#i know the timing is suspicious but this 100 percent real

[lady-buggerinton]

My Top Five Polin Scenes in Part One (and why!)

My darling gossipers, so far this show is making literally all of my hopeless romantic dreams for this couple come true and who knows what kind of angst and drama were in for in part two, so before things gets too real I just wanted to go into (too much) depth on my favorite scenes and a few swoon-worthy details from part one! *whips reigns on carriage* shall we?

5. Drawing Room Lesson/Journal

Pen's brain: TOUCH ALERT! HIS HAND IS ON MY BACK.

This scene is so best friend coded with the way they are bantering and flirting the whole time. There's an adorable contrast between Penelope's fear of being discovered and Colin being like it's chill!(when in fact it is not Chill because they get interrupted after 5 minutes of gazing into each others eyes)

He just clearly wanted to be completely alone and behind closed doors platonically with his very beautiful friend (who looks like an angel in this scene) to pretend they are courting. Nothing suspicious about that!

I love how he's so into the lesson to the point that he has set out the lemonade as a prop and brought her to Bridgerton house in the first place specifically because she said it was where she was most comfortable (previously, but he's doing his best, and probably hoping she will become comfortable again, ouch)

Colin being the "dashing suitor" for her to flirt with (loser) and when she's resistant to fake flirting with him he hits her with the, "you don't have to be embarrassed, you know me!" trying to put her at ease. And he succeeds! Penelope is so comfortable during this scene when she's opening up about how it's hard for her to get her personality across, it's so sweet and honest.

And this is when the ROMANCING really starts, I love how it's Penelope who takes the lead here. mostly by accident, but the poor man is still left in shambles.

I do kind of wish for this scene they had gone with a more back and forth flirting moment, and seen them both get a little taste of how overtly flirting with each other would feel rather than her little poetic moment, but it was sweet to see her expose a corner of her feelings for him and watching him get a tad flustered at the compliment.

Ok, while it was rather uncool of her to read his journal, I love this part so much. Because I am no better, I would 100 percent do this given the chance. Her examining the space where he spends time, her running her hand over his pirate coat, (who wouldn't) the quiet yearning of that action. As a snoop myself, this was wish fulfillment.

Penelope being hit with a confusing mix of jealousy and intrigue by the contents of the journal entry, the way she stops reading for just a second and then gives in and devours his writing, not being able to hold back from getting inside his head. Don't think about how she probably missed his letters.

Colin's anger here is warranted, and I liked how he didn't come across as aggro-angry Colin from the books but is still justifiably upset that his privacy has been violated. He is likely aware that there are certain DETAILS he wouldn't want her to be reading, like how he's a lonely lonely sad little man trying to be rakish and roguish because his beautiful platonic friend isn't writing him back and encouraging him like she usually does.

Can I just mention that bandaging a wound is an excellent trope and it's such a good romancing vehicle: the care, the tenderness, the touching! the GRUMPINESS! But my favorite thing about the wound bandaging is his reaction to her complimenting his work, of which he hasn't shown ANYONE. He's just so shocked that she likes it, and clearly starved for her encouragement/anyone to be interested in his travels.

I think its also worth noting that this is THE moment that Colin thinks back to when he's considering activating his chaos tendencies by rolling up to the red ball to interrupt her proposal, so I'm gonna interpret that as him recalling his first realization/admittance to himself that he has feelings for her beyond friendship.

It wouldn't surprise me since it is after this moment that we see the hints of jealousy start to manifest at the full moon ball (looking for her, asking her if she likes a suitor, he's not subtle with it). Can't blame him, he was just touched with intimacy and care, and told his creative outlet is well-written, he is being ROMANCED to the max and he can't handle it.

We also have our first "please" as Pen asks to help, and as we will see, these two can't say no to each other once the magic word is spoken! I hope this theme makes a comeback in part two (please please please)

4. Market Scene

ok, besides a semi-silly looking wig on Colin (reshoots) this scene is first of all, so beautiful.

SHE IS SO FINE IN THIS SCENE I CAN'T EVEN THINK. She looks like a preraphaelite painting and I'm gnawing at the bars of my enclosure.

I literally kept saying "wow" out loud. It actually makes the scene very silly to me because she keeps talking about how she'll never snag a husband and I'm over here on one knee begging for a chance.

If Penelope has been Colin's cheerleader and #1 supporter for their whole friendship, this is where that flips. This scene is all about Pen feeling dejected about her prospects and Colin trying to lift her spirits -basically by saying she doesn't need to work on anything because he already likes her so much without her doing anything but I digress!

There is nothing hotter than your crush talking about a shared memory! Literally nothing! You can see her absolutely light up here when he talks about their first meeting like "I can't believe he remembered" and "Shit, I'm trying to not be in love" and it makes me ache for her.

I am very sad we didn't get a meet cute flashback (hello romcom!!) but this was the next best thing. He's also definitely still in Rake Mode with the way he is being charming and flirty, but there is a core of genuine feeling here as he is trying to get her find her confidence and be more like the non-self conscious children they once were. I believe a lot of the rift between them was directly because she had such strong feelings for him and couldn't just connect with him as friends due to the pedestal she put him on, this scene shows that without that as a barrier, they are able to connect much more naturally.

"Living for the estimation of others is a trap, once you break free the world opens up," he says, and he's starting to realize this idea but hasn't quite put it into practice. I think seeing Penelope struggling to be something she's not, just like he is, shows him how it's not working for either of them. This I think kickstarts his self-reflection and eventual rejection of external pressures later on, leaving him open to pursue other passions.

Ok but what I LOVE most in this scene is his subtle digging for information about her that she isn't forthcoming with. He asks her why she wants a husband and where she feels most comfortable, peppering her with questions and also giving her zero personal space. He's very curious about her and what is going on inside, but she's not exactly open with him at this point, giving short and simple answers.

She's genuinely not used to someone asking her this many questions about herself, receiving this kind of devoted attention, and she clearly doesn't know quite how to respond. In fact, the dynamic has always been reversed, where she was encouraging and inquiring about him, so this switch is just excellent. there have been little moments throughout the series where he asks about her and she always seems to deflect to talking more about him, so it's nice to see this shift.

Also fun detail, the grecian statues behind them are a little nod to the eros and psyche vibes of the scene as cupid is trying to find a match for his psyche, but is slowly beginning to fall for her, his curiosity the first step towards total downfall.

When he asks about Eloise is where Pen just completely shuts down and says she has to leave, and the "before we are noticed" with the little smile? I have fallen in love. She's clearly using that as an excuse to dodge the question, and it is almost an inside joke, sadly. As if she's saying "No one would believe you are courting me anyway haha". And yet he's clearly bummed she's leaving, he was having such a good time, and she leaves him hanging, wanting to know more. I also absolutely love the Rae side eye, lethal!

3. Candy Tent

Post-kiss insanity is on full display here. The way she beckons him with a sexy head tilt and he came running, the way his hands give away his nervousness and his eyes keep locking on her helplessly. Just FULL ON crush mode. The soft "How are you?" he missed her!

Also outfits are incredible here, the pearls in the hair, the painted vest, Colin inventing the color brown, it's a rococo dream. The plushy pink of the tent, the ambiance, everything is just in a word: sumptuous? never used that but it feels right here.

Pen's giddiness here is just adorable, she's experiencing blatant interest for the first time and I couldn't be happier for her. But someone else is very peeved, indeed. He's trying to play the part of supportive friend while also just kind of feeling a lot of "confounding feelings"

The way he is trying to be so casual and attempting to keep up his swagger, but his true feelings are showing through BAD kind of harkens back to how Pen would interact with Colin in s1 and 2, with barely contained affection and hope. The script has been FLIPPED and it feels so good!!

I literally squeal every time he asks her if she's formed an attachment to Debling, this is the shit I signed up for!! Her saying Debling is not "unpleasant to gaze upon" and watching Colin just completely glitch out with jealousy. He's like AND WHAT ABOUT ME! Must be frustrating to be the most eligible bachelor of the season, and yet your very beautiful crush friend is complementing another man on his looks. When your crush expresses interest in someone it can be truly insanity inducing, so I feel for him here.

Pen is oblivious completely, she doesn't think any of what she is saying is negatively affecting him, in fact she thinks this news will make him happy! His lessons worked, she didn't care about being perceived and it is having the desired affect! and yet, he's miserable. Mission accomplished unsuccessfully if you will.

He does ALMOST a good job of hiding his feelings, but if Pen were not completely convinced he couldn't have feelings for her, I think she would've picked up on the vibes here. He's way less enthusiastic about the lessons, and is giving fairly curt responses, when before he was yapping on about being yourself and such.

Then of course the blatant staring at her mouth, being the yearning sort of man he is and likely recalling their kiss in detail, reminder it's been at least a week since. She's romancing him without even trying. It also makes sense for "food motivated" Colin to have Penelope + cake equals critical override of his facial expressions and his literally standing there slack-jawed with lust.

His soft "good luck", when she leaves and the fact that he doesn't mean it AT ALL.

I've seen it talked about, but it makes a lot of sense that Penelope wasn't as affected by the kiss as he was. I'm sure she enjoyed it, but for her the kiss was an end (more on that later) and for him it was the moment he admitted his feelings (which were already growing slowly). so it makes sense the yearning is very colin-sided in this scene.

Apart from the yearning, it's also just sweet to see them in cahoots and discussing this development with Debling like its a little group project, and its the perfect scene to show Down Bad Colin, and I love it. She also clearly wants him to share with her in her success, still wanting to be close to him in any way she can, which if I think about too much I'll cry.

Bonus points for him eating the cake later on, such an intimate detail, he just wants to be close to her in any way he can. CRIMINAL! ARREST HIM!

2. First kiss/Dream Sequence

Ok I'm combining these scenes because they happen back to back and sort of like a mirror of each other, sue me. This first kiss scene is, as Whistledown says, RECKLESS. It's nonsensical, it's desperate, and it's beautiful.

This scene has only improved upon rewatches, it really has everything. Best kiss scene on Bridgerton and possibly in anything ever? no doubt no doubt?

The silly back and forth on the "You're not going to die" and the way she doesn't back down when he seems to get embarrassed, but instead says what? The Magic Word! "Please" she says, which of course is both of their activation word. His expressions here definitely mirror the book, where as soon as she asks him to kiss her, he's a bit taken aback by how much he realizes he wants to already.

This is such a low moment for Penelope, and it's one parts embarrassing and two parts brave of her to ask him to kiss her. In her position, she doesn't even have her pride left, so why not ask the boy you love to kiss you? nothing will come of it anyway, and he probably won't even do it, so why not ask? And what are friends for!

then the moment comes, and the music swells, as does the tension as he closes the distance between them, her shocked face and shallow breaths as she realizes its actually going to happen, the way he lifts her face to his with his hand under her chin. It's just pure romance. and this thing between them, this space that has never been crossed, is being crossed, and it feels insane. reckless. intimate!!

What I love is the shot that focuses on his face after they deepen the kiss, he's intent and confused by how good this feels, how little like kindness this is for him as soon as their lips touch. Like we will see later, he just kind of mind-blanks and forgets what is happening.

Whatever he thought they were has just crumbled with this kiss, and he leans his forehead against hers, no awkwardness when there is such tenderness. which is why he's so shook when she whispers "thank you", and rushes off. he's like "wait why is she thanking me? where am I? weren't we doing something here?" The hopeful strings as it focuses on his dumbstruck face, the earth literally shifting under his feet in that moment. UNREAL.

THE DREAM: I won't say a lot about the dream sequence but I just had to throw it in here because it shows how aligned they are romantically. They are both HUGE romantics, and he has orchestrated this sort of do-over kiss where he's really going for it and proving to her that he wants this too, he wants her. And she's enjoying herself, clearly, which we know is something Colin wants more than anything. It's a great way to show his inner feelings with the lack of an inner monologue that a book brings. And this is clearly a sort of parody of Bridgerton itself, or at least the books. It's over the top, a little silly, and exactly what we all want to see.

This dream also isn't just ripping off clothes, it's emotional, a key element is him expressing how he's been thinking about her, consumed by her. This kiss also isn't as innocent and patient as the first kiss, and it's full of Reciprocation, she can't stop thinking about him either. AND NEITHER CAN I!!!

Both of these kiss scenes also set up our contrasting feelings, where Pen views their first kiss as an end of a dream, a bittersweet act to finally let go off him, the dream of him. And then his dream shows the opposite, how she's ignited something in him that begins his dream of her, awake and asleep. Dream-swap! Also the hand on the wall behind her to catch her from hitting the wall. no comment.

1. Carriage Scene

Yeah like what can I say! It's incredible! I honestly have no idea how they can top this scene, but honestly if this is the best love scene they share in the season I am 10000% content. All of my little qualms with how they did the season melt away when I watch this scene because this was what was crucial to nail and they NAILED IT. TO THE WALL BABY. YAY.

And how did he gain access to the carriage (and Penelope)?? by saying please!! we love the magic word!! I do like the confession a lot, especially the "what if I did have feelings for you?" and the way he gets to his KNEES, a truly inspired moment.

How he completely dies inside when she says they are friends, and still accepts it with grace. There were SO many obstacles to him expressing his feelings to her this night, and he just red rovered each one, and we are all very grateful.

Something about this scene is just built different, I like a lot of the love scenes in the show, but this one has some kind of secret ingredient that we didn't know we'd been missing. Maybe its the location, the context, the way they are just grasping at each other desperately (which if you think about how Penelope thought this was a one time thing in the books and she wanted to make the most of it, actually don't think about that)

He's also just so sweet about it, he's not angry, or insistent, he's just honest and intent. and she's just bewildered and INTO IT.

The lightning is gorgeous, the way it looks like Penelope is catching on fire and glowing. the catharsis, the giving into passion. The way she smiles like her dreams are coming true (because they are) before he just completely attacks her. What else can I say but EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

so many of the kisses are so tender and gentle, and they just build and build and build in intensity as they get lost in each other.

on a more horny note, so many moments here actually make me physically roll my eyes back in my head with how insane they make me. The desperate boob grab, the consensual nod, the way his hand slips under her dress, they were truly so insane for this. something tells me they knew I've waited literal years for this, so they knew they had to make it good.

Someone said Nicola should get an Emmy nom for moans, and she should, somehow they don't come across as cartoonish at all, and it doesn't take me out of the scene like some "noise making" does in these types of scenes. and for the record I'm not jealous at all, of either of them. in fact, no sooner did my head hit the pillow that I was met with complete and total darkness....not even a dream....

Like everything I could say has already been said, but it was so much better than I thought it was going to be, blew my expectations out of the water and DELIVERED. and DEVOURED. and RUINED ME. AND I AM VERY GRATEFUL.

Anyway that's all, I'm very afraid for part two so I needed some escapism, why am I already nostalgic for the good ol' times when Polin was happy for 6 minutes. thanks for reading! <3

[valiantstarlights]

[Fae!Dream and Vampire!Hob AU]

For @gabessquishytum and wing anon 🖤 I've had this in my notes for a couple of weeks, but now seems to be a good time to share it. 😊

Fun fact, this was inspired by these lines from Baby, It's Cold Outside: "I wish I knew how / (Your eyes are like starlight now) / To break this spell"

Don't ask. The weather was 30°C+ outside when I typed this up. 😂

CW: the tiniest amount of spice, and Dream and Hob being insane about each other as usual.

Fae!Dream runs away from home in the middle of winter and ends up on the wrong side of the forest. He has never been here before. The trails are winding and changes directions when he isn't looking, and the trees are indifferent to his plight, refusing to point him towards the fae side of the forest. 'We are too sleepy,' they say. 'Fuck off.'

