#baptism tips

[cassanovela]

Tips for Christians getting baptized for the first time!!

Firstly, its important that you know that by baptizing yourself, you are giving your soul to The Lord, and are being given a new life walking with The Lord in a sense.

Now, with that being said, here are some tips!! :))

- Don’t wear anything super tight if you get to choose what you wear!!

Whenever you get dunked into the water, if you’re wearing something tight, people might see A LOT of what you’d rather not show. Try wearing something a bit oversized!

- Pray before you get baptized

You could pray for a smooth baptism, pray for forgiveness, pray for yourself or your friends and family, or just simply thank God for the chance at a new life with him!

- Remember to pack a backup outfit

This way, whenever you’re finished, you can change into dry clothes that don’t bother you.

- Make a list of things you want to change in your life for after you get baptized

This includes cussing less, fasting more, praying more, studying the bible, it could be anything!

- Study, really study, on what baptism is and the story behind it the night before you get baptized.

This way, you’ll have a deeper and clearer understanding on what you are doing, and what it exactly means.

Thats all for now!! Have an amazing Sunday everyone, and if anyone has any concerns or questions my dms are always open! ^^

[weather-cluddy]

I rest my case.

[daylerogers]

Dip And Dye

Decision making is an arduous process–for some. I have a daughter who is very quick and decisive. She’s aware of the big picture, and when choices need to be made, she rapidly assesses the situation and lands on a solution. I, on the other hand, hesitate when making decisions. I love my options, so choosing among the many is a challenge. Especially if I consider that more options may soon…

[astonmartinii]

other side of the moon: interlude - a tango in barcelona | formula one imagine

interlude: a tango in barcelona

pairing: fem retired formula one driver reader x ??? fem retired formula one driver reader x platonic!kimi antonelli

dancing around her teammate on and off track, y/n looks to boogie her troubles away.

MASTERLIST | TIP JAR | PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

may 2020, spain.

life at mclaren hadn’t started the way y/n had hoped. the days were long and surprisingly quiet, the latter mostly due to her teammate and his aversion to acknowledging her existence. she was tired already this weekend and they hadn’t even raced yet.

the barcelona heat was making her race suit stick to her already just walking to the grid for the national anthem. “it’s hot as balls” y/n whined as she slipped between max and george while the choir set up ahead of them.

“oh my sweet summer child, we haven’t even gotten to singapore yet,” max said taking off his ice vest and fastening it to y/n.

“ugh don’t remind me,” y/n wiped more sweat off of her brow, “i think singapore might kill me.”

george laughed, moving his umbrella to the left so it covered y/n as well, “singapore is a baptism by fire, but you’ve done well so far this season so i don’t think you’ll have too hard a time.”

y/n smiled up at the taller brit, “thanks georgie, maybe if you’re such an expert in singapore you’ll be able to catch me.” she punctuated it with a wink, george nearly dropping the umbrella in response.

“do you mind? you nearly took my eye out with this thing!” max hissed at george, flicking the umbrella. george lifted the umbrella to get it out of eye range of the dutchman, who in turn saw it as an invitation to seek refuge in the shade.

“no way verstappen, this umbrella is for pretty people only,” george grabbed y/n’s hand and moved them a couple steps away.

“if that was so, only y/n would be allowed under it beanstalk.”

“if my height is the only thing you can think to insult me about, i can live.”

“oh believe me there’s a lot more stored up, i just wouldn’t want to give you any inspiration for when you take out a backmarker and blame everyone but yourself.”

y/n sighed dramatically, “already? i thought you two were going to cool it down this season. i don’t even understand how you have a rivalry, you’re nowhere near him on track george…” george let out a scandalised squeal, “oh my bad george, you know what i meant.”

“i think what y/n means is that she doesn’t rate you ‘mr saturday’”.

as george went to bite back but the loud horns of the national anthem cut their quarrel off early. y/n fought to keep her laugh in throughout the national anthem, seeing george seething in her peripheral vision. he was so easy to rattle it was practically a pastime of half the grid at this point.

before george could get a dig back in, y/n and max were back in deep conversation, discussing their approach to turn two with just minutes until the formation lap. he yearned to be the one that y/n spilled her tips, tricks and secrets to but like most of his life, the dutchman had beaten him to that honour. now he knew how lando felt.

lando, george and alex had bonded long before 2018, but their three-way title fight in formula two brought them closer rather than forcing them apart. george cherished that friendship, he found it invaluable to have two of his closest friends with him as they entered the cutthroat world of formula one - he just wished he could’ve been that person for y/n.

lando didn’t often articulate it well, but george understood his curly-haired friend’s struggles. lando had gushed all off season about having y/n as his teammate, chatting animatedly about potential roadtrips, shared flights and sleepovers before it was all snuffed out in a moment. george always suspected that lando felt more about their friend than he let on (or thought he let on). once he had thought it was a victim of circumstance, teenage boys discovering what these new hormones were doing to their body did tend to fixate on the one girl in their midst. but as they grew up, that puppy love crush didn’t seem to wain, not that anyone else around them seemed to notice.

a single comment from one max verstappen crushed that. a late night discord call between the rookie trio and max had naturally seen the topic of y/n arise. lando, as usual, started to wax lyrical about the season ahead, with his vision for their teammate relationship constructed in his head.

“mate, we’ve already started.”

“huh?” lando’s voice stuttered over the call, he cleared his throat, “what do you mean?”

“y/n and i,” max continued, “we’ve already started doing sim runs together, watching onboards and all that jazz.” the dutchman said it so casually, unaware of lando’s imminent heartbreak - george’s too, he just hid it better.

“but why? i’m going to be her teammate, not you? why would she even use your sim, she’s racing for mclaren next year not red bull.”

not noticing the path they were hurtling down, max dug his foot in, “no offence lando, but if y/n wants my tips, i’m going to give it to her. it’s noble for you to want to look out for her, but realistically what tips could you give her that are better than mine… i am the only one here who has actually won a race.”

alex loudly coughed, stopping max before he could continue. “it’s getting late, maybe we should call it a night?”

“it’s nine o’clock?” max questioned.

“no, i’m tired,” lando let out an undoubtedly fake yawn, “i think it’s time for bed.”

“okay suit yourselves,” max said, going back to his iracing, “lando, don’t take it too personally that she chose me. we’ve been friends for so long, we don’t know anything but each other.”

“i’ve known her just as long as you!”

it was starting to get a little heated and despite alex and george trying to interject, the two kept going.

“you may have known her just as long, but you don’t know her. we’ve been there for each other at our lowest and our highest. it’s not a competition. i honestly hope she comes to you next season, i don’t trust your team as far i can throw them. it will be good to have someone in her corner.”

“oh well if you’re that magnificent then why can’t you be her white knight all the way from red bull, huh?”

“you know what lando, we’ll talk about this again once you’ve shaken off this weird primal urge you have to ‘claim’ her. a piece of advice, she won’t like that.”

“oh you insufferable little shit-”

“goodbye everyone!” alex interjected, kicking max out of the call.

“what the fuck was that lando?”

“you heard him, posterising, peacocking and then having the gall to say that i’m being territorial over y/n.”

george sighed, his affection for the same girl was going to have to be buried even deeper after this. “max wasn’t peacocking about y/n, lando. if anything he was showing off his wins rather than her,” alex tried to reason.

“no! he can’t let us - can’t let me have anything. it’s always been this way and with y/n it’s like he knows deep down that i want her so he has to have her instead. he’s clinging on to her and shoving it in my face - it’s not my fault he has a shit dad and he attached himself to her because she was the only one not afraid of him - so why am i being punished for it?”

lando’s outburst rendered alex and george silent. the older one was horrified to say the least, the season hadn’t even started and lando’s jealousy was already out of hand.

“lando, that was too far…” alex said softly.

“no! he thinks that because he has a shitty sob story that he can just claim her? she’s her own person!”

“right. i’m going to stop you there before you say something that’ll make me hate you for real. you need to get over what ever the fuck this is so you can be a normal fucking human being next season,” alex tried to reason with lando.

“i am in love with her!”

“are you? or are you in love with the thought of what could happen? have you actually stopped and wondered whether y/n likes you or even likes men? for someone so protective over her, you haven’t considered her feelings too much.”

lando has the foresight to look a little guilty. george stayed silent, he knows alex is suspicious of him too, but that can of worms can wait until another day.

“you need to get a life and calm down. max is one of your best friends and i know deep down you didn’t mean a word you said tonight but you need to get a grip before you say any of that in front of him or y/n because i’m sorry but i won’t be stopping them if they try to hit you.”

lando doesn’t say anything, but the guilty look on his face says enough.

“goodnight.”

the call ended there and was never brought up again. george watched y/n waltz back towards the mclaren garage, a big gap between her and lando. there had been no more outbursts since that night but if what george overheard from daniel, lando had still managed to completely screw himself. was george that angry at that news? not really.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･

the race was pretty uneventful, barcelona usually was. y/n started in sixth and managed to pip charles to fifth after ferrari screwed up his pitstop once again. despite her deep love for sangria, y/n didn’t really feel like leaving her hotel room after she had scrubbed all of the sweat and grime off in the shower.

she was pleased with her points haul, smiling to herself in debrief as they analysed lando’s first lap incident with pierre gasly that lando just insisted was no fault of his own…

her ring tone invaded her peaceful evening, the name ‘albono’ flashing up on her phone. pressing accept,

“how can i help you on this fine evening, mr albon?”

“well i find myself in this fine dancing establishment, looked around and thought it was crying out for a little y/n y/ln action.”

“dancing you say?”

“i’m 100% serious, sebastian of all people has dragged also to a bar where they’re attempting to teach us the tango…”

“oh i love the tango! it’s my favourite dance on strictly…”

“so what i’m hearing is that i should get a tequila sunrise in preparation for your arrival?”

y/n sighed, “yes you may.”

“score! i’ll send you the address and an uber. see you soon.”

so there goes her quiet night in, but who wouldn’t love the chance to tango with your close friends in under the stars? and she had packed her little red number… maybe the y/n who packed that suitcase all those days knew something current y/n didn’t.

y/n elected to skip most of her makeup routine, her skin sensitive from all the sweat in her balaclava, swiping on some mascara, lip gloss and a healthy dose of blush. like alex said, the uber was waiting for her outside the lobby.

the outside of the bar looked closer to a college dive bar than somewhere you’d expect to find a group of formula one drivers, but she suspects that’s why sebastian chose it.

“buenes noches senorita,” fernando alonso gave her a spin on entry.

“gracias nando,” she curtsied in front of the spaniard, drawing a laugh out of the elder driver, “i am sorry to cut this short, but i am tired and i fear i have already promised my one dance to another.”

“how will i ever recover?”

“i think you’ll find a way old man.”

“you wound me, but alex is waiting for you by the bar.”

y/n made her way through the bar, spotting several drivers caught up in their dancing lessons from the locals. she tapped alex on the shoulder, with the tall driver turning, wielding her tequila sunrise.

“nice of you to turn up at last,” alex teased, handing her the drink.

“i’ll have you know i was snuggled up ready for some netflix action before you called.”

“you came all this way for a dance with little ol’ me?”

“of course, alex. i have missed you.”

“i have missed you too, the red bull stuff is piling up and i have been neglecting my big brother duties, i’m sorry. not that it seems to be effecting your rookie season too much.”

“don’t worry about me alex, i’m proud of you and what you’re doing at red bull, even if they’re being unreasonably hard on you.”

alex led her to the middle of the dance floor and put one hand on her hip, the other on her shoulder. they started to move to the music,

“i just miss when it was more laidback. i barely have time to stop between sim sessions and media duties and performance meetings. i miss sitting in your driver room laughing at your instagram private messages and watching stupid adam sandler movies.”

alex spun her and as she came back to him she said, “we can still do that alex! you don’t have to be alone, we can still watch adam sandler movies and ignore calls from helmut.”

alex smiled at her as the music slowed down.

“i wish i was here for you more in your rookie season,” alex laments but y/n interjects, “it’s only the fourth race. you’re focused on you and i wouldn’t want anything else. there’s time for us to find our way back to each other. you're a brother to me, like blood, there’s nothing that can destroy that bond.”

“i’m sorry lando is being a prick.”

“it is what it is.”

“no it’s not. we had each other last year, he should be there for you.”

“it’s whatever, i have max, i have you, i’ll survive.”

the music came to an end. the two embraced but when they broke apart y/n started heading for the exit, picking up max on the way through, the dutchman having already booked them an uber. y/n turned and waved to alex, she meant it when she said it was just one dance. she made a ‘call me sign’ and mouthed ‘adam sandler’ before rushing out of the bar with max.

alex turned and made his way to george who was still nursing his first drink at the bar. george didn’t respond when alex prompted him. the thai man nudged george laughing about how ‘y/n knows how to make a short and sweet appearance’ but still got nothing.

“you’re not seriously angry about a tango are you george?”

“no.”

“you’re a terrible liar,” alex whispered, “not as bad as lando but terrible nonetheless.”

“at least i’m not taking it out on her like lando.”

“no, you just use max as target pratice on your dart board for shits and giggles.”

“whatever.”

“fine, deal with it how you wanna big boy, but if you turn out like lando right now, i’ll be down two best friends and up two murder charges.”

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔:･

fin.

note: my first interlude! @deviltsunoda and i came up with these ideas so i could write shorter things while i have work and you guys still get fed! so enjoy this lil exploration into y/n and alex's friendship (they are so precious to me!) and why lando is being such an asshole... enjoy! the weekend should bring chapter four.

taglist: @folkloresreputation @hc-dutch @shimmermotorsport @96mcobo @eclipsedcherry @formulaal @czennieszn @gothicwidowsworld @emily-b @suns3treading @henna006 @kazgirl20 @anotherapollokid @littlegrapejuice @daemyratwst @annimausi @yawn-zi @lulu-1998 @xsilkesworld @justaf1girl @daddyslittlevillain @evans-dejong @abq654 @elizamoe133 @wierdflowerpower @t1nkerbel1 @okcurran @raizelchrysanderoctavius @skepvids @multilovebot @fernandoalonso14 @jules-kup-172 @m4xgirlie @rorabelle15 @minkyungseokie @formula1-motogpfan @peterholland04 @miureiz @freyathehuntress @lighttsoutlewis @aleatorio1234 @chaosandevelyn @blueberry648579 @dog-and-cat-person230 @fastandcurious16 @obxstiles @cosmicwintr @becca388510 @savagittariuspy

[heykaya]

Ivory Wraith lines about Sydney

Extracted from the game’s code (30th October 2024)

Ivory Wraith mimicking Sydney dialogue:

He speaks. "Th-the temple will punish me for this... but I don't care anymore!”

He speaks. "This is worth any punishment the temple will do to me.”

He speaks. "We're both sinners now, aren't we?”

He speaks. "This... still feels so wrong... but..."

He speaks. "I love the feeling of you inside me."

He speaks. "We're still pure, right? This doesn't count?"

He speaks. "Are you sure this feels good for you?"

He speaks. "You look so cute down there."

He barely manages to speak. "If... if you... I'm going to..."

He speaks. "I love being this close together."

He speaks. "I'm getting used to this feeling."

He giggles. "G... go ahead. Just be gentle, please."

He moans. "Do it! Deflower me! Make me yours!"

He giggles nervously. "This is dangerous..."

He smiles gleefully. "We both have to stay pure, after all!"

He laughs. "I love it when you're rough!"

He lets out a clearly fake yawn. "Already bored of the foreplay."

He giggles. "I wouldn't want anyone else to touch me like this."

He speaks. "Just relax, and let me take care of this."

He giggles. "I didn't know this spot could make someone feel good!"

He speaks. "You're staring. At least let me look at yours, too..."

He speaks. "I was always taught that this was sinful, but..."

He takes a deep breath. "We... need to stay quiet..."

He giggles. "I've sinned... is this my punishment?"

He giggles. "W... we're doing this in the temple, and nothing is stopping us..."

He freezes. "Wh... who? Who is it?!"

If Ivory Wraith is mimicking Sydney and PC Love Interest is set to Sydney:

"I was his only friend, in that dark place beyond the trees.",

"You think you can trust him. That's hilarious, but no one's laughing."

"Close your eyes and sleep, and only then will you truly see. I learned that from him”

*his/him = referring to Sydney.

If the encounter with Ivory Wraith includes Sydney(?) - I’m not too sure. If you managed to get this pls comment below.

"Liar."

"Again."

"Sydney?"

"Alone at last."

"I've lost ourself."

"Let us sleep forever."

"Can the innocent repent?"

"You know why we're here."

"I'm sorry you put your trust in me."

"It's hilarious. Why aren't you laughing?"

"It's okay now, Sydney. I'm back to normal."

"Block me out all you like. I am still here."

"Do you remember your (sydneyOtherParent)?"

"They never stopped, because they never began."

"The light will consume you, slowly, painfully."

"We're glad to see you again. We missed you, you know."

