries." Beyond this special bond with Mizer, he also felt linked to his fellow subscribers through their occasional letters to the editor, which he thought made Physique Pictorial "more a friendly resource than a mere sales catalogue."

Hope was exactly the message that a young David Hurles understood when he encountered Physique Pictorial on newsstands in Cincinnati in 1957. "I came face to face with the awesome and wonderful knowledge of a place somewhere different from any place I yet knew," Hurles later wrote. He remembered following Mizer's exploits closely, noticing when he put in a swimming pool in 1956. "His pictures, magazines and films turned us on. But more than that, they gave us hope," Hurles eulogized at the time of Mizer's death in 1992. Hurles later became a Mizer protégé and went on to produce his own magazine. "Bob revealed the evidence which made us certain that what we desired and needed did, in fact, exist."

-- from David K. Johnson's Buying Gay.

[acuar-io]

haii interview incoming about your ocs

If they were an animal what animals would they be?

Do they have any siblings? hows their relationship with family?

Where are they fromm? do they speak another language?

What's their biggest (stupidest) fear?

Favorite music genre/artist?

and last because im yapping away...are there any fun facts or deets about them youd like to share?

YAY OC ASK TIME!! I actually answered this on the app and tumblr poofed it. So im going to reanswer the questions again lol. Its going to be a long one so BUCKLE UP CUS HERE WE GO!

If they were an animal what animals would they be?

Sephtis would be a black cat 🐈‍⬛, Izara a bunny 🐇, Benny an otter 🦦 and I have really introduced him to the blog yet and gotten into his character, but Dante would be a dog 🐶 specifically a Jack Russell

2. Do they have any siblings? hows their relationship with family?

I love this question and I will get more into detail with all of my ocs in another post or in their character page (when i create one :3)

Sephtis has an older sister (three years older). They both have a good relationship with their mother, but a terrible one with their father. Their dad actually cut ties with them because they are both (according to him) "a disgrace to the company and family name" he ended up giving the company to their cousin because neither of them wanted to inherit their fathers company, nor cared about his business lol. Their father was never really there for them, their mother practically had a facade the entire marriage & fought so much for Seph and his sister to live "normal lives" as nepo babies (lol) they were pretty popular in school because of their bg which they hated. Their parents divorced Sephs senior year of hs and at that time is when his dad cut ties w him as well.

Izara is an only child. She has a good relationship with her parents. They're more on the traditional side & older people, so sometimes they dont see eye to eye, especially when she was in Junior High & High school. Izara's interests concerned them (literally just regular interests teenagers have that freak out ethnic parents bc they need theyre becoming demons or some shit lol) also didnt like that she loved art and wanted to be an artists/art curator. Eventually though, they understood that they cant control what their daughter does with her future and that is all up to her ( I think they left her alone more so because they realized she is successful in her art and modeling career).

Benny is the youngest of 4. He has 3 sisters. His relationship with his parents was really shitty growing up, sadly. He is gay & hes known that for his whole life. Having 3 sisters and being the only boy, he loved to play with dolls. His parents being very religious, seeing him play with dolls, was not something they liked. Even if he was just playing with his sisters. In school, he was bullied. There was name calling and rumors that spread around about him. His parents hated the rumors and name calling not because it hurt Benny, but because it makes them look like bad Catholics. Benny truly only had his sisters and other female friends by his side throughout school. It wasnt until high school where things seemed to change for the better. This especially were better because he had Sephtis. His parents have come around, but they def took their time to finally accept their son.

3.Where are they from? do they speak another language?

Sephtis is from Osaka, Japan (Mt. Komorebi) then moved to Los Angeles at age 4 (Del Sol Valley). He speaks English and Japanese!

Izara is from New York (San Myshuno), shes Ethiopian-American. She speaks English and Amharic.

Benny is from Quebec (have no idea what sim world would be considered Canada lol) He speaks French & English

What's their biggest (stupidest) fear?

Okay so Sephtis & Izara are afraid of movie characters LMAO Sephtis will forever be afraid of Kayako (The Grudge) movie he watched as a kid with his sister that scarred him as a child ksfkksfks. Izara specifically does not like the older Godzilla (model?? costume??) she thinks its ugly and creepy as fuck like literally nightmare looking ass creature. IS THIS NOT JUST CREEEPY TO U???

Ok I wouldnt say Benny's is stupid....hes afraid of bugs specifically roaches. I mean logically, hes bigger than them so he can step on them and kill them, but he just finds them super fucking gross that he cant bring himself to do that lol.

Favorite music genre/artist?

Sephtis' fave band is BUCK-TICK, Fave genre is Rock (I'll keep it broad because he loves a toe=ne of sub rock genres).

Izara's fave artist is PinkPantheress! For groups, she likes New Jeans, Aespa & Perfume (yes she listens to kpop/jpop). Fave genre is pop for sure!!

Benny's fave band are the cranberries!! fave genre is also rock, but he prefers alternative rock!!

and last because im yapping away...are there any fun facts or deets about them youd like to share?

Okay well, I want to share a little about Seph and Benny's relationship rq!! So they went to the same high school. Sephtis is a year older than Benny. Their paths didnt officially cross until Sephtis' senior year and Benny's junior year of high school. They met one day after school when it was raining, Benny didnt have an umbrella but sephtis did :) thats all ill say for now :3

[jo-harrington]

As Above, So Below - Chapter 2: Descendió a los Infiernos

Previous Chapter: Chapter 1 - Illumination

Summary: You arrive in Hawkins looking to offer assistance and come across some familiar faces; however, you're quick to realize that danger no longer lies dormant in the place you once called home.

Word Count: 13.7k

Pairing: Eddie Munson/Fem!Original Character (Written in 2nd Person POV - You/Your - No Use of Names of Physical Descriptors)

Warnings/Themes: Van Helsing Inspired, Religious Themes, Criticism of Religion/Catholicism, Fate vs. Free Will, Death and Injury, Mentions of Major Character Deaths, Grief, Mourning, Discussion of the Upside Down, Supernatural Encounters, Angst, Violence, Action Sequences, Gore, Biblical and Other Literary/Media References

Note: I was gonna use this note to wax poetic about the Misa Criolla and I VERY MUCH WILL in its own post found here. But I need to take this opportunity to thank @chestylarouxx and @pastel-pillows for helping me clear some cobwebs when it came to the...well the literal webs I've woven with this chapter. Even me with my Pepe Silvia style board can get a little caught up in the details and need to talk it out or get another perspective to make sure things make sense. I appreciate you immensely.

This series will not be for the faint of heart, nor is it something that was written with a general audience in mind. Please check the above warnings and ask yourself if you are in the correct headspace to proceed. I am happy to answer any questions via PM or Ask.

You can find my masterlist here.

Please do not interact if you are not 18+.

Enjoy!

“The path to paradise begins in Hell.” - Dante Alighieri

October 9, 1987

It had taken much longer to reach the center of town than you had anticipated.

Like the earthquake relief efforts in Los Angeles, and what you recalled of the news segment from Hawkins' first earthquake the year prior, you knew your best attempt at offering assistance would need to be done at some community gathering spot. Since Hawkins was a small town that meant the town hall, the church, or the high school.

You knew the lay of the land in Hawkins—even now, 3 years after you had packed up and left—so you were confident about getting there. Actually making it to your destination was another story.

The roads cracked and buckled erratically; there were abandoned vehicles intermittently along the curb with large dents, shattered glass, and blown out tires.

"Looks like something out of Mad Max," Mary Victoria commented as you passed by one that had actually been turned on its side. “I don't think an earthquake could do that."

You realized as you got further into Hawkins that the fog that had suddenly popped up as you approached the city limits wasn't fog at all; it was smoke. It emanated from the fissures in the ground, slow and sluggish as it permeated and mixed with the air, and left a haze that blanketed everything and blotted out the rising sun.

"That's because it didn't," you muttered. "If, uh, if you still have a rosary on you, I think now would be the time to start praying Mare."

It was still early but people were already out and about, walking to some unknown destination. Smart, given how much you struggled to navigate your car between the uneven pavement and your cracked windshield. Some had hand carts and wagons with supplies, others had garbage bags and cleaning supplies. The handful with pitchforks and rakes and other makeshift weapons...they were the most alarming to see.

No matter what tools or tasks they had though, their eyes followed your car with distrust as you rolled by them.

At a certain point you reached a thick fissure that split the main road into town in two. The concrete burst, leaving a fluted edge that you knew your car wouldn't be able to make it over. So, oncoming traffic be damned, you followed along it on the wrong side of the road.

It didn’t help matters that the fissure pulsed ominously and you could sense it as you drove.

The further you went, the worse conditions got, and quickly the Hawkins of your memory—a cherished, happy place—was replaced with something sinister and desolate. And where Los Angeles had been filled with community, camaraderie, and hope in the recovery, you could only feel a weariness in your surroundings that was reminiscent of the aftermath of a great battle.

Especially when you reached the Town Center.

The marquee of the Hawk had fallen, city hall destroyed, the library was a strange half-collapsed shell, and Melvald's and a half dozen other shops along Main Street were simply scorched piles of rubble, including the shop you used to live above.

Even if the street was safe to traverse, downed traffic lights prevented you from driving any further, so you stopped the car and you and Mary Victoria continued onwards by foot.

"I know you said it wasn't an earthquake but this must be the epicenter," Mary Victoria observed as she shrugged her jacket on and took her first few steps. You shouldered your bag and caught up to her.

"Hey," you grabbed her arm and stopped her in her tracks. "Lesson 1. Take a minute. Even people who haven't unlocked any abilities can sense it sometimes. Focus."

There was a beat and she shivered.

She could feel it. Good.

"It's like a cold draft when you walk through a house where someone died. Or when you step into a graveyard, and you can feel there's something different there."

"Consecrated ground?" she asked.

It was a start.

You, though...you knew what it was. Could feel it penetrate your body and mind and shake you to your core. Whatever this town had seen—the very earth itself—had left a scar. Once. Twice. Many times. And it could tell you more than any recount that a living being could.

You could hear the echo of screams and cries and roars like a ringing in your ear, a jarring tinnitus with no remedy. Feel the phantom rumble of the earth beneath your feet like there was some great primordial worm burrowing below.

There was a thin barrier between this world and another...right here in Hawkins…right in this square...and whatever was on the other side was eagerly testing the strength of it.

"Not consecrated," you finally answered. "Desecrated."

You surveyed the square, ignoring the scathing, suspicious looks sent your way as you did.