Soon, though, he comes upon a castle, and he can see that there's light inside. Snow is already falling pretty hard by then, and Dream is so desperate for warmth and shelter that he knocks on the imposing front doors.

It takes a while for someone to answer, but Dream waits. It's a huge castle. He's about to knock again when the door opens and a handsome vampire peeks his head out. When he sees Dream, shivering and hunched over, lips almost blue, he hurriedly opens the door wide and ushers him in.

Dream enters the castle. Despite everything he has learned in his long, long life.

He knows he has to tread carefully. It's common knowledge that fae and vampires don't get along. But he also knows how important inviting someone inside is to vampires, and he doesn't exactly have a choice. He has two options, and they are: 100 percent chance of freezing to death on one hand, and 50 percent chance of being murdered by a vampire on the other.

Although...now that he's looking, he thinks the vampire looks nice, actually. He's currently talking about getting Dream warmed up in front of a fire and getting him some soup, then apologizing right after because there won't be garlic in the soup.

Dream thinks his voice sounds lovely.

The vampire keeps his promises. Soon, Dream is warm in front of a fireplace, eating creamy vegetable soup. The vampire talks about how he made the soup, and Dream can tell that he's just as nervous as having a fae in his home. But Dream senses no falsehood in his words or in his manners.

Dream is so fucking charmed by him that he (unthinkingly) asks him his name. And then realizes his mistake one second later when the vampire's open features shutter close and his muscles tense.

"My name is Dream," Dream offers. He knows he should not give his name. Not his true one, anyway. And yet he does.

If the vampire's goal is to hurt him, he does not need Dream's true name for that. Dream is still weak from running and escaping his bodyguards. If the vampire wants to hurt him, he'll be too weak to fight back.

"Sure," the vampire says, and...yeah, he's right to be suspicious. 'Dream' isn't exactly one of the top 100 baby names for male fae babies. Lord and Lady Endless knew what they were doing when they named their children. "You can call me Hob."

Hob.

His name doesn't taste like a lie, but Dream knows it's not his real name. It's fine. He likes 'Hob.'

"Thank you for offering me shelter," Dream says. He knows he shouldn't show gratitude or else it will bite him in the ass in the future. He does so anyway. "I was running away from home."

He knows he is under no obligation to speak the truth in its purest form. He has learned how to mislead and twist his words in a way that is still true, but volunteers less information. He does so anyway.

Hob is looking at him intensely, like he is also trying to figure Dream out. "May I ask why?"

And so the whole story falls out of Dream's mouth. It's the first time he has ever talked to anyone about how he is being treated at home, but Hob is respectful and lets him talk. Hob is nice and pours him a glass of water when his voice become hoarse.

Hob is lovely because when Dream starts to break down in the end, telling him all about the entire business with the Burgesses, he takes out a handkerchief and wipes Dream's tears away himself.

"I'm so sorry about everything that has ever happened to you," Hob says in the end, when Dream realizes that he is on Hob's lap, being held. It feels nice. He wants to snuggle up further, but his manners prevent him from doing so. "But I'm glad you've left them for good."

That makes Dream pause, and he shakes his head. "I have not. Technically, I am still under their protection." He looks outside to see heavy snowflakes still drifting down, and an occasional wind gusting through. "I still have to go home."

Hob looks out the window and then back to him incredulously. "In this weather?"

"I have to," Dream insists. "If not..."

"If not?"

Dream looks down at his lap. At Hob's handkerchief that was somehow now in his hands. It's a pretty cream color with the initials R.G. embroidered on the corner. Dream does not think what the initials mean because he doesn't want to pry. Hob's true name is his business alone. But he likes the handkerchief. Perhaps he can keep it as a souvenir of his time at the castle of the handsome vampire. It would be his most prized possession. He will not draw attention to it so Hob will forget to ask him to return it. "If not," Dream says, "I will die before the season turns."

Hob inhales sharply, and then he's clasping Dream's arms. "Is that a fae thing?"

Dream nods miserably. It's how they lost Destruction. And how Dream will be lost, if he doesn't get back. He hopes Death will take care of Jessamy for him.

"Is there no loophole for that?" Hob asks, looking frantic. "There must be something. Like...I don't know, like a transfer of protection?"

Hob must be a very young vampire for him not to know the rules. But Dream knows the rules by heart, and all the loopholes as well, from hundreds of years trying to bend them. And the only way...

"Oh."

"Oh?" Hob echoes. "Is there a way to save you after all?"

There is, but--

He could not possibly--

"I have to leave," Dream announces, and regretfully gets off of Hob's lap and starts walking away.

"What? Why?" Hob asks, standing up himself and following him. "Do you have to go on a quest for some item or something? Stay the night. There's literally a blizzard--"

"I cannot!" Dream shouts.

Hob, shocked by Dream's outburst, holds his hands up peaceably. "Alright," he says gently. "May I ask why?"

Dream bites his lip and says nothing.

"Tell me," Hob begs. "Please. I want to help."

Dream shakes his head. Nobody wants to help. Randall had tried to trap him against his will. Alexander was too afraid of his father and brother to help Dream escape and had only pointed him deeper into their house. Dream almost didn't make it.

Hob exhales. Not out of impatience, but out of a decision reached. "Look," he says, hands still open in a gesture of peace. "I know you have no reason to trust me, but I really do want to help you. I know a thing or two about being trapped in a situation I do not want to be in, and I wouldn't want anyone else to experience that. So...I would like you to know my name."

Dream gapes at him. A vampire willingly giving his own true name to a fae? It's practically unheard of. It's a trick. It's--

Hob takes a deep breath and says, "My name is Robert Gadling."

'R.G.' The handkerchief is his. Dream's fingers tingle at this new information.

There is a change that happens, when someone tells a fae their true name voluntarily, knowing exactly what they're getting into. It's a different kind of change than when their name is tricked out from them.

If their name is tricked out of them, a thin string, only visible to the fae, connects the being to the fae they gave their name to, as a sign of possession.

But when someone tells a fae their true name the way Hob--Robert Gadling, just did, they will look more real to the fae. More tangible.

And a more tangible Robert Gadling, a kind and handsome vampire who would open his doors to a fae, feed them, keep them warm, and want to help them save their life? All the while smelling of nothing but sincerity?

"Tell me," Hob, Robert, says again. "I want to help you."

Dream suddenly hungers for him. And his sudden yearning to make Hob his is not conducive to the conversation. "You--"

"Please," he says. "Unless there's something preventing you to? More of your fae rules?" He looks contemplatively at the space between them. "Do I have to kneel?"

No. Yes. Lie and make him kneel.

"If I stay," Dream says faintly, the words tumbling out of his mouth without his conscious consent, "my parents' protection will slowly pass to my current host."

Hob looks alarmed at that, probably wondering how many hours it has been since Dream has arrived. "How slowly?"

"A week at most."

The answer, of course, is much more complicated than that. In the case of the Burgesses, Dream still has his parents' protection at the end of Day 5, when he finally escaped. In Unity Kincaid's case, she was so in love with Desire that it only took a day for her parents' protection to fade.

But with the way things are going between him and Hob, and with how fast Dream is prone to falling in love, his parents' protection will most likely fade after three days. At most.

"So stay," Hob says, as if it were that simple. He is still so young. He doesn't know what he is offering. "If you haven't noticed yet, the castle is entirely empty, aside from the castle's spirit itself. It takes care of itself and was kind enough to open its doors for me when I rose from the dead. And if it can offer me, a no-good vampire who used to be a highwayman, a home, then who am I to not offer you my protection as well?"

'Highwayman' is a term that cannot be more than 300 years old. Dream is robbing the cradle.

"I am saying," Dream says slowly, "that if you are to offer me your protection, once my parents' protection has faded, you would be considered my husband. The fae will consider us married."

Hob blinks. "Oh."

"Yes, 'oh,'" Dream cannot help but say mockingly. "That is why I must leave."

But Hob just gestures to the windows helplessly, begging him to see sense at the sight of the howling winds that are thankfully muffled by the thick castle walls. "In this weather?"

"I must."

"A night."

"What?"

"Stay for the night," Hob begs. "The weather might be better tomorrow. And if so, I will give you my thickest coat and help you get back to fae land myself. If...if you are afraid of me, I will stay here in the study, and you may choose any room you'd like to stay in for the night."

Dream stares at him, and ignores the way his body is pleasantly tingling all over, but especially between his legs.

Faes are not good. They are greedy creatures who will take the entire dish when presented with a bite.

And in the face of Robert Gadling's kindness and consideration...

Dream walks up to Hob and grabs him by the collar of his dressing gown. If Hob is willing to give him a coat, then Dream will steal all his clothes for himself as well. If Hob is willing to offer him his protection, then Dream will cast his own on him and name him husband without bothering to wait for his parents' protection to fade. If Hob has shown him kindness for an hour, Dream will want him for the rest of their life.

"Kiss me," he says. Demands. Begs. He doesn't know anymore. All he knows is that if Hob does not kiss him, he will cry.

Hob looks baffled. "What...will that accomplish, exactly? If I may ask?"

Dream groans in frustration and stamps his feet. "I will be kissed," he says. "I will know what you taste like, and you will know mine. Our lips will be thoroughly acquainted and we will feel our tongues push wetly against each other. Is that not enough of an accomplishment for you?"

"Sounds like you want more than just a kiss, your highness," Hob says, but his gaze and his voice are lower now, which is exactly what Dream wants.

"I am not a prince," Dream tells him honestly. Always with honesty. "But I do want more than just a kiss from you. With the generosity you have shown me, with you telling me your name, if you do not kiss me, I will simply waste away and perish."

"Well, we can't have that," Hob says. "Not after I just saved you from freezing to death."

"No, we cannot," Dream agrees. "So kiss me, Robert Gadling." His true name on Dream's tongue tastes like sunlight. "Kiss me and protect me and make me yours right now."

Hob's eyes are dancing as he brushes a lock of hair away from Dream's face and tucks it behind his ear. "You're a greedy little fae, aren't you?"

"And you are still not kissing me, you stubborn vampire."

"I can't believe this is how my evening turned out," Hob chuckles, and touches their foreheads together. "I must have gone insane the moment I saw you. I would normally offer to court someone first before the topic of marriage can even be considered."

Dream pecks Hob's dimpled chin, impatient. He has a slight stubble that would feel wonderful against Dream's thighs. "I am not human. Or another vampire. I am a fae. And if you do not kiss me right now, I will go out in that snowstorm and--"

"Alright, you sweet impatient thing," Hob says, "No need for such threats." And finally dips his head down to touch their lips chastely.

Dream would have none of that, however, and surges upwards, intent on devouring him. Their sharp canines clack against each other, but it does not deter them.

"Are we insane?" Hob asks when Dream has to take a breath. It's so unfair that Dream has to breathe when Hob does not. "To do this right after we just met? Tell me truly."

"Yes," Dream answers honestly. "I do not know of anyone who consummated their coming together as one on the very day they met."

"Consummating, hm?" Hob's thumb presses against his hipbone when he pulls Dream closer to him. "We can do that."

"Yes," Dream agrees. "Right now. Please. Everything."

And Hob does just that.

--

His parents' protection fades even before Hob could fuck him, but he's too preoccupied by the feeling of Hob's stubble on his thighs to notice.

--

In the morning, Hob presents him with the most beautiful obsidian ring he has ever seen, and Dream immediately says yes before Hob could even ask the question.

--

"For the record," Hob says one night after they finished fucking in the library, "I was fully intending on lending you all my thick coats that first night. You looked so cold I was hesitant to even take off your clothes."

Dream snuggles up to him and drapes one leg over Hob's deliciously hairy thighs. "That would not have worked," he says, certain. "I would have simply taken off all my clothes and accepted nothing from you except your most translucent nightgowns to cover my nakedness."

"You will seduce a vampire? Didn't you tell me that our kind do not get along?"

Dream bites him gently on the shoulder with his smaller fangs.

"I would not seduce a vampire," he says haughtily. "I have met some before, and found none of them pleasing. It is you I would seduce. The man I have decided would be mine forever as my husband."

Hob kisses his forehead, and Dream could feel the foolish smile on his lips. "Who is a vampire."

"Shush, Robert Gadling," he says, unable to stop himself from smiling as well.

[florencetypemaniacs]

Someone disguises as MC to dig out information from the ROs about some sort of secret information.... Can they figure it out before it's too late? 😅😅😅😅 Can Aunt Zinnia?

🏹 Zinnia:

100% Yes. Not because Zinnia is a talented hunter of the supernatural, but because the MC is her niece/nephew/nibling. She has been with the MC since their parents died, and she will continue to be with the MC for as long as they will have her. The very second the MC does something out of the ordinary, her eyes are on them.

💛 Marcel:

I think it would take them time, but eventually, he would figure out that something was wrong with the MC. First, he would probably chalk it up to the MC being sick or something, but when it starts to get more constant, he is immediately suspicious. 

🧡 Margaret:

Ooo, this is a hard one. I am going to have to say no, not because Margaret wouldn't realize that the MC was acting differently, but because I think she would believe that something else was going on with the MC, like feeling sick or tired. Margaret is a sweetheart, but she is native and doesn't have that much experience with supernaturals, even though she is one herself. 

❤️ Owen:

I would probably be the last one to notice that the MC was acting strange. Not that he doesn't care, but he just has a lot of other stuff on his mind, so the "MC" would have to mess up real bad or it would take time for Owen to fugure it out. The moment Owen does figure it out, he has the imposter strapped to a chair. He is impulsive and right out and starts questioning the MC. 

💙 Rosemary:

I believe yes, Rosemary has a lot of walls up, even if sometimes it doesn't seem like it, so if the MC started to try to ask too many questions, especially ones they already know the answer to, she would be 100 percent suspicious. She wouldn't say anything, though; she would play the long game until she trapped the fake MC in a corner and used their own words against them. 

🩵 Tai:

Oh, God. Tai is already dissecting everything the MC says to him, particularly romances. Thus, he would likely be one of the first ROs to notice something was amiss. My prediction would be within the next hour. Tai is quickly skeptical of any strange action or attitude from MC, no matter how slight. Tai will subtly probe and question the false MC about memories. I could honestly see him acting strangely nicer to see the "MC" reaction.

💚 Zane:

Yes, but only if it affected him. Zane is a creature of habit, so if the MC and he had a routine, especially when they were a couple or in a close friendship, he would instantly know something was wrong. He would totally be suspicious and ask Zinnia if she noticed anything different with you, which would ultimately be the "MC" downfall. 

[journeythroughlifesblog]

'Help' AU Chapter 12.

Next day. DBK Palace. Throne Hall.

Guain and Nezha have arrived. Wukong and Macaque stand in front of them.

''Have you thought about it? Have you changed your mind?” asked Nezha.

''Yes. I agree.” Wukong replied.

''You could do that before. We'll deliver a message to the Emperor. Of course, you understand that the gods will be watching?”

''Yes. I am aware of this. Also, warn them that they will be witnessing my fight against DBK."

"This DBK will not go voluntarily?"

''NO. He agreed to it if I beat him in a fight."

"But you shouldn't fight like this..." the goddess said.

''Never mind. I want peace from the kingdom of heaven, so I have to fight for it."

''Okay, we'll pass it on. How are you feeling today?” Guain said.

Wukong eyed her suspiciously. ''It's much better than yesterday. As you can see, I can stand on my feet."

“And when are you going to seal the DBK?” asked the prince.