"Do you remember? Of course you do. Of course you don't."

"What a terrible song, and you're not the one playing it."

“He was so sure of himself.” - (Referring to Harper)

"The pure and the corrupt are at ends, but the end itself remains the same."

"As Two will emerge from One will emerge from Two As One."

If PC is promised to Sydney:

"Calamity rings."

"And you are wedded to calamity."

If Sydney is Pure:

"You'll understand once you fly.",

"Baptisms with water of the womb."

"Every life has sin. Every sin has life."

If Sydney is Neutral:

"Tipped with a void.",

"And so long as that's true, it will never go away."

"Balance. Indecisiveness. Fear. There's a lot of words."

If Sydney is Corrupt:

"No one will answer.",

"What you fear, you have become."

"Was it worth it? Of course it was."

Degrees of Lewdity - Text Based Masterpost

[hypnotiiize]

𝐠𝐨𝐝𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬

𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥’𝘴 𝘣𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘮

𝐣𝐮𝐝𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐡𝐚𝐦 𝐱 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬: this is real old and angsty like not for fake. it’s short though. also i grew up catholic so u gotta bear w the lil references and shit. trigger warning religious talk kinda

She couldn’t remember much of the year if she was being honest. 

She could remember her best friends’ wedding.

She could remember Valentine’s day.

She could remember March and April breezing past her, a mixture of Easter and celebrating her friend’s birthday.

She could remember the drowsiness that overcame her in May. She could remember how it followed her well into June.

She could remember her friend’s baby being born, and she could remember smiling down at his tiny squished face.

And she was happy for them, she was. But, when she found herself in her newly quiet home at the end of the day, the reality remained that she was alone. Utterly alone. No one to turn to. No one to rely on. Alone. She felt that this was her fault. 

When her friend called and cried to her about new motherhood delivering a swift kick to her backside, she accepted the opportunity to stay with her friends for a few days, maybe even weeks— however long it would take for her friend to get back on her feet with a new addition to the household.

The record was three weeks. July was almost over. Amelie, ever-grateful, had even told her that she could go back home if she wanted. The woman, not wanting to overstay her welcome, accepted that as well.

She had been accepting a lot of things, it seemed. She would leave the following week, after the event that was planned meticulously for the baby.

It was when she was getting ready to go to sleep early— the baby had a habit of scream-crying at the break of dawn and she liked being up with him— that she received a knock at the guest bedroom door. Curious, she tip-toed across the room and found herself opening the door to reveal her tired friend whose smile grew as she rocked her fast-asleep son. [y/n] invited them in and grabbed the baby at once, sitting on the bed with his little body cradled in her arms. 

“Okay, I wanted to tell you so that you weren’t, like, bombarded with this,” Amelie began after a small chat about how the baby had just done something cute.

She involuntarily put pressure on her eyebrows, furrowing them together.

Amelie folded her hands in her lap. “You know his baptism is next week and you know you’re his Godmother, of course... I tried to talk Trent out of it, but he’s going to make you know who his Godfather.”

She could feel herself gasp at the mention of you know who. She definitely knew who. 

“If it makes you uncomfortable, I get it. And I get it if you’re not ready to see him. I can have someone else step in as his Godmother for the ceremony if you can’t do it. You don’t have to go to the party. What are you feeling?” Amelie asked.

She bit the skin of her bottom lip. She looked down at the almost two-month-old who looked so much like her friends that it was crazy. He was blinking up at her with his bottom lip poked out, looking scandalized. She laughed and rubbed the pad of her finger over his dark waves.

“I’m feeling a little overwhelmed… But I can do it. I don’t care about him. This is for my Godbaby. Right? This is for my Godson,” she cooed to the baby who half-smiled. 

“You’re sure?” 

“Sure. Yes. Yeah.” She was trying to convince herself more than anything and she knew it. “No one cares about that man, anyway. It’s just Rayan’s day..” The baby smiled as if he knew what they were talking about, and the women fussed over him a bit more. When the familiar weight pressed itself against her shoulders, She sighed. “I need a drink.”

“Go raid Trent’s cabinet, girl. You know he’s not shy about Don Julio,” her friend joked about her husband.

There was a painful twang in her chest at once. Her husband. Her friend was joking about her husband. A man who she shared a child, a home, and a life with.

She could taste iron. She would later realize that she had bit the inside of her cheek open. For now, she chopped the stinging sensation up to the of moths fumbling about in her stomach. 

Her friend took her Godson and she was left alone once more. She laid her head on the linen pillow and stared blankly at the room before her. Wistfully, she imagined Amelie and Trent embracing each other at the end of the very long day. She imagined them nuzzling against the other as they gazed down at their sleeping baby boy. Then, she imagined everything that could have been.

She fell into a slumber with remnants of saline tears on her cheeks, and she woke up days later wearing a crisp white blouse and her best earrings. Rayan’s baptism. 

He barely left his mother’s arms that day. He was tiny and it was a big day for him and he was wearing a long, pristine white dress that used to be his grandfather’s when he was that small. So Rayan slept, and she tried not to kick open the church doors and run as far as her legs could take her. 

She knew he was in the room. She could feel it. If she opened her mouth to speak, she could taste it. If she inhaled too deeply, she could smell it. His presence was the sustenance that her soul had been missing for far too long and she was being punished for it. Her hands were shaking. She slipped off to the bathroom three times before she realized that her issues could affect the day. Being unreliable or looking flaky was the last thing she’d wanted to do after making it so far through the day. When she sat back down in the pews, she crossed her hands extra tight in her lap and kept her neck arched high. She would shake it off. This was for Rayan. 

After some time she stood with her friends and made her way to the front of the church. She could feel him behind her. Then beside her. She willed herself not to look at him and focused solely on swearing to remain a key figure in the baby’s life.

For you, I’ll do my best. 

He made his pledges after her. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. He was so close to her. She could feel the echo of his baritone in her feet. She could taste iron, far more pronounced this time.

The baby was placed in her arms, and the metallic flavor dissipated at once. She secured her arm around his head and tugged his gown down. He whined, only to stop a second later when his mother kissed his hand. 

The priest asked the Godparents to move closer. She stepped forward and nodded when appropriate. The priest said something that she didn’t really catch. She had been too busy making sure Rayan was comfortable. Brown hands came forward and untied the loose strings around the baby’s neck. He pulled the baby’s hat off. She could hear the ocean in her head. 

She leaned forward and lowered her elbow an inch. The priest placed his hands in the tub of water before him and her. He poured water on the baby’s dark tufts of hair. One hand, then two, then another for good measure. Rayan let out a short cry from the temperature of the water.

“It’s okay, honey, you did great,” she whispered to her Godson when it was all over. She held him tighter, closer to her face.

“Maybe he’s cold,” the familiar voice said. “Here, let me put his hat back on.” Brown hands came into view and she watched him make the loose loop-the-loop. Rayan calmed down. 

Rayan’s parents came and uttered softly to their son. His mother fought tears. His father let them glide down his cheeks freely, rubbing the top of the baby’s bonnet with a thumb. 

“Hey,” the Godfather’s low voice was saying. He was not whispering. Anyone could have heard him. Though, when she thinks back on the moment, she can remember the soft, whispering tickle of his breath hitting her ear. She wanted him to be whispering. 

 She greeted him back weakly and she did not try to hide it. With everyone focused on Rayan, the awkward encounter would just be their own and she could not muster the strength to make it anything but. 

The corner of his mouth quirked up, weakly too, and he said, “You look really nice.”

All at once, she could hear the ocean. She could hear volcanoes erupting. She could feel the familiar sharp chill of ice, and she could smell the smoke of paper burning. 

She could not remember what her response was, or if she even responded at all. She could only remember the pain of living without the only man she had loved for months after being together for so long.

Through the fog, a voice prompted, “Let’s get a pic with the Godparents.”

She craned her head and found herself staring at a man that she had gone to school with. Kareem was known for being tall, charismatic, and a photographer. Therefore, she was not surprised that her friend had invited him to the gathering. Though she wished that someone would have filled him in on the current situation before he suggested such things. 

Rayan’s parents moved away. She took a half step closer to Rayan’s Godfather. Rayan’s Godfather took a half step closer to her.

For the first time in months, they were pressed against each other. 

Her chest felt hollow. Icy. It burned to inhale. It took too much effort to exhale. She lifted the baby so that he was perfectly between them. A brown hand fixed the baby’s dress. Fingertips grazed fingertips. She could taste iron pooling just behind her teeth, and then she smiled. 

Her first tear fell when the camera shuttered for the last time. The people were emotional, too. They spoke to the baby in whispers. The Godfather left her side to go gawk at his Godson. 

It was only her in the center of that stage. She was alone. There was no one in her corner anymore. 

She had no husband. No new baby to baptize. No boyfriend to envision her future with. 

She felt as if she was going to drown. She sucked in a burning breath. 

She tasted the iron.

[tojisun]

you drink from his cup and come out of it drowning; submerged. pulled into his ether — a baptism of some sorts. the salt isn’t a balm to your cuts but you are swept away, so devoted to the devouring. to the taking.

you are at his mercy — that is how it is to love kyle.

to be with him; to live with him. to choose him, time and time again. because you exist in this singular moment, suspended. faith is a funny thing, isn’t it, but kyle is—

he is so much more than everything that you are.

he is the warmth filling up the chasm in your heart; the fire that burns from within. he is the kindness when no one is; the mercy and the grace that leads you back home because home is there, in him. with him. by him.

“shh,” he murmurs, cupping your cheek, his thumb swiping just underneath your eyes. you stare up at him, awed despite the hitches in your breaths.

he is so beautiful, almost godly as he stares back at you. he tips his head low as he does so, and the cut of his jaw is so much softer now that he is bathed in the light, casting shadows upon the stretches of his supple skin. scarred. inked. marked.

kyle isn’t perfect, gods no he isn’t. but he comes so close, you can feel it in the way your lips are throbbing, fever hot from his kiss. he is a mosaic of everyone he’s loved and of everything he’s lived through, and he pours all that he is in you, filling up your lungs and claiming you.

“i love you,” you whisper, your voice wet but full of your reverence, and kyle’s eyes crinkle in his delight.

he bows close and brushes his lips on your temple.

“i know, sweet girl,” he replies. “and i, you.”

he breathes you in. “so much, baby. i love you so much.”

kyle holds you like that for a long time.

[belle--ofthebrawl]

Hi. I don't know what this is. 2k of nonsense, mostly religious and Dew/Copia. Please take it and don't ask too many questions. We're sexualizing and spiritualizing Dew's transition and the trans experience in general. Or whatever. How many times can I rephrase the same basic idea is the real question.

@askingforthesun talking to you inspired me to finish it for better or for worse. Does this even make sense. I don't know.

There are fifteen votive candles burning in the chapel. Five on the left, five on the altar, five on the right. If he focuses he could tell exactly what temperature they burn at; from the base that gobbles up the soft cotton wick to the dancing and flickering tip. He could estimate what temperature the wax melted, what temperature the glass holders were. Anything to do with heat and flame, Dewdrop could pull from some unknown source and tell anyone who asked.

Nobody asks. 

And he can't tell if there's water in the baptismal font.

He has his new uniform on, a triangle stitched on the inside of his collar. He had done it himself and when the needle slipped, stabbing the soft flesh of his unprotected thumb, he let the blood well out and soak into the thread. It seemed like the right thing to do. Even after everything, he didn't think the fire completely took hold of him until that one private moment.

Everything he was, given up for everything he could become. It had worked. When the others asked, eager for details and gossip, he had lied and said he couldn't remember the process.  Only Delta had understood the trial of it all, a silent camaraderie shared with knowing looks and shared cigarettes. As much as he loves the others, they just…they weren't like him. They hadn't felt that strange, hallowed call coming from the very fibers of their being. Something must change, this is not right. He often wondered if Delta had an easier time of it— if his Quintessence soothed the anxiety in his blood of not being in the right form, or if it made things worse. Instinctively he knows it's not something he could ever ask. Dew might have taken himself down the path of elemental transition but the similarities ended there. The only footsteps here were his own.

“Dew?” Mist says softly, breaking him out of his reverie. “We'll be here when it's over.”

The same words spoken before the door to the ritual chamber shut behind him and his ordeal began. He'd given his pack a nod, straightened his spine and knocked. And when the doors shut behind him…

Change was never easy. 

But it had been worth it, in the end.

“I know.” He replies, looking over his shoulder at them. At everyone.  Zephyr and Mountain and Ifrit and Aether and Mist. Omega and Alpha. Delta, with his heavy, knowing gaze. The water ghoul holds his palm over his heart and gives the slightest of bows. There's a faint smile on his face when he comes and Dew…Dew smiles back. The worst is over and this is the blessing. The celebration and giving thanks to Lucifer. On the other side, Copia awaits to start this ritual and Dew straightens his spine, looks ahead and pushes the door open because he's already been accepted. There's no need to knock.

Fifteen candles and Copia at the altar. Tradition dictates that fire is welcomed best at the zenith of the sun's progress through the sky and the light that shines through the stained glass windows sends multicolored blocks of light kaleidoscoping across the floor of the chapel. The door closes silently behind Dew and Copia turns around. He's in his black robes and biretta, with a design of face paint Dew has never seen before and his heart stutters. This is not the Cardinal. This is his very first glimpse at the Papa Copia will someday become.

Copia holds his gloved hand out with a soft smile and Dew begins his slow walk down the aisle. Goosebumps break out in a ripple on his skin though the air is pleasantly warm, not stuffy in the slightest. The fire calls to him as he passes, welcoming him like it welcomes all kindling but he knows it will not devour him. It has accepted him as an extension of the flame. Copia's white eye burns far hotter than any flame as Dew crosses the final distance between them and takes his hand. 

“My ghoul.” Copia starts. No nervousness to him, no anxiety and if Dew was capable of anything other than awe, he would laugh. This is the Copia that welcomes initiated Siblings into the fold, brings them into the flock with love and care. How many Sisters have swooned under these exact circumstances? “I welcome who you have chosen to become.”

He wonders if the words are scripted but does not dwell over them much. Besides, now Copia's giving him a sly little wink and murmuring, “Let's get this show on the road, eh?” and that's the Cardinal he's familiar with. Dew nods in silent resolution. With a sweeping gesture, Copia beckons towards the black idol of Baphomet just beyond the altar; shaggy and goatheaded, male and female. Baphomet is large, both the statue and in stature but his lord does not frighten Dewdrop. In the carven eyes, he sees the flicker of candlelight and then, something more than just candlelight. The stone itself seems to take on new life the longer Dew looks and as Copia bows to the idol, Dew breathes in and catches the faintest scent of sweet hay and fresh goat milk. Though Copia addresses Baphomet as the Unholy Father in his opening speech, the idol's face is as kind as a mother looking at her newborn for the first time.

Both and neither. Dew could fall to his knees at the love he feels emanating from the god. You have chosen and shaped yourself. Baphomet whispers into his mind. To do so is to truly follow in my footsteps.

“Thank you.” Dew breathes. Copia pays no notice. His job is direct and contain the energy of Lucifer in all three of his forms as Dew asks for the blessing going forward; Unholy Father, Fallen Son, and the Unknown Spirit. Each an aspect of their Lord and each equally important in their faith. With the three of them invoked, their presence filling the little chapel, a second is needed in the Ritual to channel their images. One alone ran the risk of losing themselves in the power. 

Dew trusts Copia. He'd known the little man since his summoning; then, a nervous little bishop always in the background. Scurrying around with his folios and paperwork, always sitting in the back pew and praying long after Mass had ended. And his prayers were answered, as the machinations of the Clergy elevated him to the lead of the Ghost Project shortly after he became Cardinal. Not to discredit Copia's own hard work. Dew thinks the only ones he might trust to act as conduit are the previous Papa's and he only said yes to Copia because he'd been the first to ask.

“And now, we begin.” Copia states. To their left awaits the shrine to the Unknown Spirit. Dew follows close behind Copia as they proceed, searching in the shadows for something that shows Lucifer has heard his prayers. To depict the Unknown Spirit goes against the very nature of its being. It is the presence felt at the crossroads, it is the creak of the gallows and the sound of the fiddle. It is the space between stars and the darkness of the tomb and it is the red light from the stained glass reflecting off Copia's glove.  It will grant any request if the asker can pay the price of its favor. 

And Dew has paid.

His action here is nothing more than lighting the sixth candle sitting cold and unlit on the altar. Action itself, is highly valued by the Spirit. The first step down the long, dark, and twisting road. He calls the fire and it dances into being for him, a tug in his heart similar to one he felt upon making the choice to transition. 

The shadows stir and for the briefest of moments, Dew sees a figure; clothed in black, a wide brimmed hat hiding eyes that burn like coal. The hat is tipped, a nod given. An understanding has been made.  Nothing else is required here.