You weren't here to make friends, you just needed to find someone in charge. Needed to get to work.

There was a group of people near city hall digging through the rubble; a young woman with curly hair pointed and gave some direction as they moved pieces of all shapes and sizes. You took a few steps, hoping she might be the authority figure you were looking for...and then there was a commotion. The group frantically moved several cinder blocks...and revealed an arm, a face, and cold unseeing eyes.

You expected to feel a wave of sorrow to move through them, but you could only sense their collective fatigue and it numbed you further.

Another one. At least there's an answer. Where are we gonna put this one?

Your steps faltered and your foot knocked into something on the ground that clattered—a broken plastic walkie talkie; the young woman's head immediately snapped towards you. Her eyes got wide as though she was startled, and then her expression morphed into something angry and hateful.

Hostile.

"Hey!" she shouted at you.

Great, that was just what you needed.

You pivoted back so you could warn Mary Victoria to keep calm even if the townspeople got violent, but she stood, frozen, watching another group as they picked through a pile of boxes stacked in the center of the square.

You followed her line of sight until you landed on one of the volunteers. A young man with fluffy brown hair, an easy smile that grew as he chatted with his group, and a stubble-covered square jaw.

You could almost see the gears grinding in Mary Victoria's head as she watched him; you wondered if everything was going in slow motion for her.

His hair ruffled as he threw his head back in a laugh, the shrug of his muscles beneath his polo as he picked up a box to haul it over his shoulder, and the little crinkle of his forehead as he concentrated on balancing his burden.

Then along you came. The moments ticking along as you leaned into her eyeline, face contorted in confusion, hand coming up to snap her out of her reverie.

"What are you doing?" you asked. You looked back and forth between her and the guy in confusion.

"I'm just enjoying the view," she shrugged and continued to look unabashedly.

"We're in the middle of a mission. The middle of a disaster zone," you reminded her.

"And I'm a nun," she retorted and nodded back over at the guy. "But I'm not blind. He's pretty cute. I can multitask."

You rolled your eyes.

Of course you got the horny nun.

"Hey!" the woman shouted again.

"Shit," you groaned. "Act natural."

"What does that mean?"

"Hey! Who are you? FEMA?"

"Uhhhh," Mary Victoria fumbled and looked to you. “I mean…”

"No we—" you started but you were cut off.

"Military? Department of Energy?" she continued. "Because you're a little too late."

"Hang on a second. Do we look like we're Military?" Mary Victoria laughed.

"Mare," you groaned in warning.

"What?"

"No. We're not the military," you turned back to the woman.

“How did you even get here? The roads have been—”

"Nance! What's going on?" The guy Mary Victoria had been ogling jogged over, a curly-haired teenage boy hot on his heels. "Who are they?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out," Nance replied.

The two of them chattered and a handful of other bystanders also jumped in. Mary Victoria tried to explain as best she could, and you would have put a stop to all of it if your eyes hadn't been glued to the teenage boy's shirt.

A familiar black and white raglan sleeve shirt that had seen better days; the white was faded and dingy, the screeching demonic face had a splatter of blood across it, actual blood, making it look even more nefarious. There was a jagged slash through the words with edges that curled and a bloody bandage beneath it, but you didn't need to guess what it said.

Hellfire Club.

Does that mean he knew—

"Hey," the boy exclaimed and pointed a finger right at your face. "It's you."

What?

"Me?" You put a hand on your chest; the crowd wend silent and focused their attention on you. Your eyes flit across them and then to Mary Victoria who held her hands up innocently.

"You know her?" Nance asked the boy.

"From the tunnels," he elaborated and then turned to his friend. "We were there...Steve you remember with Dart and then she..."

"You!" Steve shouted in recognition. "But you're...how are you alive?"

And then you realized.

The tunnels. That night. With Dart. The tunnels.

November 5, 1984

It was the end of your shift--the end of your "week" after trading shifts left and right so you could have the 30th and 31st to celebrate Halloween with the guys—and relief sunk deep into your bones.

You had no plans for the next two days but your bed and all of the junk food and trash television you could stomach.

"You going to Eddie's after you get outta here?" your coworker asked.

And Eddie, of course...but unlike the stack of Kraft Mac and Cheese that you were stocking up on for your hedonistic sloth-fest, you could never get sick of your boyfriend.

"Not tonight," you shook your head. "I'll probably sleep right up til his set at the Hideout tomorrow night."

"Awww, sweetie," she cooed, knowing how many hours you'd pulled. "He better dedicate a song to you, making time for his shows every week."

You grinned a secret little smile at her and nodded.

He dedicated them all to you. Even if he didn't say it into the microphone, he would prove his devotion after the fact. With his eyes and hands.

And his mouth.

You said farewell to your coworkers and headed out into the parking lot; you cursed as you fumbled with the brown paper bags against your body and the keys in your hand as you approached your car.

"Of course," you angrily muttered to yourself as you felt the keyring slip through your fingers and hit the pavement. "You never get a cart. No matter how much you buy, you never get a cart. ‘It's not that bad. I can carry it.’ Idiot. No you can't."

You groaned a little as you knelt down, and as you tried to find them by touch alone, you saw the movement in your peripherals.

Just a flash, a barely-there blur in the darkness beyond the parking lot.

But you saw it.

Then in a blink, he was there.

Gabriel held your key, inches from your face; your eyes moved up his form to meet his. Eyes you knew so well, better than your own. They had always stared at you, unblinking, with a still coldness that would have made anyone else uneasy.

If only they could see him.

Actually, you hadn't even seen him in a while. Not since you’d run; not since he appeared in your rear view mirror, getting smaller and smaller as you drove further away what felt like a lifetime ago. You always knew he could catch up at any time, but the satisfaction had been so great. You hadn't seen him...but you had felt his presence every so often. It's why you always turned tail and ran again...until Hawkins.

You’d thought it was over. That you were free.

You should have known better.

“Have you come to bring me home?” You asked bitterly, unwilling to trust him.

He flexed his hand and the keys jingled, a sign for you to take them. You reached out, but before you could even touch them they were in your grasp and your arms were empty. Across the lot he stood by your car—you could see the tops of the paper bags through the windows, secured in your backseat with a seatbelt—and he nodded his head in the direction of the trees.

He then began walking.

So...not home. Somewhere else.

The urge to follow him was strong and your body reacted to it. Your feet moved without your permission, an automatic process akin to breathing; it was a survival method, to prevent whatever demise would befall you if you didn’t choose to do so on your own. You stopped yourself for a second, to test the mettle of whatever consequence might await you.

He’d never led you astray before; never lied...but never told the truth either. He always...omitted the truth. When you were young and naive in your faith, he brought you great comfort. But ever since you had begun to ask why, he became less willing to cooperate. This time though...something about him made you feel sick. The swell of his unseen form was overwhelming, and as the human form got further away, the celestial presence encroached on your body...smothered you.

You considered, for the briefest second, turning on your heel to run just like you had done for the past two years. However, a screeching, whistling roar began to fill the stillness of the night, louder and louder. Not in your ears, but in the very depths of your soul itself. And you knew you couldn't escape whatever he was leading you towards even if you wanted to.

So you followed silently. For miles. For hours.

Cars passed by on the road every so often, blinding you, but you couldn't stop. Even when you needed to rest, he kept walking and the tether between you was tested. You'd wince and groan but it fell on deaf ears. Every so often something would snap or creak or groan in the darkness around you and you would startle; he didn't even give you the decency to tell you everything was ok.

Some guardian angel he was.

You were confused when Gabriel finally stopped and you stepped in place beside him.

Merrill's Pumpkin Patch; you and Eddie had tried to make a visit last week ahead of Halloween but had been turned away. The pumpkins had all been dead and in various stages of putrefaction then, and it was even worse now.

A car sat idle in the middle of the field; the doors and the trunk were still open.

"Abandoned?" you asked.

"No," he responded, suddenly appearing within the field itself, staring at the ground. You groaned and followed after him, careful not to step on any of the rotten pumpkins as you did, until you reached the car...and a hole in the ground. There was a rope tied to the front grill of the car that dropped into the depths of the hole.

"What the fuck?" you muttered.

"Keep steady your steps according to His promise," Gabriel recited. "And let no iniquity get dominion over you."

"I'm not..."you shook your head at him and looked down into the dark abyss below you. "I really haven't been keeping up with Bible study since I...yeah."

"This is your first step." His voice surrounded you, and when you looked up to question him, he was gone.

"Gabriel?" you called out. "What...Gabriel come back! You led me to...a hole in the ground! What is this? G-Gabriel!"

When he didn't return or answer you, you shook your head and rolled your eyes. This was the first step? A test of faith? Of trust? To follow him blindly across town and to a field...only to have to walk all the way back? What a load of—

A scream came from the hole, a shriek.

"Help, help, help," someone called distantly from below then shrieked again. A bloodcurdling thing that sent a chill down your spine and had your hair standing on end.

You didn't think twice; you simply jumped.

It was instinct. Second nature. Fate.

It annoyed you.

Because what the hell.

No normal human being in their right mind would jump into a hole like this after hearing a scream like that.

As you landed, you were sure you pulled or twisted something in your hip; the action heroes in the movies made everything look easier than it was and it seemed some...subconscious instinct thought you were a hero without realizing you were just a grocery store clerk a few years out of high school where you really loathed to partake in PE anyway.

And you were cursed.

"It would really be nice if you could show up right now and tell me this isn't the curse, this is my destiny, huh Gabe?" you called out, hoping your guardian would hear you.

No luck.

"Fucker."

Looking around, you realized that the thought of what was waiting at the bottom of the hole hadn't crossed your mind at all. But a tunnel...well what else could you expect? It was dark and dank, filled with roots and vines and muck. The air was stale and filled with floating particles.

Could they be seeds? Like dandelion fluff?

You reached out a hand and as one of the particles landed on your skin, you felt a shock run through you.

You never truly understood what your grandfather or father did during their trips, their missions. All of the stories, the warnings, the preparation could never hold up to the reality and the electricity that coursed through your veins.

There were flashes before your eyes: a desolate waste, a gaping mouth, bloodshot eyes, a thousand teeth, veins black with tar-like blood, a pulsing portal, and monsters. So many monsters.

Your gifts, though dormant from misuse and lack of practice, might have been from Heaven, but they were certainly rooted on Earth. Now that you were introduced to the darkness, the infernal, the atrocity firsthand, you could feel the way it carved into the ground. Infected these tunnels like a cancer. Mingled and stained and tainted what would otherwise be bright and healthy and alive.