''Tomorrow. I still need to get ready.. if that's all, you can go to the Emperor now," Wukong said ironically.

“Okay, but remember we are not your enemies.” Guain said.

"that I will see," said the king, and watched them go.

The monkeys went to the main lounge, where PIF and DBK were already there, and Red Son, who was sleeping in his father's arms. DBK watched as his son was sleeping sweetly.

“What if it fails?” DBK asked.

"It's got to work," she told PIF. "Have you told those gods you're going to fight?"

"Yes," replied Wukong.

"Don't you think it would be better to send a clone or me?" said the warrior.

The king sat down in the armchair.

"You said it yourself, it has to look real." Said the king.

''Yes but..''

''They must see me or they will suspect something. News of my illness will spread quickly throughout the kingdom of heaven. They probably already know what state I'm in, so if it's going to work, it has to be me."

"I understand," said the warrior sadly. He stood by the huge window and looked out at the vast land of demons.

''If it's all over, then what? My husband can't live in the shadows forever. there are people in the castle who would like to take over the power of my beloved.'' Said PIF sipping his tea.

Silence fell.

''What if after some time, for example, when Red Son is an adult, he raises the staff? Then DBK will be able to come back and show your strength.” Said the warrior.

“But how will our son be able to do that?” asked PIF.

''I will help him. That is my staff. I know how much energy and strength it takes to lift it.” Wukong spoke up.

"This will give DBK notoriety among the demons and no one will want to take the throne away," said the warrior.

''All right. But what will be his motivation? After all, I will be with him.'' Said DBK.

''The motivation will be to gain publicity for you so you can return to the world. This will be his goal. You just need to direct it well and it will work.'' Said the warrior.

''but how long will it last? You know very well that coming of age in the demon world is different than in humans. Time is counted differently here.'' Said PIF.

“Yes, it can be a problem waiting for a big comeback for centuries,” said Wukong.

''It's okay, I'll wait. The important thing is that the Emperor will finally let you go, brother,” said DBK.

They fell silent again. PIF saw that Macaque looked very worried about something. She approached him.

"What's bothering you?" she asked.

''Nothing..''

''Nothing? Definitely?''

The warrior turned from the window and looked at his king, who crouched closer to DBK.

"I'm not sure if Wukong can handle the fight..."

"You can't know anything with 100 percent."

''hah..'' the warrior chuckled.

''But I personally believe that it will work.''

The warrior walked closer to DBK and Wkong. PFI did just that. They sat in opposite armchairs.

''All right. I think it's time to review the plan." Said the warrior. Everyone focused.

''Tomorrow. Exactly at noon, you'll have to put on a show. I don't know what gods will be watching this, but me and PIF will. We'll stay out of the way.'' PIF nodded to the fighter. ''You will fight. Just please, Wukong, try not to get angry. You know what's in store for you.'' He looked at the king, who laughed nervously.'' And you, DBK, try not to use your full power.''

"Yes, I understand," said DBK.

Red Son sneezed cutely and everyone looked at him in awe, especially Wukong and DBK.

''Going back. Wukong you will have to pick up the top of the nearby mountain and throw it where the DBK will be, when the mountain is falling I will use the shadow portal to quickly transport the DBK to the castle. Where PIF will be waiting for you. We'll have to deal with the servants."

''I will definitely lay off half the servants. I will try to limit the influence on the castle so that no one even knows what is going on in it.'' She told PIF.

"Good," said the warrior. "If anything goes wrong, I'll transport you here right away." Everyone nodded. They sat for a while in the main living room and then the monkeys went to their chamber.

They sat on the bed.

“Are you sure you can hold on during the fight?” Macaque asked.

“Oh.. how many times do I have to tell you yes.” The king replied. "Could you bring me some armor from above?"

''It's heavy''

"Yes, but I have to represent myself in this show"

"Who would have thought you'd enjoy performing so much?" said the warrior with a sly smile.

"You know what....  it doesn't matter" the king blushed. The warrior approached him and kissed him on the cheek, which made the king blush even more. They stared at each other straight in the eyes for a moment. The warrior said ''at least sleep. Tomorrow is a big day.''

"I thought you were going to tell me something more cute," the king pouted.

"I will  after this..haha" the warrior quietly laughed and lay down. The king cuddled up to him and they fell asleep.

[kurishiri]

06 . . . alfons main story

꒰ ִ ֺ ⊹ @ notice ⊹ ֺ ִ ꒱ this translation may not be 100% accurate or contain creative liberties due to characterization or narrative flow purposes. if you enjoy, please consider reblogging, but don’t repost these or claim these as your own!

— cw: alcohol consumption, drug usage, dub-con (will try to put in between dividers), awkwardly translated smut.

Together with Roger and Liam, we stepped into the pub.

Though it was the middle of the day, the interior was dimly lit, the smell of tobacco, alcohol, and perfumes hanging heavily in the air.

(But, I think with the way we look now, we fit right into this crowd.)

(I’d expect no less from an actor like Liam... he knows exactly which clothes to wear for any place.)

—— Flashback ——

Liam: Hey, we’ll out ourselves too easily if we just go in like this… so how about we dress up a bit?

—— End flashback ——

After that, Liam quickly coordinated our our hats and glasses,

and so, here we were now, slipping into the pub.

(Anyway, I need to keep an eye on Alfons... where is he...?)

I scanned my surroundings, and...

Lady in a night dress: Jeez, Al, I swear you never come around when we invite you, but then you show up at the most sudden times.

Man smoking tobacco: Hey, could you do that thing again? I wanna see someone real tough and strong.

Alfons: Now now, aren’t we a hasty bunch... I’ll have you all know this is only my first cup.

A: I must ask you to be patient enough to allow me some time to get at least a little tipsy.

(Found him...!)

There he was, with the arms of several ladies snaked around his body,

along with several men who were smoking something like tobacco, though I also couldn’t be sure, as they held some rolled paper that looked suspicious at best with their mouths as they smiled from the other side of the smoke.

Roger: Oh man, there he goes again today.

Liam: Looks like we snuck in right as his friends were gathering around him.

Seeing his ‘indulgent private life’ that I had imagined in the back of my mind play out right before my eyes was enough to render me a bit dizzy.

(So this kind of lifestyle is normal for him, I guess...)

I was certain the one night I had spent with him could only amount to a single percent of his breadth of experience, which was probably comparable to the number of stars in the sky.

(...Not that I really care about something like that though!)

I turned a blind eye to the twinge of pain in my chest that felt as though it had been pierced ever so slightly with the tip of a needle, as I turned back to Alfons.

While sitting at a table some ways away from him, I occasionally took a sip of the drink I ordered while stealing glances in his direction.

(Or rather...)

Kate: I guess none of this can really count as a weakness, so to speak.

Roger: Hm? Oh, yeah, guess so.

R: The fact that Al plays around like this isn’t news to anyone in the aristocratic society, so I heard.

Liam: And also, Lord Elbie’s the only reason why he’s still able to attend balls and other public events.

I closely observed Alfons, who was on a table some distance away, from behind my glasses.

(Ah... there it is again...)

(I get the feeling that Alfons is smiling, and yet he’s not at the same time… at least, I think.)

His smile suggested — superficially — that he was having fun, and yet at the same time it looked awfully cold.

I remembered that very feeling of unease from the time I was close by, face to face with him.

(Here he is, playing around to his heart’s content, and yet he is pulling a face like that...)

Kate: Is this really fun for you…?

Roger: Oh?

Roger, whose chin was resting on the palm of his hand, peered at me with interest in his eyes.

Roger: What, you’re worried for Al, lil lady?

Kate: I-it’s not as though I’m worried.

Vigorously shaking my head in response, I turned back to him to see Alfons, a smile still plastered on his face.

(But...)

Kate: I guess it’s just... I don’t know, sometimes I feel like he isn’t really here or something.

K: He told me he likes having fun, but then here it looks like he’s not having fun at all... and I couldn’t help but feel a bit curious about that.

(...And on top of that, that could possibly serve as a lead to find out his weakness.)

(Even while playing around, he does not feel it’s fun. All that to say——)

(The so-called ‘playing around’ Alfons does could serve as a type of distraction, taking his attention away from something else...)

If I thought of it like that, it would make sense.

(And also, what else... if not that, then while he may be a playboy of many years, maybe he has a single woman in his heart?)

(Maybe the reason he plays around would be to bury the loneliness filling his heart... at least, that’s what’s commonly told in stories.)

As I bounced ideas in my own head and covertly stole glances at him for a bit...

(Ah!)

I saw Alfons stand up with several people, taking them out through the back door.

(...Oh no, I’ll lose sight of them.)

Kate: Let’s follow them!

Roger: Ahh, wait, Kate, I really don’t think we should...

R: ...follow them, is what I would finish with if she wasn’t gone already.

Liam: Umm, will she be okay? At this rate she might get caught up in something naughty, you know?

Roger: Yeah, I hear you.

R: Guess I’ll chase after her in case after another cup of beer.

Liam: That’s pretty nice for someone like you.

Roger: Well, you just never know when something useful for research is gonna come out of it.

Roger then looked toward the door in the back of the pub.

Roger: ...You see, if there was one Curse where there could never be enough research on, it’d be his.

—— Kate’s POV ——

(I guess... this is the place...)

Going through a dim alleyway where sunlight could hardly make it through,

I followed the faint, flirtatious voices of men and women to a building that looked more like a ruin, before stepping inside.

As I ascended the steps made of brick with cracks everywhere to be seen, the voices also got louder...

(Is this the door...?)

When I pressed my ear against the door and made sure that voices were indeed coming from the other side, I turned the doorknob to the fullest.

Kate: ...!?

And when I opened it——

The scene unfolding before my eyes was a bed with a canopy attached to it and a light veil surrounding it.

That, and... several men and women whose bodies were entangled with one another.

(Wh...wha...)

That seemed to be all that was going on amid this room... and I didn’t know where to look.

Alfons: ...Hehe, following me aaall the way to such a place, such a naughty girl you are, aren’t you.

Kate: !?

Alfons emerged from behind the curtain, slipping his arms around my waist.

Kate: Wh—Alfons!

The moment I opened my mouth, though, a sickly saccharine scent along with what I guessed was either smoke or steam wafted up.

For a brief moment, I sucked in a deep breath, causing my vision to sway with dizziness.

(W-what in the... what is this... some kind of medicine...?)

Alfons: You could not be more painfully obvious in your tailing. Truly a hopeless little miss robin you are.

His voice seemed distant one moment and then close by the next, and in the end I couldn’t properly respond to him.

Lady in a lingerie: Ohh, Al, who’s that?

Long black-haired lady: My, she’s just adorable... say, would you like to join in on the fun?

Shirtless man: You must’ve been through some rough patches, right? We can forget about all of it here.

I was being pulled from either side of me, causing my body to sway left and right.

Alfons: ...is what they all said.

(Join in... on the fun...?)

My thoughts became more of a haze, and I couldn’t think clearly.

But, on the other hand, sensations alone seemed to become awfully elevated——

Kate: ah...

Alfons’ fingers made their way through the gap in my blouse, and the slightest movement of his fingers was enough for me to break out in goosebumps.

(The memories of last night... are engraved in my body...)

Kate: ah...p-please...stop...

Long black-haired lady: Hehe... what a green reaction... say, could I feel you as well?

Alfons: Now that just won’t do. You see, she’s a new favorite of mine.

Long black-haired lady: Ehh? That’s rare...

Even while listening in on this conversation, I couldn’t muster any strength in my arms or legs.

Alfons: It’s as though keeping your guard up never crosses your mind.

Alfons looked down at me leaning into his arms, his lips curved in an amused smile.

Those very hands that were around me traced the lines on my body before making their way between my legs, causing me to shiver on reflex.

Kate: a-ah...hyaa...? W-why am I...

(My body feels so hot... I feel I might go crazy...)

Alfons: Dare I say, I’m quite intimately familiar with every spot that makes you tick. Every one, that is.

A: After all, our relationship has become something more [1]... yes?

Alfons peered into me while smiling.

Maybe it was because of something I had inhaled, but I seemed to become more and more sensitive to the sensations on my body...

Kate: Mn, sto...ah, uhh... n-no...

Alfons: ...Aha, your lips say to ‘stop,’ and yet you’re quite wet here now.

A: Would it perhaps be safe to assume that when you were on my heels from the pub, you were anticipating this?

[1] ...And what if I was?

[2] I’m not sure.

[3] I wasn’t anticipating anything. (+4 / +4)

Kate: I wasn’t... anticipating... anything...

Alfons: Oh, is that so? Or is what I’m seeing before my eyes a mere facade...?

A: You see, the fragrance you inhaled is able to elevate a certain sensation to a certain extent——

A: So I reckon in your case, it’s simply spurring your obstinate nature, perhaps...?

A: ——How about I bring out what is truly in your heart?

(Huh?)

Suddenly, Alfons started looking around the room.

On the bed were empty cocktail glasses and earrings missing their pair,

along with corsets, garter belts, and neckties...

Alfons: Ahh, look at what we have here. This will do.

He picked up a fallen hand mirror, his arms withdrawing.

(What... is he...)

My head was still in the clouds, so I couldn’t grasp what he wanted to do, so I could only follow his movements with my eyes.

With a small laugh in my ear, he flipped the mirror over.

Kate: ——Wh, no...!

There reflected on the surface was my shameful self.

His fingers crawled beneath my wrinkled skirt, going beneath my underwear before inserting them into my wet spot.

Being shown myself as he was doing this hit me with so much confusion and embarrassment I wanted nothing more than to turn on my heel and run out of here.

Kate: N-noo...

Alfons: So you say, but see here, you feel really, really good right now, no?

The truth was——it was exactly as he said.

In fact, seeing myself being in a shameful mess seemed to play into the pleasure, lighting a flame in my body.

And that realization caused me to spiral into even more confusion.

Alfons: Now, how about you cease your efforts to search for something that does not exist at all, such as my weaknesses and whatnot. It is all futile at best.

A: Instead, give yourself in to pleasure, why don’t you?

Kate: ah, ah, ah...

Amid the laughter and coquettish flirtations that filled the room, my own voice mixed with wet sounds.

Eventually, I could no longer stand, and I collapsed——onto the large, canopied bed.

Alfons: See, you would like to feel even more pleasure, don’t you?

I looked at that plastered smile that masked his face.

The feeling of the sheets on my back, the breath close to my body, and the feeling of his hands slipping under the hem of my clothes...

(...Has Alfons always been doing these things on this bed?)

(Just how many times did he do this before... and with whom...?)

(Will I just become... an addition to that body count...?)

Kate: gh...

When I thought this, I pushed Alfons away, hard.

Alfons: Whoops.

Kate: ...I-I’m heading back——!!

When I got off the bed in haste, the hand mirror fell to the floor.

I heard the sound of the mirror shattering, but I couldn’t bear to pay it any mind.

Alfons: My, is that so? Do be careful on your way back then.

Alfons was still sprawled on the bed, an easygoing air about him.

And wanting to say something, I turned back toward him, just this once.

Alfons: ...Did you need anything else? Or perhaps you have some lingering desire to continue where we left off?

Kate: I...

K: I wanted to say that you better cut back on the liquor, and don’t stay up all night. Unless you want to destroy your body. That’s all!

I just blurted out what was on my mind, so they sounded more like a sharp parting remark...

(Urk...)

And starting to feel embarrassed, I turned and left the place, this time without turning back.

Alfons: ......... [surprised]

The door then closed behind Kate in a hasty motion.