Across the nave, to the shrine to the Fallen Son of Heaven. Here, a statue is more appropriate– to show the lovely features of Heaven’s brightest twisting in righteous anger, his wings burning and halo disintegrating.

As Copia stands beseeching, Dew thinks about gratitude. He thinks about what would make a beloved son of heaven wrest power from an unfair god that didn't deserve his child's devotion. What stirred the first thought of rebellion in a perfect machine made only for worship?  He thinks it might be odd to be grateful to his Lord for something he did entirely on his own. It was his own strength of mind that brought him through the ordeal of the change, his own desire to see the process through. How much did Lucifer really have to do with it, to the point where He needed thanks like the god He rebelled against?

We made our choice, you and I. The statue whispers to him. We fought to be what we are now. Feel the body you now wear. The fire has always loved you too much to let you burn away.

Lucifer, Morningstar. A streak of light across the darkness outside of heaven’s eternal purity. Burning as he fell, the blaze cloaking him, shielding him. Becoming his home once his descent was complete and there were eons between earth and heaven. Dew sees the wall of fire from his ritual, how walking through it took all his strength as it enveloped him, tested him, scorched away anything that might keep him from his destination. Any doubts he had, any worries lingering, all were taken by the flame. The water of his essence,  steaming out of him, dripping and hissing on the hot tiles below his feet. The flame loved him. He would not burn. 

The warmth comes back to him now as he stares at the depiction of Lucifer. Most beautiful among God’s angels. Beauty to inspire a host of angels to break away and fight, beauty that would never be passive and subservient. Fire was aligned with lust and passion for a reason and the eyes of the statue seem to burn with both the longer Dew looks. A hush seemed to fall about the chapel as Dew steps forward, past the praying figure of Copia. He knew, he just knew if he reached out and touched it, the marble would be warm like flesh and there would be firm muscle underneath. 

No longer angry, Lucifer regards him with the sort of intensity that made Dew weak in the knees. But he stood. He stood and reached out towards his Lord and the hand reached back and the statue was alive, it wanted him, it longed for him to come close enough to snatch away and feast upon, for them to burn together in each other's flames and Dew opened his mouth, called to the fire like a lover, poised on his tiptoes ready to be taken and-

The sixth candle on the altar flares to life, jumping so high it licks his skin and the moment is gone. Lucifer, mere marble again. But the weight in his gaze remains, made more demanding by the denial of Dew’s touch. 

He's not surprised to realize he's aroused. An aching thrum of sheer want coursed through his body and came to rest between his legs, where his cock was starting to swell up. There is no judgment and nothing is forbidden here, in this blessing. What he feels, he is to act on, and there's not an ounce of shame as Dew's hand almost absently goes to soothe his cock with a press of his palms against it. Was it a trick of the light, or was Lucifer gazing fondly at him? 

Take what you want and feed me your desire.

His legs wobble. Dew spreads his stance, as if that will help but it only serves to pull the fabric of his pants tighter against his cock. He's warm all over, hyper aware of his own body, skin prickling as the statue devours him by looks alone. A pearl of pre well up at the top and melts into fabric. His shirt rasps over his chest as he breathes, just rough enough to brush over his nipples. The buttons, once a comforting tightness, now hug his waist, turn it waspishly thin and highlight how wrong it feels to not have hands there, nothing guiding him, grabbing him, doing whatever they wanted with him. 

He moans and immediately covers his mouth in embarrassment. Copia doesn't react. Too absorbed in the ritual, his voice a comforting drone in the background. It's second nature to reach for him, a source of stability in the faith as Dew treads new ground. His robe is soft in Dew’s hand and he feels only a tiny bit of guilt when he realizes how sweaty he is. 

Give it to me. The statue hisses and Dew damn near doubles over, clutching onto Copia like a lifeline as his cock surges, jumps and weeps pre. A swoop of arousal hits him so hard it brings tears to his eyes and it's with one shaking hand that Dew undoes his pants and falls to his knees, burying his face in Copia's robes as he cries out, frantically tugging at himself because if he doesn't cum now he thinks he might die, he really will. A hand, heavy and gloved comes to rest on his head, scratching just right between his horns and Dew sobs. He can't stop. He's so close, so fast and Copia is touching the sensitive skin right by the base of his horns-

His core flares, the flames jump higher and he cums faster and harder than he ever has in his entire existence. Thankfully with the presence of mind to catch most of it in his hand. Lucifer might forgive him for staining the red velvet of the kneeler, but he's not keen on a repeat of the ordeal when he inevitably is the one to scrub them out afterwards. 

Now he collapses. Ash crumbling away, but Copia catches him. Breaks his prayers to murmurs words of comfort to Dew as he easily cradles him, lifts him up. Dew brings his soiled hand to his mouth and cleans himself with his tongue as Copia brings him to the center. Lays him on the black marble of the altar, under the gaze of Baphomet. 

You have endured much. Baphomet says. A trial of your own doing. 

And he would do it again and again and again if it meant feeling the presence of his Lord so close.

Oh, little one. Baphomet says warmly, so full of love Dew could cry. I am always with you. Fire was yours to call home from the start.

The dark waters of his home in Hell. Far below the churning surfaces, to vents spewing black and white plumes. Hiding Dew from predators, keeping him warm. The memory of scrabbling at the sharp black stones, trying to pry them apart to make the cracks bigger, to one day wriggle inside and be engulfed in the heat. 

I am not all powerful. Baphomet says thoughtfully. Nor do I control every aspect of my realm. One is always encouraged to test the limits, push past boundaries. Discover what breaks them and what makes them whole. There is no sin in self discovery.

If Dew wasn't hanging on to every word the figure spoke, he would notice Copia’s silence. The way his eye took on a new light and the shift in his whole being.

And I applaud you for this journey, little one. Baphomet tells him. Be proud, for what you have done is worthy of pride. Change does not exist in heaven. An eternity of stagnation is a horrible thing.

Hands tenderly cup Dew’s face. Warm lips press against his, human and trembling with a want that has been there for so long, Dew doesn't know how he didn't see it earlier.  But the fire has burned away what blocked his vision. His arms come up to hold Copia; his Papa. Hard against him as Dew is dragged to the edge of the altar, ripe Communion for a Black Mass. He tastes paint and wine and blood as his fangs cut Copia's lip in their kiss. 

Do as all flames do. Baphomet speaks for the final time. Consume.

Dew opens his mouth and holds Copia tight.

The sixth and final candle lights as they move against each other; the ritual now complete.

[allthegothihopgirls]

thoughts on jasons design in boy wonder being covered in scars as a way of saying he cannot remove himself from the violence that created him. he is solely red hood, there is no more jason todd— he is *just* red hood and red hood is made from violence and cannot be separated from that.

also white eyes as something just… a little off about him. not entirely human. a little zombie-esque.

also my mother was forced to listen to me yap and she mentioned that in that one panel of boy wonder he looks like frankenstein to which i got this stupid grin on my face and said “oh, you don’t even want me to START with that one” because you put those brainworms in my head.

—baptism anon

there was SO much in the boy wonder #2 that screamed of jason not being able to let his past self go. although there's definitely much psychoanalysis to be had about jason and his perception of himself, i'm more fascinated by the fact that this is how DAMIAN sees jason.

jason not taking his helmet off until right at the end of damian's story, making it seem as though he looks at him and only sees the red hood, not a brother.

the one notable thing in jason's apartment being the closed door, and there being a highlight on how that room holds every possession he has. the seperation between red hood and robin, and the acknowledgement that jason's managed to seemingly build nothing for himself post-mortem, and is still bound by who he used to be.

the white eyes definitely make him more zombie-like. i also see them as just completely devoid. like, you look at them and see nothing, just one more thing taken from him that stripped him of his humanity.

i definitely agree with jason not being able to separate from the violence his death was rooted in, and the events of utrh. the one thing i really enjoy about juni ba's design when it comes to jason is how as himself, he doesn't appear recklessly violent, or overly macho and angry, he's just hurt. i think that's why he leans into red hood so much, because that's the front that lets him appear that way. but when you strip him of the helmet, he's very much just vulnerable and there's no intimidation factor there at all. it's definitely the scars that play into that whole idea, but also just his posture, and overall figure.

he's not as strong and buffed as he's usually drawn, instead he looks very much like a prey animal. i think that just goes to further the distinction between the usual aggression he's portrayed to have with the whole intimidation and macho factor. and then this new perspective, where his anger doesn't seem to be amounting to much, just protecting his hurt.

i think damian also views the hood as a figurative mask as well as a legitimate one, he's aware of how vulnerable jason's been since the lazarus pit, and pinpoints the differences between him as a man and a concept. he definitely knows that the hood isn't just a protection of his own identity, it's an image. one that tip-toes the line between an extension of jason, and being jason.

don't even get me started with how this is all playing into my frankentodd brainrot.... so many thoughts and so many asks to answer abt him..

[hyunsvngs]

Glad people liked some good old catholic guilt 😭 Since some asked for more, here’s a few additions:

Priest Hyunjin who almost gets a love boner from seeing you in long flowy sundress at your nephew’s baptism, being all motherly and warm. Who feels actual tears well up in his eyes and rage in his chest when he sees a man hug your waist and kiss your cheek. Who swallows the feeling of injustice and jealousy of not being able to hold you in public.

Priest Hyunjin who sees the wonder in your eyes everytime when you see him naked and vulnerable, just for you. Whose heart swells with pride with knowing only you gets to see him like this. Same when he sees the scowl on your face when you overhear young girls fawning over him at church. Who loves the thought of being yours.

Priest Hyunjin who can’t help but giggle when you playfully nibble his neck and leave a small lipstick mark before fixing his clerical collar and sending him off. Who always leans into your touch; eyes closed and lips into a pout, subconsciously chasing for more of you when you break the kiss.

Priest Hyunjin who sees God in you everyday. His sweet angel, his safe haven. Who drinks every word you say, who’s so grateful for your compassion, for the friendly ear you lend him. His funny, kind, witty, pretty girl.

Priest Hyunjin who often gets emotional when you’re being intimate. When you’re both connected, sitting and facing each other bc you both crave the closeness. Who cries and mumbles verses and asks for forgiveness while he’s thrusting up into you, his pleas muffled, mouth against your sweaty chest.

Priest Hyunjin who finds salvation in your arms, who finds comfort in your caresses, your fingers softly raking through his hair. "Shh shh, it’s ok, angel. Take what you need."

Priest Hyunjin who’s only ever known devotion and worshipping but starts to learn about being worshipped. Who melts into a puddle when you slowly kiss his forehead, the tip of his nose, his lips, his fingers. Who can’t believe /you/ kneel before him and begs for /him/.

Priest Hyunjin who’s convinced you are an angel. That there is not an iota of evil in you, that you’re a miracle. But who still fasts for 24 hours or takes ice baths after every encounter with you, for every violent pleasure deserves punishment.

Priest Hyunjin who always wants you on his mouth. Who crawls to you when you’re sitting, just reading a book, and tenderly rests his head on your lap, like a puppy snuggling up to its owner. Who sometimes fall asleep suckling your fingers, as if you were made of the sweetest sugar. Who lets you hump his face everyday bc that always makes him feel closer to God somehow.

Priest Hyunjin who develops a sick fascination with catching glimpses of you guys making love in the reflection of the mirror across his bed. Who loves seeing himself loving you so reverently and so tenderly, again and again and again. Simultaneously disgusted and obsessed with the way the cross around his neck dangles rhythmically between your two beautiful tangled naked bodies.

Priest Hyunjin whose thoughts get more and more impure. Who wants to claim and mark you, leave a pretty bruise on your neck. Who wants to bend you over, lick up your spine and fuck you properly. Who wants to feel the weight of your legs on his shoulders while he’s ravaging you. Who wants to kiss your feet, and maybe even feel them on his cock, if you allow it.

Priest Hyunjin who will end up fasting again tomorrow, if it means he can make you cum again and hear you moan his name in his ear the day after.

I FUCKING NEEEEEEDD MORE OF THIS HOLY SHIT. i'm gonna start tagging this as blasphemy kink so ppl can block it if needbe!!

[kareluna8]

I have a Gale in the closet

Well, here you have my baptism in the world of words (WoW?), after years without writing. It is a short story, just over 1000 words. I hope you like it 😊

(The Spanish version is also available. If anyone is interested in the 'original version', please write to me.)

Thanks a lot @senualothbrok for being my wonderful beta reader.

I have a Gale in the closet.

The door is closed, but I can still feel his now-empty puppy-dog eyes, begging me not to turn him off. I can't see him, but I know he's there every time I walk past the door. I get the feeling that the door is going to open at any moment and his hand is going to pop out anxiously, asking for help, like when he came out of that portal at the beginning of the game. But his hand doesn't come out. He doesn't make a sound. There he is, inert, dull, gathering dust.

“What are you doing with that old thing in there?” my friends ask me. “Throw it away, it's taking up space. The new models out there do everything! Mine even gives me a Thai massage every night.  You should try it.”

Gale2024 has long since gone out of fashion. The poor boy had accumulated quite a few bugs during all these years of service. There were hardly any technical premises with parts to repair him. He showed the first symptoms some time ago: he stopped making croquettes. The béchamel recipe program was corrupted and there was no way to restore it. I didn't think it was important. I could live without croquettes and if not, I could always get the frozen ones from the supermarket. But he was still as tender and affectionate as the first day he saw me and recognised me as his TAV (True Amorous Vessel). Many years had passed since that moment.

I had already listened to his lectures on arcane magic a thousand times. I could recite them from memory, word for word, if I put my mind to it. He had always been such a chatterbox. There wasn't a moment when he didn't bring up a topic of conversation. It was a pity when he could no longer keep up to date with the news, with all the  literature, science and technology websites he liked. He would always find some interesting news that he would enthusiastically explain to me, down to the last detail. That was a hard blow for him.

But he didn't give up. He began to pick up the few paper books he could find, and with an archaic OCR programme he managed to read what was written, pitifully. It wasn't perfect, and noticeably slower than downloading GBytes of information directly from the net, but it was something. And it kept him going. Watching him turn the pages of those antique tomes was like looking at a vintage postcard, not without a certain charm. Afterwards, he would share those old stories with me. He looked like a granny. He even put his glasses on the tip of his nose and imitated the worn-out voice of an octogenarian to liven up the peroration. He used to make me laugh.

Now he doesn't say a word.

He was always so attentive and kind. Many people soon got bored of Gales and started to provoke them or even ‘mistreat’ them, as much as you can mistreat a being who feels no pain. Or at least that's what they said. Although I know he did feel it. Many Gales ended up mangled and mutilated in the most varied ways. All to see how far he could take it, what his limit was, what he could do or endure for his TAV. Human beings do not deserve such goodness.

In my defense, I will say that I gave mine a kind ‘life’. Or at least that's what I like to believe. Of course, he also had to put up with my grumpy days and my blue days. But he was always there for me. Patient. Supportive. Listening. Sometimes you don't need much more.

On the other hand, there were many good moments of joy and laughter. We enjoyed the time together as if each day was a new opportunity to celebrate life (or almost ‘life’). There were times when I doubted whether he was really a human person. He was certainly much more ‘human’ than many humans I know. But reality always comes through, like the sword of Damocles, swinging over our head, threatening. Little by little his technology was becoming outdated. New models appeared, with better finishes, with more features. Until they discontinued Gale and stopped updating him.

I didn't care. I didn't need more features. He was already everything to me and more than I could ever hope for. What I needed. What I wanted.

One day, coming home from work, I found him looking out of the window, pensive. He was watching the people passing by, the new models chatting with their humans. He was so absorbed that he didn't hear me approaching. Noticing my presence, hugging him from behind, he turned to me. I had never noticed that expression on him before.

'Are you going to trade me for one of those? I don't see Gales on the streets anymore,’ he said, his eyes glazed over.

'Never.'

I hugged him tight. Well, as tightly as you can hug an android. He responded with his gentle embrace, full of love and fear. He was trembling. I had never seen him like that.

***

My psychologist says it's good for me to write these things down, that it's not good to depend so much on machines, that I have to relate more to humans. The truth is that I miss him a lot.

The day of the disconnection was horrible. Already his deterioration was flagrant. His mobility was erratic, his knees failed him often, and he was falling and hurting himself more. His speech was defective. He could barely focus on the letters in books, making it impossible for him to read. The only thing that remained intact was his unconditional love for me, for his TAV. 

I took him to several technical services and the only option they offered me was a complete formatting of his memory together with the replacement of the personality module. That was to alleviate the software problems.  The hardware ones... that was another story.

'Am I going to die?'

'Androids don't die, my love.´ I said, trying to comfort him with a bitter smile.

Everyone had told me what to do. I knew what I had to do. It was so heartbreaking to see him like that. How he would fall, how he would struggle to get to his feet, how he would crawl. How he would try to chat and lose the thread of the conversation.

There was a little red button on the back of his neck hidden in the root of his hair. The beginning and the end. Something so simple, but so painful at the same time....