There was another shriek down one of the tunnels and you sighed and went into action.

If fate wanted you to be a hero, what else could you do but be one?

"Fucking angel should be the one swooping in to save someone stuck in a hole," you grumbled and started jogging through the tunnel in the direction of the sound. "Not me."

It wasn't as bad as you made it out to be; though out of practice, your body was made for this—you were born for this—and you quickly sensed the direction you needed to go in when the tunnel forked. Instinctually skipping over rocks and roots as they appeared underfoot. The density of the infernal particles became thicker the further you went, and you covered your mouth with the collar of your jacket so you wouldn't breathe it in.

You turned a corner and almost tripped over a group of figures huddled in the opening of what could only be described as the core of the tunnel system. A cavernous hub where several paths converged.

The figure at the front of the group threw something into the Hub and the cavern erupted into flames. You hadn’t smelled the gasoline until it ignited and when the heat of the fireball hit you, errant bits of flame licked at the edges of your clothes and hair.

The group—an older teenage boy and several kids—all recoiled and patted the singed bits of themselves. They startled at the sight of you.

“Jesus Chr—”

“Who is that? Who are you?”

“What the hell?”

“What are you just standing there for?!”

You watched, enthralled, as the infernal growths in the center of the cavern and along the walls writhed and screeched from the flames. You could sense…emotions emanating from it. Anger, pain, danger, wrath. But hands were quickly placed on your shoulders and you were turned back in the direction you came.

“I don't know you the hell you are but we need to get out of here,” the older boy said frantically. “Who sees a hole in the ground and just...jumps in.”

“To be fair, you all are also down here,” you argued.

“She’s got a point,” one of the kids piped up.

There was a shuddering screech that echoed from beyond the cavern, from one of the connecting tunnels, and the guy pushed past you and ran.

“Run! Go, go, go!” He led the way, looking back every so often to make sure everyone followed him, including you.

You were shoulder to shoulder with one of the kids at the back of the group who just kept saying “shit” over and over. You quickly skipped over an exposed root on the ground but the kid tripped and hit the ground. Hard.

The others kept running for a second but you skidded to a stop to help him to his feet, only for a slithering vine-like tentacle to shoot out from its place along the wall and wrap around his ankle. You watched, horrified, as it yanked him back to the ground and began dragging him back in the other direction. He screamed and the others immediately rushed to his aid.

The tentacle was strong but not as fast as they were. The kids grabbed his arms, his shoulders, and tried to yank him away from the infernal limb.

“I’ve got you Mike. I’ve got you,” the older boy was obviously the strongest and wedged himself beneath Mike, arms wrapped around his torso as he dug his feet into the ground for leverage.

“Don’t just stand there,” one of the kids—a girl—screamed at you. “Help! Do something!”

Little did she know, it had been building inside of you since the heat of the fire had touched your skin. You tried to swallow it down, unsure if you'd be able to control it for so long. When you'd been younger, when you didn't know how to channel it, you had hurt people accidentally. Destroyed things.

That same feeling of untethered power was trapped inside of you now, aching to be released. You didn't want to hurt anyone, let alone these kids. But you thought of the flashes you had seen when you touched the particle; you needed to use that power to stop the darkness now.

They would die anyway if you didn't.

You dropped to your knees by Mike’s feet and held a hand over his ankle. You closed your eyes and channeled the churning heat, along all of your nerves, through your limbs to the very heart of you. Then directed it outwards to your fingertips.

“I shall defend against the wickedness and the snares of the devil,” you recited under your breath and placed your hand directly on the slimy, writhing tentacle.

It stilled beneath your touch and loosened on Mike’s ankle as the shrieks from the hub echoed around you. Then from the one tentacle you touched, a burning red glow grew and it quickly moved through all of the connecting parts that had penetrated the rock and earth around you. It burned red hot like lava, illuminating the tunnels, and then rapidly cooled and crumbled into ash.

You let out a huff of disbelieving laughter; you didn’t really expect that to work.

“What did you do?” Mike stared at you with wide eyes. “What was that?”

“Are you good?” You asked him. “Are you hurt?”

“No! But how did you—”

He didn’t get to finish his thought as a cold, chilling breath hit the side of your face and a roar deafened you. The shock knocked you to your rear and you stared deeply into a petal-like mouth lined with razor sharp teeth as it shrieked.

The mouth snapped at you once, twice, and you almost held your hand up to inflict your power at it like you had with the tentacle but one of the kids got to his feet and immediately set himself between you and the creature, arms held out to shield you.

“Dart, Dart!” The creature backed away, and the petals shrunk in on themselves to form a cone-shaped head that tilted back and forth. “You remember me don’t you?”

The kids hissed at their friend and told him to get back.

“Trust me,” he reassured them, and then turned back to the creature. He removed his goggles and bandana, tipped his baseball hat further back on his head. “Dart, you remember me. Don’t you? It’s me, your friend. Dustin. Alright?

“Will you let us pass?” He asked sweetly.

The creature roared again, spittle spraying onto you and Dustin both. Your hand shot out and grabbed the back of Dustin’s shirt as he tried to take a step forward, but he looked back at you and waved you away.

“I’m sorry for the storm cellar,” he laughed at the creature. “That was real douchey of me.” The creature made a chittering sound as though it agreed with him.

You didn’t understand. Was this…his pet? Did he try to keep an infernal creature from another world—from the depths of hell—as a pet? Your thoughts briefly turned to Eddie, who had befriended all manner of creatures around Forest Hills, and then suspended your disbelief.

“You hungry?” Dustin then asked and dug into the pocket of his jeans. “Yeah?”

“What are you—”

“Shhhhh.”

“He’s insane.”

“Shut. Up.”

“I’ve got your favorite,” Dustin ignored his friends and held out his hand as a peace offering. Palm flat, the way someone would if they were feeding a horse. “Nougat. You want it?”

Dart sniffed at it with a gurgling grunt and started tapping its feet impatiently as Dustin unwrapped the candy.

“Eat up buddy,” he said softly and waved at everyone to go on. “Delicious. There’s plenty more that that came from. Come on, there you go.” He helped you to your feet and then pushed you ahead.

You ran ahead to the head of the group to trail behind the older boy while the kids followed.

"You know where you're going?" you asked him, pointing to the makeshift map in his hand, drawn in crayon.

"Why? Do you?" he scoffed and shined his flashlight in your face. "Who are you anyway? You just show up and you...burned that thing! Are you another one like Eleven?"

"A thank you would be nice." You narrowed your eyes at him. "What do you mean another one? Who's Eleven?"

The tunnel suddenly shook violently and a collective roar came from behind you. The kids gasped in shock and pain as they fell and scraped elbows and knees on the tunnel walls.

"What was that?" the girl asked.

"They're coming!" Mike exclaimed. "Run! Run!"

"Let's go, let's go!" You were the one to lead the way this time, following your instinct once again. You pointed out the roots and bumps as you went. "Watch your step. Jump. Duck."

"There it is!" The older boy powered past you to get to the rope that they had dropped. He turned around and held his hands out. "Go go go, let's go!"

The girl was the first to step up and the older boy boosted her up and out of the hole. You helped with the next one. You were not as strong as you assumed the older boy was, but you could dig your heels into the ground and borrow a little bit of the earth's elemental fortitude for this.

"Lucas, grab on!" the girl reached out and grabbed the hands of the boy you were helping.

Mike was next. Between the older boy and the two kids above ground, he made it up safely.

But your time was up, and as the first of your pursuers rounded the corner and bounded for you, Dustin and the older boy grabbed a hold of one another to try and find comfort before their demise.

You, on the other hand, moved in front of them, shielded them as Dustin had to you; you had to protect them.

You clasped your hands together as though in prayer, and closed your eyes to focus. Time slowed down, and with every beat of your heart, another set of footsteps were added to the mix signifying another creature prepared to attack. You could imagine it. A wave of rocketing bodies and vicious teeth.

And you stood there, ready to cut through them, or be cut through yourself.

"I shall defend you in the hour of your conflict," you muttered and thought about a sword cutting through a foe, about hands parting the wild waves of the sea, about a wall of flames that could stop a foe dead in its tracks.

The heat built up once again, engulfed you and then exploded out from you. The kids above shouted in shock, followed by several pathetic whimpers. You opened your eyes as you felt a whip of air brush past you, and although you saw several charred bodies of the creatures at your feet, you turned and watched several more that had made it past your defenses continue down the tunnel.

"Where are they going?"

"They're going after El!"

"How did you do that?!"

"Nevermind that," you dismissed. "You need to get out of here. Get to safety."

You grabbed Dustin and helped the older boy boost him out of the tunnels.

"Let's go," the older boy held his hands out for you. "Up."

"No, you," you mirrored him. "I need to stop them."

"What?" he argued. "No, we need to get out of here."

"You!" you pointed up at Mike. "Where are those things going? You said they're going after El. Who's El?"

"She's our friend, she..." he shook his head. "The demodogs are going after her. To stop her. She's trying to close the gate."

"The...gate?" you narrowed your eyes at him.

"To the Upside Down," Lucas piped up. "It's another dimension."

It flashed in your mind's eye, the vision of the pulsing portal. And this time, standing in front of it was a small, lone figure.

Fuck.

"Are we just telling everyone now?" Dustin asked.

The kids all started bickering again and you rolled your eyes. If someone was in danger...regardless of whatever the gate was or whatever these things were or whoever El...Eleven was, you needed to stop it.

You were the only one here who could.

You slapped your hand on the older guy's shoulder and he stopped bickering with the kids to look at you.

"Listen," you started frankly. "I don't know what's going on. I really don't care to know either. Whatever you came down here for? It's dangerous. We all know that. Why you thought you and a gaggle of kids were a good...army? Candidates for heroes? I don't know.

"So let me do it. Let me help your friend, let me be the hero. I can handle it. Whatever all of you came down here for, it's only gonna get you killed if you keep at it."

His eyes darted back and forth between yours before he swallowed hard and nodded. He started climbing the rope to get up to the surface but stopped to look at you.

"We're gonna wait right here until you get back," he said with finality. "And if you need help...just yell."

You reluctantly nodded and waited until he got to the top before you turned and stared down the looming tunnel ahead of you.

You used the first few steps to reground yourself, to sense what was ahead. You could still feel the vibration of the retreating demodogs; they were either not as fast as they seemed or these tunnels were much more vast than you really acknowledged. You thought about the map that the kids had...the way that several tunnels switched back on themselves...