Alfons: ...Pfft, ahahaha!

Alfons burst out into laughter, holding his stomach, paying no mind to anyone else around him.

Behind him, the others continued making out as always.

Alfons: Haa......... truly, what a fool you are.

—— Kate’s POV ——

My legs trembling, I bumped into this and that while making my way down the alleyway, when I felt someone’s arms reach out to support me.

Roger: Whoa. You okay there, Kate?

Kate: Haa... haa...!

(Tailing him proved fruitless...)

As I expected, Alfons was truly living a decadent life.

(The only thing I could get out of this was that this irrefutable truth was burned into my mind.)

(And once again, I fell into his trap and got caught up in pleasure...)

(I could not grasp a single weakness of his in the end.)

Liam: Your breathing is really uneven right now... are you okay?

Kate: Yes... I’m okay.... I won’t ever give up...

If I do, I’ll only end up being played all over again by him. ...And besides,

(Even after having gone through all this, I——)

I wanted to know the reason why, for all his smiling, he didn’t seem to be having fun... to the point it gnawed at my heart.

to be continued…

← prev next → his side

NOTES:

[1] Alfons says [ただならぬ関係] (tada naranu kankei) here, which I have translated as a relationship that has become something more. I think he is quoting something he had said from the previous chapter, where he was like “our relationship has become more than a one-night stand” to Kate. Another way to say this could be along the lines of “we share a special relationship,” thereby removing the become part, but I wanted to sort of emphasize the quoting part, so I directly extracted from the line in the other chapter.

masterlist🪞 ╱ ko-fi ☕️

꒰ ִ ֺ ⊹ @ tags🏷️ ⊹ ֺ ִ ꒱ @drachonia @.comment or dm to be added or removed!

[crisshiddles-blog]

Make Wow Gold - Learn to Earn

At the point when I read a post as of late about a person whose account got restricted for all time (including his level 70 person) just for buying two or three hundred gold - I understood I wasn't the one in particular who got tired attempting to earn a couple of gold coins in Azeroth - it tends to be very challenging to this website make Wow gold except if you know the right procedures.

You can in a real sense go the entire day earning 100 coins or somewhere in the vicinity - do you suppose the gold ranchers who run the dodgy Wow Gold available to be purchased destinations take that long? Obviously not - the straightforward truth is just similar to this present reality there are simple and hard ways of earning money. You can obviously just buy some gold through one of these locales - however before you really do believe about their cases to be 100 percent safe. How can an exchange specifically prohibited by Snowstorm be 100 percent safe - they can undoubtedly follow each exchange that is made on any world - a couple of pieces of code can trap anything suspicious. There's a probability that large numbers of the accounts that are used to convey Wow gold are hailed as suspicious at any rate.

It's essentially not worth the gamble - how much time have you invested in your World of Warcraft character? How might you feel assuming that character was successfully erased ? It's basically not worth the gamble - sure you probably will not get found out however on the off chance that you are anticipate no compassion from Snowstorm - this is an extravagant industry and they'd joyfully erase thousands of account to protect the game play.

Try not to get hung up on earning gold - on the off chance that that is all your doing you won't have a good time - step back and enjoy the game those prizes will come eventually and you will feel better knowing you've earned your own Wow gold and not just gotten it.

[mmishee-art]

DerpyChoCho:

Presenting... One Romantic Date, Hold the Awkward! A short VN where you date the coolest skelebro: The Great Papyrus! Featuring the amazing talent of: @mmishee_mw, @DavetasticDave, @TwoAllNighters, @cellochicita-va​, dan_does_voices

I did the character art!  Download it for FREE here!

[iheartchv]

Can You Do A Vampire Donnie x F!Reader In Bayverse

151. “Do you know how a turtle takes his mate?” 112. Biting/marking 5. “MINE.” 96. Making out 70. Abandoned building 89. Mating/breeding season 142. “Bite me.”

Sure😁👍

Well i guess you'll be seeing a lot of stuff from me Kass x3

Prompts used(c)@turtle-babe83

⚠️ Donnie and reader are over 18, ok? by clicking Keep reading, you agree to seeing mature content ⚠️

Midnight Desire

You sat at a table with your friends. Everyone wanted to have a weekend night out since you and a few of your co workers suffered a rough week at your job. But your mind wasnt on having fun, only on your boyfriend, Donatello. You've been so busy lately that you only had time to go to work, come home, and then go to bed. You missed him. You missed those nights were he would talk to you till the sun came up.

'Y/n'

You looked up, looking to see where the voice came from. You heard Donnie's voice calling you. Were you really so desperate for him that you was imagining his voice?

"Hey, Y/n, are you alright?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm alright."

"Works been hitting you hard. Just relax"

You couldn't relax, though. Your mind was obsessed with Donnie, his touch, the way he made you feel good. Plus your body was wanting more than the soft outer course sex you both had been having. You craved him... your body squirmed in your seat.

'Y/n, if you can hear me, meet me at the abandoned building down the block from your place. I can help you.'

There was his voice again. You didnt know how but you had to thank him later for bailing you out. You stood from your seat, explaining that you wanted to go home and take a 'me time'.

"Okay, be careful."

You exited the resturant and headed toward home, not making it seem suspicious to your friends what your real plans was. You made it to the abandoned building and went inside. It was creepy being in here after dark. Chills ran up your spine. "Donnie?" you called out.

"Yes, princess?"

You turned to look in the corner of the room and saw the tall terrapin. He approached you and caressed the side of face. Your body was electric with his touch, making your heart beat.

"Don... I've missed you."

"I did too, my little dove."

He showed you how much he longed to be with you. He kissed you with such hunger it made your body hot as the make out session got intense. You gasped when he picked you up and pushed you against the wall, opening your mouth with his and using his tongue to taste you. You wrapped your legs around his waist, pressing yourself against him, and returned his kisses with the same desire.

When you both seperated to breath, you just then remembered hearing his voice while a ago. "Donnie, thanks for bailing me out, but how did you know where I was, how did I hear you but you weren't there? I'm not crazy, am I?" Questions flodded in your mind, but only a few you could get out due to you being love drunk.

He chuckled lightly,"No, you're not crazy. That was telepathy. My thoughts searched for yours, i guess you could say that." He said, trying to explain what it was, because science wasn't 100 percent accurate.

"It that because you're a ... mutant?"

"No. There's something ive been meaning to tell you, too... I'm not just a mutant turtle, I'm also... a vampire..."

The look on your face must've said it all.

"You don't believe me."

"It's just... hard to believe"

"Mutants can exist, so can aliens, but vampires aren't a possibility?"

He stumped you there. There was only one other way to prove he was telling the truth. Did you dare to ask? The idea of Donnie biting you was down right sexy, kinda like those vampire romance stories you read in high school.

"If you a vampire..." you exposed your neck. "Bite me."

The need to bite into your flesh and take you exploded within him. He wanted to hear you scream in ecstasy. He felt his fangs aching. He looked into your eyes and told you telepathically,'This will hurt just a bit, but I'm going to try and be gentle with you...'

You saw a glimpse of fangs youve never seen, and then felt a prick of his sharpened canines break through your tender skin. "Aahhhh~" Your hands squeezed his forearms as his tongue lapped at the tiny streams of blood, causing a new feeling of pleasure course through your veins.

The small whimpers and mewls you made Donnie hard. He moaned at all the sensations he was feeling at once: the taste of your blood, the warmth of your skin, the smell of your arousal... It would've made him cum then and there. He went back to kissing you, deeply this time.

The coppery taste of your blood on his lips was strangely arousing. A whine escaped your throat as one of his hands slid under your shirt, cupped a breast and started massaging, paying attention to your nipple. You arched your back, pushing up into his hard plated torso.

"Donnie~ I want you... inside me, please~"

He smirked at you, his longer fangs exposed. A shiver shot to your womanhood, making you squirm. Even though he knew the answer, he asked,"How badly do you want me?"

"Sooooo deep, take me as yours"

Minute after agonizing minute you both were soon stripped naked. "Tell me, love, do you know how a turtle takes his mate?" You couldn't respond with your mind buzzed with lust. Moans was all that you could get out.

"Please...~"

He pushed you down on your hands and knees, then pushed your head down to leave your bottom up in the air. He held your hips to hold you still. Slowly he entered your tight wet sex, hissing as he was enveloped with heat.

His wide girth stretched you deliciously. "Ohhh god, Donnie~" you softly cried. You felt him touching and pushing between your sensitive slick walls. Once you felt him fill you, he pulled back and slammed into you. You cried out loudly, and moaned as he rocked his hips into your backside.

"MINE . You're mine"

He leaned over your back and left bite marks on your shoulder as he pounded deeply inside you, loving how you squeezed him. The louder you were, the closer you were to your orgasm. He was close, too.

"You want me to cum inside you, fill you up with my hot sticky seed?" he said in between thrusts.

"Mhmmm! Mhmmm!" you whimpered.

"Then cum for me..."

He sped up, thrusting into you at an amazing speed. All you could do was let out loud long screams until you felt the tightening heat explode. Your climax was so intense hot tears stung your eyes. Above you, you heard Donnie growl and grunt as he shot thick ropes of cum in your womb.

You belived him now.

[emerald-studies]

Racist Clothing Brands + Black Brands to Buy From Instead:

                  ��                      Racist Brands

Chanel

Chanel has been repeatedly accused of racially profiling Black customers and last year they hired a white woman as head of their "diversity and inclusion" department.

Gucci

Gucci has a complicated history with the Black community, stemming from them all but trying to destroy Dapper Dan's business only to hire him two decades later. Most recently they came under fire for releasing a sweater that had suspiciously Blackface elements and stealing designs from Black designers.

Prada

Prada has a similar history and they recently had to apologize after releasing a collection of monkey key chains.

Dior

Dior's most recent fragrance campaign came under fire for racist undertones but a Black Hollywood stylist also gave BET.com an account of an incident that she had with a brand. The stylist requests to remain anonymous says, "they compromised our creative relationship by not following through on requests and instead loaning looks that were promised to me to white actors instead."

Celine

Celine's branding is notoriously extremely thin and extremely white. A quick scroll of their social media will reveal exactly their opinion on Black lives.

Barney’s 

Before going bankrupt, Barney's had to pay out a settlement in a racial discrimination case of $525k to two plantiffs. 

Moda Operandi

A former employee of the company released this thread on Moda Operandi, citing several micro aggressions she suffered there. 

Burberry

Burberry issued an apology after releasing a sweater featuring a noose motif.

Tommy Hilfiger

In 1996, Tommy Hilfiger famously made comments against the Black community and has since clarified what he meant, but the hurt in the community lingers. 

Moschino 

Managers discriminated against black customers who did not appear to be rich or famous.

“If a potential black client was not a celebrity and did not have an outward appearance of money via diamonds or name brands, defendant [Ranna] Selbak called them a ‘Serena’ to other sales associates and wanted the ‘Serena’ to be closely watched,” according to the complaint.

Versace

A former male Versace employee sued Versace for allegedly firing him after his manager realized he was Black.

Zara

Zara was accused of using racial code words for black and Latinx customers. The Center for Popular Democracy surveyed 251 Zara employees in New York City about the retailer’s practices. Poll respondents said that when the term “special order” was used at the store, employees were to find the location of the shoppers in question and follow them around. Black customers were most often described as “special orders,” according to the survey results.

Reformation 

They were criticised for their internal practices by a black former employee, Elle Santiago. Santiago said she was denied work promotions in favor of white colleagues, as well as being ignored by the company founder, Yael Aflalo, because of her race.

“Being overlooked and undervalued as a woman of color who worked and managed their flagship store for three years was the hardest,” Santiago wrote in an Instagram post picked up by industry watchdog Diet Prada. “I cried many times knowing [that] the color of my skin would get me nowhere in the company.” 

Urban Outfitters

“As one of very few PoC [people of color] I quickly noticed the toxic environment I’d joined,” says the former employee, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Within my first month my manager made a flippant racist comment in regards to an Uber I’d called; the driver’s name was Muhammad. Her comment was, ‘You would get a Muhammad’ – in what I can only take as a comment made because of my heritage.

“There’s no PoC in the executive team and very little representation of PoC in head office, on the website, marketing campaigns and within the retail management teams.”

The company has a history of producing offensive items of clothing, including a seemingly blood-spattered T-shirt seen as a reference to the 1970 Kent State shootings; a T-shirt in a color named “Obama/Black”; another featuring a six-pointed badge, which seemed to allude to the Star of David badge that Jewish people were forced to wear during the Holocaust; and a racially insensitive Navajo line which used the Navajo nation name illegally.

Dolce & Gabbana

Ads, featured a Chinese woman struggling to eat spaghetti and pizza with chopsticks.

Comme des Garçons

White models wore wigs of traditional Black people’s hairstyles during its men’s autumn/winter 2020 show.

                                             BLACK BRANDS

ASATA MAISE

This designer transforms vintage fabrics into unique pieces that are made to be photographed. I mean, this whole slideshow of looks is A-R-T. Of course, being a one-person business can be overwhelming, so if you have the means, you can donate to Asata's GoFundMe which will provide her with equipment to keep up with demand.

Website: asatamaise.com

MIE

If dreamy, flowy dresses are up your alley, you definitely want to give this brand a follow. All the pretty pieces, including this stunning red puff-sleeve number, are made by local seamstresses and artisans in Lagos, Nigeria where it's based.

Website: mie.ng

JBD Apparel

Kim Kardashian recently gave this brand a shoutout, and it's easy to see why she's a fan of these body-hugging knit sets. All the pieces are handmade to order.

Website: jbdapparel.com

PHLEMUNS

Another celeb fave is this gender-neutral brand designed by James Flemons and based out in Los Angeles. Solange Knowles, Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Clairo, Lil Nas X, Miley Cyrus, and Bella Hadid have all worn its designs.

Website: phlemuns.com

RIOT SWIM

Looking for a truly standout swimwear piece to add to your summer wardrobe? Check out this label designed by Monti Landers featuring minimalistic silhouettes and shades that blend in seamlessly with darker skin tones.

Website: riotswim.com

COME BACK AS A FLOWER 

Specializing in hand-dyed garments, the pieces are ethically made using 100 percent recycled cotton. It also does drops of cool vintage tees, and stars like ASAP Rocky and Big Sean have worn its clothes.

Website: cbaaf.org

HUMANS BEFORE HANDLES 

This jewelry label has some of the cutest accessories for summer (eyeing these seashell ones, wow), and most impressive is the fact that everything is under $50.

Website: humansbeforehandles.com

LAQUAN SMITH

Here’s a real celeb fave (Rihanna, Beyoncé, and sooo many more have worn his pieces). Go to LaQuan Smith for any of your glam/sexy outfit needs, please! 

Website: laquansmith.com

BROTHER VELLIES

Founder Aurora James creates truly one-of-a-kind shoes (please look at this pair of mesh boots topped with feathers) and small leather goods that are handmade by artisans around the world.

Website: brothervellies.com

CUSHNIE

Designer Carly Cushnie’s sleek styles have been worn by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ashley Graham, and Lupita Nyong’o, btw.

Website: cushnie.com

JADE SWIM

Need a swimsuit? You’re going to want one of these pretty, minimal designs by former fashion editor and stylist Brittany Kozerski.

Website: jadeswim.com

CHRISTOPHER JOHN ROGERS

The 26-year-old designer from Louisiana was one of the hottest tickets at New York Fashion Week in February 2020, and high-profile ladies like Michelle Obama and Cardi B. have worn his unique, colorful pieces. Find his clothing exclusively at Net-a-Porter online.