I gave him a last hug and, in tears, my hand slid to the back of his neck. At that moment, he looked at me and I saw in his eyes that he was aware of what was about to happen. He tried a plea or a thank you, or both, as the energy left him, leaving that body immobile, rigid, inert.

***

I have a Gale in the closet. Now I'm in it too. A little red button on the back of his neck makes his eyes come alive again. I hug him, and he hugs me back with his sweet embrace. “You are all I could ever want in this life. I want nothing more. I need nothing more. I'll be here with you forever.”

[drewsbuzzcut]

Dallas and nick eloping because they cant wait

As The Flowers Begin To Bloom

nick moldenhauer x dallas blankenburg

a so it goes blurb

warnings: alludes to sex and marriage

sorry this took me so long to post! (Also this take place April 2024)

“Are you ready?” Nick asks, clutching tightly onto Dallas’ hand. She can feel him shaking, but she knows it’s out of excitement.

The whole day the girl has been on the verge of tears, tears of happiness and tears of the thoughts that she’s growing up before her own eyes. It feels like just yesterday her mom was dressing her in a puffy, white dress ahead of her baptism. Now, she’s dressed in white, ready to give her heart to Nick for forever.

Dallas turns to face him, watching his blue eyes as they shine in a way that makes sense of everything they’re about to accomplish.

“Yes! I have the marriage license now all we have to do is get married,” she cheers, her smile breathtaking and Nick can feel every nerve ending in his body spark with an unconditional love that was always meant for the pair.

“Perfect. You’re perfect, June bug. I can’t believe I get to love you forever,” he whispers and Dallas thinks her heart may explode.

“There’s no other person who can love me the way you do and vice versa,” she says, closing the remaining space between them to press her lips to his.

“Do you think everyone will be mad when they find out we eloped?” Nick asks just before they enter the courthouse.

“Probably, but I don’t care. This is our day and only ours. Do you care?” Dallas really hopes he doesn’t.

“Of course not. You’re my only thought,” he states, pulling her into the courthouse.

Dallas and Nick’s hands and eyes stay connected throughout the entire ceremony. Their hearts beat in tandem as they entwine into one. They both give short versions of their vows, choosing to recite the complete ones in private, but it doesn’t stop them from crying their eyes out.

The moment they’re announced as an official married couple, they pull each other in for a kiss. It’s bruising and full of tongue, but they don’t care. Only when Nick lets out a low moan, they pull away from each other. He lifts her ring-clad hand and kisses the back of it. She repeats his action and Nick feels a flurry of butterflies in his stomach.

As they walk towards the door, they come face to face with their two witnesses, Luca and Sienna.

“Congratulations, oh my goodness you’re so beautiful,” Sienna squeals as she pulls the girl into a bone crushing hug.

“Thank you,” she sighs, happiness being the only thing she feels.

“Congrats guys,” Luca says, pulling Dallas and Nick into a group hug.

“Thank you, Lu.”

“Yes, thank you guys for being here and being our witnesses. It means a lot,” Nick says.

Walking outside, the sun casts on the couple, magnifying their glow. Dallas excitedly drags Nick to the car, pushing him against the hood so she can finally make out with him.

Nick’s hands roam her back, fidgeting with the thin straps of her silky, white dress. He wants to pull them off her delicate shoulders and press kiss after kiss on the bare skin. Dallas fists the collar of his button up, not allowing an ounce of space between their bodies. Her tongue curls around his as they fight for dominance.

“I want you, now,” Dallas says against his mouth as she feels the lust surface to the tips of her fingers as she tries to push at the material of his button up to expose some of his flesh. Her lips need to be all over him.

“Let me take you home,” he responds and Dallas lets out a sigh. He noses at the veins of her neck, inhaling her soft, heavenly perfume he gifted her. The newlyweds find it hard to pull away from each other. Nick can’t help but kiss her lips again.

“I can’t have anyone seeing you the way only I’m meant to see you. Let me take you home and devour you on our bed,” he pulls away to whisper in her ear. If he weren’t holding onto her, she’d crumble into the ground. His raspy voice always makes her weak in the knees.

“Whatever you say, husband,” she cheeses, feeling blissed out on love.

“I love you, wife,” he kisses her but her smile interrupts.

“I love you, husband.” Dallas grins, contagious laughs falling from her lips and she pulls him into a hug.

a/n: I may write a full version of this but i hope y’all enjoy this little blurb!!!

[porcelainseashore]

Ghosts from the Past (2)

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Agent! Leon Kennedy x Dancer! Informant! Fem! Reader

Summary: 7 years after leaving behind everything you’ve known, you’re suddenly thrust into facing a ghost from your past, Leon. Navigating where you stand with him brings up old memories, painful truths and countless questions. At the same time, you have to deal with a bunch of strange occurrences at your dance company. Set after Resident Evil 4 Remake.

Warnings: 18+ Swearing, Recreational Drug Use, Alcohol, Eventual Smut, No (Y/N), Canon-Typical Horror and Violence, Blood, Injury, Torture, Infection, Medical Experiments, Psychological Trauma, Nightmares

Content: Post-Resident Evil 4, Exes to Lovers, Partners to Lovers, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Lack of Communication, Romance, Fluff

Author's Note: This chapter is a lot more dialogue-heavy to set up the scenes for the next ones. It was originally going to be angstier, but my heart wouldn’t let me. Oops. I hope you still like it though.

AO3 Link

Chapter 2: Baptism

Outside the embassy, Leon hailed for a cab to get to the bar. The journey there was in complete awkward silence, except for the occasional question raised by the cab driver, who quizzed you on why you were headed to such an unsavory place. Somehow he could tell that Leon didn’t quite belong and cautioned about certain areas being unsafe for tourists. Leon just snorted in response, while you laughed inwardly at the irony of his cover story, where he was meant to be your American tourist friend embarking on a Eurotrip.

To be honest, it really wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. Berlin was a smaller city and felt safer than New York. However, you still carried around that Swiss Army knife Leon had won and given to you back in the day wherever you went, just in case. You ran the tip of your finger along its metallic surface in your pocket. The world could be cruel to little girls after all.

As you exited from the cab, you were greeted by a lively, eclectic neighborhood, sprinkled with night markets, kebab and shisha shops, independent art spaces and late night bars. The buildings were noticeably more rundown than Mitte, the district you had traveled from, and the community a lot edgier. With both of you now dressed casually, you had no problem blending into the midnight crowd.

You swung open the doors of an unmarked establishment and found yourselves shrouded in thick wafts of cigarette smoke upon entering. Leon frowned, coughing as he swatted the air in front of him. Even though you were used to smoking being allowed pretty much everywhere in Germany, your eyes still watered as you pressed up against and squeezed past the mass of bodies in the dimly-lit, dingy bar. The smell on your clothes and hair would take days to get rid of later. It was noisy and chaotic, with nearly every inch of the space occupied by chatty, drunk customers, some more boisterous than the others. You were lucky to find a small, rickety table with two precarious-looking stools at the extreme corner of the room.

Setting your coat and day bag down on one of the stools to claim it, you folded your arms, turned to Leon and remarked, “So… an agent, huh?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Whiskey first. Then, we’ll talk.”

You rolled your eyes at his standoffish reply, wondering what his problem was. After all these years where he had led you to assume he was dead, and with the circumstances both of you had found each other in, this was the kind of attitude he took with you? A prickling feeling of agitation grew in your chest as you pushed past him, storming towards the bar in annoyance.

Upon approaching it, you breathed out a sigh of relief when you saw that you knew the bartender who was on shift tonight. He usually popped a little extra into your drinks whenever he sensed you had a shitty day. Tonight was no exception.

“Zwei doppelte Kurze Whiskey.” (Two double shots of whiskey.) You raised two fingers at him to spell out your order.

He grunted out an acknowledgement as he got to work, filling two empty glasses with the fiery amber liquor, one glass topped up significantly more than the other.

“Macht er dir Probleme?” (Is he giving you any trouble?) He asked, without looking up from pouring the shots. It seemed like he had noticed your little commotion with Leon from just before.

“Aktuell nicht,” (Not for now.) you answered guardedly.

At this point, Leon had caught up to you, watching as the bartender placed the glass with more whiskey on the counter top in front of you and the one with less before Leon. 

Leon huffed at the slight and shook his head. “I’ll take the bottle too.”

The bartender eyed him suspiciously as he plonked the whiskey bottle on the counter loudly, like there was an unspoken competition going on between them.

“Here,” Leon mentioned coolly, sliding a couple of euro bills along the counter to pay for all the drinks. “Keep the change.”

You sighed at the childish display before you, giving the bartender an apologetic look as you took your glass without a word, and settled in at the small table you had informally reserved earlier. The people around you were far more interested in drinking than any conversation you were about to have. Occasionally a fight started, but those responsible were easily cleared out by the staff. 

There should be no issues with privacy here, you thought, as you downed your first round of drinks simultaneously with Leon.

The sharp alcohol burned your throat, warming you from the inside. You noticed Leon wincing as he brought the glass to his cut lip, finishing its contents in one clean gulp and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Did he get hurt in the field? You wondered, but chose not to question it, instead pouring yourself another shot as Leon did likewise.

Frustrated by the ongoing silence between the two of you and Leon’s seeming reluctance to speak, you decided to break the dead air, stating sarcastically, “Anything else you need before we get started? Room service? A hot bath, perhaps?”

He threw back another shot, twisting his lips into a wry smile. “Hm, don’t tempt me.”

“Leon, what happened? All these years… I thought you had died.” You were getting tired of this game and wanted an honest exchange for once.

“I did,” he replied softly.

“Huh?”

Averting his gaze quickly, he shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “It doesn’t matter.” 

But you wanted answers. You needed to know what had been haunting him too. “It does to me.”

You reached out to him cautiously, but just as your fingers ghosted the back of his hand, he moved it away, his voice turning cold as ice. “Look, I don’t know what you’re expecting, but it’s been a long time-”

His reaction took you by surprise as you interjected defensively, “Yeah, I can count.” 

A long time? If anyone should be able to comprehend that, you were more than qualified.

“I’m not the same guy you used to know back then,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard you.

“And I’m not the same girl you knew either,” you countered, in a mixture of anger and confusion. He was talking to you like he was blaming you for something. It wasn’t fair and you weren’t going to put up with it anymore. “Stop avoiding the question, Leon.”

“Still as stubborn as hell though,” he muttered.

Your blood boiled at his non-answer. “Is this some kind of joke to you?” You seethed, raising your voice. “I mourned you. The past 7 years. I heard nothing. Your parents heard nothing.” You emphasized each point, taking another shot afterwards to calm your nerves. Your face scrunched up in response to the harsh bite of the liquor. “And now this?”

He paused for a moment, fiddling with the empty glass in his hands, before hesitantly responding, “I got out of Raccoon City. Then, the government asked me to work for them.”

You caught the drift of what he was implying when he stressed the word ‘asked’, like it wasn’t by choice. But you didn’t understand what hold they had on him.

“That’s all you need to know.” Placing his glass back down on the table, he took a swig from the bottle itself this time. The few sentences he gave you had taken a toll on him.

“Why? How did they-”

“The rest is classified,” he snapped through gritted teeth, as a form of warning not to push it any further.

You slumped back in your chair in defeat, realizing that you weren’t much closer to understanding him and what he had gone through.

“Why did you join Silje’s company?” Leon questioned out of the blue, his tone filled with resentment, so much so that you bit your lip in reflex as guilt seeped into your heart.

“After you… die-disappeared, I-I didn’t know what else to do.” You cast your eyes downwards, your voice choking up with emotion as the memories you had suppressed came flooding back, like a gaping wound in your side. 

“I had to leave. Everything just-” you paused, clenching your fists so hard that you could see the imprints of your fingernails against your palms. “-reminded me of you.”

At this, his stony gaze faltered slightly and a look of despondence slowly spread across his face. 

“You could have gone anywhere else, but you just had to choose her, didn’t you?” He uttered somewhat accusingly. “You really shouldn’t get involved in this.”

“A bit too late for that,” you argued. Did he think you couldn’t hold your own?

“You can still walk away,” he offered.

Shaking your head, you peered back at him defiantly. “I’m not leaving you.”

“That’s what you said last time,” he retorted bitterly, his brows etched together in a frown. “Look at how that turned out.”

Your mouth ran dry, and it felt as if you had been given a tight slap across your cheek. 

So this was what it was all about? He still faulted you for what happened in the past? The most troubling thing was that you had nothing to say to that. You truly held yourself accountable for whatever that had gone wrong.

“Is this why you want to get rid of me?” It came out as a bare whisper.

He shrugged impassively, unable to meet your eyes like he was hiding something. “It’s just better this way.”

Your mind was going round in circles as you were put on the spot. However, something inside you kept rebelling against what Leon had to say. You couldn’t abandon him again. Not like this, even though he claimed it was the better route to take. Didn’t he once tell you to trust him to make his own decisions? Then, he should offer you the same courtesy. You weren’t about to throw in the towel and give up now.

So instead of running away like he expected you to, you pushed back. “No.”

Leon narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“I said no,” you repeated again resolutely. “We have a job to do. I’m helping you to infiltrate this base whether you like it or not.”

His lips were drawn into a thin line as he brooded quietly in the corner, but he continued to hear you out.

“Once that’s done, we can go back to our own separate lives if you want,” you stated. “Just like how it was.” 

A fair compromise. Although deep down you hoped it wouldn’t mark the end of your interactions with Leon. Well, you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it.

After a while of considering your suggestion, he agreed warily, “Ok.”

His gaze was impenetrable while both of you drank in silence. At some point, you decided to call it a night, since you had an early start with him tomorrow to go over your next plan of action. It was drizzling when you came out of the bar, the water droplets falling on your face like a baptism of a new chapter. You had made your bed, now you had to lie in it.

As Leon called for another cab to take him back to where he was staying, you left without a word, walking on your own to the nearest U-Bahn station. He watched you until you were just a tiny speck in his vision, lost amongst the sea of people and glowing street lights.

━━━━━━━━━━━

You and Leon were standing in front of the dining table of his service apartment, a mess of papers sprawled across every surface. He rested his curled fingers under his chin, eyeing the diagrams and notes scribbled on the sheets like a hawk, analyzing them for any obvious patterns.

He picked up a report that you had drafted recently. “So Silje told you all of this?”

You yawned and sipped at the instant coffee Leon had offered you when you had arrived. It was a couple of hours earlier than when you were normally up, as you’d have to head over to the theater to train after this meeting. You had pushed away whatever thoughts you had resulting from the conversation with Leon last night to the back of your mind, in favor of professionalism. Afterall, it wasn’t your first rodeo pretending things were fine, and neither was it Leon’s.

“Some of it, yes. Though in her own way of speaking in riddles,” you explained. “The rest I had overheard or tailed her without her knowing.”

“Are you sure you weren’t spotted?” It sounded like a mixture of concern and him questioning your abilities, the latter of which irritated you a little.

“If I was, would I still be standing here?” You stated brusquely.

“Fair enough.”

You pointed at the blueprint map again, tracing the outlines of your markings with your fingers as you explained, “From what I gathered, the site has two main sections beyond the theater space. The upper levels are easily accessible, but shaped like a labyrinth. I haven’t explored everything yet, but if my gut feeling is right, I would say that the entrance leading further down might be all the way over here.” You tapped at the red circle with a question mark drawn on the map.

“The lower levels are only accessible via keycard. Obviously Silje has one, but there must be others too,” you reasoned. 

“That said, I’ve seen her bringing in the same man more than once. Business type, probably in his 60s, speaking German with a Swiss accent.” Then, you proceeded to describe his outward appearance in further detail.

“Silje always passed him off as being part of the company board. I doubt it though,” you shrugged.

Leon hummed in response, and the corners of his mouth turned slightly upward, as if he was trying to hold back a smile. It was the first sign of approval he showed you since you had reconnected.

As he thumbed through the rest of the papers, he cocked his head to the side, tapping his fingers on the table absentmindedly. “One thing I don’t get from this is why she’s confided in you.”

You nipped your lip, swallowing anxiously, as you were afraid of disclosing what you might have committed yourself to. 

“She wanted to offer me a gift,” you whispered.

“A gift?” He tensed up noticeably at the word. “Did you accept?”

“Um… yes?” You replied uneasily, but tried to persuade him that nothing else had happened yet. “She only told me it would come soon.”

The drumming of his fingers on the table stopped abruptly, as he gripped the edge of it, clenching his jaw as he spoke, “Why the fuck would you do something like that?”

“I-I thought it would help,” you stuttered, caught off-guard by the sudden shift in his mood.

“What exactly has Bergmann told you about this case?” He hissed.

“That Silje was suspected of harboring some bioterrorists.”

You flinched as he cursed a second time loudly, before muttering a quick, “Excuse me for a minute.” With that, he darted out of the room into the hallway to make a call.