There had been the cavernous hub, sure...but another cavern...a room...

The Gate. A portal to another world. A doorway into hell.

The Order called them Atrocities. A wicked and unpleasant thing only meant to cause chaos and pain and sow destruction on the Earth.

How had you not sensed it this entire time living in Hawkins? When it was so obvious to you now? Maybe you had always known; you just ignored it. Maybe that's why Gabriel had led you here so obviously, so tediously. You hadn't wanted anything to do with the Order or the Atrocities or your fate. And it had snuck up on you, just like it always had.

A bitterness filled you; you didn't want this. You didn't want any of this. You wanted a normal life. You deserved a normal life.

You stopped in your tracks and sighed.

"What if I just turn back now?" you called out to no one. Or maybe to Gabriel or to God Himself. "What if I just choose to let the Darkness win? Huh? What then?

"Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to do this? It could be anyone else. It could be this...Eleven. It could be...I don't know it could be my Father? You could have brought him here. Why does it have to be me?"

There was a pulse through the earth then, another shaking rattling boom that nearly sent you to your knees. An ear splitting screech echoed through the tunnels and the vibration of the demodogs got faster, as though they were being urged into battle by their nefarious master.

And that was more than answer enough for you.

There was no one else. Even Eleven couldn't do it alone. It had to be you.

You conjured the image of the portal in your mind, the small figure that struggled against the immense power of Hell that laid behind the thin glowing barrier. You thought of the vastness of the tunnels and mapped them in the planes of your mind.

They were like veins and the portal was the heart.

One could stop the pulsing of the heart and the veins would stop too, or you could block the veins and starve the heart.

So while the figure—Eleven—struggled to stop the heart, you worked on the veins.

"By the Power of Heaven," you took a breath and steeled yourself in your anger, found strength in the smiting wrath of your lapsed faith. You'd been reciting the oath of the Order all night, and now would be no different. "I will thrust the wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls...back into the depths of Hell itself."

It took a beat to find it, to connect with the slow-moving tectonic plates of the Earth and the molten hot mantle below. You called it forward and it obeyed; burning, melting, molding until you felt your own body sink into the ground ever so slightly. Then you willed it outwards and the tunnel system rattled; the remnants of the organic, otherworldly matter shrieked in agony as they burned before they were crushed under the massive weight and pressure of churning earth.

You started at the hub—an easy target—and worked your way outwards. One by one the vibration of the demo dogs slowed and stopped as they succumbed to the assault. As the tunnels churned and burned and collapsed around them and the earth swallowed them whole.

What was the power of Heaven and Hell when the Earth could provide just as much wrath of its own?

You felt the distant feeling of betrayal as Dustin's Dart was consumed and put down, and then the rest. There was a collective cry to the master beyond the portal that they had failed, and then a shuddering wail as the connection to the other world was severed.

You opened your eyes briefly to celebrate your triumph, only to see the churning earth consume you as well.

It was an onslaught.

The burning soil, the turbulent motion, and then the stillness of it as you found yourself trapped in a peaty prison. You tried to take a breath, tried to scream, tried to see, but every time you moved, the dirt shifted around you.

You were surrounded. You couldn't move. You were buried. You still felt the vestiges of agony at the corners of your mind as your otherworldly adversaries' lives were taken from them and it spurned your own panic.

Before you had been overtaken, you had thrown your hands up to shield yourself; it provided you the tiniest little pocket of air. You shimmied slightly so you could gain access to it, so you could breath, and you took a hungry gulp of stale spare air. You tried to control your breathing; this was all you would have until you could get free.

If you could get free.

If you didn't die.

You felt an unfamiliar emotion try to overtake you; you had asked Father Jinette once what dying felt like. He said it would be peaceful; it was hell that you needed to worry about. But this...this didn't feel peaceful at all. It felt overwhelming.

If you died here, no one would ever find you. Those kids and their friend...would they tell anyone? Who would they tell? They didn't know who you were.

Your car. They would find your car in the parking lot at Bradley's though.

Your car.

"Gabriel!" you cried out in realization. You could barely hear yourself; there was dirt in your ears too. "Gabriel! Ga-gabriel please help me, please, please. I need you, I need you."

There was nothing. No sound, no shifting, you were still stuck in place with even less air than before.

You stifled your sobs, knowing they wouldn't help you.

You tried to call him silently again, in your head. You envisioned his stupid human form appearing in front of you or you appearing outside. Where was outside? Where were you? Even if you did manage to appear out there? Where would you be?

You didn't want this anymore, you didn't want this. You had never wanted this. Ever. But you’d told that boy that you would be a hero so he wouldn't have to be because you would survive and he wouldn't.

How wrong you were.

You were alone there. No one would come to save you. You would die.

You'd be buried here with the other bodies, with the demodogs and when someone noticed your car in the lot of Bradley's, they'd—

Your throat clenched.

Eddie.

They would call Eddie and say you disappeared and he would never know that you...that you loved him, that you were what you were, that you would die for him.

But could you live for him?

If you were gone unexpectedly, what would Eddie do? It would destroy him. It would kill him. And you couldn't do that.

So you had to live.

You had to crawl from this dank, dark pit. You had that little bit of space...you could wiggle and shuffle and get free.

You had power. You could control the earth, you could manipulate it. Draw the strength you needed from it to get free. You still had the shift of the core of the Earth on your side.

It was dark, unbelievably dark. You didn't know which way was up or down. Had the avalanche of soil knocked you backwards or were you still "standing" upright? Did you have to dig up? Or sideways? Was there another pocket of air somewhere you could get to before it was too late?

You considered all of the factors, all the reasons for living.

And the only one that really mattered as you began to dig...was Eddie.

You thought of your silly stupid boyfriend and all of the things that he did for you, all of the ways he made you happy, all the ways you loved him and needed him. The ways that he gave your life meaning.

"Hey sweetheart, I'm here," you could practically hear his voice. Not Gabriel's emotionless tone. The warmest, most loving voice you'd ever heard, full of encouragement and support. " You can't die on me now."

You pushed the dirt down and wedged your body upwards. Further and further and further.

"You're almost there," he encouraged you. "I believe in you. Only a little bit more to go. You can't give up. I need you."

You thought of all the ways he needed you, needed your company and support. Thought of the ways you held him as he was sad, and cheered with him when he was happy. He had Wayne and Rick...he had his friends...but your love...he couldn't survive without your love. He had told you in the throes of passionate worship.

"Just a little bit more, do you feel it?" he asked. "It feels a little bit lighter now. Hold your breath if you need to. Keep going for me."

What was he without you? What were you without him?

You had to live so he could.

Your hand burst through the last layer of dirt and you gasped for air greedily as you hoisted yourself up and out. You collapsed on your side and watched as the ground shifted with instability and filled in the hole you created back up, the remnants of your power still at play.

A light rain washed over you, caking the dirt to your hair and skin and clothes. Your fingertips ached, skin and nails broken from clawing your way out.

You wailed into the night.

You were broken.

And you were alone.

But you were alive.

"You made it out alive!" The boy, Dustin, grabbed you by the shoulders and shook you from your recollection. "We thought you were dead."

You briefly considered it; looking back now, that was the night everything started to change.

So yes, you had died in a way.

"Hop looked for you for days..." he continued. "Even El..."

"We saw the tunnel collapse," Steve added. "We just thought...obviously no one could survive that."

"B-but people come back from the dead...kind of all the time in Hawkins."

That gave you pause.

"What the hell does that mean?" You put your hands on your hips. "Come back from the dead?"

The two of them went back and forth, tripping over each other's words about how people seemed to be dead and then they were not, more times than they could count. Usually they were just hiding in the woods or in another country or...

Alright, that's a relief. No spontaneous resurrections. You could check that off the list.

The boys continued to chatter and Nance was clearly over it.

"Excuse me," Nance piped up. "Excuse me!"

Both boys went silent and she turned to you.

"Who are you again?" she asked suspiciously.

Mary Victoria took it upon herself to introduce you both by name and then when she didn't get an immediate response she added, "we're from the church."

You winced as a few of them laughed out loud Nance included.

"Is it always like this?" Mary Victoria asked you out of the side of her mouth.

"Pretty much," you sighed, and then turned your attention back to the crowd. "We're not from the church but we're not not from the church. It's complicated."

"What does that even mean?" someone shouted. "You're here to say prayers with us? Our own reverend did that and now he's dead."

"What church sends two girls in a beaten down shitbox of a car," another person laughed.

"Yeah, we need an army not a prayer circle!"

"We're just here to help," you explained tiredly, desperate for them to put their trust in you. "Wherever you need us. Supply runs, medical, recovery, anything."

"We don't need help," Nance spat. "And we don't trust strangers, so if you could kindly take your things and go back where you came from."

"Nancy!" Steve exclaimed. "I think they can help."

"She's been here before," Dustin tried to explain and pointed at you. "She helped us. She saved Mike."

"Fat load of good that did him, he's dead now too," Nancy lashed out and then froze and covered her mouth. The group went silent and she fidgeted under the weight of everyone's sympathetic gazes.

You saw it, for a split second as her shield went down and she desperately clawed to pick it back up. Someone young and innocent with all the hope in the world ahead of her…forced to grow up too fast and carry an immeasurable weight on her shoulders just for a little while with the promise of an ultimate prize if she could succeed…only for it to be ripped away against her will.

You saw yourself.

"I'm sorry," She said when she finally regained composure. "I...I'm sorry. That's...and we only have so many hours of daylight..."

"Hey! You're mourning," Mary Victoria piped up. You were glad she did, because you couldn’t. "You're tired. It's been a tough few days, weeks—"

"Years," Nancy sighed miserably.

"—you just need to sit for a second. Take a break. Let's...is there someplace with coffee or something? I'm not good at a lot of things, but I'm good for a shoulder to cry on and a shitty cup of coffee."

Nancy nodded and gestured a makeshift mess tent in the square where people were putting together food for the volunteers. You mouthed a quick 'thank you' to Mary Victoria as she ushered Nancy away.

You didn't miss the way she winked at you.

You didn't even need to give her a Lesson 2. She understood this was the best time to play detective.

"Alright." You looked at all the others and clapped your hands together. "How can I help then?"

They put you to work.

It was no different than anything you had done at the Mission in LA, but it felt much more purposeful. Not only because you got information in return for the help you offered, but because you would always think of Hawkins as your home.