Website: christopherjohnrogers.com

MATEO NEW YORK

Matthew Harris of Mateo New York is a self-taught jewelry designer hailing from Montego Bay, Jamaica, and living in NYC. Shop here for beautifully minimal 14k-gold fine jewelry.

Website: mateonewyork.com

TELFAR

Looking for something truly magical and out there? Consider designer Telfar Clemens, whose hybrid pieces (hello, “sweatpant jeans” and “scarf-collar shirt”) really stand out.

Website: telfar.net

FENTY

DUH.

Website: fenty.com

PYER MOSS

Founded by designer Kerby Jean-Raymond in 2013, Pyer Moss uses its platform for social change, storytelling, and activism as well as art and design. For shopping, come for the bright, matching suits, glam, and pleated gowns and stay for comfy sweats and jeans.

Website: pyermoss.com

                                         + More Brands Here +

[amemesiella]

I couldn't catch the stream this afternoon but I came on here like half an hour ago to see if there was anything new in the tag and I'm greeted with everyone on fire once more because Daniel decided to mention Tumblr. again. which, considering what he mentioned, makes me absolutely certain he's seen RTcler. I say that even if he doesn't need an account to look through tags and search things (I should know, that's what I do lol) he may have one since he's been here several times now. -Luma :D

rip luma i'm so sorry you had to come back to the rtumblr house burning down again LSKDJFLSKDJFD

@ your comment about rt seeing rtcler, i too am almost 100% percent positive he's seen rtcler fanart (it's just not completely 100% sure because hasn't outright confirmed it), the real questions are now just: 1) does he have a tumblr account and 2) what has he seen during his times here; the fact that he keeps bringing up tumblr has me very suspicious that he comes back here from time to time, but there's also a real possibility that when he talks about tumblr he's just talking about the one (1) time he decided to come down here and never went back again based on his language and word choice and the fact that this is all ambiguous is making me lose it AKKSJDFKSJDF

[vital-information]

How to Fiction Like a Grown-up

“in SKAM, everyone has a purposefully acknowledged percentage of sheer ignorance, things they understand and things they reeeeally don’t...this is how real life works. nobody is the ideologically flawless character, teaching the ideologically backwards character that they are Wrong About Everything. everyone is pulling everyone up, everyone is making an idiot of themselves, everyone is learning....with SKAM over and over again, communication is highlighted as the best way to solve any issue. it gives a range of issues, yeah, but in the end it teaches HOW to deal with new issues, not simply a list of behaviors not to emulate. it’s never ‘don’t be That Guy,’ it’s ‘everyone can be That Guy sometimes, it’s gonna happen, you’re gonna be ignorant about something, but here is how you overcome and deal with it...’” — uninterestiing

“We can only attribute the ease and pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as one finds upon rereading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.” — Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot”

“TV’s long taught its audience to expect an outsized amount of drama where there might not be as much in reality, even if only to milk every storyline for what it’s worth. But on Ted Lasso, potential landmines like seething jealousy, secret lust and Rebecca’s scheming only fester for so long before the characters deal with it all like….well, adults.” — Caroline Framke, “For Your Reconsideration: Ted Lasso” 

I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are."We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?"I don't think it's like the pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."Which helps explain why Miyazaki's films are more absorbing and involving than the frantic cheerful action in a lot of American animation. I asked him to explain that a little more."The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over," he said. "They're worried that the audience will get bored. They might go up and get some popcorn.But just because it's 80 percent intense all the time doesn't mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions--that you never let go of those.What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970's is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don't just bombard them with noise and distraction. And to follow the path of children's emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don't have to have violence and you don't have to have action. They'll follow you. This is our principle."He has been amused, he said, to see a lot of animation in live-action movies like "Spider-Man." “In a way now, live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation. Animation has become a word that encompasses so much, and my animation is just a little tiny dot over in the corner. It's plenty for me. — Roger Ebert, “Hayao Miyzaki Interview”

“The pilot’s opening scene foreshadowed the kind of quiet impressionism that Friday Night Lights would embrace, again and again, throughout its five excellent seasons. It also foreshadowed the approach that you might call the “friendly panopticon”: Everyone, here, is seen. And everyone, here, is capable of seeing....There are minor characters and major ones in all this, certainly—it would be narrative anarchy without that—but FNL, much more than most shows that preceded it, took for granted the dignity of each character in its universe. It rejected sitcomic snobbery in favor of a broader embrace of its wide array of characters. It turned empathy into an aesthetic.” — Megan Garber, “Friday Night Lights Democratized TV Drama”

“But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.” Zadie Smith, “Bookworm: On Beauty”

“It pains me to have to introduce this lot with a couple of adjectives apiece, since, again, they all deserve about 12. These beautifully drawn characters just can't be reduced or pigeonholed so glibly. Where you're expecting an exaggerated comedy of town-and-country manners, pitting pious, suspicious in-laws against the worldly, patronising [career woman], Junebug courageously demurs, time and again: we get a real home, and real people in it, and what's laugh-out-loud funny about scene after scene is what's resolutely specific and true.” — Tim Robey, “A Small, Quiet Miracle”

Doesn't she worry at the lack of explosions? [Robinson] laughs. "There's something in my temperament . . . I have a problem with explosions in the sense that many very fine books are written about things that do, in fact, explode. But if the explosion is something that's supposed to make the novel interesting as opposed to being something that it's essentially about, I think it's very much to be avoided...It seems to me that the small drama of conversation and thought and reflection, that is so much more individual, so much less clichéd than - I mean when people set out on an adventure, I think 90 times out of 100, they've read about it in a brochure  — Emma Brackes, “A Life in Writing: Marilynne Robinson”

[florenceandthemachine]

hear your heartbeat

happy birthday to the incomparable @elisela!!! just for you, please enjoy a good fake-dating au with plenty of idiotic and family members abound.

12.5k - on Ao3

—————

“I’m telling you, Scotty. New York has been good to me. Maybe we should just renounce California and stay here for the summer.”

“Don’t joke about that, dude.”

Stiles laughed as he shouldered his phone, taking in the city air as he strolled along the streets of Manhattan.

Needless to say, Manhattan was far from home—while the city certainly was his vibe, Stiles was no stranger to tamping down the champagne tastes that clashed with his tapwater budget. The little shitbox apartment he got through NYU’s housing program was almost a thirty minute train ride from school, but Stiles figured that when he was more or less trapped on campus for nearly fifty hours a week, he could justify spending his breaks wandering the streets of Manhattan and really taking in the city.

On today’s agenda, Stiles was looking forward to wandering around a farmers market that literally stretched on for city blocks. There were fruits and vegetables literally as far as the eye could see, spices and roots and mysterious tubers of all shapes and size, but Stiles didn’t give a flying fuck about the food—his real interest were the vendors and the shoppers.

He had learned early on that open air markets like this were perfect meeting grounds for mythical beasts of all shapes and sizes, so, what better palace for him to do some… field work, so to speak?

There were nymphs who had full bouquets of beautiful flowers that lived suspiciously long in their vases as long as you complimented the blooms on a regular basis. Dryads who sold the most delicious fruit he had ever tasted, even if they charged six bucks for a pear.

Stiles had learned early on to avoid the fae—basically, any stand that sold crystal or metalcraft. His first time at the market, he had somehow wound up spending nearly four hundred dollars on quartz; the moment the money had left his hand, the stall had all but vanished in front of him.

“The people are good here. They’re fast. Blunt. Sarcastic. My kind of people.”

“Uh huh.”

Scott liked to call their whole situation lucky.

When Stiles applied to NYU’s doctorate program, he expected rounds and rounds of interviews, lists of deadlines he needed to memorize, and some less-than-subtle digs at his proposed field of study (which was fair, honestly—he knew that criminology and mythology rarely mixed).

What he didn’t expect was Scott, though, the bro of all bros. When Stiles told him he was applying to NYU, Scott had cheered him on, helped him prepare, and then immediately applied to different veterinary positions through the state.

(Scott was golden, obviously—he had years of training, letters of recommendation from everyone he had ever met, and him being a werewolf basically made him the animal whisperer.)

At the end of the day, Stiles got to pursue his passion thanks to a hodgepodge of grants at NYU, and Scott was awarded a fellowship in veterinary medicine through the Bronx Zoo. What kind of weird twist of luck would let the best friends wind up together across the country like that?

So, yeah, Scott called it luck.

Stiles called it karmic retribution for their supremely fucked-up years at Beacon Hills High, but even he could admit that ‘luck’ sounded nicer... and if Stiles was being honest, ‘luck’ was definitely the best way to classify his meeting Derek Hale.

Derek Hale was smart, he was sarcastic, and he could go toe-to-toe with Stiles over completely obscure things for literal hours. He was a first-year professor at NYU, who had the tiny office right next to the broom closet Stiles had managed to shove PHD desk into, and he was probably the only other person in the program that took mythology seriously (meaning he was the only person who didn’t make Stiles want to put his head through the wall).

He was also hot as fuck, but that was beside the point. Stiles had a little bit of a massive crush, but that was also beside the point.

They had built up a fast friendship based on a series of arguments about the Necronomicon, of all things, and Stiles loved the thought of being friends with someone who didn’t know him as the weird kid in high school who knew way too much about ritual sacrifice and circumcision.

He had evened out a lot through undergrad. He was still awkward, sure, but he was awkward with a refillable prescription for Adderall and some sort of brain-to-mouth filter.

(Honestly, the fact that Stiles had managed to avoid making a single joke about the werewolf who was stuck teaching Mythology 101 really did speak volumes to his newfound maturity.)

Speaking of Derek, though…

“Stiles! Hey, Stiles!”

Stiles almost jumped a foot in the air as he heard his name called, doing a spectacular near-drop-mid-air-catch of his phone as he regained his footing, turning on the spot to see a taller woman with jet black hair waving him over.

She was… okay, she was gorgeous—dark hair, smooth skin, someone who looked like she just stepped out of one of the windows on Fifth Avenue—but Stiles was decently distracted, because standing beside her was Derek Hale, the object of his extremely private affection for the past few months. Who, for whatever reason, was standing there looking like he wanted the sidewalk to open up and swallow him whole.

“Scotty, I’ll see you tonight, yeah? I gotta go.”

Stiles pocketed his phone as he cautiously made his way over to the pair—trio, he corrected, because there was another woman with them, looking incredibly more invested in the conversation now that another party was joining them.

He hiked his canvas a bit higher up as he smiled, trying to remember where he had seen the two before… students, maybe, but if that were the case, they would know Derek, not Stiles. They weren’t faculty members, he was sure of that. Donors to the program, maybe?

Well, if they were donors, Stiles sincerely hoped that Derek would have tried harder to wear literally any expression other than his current ‘bitter and miserable’.

And if they were donors, why were they so fucking happy to see him?

“I’m Laura. This is Cora.”

The taller of the two women extended her hand confidently as Stiles got within arms reach, and he instinctively reached out to take it, Cora following suit. “Derek has told us all about you. I have to say, I figured there was at least a ten percent chance you were made up, but… here you are!”

“Here I am!” Stiles was officially lost, but he kept his smile up, cheeks pinking up a little bit as he turned back to Derek. “You’ve been talking about me?” he asked, his voice on the line between flattered and teasing, nudging Derek playfully as he tilted his head.

“Stiles, I—“

“Of course he has! Derek’s a private guy, sure, but you can’t be surprised he told us about his new—“

“Laura—”

“Lord, Derek, calm down. You already had your big bisexual awakening, I’m allowed to be excited to meet your first boyfriend.” Laura shot back, her glare rivaling Derek’s absolute best ‘listen to teacher’ look, and Stiles could see the muscle in his jaw start to twitch. He probably would have done something, but… he was basically short circuiting, brain trying to keep up with whatever the fuck Laura had said, because Derek now had his arm around Stiles’ waist.

Derek had a big bisexual awakening?

And a boyfriend, apparently?

How had Stiles missed that??

“Stiles, these are my sisters, Laura and Cora Hale.”

Okay, great, they were Derek’s sisters. Stiles didn’t even know that Derek had sisters, which was a little sad if he thought about it.

Thankfully, he didn’t have long to think about it, because Derek—

“This is Stiles, my… my boyfriend. Now stop bombarding him. Give him half a fucking second before you go a thousand miles an hour.”

Oh—oh God. Stiles was the boyfriend.

He had seriously missed something, then—he didn’t think he had confessed his feelings for Derek anytime recently, or he probably would have died from embarrassment. Scott was really good at hiding his phone when he was drinking, which ruled that entire scenario out. Stiles could be forgetful at times, sure, but he thought he would remember if he had managed to score himself a boyfriend.

He looked up at Derek, trying to ignore the sudden burn of contact where their bodies were pressed together, but his brain was extremely focused the moment that he caught the look on Derek’s face, there and gone in a flash. He felt the hand squeeze at his waist, and the message was clear enough.

Please.

Ah, well. Stiles was always good at bullshitting, and this was no exception.

“No, no, Der, it’s fine! It’s good to meet you both, sorry, I wasn’t even expecting to see Derek until… uh, later, let alone meet anyone new,” Stiles said, his voice 100% betraying his nerves as it picked up an octave.

Laura’s voice was much more evenly toned, even if it was a little teasing. “Oh? You two have big plans tonight? We aren’t interrupting anything, are we?” she said with a grin, giving the distinct impression that even if they were interrupting, she and her sister wouldn’t be leaving until they were good and ready. Stiles felt his mind kick into overdrive, waving the question aside.

“Oh, nothing like that. We were going to meet up with my friend Scott for dinner, introducing the boyfriend to the best friend, you know how it is,” he continued, hoping his little chuckle wasn’t too terribly fake as he reached up to pat the lapels of Derek’s jacket, letting his fingers linger a little too long on Derek’s chest as he nodded.

He hoped that she knew how it was. Hell, Stiles didn’t even know how it was. He hadn’t exactly been rolling in romance since moving across the country.

“Well, if you say so,” Laura mused, raising a perfect brow, head tilted to the side. “You look like you’re about to pass out, Stiles. You alright?”

And, okay, Stiles knew enough to know what that meant. It meant that her super-sonic ears could hear his heart trying to break through his ribs with a staccato beat, typically a tell-tale sign that someone was lying, but… maybe he could work that to his advantage. He swallowed, voice a little tight as he laughed, waving the concern away.

“Sorry, I just wasn't… planning on meeting the family today,” Stiles said, probably the most truthful thing he had ever said. “Usually I’d try to prepare a little more, you know, make sure I’m wearing something nice and avoid putting my entire foot in my mouth. Maybe just a toe or two,” he said, relaxing minutely as Cora snorted from her position near Laura’s elbow.

Okay, so self depreciation was a good way to avoid suspicion with all the Hales. Got it.

“Well, if you both have plans, I’ll make this quick,” Laura said, her voice deceptively charming as she sidled up next to Stiles, though he certainly wasn’t going to complain about the way Derek’s hand tightened around his waist. “The semester is up soon, what are your plans this summer? Never mind, move them back. We’re having a family reunion the week after finals, and everyone is dying to meet baby brother Derek’s new boo after all the stories he’s told.”

…stories?

He looked up to Derek again, who was now blushing up to the tips of his ears, which—okay, cute—but which told him absolutely nothing and offered him exactly zero defense.

“Actually, I already have a flight booked as soon as my spring contract is up. Heading back to Beacon Hills for a few days, and—“

“Wait, did Derek already invite you?” Laura asked, her expression pleasantly surprised, and Stiles was speechless for a half second before Derek stepped in.