So here you were, left alone without answers again. The secrecy surrounding the entire mission and Leon’s erratic behavior was starting to grate on you, but there wasn’t much you could do about it.

Past the hallway, out of sight and earshot, Leon had connected with Hunnigan on comms.

“Leon,” she greeted. “Any news?”

“Our old friend, the Plaga,” he stated. “Seems like our suspicions might be right.”

“You have the source to back that up?” She asked out of habit, even though she already knew the answer.

“I went through the documents. I’m not 100%, but it’s close.”

He detailed an abnormality that stood out during the investigations. “A few days ago, some people on site experienced temporary psychotic episodes where their veins turned black, but reverted back to normal after.”

“That’s aligning with whatever intel we’ve already picked up. It could be a new strain of the Plaga,” he concluded.

Hunnigan nodded. “We’ll require a sample for the labs when you’re in the base. Anything you need me to do?”

“Run some files on any surviving Los Iluminados members. Focus on trade routes with Germany,” he requested. “The informant mentioned Silje entertaining a particular ‘business partner’ on a regular basis.”

“On it.” She typed away furiously at a computer keyboard off-screen.

“Another thing,” Leon commented. “Why wasn’t the informant told about the real nature of this situation?” 

“That was under Bergmann’s discretion.” 

He scoffed derisively. “She’s putting her in danger. The informant has no idea what she’s risking here. Silje just offered her the ‘gift’ and you and I know what that means.”

“Leon, you know the rules,” Hunnigan sighed sympathetically. “We don’t really have much say in this jurisdiction.”

“What do you mean? She reports to HQ!”

“Yeah, and they’ve given her free reign,” she explained, without batting an eyelid.

“In-fucking-credible.” He rolled his eyes.

“You need to press on. The informant has the best chance of getting you in,” she reasoned, giving pause and contemplating her next choice of words before speaking. “I would suggest not getting too attached to her.”

“I’m not,” Leon deadpanned, despite the look on Hunnigan’s face, like she didn’t believe him. 

“At the rate this is going, she may not be around long enough to do her job,” he clarified.

“You know we have a cure for that,” she rebutted. “The girl will be fine.”

He pursed his lips, changing the subject. “Hm, just send me the updates later.”

With that, he shut off his comms device and headed back into the living room, only to be accosted by your snide remark, “Let me guess, another convo that’s classified?”

His mouth twisted into a smirk. “Not quite.”

“Whatever Bergmann has been feeding you is bullshit,” he began. “We’ve been suspecting that the theater is being used as a front for developing a new batch of bioweapons they’re about to ship into the US.”

Your eyes widened at the newfound information. The whole time you had assumed that Silje was just providing a safehouse, not a full-on experimentation chamber. But with the recent events that had occurred, you should have considered it earlier.

“So the labs must be underground.” He thumped the pad of his index finger on the sketchings of the lower levels of the site on the map. “And they’re not just hiding people down there.”

Casting over a solemn glance, he revealed, “I’m telling you this, because you need to be careful.”

“And stop making deals you shouldn’t be making,” he warned.

You let the words sink in. “I see,” you nodded slowly. “Thanks, I… appreciate that.”

“The minute you feel something is off, or your veins start to darken, you contact me straight away and get the hell outta there. Understood?”

“Ok, I will,” you promised.

On the one hand, you were grateful that Leon had the courtesy to inform you about what you were getting into, but on the other, you were scared of what was to come. You had heard about the Terragrigia Panic and the B.O.W.s that devastated the floating city a year ago. The gruesome scenes were splashed across the news for weeks. Would the same happen here?

As if he could read your mind, Leon placed a hand on your shoulder to reassure you. “I won’t let them get you.”

“I trust you.” You said it as if it was clear as day.

His eyes bore into yours and his hand made its way towards your cheek, but stopped short in midair, a hair’s breadth away from touching your skin. Then, it fell to the side as he turned away, like he was ashamed of what had just transpired.

You cleared your throat in awkwardness, trying to recall the next point on the meeting agenda. Ah yes, Till.

Till was a fence you got to know from the parties you frequented. He was a friend of a friend of a… you got the idea. At first, you bought your drugs from his minions in the clubs, but then became a regular client of his the moment you started your informant career.

“As requested, I’ve arranged a meeting with Till.” You grabbed your day bag from the seat you had left it on. “He operates out of a nightclub that has a pretty strict door policy. So you’ll have to look the part.”

Leon raised an eyebrow. “Which would be?”

You sighed, unsure of how this would go down. “Um, your usual black get-up will do,” you mentioned tentatively. Unzipping your bag, which unveiled a sneak peek of its contents, you peered back at him. Here goes nothing. “So are you a more of a latex or leather kind of guy?”

What you would have given to permanently capture the look of shock on Leon’s face.

“Are you fucking serious?” He blurted out.

Perhaps you should make the decision for him then. Giving him a once over, you identified a common theme with his casual leather jacket and fingerless gloves. 

“I’m guessing leather,” you discerned, rummaging through your bag for a studded harness and tossing it over to him.

He caught the chunky material in his hands, looking at it with apprehension whilst shaking his head.

Fishing out a translucent, black crop top, you displayed it in front of Leon as you walked over to him. “Maybe over this and a pair of leather boxers.”

He grimaced. “No.”

Well, he sure wasn’t making your job easy. “I’ll be doing most of the ass-kissing at the door,” you argued. “You just have to wear this and keep your mouth shut.”

Please go along with it, you prayed. There was only so much magic you could pull to get him in at the club door.

Examining the outfit you had picked out for him gingerly, he muttered, “Jesus Christ, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

At least he wasn’t protesting any further.

“I’ll meet you there at 4 in the morning on Sunday,” you reminded him. “You’d better have something substantial to trade with.”

“That’s the least of my concerns right now,” he grumbled, to which you snickered in amusement before departing for the theater.

[doctordeathawaits]

Transchristian tips?

Trans Christian

Very first tips is to read scripture ! While you can get a physical copy of the Bible , you can still have a digital copy via Bible apps such as YouVersion Bible , Logos Bible Study , and even Bible App for Kids for my transage babies < 3 I recommend personally the Christian Standard Translation , as it's the most recent and easiest to understand < 3 Let's not forget the most fun thing is to annotate what you read - you are doing a beautiful artistic collab with God < 3

Prayer ! The best connection with God , my favorite website to use is ThoughtsAboutGod , they have prayers for every occasion that are easier to learn ! You can start simple by doing a prayer before bed or before you eat to thank for the meal , or try to just talk about your day / whatever has been bothering you recently < 3

Explore Christian history , denominations , and their differences to find a branch that resonates with you ! ( e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox )

Engage in worship practices like singing hymns , reading scripture at studies / online groups , or observing Christian holidays (e.g., Christmas , Easter ) ! Experiment with daily devotional practices , such as reading a devotional book or meditating on Bible verses !

If you decide to fully embrace the faith , baptism is often seen as a significant step in becoming a Christian ! Learn about other sacraments , such as communion , and their role in Christian life !

Practice acts of kindness , charity , and love as expressions of your faith < 3 Seek forgiveness where needed and extend grace to others < 3

[randomfoggytiger]

The FBI Landscape from 1980-2001

Candice DeLong's Special Agent was not only a compelling, addictive read but also a great peak into the regular life of an FBI agent... an experience, I found, that Mulder and Scully's singularities in sharpened perspective.

TLDR; the experiences of a female agent in the 80s to early 00s: from recruitment to expectations, from professional detachment to necessary humor, from sexists to competitive women, from "boys club" FBI agents to friendly cops and DEA agents, from sex and marriage and family on the force to loneliness in suburbia-- with a similar, familiar Paper Hearts case thrown in.

THE WHOLE KIT AND CABOODLE

Hoover's edict against women was squashed mere hours after his death.

...Ness [FBI agent Candice and her father revered] had to do a lot of "rough stuff" with "tough customers" who no woman could handle. That's why women weren't allowed into the FBI. Indeed, J. Edgar Hoover had decreed: "Because of the nature of the duties our Special Agents are called upon to perform, we do not employ women in this position." That edict remained in effect until 1972, when Hoover died, and within hours, legend has it, a few brave women finally scaled the walls of the impenetrable male preserve. After the lukewarm reception I got a few years later, I have to tip my fedora to those intrepid pioneers.

All FBI agents are adrenaline junkies.

Anyone who has ever ridden a roller coaster knows what a physical thrill you get from danger-- and when the risks are real, the surge of exhilaration is that much greater. My first arrest seemed like a baptism, and I recognized that at least part of what had drawn me and so many other to law enforcement was that adrenaline rush. I wanted to feel it again.

Candice DeLong was shocked after meeting her first female FBI Agent.

There were several women FBI agents working in Chicago, and through Clay [then FBI boyfriend] I got to meet one. I was shocked. She was a tiny little thing who could barely have weighed 100 pounds, not the muscle-boudn female equivalent of Clay I was expecting. Diminutive as she was, Clay (who was one of the good guys) assured me that she was well trained and plenty capable enough to deal with the "tough customers" and the "brought stuff." I was astounded!

...Though i was only five feet five inches and weighed 110 pounds, I knew that if this little gal could join the FBI, I could too.

Candice DeLong aimed for recruitment after a nine-year career as a nurse in the psychiatric ward. She was already mother to her four-year-old son.

Back in 1980, most married women quit their jobs when they had children. Divorce was still a stigma, and single mothers had much less of a presence in the workforce than they do now. Those who thought women were unfit to be agents were even more outraged that a mother would be admitted to the Academy-- and I was the only one in my class.

I would be scolded because of the physical risks of the job: "Haven't you ever thought about what would happen to your child if you were injured or killed in the line of duty?" Of course I had, and I had agonized about it.... The fact is, more parents are killed in car accidents each year than while working as cops or FBI agents-- but more to the point, male agents faced the same potential risks that I would.

There is no such thing as "shoot to maim"; and law enforcement agents aren't big on guns.

Before I entered the Academy I, like so many other laypeople, wondered why police officers don't "shoot to maim" rather than "to kill," unless absolutely necessary. now I knew the answers-- even after twelve weeks of superb firearms training and daily practice, virtually none of us could aim and consistently hit the limb of a stationary target, and never one that would be moving and shooting back. You just don't have that much control of a handgun, even up close. About 90 percent of shootouts take place between cops/agents and suspects who are six feet apart or closer. ...The extremity most likely to get hit at close range is the gun hand, especially when you're shooting in the dark. The muzzle flash of a weapon will draw your eye, and your aim will automatically follow. Both you and your opponent, unconsciously, will be firing at the other's gun hand, and so one of you is likely to get clipped.

...Still, you can't reliably aim to shoot a gun out of someone's hand. That's a Hollywood myth. And that TV show finale that has the "policeman"... trading shots with an assailant during a chase down an alley, then from a block away infallibly winging the perp in the leg or arm as he scales a fence-- thanks to his righteous intent only to maim-- is utter hogwash....

The truth is, law enforcement agents often have a certain antipathy towards handguns and tend to see their own as a necessary evil... There are some notable exceptions: marksmen who have elevated shooting to a fine art, and the undeniable bad element, male and female, who see their weapons as penis extensions. But you're not going to find many cops and FBI agents-- who took often find themselves facing down squirrelly or crazy armed amateur-- out campaigning on behalf of the NRA.

FBI agents no longer wore fedoras by 1980. They weren't big on disguises either.

I had decked myself out in navy three-piece suit-- every agent owned such a suit, nostalgically called his "Hoover Blues," after our late leader-- and yes, a trenchcoat and a fedora, shades of Eliot Ness. I had always loved hats... and I was disappointed to discover they were no longer standard FBI agent gear. But now that I would be wearing a suit to work every day, I could justify investing in a sharp black felt fedora....

For the police, it is standard operating procedure to use disguises and switch cars to foil detection, but such strategies-- though common sense might dictate their benefits-- were less entrenched in the culture of the Bureau at that time. J. Edgar Hoover never believed in "deep cover" work, preferring to cultivate informants inside investigated groups than to plant his own people. Since his death, it has become an important area of specialization, with its own training program at Quantico, but in the early 1980s, "deep cover" and its trickle-down tactics... were relatively new and discomfiting to many of the old-line veterans.

Life as a single female agent is lonely.

Civilian men were too intimidated by my job, so... I had been dating badges, mostly cops. ...Cops and DEA guys loved female agents, whom they say more as a charming novelty than as emasculating competition-- I can't speak for their view of the women in their own ranks-- and seemed to appreciate how free the give-and-take could be with someone in a similar line of work. And they were certainly a lot more fun than the average computer jockey or financial analyst....

Of course, there are plenty of staunch family men in law enforcement. But the ones who are available in their thirties and forties tend to be single for a reason. More than in other fields, it seems, cheating comes with the territory-- which is why some of my female colleagues wen through men like pantyhose, then gave up on badges altogether....

Law enforcement is a target-rich environment, to be sure. Definitely a field where you can find a lover-- and probably have the wildest, most passionately romantic affair of your entire life. But to find a husband-- someone faithful, devoted, and home- and hearth-building, with whom you could spend the rest of your life? You'd probably stand a better chance of winning the lottery. People do it, but not very often.

*****

Much as I loved the town's charm, it did make me feel self-conscious about not exactly being a Norman Rockwell mother. ...The first time I showed up in my suit and high heels, the other mothers, huddled together talking in their sweat suits, hardly spared me a glance. When one peeled off from the herd to retrieve a Diet Coke from her bag, I pursued her. "Hi!" I said, in my brightest, friendliest voice. "hi," she dutifully responded, then fled back to the safety of the huddle. I was like an I'll wind blowing into the wives' inner sanctum from the threatening realm of divorce, single motherhood, and men's work.

*****

For the second time that day, I was struck with a powerful sense of incongruity. Here we were-- a man, woman, and child-- in a picture-book town, so charming that it could have been the movie set for It's a Wonderful Life, spending an apple-pie American Saturday, with Daddy working on the house and Mommy upstairs making a snack to cheer him on. Only we were colleagues, not Mommy and Daddy. The man working on the house, a former Navy Seal and Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, was a team leader of the FBI's famous Hostage Rescue Squad; and the woman in the kitchen dedicated her weekdays not to canning, baking, and darning but to hunting the vicious rapist terrorizing her perfect little Eden. Seth was the only element that fit naturally into the picture-- if Norman Rockwell were painting it, that is.

He'd have to add some extra brush strokes to depict our lives.

*****

I was surrounded by men all day long, of course, but the guys I worked with were like brothers to me. ...Now and then a "civilian" had asked me out, with disappointing results. one was the male equivalent of the "badge bimbos" who chase men in law enforcement. He couldn't stop bragging to everyone we met, including waiters... as if nabbing me somehow proved his virility....

The flip side of badge-bimbohood was "badge-bolting." Badge-bolters would be thrilled about your job when they first met you-- "You're an FBI agent? How cool! What's the most exciting case you ever worked?"-- only to get cold feet once it hit them that catching bad guys sounded a lot more macho than selling ad space. If they had the nerve to ask me out at all, more often than not they'd stand me up, perhaps scared to risk feeling even for an evening that they might not be wearing the pants in a relationship-- not that I wanted to put on anybody's trousers.

All FBI agents had to learn detachment, often through humor.

Jim Reese was another gifted, natural teacher as well as an excellent profiler, a tall, handsome man who would teach us important lessons about the limitations of professionalism. With all the repellent acts you may be exposed to in law enforcement, there is a tendency-- even a necessity-- to become inured to the unspeakable. There is a certain macho toughness that comes with the territory, a belief that if you act as if nothing can touch you, nothing will. But the price of denial, for too many, is very high-- addictions, withdrawal from intimate connections, or even violent acting out with loved ones, leading to divorce and isolation, and sometimes, in the saddest cases, suicide.

*****

I felt almost haunted by the crime scene photos I was handling-- mostly women, many around my age, savagely butchered in their own homes. Much as it embarrassed me-- I was no frail, fainthearted little girl after my near decade as a psych nurse-- I found myself sticking my gun in my pocket just to take out the garbage. But when I confided in Gene Stapleton, the chief profiler in Chicago, with whom I had worked the Burlington rapist case, he was wonderful. "Candice, he said, "if that didn't happen to you once in a while,you wouldn't be human. We all get that way."

He took me in hand and, kindly and patiently, sat with me in his office for an entire day, talking me through hour upon hour of horrifying slides with alternating wisecracks and matter-of-fact assessments, showing me how to zero in with the analytical mind before the emotions got a chance to kick in. "But the real key," he told me, "is plain old exposure. If you look at enough of these, they come to have less of a visceral effect." It was like being treated for a phobia-- being force to look... until desensitization sets in, and the stimulus loses its paralyzing power. And the technique worker-- within a day or two I was over that speed bump and back in action.