The townspeople didn't trust you, understandably. Many of them don’t know you, and the few who recognized your face questioned why you had returned at all. They cast wary and judgmental gazes at you and when you tried to influence their thoughts of you with gentle waves of comfort, your attempts were thwarted.

They were hardened and suspicious, irreparably damaged by the nightmares they had seen, and no heavenly powers could change that.

You we’re lucky, though, that a few you did get paired with fed you enough information for you to piece together what happened over the last few years since you left, not just the past few weeks.

You packed boxes of clothes for families who had been displaced with Patty Fischer, one of your old coworkers from Bradley's. She vaguely recognized you—she'd been a cashier while you mostly stocked the floor—but she'd been glad for a friend.

Patty told you the widest array of information—loose lips and all—but the vaguest.

The StarCourt mall fire, the satanic massacres...about how a devil really had risen from the depths of the earth to destroy their town.

"All the stories were true," she sighed. "But the nightmare's almost over...we're just left with the aftermath."

You dug through rubble with Mr. Richardson. You left recovered bodies for another team to handle—to burn or bury, you didn't quite know—and took discarded weapons along to a stockpile in the square in an old wheelbarrow. You learned that his brother had been one of the victims of an accident at the Hawkins Laboratory and his niece died avenging him in the battle against Vecna.

"He had his armies, but so did we," he chuckled sadly, wiping tears from his eyes. "My niece...she gave them the fight of her life. And of course we had our hero, Jane Hopper. Shame about her and the chief. Those bats gave us a fight though."

Bats?

Mostly though, you worked with Dustin. He was eager to ask you questions—the real reason he wanted to work with you, you were sure—so you made a game of it: an answer for an answer. He started. With two questions actually:

How had you survived the tunnels and where had you gone?

And you answered him truthfully. You had crawled out...and then laid low for a while before leaving town altogether to help the next people in need.

"Who else needed help? Did you find gates to the upside down anywhere else?" he shot questions at you rapidly.

"Woah woah," you held your hands out. "Rules are rules. My turn."

"Fine," he conceded. You tilted your head and pointed at his shirt.

"Hellfire Club."

"That's...not a question," he curled in on himself defensively. "What about it?"

For both of your sakes, you knew you needed to start with...maybe a gesture of good faith...familiarity. The only thing Dustin knew about you was...well, that you could help, that he could rely on you, even if he couldn't trust you yet.

You needed to prove you were here for a reason, and not just to play some heroic game with the town's very real lives.

"I have one of those shirts." You gave him a soft smile.

"No shit!" He dropped the box in his hand and clapped his hands together. "You went to Hawkins High? You were literally under our nose this whole time?"

"No," you laughed at his enthusiasm. "Well...no. I dropped out of school before I came to Hawkins the first time around, but my boyfriend was the one who introduced me to DnD and I even played a game with them. Which is why I had a shirt."

"Who was your boyfriend? Gareth? You're his type, hero adventure girl."

"Oh my god, no. Robbing the cradle; Gareth was my little buddy. No...uh...don't know how old you are...or how taboo his name might be around here but...Eddie...Eddie Munson was my boyfriend."

It was like a record scratch; Dustin blanched and stared at you wide eyed. Like he had seen a ghost.

You suddenly felt bad.

"E-Eddie?" he repeated the name. "You were..."

"Hey, no, like I said, I'm sorry. I know he's dead...but I didn't know if people still thought..."

"No he was my friend too," he interrupted you. "He...people...I mean after...you don't understand. Nobody does, really. He...he sacrificed himself...saved a lot of people. He saved me. When...Vecna first attacked Hawkins...people blamed Eddie for killing those kids but he did whatever he could to stop Vecna from escaping the Upside Down. And the Gates still opened but...but he helped us stop Vecna."

The two of you went back and forth for a while, continuing questions and answers.

Dustin regaled you with some stories about Eddie but kept it heartfelt and funny instead of sad. You’d been surprised and a little guilty to hear that he had flunked senior year again after you left but you melted at the way Eddie never ragged on the kids for having long distance relationships when his own smoking hot girlfriend was in Chicago.

You heard about the Upside Down and Vecna, about the creatures from another dimension, Eddie's sacrifice, and the Gates that had yet to be closed.

He had the decency to avoid telling you how Eddie died, but considering everything else...you knew it wasn't peaceful. You were still grateful.

In return, you told him stories about your travels. More than you had really told Mary Victoria because he was a kid and could do with something fantastical in the midst of this tragedy. Not everything, but things you felt comfortable exposing him to.

The demon who had possessed a bride in New Orleans, the time someone had trapped a hearth deity in Cádiz and had used them to burn the homes of their enemies...

"And then someone tried to reanimate a bunch of bodies for their own..." You waved your hand to find the right words. "Underground boxing league. I don't know."

"Zombie boxing!" He was in awe, cherubic face alight with joy; it was easy to see why Eddie would have been fond of him. "That would be very cool; I would pay to see that."

"A lot of people did."

"I mean...imagine you knock someone's head off and they just keep fighting."

"In theory, ok...it sounds cool," you agreed. "But it's the means that someone uses to get there."

There was a holler from someone across the square about breaking for lunch. Perfect timing too as the smoky haze from the fissures—the Gate—began to meld together with the rolling cloud coverage of an impending storm.

Everyone around you sighed in relief and took off towards the tent. Lunch would provide a much-needed respite.

"Heard that we've got turkey sandwiches today."

"Ol' Tim's being real generous with the supplies."

"Let's just get our strength up before it's feeding time, you guys," someone piped up as they pushed past the crowd. "You don't gotta run fast...you just have to run faster than the other guy."

That seemed a little concerning though.

Your mind raced to connect the dots as you followed the others to the mess tent.

Feeding time...running...bats...the gates still open...the nightmare almost over...but not over yet...

"Dustin," you turned to your new friend as you were handed your lunch. "What...what are they talking about? Running..."

He avoided your eyes, and instead turned to look for a place to sit amongst the volunteers. You kept talking as you followed him to a small card table at the corner of the tent.

"I hit something with my car on the way into town. It was a demodog, I think. If the gates are still open, are creatures still crossing over and attacking people?"

"It's...complicated," he answered hesitantly and took a bite of his sandwich.

"Explain it to me then. Vecna's gone...do you just...have no way to close the Gates?" you asked. "Because I can—"

"No!" He shouted mid-mouthful, and your eyebrows shot up in surprise. "It's...it's not that. Vecna might be gone, but that's not the only danger that's in the Upside Down. You could try to close the Gates...but...but Kas would just open them back up again."

"Kas?"

You hadn't heard that name before today, you were certain, but for some reason, it seemed familiar. Scratched something in the depths of your memory that you couldn't quite place your finger on.

Your stomach churned with uneasiness.

It wasn't that you didn't like not knowing something. It was that you knew it and it evaded you. And every second you failed to remember, someone could be in danger.

"Yes," Dustin swallowed and gestured for you to eat as he wove the tale. "He was Vecna's right hand. You see, Vecna couldn't cross the Gate without his spell being complete, so he sent Kas as the general of his armies until he could. To cause as much destruction in Hawkins and try to go after our friend Max. She was the key to finishing the spell.

"Kas came from our world, just like Vecna, but the Upside Down changed him too. Vecna offered him power in exchange for his loyalty, and he let Kas control the army. When Kas crossed back into this world, he started...remembering his human life, feeling remorseful. And he betrayed Vecna."

"So he could get his life back?" you questioned.

"When the battle was over, he tried to get all of the creatures back into the Upside Down and found that...he couldn't cross back to our world himself. He's stuck there."

You really tried to understand; you had heard of transformations like this before...distantly. They mostly occurred after someone had died. If Vecna had been left to the Upside Down to die...and the Upside Down really was some living, breathing dimension, Vecna's anger was what fueled him as a vessel for this power.

But once he was gone, and Kas was left...if Kas had regained some form of his humanity...

Then why was he stuck?

"And that's all he wants?" You needed reassurance. "To get back."

"Yes."

"And he can control these creatures?"

"Yes."

"So why is he still sending them to attack Hawkins?"

Maybe Vecna's influence wasn't gone after all, maybe you were dealing with some kind of vengeful, undead spirit who didn't realize he was actually dead in the first place.

You considered ways to deal with the undead. Burning their bones, some kind of exorcism-adjacent rite, banishing them altogether...

You could do this. You could handle it and close the gates and then Hawkins would be safe again.

"Because he's hungry," Dustin finally answered, his words weighing down upon him so much that his shoulders sagged as he said them.

Your stomach dropped and your body went cold with dread.

"Excuse me?"

You didn't mean to sound as grave as you did but...hungry?

The two of you had just been talking about zombies and reanimated corpses and all manner of creatures. He didn't think to bring this up before?

"Ope, I think Steve's calling me!" He ignored you and started to stand from the table. You were hot on his heels and grabbed his wrist to stop him. Everyone left in the tent still eating stopped their chatter to watch the spectacle.

"Dustin, what do you mean hungry?" Your eyes darted back and forth between his, willing him to tell you the truth. "What is Kas?"

Someone screamed from outside the confines of the tent and you both jumped in surprise.

“Everybody inside! Go! Run!"

The other volunteers who had been resting immediately got to their feet and began to flee; tables and chairs were tipped over, plates and food discarded, abandoned, and squished underfoot.

"We need to go!" Dustin grabbed your wrist and pulled you out of the tent into the chaos that had erupted in the square.

It was a cacophony of noise; people running and screaming, hiding.

"Arm yourselves!"

"Hide the children."

"Run, run!"

You dismissed it at first, the looming grey storm cloud in your peripheral vision, as you were dragged and Dustin spoke a mile a minute about finding Steve and Nancy and getting people to safety.

Then the cloud got closer.

And you realized it wasn't a cloud at all, wasn't a storm.

It was a swarm.

You stopped in your tracks and watched, for the briefest of seconds, all while Dustin yelled at you. A hundred bats led by three massive anthropomorphic winged creatures with sallow skin and claws. Even from this distance you could see the way their jaws opened unnaturally wide and revealed mouthfuls of razor-sharp fangs.

"What the hell is she doing just standing there?" Steve's voice reached your ears. You glanced back to see that he held a baseball bat with nails pierced through the wood at the end, while he handed Dustin a makeshift spear.

They weren't planning to run, they were planning to fight.

Alright. You could fight.

"What's going on?" Mary Victoria skidded to a stop by your side, out of breath from wherever she had been. "People started running, no one told me what was going on...and what the fuck is that?"