“No, I didn’t invite him because I’m not even going, Laura. Besides, he has his own plans with his own family,” he said, and Stiles blinked as he tried to keep up. “And what do you mean, they’re excited to meet him? I was very clear that the further I can keep him away from you and Mom, the better.”

Laura only rose a brow as she turned back to Cora, who took a beat before looking up from her phone, her expression halfway guilty as she clutched the device. “I uh—I may have just sent a picture of you two to the family group chat.”

Stiles choked on a laugh as Derek gasped—actually gasped—and pulled his phone from his pocket, making the mistake of releasing Stiles’ shoulder to unlock the device, looking absolutely scandalized as he glared at Cora.

It wasn’t long before Stiles had a similar look on his face, though, as Laura took advantage of his free arm, linking her own with his as she started to walk. “Alright, Stiles, here’s the deal.”

“Cora, you little—hey! Laura, get back here with my boyfriend!”

“Calm down little brother, the adults are talking.”

“He’s younger than I am!”

“So, Stiles, like I was saying,” Laura started, oblivious or ignorant to the way Stiles' mind had absolutely reeled when Derek had called him his boyfriend for the second time. “Derek hasn’t been home for more than a day visit since he moved out to this dump, and no one has raised a stink about it in years. This year, though, is… important,” she started, and Stiles nodded idly as he mentally ran through the calendar in his head.

The semester was over in just over a week, with finals crammed into three days after that, and then—oh, the full moon.

No, Stiles corrected himself, the blue moon. The first blue moon in May in probably… thirty years, if he had to guess. He nodded up to Laura as that clicked into place, a flicker of curiosity crossing over her face as she continued talking.

“We won’t take up that much of your time—it’s only like two events, I promise, and I also promise Derek will personally take care of whatever flight changes you have to make so you can still get some time with your family. After all, it’s not your fault my bonehead brother tried to exclude you until now.”

“I’m not a bonehead!” Derek said, his tone of voice just exasperated enough that Stiles sighed, carefully extracting himself from Laura’s grasp as they slowed to a stop near the curb of Fifth Avenue, the noise from the farmers market blending in with the sound of traffic as he turned back to Derek.

“Alright, hang on, hold up,” Stiles started, his tone firm enough to stop the three wolves in their tracks, Derek and Laura wearing matching expressions of surprise as they stopped in their tracks—even Cora was peeking over her phone, clearly interested, and Stiles couldn’t blame them. It had probably been a long time since either of them had been stopped by a human.

“Laura, Derek is not a bonehead. He’s smart, and he’s sweet, and he’s very kind, and it’s okay that he’s a little more private. Yeah, he’s also a stubborn asshole, but… well, that’s one of the reasons I like him so much,” Stiles said, the first genuine smile in the entire conversation gracing his face as he looked at Derek again. “But you know your brother. Did you really think that catching him off guard across the country in person was going to be the best way to convince him to visit?”

He was fine taking their silence as an answer, honestly.

“Now, Derek, that being said, I… if you are comfortable with it, I can rearrange my plans and come down with you. If you’re not comfortable with that, that’s okay too. Meeting the family—at least, the rest of the family—is a very big step,” he continued, his words very pointed.

(Yes, Derek, meeting the family would be a very big step for someone you weren’t even dating, please pick up on the subliminal messaging here.)

“But even if you’re not comfortable with me being there, I think you should still go down. I’ll get to spend plenty of time with my dad, you shouldn’t have to be all alone up here while I’m gone.”

Moving to smooth over the lapels on Derek’s jacket again, Stiles only barely tampered down a noise of surprise as Derek intercepted his hands, pleasantly shocked by how easily Derek’s warm, smooth fingers slipped between his own lanky digits.

Stiles felt his cheeks pinks up as he cleared his throat, doing his best to act normal, because he was… well, he wasn’t lying. He had absolutely thought about Derek being alone here in New York while Stiles was gone, but that was more in the sense that Stiles would miss him.

He just didn’t know that Derek might be missing some family, too.

Besides, he may not have known that much about the intricacies of a normal, family pack, but Stiles knew enough to know that a big event like this would probably be good for Derek, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

Even if Derek was going to reject his offer and go down alone.

…because Derek was going to reject him.

Derek was going to reject him, right?

Stiles had been fairly sure of that when he offered, but judging by the way Derek couldn’t meet his eyes after something as simple as holding hands, Stiles might have just fucked himself over. Derek opened and closed his mouth twice before he finally let out a huff of air and looked up, doing a remarkably good impression of a guilty animal as he looked at Stiles.

“…you’re sure you don’t mind?”

Fuck.

“Derek, I wouldn’t have offered if I minded,” Stiles said, and that much was at least true—but before he could say anything else, Laura was squealing in his ear, wrapping both of them up in a hug so tight Stiles almost had to remind her that he was human, but he was able to breathe again as the car next to the curb chirped.

“Thank God, Stiles, thank you for getting through to him! Oh, Nana is gonna flip out when she hears who’s coming—Derek, you know you’ve always been her favorite—Stiles, do you have any dietary restrictions? Derek, send me his number, and—no, Cora, you are not driving us back to the airport, move your ass—“

Stiles looked up to Derek, his expression somewhere between bemused and fearful as Laura rambled on, but… well, the apologetic look that Derek had on his face wasn’t much reassurance.

“—and Stiles, you’re going to love Beacon Hills. Bye boys! See you in two weeks!”

Stiles was left, partially shellshocked as Derek’s hand slipped from his own, the need for the facade no longer essential as the shiny silver rental car pulled into traffic.

“… Derek, since when the fuck are you from Beacon Hills?”

—————

“Scotty, stop laughing, this isn’t funny.”

“Dude, are you kidding me? This is hilarious.”

Stiles groaned as he shoved another slice of pizza into his mouth, ignoring the burning sensation that spread across his tongue as he tried to pack as much melted cheese as he could into one bite.

Scott’s apartment had been their go-to for the entire time he and Stiles had been in the city—not because it was huge and glamorous, not by any means, but Scott’s shoebox had a door between the bathroom and the living room, and therefore it was the best place for bro-time by default.

Stiles had loudly complained about the entire situation when he and Derek showed up on Scott’s stoop, firmly planting himself in his favorite of Scott’s chairs—the ‘old man’ recliner next to Scott’s little television, the game on screen forgotten as he recalled their harrowed tale.

“Stiles, if you weren’t comfortable with it, why even… okay, no, don’t you dare answer me until you swallow,” Derek snapped, and Stiles rolled his eyes as he swallowed a few times, sticking his tongue out at Derek once his mouth was empty.

“Good. Thank you for pretending to be an adult. Now, why did you even offer if it wasn’t something you were comfortable with.”

Because it was supposed to just be a gesture, Derek. Because I didn’t realize you would take it as a serious offer, Derek. Because you were supposed to say no, Derek.

… because I didn’t want you to be alone, Derek.

Honestly, as surprised as Stiles was that Derek took him up on his poorly-timed moment of goodness, he was even more surprised that after Laura drove off, when he numbly asked if Derek wanted to come over to Scott’s for some pizza, Derek actually said yes.

Derek Hale was being social. Alert the media.

(Well… maybe ‘social’ was stretching it a bit—Stiles didn’t know if it was a territory thing or what, but Derek had turned hilariously, awkwardly stiff the moment he stepped inside Scott’s apartment.)

“I offered because I’m nice, dick, but don’t even think that you can turn this on me. Derek, they knew my name. They knew what I looked like. And yeah, I mean, I’m a complete catch and all—oh fuck off, Scotty—but what in the actual, literal fuck?”

Stiles didn’t think it was possible, but somehow Derek got even more tense, shoulders tightening up toward his ears as he looked down. It took a moment before he answered, but Stiles knew by then that Derek usually had to… wind himself up to talk about some things.

“My mother lives on the opposite end of the country, and even then, she still managed to set up twenty four blind dates for me last year. Twenty four, Stiles. That’s basically one every other week. Do you have any idea how much small talk that is? And how much I hate small talk?”

Yes, Stiles thought, to both of those questions. He would never admit this out loud, of course, but thinking about one of the most intensely private people that he knew stuck at some shitty little coffee shop trying to chat with some random female on behalf of his mother was hilarious to a degree he couldn’t fathom.

It definitely wasn’t a redirection of his own… personal feelings that may or may not be directed at Derek. Not at all. Nope.

“So, around the time the spring semester started, when my mother let slide that she had passed along my number to yet another perfectly eligible barista, or something, I panicked and told her I had a boyfriend. And then she asked for a photo, and the most recent one on my phone was that selfie you sent miming your own death in the stacks, so…”

“Oh fuck, Derek,” Stiles started, downing the last of his beer. “Your big bisexual awakening wasn’t just you trying to get out of your mom setting you up on dates, right?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, ass,” Derek said, rolling his eyes as he shook his head. “The two events were completely separate.”

Stiles laughed at the thought, but even then, his mind was reeling. If this wasn’t a recent discovery, how in the fuck did Stiles miss that for so long?

“Well, you’re lucky Scotty and I had a flight booked anyway. I won’t let you face them alone, not when you have a picture perfect boyfriend to show off now—what role should I take on? Doting, love struck fool? Rebel without a care? Some sad forlorn loser who… okay, no, that one is too close to home.”

Scott stood up and laughed as Derek glared at Stiles again, but it didn’t take a genius to see the tiny smile on his face, or the way his shoulders eased as he leaned back into the couch.

“Alright, this is getting too intense a conversation while the game is on. Want another beer, Stiles? You, Derek?”

Stiles made a vaguely affirming noise as he wove his hand in Scott’s direction, eyes drawn back to Derek yet again as the other wolf politely declined, his own attention affixed to the television as the game picked back up.

Derek was… not a particularly expressive person, Stiles knew, and part of that was because Derek had what Stiles affectionately called ‘resting grumpy face’; at least, he did privately, because the one time he said it out loud Derek had thrown the Encyclopaedia of Demomorgons at his head.

So, to the outsider looking in, Derek might have just seemed uninterested in the game; but Stiles had been watching Derek work for the better part of a semester, and he knew perfectly well how to tell when Derek’s resting grumpy face formed an actual frown. Which it did. Because apparently, the Mets had personally offended him.

“I’m sorry, are you seriously glaring at the Mets? While they’re winning?”

Derek leveled Stiles with the most unimpressed glare he could as Scott laughed from his kitchen, walking back into the living room with two beers. “God, I hope he was. It would be nice to have someone with taste in the apartment for once.”

“Scotty!” Stiles gasped, clutching his heart as Scott handed him a beer, extending the claw on his thumb to pop the top off before he handed the bottle over. “The Mets are a treasure, okay? If God lived in New York, she’d be a Mets fan. I have suffered much for my Mets in my lifetime, and they—woah, Derek, you okay?”

Stiles’ charming cliches would have to wait, because when he looked over to Derek, his humor dropped immediately. Derek had gone white as a sheet, jaw slack as he stared at the beer in Stiles’ hand.

He stared back and forth between Scott and Derek, trying to figure what the hell had just happened; it wasn’t until he watched Scott pop the top off of his own beer, looking between the two of them, did Stiles put two and two together.

“Derek, you… you had to know that Scott was a were, right? Like, you had to. He—Scotty doesn’t do subtle.”

“Me?! Stiles, you called me a wet dog for like a month after I fell into the Hudson.”

Derek let out a sort of choked noise as he shut his mouth, coming back into himself as a bit of pink dusted his pale cheeks, hands moving in front of his face. “Of—of course I knew, but—you knew?!”

“Dude, I’m studying mythical lore and criminology. I’m the one who taught this furry fucker how to control himself. Of course I knew, I... oh my god. You didn’t know that I knew—uh, that I know.”

Matching looks of realization dawned on Scott and Stiles’ face as Stiles stood up, putting the beer down on the coffee table. He moved next to Derek as he sat down on the couch, keeping his movement slow, reaching out to pat Derek’s leg like he was a frail old lady.

“Derek, I know.”

After what felt like an age and a half, Derek melted into the couch, a huge sigh leaving his lips as all the tension in his body bled out like a string had been cut, burying his head in his hands.

“We’ve had arguments about wolves in pop culture. I’ve offered to help you out with your coursework every full moon for, like, the entire semester. Dude, you had to know that I knew, there’s no way I didn’t—Derek!” Stiles felt his giddy laughter bubble over as Derek shot him a red-eyed glare through his fingers, his scowl somehow less intimidating now that everything was out in the open.

Okay, Derek wasn’t just a wolf, he was an alpha. That was… interesting.

“God, you two really are perfect fake boyfriends. Two halves of a whole idiot. Derek, are you sure you don’t want a beer? Or maybe something stronger, if you have to deal with Stiles?” Scott said easily, laughing as Stiles immediately protested, though the way Stiles eased himself next to Derek wasn’t exactly subtle, either.

—————

Scott may have been joking, but by the time finals had come and gone, Stiles had accepted the fact that he would have to forgo booze and opt for a mainline of caffeine to keep up with Derek. How one person remained so meticulously organized, Stiles would never know—but in the amount of time it took for Stiles to wrap up his grant work for the semester, Derek had given four exams, proctored three more, cleaned out his office, and shared the updated flight itinerary with Stiles.

“Wait, wait, hang on,” Stiles had said, tripping over an empty box in his tiny office as Derek handed him his updated boarding pass. “Why do we have to change our flights? Scott and I are already booked, you can probably just join us, right?”

Derek rose a perfectly sculpted brow as he tapped the ticket again, shaking his head. “Hey, I promised you’d spend as few days as possible with my family, and I intend to keep that promise. The sooner we get in, the sooner we start that clock, the sooner you get to spend the rest your time with your dad.”

Stiles blinked as he looked down to the itinerary, eyes scanning over the earlier time—and it was non-stop too. That would be a bit killer on the legs, but Stiles could handle that, maybe he could take some time to sleep or pester Derek for...

“Uh, Derek... this ticket is for first class.”

“I know, Stiles, I booked it.”

“Dude, there’s a reason Scott and I booked an economy ticket with a layover in Bismarck. There’s no way I can pay you back for this.”

If looks could kill, Stiles would be... maybe not dead, but at least set on fire. Derek sighed, as though the weight of the world was on his shoulders as he rolled his eyes.

“You’re not paying me back, dumbass. You’re already doing a ton for me with this little... charade, the least I can do is make sure your frail human body—“

“Hey!”

”—is comfortable in a lie flat seat.”

“Look, I appreciate that, but I’m not leaving Scott alone on his flight in coach just because of our... fake... whatever.”

Stiles’ voice trailed off in curiosity as Derek sighed, his cheeks pink as he pulled the paper out of Stiles’ hand, pointing to the second half of the sheet—where MCCALL, SCOTT had been printed in big, bold letters, that Stiles had completely ignored.

“... you got Scott a ticket too?”

“Of course I did. He’s your best friend, I wasn’t going to ask you to leave him behind just for me. Besides, who do you think I got your information from to book the flight?” Derek said dryly, as though his deadpan delivery could cancel out the ruddy color to his cheeks, or the way that Stiles’ stomach flip flopped when the reality of that sunk in.

It was nice that Derek acknowledged the importance of their friendship, in the way that tugged at the little space right beneath his sternum, but something about the way Derek so quickly dismissed himself was... concerning.

Stiles couldn’t help but play that little bit of their conversation over in his head as he packed, as he hopped on the train, as he met up with Scott and Derek in security.