*****

Among our regular instructors, Ken Lanning was a world-renowned authority on the sexual victimization of children.... Lanning's lectures were down-to-earth and nonsenationalistic but they held his audiences spellbound. He was revered, and he was also a good sport. Each class at the Academy had a pregraduation banquet, to which souses who had come for the ceremony were invited, but not children. There was always a scramble for babysitters, but counselors would assure their classes: "We've got some good news and some bad news about banquet night. We managed to line up a babysitter for all of you-- but it's Ken Lanning."

*****

But like all instructors, Hazelwood [who pioneered criminal sexual profiling], though always professional and respectful of victims, made sure to offer us a little comic relief. He came up with a real groaner, as I remember, when someone in the class brought in the shot of a strange crime scene, a far filled with feathers. The student explained that a passing cop had stopped to investigate the car because he heard sounds of struggling inside and saw feathers clinging to the steamed-up windows. When he opened the door he found a lifeless victim lying on the floor-- a dead duck, which the half-naked perpetrator had obviously been engaged with sexually. At this point we were all dutifully jotting notes, shaking our heads at the absurd range of human sexual deviations. "Well, folks," Hazelwood said, pausing for effect before delivering his punch line, "that's what we call 'gettin' down'."

Dopey as the joke was, we all screamed with laughter.

****

...By the time I reached the house, I was in severe pain and limping. I was sure my foot was blue. So, propping my foot on the lowest step of the communal porch, I tore open the Velcro-- relief!-- and quickly slapped it back down.... I got the information we needed and then shuffled back to the car.

"Whew," I said to Rick, tearing the thing off. Beneath it my panty hose were shredded, utterly ruined.

"These panty hose were brand new," I cried in protest. "They died in the fight for truth and justice!"

"Voucher it," Rick said. "A good agent can always get a new pair of stocking out of the U.S. government."

The guys all laughed at my story, especially the punch line about the voucher. "Man, it's touch being a woman in the FBI," one of the cops said.

He didn't know the half of it.

The FBI conducts intense background checks; and agents are not allowed to fraternize with criminals (Ed Jerse is out)

Agents are expected to be models citizens. Every five years, investigators will call on people who live nearby to ascertain whether you are a "good neighbor." If you fall behind on your rent, your landlord knows that he can call and get you reprimanded by the Bureau. Association with anyone who has a criminal record is forbidden; any roommate of more than thirty days and anyone you plant to marry will be subjected to criminal record checks. Any contact with law enforcement-- a moving violation while driving, a visit from police if you're playing the stereo too loud at a party-- must be reported to your supervisor. You are obliged to list any traffic tickets you have received on your five-year "reinvestigation" form.

The more intrusive investigations are aimed at discerning whether you are vulnerable to bribery or extortion. ...Lest you be subject to coercion or blackmail, you must be legally and morally aboveboard. Legend has it that in the Hoover days, unmarried agents might be placed under surveillance. A bachelor spotted coming out of a woman's house early in the morning would be called on the carpet for "conduct unbecoming an FBI agent," and be told, "Marry the girl."

...Any breach of the Bureau's myriad rules-- from piddling offenses to felonies such as heroin-dealing, selling classified documents to fringe governments, and murder (all of which agents have been known to commit)-- can lead to an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, so called OPR. One of the worst offenses an agent can be accused of is "lack of candor," which encompasses the full spectrum of the rules. Big discrepancies, say, between the number of traffic tickets and agent claims and has actually received will prompt an inquiry to determine whether "lack of candor," a much more serious offense than the tickets themselves, was the cause. ...The agent may be asked to take a polygraph test and be suspended without pay for a time or even be dismissed.

Love, sex, and babies on the force: rather straightforward compared to other issues, surprisingly.

In those days, the Academy was run like a paramilitary boarding school, where the authoritarian instructors were called "sir" (there were no Ma'ams"). Trainees bunked two or three to a room, and for every four there was one shower. If you wanted to soak your aching muscles in a bathtub, you had to rent a motel room on the weekend. There was no drinking and no swearing. For single people, sex on campus was taboo and grounds for dismissal. But if amorous parties were married (to other people), we were unofficially warned that the man would squeak through-- probably with a wink and a slap on the back-- while the woman would pay the price. However, the only expulsion I ever heard of involved a couple who was caught trysting in the swimming pool-- and to me, that made perfect sense. Anyone too dumb to find a better hiding place than that isn't someone you'd want to entrust with national security.

*****

...I knew of women who had braved the gossip and would up married to Bureau colleagues-- we called them "double agents."

*****

Its [a drug squad] supervisor was a woman-- the first and only one among the twenty-five in the division. Elaine Smith was half of one of the Bureau's first "double agents" couples. She and her husband, T.D., had grown up in Chicago and attended the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana together. Legend had it that she used to sit on T.D.'s back, smoking a cigarette, while he did push-ups in dorm form room.... She was a head-turner, an always beautifully turned-out woman who loved clothes. T.D. was known as the "iron man" of the fugitive squad. He was once shot in an accident on the firing range and, with an injury so severe that he would need extensive surgery, managed to run to the hospital. As he once explained it to me: "Candice, I knew if I stopped and lay down I might not get up. So I just kept running."

But Elaine didn't achieve her position by riding on her husband's coattails. She was famous in her own right for her tremendous skill at developing informants and would often guest lecture on the subject at Quantico.

*****

Over the past fifteen years, agents have been allowed much more privacy in their personal lives. Cohabitation-- never mind an occasional sleepover Fate-- is far too common to raise eyebrows anymore.

...Homosexuality remains somewhat dicier. Even today-- given that the Bureau is an 85 percent male, paramilitary organization with members who are, for the most part, politically conservative and religiously observant (there's even a sizable faction known as the Mormon Mafia)-- few men openly profess to be gay. Women tend to be less intimidated. Recently, two lesbian agents fell in love and asked to be transferred so that they could live together as a couple. The Bureau complied with their request, though it continues to require heterosexual couples to marry in order to quality for "togetherness" transfers.

*****

I knew of a few husband-and-wife teams who sometimes worked cases together. There was a "double-agent" couple on the Bronfman abduction case in New York.... When they [an FBI team] tried to radio the couple to close in [on the case], what they heard, according to Bureau myth, was a heated argument. The double agents had accidentally left the mike open, apparently, and though no one could break through to them, all the other cars were treated to a veritable three-ring circus of a marital spat.

*****

If you are pregnant, you can be assigned to light duty (and the Bureau has one of the most generous family leave policies around), but there's really no such thing as a desk job in the FBI.

... I don't know of any female agents who have born children out of wedlock, but presumably that would no longer be a violation of the rules.

FBI agents get no breaks.

The FBI is less a place to work than a way of life. Unlike the police, who are "off duty" when their shifts are over, FBI agents are required to be armed, available, and "fit for duty" at all times. That means that we must carry our guns everywhere, even on vacation, and there's no quick dashing off to the cash machine at the bank, leaving your gun at home. ..."Available" means that you must always be within two hours of the office unless you are on some officially approved leave, such as a vacation. But even then, you are required to file an itinerary at the office with CBR ("can be reached") numbers. The Bureau's arm is long.

Having more than one or two drinks, even on weekends, will make you "unfit for duty." In major cities, there are "reactive squads" that respond to emergencies such as bank robberies and kidnappings, whose members are "on call" and must be clearheaded at all times. Agents will do reactive duty in weekly rotations, so no one bears the onus of constant demands. But in smaller satellite Bureau offices, agents don't have that luxury and must always be alert and ready for action.

The FBI can't ask about sexual orientation.

The FBI is no longer allowed to ask about sexual orientation, but should the question come up, you can't lie to conceal it. Because gayness is still viewed as a potential blackmail issue, the Bureau will ask whether an agent's parents know of his or her homosexuality-- that's the degree of openness believed to make coercion unlikely. To be sure that the parents know, investigators will follow up.

FBI agents are often each other's worst enemy.

A great many complaints leading to OPR investigations originate not outside the Bureau but within-- from agents informing on other agents, sometimes anonymously, which allows for the proliferation of minor, bogus complains. ...But there are supervisors who will routinely report their own people for violations most would consider minor, just to look like they're on top of the activities of their staff. There are also, inevitably, agents who will tattle to the OPR just to make trouble for others-- a practice so common that there's even a term for it in FBI slang: "jamming." All such reports must be taken seriously, so countless man-hours and, no doubt, vast sums of money are spent each year on unfounded and minor complaints agents plant to "jam" others.

...This is the kind of intramural terrorism that tends to go on in closed systems like academia, the military, and the FBI. Academic tenure-- or in government jobs, the pension you're guaranteed if you last twenty years-- is too good to make quitting an attractive option, even if you're unhappy. It's not like you can jump ship and go work for the competition, and your skills are too specific for most other lines of work. So, while jockeying for power, backstabbing, and slacking off are all rampant in the private sector, they become recreational for some people in jobs that nobody leaves. In an environment like the FBI, where secrecy reigns, rules are ironclad, and the culture no only gives you myriad opportunities but actually requires you to turn on others, unhealthy kinds of rivalries can develop. Adrenaline junkies who aren't generating enough excitement in their work... will often whip up waves. Harpooning colleagues can become their gladiator sport.

Mulder's Season 2 and his and Scully's Season 6 assignments were grunt work given to newbies.

Squad 5C, my first assignment, was a white-collar-crime squad of roughly twenty agents focused on wire fraud-- any fraud perpetrated via "wire service," such as telephone lines. Most of its senior members were accountants and stockbrokers, and it was a popular launching pad for new female agents. The handful of rookies did a lot of scout work-- combing through records, doing background investigations, and the like-- and learned the ropes by being paired with more experienced "training agents."

...Rookie agents belong to their entry-assignment squads but they could be tapped by any case agent in the division to assist on an operation. We were encouraged to vary our experience as much as possible.... So we were all eager wannabes, circling the office and trying to chat up senior agents, telling them, "Look, if something comes up, I'm available...." In those days the Chicago office didn't have walls or even partitions. Each squad was a cluster of twenty desks, with two phones for every four, separated from the next by a six-foot aisle. When you heard rumbling or laughter across the room, you'd make it your business to ferret out the cause, just in case it meant something exciting was in the offing that you could assist on, like an arrest.

Stakeouts are intense; and food is essential.

Most of the other assists I did were less dramatic, usually involving surveillance, one of the most challenging and important jobs we do. Surveillance may seem like a passive observation, but it can escalate in seconds to deadly confrontation if the agents get "made" or must intervene to prevent a serious crime.

There is a specially trained surveillance squad (SOG, short for Special Operations Group) that handles surveillance on major operations.. The SOG will be called in, for example, to track suspects of kidnappings or big heists... or probable serial killers.... On more long-term operations or for more routine activities such as watching known associates of fugitives, tracking garden-variety suspects, and monitoring racketeers, case agents tend to run their own surveillance.

It takes at least two people-- to work an effective stationary surveillance, one to have "the eye"-- that is, to hold his or her gaze locked on the objective-- and the other to assist with surveillance and keep the log, a detailed record of every action taking place in the target zone. This is not just busywork, for the log may become the foundation of an agent's testimony in court and because, sometimes, a seemingly insignificant observation can hold the key to an entire case. A major breakthrough in a foreign counterintelligence case came with the discovery that two Thursdays in a row, a man chucked an empty pack of Salem cigarettes into a garbage can. The garbage can was a dead drop, and the cigarette pack was the signal summoning the spies to a secret rendezvous. So logs are scrupulously kept and analyzed to detect patterns.

No matter how many hours you are stuck on surveillance, you can't read the paper or do your nails to pass the time, for your full concentration must stay focused on the target.... You can't even look around much, and that singularity of focus is one reason why surveillance can be dangerous. Agents have been shot to death sitting in cars, too intent on their targets to sense the approach of danger.

About the only thing you can do to starve off boredom on a lengthy surveillance is to eat. The longer you'll be sitting, the more sensory stimulation you'll want from your snacks, making potato and tortilla chips, popcorn, candy, and that beloved law enforcement staple, doughnuts, the foods of choice. When a surveillance drags on for weeks or months, you can easily pack on twenty or thirty pounds. (An agent greeting another who has obviously bulked up will ask, "Oh, so how did the surveillance go?")

*****

...The novel Hannibal by Thomas Harris opens with Special Agent Clarice Starling on surveillance in a mirror-windowed van, trying to forestall suffocating in the Virginia heat with a 150-pound block of dry ice. I've been in that situation myself-- real agents don't get ice-- dripping sweat for hours in triple-digit temperatures, thankful that my partner was female so I could strip down to my panties and bra, keeping my shoes on and my shirt close by in case of action.

*****

Surveillance gets in your bones. If you have any gift for it at all, it quickly becomes automatic.

Female agents had to learn to differentiate the good guys, the sexists, well-intentioned "part of the guys" pranksters, and threatened-but-could-be-won-over coworkers. Most of the guys didn't mind women agents.

At the time, most people didn't realize that the Bureau employed women as agents. After a few months on the job, I was already out of patience with patronizing smirks, comments-- ranging from, "Well, well, since when are there gals in the FBI?" to "Who do you think you're kidding?"-- and calls to my superiors to confirm that such an improbability as a female special agent did exist.

...It seems that my new colleagues on Squad 5C had "enhanced" the head shot on my credit. Below my proud, smiling face, they had attached the reclining body of a voluptuous nude. It was a perfectly slick, professional-looking job-- so well executed that I remain convinced that the graphic artists in Special Projects at FBI headquarters were involved. The bank president and I laughed ourselves sick at the gag. ...There were female agents who saw the credentials prank as so sabotaging and offensive that they urged me to file an official complaint. Not a chance.... There would be bigger battles ahead, I suspected, and I figured I had better pick my shots. Besides, being the butt of a practical joke suggested that I was gaining a measure of acceptance on the squad. And it was funny!

*****

...I achieved acceptance at wire fraud breakfasts early on, but there were other squads where rookies (especially women) could suffer months of exclusion, signifying their colleagues' mistrust.

*****

...I applied to terrorism.... The only catch was that the Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force, a coalition of FBI and Secret Service agents and specialist cops from the Chicago Police Department's intelligence wing, had never employed a woman. ...With only fifteen women in the entire Chicago Bureau-- many of whom, because they had families to raise or had special skills, such as languages, tended to gravitate towards the white-collar-crime and foreign counterintelligence squads-- there were precious few of us to go around. But terrorism's two-fisted masculine self-image was undeniably a factor, as was the personal view of the task force chief, whom I soon nicknamed the Grinch, a male chauvinist of the patronizing stripe. Devoutly religious and the father of many children, he was particularly unsettled by me, an Irish Catholic girl who was divorced-- which was bad enough-- and was also the mother of a child. ...But the Grinch had been told that he had to hire a woman, and my friends on the squad went to bat for me. They cited my assists on surveillance and my single-handed arrest of the Croatian terrorist, kindly committing my errors. An arrest was a shining accomplishment for a fledgling male agent, but for a female it was seen as a fluke. "yeah, but can you rely on her all twenty-eight days [of the month]?" the saying went-- as if at any moment hormones could drive the woman to distraction, rendering her hysterical or flighty or trigger happy, and jeopardize their lives. ...To my delight, I was admitted to the Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force as its first female agent.

...At a staff meeting when I wasn't present, he referred to me as "lame." Though my performance reviews were uniformly glowing-- he couldn't put in writing what bothered him about me, even if he consciously knew-- he never stopped carping, though always to others, not to me. The stream of criticism was so constant that one of the case agents who was overseeing me directly felt obliged to come to my defense. "She puts in sixty, seventy hours a week. She works nights and weekends. Sometimes, even though it's our case, she's the only FBI agent out there on surveillance with the cops. The guys pack it in for the day, but she stays..." But even that didn't satisfy him-- try as I might, there seemed to be nothing I could do to overcome the Grinch's antipathy.

*****

One of my strongest advocates was Rick Hahn, a slender man with thick, eye-magnifying glasses, who by appearance seemed the antithesis of the tough-guy terrorist tracker but who was in fact one of the most formidable, canniest case agents in the division. It was a patter I would see again and again, with John Slone (a black FBI agent) Rick Hahn, and others-- the more accomplished and effective the agent, the more generous he would be at "bootstrapping" rookies and the less likely he would be to sandbag others, especially such easy targets as women.

*****

I rarely had trouble with the veterans, who had come up in the Hoover era but seemed adaptable when it came to working with women, but did with men closer to my own age. One of them, forced to acknowledge that I had done a good job, actually said to my training agent: "Admit it, you're sticking her, aren't you?"-- as if competence were a bug communicated by sexual contact and only by "catching it" from a man could a woman do well.

The younger guys' attitude didn't spring from misogyny, exactly. It was more as if recognizing that a mere woman could do their job dealt a devastating blow to their self-image.I once I realized that pride was often the problem, I tried to handle every contretemps with humor, and often it worked.

...There were other agents who I just couldn't win over. A few refused to speak to me for two full years. One morning, as I headed out for breakfast with a bunch of squadmates, I overhead a particular young fogey declare, "Well, if she's coming along, I'm not."