Mary Victoria, however, could not. And you were not gonna get your new friend killed right off the bat.

"Demobats," Steven and Dustin said in tandem.

"Vampires," you corrected them. "At least the big three are."

"Vampi—are you kidding me?" she huffed a breath of disbelief. "I said! I said vampires when we were in the car. Does this mean I'm psychic then? Is that my power or—"

"Now might not be the time to debate about that, Mare," you argued. You pulled the car keys out of your jacket pocket and slapped them into the palm of her hand. "Go to the car. There's a knife in the glovebox; lock yourself in."

"But I can help," she protested. "I can get the knife and stab some bats. How hard could it be?"

"Trust me, these suckers are hard to kill," Steve told her. "Leave it to the experts."

"Experts? It looks like you made these things in your garage," Mary Victoria scoffed. "Come on! I can help!"

As you watched them bicker back and forth, you failed to sense the imminent arrival of the attackers. Your eyes didn't sweep over the square quick enough to see the first of the bats—the ones most eager to feed—divebomb and begin their assault.

A resonating BOOM sounded off behind you and you swiveled on your toes to find a very ticked-off looking Nancy with a sawed-off shotgun in hand, muzzle smoking; she quickly reloaded and took a few pot shots at bats as they flew past in search of prey.

She turned, aimed directly past you and shot one out of the air as it was about to take a swipe at Steve, who had the good sense to duck before he got his head blown off too.

"What are you doing just standing here?" she yelled and cocked the shotgun. "Run. Hide. Fight. Do something before you get yourselves killed!"

Dustin and Steve ran into action, as well as several other volunteers who decided to take the defensive approach. And as the vampires and the remaining swarm of bats descended on the square, you snapped at Mary Victoria and then pointed at your car in the distance.

"Go!"

"Fine!" she scoffed. "But where are you gonna go? You don't have a weapon!"

"I am a weapon!" you shouted as you bolted down the street.

This wasn't the first time you'd fought an onslaught like this. Maybe not exactly like this but...close enough. You were pretty handy at throwing a punch, and it had been useful once or twice in a pinch, but that didn't help unless something was already on top of you. Your first actual experience in a fight had been an infestation of disgusting infernal spider-like things that had decimated a small town in West Virginia. Like something out of Tolkien's wicked imagination. You had used your abilities to draw fire from the core of the earth to burn their nests.

You had wondered then if Eddie would have been proud of you; you hated spiders, he always had to kill them for you. You couldn’t even stand to listen to him read about them in the Hobbit.

This would be a little trickier. Your adversaries were aerial, and even if they got low enough for you to strike, there were too many innocents in the area for you to do anything useful.

The vampires themselves would be the worst to deal with though; there were only so many ways you could weaken them, let alone try to kill them. Which would be ideal.

How could they conveniently leave out the fact that vampires plagued the town?

Shy of spending the time to dig through your trunk for maybe your grandfather's revolver and maybe a wooden bullet or two, you were left to rely on something a little less conventional here. The wheelbarrow full of discarded weapons was still beside the recovery area and you immediately skidded to a stop beside it to search for something suitable.

There were handguns without bullets, a few makeshift weapons like a machete made of a broken, sharpened street sign, which probably wouldn't help unless you got close enough to decapitate one of the vampires.

Because the bats might be a nuisance, but the real goal here was to take out those vampires.

You snagged a pocket knife from the bottom of the wheelbarrow then—

"Bingo!"

—you came across a dingy old crossbow and a hip quiver full of wooden bolts.

Not a stake, but good enough in a pinch.

"How many times in a girl's life can she be grateful for a small town hunter and their cache of crazy weapons," you asked out loud as you loaded a bolt into place.

Surveying the square, it was easy to tell this was not the townspeople's first rodeo; there were several bats down already, Dustin and Steve were back to back, only separating when something swooped at them, an array of people with slingshots and even an older woman with firecrackers and a wicked throwing arm.

You were grateful to find that Mary Victoria had barricaded herself in your car, especially once you saw small clusters of bats feeding on the bodies of those who were either too slow, too sure of themselves, or simply didn't have luck on their side.

Nancy, however, tried to play savior.

She ran to the aid of one of the downed bodies and used the butt of her shotgun to dislodge a few bats before shooting a few others. She knelt at the person's side and tried to offer some kind of aid—find a pulse or staunch the bleeding—but you knew it was too late.

Her gallantry made her lose focus and awareness of her surroundings. You felt it though, the tremor in the air around you as powerful wings beat several times. Heard the lustful, hungry breaths and the clacking of teeth that begged to sink into flesh for a meal most decadent.

You trusted your instinct; you took a breath to center yourself, pivoted on one leg, and pulled the trigger. The bolt soared true and pierced through the wing of the vampire. The unholy screech that echoed from its mouth as the pointed tip ripped through fragile skin and blood vessels was ear-splitting, as was the resounding crash as it lost velocity and skidded upon impact with the ground, spraying everything in the vicinity with dirt and gravel and chunks of dead grass.

You knew it was beginner's luck, and somehow still not good enough; you also knew you weren't gonna get another chance quite like it again. Especially as the massive creature recovered and turned its sights on you.

There was a moment as your eyes met and the vampire stilled unsettlingly. You willed yourself to break eye contact with their pure-black sclera and roam over their form.

Cascading locks of burnished gold hair, a demonic face with distinctly feminine and otherwise sweet features. Its skin was sickly pale, and unnaturally elongated bones practically protruded from the stretched dermis, with clawed hands and talons for feet. Modesty protected by strange garments made of a leathery hide and...the tattered remains of a cheerleading uniform.

Fear rarely got a hold of you anymore. Not like it used to. You'd stared in the face of danger many times and lived to tell the tale. To say that you were immune to it was incorrect; you simply didn't have time to panic right now. You could break down later, when the realization of how close you came to your own demise hit you; you always did.

Still, a lump formed in your throat as you observed the vampire. As it extended its wings, its injured skin stitched itself back together unnaturally, and it gave a few experimental flaps to ensure it was healed enough to fly.

It licked its lips enticingly and shot you a feral smile with its massive, razor sharp fangs proudly on display, and then rocketed back into the sky.

"Fuck," you hissed.

That was the look of something that viewed you as a threat and accepted the challenge.

That was not good.

“I had it handled,” Nancy scowled at you as she got to her feet.

“That’s a funny way to say thank you,” you quickly recovered and told her matter-of-factly, which earned an even more scathing expression as she reloaded her shotgun. "You need to know when something's a lost cause. If they're already on the ground being fed upon, it's too late."

"It's never too late," Nancy scoffed. "If I took that approach, my friends would have been dead ten times over already. Even if it's futile, I still need to try."

You glanced past her and loaded another bolt into the crossbow as quickly as you could, before aiming past her to fire at an incoming bat. Although you were aiming for its wing, trying to achieve something similar to what you did to the vampire—because at least the bats stayed down when you injured them enough—the bolt pierced through the mouth of the bat and tore through the back of its head, killing it instantly.

God damn, ok you really weren't great at this.

"At least trust someone to watch your back," you told her in the interim.

She reluctantly nodded and the two of you attempted to work in tandem.

You covered each other as you reload your weapons, communicated constantly about what you saw and didn't see. It was a little clumsy, sure, but you still were able to keep yourselves and others safe as they ran for cover.

At first the swarm focused on the sparse group of people who were out in the open—the vampires created distractions so the bats had the opportunity to strike by ripping doors and shutters off their hinges, overturning parked cars with the strong grip of their talons—but the opportunity to feed became too sporadic. They'd already picked off the weaker few and lost a significant number to the defense efforts.

You thought that it would be the opportunity for them to turn their attention to the skeletal buildings and every other nook and cranny that their feast might have hid.

Instead, they seemed to vanish.

The square was suddenly silent, bats and vampires nowhere to be seen. The sky was still hazy and swirling with storm clouds and smoke alike, but not one adversary darting across the ominous grey canvas.

Not even a single screeching cry or flap of wings to alert you to their possible presence.

"Did they leave?" you asked Nancy. It wasn't over...you knew it wasn't over...but wishful thinking and all.

Maybe something nice could happen for once in your life.

"No..." she narrowed her eyes and did a quick strafe to check behind you. "No, they're too hungry. They haven't attacked in an entire day, which was why we thought it would be safe to come and do cleanup."

People started emerging from their hiding spots and Steve yelled at them to get back inside.

"The square is pretty defensible," she continued. "Especially after the battle with Vecna. But they have a hive mind. They can communicate with one another. Even if a swarm is slaughtered, the entire legion of beasts waiting in the Upside Down experiences it through the connection. They know our tactics, which means they get crafty when they're ready to feed again."

"If there's a legion in the Upside Down, maybe they're waiting for backup." It was an easy assumption for you to make.

"No, it would take too long. Their best bet is to regroup, lure us into a false sense of security, then attack again."

"So they're coming up with a plan," you muttered. "And I'm sure Kas is a master strategist."

Nancy's expression immediately morphed into one of confusion.

"Wh-what did you say?" Nancy stuttered. "Did...did you just say Kas?"

You started to answer when a sharp, burning pain tore through your shoulders. You dropped the crossbow at the unexpected jerk of your body as you became airborne.

You watched as the distance between you and the ground rapidly increased and the people in the square below were immediately besieged by bats and vampires alike. You turned your head upwards and saw the vampire you had injured just minutes ago carrying you up and up and up.

She looked down at you and laughed wickedly, tightening her talons painfully as she did so. She spat and hissed at you through her fangs.

"Don't you want to fly angel?" she cackled and flapped her wings harder.

Panic shot through you; there was nothing around, nothing to ground you, and the pain that ripped through you was distracting enough to prevent you from focusing on your power.

Then you remembered the pocket knife that you had stashed away, and you strained your arms to shove your hand into your jacket to grab it.

You cried out as you flipped it open and reached up to rapidly slash at your captors ankles. An otherworldly monster, sure, but an achilles tendon was still a weak point that hurt like a bitch when sliced clean.

One talon released its hold on you, then the other, and then you were in free fall.

You briefly thought that the cushion of air, the weightlessness of it, was nice.

Freeing.

But it wasn't a long fall and the earth caught up with you quickly, and when you did impact the ground, it wasn't the ground at all; it was the hood of your car.

The already-cracked windshield fully shattered and the jagged edges of glass cut through your clothes and into your flesh. Mary Victoria screamed as all the wind was knocked out of you and it took a second for you to get it back.