Scott, bless his heart, was absolutely elated—his excitement was almost tangible as they dropped off luggage, walked through security, and stood around at the boarding gate. Derek had to smack the both of them to get them to stand up when first class was called to board, and Stiles idly wondered if Derek regretted associating himself with them when he and Scott managed to trip in sync as they went down the jetway.

Derek and Stiles were seated together, of course, and once Stiles got over the novelty of not having a middle seat on a plane, he liked to imagine he fit right in—easing back into the seat, enjoying the comfort of the little blanket he had been given, grinning at the flight attendant as she checked in with them.

(Scott was one row ahead and across the aisle, close enough that Stiles could lean forward and smack him if he wanted to... but the moment Stiles saw his seat mate, a pretty woman with dark hair and impeccable eyeliner, he knew his best bro would be on a different planet for the entirety of the flight.)

His grin slipped a little bit, though, as he thought back to the conversation surrounding the tickets, and he looked up to Derek as he settled in a bit further.

“So, we never went over what role I should be taking on.”

“Stiles, just be yourself. You’re funny enough, and you generally mean well, they’ll love who you are.”

Yeah… who he was. Well, who he was was someone who was going to be dangerously invested in a fake relationship that would probably end terribly for him, so that was fun. He sighed as he settled into the seat, opening and closing his mouth a few times as he debated on where to go from here.

No time like a non stop plane ride to have a potentially awkward conversation, right?

“Dude, we’re friends, right?”

“We’re fake boyfriends, don’t call me dude.”

Derek’s tone was teasing as he flipped through his SkyMall, a small smile on his face, and Stiles felt a little bit of the tension ease out of his shoulders as he buckled in.

“First of all, I have called many boyfriends ‘dude’ before,” Stiles started, ignoring Derek’s snort of laughter, “and I’m being serious. We... we are friends, right?”

Be it his words or his awkward energy, Derek looked up, surprise on his face as he closed the magazine and stowed it away as the plane bumped down the taxiway.

“Of course we are, Stiles. You’re like... the only person I talk to at work outside of teaching, that’s light years ahead of most of New York as a whole.”

“I mean, I’m glad to hear, I just...” Stiles chewed on his lip as he turned in his seat, weirdly soothed by the roar of the engines as the takeoff roll started. “You know about my dad, and about my school, and about Scott, and those are basically the three important things in my life,” he started, letting out a sigh as Derek just stared at him blankly.

“It’s fine that you’re a private person, I can respect that... seriously, I may not understand it, but I can respect it,” Stiles said, grinning as Derek shot him a look, lowering his voice again as he leaned over the divider between them. “But I didn’t know that you were from my hometown, too. Or that you had sisters, let alone other family. I should have asked, I guess, but... you know you can talk to me about things, yeah? Even after all this is over, you’ll always be Derek to me. Not just another Hale.”

Stiles’ was smiling as he gently bumped Derek’s shoulder with his own, watching the way different emotions warred over his face, biting back on the urge to babble on so he could give Derek the time he needed to respond.

“We’re... we are friends, Stiles. We are.” Derek insisted, looking down to his linked hands as the plane continued to rise. “Sometimes, I just... I’m not great about talking about myself.”

For a while, Stiles thought that was all he was going to get, and honestly, he was fine with it—it wasn’t until the fasten seatbelt sign chimed off and the flight attendants passed out little bottles of water that Derek spoke again, his voice low as he cleared his throat.

“My family is huge. Like, big enough that we need spreadsheets and flowcharts to organize family events like this. I know they love me, and I love them too, of course I do, but I made some really, really stupid decisions when I was younger… I know they forgave me for it, but...”

Derek sighed, taking a deep breath as he ran his hands through his hair.

“Sometimes it’s hard to be around them and still be okay with myself, you know?”

No, Stiles didn’t know. He only had his dad and Scott growing up, but he nodded his head encouragingly as he took a sip of his water.

“I actually have four siblings. Mark is the oldest, and then Taylor, and I’m right between Laura and Cora. They’re betas, like my dad; my mom and I are both alphas, her mom, too…” Derek continued, and Stiles smiled as he settled into his seat.

By the time the flight landed, Stiles’ head was full to the brim with Hale family trivia, names, faces, teasing stories, and the warmth that had danced across Stiles’ chest for the past year or so had bloomed into a full-on fire.

Would it lead to his downfall? Probably.

But when he saw how Derek smiled when he remembered Mark’s graduating medical school, or heard the pride in his voice when he talked about Laura’s charity work, and the genuine joy he got to see when he heard another story about Derek’s childhood… well, that was all more than worth it.

—————

“I think you should kiss me.”

Stiles had to stop himself from laughing at the look that Derek shot him, doing his best to keep his body language casual as he leaned against the gas pump at a tiny station outside of Beacon Hills, though he knew his heart was going at about a million miles a minute.

“I—you—what?”

“Derek, I’m an affectionate dude, in case you couldn’t tell from all the hand holding. And if you’re going to freak out if I kiss your cheek, then you should freak out now, not when we’re in front of your family.”

Stiles knew full well his heart betrayed his confidence, but seeing Derek’s ears go pink as he dumped the armful of snacks Stiles had asked for into the back seat was a welcome sight—it was always nice to know that Derek’s cool and controlled exterior could be ruffled up once in a while.

Somewhere between the rental kiosk and the gas station, Stiles had decided that he was going to go all in on this. His little crush was already stuck right in the back of his throat and would be unlikely to dislodge any time soon, so he figured that indulging himself in the fake relationship Derek had set up for him… well, it wouldn’t do any good, but it was unlikely to make things worse for him than it already was.

It was a little weird being alone with Derek—Stiles didn’t realize it until now, but between meeting Derek’s sisters and meeting the rest of their family, this was the first time they had been alone together. They had other staff members at school, or strangers around the city, or Scott (who had politely declined a ride back to Beacon Hills with Derek and Stiles, choosing instead to split an Uber with his pretty new friend, Kira).

“You know, as far as first kisses go, usually they’re a little more romantic than just a demand. You’re supposed to woo me, Stiles,” Derek said, his sarcastic tone betrayed by his shy little smile as he pulled the nozzle out of his tank, closing the gas cap as Stiles gasped in mock offense.

“Hey, I said you should kiss me, not the other way around. Why should I have to be the one to woo?” Stiles started, sliding into the passenger’s seat as Derek followed suit. “After all, this relationship wouldn’t have even happened without your instigation, so why should I… uh… Der?”

Stiles’ voice trailed off as Derek’s hand sunk into the soft crook at the juncture of his neck, effectively cutting off his entire train of thought as Derek’s thumb pressed against the hollow of his jaw.

“Stiles.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

“O-Okay.”

For a minute, all Stiles could think of were those cheesy old rom-coms, where fireworks would go off, or bells would chime, but kissing Derek was nothing like that. It was the comfort of wrapping yourself in an electric blanket, instead of the shock of jumping into a frozen pond; the familiar buzz of goosebumps over his skin over a bolt of lightning. He felt a surprised little noise leave his chest as Derek’s tilted his head to deepen the kiss, his tongue flicking out instinctively to drag along Derek’s bottom lip, hands coming up to rest against the wolves chest.

Stiles could feel his heart beating through every inch of his skin as the kiss broke, struggling to remind himself how to breathe as he opened his eyes again, his nose brushing against Derek’s as he let out a little huff of a laugh.

“Was that enough woo for you?” Derek asked, his voice barely more than a whisper, and Stiles smiled as he nodded his head, savoring the way that neither of them moved back. Derek’s hand was warm against the crook of his jaw, his own palm flat against Derek's chest, and it was natural, it was so nice, it was—

Fake. It was all fake.

Stiles sighed, closing his eyes as he gently leaned in and pressed their foreheads together, that mantra playing through his head as he pulled himself back. He buckled himself in easily as he took in a deep breath, his goofy grin still in place as he looked back up to Derek.

“See? Now you can honestly tell your mom we had our first kiss at a gas station and that it was magical and I totally rocked your world.”

“Is that what happened, though? I mean, if you wanted me to kiss you so badly, you should have just asked,” Derek said, the sarcasm thick in his voice as he started the car, and Stiles laughed as they pulled out of the lot, his hand finding Derek’s easily once again.

Their silence remained comfortable as they left the city skyline behind and basically blew through Beacon Hills, the trees inching closer to the road as they wound through the preserve.

Finishing off a bag of M&M’s, Stiles cleared his throat as he crumpled up the wrapper and chucked it in the back seat, sucking a little bit of melted chocolate off of his thumb. “So. Is this regular introducing-the-boyfriend-to-the-family nerves I’m looking at here, or is this introducing-the-fake-boyfriend-to-the-family nerves? You don’t have any weirdos in your family, do you? An ex-felon auntie? A cousin who doesn’t quite get personal space?”

Stiles grinned as Derek laughed, oddly comforted by the sound as Derek shook his head. “Nothing exciting. A weird uncle, I guess. Lots of cousins, you should basically abandon any idea of personal space as soon as we walk in, and plenty of human family, too—so you won’t be alone in that. As far as felons go, well… none of us have been caught?”

“Hey, game recognizes game, it doesn’t count if you don’t get caught. And I can work with a weird uncle.” Stiles laughed at the sheepish look that Derek shot his way, his fingers still happily wrapped up in Derek’s warm hands. He could almost feel it when they crossed over onto the Hale land, the huge, white house as much of a giveaway as the shrieks of joy that even Stiles could hear from the property.

“They’re gonna love you, you know?” Derek’s voice was soft as he pulled the rental into a long row of cars, nearly lining the road leading up to the house, and Stiles felt the snarky remark die on his tongue as Derek caught his eye, his expression somewhere between grateful and wistful as he turned the car off.

“Maybe, but…” Stiles sighed as he popped his door open, chewing over his next words carefully. “But if they do, it’s because they already love you.”

He took it as a personal victory when Derek turned away, his ears pink again, and Stiles couldn’t help but grin as he followed the werewolf up the path to his family home.

The Hale House was probably as huge and impressive as the Hale family itself from the outside, and Stiles did his best not to gape like a fool as Derek opened the door for him, his hand finding the small of Stiles’ back as they stepped into the house. Polished floors, huge, high windows, a grand staircase that was the definition of grand, and—

“Derek!”

—and another unfairly attractive Hale moving forward to greet them. Tall, broad, dark hair with just a splash of salt around the temples and the goatee, shining a million watt smile on Derek and Stiles as he wiped his hands on his probably-uncomfortably-tight jeans.

Jesus, was everyone in this family gorgeous? Stiles was going to get a complex.

He looked up as the stranger and Derek briefly hugged, watching the halfway-subtle way they scented one another, Mark’s head buried in Derek’s neck for a half moment before they pulled away. If Stiles strained his ear, he could have heard something along the lines of ‘be nice’ as Derek pulled back; if the situation weren’t so funny, Stiles probably would have blushed.

“Don’t listen to him, I’m always nice. I’m Mark, and you…” Mark started, his million watt smile back in place as his eyes dragged over Stiles’ body, “... you must be Stiles.” Stiles snorted as Mark pulled him into an easy hug, catching Stiles just a little off-guard as he was wrapped in another pair of arms.

Apparently Derek’s family was an affectionate bunch. Stiles didn’t know if it was a wolf thing or a Hale thing, but either way, it was good to know.

“Mark, uh, Seattle, right? You’re the surgeon?” Stiles asked, clearing his throat as the hug carried on just a bit too long, regaining some footing in the introduction as he pulled back. “Derek’s told me a lot about you.”

That was… mostly true, Derek had told him enough about Mark to thoroughly embarrass the older male, and Mark looked like he expected nothing less as he laughed, holding Stiles’ shoulders as he stood at arms length. “Yeah, I’m sure he did, but it’s probably all garbage. After all, how can you really describe a wonder like me in words, huh?”

He actually winked, and Stiles honestly couldn’t believe that this dude was for real.

“Der, nice job with this one. He’s cute. Kid, is my brother treating you well? Cause, you know, if Hale is your taste, you can do much better than—”

”Mark—“

“Oh, lighten up Der-bear, there isn’t enough Botox in the world to get rid of those scowl lines. It was a joke. Now come on, everyone’s out back.”

Stiles laughed again as Mark put Derek in an easy headlock, ruffling up his hair as he led them outside, immediately filing ‘Der-bear’ away for future use as they stepped out into the backyard.

The backyard, which was absolutely filled with Hales.

He felt his heart do a funny little lurch as he was hit with the sheer family of it all—all dark haired, all gorgeous, and for just a moment, he wanted to smack Derek upside the head. There were probably generations of Hales here; Derek had all this family, this built in support group, and he was just going to spend the summer holed up in New York?

“Alright, Siles, we’re gonna keep you in with the main family and keep you away from the cousins,” Mark started, artfully ignoring the way Derek was swatting at him. “Uncle Peter all but insisted that Mom come pick him up, so you’ll get to avoid them until later tonight, but who you really want to watch out for is—“

“Is that my grandbaby?!”

Mark stiffened as Derek perked up, and Stiles couldn’t help but snicker as a bony hand shot up, grabbing Mark by the scruff of his neck, pulling him off of Derek with a flourish that would probably seem overly dramatic if Stiles didn’t know just how much werewolf strength was packed behind it.

“Derek!”

“Hi, Nana.”

Stiles couldn’t keep the smile off of his face as Derek leaned in to wrap his arms around the older woman—she was a good foot shorter than he was, her movements loud, with light skinned with the same tell-tale black hair that the rest of the family had. What caught Stiles’ eye, though, was the way Derek scented her—it was the same way Mark scented him, a familial nudge that Stiles read easily as a sign of deference.

Whoever this Nana was, she was clearly the woman in charge here.

“You know, we’re all technically her grandbabies,” Mark started as he reappeared at Stiles’ shoulder, rubbing the back of his neck, his childish pout painfully obvious as he pointed his words. “But you wouldn’t know it with the blatant favoritism she shows for Derek!”

“Mark, don’t be such a baby,” Nana Hale said as she pulled back from Derek’s hug, patting his cheek affectionately. She raised a brow in a spectacularly unimpressed fashion as she turned to look at her eldest grandson, sighing in mock disappointment. “Not that I thought a career based off of liposuction and face lifts would have brought you some maturity.”

“That’s—I don’t just do—Nana!”

“Now, who do we have here? Derek, are you going to introduce me to your special friend?”

Ignoring Mark’s protests easily as she turned her attention, Stiles felt his heart pick up again, his eyes flicking to Derek as he beamed; Stiles wasn’t sure if he was happy to see Mark get smacked down, or if he was happy to introduce Stiles, but Stiles would have literally killed a man to see Derek smile that brightly on a regular basis.

“Nana, this is my boyfriend, Stiles Stilinski. Stiles, this is my grandmother, Ger—“

“Nana Hale will do just fine, thank you very much,” she interrupted, pulling a face that made Stiles grin—he could absolutely relate to someone who would rather set their birth name on fire than own up to it. “Now, come here, let me get a look at you.”

Stiles stepped forward and hesitated a half moment, not sure if he should try one last time for a handshake or wait for her to initiate a hug, but before he could make up his mind she had her hands clasped on his elbows, a grip like iron stopping him in his tracks.

“Scrawny little thing, aren’t you? We’ll take care of that, don’t you worry. It’s good to meet you, sweetheart, let’s get you some food.”

“It’s good to meet you too—and some food sounds great,” Stiles said with a laugh, ignoring the fact that he was still full of junk food as Nana Hale all but preened beside him. Her grip was gentle but unyielding as she dragged him to a table that was piled with food, giving a half wave to Laura and Cora, who were stationed beside a punch bowl the size of a fish tank as he kept himself a half step behind Nana.