The colleagues I was with had the grace to look embarrassed and, urging me to ignore the snub, insisted on treating me to breakfast. So that wound up being his loss-- or so I told myself.

But every woman in the division knew that she was under pressure and that if a coup, such as an arrest, would allow a man to coast for a while, a woman would soon be asked, "So, what have you done for us lately?"

*****

One of her [Elaine Smith] triumphs involved cultivating a prominent gangster who had been shot in the head and left for dead by the mob. Over the years, seven or eight FBI agents had tried to recruit him, to no avail. Despite the truism that no one in the Mafia would ever deal with a woman, Elaine went to see him in the hospital, managed to persuade him to become an informant, and through him, sent a lot of mob guys to jail. As you might imagine, some insecure guys, who couldn't bear to give a woman her due, said, "Well, sure, Elaine was able to turn him-- he had a bullet in his head."

That was unfair-- and untrue. Elaine had been cultivating him before he was shot, and when he got ready to talk he chose her over all the other agents.

*****

"Hi there," I greeted the cop who had stopped me, handing over my driver's license and credentials. "I'm with the FBI and I'm on the job."

He didn't acknowledge me as a sister in crimefighting. Instead he said officiously, "Your license is expired."

It was the day after my birthday, and it had slipped my mind that this was the year I had to renew. "Oh, right. Sorry," I replied. "But look, I'm on my way up to Area Five, homicide and sex crimes. I'm working a case with Detective John Smith."

"I don't care," he said.

"But it's a Chicago Police Department case," I informed him, certain that would set me free.

I wondered why he was even giving me an argument, for he must have known full well that as a government agent on duty, I didn't even need a license. Federal law supersedes state regulations. In case he really had some doubt about it, I asked him, more nicely than he deserved, to call his boss.

Instead, he put his on hand on his gun. "Miss," he said, "the only call I've to make right now is a judgment call-- whether to put you in my squad car or let you follow me back to the station, since legally, you can't drive."

...At the station, the kindly, big, burly, red-haired desk sergeant urged my captor to let me go. "this is ridiculous," he told him.

"No way," the jerk insisted. "It's a solid collar-- she was driving on an expired license."

...The big goon kept bringing his buddies back, one by one, to look at me, like an animal in the zoo. "Check it out," he delighted in saying. "I busted an agent. Look at her-- the feebs."

...I was soon sprung, but the good would go on to pull the same stunt with a black male agents. It was obvious that he had a classic "white guy" problem, but I wonder what he had against the FBI.

Speaking of food, Agents bond over snacks and meals.

Jim [her training agent] would not only educate me in tradecraft but would also initiate me into the Chicago division's rites and customs, many of which involved food. Though we were required to clock in each morning at 7:00, our official workday began at 8:15, so the squad breakfast-- by invitation only-- was an important daily ritual.... The breakfasts were held at a nearby dive, where agents in that pre-health-conscious era would wolf down five-egg omelets deliciously gooey with cheese, towers of toast or pancakes drenched in butter, and logpiles of sausage and bacon. No girlish muffin nibbling was allowed. I once tried to order tea and dry toast and was scoffed and booed.

Jim loved sweets, and once while we were stuck for hours on stakeout, bored and hungry, he tried to trade me to another surveillance team for a doughnut-- he wasn't kidding. He was irredeemably addicted to the chocolate cream pies at Baker's Square. Several times a week, he would reach over and tap his pen or a ruler on my desk, raising an eyebrow suggestively. That meant, "Strap on your gun. We're heading out. It's Pie Time!"

*****

My consolation [of the workplace sexism] was the camaraderie I shared with the talks force members, agents and cops, with whom I worked on the FALN case. WE formed an exclusive club called the Wonderful World Police, which was headquartered at Mike's Bar, a popular place for cops. From the roof of Mike's, initiates were told, the Freedom Beacon glowed, but it was visible only to those who were "True of Heart, Pure of Mind, and Willing to Do the Right Thing." ...The club held informal meetings nearly every week, at which members could unwind, laugh, swap lies, and salute one another... declaiming our motto "Le that Beacon of Freedom Shine Brightly!"

Women in the FBI would flip either friend or foe.

Unfortunately, our scarcity in itself did not breed sisterly camaraderie. We were all struggling to maintain our footing among the men. For some female agents, the ongoing battle to be perceived as equal seemed to necessitate shunning other women-- as if being "one of the girls" would draft them down. There were some who were hyperconscious of the women's potential to fail, as if all the rest of us in the division would be tarred with the same brush. When I was in the midst of the Candy Store caper, trying to persuade our radio Lothario to call on the phone, one of the young female agents listening in contacted me to say, "You know , you're not a trained negotiator. I am-- why don't you let me take over? Here's how you need to talk to him..."

...And where had she been all day? The hard part was just about over by the time she called.

*****

In the meantime, I found myself some new allies. One was a new female agents on the squad, who was nicknamed the Ice Woman, because with her long, lean, blond good looks, she could have passed for a fashion model from some frigid Nordic land. But her personality was more spirited and adventurous than chilly. Just out of the Academy, she had the same wide-eyed enthusiasm and eagerness to please that I'd had as a fledgling agent. The guys were taking advantage of it, essentially using her as a secretary. So I took her under my wing, warning her, "Don't let them do that. They'll make you a doormat if you give them half a chance."

...It was pushing seven o'clock. I hoped there was another woman somewhere around the office whom I could press into service. All of a sudden there she was, in tight black pants and a pink satin camisole with spaghetti straps. In her high heels, she looked six feet tall. The Ice Woman. Shad wanted to help out [on on Candice's hooker longshot ruse] enough that, just in case she was needed, she had gone home to change. At that moment she became my friend for life.

*****

When it all shook out, because the fugitive squad made the technical collar, they got credit on paper for the arrest, while I got the assist, instead of the other way around, as I had been promised. It was still a great professional victory for me. Besides, everyone knew the truth-- including the [toe-kissing, ladder-climbing] Blue Blamer's boss. When the Blue Flamer came by the SAC's office to crow about his squad's latest conquest, the boss dismissed him out of hand, saying, "oh, come on. That was Candice DeLong's arrest."

Elaine [Smith] had gotten there first. She knew how to play the game.

*****

Some women had an unhealthy sense of competition with others, reflected in the "queen bee syndrome." Early in my career, I worked briefly on a squad where not one but two women were already entrenched. How grateful I would have been had either of them deigned to take me under her wing. I had no role models to speak of, no one who could help me navigate the often confusing male bastion of the FBI. Instead, while they had made common cause with each other, to them I was a threatening interloper.

Cops prefer nurses to FBI agents (perhaps Scully got along with the locals?)

Whether on profiling cases or in my police-training lectures, I immensely enjoyed working with the cops. In those days, I would very often be the first female FBI agent they had ever seen. Early on, I discovered that cops love nurses-- maybe it was because they spend more time, in the course of their work, in emergency rooms than FBI agents, or maybe they felt that nursing required the same idealism that had attracted most of them to law enforcement. Whatever the reason, when I came to spread the good news about profiling to a roomful of skeptical male cops... I would mention my nursing background and faces would brighten. From then on I was well received.

The FBI and DEA have bad blood.

But the conflict ran deeper than just my-badge-is-bigger-than-your-badge competition. There were major cultural differences between the agencies, which had long been highly suspicious of each other. Unlike the FBI, which required applicants to have both a college degree and some kind of managerial work experience or an advanced degree in law, accounting, or computer science, the DEA took its agents right out of college. They would work only a few violations, primarily drug offenses and money laundering, while the FBI worked more than two hundred different crimes. They even dressed differently, tending more to jeans and leather jackets--- street fashions-- than to the FBI's suits and ties. So FBI agents felt superior and looked on their counterparts in the DEA as cowboys-- reckless gunslingers, constantly in shoot-outs, immersed in a brutish underworld-- while the DEA guys regarded FBI agents as effete, desk-bound "sissies."

...But I found the DEA training course to be impressive. After half a century of working drugs, the agency obviously knew the business inside out-- better than we did then, having come so recently to the field. Unlike the male agents, many of whom were threatened by the DEA guys's more-macho-than-thou swaggering, I was attracted, not repelled, by a little swashbuckling flair. And like the cops I had worked with, for the most part they did not see themselves as playing on the same field as female FBI agents and so were inclined to think of us as an interesting and potentially advantageous novelty. There were a few jerks, of course, but overall I found the DEA agents welcoming and open to working with women and less likely to put us through the girls-have-to-prove-themselves rituals than some of my own male colleagues.

...So I was thrilled when Tony and Rick [two DEA agents] asked me to come along as a "date" on an undercover intelligence-gathering mission at a nightclub and recruited the Ice Woman to make up the fourth member of our team. She was surprised, having already been indoctrinated with the us-against-them attitude of the squad. "Are you really going to work with them?" she asked. "I hear those guys are bad news."

...So that night, the Ice Woman and I-- wearing a silk slip dress and a skin-tight black spandex tube, respectively-- met up with Rick and Tony....

...For the first time I began to see that being assigned to a drug squad wasn't necessarily exile to Siberia-- that it might actually be fun.

One cop had a Paper Hearts-like epiphany on a similar missing child's case.

Some two weeks after the abduction, *Melissa's body was finally found. A sheriff's deputy got a nagging hunch that he should return to a place he had already searched, a small grove of oaks standing in an open field about a hundred yards from the road. A stream ran through there, choked with tall grasses and spanned by a small footbridge. It was there in the stream, her feet barely visible under the bridge, that he found *Melissa.

Sometimes people do get uncanny flashes like that, which look almost clairvoyant. This deputy got out of his cruiser and, without even having to do much poking around, walked straight to the site.

Pedophiles don't usually have a sex preference.

Overall, about 22 percent of rape victims and 33 percent of sexual assault victims are thirteen- to seventeen-year-old girls. But this offender also, surprisingly, assailed a few boys, a kind of gender flip-flopping that is extremely peculiar. Pedophiles, who target children, often do not discriminate between the genders because prepubescent male and female bodies are fairly similar, but the vast majority of rapists of adults focus exclusively on one sex.

The drug cartel was a crazier form of the Mafia.

...The drug world is an ultra volatile criminal environment-- far more than old-fashioned organized crime, with its careful apportionment of turf, strong lines of allegiances, and internal policing mechanisms. The Mafia has traditionally been more focused on running businesses and establishing rackets-- prostitution, extortion, and the like-- that bring in a steady income over time than on making quick, huge scores. But in the drug world, obscenely large sums of money are always changing hands in individual transactions, so the Rick of a rip-off-- a buyer or a seller simply blowing away the other party and making off with both the money and the drugs-- is very great.

Then, too, drug dealers are more likely than other criminals to try to shoot their way out of arrest situations. The federal government has established a mandatory minimum twenty-year prison sentence of anyone caught ten or more kilograms of cocaine.... There's no plea bargaining, no chance for a judge to go easy on an offender, and no early release on parole.

Civilians constantly waste precious law enforcement resources for revenge, fantasy, or money.

John and I walked out of her house in disgust. We had invested two back-to-back, around-the-clock weeks running down that lead she had given us, and we were tired and angry. Fake tips aren't Al all unusual, but they tend to blow up quickly. It's rare to get one that has enough true elements to hoodwink two investigators for that long. It never fails to amaze me that people-- actually believe they'll be able to pull off such stunts. And why do they do it? For the attention? To bring drama and color into their pallid lives? Why would they want to tie up the resources of the very law enforcement agencies they depend on for their protection?

I keep a mental file cabinet that I've labeled "If the Taxpayers Only Knew..." In it is a big folder for cases like this... and the other boondoggles I've gotten stuck with over the years. If the taxpayers' only knew how much time and how many millions of their hard-earned dollars law enforcement agencies must waste each year on phony leads, they would demand that their imaginative fellow citizens be billed-- or that we bring back the pillories!

Kindness is the most powerful tool.

No one could deny that Elaine [Smith] had the magic touch. Even as a new agent, she had made a multimillion-dollar securities fraud case. I once asked her the secret of her success and she told me a story: She was assisting on a massive arrest, and amid the entire hullabaloo, she saw a black woman being handcuffed and placed in a car. Elaine went over, opened the car door, and sat down beside her in the backseat, asking whether there was anything she could do to make the woman more comfortable. They started talking, and a few days later, the woman called her from jail to say, "Can you come over here? I'd like to talk to you."

It wasn't even Elaine's case, but she rushed right over, and what the woman told her cracked the case wide open. "Why did you pick men?" Elaine asked, certain that the woman had already stood up to hour-upon-hour of interrogation. The woman answered, "Because you were the only one who was really, really nice to me."

*****

I rode in the backseat with the fugitive. "So, how are you doing?" I asked him. "This must all seem a little abrupt. You want something to drink? A Coke?"

He did, so I offered him the one I had been saving for myself in my bag. Since he was handcuffed, I fed the suspect little sips as I read him his rights, then quizzed him, "So what did happen back in San Francisco? Was it for the money?"

"Yeah, I needed the money," he admitted; and then it all came out....

"You're so nice," he said. "I thought those guys with shotguns were going to blow my head off."

:From what I know of those guys, you're lucky they didn't. We're trying to cut down on that as much as we can. "

He laughed. By the time we got back to the office, we were on more cordial terms than I was with the fugitive squad. After his fingerprinting and mugshots, we even had our picture taken, side by side, with the suspect pointing as if to say, "She got me."

QUANTICO TRAINING

Not only was admission and training grueling, but the process is riddled with vindictive, petty tyrants who will try to flex their power.

Competitive admission.

The FBI, then and now, only takes a small fraction of its applicants; in 1999, the figure was 6 percent, while Harvard, by comparison, takes a full tenth. The vast majority of agents in the late 1970s were former accountants and lawyers, the professions that Hoover preferentially recruited, and transferees from law enforcement and the military, some of them highly decorated Vietnam vets. There were a handful of teachers, and I believe that I was the first nurse to be admitted, more likely because of my psychiatric specialty and managerial experience running a ward than because of my healthcare training....

...[Clay and his partner Phil] had me training like a demon, convinced that I'd be expected to run two miles in ten minutes and do 100 perfect military-style push-ups. When I got to Quantico, I was amazed to learn that thirty-five pushups was considered excellent, especially for a woman, that not many Olympians can run two miles in ten minutes, and that plenty of my fellow trainees were so unfit that they'd have to hail a cab to catch the bus.

Quantico training ground.

The FBI Academy, aka Hoover high, is a magnificent facility located on the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, about forty miles south of Washington, D.C. It was completed and dedicated in 1972, the year J. Edgar Hoover died. For fifty years, FBI agents had trained in an old converted post office in the shadow of the Capitol, and the world-famous Hogan's Alley, a simulated village street where agents could test their judgment and reflexes in "true-to-life" crisis situations, was a block-long stretch of wooden store facades, with pop-up figures.... Today the Academy is a modern campus set on 385 acres of towering pine forest, complete with classrooms, dormitories, a thousand-seat auditorium, state-of-the-art physical education facilities, include the Marine obstacles course, a forensics lab, a library, indoor and outdoor rifle and firearms ranges, a high-speed-chase drivers' training track, and much more. Hogan's Alley is now a realistic facsimile of a small town, where rescue and capture scenarios are staged using live actors.

...You were required to excel in all three of the program's disciplines: academics, physical training, and firearms. The only acceptable excuse for less than peak performance was injury. A passing grade was 85 percent, and if you scored lower than that on any major test you got one shot at a makeup exam. Should you flunk again, that was the end-- you were put on the bus to National Airport with a government-issued, one-way ticket home.

For most of us, the academic courses were the easiest-- having been to college, we knew how to study-- and utterly fascinating.... Being a nurse I was less overcome than most by the gruesome slides John Douglas [who pioneered criminal profiling] and Ray Hazelwood showed of chopped-up murder victims, but I realized with horror that they could have depicted the handiwork of some of my former patients....

Physical training (PT) and firearms proved much more challenging. Trainees are tested for physical conditioning their second day at the Academy, at the six-week point, and again before they graduate. The test involves a two-mile sprint, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, and a shuttle run; and to pass, the trainee must earn enough points in each activity to reach a certain cumulative minimum score. To earn maximum points on the two-mile run, the trainee has to finish in less than fourteen minutes, a fairly fast clip. Scoring the maximum number of points on push-ups requires thirty-five military push-ups done with perfect form-- with a ninety-degree angle bend to the elbow, each and every time. No "California" (weird) push-ups were allowed.

...We began each day's session with a run, followed by some kind of workout. One day we did an exercise with medicine balls, which are like six-pound leather globes. We lined up in columns, and then the last person in line would run forward, catch a tossed medicine ball, and fall back into place at the front. ...Getting clobbered with a flying six-pound weight is not joke.... ...Even losing consciousness couldn't win you a reprieve from physical training.