"Are you fucking with me right now?" She got out of the car and yelled at you. "Wait in the car Mare! It's safe in the car! Bull! Shit! Oh god, oh god, you're bleeding!"

"I'm fine," you groaned.

You were not. You were hurt and you were pissed off.

"Fucking vampires in fucking Hawkins and no one says anything and I let my guard down for two god damn minutes," you grumbled to yourself as you slid off the hood and got back on your feet.

"Do you have a first aid kit in the trunk or something with all of that other shit?" She immediately went to the back of the car to search for something.

You did a quick assessment of yourself as you stood there; something in your leg twinged and you felt...maybe a little sloshy inside. Ok you could deal with that. But you bit your tongue on impact, and that was...probably the most annoying thing.

The icing on the cake.

"Don't worry," you insisted. "As long as everything important is still inside of me, I'll heal."

"Heal?!" She peeked out from behind the propped trunk lid. "Excuse me, what do you mean?"

"Blah blah, heavenly light, blah. Were you not paying attention to anything I said during the drive?"

"Yeah but I thought you meant other people, not yourself. How long will it take because there's still vampires flying around if you didn't notice," she gestured outwards. "They kinda need you at your best here."

"Even my worst is better than nothing." You joined her at the trunk and grabbed one of the knives.

"Not a crucifix?"

"Not gonna work unless they look directly at it for an extended time," you explained. "Which is kinda hard with them flying around. So we either stake them through the heart, or we cut it out of them."

Mary Victoria nodded and held onto her own knife a little tighter with a quick "ok I can do that, I think."

"Stay close to me," you commanded. "I'll keep you safe but...I might need you to help me keep them down while I do the dirty work."

Mary Victoria bit her lip but agreed.

You rushed back to where you had been taken—Nancy was nowhere to be found and you momentarily applauded her for listening to you and recognizing that you were a lost cause. The crossbow, thankfully, wasn't broken, but your impact with the car did break some of the remaining bolts you had in the hip quiver.

That just meant you'd have to make the last few shots count.

If you were able to hit the vampires wings like you did with the first one, you would be able to strike...you just had to get them on the ground and then—

"Ok this is dangerous and all," Mary Victoria muttered beside you, as though speaking in any tone above a whisper would alert the swarm to your presence. As if you weren't standing in a wide open space. "But this is actually really cool."

"What?" You shot her an incredulous look.

"I mean don't get me wrong, I'm...quite possibly shitting myself right now, but—"

"You have the worst timing known to man," you told her earnestly.

"I get that a lot," she nodded. "Is it always like this?"

You noticed movement behind her and pushed her behind you so you could strike; one bolt took out two demo bats.

"Pretty much."

"Do you think that Steve guy thought I was cute?"

You turned to give her the most scathing look, the words shut up Mare right on the tip of your tongue. But when you turned, she was grabbed.

One of the vampires—one with dark curls piled high on its head—did a nosedive and tackled her to the ground. The two of them skidded on the pavement and Mary Victoria squirmed desperately to get out of its grasp.

A serpentine tongue slithered out of the vampire's mouth and swept down Mary Victoria's face and neck, and she let out a blood-curdling scream that echoed over the ruins around Hawkins Town Square.

The vampire, though, countered with a hiss-like laugh, and something deep inside of you burned. It wanted to play with its food, wanted to laugh? You would give it something to laugh about.

You quickly reloaded a bolt into the crossbow and fired—any shot good enough to draw attention away from your friend and onto you—and the arrow embedded itself deep in the flesh beneath the shoulder joint of its wing. The vampire jolted from the force and thick, black blood began oozing from the wound.

It rounded its attention on you then, Mary Victoria still pinned beneath its legs, and roared ferociously. Its fangs were disstended, dripping blood and spraying spittle, as the guttural sound burst from the gaping maw. It's jaw...wasn't even unhinged, the way it hung; it was practically detached, the weight of it pulled at the weak, stretched flesh of its cheeks.

As if it could scare you with sounds and sights alone.

Pathetic.

You should have paid closer attention.

Should have used the divine sense that was natural to you to feel the approaching danger.

Should have just been a little smarter than Kas—who no doubt was gunning for you now that he knew you'd be a thorn in his side—and recognize a trap when you were in one.

Claws grasped your still-wounded shoulders and sharp teeth sunk deep into your neck. One of the hands moved to your jaw and held it with an iron grip. It tilted your head in a way that would give it easy access to its meal as it pulled mouthful after mouthful of your life-force from you.

Your vision blurred—already affected by the previous injuries and blood loss—and you knew you didn't have long before you succumbed to the effects of being drained.

You breathed heavily and fumbled with the knife that had been tucked into the hip quiver along with the half-broken crossbow bolts. You stabbed at the hand gripping your chin; the blade broke through fragile metacarpals and tore through the other side, through its palm, and grazed your chin.

The vampire released its grip on you and its teeth retracted from your neck as it howled in pain. You took advantage of the release to spin and drive one of the splintered bolts deep into its chest, right into its heart.

You watched with sick, victorious fascination, at the way the mottled, paper-like skin gave way with the force of your strike. The muscle and sinew tore and as the wood pierced the most-vital organ, it burst in the most satisfying way. A gush of blood, both pitch black and vibrant red, sticky grey mucus, and sickly green bile.

You'd never heard of a vampire doing that before when it was staked.

As the vampire's body crumpled and folded in on itself and collapsed at your feet, the air began to ripple with cries. Infernal, unholy screeching reverberated around you as the vampires and bats alike felt the death of their brethren. The vampire that had attacked Mary Victoria practically howled.

The overwhelming beat of wings began to sound off and you watched as the swarm regrouped over the square. The residents of Hawkins—both the ones who had been defending against the swarm and the ones who had gone into hiding—began to filter back out into the open and your heart was in your throat.

Because if this was their opportunity for the creatures of the Upside Down to avenge their friend, it would be a massacre.

You mentally prepared yourself for the attack, body weak but still able to channel any available power into some kind of defensive wave that could burn through them all if necessary.

Instead they dove in a funnel formation, straight for the Gate.

You felt the pulse of otherworldly energy that was released into Hawkins as they ripped through the membrane that separated the two worlds, and you were blindsided by a sense of longing that surged through it.

Yearning...desire...hunger.

You were confused; it was so strong. Overwhelming, even.

Was that Kas?

Or the Upside Down itself?

As soon as the last bat crossed over and the membrane sealed, the feeling was gone, and the only thing you felt was a bone-deep weariness and the pain that coursed through you.

You finally succumbed to the effects of your injuries and sank to your knees weakly. You had no choice but to stare deeply into the blank eyes of the vampire.

Mary Victoria called your name and got louder and louder until she was at your side. Her hand grasped the bite on your neck and held it steady to stop the bleeding. Dustin appeared on your other side and asked if you were ok or if the bite would turn you into a vampire...

"You're the only one who's been bitten and lived."

Except...you truly wondered if this even was a vampire.

The body was both...bloated and emaciated all at once, limbs bulging and elongated with skin that pulled and stretched over fragile tissue and bones. Its ribcage practically protruded outwards, like it had been pried open at some point and then the skin knitted itself shut atop it.

The hair was the only vibrant—the most alive—thing about the creature. Short red curls that had been tousled in the wind.

Aside from the strength while it was still...alive, if you could call it that, and the thirst for blood...you didn't know for sure that you could call this thing a vampire. It wasn't like anything you'd read or heard about from the other Knights.

It wasn't quite like the other two vampires though either.

"What is it then?" you asked yourself out loud.

Mary Victoria shushed you and told you to keep your strength, but you could already feel yourself healing.

Other voices began to overlap hers though.

"She killed one!"

"He'll send them in droves now that one of his brides is dead."

"At least we stood a chance before."

"Enough!" Nancy shouted and the group went silent. "That's enough!"

"I don't understand, isn't killing one of them a good thing?" Mary Victoria questioned.

"Uh, you'd think so," Steve piped up. "But...no one's killed one of the Brides before."

"It's not one of the Brides," Nancy yelled at him and crouched in front of you, on the other side of the body. She looked at it with soft, sad, practically heartbroken eyes. "It's Barb."

“If you've been through hell on earth. You would understand that the people you see are more dangerous than the devil you haven't met.” - Ojingiri Hannah

Next Chapter: Crucible

[lboogie1906]

Ambassador Charles R. Stith (August 29, 1949) is a businessman, diplomat, former educator, author, and politician. He is the Chairman of The Pula Group, LLC. He is the non-executive Chairman of the African Presidential Leadership Center. He established and directed Boston University’s African Presidential Center. He presented his Letter of Credence as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US to the United Republic of Tanzania. He served as the Ambassador during the traumatic period after the bombing of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam.

He received an appointment to the Faculty of the Boston University Department of International Relations and taught a course on Africa and Globalization. He retired from Boston University. He was on the Advisory Committee of the Office of the US Trade Representative and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of American Ambassadors. He is the author of For Such a Time as This: African Leadership Challenges and Political Religion. He is the Senior Editor of the annual African Leaders State of Africa Report and author of many articles, which have appeared in such publications as the African Business Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Chicago Sun-Times.

He is a graduate of Baker University, the Gammon Theological Seminary, and Harvard University Divinity School (Th.M). He is the founder and former National President of the Organization for a New Equality.

He was one of the architects of the regulations redefining the Community Reinvestment Act.

Before heading ONE, he was the Senior Minister of the historic Union United Methodist Church in Boston. He was an appointee to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has served on the National Advisory Boards of FannieMae and Fleet InCity Bank, the editorial board of WCVB-TV, and the boards of West Insurance, Inc. and the Wang Center for Performing Arts, among others. He is the recipient of several honorary doctorates. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #omegapsiphi

[dragonstepp]

Cummittees for we older folks who are liberal and interested

I like the idea of communties, especially for we older folks.

I was born in 1940. My mother married my dad in 1938, after I was born, WW II started, my dad moved us to Los Angeles where my dad tried to join the military and join the war, he was not allowed in because of his wearing glasses, and me. We moved to Las Vegas, a brand-new town building up out of the desert and near Hoover Dam, where he was an architectect and builder, and helped to build Las Vegas out of the desert floor. My sister was born there in 1943.