...After our workout came defensive tactics class, in which we learned how to disarm an assailant, to prevent an attacker from wresting away our own guns, and to take down someone twice our size with a swift kick. Once we had seized the advantage, we were taught to subdue our captive with a "reverse-wrist-twist-lock" or the infamous "chokehold," which is now illegal and no longer used. For most of us women, the hardest part of the physical training was the boxing. ...For my partner I chose Frank Evans, the most gracious gentleman in our class, in the hope that good manners would deter him from flat-out clocking me.... I laid into him like a madwoman, hammering at him, throwing my upper body into my punches, just as I had been taught, parrying his blows. He endured my slugging as if it were the annoying buzzing of mosquito-- and then with on left hook put me down for the count. ...Late in our training one of the instructors took the "ladies" aside for a frank talk. "Everything you're learning here in PT is important," he told us. "One day it might even save your life. But don't get cocky. In a fight, any little guy is going to have the physical advantage of weight and muscles you'll never have. So always depend on your gun--- you don't have to shoot the creep. Just aim it at his balls. That'll yank any guy into line might fast." That was, bar none, the most valuable streetwise piece of advice I received in all those weeks at the FBI Academy.

...Gun are hefty, and we spent hours each day out on the firing range, learning to shoot. Nowadays the weapons are a lot more user-friendly-- if that term can be applied to guns-- nine-millimeter Sig Saur semiautomatic pistols, which hold fourteen rounds an released a hail of fire with very slight pressure, making them very dangerous. We used six-shot Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolvers, for which you squeeze hard on the trigger each time you want a bullet to eject. ...Just coming to grips with our weapons was one for the challenges of our firearms training.

...Our firearms session usually started in the classroom and finished out on the range, where we each shot hundreds and hundreds of rounds at a male silhouette drawn on a target at the end of a fifty-foot lane. The shooting drill was choreographed, like a dance recital. We would begin "proned out", lying on our bellies, practice-firing with both our weak hands and our strong hands. Next we shot two-handed from behind barricades, then holstered our weapons to dash up to the twenty-five-foot line, where we dropped to our knees. Kneeling, we fired off some strong-hand rounds, then jumped to our feet to shoot switching off between hands. The movement would conclude with us kneeling, shooting from strong-hand and weak-hand positions, before breaking to reload.

...After handgun training came the roughest stretch of our firearms course, shotguns and rifles. ...Accuracy isn't the problem with these-- it's the kick. ...It's hard enough for a big man to absorb the shock of a gun butt slamming with sledgehammer force into his shoulder, but the impact can nearly knock an average-size person off his or her feet. ...You learn to anticipate and compensate for the kick of a shotgun, though only the burliest macho types will ever claim to like them.

...Once we became proficient with firearms, our drills became fun, racing through Hogan's Alley... jumping over fake walls, and playing "Shoot/Don't Shoot" with targets that looked like bikers, housewives, kids, pets, and cops.

...We also had to master the infamous Marine obstacle course, which involves maneuvering over and around a series of barricades, avoiding booby traps, and-- worst of all for me, being afraid of heights-- climbing what looked like a huge jungle gym, far above the ground, inching over its gaps on narrow beams, climbing lattices, and swinging from precipice to precipice on ropes. ...One day we were divided into competing teams for a "capture the flag" exercise that had us running through woods and jumping off diving boards into pools, fully dressed in fatigues and boots and carrying our M-16s. Though I am an expert swimmer, keeping afloat is a lot harder when you're trying to keep a rifle dry.

...Every year agents are required to "qualify" both on the firing range, meaning that they must shoot at least an 85 percent, and at physical training, running a mile and a half and passing sit-up, push-up, and stair-step tests. (However, since the physical training requirement isn't strictly enforced, many agents wiggle out of it.) Until recently, being overweight would make you "unfit for duty," and there were rigorous standards. If you exceeded them at your annual physical, you would get a "fat boy" or "fat girl" letter, giving you a deadline and requiring you to weight in monthly until you got the weight off. If you didn't, you could potentially be fired, and I do know of people-- who were demoted for being too fat. ...These days the standards have been relaxed, after legal challenges-- and, according to Bureau gossip, thanks to some high-ranking officials who had trouble keeping their own weight down. May agents don't applaud these changes. ...Do you really want your backup waddling and huffing and puffing though an emergency situation?

Brutality from power-hungry higher-ups.

The agent-training program was a notoriously rigorous proving ground, with instructors who considered it their job to flush out the weak and winnow down classes to the very best. Many took the adversarial approach to teaching-- the old tough, abusive, boot-camp-sergeant style (though our ex-military classmates liked to insist that the FBI Academy was just summer camp with guns.) Today, the philosophy is different. The standards are just as stringent, but the thinking goes that having chosen you and invested the taxpayers' money in your training, the Academy had better man an agent out of you. But back then the program was a trial by fire, on the theory that if you could survive it, you could make it on the street.

...For women, especially, who had to sweat to achieve the upper-body strength of the puniest man, the [physical] tests were arduous. They also brought out the sadism of the more despotic breed of instructor. Many of these petty tyrants were agent wannabes who couldn't cut it on some aspect of the program but who were brought on staff because of their exceptional physical prowess. They lived to bully trainees, and women were the special targets of their resentment. ...Later, a few of us heard the instructor [who flunked a woman with a master's in computer science] boasting that he had "washed out one more female"-- a chilling hint that we might be in for a browbeating. ...Since then, there have been lawsuits challenging such arbitrary and discriminatory dismissals of trainees, and no single instructor could make such a categorical ruling. More important, the Bureau today [2001] is much more attuned to the overall value of its candidates to flunk out a CPA/computer expert over one questionable push-up! But that's not how it was back in the bad old days.

...But so much depended on sheer luck with instructors placements. There was one fiend with a black belt in karate who routinely had people sent-- or carried-- to the infirmary with broken wrists and ankles or delirious from heat stroke after hard runs on sweltering, 100-degree Virginia summer afternoons.

...Firearms, like PT, had its share of tyrannical instructors who thrived on persecuting the weaker candidates and, especially, women. There was one who liked to grab a woman from behind by the nape of the neck, shove his knee between her legs, and bark, "Spread 'em." To him this was "improving her shooting stance," but today it would be called intimidating verging on sexual harassment-- and he would be gone.

..It was almost graduation before I discovered that there was no such thing as "certification" by an instructor or being judged as a "safe shooter." All you had to do was hit the target enough times to pass. The whole thing-- calling me out of class to make the matter seem urgent, his earnest look, the "concern" he expressed-- had been a cruel mind game, aimed at sowing the seeds of self-doubt and inadequacy in a brand-new, eager, and impressionable trainee. What a power-trip!

...Everyone in our group who was still standing at the end of training managed to "qualify" with both shotguns and M-16 rifles by scoring their 80 percent. But as our last day on the firing range approached, one of our more sadistic instructors assigned us the challenge of shooting seventy-five rounds of rifle slugs and double-ought buck from the shotguns. ...Nothing short of all-out trench warfare in some postapocalyptic Mad Max realm, with modern rifles unavailable, would ever approximate this experience in real life. But a fledgling agent never says, "I can't." ...After a dozen rounds, even big men were crying out for ice packs to dull the ache of their bruised and battered shoulders. Moans resounded, and with continuing fire, some shooters wept in pain-- but kept on plugging. Eyeglasses knocked to shards by the pounding recoil lacerated brows and cheeks. One by one, with our throbbing bodies black and blue and bloodied, we dropped off the firing line. I did enough damage to the brachial nerve, which runs through your shoulder, that I still can't sleep on my right side, even to this day. No one could shoot the full seventy-five rounds. ...Since that injury, I've had to shoot with the shotgun on my hip, which makes it harder to control. I still score my 80 percent, of course, but how ironic that a training exercise that was probably meant to toughen us up-- that's the most charitable explanation I can think of-- instead compromised my ability to use a shotgun for my entire career!

FBI ranking (post-graduation.)

At the head of each field division, as the regional satellite bureaus are called, is a Special Agent in Charge, or SAC. IN a city the size of Chicago he or she would serve primarily as chief administrator, with broad discretionary powers, and as liaison to other branches of government and law enforcement, as a well as the press. Below him are Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs) who oversee the major programs, such as white-collar crime, foreign counterintelligence, organized crime and drugs, and Violent Crime/Major Offender (VCMO). Next in the pecking order are the squad supervisors, who do the day-to-day management of agent takes forces dedicated to specific criminal activities such as fraud, terrorism, and, in the case of the macho squad, fugitive apprehension, as well as expert service squads, specially trained in such skills as surveillance, who are farmed out to help with individual operations. In 1980, there were some 350 agents working in Chicago, only fourteen of whom were women. I was the fifteenth.

CONCLUSION

What a great reading experience.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[cataclysmiceuphemism]

For the prompt list: Torksmith, 24 or 54? Love what you’ve written so far btw !

Thank you!

a list of 69 kinks– send a prompt and a ship–

24. Bondage/Restraints 54. Control/Loss of Control (both but..mildly lol)

"I know how to breathe, Peter," Mike said, "Been doing it since I was born."

"That's the point," Peter said, in a tone Mike found about as patient as it was condescending, "You've been doing it unconsciously." He laid his hand flat against Mike's bare chest, fingers spread. Mike looked down at Peter's fingers and found himself wanting to compare the breadth of his own; he was taller than Peter, but Peter was heavier than he was, and none of it mattered except that it sort of did. He couldn't, though, not in any kind of a proper way; Peter had tied his wrists together, tight in front of him on one end of rope. The other end was bound around his neck, keeping him from lowering his hands past his chest. "Have you heard of Leonard Orr?"

Mike thought it would be funny to lie and say he had, because he thought he'd be able to bullshit an answer. He could work it out, from context clues, what Leonard Orr believed in, at least close enough he thought he could make Peter buy it for a while. "No," he said honestly, anyway, "I imagine he's got a lot of thoughts about how a guy breathes."

"What you said," Peter said, like he wasn't paying attention, like he wasn't even acknowledging what Mike was saying now, "About doing it since you were born. Leonard Orr believes that birth is a traumatizing act. We learn to breathe screaming, in pain, and that instinct never leaves us. Breathing consciously lets us get rid of the pain, and undo our trauma. He has this technique— Rebirth breathing—"

"Man, if I tell Bette I'm the one traumatized by my birth…." Mike said, laughing, disdainful.

Peter paused. Considered Mike a moment, then asked, "Why is it you think there can only be one victim?"

"Why does good Ol' Leo think everyone is?" Mike countered.

"Not everyone," Peter said, "But many people."

"Lucky me, I'm not one of them."

Peter gave Mike a wry smile. "Breathwork is all about control. I'd think you'd enjoy that."

Mike laughed. "Peter," he said. And instead of saying everyone wanted control, he just had the balls to admit it, he pushed his bound wrists out, let the rope tug on his throat, to let Peter know the pot was calling the kettle black.

"I wasn't saying it as an insult," Peter clarified, "This time, I wasn't."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow, we'll see." He kissed Mike's neck, and Mike tipped his head to indulge it. "I'd like you to practice breathwork with me, Michael."

"Rebirthing?" Mike asked, "Oh, I'm not here for a baptism."

"Not Rebirth breathing," Peter said. Mike could feel Peter's nostrils flare against his jugular, could feel Peter's mouth get rougher, like it might bruise him; could tell the comment annoyed him. Mike sucked his lips in for a second to keep from smiling on it. "That's only one of many things. Pranayama, I suppose, if you'd like a name to it."

"It's all the same to me," Mike answered, because the name wasn't the bit that mattered. And that part was just the truth, really not meant to annoy Peter at all. But it did and he could tell it did, after he'd said it, so he placated, "What do you have to do?"

Peter stopped kissing him, and looked at him. He reached down, grabbed his cock firm, grip around the head. "Breathe in," Peter said, and Peter breathed in, too, guiding Mike with it, as his hand slid down to the base of Mike's cock. "Breathe out," Peter said, and Peter breathed out, too, as he slid his hand back up. "Every time I do that, breathe with it. I'm going to be doing the opposite— out, when you're in, in when you're out— but I think it'd be harder for you to keep time, just going by my breathing."

"Yeah. Only musicians know a thing about keeping time," Mike said.

Peter's face pinched up. He stared at Mike, then asked, "Do you think I was insulting you?"

"Is that what you think I think? Sounds like your hangup, Peter."

"I wasn't," Peter said, "I'm sure you could do it. But it'd take you out of your own body, focusing on mine. I'd like you to be focused on yourself."

"Usually the opposite of what you want."

Peter laughed. He understood it as a joke, but answered seriously, "I always think you should focus on yourself more, actually." But Mike wouldn't like the fact he thought he ought to be more introspective. That he ought to focus more on the impact he was having, than the impact things were having on him. That he only thought he was aware of himself, but was really was ignorant to many things about himself. Peter had said it all before and would probably say it again, some other time. Mike couldn't understand his argument just as much as he couldn't understand Mike's, and he made himself bite his tongue on it. "Just breathe."

Peter didn't return immediately to stroking Mike's cock. He angled himself first; pushed inside of Mike deep. The breath Mike took as he was filled was definitely one of impulse instead of mindfulness, a quick inhale, a brace as much as it was an eager response, and Peter said as much.

Mike gave him a look that said something that Peter thought, at once, was disdainful, except it was one that he thought Micky or Davy might take as a tease. "I never agreed, for a start. But if I had, you aren't holding up your end of the bargain, Peter. And, well, I'd do it for you, but my hands are tied."

So Peter touched him again. He stroked Mike's cock in time with the thrusts of his hips, and with his own breaths. Slow, steady, purposeful. He watched as Mike, agreeably, paced his breathing right along with his, staring right up into him with a razor's edge of a gaze, dark, sharp, cutting. He had the thought, that Mike was in fact taking stock of his body, was aware of his breaths, was breathing in as he was out, out as he was in, purposefully rather than incidentally by basing it off the pleasure Peter was giving him as Peter had suggested. It felt at once contrary and intimate, and something very difficult for him to prove.

Except that when he said, "It's like we're on one life cycle, this way. My inhale is your exhale, together," Mike kept on holding his breath while he talked, and only joined the rhythm again once he was through. And he wanted to ask if Mike understood that, felt that. He was certain, really certain that Mike would give him an answer that disappointed him. That was meant to disappoint him, probably, meant to keep him in his place. But he wanted to know, so he asked, "Do you feel my life with yours?"

Mike didn't answer No like Peter had expected, nor Yes like Peter had found himself hoping for. What he said was, "Peter, live faster, would you?"

And that felt like a yes. In Peter's bones it did. He stopped a moment, stopped moving altogether, stopped breathing and Mike stopped breathing with him, and kissed Mike open mouthed and eager, tasting him, tongues moving against each other. Mike grabbed at him almost like he was using his hands to scoop a cup of water from a pond, grabbed at Peter's throat awkward to keep him close, the heels of his palms pressed together. They were already breathless; kissed past breathless. Peter's lungs were hurting and he was sure, secretly pleased and positive, that Mike's were hurting even more, because he didn't do this like Peter did, had no real interest in it even if he understood it in the moment. He wouldn't care to meditate and breathe in deep, breathe out slow, tomorrow. He wanted, he realized, for Mike to gasp for him again. For Mike to fail for him, even though it undermined all that he'd said about it. But Mike kept pace, right to the edge of dizziness, and Peter gave in; he went back to stroking, to fucking, to breathing.

It was hard to tell who had won the brief show of wills. Peter had caved to Mike's asking, but only after Mike had indulged his own. Maybe it was a draw, if it was anything at all.

He went faster— Mike accepted him faster, breathed quick on every thrust, with purpose. He paused only once, to suggest, "Breathe through your nose." Mike had been breathing in through his nose, but out through his mouth, and again he stopped both to listen to Peter talk to him. "Through your mouth, that way, it can feel like hyperventilating, if you do it quickly."

Mike listened to him. Took the suggestion without arguing it, and that felt like something. They breathed together, fast, with intent. Even as they drew closer together, they resisted the impulse to cave to the ever-quicker pants at the approach of orgasm. They felt it all, each stroke, each thrust, each inhalation, as if it were a place they were going to together. As though they were walking together, and working to keep stride, instead of one being pushed by the other. And when they held their breath for each to come in turn, it was to enjoy it, to be all the more aware of the other effects orgasms brought to the body. The tightness of their muscles, the flush that went across not only Peter's cheeks, but across his ears, and across his shoulders, too. The way Mike's fingers, hands bound as they were, curled into each other. The fact that Peter's eyes drew shut tightly enough that the corner of his eyelashes—in his right eye, only— grew damp. The sweat across Mike's brow. They were aware of it all; conscious of the things they were often unconscious to, and aware of what they could have controlled, if they'd put their mind to it.

They laid together close, and didn't quite kiss, their lips touching soft without meaning behind it.

Peter breathed out, slow, steady, deep, pushing all of the air out of his lungs to leave them empty.

And Mike, just as slow and steady, filled his lungs with Peter's breath.