My dad was getting known as a builder, and a great help to building Las Vegas. He also build a building to be used by the Church of Christ, which was my mother's religious leaning. After WW II was over, in 1946, men started coming back home, including several uncles, my mother's brothers, and my mother told my dad she wanted to take me and my sister back to Corpus Christi, TX, to see her brothers, my uncles. I remember well the train trips from Los Angeles to Corpus Christi, and the many servicemen that were with us. Yes, they loved this little girl of about 5 years old.

After a while, my mother refused to return to her husband, my dad. I am aware that my grandmother was on my side, felt sorry for me as I was definitely my daddy's girl, but of no use. My dad, as a man, was taken up by a woman in Las Vegas, and being a man during those days, was caught up with her. As my mother has informed him that she was not going to return, and Joyce tricked my dad into believing she was pregnant (it was learned later that she was incapable of having children), my mother allowed my dad to get a divorce. The church threw him out. My mother that he bitched that he would not even send her her iron. My sister and I lost all our toys and things because of the loss of our home. We did own our home in a place called Huntridge. I remember the house and the toys and the tub of water when both Patti and I got the measles, then the mumps, one after the other. I remember it all.

Moving forward a many years, my mother married a second time, then they had two children, and Patti and I were left behind as being not his children. In the meantime, we had been led to believe our daddy didn't want us any longer. Patti was young enough not to remember him, but I wasn't, and I was definitely a daddy's girl.

My sister caught fire in 1957. She was burned badly (she did survive, but that is a different story), and my mother contacted my dad. I never got over him, though I was angry because I thought he didn't want me, and after I got out of high school, I moved to Las Vegas to meet and be with him.

Joyce, his second wife, was not a friend of mine. One of her sisters had a daughter Sharon, who taught me how to smoke. I got my first job in Vegas, and lived a pretty good life. But I started drinking. I had my first child in 1961, went back to Corpus, had my step-father theatren to rape me because I had a child out of marriage, and I went back to LV with my daughter. I worked in some of the casinos as change girls, started drinking, and ended up at a dude ranch outside the city where I was a barmaid and a cook, and lived there. I was really drinking by then, had an abortion, had a second child, and moved back to CC in 1964. By then the 60s movement was in full stride. JFK had been murdered, and I was trying to raise two children by myself. I had a good job, but my drinking was out of hand, I gave my two children up to forage, and took over as management of a merchant seaman's bar in late 1964. During the year of 1965, I gave up my two girls for adoption.

Drinking alcohol was my choice during the next few years. I was all involved over the war in Vietnam, drinking, sleeping around, and moving from place to place in 1968. I had had a child in 1967, gave it up for adoption, moved with a couple of friends to Biloxi, MS, got pregnanted one more time, moved to Wichita Falls, TX, had a seond child in 1969, and finally moved back to Corpus Christi, where I tried to find work. I got there, but I didn't stop drinking, and eventually found another job, which I lost because of my drinking. I went to work as a change person, stopped drinking in 1973 because of the alcohol, moved to Austin in 1975, and got real work.

I was at the University of Texas for well over 22 years, and also worked in radio where I programmed Celtic music, and because of the p roblems of women being discriminated against women, finally went into early retirement in 2003. I did some cleaning of apartments for a friend of mine, but when it became difficult for me, stopped, and moved into assisted housing in 2009.

I served on the Board of Directors, put up with a lot of changes of the apartment complex, went suicidal (fourth time over the years), got psysological help in 2019, had a nervous breakdown in 2020, then Covid came along which kept me penned up, wrote my autobiography. In 2021, I started drinking again. I drink my scotch every day, not enough to get drunk (though that happened once because of some music and memories coming together) and drink a few drams every day. I was going to quit smoking, but decided I don't want to do that.

I fight all the time for my rights as a human being, as a woman, for fairness for all. I am a liberal Democrat, support a couple of organizations that help people, and keep up with politics, to my sorrow. I have found Acorn TV and British shows. It keeps me calm. I take an antianxiety pill, in spite of mixing it with alcohol. I have overcome suicide attempts, a life with liars about my father, been able to have him as a friend before he died in 1984, and never been in love or tied myself to anyone. I am independent, survive by my own wits.

And yes, I fell in love with Sam because he is the man I might have been able to survive with half a lifetime (mine) ago. And no, I use common sense, and I know he can not ever be in love with me, and in fact, does not even know I exist. There are reasons why he moved me so much,

If these communities are brought to reality, I know there are other folks in my age group who would be interested. I expect to live a long time. In fact, I have overcome so many things that I believe I must be immortal.

I love this site. It has people who believe as I do, that everyone is equal, has the right for their sexuality, their lifestyle, their habits, their hobbies, their caring for the general population. I love you all, so don't judge me for loving Sam.

Could have used him when I was his age that he is now, and I am well beyond.

Comments and criticisms welcome. But be careful unless you have walked in my shoes.

Carol in Austin

[michaelgeary]

nicholas  galitzine  appears  as  michael  geary  ,  a  twenty  eight  year  old  ex  -  playboy  who  found  god  when  the  party  ended  .  currently  residing  in  la . pinterest .

full name : michael laurie geary jr. date of birth : december 13th , saggitarius . family composition : loretta geary , michael geary sr , kady (26), renee (22). birth place : toledo , ohio current residence : los angeles , california current occupation : pioneer priest , model and orchastra first violin

the story :

tw: divorce, emotional abuse, religion.

michael  had  the  misfortune  of  being  the  first  born  child  of  a  socialite  who  had  never  wanted  a  son  .  from  the  very  moment  that  he  was  born  ,  his  relationship  with  his  mother  was  fractured  and  even  though  his  father  was  an  ever  present  figure  ,  he  never  seemed  to  become  that  attached  to  his  family  .  in  succession  ,  his  sister  kady  was  born  just  as  his  father  was  making  a  greater  breakthrough  in  his  acting  career  and  both  children  were  cared  for  in  majority  by  nannies  or  other  paid  staff  who  did  dote  on  them  but  never  quite  hit  the  mark  of  a  mothers  love  .  michael  knew  he  was  not  loved  by  his  mother  ,  her  own  disposition  to  isolation  and  coldness  quite  clear  but  still  ,  he  always  wondered  if  the  hatred  she  seemed  to  have  for  his  father  was  the  reason  .  the  family  was  never  on  an  even  keel  ,  the  parenting  of  his  father  becoming  lesser  as  he  became  more  famous  and  soon  the  youngest  geary  child  ,  renee  was  born  . 

michael  was  getting  older  when  things  began  to  change  even  more  ,  his  desire  to  torment  his  mother  only  growing  because  of  her  irrationally  strict  rules  .  he  would  do  anything  to  catch  her  attention  where  as  his  sisters  were  younger  and  more  submissive  to  the  idea  of  perfection  .  as  their  mother  began  to  accuse  their  father  of  affairs  (  that  were  never  substantiated  )  ,  she  took  over  the  family  home  and  ousted  michael  sr  out  beginning  a  six  year  legal  battle  which  would  see  all  three  children  forced  to  take  the  stand  and  express  their  wishes  .  their  father  was  famous  now  and  their  mother  could  not  stand  it  ,  she  spun  lies  to  the  press  at  any  opportunity  in  the  hopes  of  clinging  to  her  own  moral  high  ground  .  it  didn't  matter  to  her  what  she  put  her  children  through  ,  only  that  she  wont  the  battle  and  got  her  own  way  .  the  family  courts  had  never  seen  such  a  high  profile  contested  hearing  and  finally  ,  they  concluded  that  all  three  children  should  remain  in  the  care  of  their  father  ,  michael  sr  ,  who  tried  his  best  to  pick  up  the  pieces  .  and  ,  if  anybody  cared  for  the  truth  ,  he  was  a  fantastic  father  to  three  very  trying  children  throughout  the  rest  of  their  lives  ,  never  once  turning  his  back  or  offering  coldness  as  their  moth  had  .  unfortunately  ,  it  was  too  late  for  michael's  unbalanced  psyche  . 

by  the  time  that  michael  and  his  family  moved  to  lincoln  city  ,  he  was  13  years  old  and  his  father  duly  retired  from  the  limelight  to  become  a  full  time  parent  ,  remarrying  much  later  .  he  enrolled  his  children  to  st  marys  catholic  high  school  in  the  hopes  that  maybe  religion  would  be  a  guiding  star  in  their  lives  and  it  appeared  ,  at  least  sort  of  ,  that  michael  thrived  .  he  was  not  a  religious  boy  but  he  did  enjoy  the  idea  of  greater  power  and  that  he  could  get  his  hands  on  some  of  it  .  he  certainly  didn't  turn  into  a  disciplined  child  but  he  did  grow  up  into  a  teenager  who  could  be  charming  ,  interesting  and  dynamic  .  on  the  other  side  of  that  came  his  love  of  dramatics  ,  the  uncontrollable  over  the  top  reactions  that  he  had  to  not  getting  his  own  way  well  notes  .  he  never  knew  where  to  draw  the  line  and  his  instability  was  sometimes  mistaken  for  manipulation  .  perhaps  ,  in  his  way  ,  he  could  be  manipulative  ,  attention  seeking  and  prone  to  unreasonable  lies  to  build  the  appearance  that  he  so  desired  but  who  didn't  tell  a  few  white  lies  ...  right  ?   

after  graduation  and  the  unfortunate  incident  that  michael  sorely  pushed  to  the  back  of  his  mind  as  if  it  wasn't  life  or  death  ,  he  spread  his  wings  and  flew  all  over  the  united  states  of  america  on  his  fathers  trust  fund  ,  making  the  most  of  what  life  had  to  offer  .  his  family  would  not  hear  from  him  for  five  years  and  when  they  did  ,  they  would  find  out  their  son  and  brother  had  now  devoted  his  life  to  becoming  a  man  of  god  (  supposedly  )  .  he  didn't  mention  all  the  money  he  had  blown  on  partying  ,  getting  high  and  everything  in  between  ...  and  now  his  image  ,  pristine  in  some  ways  and  completely  false  in  others  ,  is  ready  to  return  for  a  second  comeback  .  although ...  he  may  not  be  accompanied  by  the  holy  spirit  . 

connections :

christopher wilder : michael  was  generally  popular  in  high  school  and  knew  chris  ,  he  would  have  never  thought  twice  about  his  fate  until  the  night  of  the  dare  .  there  was  no  grand  relationship  there  and  michael's  return  is  very  much  something  he  recognises  as  part  of  a  greater  calling  ( or so he will say ) .

open to anything !!!!! i wld like a couple of exes , any gender , traumatic endings . & maybe an unrequited best friend situation , either direction :-)