Stiles wasn’t dumb, okay? He knew how to make nice with wolves, and more importantly, he knew how to be subtle.

(He didn’t like it, but he knew how to do it.)

“Uncle Derek! Get Uncle Derek!!”

Thankfully, the moment was over in a flash as Stiles heard a familiar name called out in a high pitched squeal, looking back out to the yard where a hoard of kids had just caught sight (or scent?) of Derek, immediately abandoning the rough-and-tumble games they seemed to be wrapped up in to run toward Derek as fast as their little legs could carry them.

Derek immediately tensed, a manic grin on his face as he prepared to run, body twitching as he caught himself before taking off. He sent a look Stiles’ way that was somehow both apologetic and asking remission, and Stiles sighed as he smiled.

“You better run, Uncle Derek. They’re gonna get you,” Stiles said mock-seriously, only barely keeping a straight face as Derek instead ran straight to the kids, making all sorts of comedic noises as they mobbed his legs.

Fuck, he was cute.

Stiles’ attention was pulled off of Derek as he felt eyes on him, subtly scanning the yard before he made eye contact with another adult in the family, who was very shirtless, and very sweaty, and very much walking toward them with a bright smile on his face.

Okay, Stiles was definitely getting a complex.

“You must be Stiles!” he exclaimed once he was closer to their little group, and Stiles had never been as thankful for a child as he was for the tiny body perched on top of the other males shoulders, because he was just about at his ‘hugging gorgeous people’ limit. He was still sweating, for fucks sake, but Stiles supposed that even a wolf got tired out when they had eight kids hanging from their body until Uncle Derek stepped in.

“I am, and…” Stiles was about to assume this was the firefighter sibling, but as soon as he opened his mouth, the kid on top of his shoulders smiled, and Stiles was absolutely smitten. “And who is this little guy?”

The distraction was apparently a welcome one, because shirtless dude’s smile grew even wider, reaching up to pat the kid on a mop of curly hair before he lifted him up and over, holding him at chest level. “This is Isaac. Isaac, can you say hi to Stiles? He’s your uncle Derek’s special friend.”

Stiles literally felt his heart melt as Isaac gave a shy little wave, looking up at him with big blue eyes. He couldn’t have been older than three or four, and Stiles smiled and waved back as Isaac was set down on the ground.

“You wanna go play with Uncle D?” Any hint of shyness was forgotten the moment the question was asked, taking off toward Derek as fast as his little legs could carry him, which… wasn’t very fast, but was very, very cute.

“They all yours?” Stiles asked, raising an eyebrow as he looked over to Derek, who now had at least six kids hanging off of him. He smiled as the other male shivered, shaking his head quickly.

“God no, just the three. Erica and Boyd, and Isaac too, now that the adoption has been finalized. Those kids basically run the joint, Derek included—as long as you don’t mind the occasional toddler mobbing, you’ll fit in just fine.”

“Thanks, random shirtless man, I really hope so.”

Stiles grinned as Laura choked on a mouthful of punch, the weirdness of the situation apparently just now visible to her as she sputtered, punching her brother in the arm. “Oh god, Taylor, what is wrong with you! Go put on a shirt, you can’t just—you didn’t even introduce yourself, I swear—Stiles is a guest, you weirdo!”

They kept bickering back and forth as Taylor pulled an undershirt on over his head, the whining turning into background noise as he poured himself a glass of punch. He knew perfectly well what Laura was trying to say—Stiles is a human—and he was pretty sure he was mostly flattered by everyone trying so hard, but any coherent thought left his head as he took a bite of the ribs, watching Nana Hale grin out of the corner of his eyes as he groaned in delight.

“God, they really do have Derek wrapped around their pudgy fingers,” Cora mused, and Stiles nodded his head, swallowing. It was honestly hilarious to watch Derek try to manage all those kids by himself; they seemed determined to pile themselves onto his head and shoulders, and he could almost see Derek sweat, trying to make sure he didn’t drop anyone as Isaac managed to wriggle his way into Derek’s grip.

He tilted his head in consideration, taking a sip of his drink before he spoke up.

“Yeah, he always did strike me as that kind of Alpha.”

He couldn’t help but savor the way the conversation ground to a halt around him, Laura and Taylor both sucking in a deep breath as Mark shattered the glass he was holding. There probably was a better way to acknowledge that he was in on the secret, but as funny as it was watching Derek’s siblings tiptoe around the fact, he figured it was best to rip the bandaid off in one go.

Even if it meant he had the attention of the Hales closest to him in one second, flat, Nana’s burning red from where she stood with a plate piled high with food.

He probably should have been nervous, but as he looked back at Derek, he could tell it was the right choice—Derek was all smiles, waiting only a beat before he popped his fangs and playfully snapped at one of his little nieces, the air soon full of squealing laughter once again.

Keeping his gaze even, Stiles smiled in thanks as he took the plate of food Nana offered to him, watching as her eyes melted back into their darker, human color. She was staring at him like he was a particularly complex puzzle, and she wasn’t alone—Cora looked hilariously outraged that she didn’t realize sooner, and even Mark was looking over him with renewed interest as his hand healed.

“I knew you were a smart boy. He told you?”

Nana’s question was accusing, but not unkind, and Stiles shrugged it off easily as he popped a chip into his mouth.

“He didn’t have to. My best friend was bitten when we were both fifteen. He didn’t have… anything, no alpha, no pack, just me and my mad Googling skills, and we’ve had plenty of supernatural run-ins over the years. Derek didn’t tell me because he didn’t have to tell me—I’m not anything special, but I’d like to think I can spot a non-human from at least fifty feet. Maybe more on a good day.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong.”

Stiles jumped as he heard Derek’s voice from behind him, and it truly was a credit to his poise and sophistication that he only blushed a little as Derek’s arm snaked around his waist. His body was warm, far warmer than it had been ten minutes ago, and Derek’s breath came a little heavy as he kissed the back of Stiles’ head.

“You are definitely something special.”

“You—you absolute cheeseball, what is wrong with you—” Stiles managed to get out as he shoved at Derek’s shoulder, his entire face burning red as Laura and Cora both gagged. Any residual awkwardness melted away as Nana’s sharp laugh cut through the air, the sound putting him back at ease as he leaned back into Derek’s warmth.

Somewhere between the fortieth round of storytelling and the gathering moving back into the house, Stiles needed a breather. Derek’s family was huge, and loud, and honestly, Stiles loved it—but it wasn’t long before he felt an itch beneath his skin, his fingers buzzing against his thigh, the muscles in his jaw a little too tight.

Stiles had expected Derek to be pretty popular in the family—what he didn’t expect, though, was that he would be anything more than an introduction and the same polite questions that everyone gave the new boyfriend.

“Wait, no fucking way did the two of you take down a Kanima, Stiles, I’m calling bullshit right now—“

Derek’s siblings were great, but they were also the worst; the minute they found out that Stiles had his own supernatural background, they were pestering him for stories, demanding his opinion of things, getting more and more exasperated with his entire life the more he shared.

Stiles knew that his life was crazy, okay? He didn’t need the constant reminders or the slack-jawed shocked expressions to reinforce that fact.

“Jesus, we didn’t even know that there were any wendigos in the state, and you knew an entire family of them?”

The only stories he flat out refused to talk about were the… issues he had had with hunters through high school—this was a party, after all, and he didn’t want to be the one to bring the vibe down by talking about the one time an assassin held a gun to his head to try and draw Scott out.

Fun times.

“What do you mean, you just know a banshee? And set her up with a hellhound? Dude, who are you?!”

Kissing Derek had, oddly enough, only exasperated the situation. In less than a day, they had gotten better at trading little affections back and forth; but instead of helping Stiles calm down, they only increased that thrumming nerves that bounced around at the base of his skull.

Which sucked, honestly, because kissing Derek was… really, really nice.

Stiles waited until another cousin who’s name he would never remember caught Derek up in a conversation about another tradition he couldn’t follow before he squeezed Derek’s hand, taking the opportunity to stand up from his spot on the couch and slip away.

The Hale House was huge, and outside was no exception; Stiles soon found himself on the porch, a huge wraparound wooden structure with built-in benches that let you enjoy the kind of view that made Stiles remember why he loved home so much. He treated himself to a few pictures of the sunset over Beacon Canyon before he flopped himself down on a bench, rubbing at his neck.

“Stiles? Everything alright?”

He had half expected Derek to follow him out after a few moments—but to his surprise, it was Nana Hale that sat beside him, her cheeks still pink with laughter as she tucked a jet black flyaway behind an ear.

“Is—oh, no, it’s great! Just wanted to, uh, snap a few pictures of the view.”

Another half truth—he was full to bursting with those lately.

“I know that our family can be… a little overwhelming,” she said, her tone even as she rose a brow, keeping her gaze forward as her fingers drummed a pattern into her knee.

Stiles hummed in agreement, his own smile a touch more genuine as he looked over to her. “Maybe, but that’s not a bad thing. When I was growing up, I spent so much time wondering what it would be like, to have siblings, and cousins, and… well, it might be a lot, but it’s a lot of love, too. I’m really glad Derek has that kind of support.”

Nana’s fingers stilled against her knee as she turned to face Stiles, and for the first time, Stiles was really able to get a good look at her properly. He could understand why she was the matriarch of the family, and how she had kept that title so long; even if he hadn’t witnessed her taking Mark down less than four hours ago, there was a whole other kind of strength that she was showing here, radiating off of her in waves.

“He does. But he doesn’t just have us for love and support... or was I reading the way you look at him wrong?” Her tone was teasing as she rose her brow, and Stiles felt his cheeks pink up spectacularly as he coughed, his eyes flashing back to the window for only a moment before Nana patted his knee.

“Don’t worry, the house is completely soundproof. Those nosy little pups can’t hear a word we say. Now tell me, how long have you been in love with my grandson?”

Now fully, beautifully red, Stiles groaned as he hid his face in his hands, Nana’s laughter ringing strong and clear as she stood up and walked toward the railing. “Oh don’t be so dramatic, I have no intention of spoiling that surprise until you’re ready to really woo him with it. And you’d better woo him! You know as well as I do that he deserves the romancing.”

Her tone softened as she chuckled, trailing off with a sigh and a sort of wistful smile as she shook her head. “New York has been good to him. You have, too, I think. California was… a rough part in his life.”

Something in the way she phrased it got the investigative side of his brain thrumming, his curiosity piqued as he remembered what Derek said on the plane.

‘I know they forgave me, but… sometimes it’s hard to be around them and still be okay with myself, you know?’

The nosy part of him wanted to pry, to dig a little more, but his eyes flicked back to the window again, where Derek and all four of his siblings were doing a terrible job at acting like they weren't trying to stare him down.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure he’ll tell me when he’s ready.”

Apparently, that was the right answer—Nana’s face softened again as she smiled, nodding her head, beckoning Stiles into standing up. She put her hand in the crook of his elbow easily, steering them back toward the house in a way that allowed no room for compromise.

“You are going to be good for my Der-bear, I know it.”

“Oh, I mean, I hope so. Derek deserves that, and I definitely—“

“Just let him be good for you, too.”

She reached up and patted Stiles cheek as he stared at her, dumbfounded, automatically opening the door for her as she walked back into the house. His expression was mirrored in the matching expressions of slack-jawed shock from all five Hale siblings, all staring at Stiles as Nana started in on another family story that would be sure to embarrass Mark, or Laura, or anyone who wasn’t Derek.

He meant what he said, of course. Derek deserved someone who would be good for him.

Somehow, that was the problem here.

—————

“Stiles, you reek of nerves. All I can smell is nerves and bell peppers. It’s not a good smell. Are you going to tell me what you’re freaking out about, or what?”

Stiles jolted as Derek called him out so effortlessly, pulled out of the trance he had fallen into as he watched Derek work, pushing around some of the barbecue from the night prior with some fresh chopped veggies into a delightful spur of the moment stir fry.

Derek was also as dressed down as Stiles had ever seen him, in a light grey henley and a dark pair of jeans, and that was even more delightful than the stir fry.

“Wait, you—that’s just something you can do? Oh god, your entire family must have known how nervous I was yesterday, did they—“

“Stiles. Breathe.”

Right. Breathing. He could do that.

…. maybe.

The truth was, Stiles could honestly say that he was having a great time back in Beacon Hills.

Derek and his family were great, no lie, and fake relationship aside, the researcher in him was absolutely thriving seeing how a huge, well-established pack worked with one another. They were literally a well oiled machine, the personification of the old ‘it takes a village’ metaphor, and the only thing that amazed Stiles more than how well they worked together was how well they adapted to Stiles being there.

Of course, he thought a big part of that came from having the Alphas on his side—not just Derek, but Nana too.

(“I can’t believe she hugged you,” Laura had hissed after yet another glass of infused punch. “When she met my last boyfriend, she threw him off the porch.”

“Well, Stiles is a fragile little human,” Taylor had snorted, ignoring the way Stiles smacked his arm, “and Hank was a major, prolapsed asshole.”

“Well yeah, but that’s not the point!”)

As great as Derek and his family was though, getting to come home and surprise his dad early… well, there was no place on the planet he would rather be than wrapped in a signature Stilinski hug, the kind of hug where you held on just a little longer than you needed to so you can pretend you definitely weren’t crying.

He got to watch a game with his dad, he got to sleep in his old, lumpy-ass childhood bed, he got to make breakfast in his mom’s kitchen.

So yeah. Great time.

Or at least, it had been, until a text rolled through after he kissed his dad goodbye that morning.

der-bear: Do you want to come over for lunch? Nana has everyone out of the house, Mom and Uncle Peter showed up this morning and he’s already driving everyone crazy.

sent: sure man. want me to bring anything? :)

der-bear: Don’t worry about it. Besides, I figure we should talk before the bonfire anyway.

And just like that, something brought around a cloud to rain on Stiles’ parade.

“Is it about tonight?” Derek asked, and if Stiles’ hadn’t been so laser focused on his cooking technique (his arms, okay, he was staring at Derek’s arms) he probably would have missed the way Derek hesitated when he asked, like he was afraid of the answer.

He picked himself up off of the barstool at the island in their gigantic kitchen, leaning against the counter closer to Derek, reaching in to pluck a chunk of onion out of the pan, skillfully avoiding the swat from Derek’s wooden spoon. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you… You know we’re looking forward to having you with us, right?” Derek asked, spooning some of the food onto two separate plates, using his claws to rip two fresh chunks of bread off of a loaf. “But if you don’t… I mean, I just don’t want you to feel like you have to be there if you don’t want to.”

Stiles frowned as he accepted one of the plates, pulling the smaller chunk of bread off of one of Derek’s claws, mulling his next words over. “As long as you want me there I’ll be there,” Stiles said slowly, because there really was no way to politely say that Stiles would rather throw himself into the sun before his mythical lore studying ass missed out on observing pack activity on a blue moon.

“Why would you think I didn’t want you there?” Derek asked, looking like he was offended at the very notion, sliding a fork to Stiles as he sat down at the countertop, that offended look only growing as Stiles snorted.

“I dunno, I thought you might have changed your mind about it. Dude, you sent me a ‘we should talk’ text. I’m no expert, but I know that nothing good follows a ‘we should talk’ text,” Stiles said around a mouth full of bread, but any degree of playful levity he had gone for was sapped out of his voice the moment he saw Derek look back down at his plate.

“That, uh. I do think we should talk, but not about that. Stiles, I...”

Ah, fuck. Derek’s ears were pink again, and for once, Stiles thought that was a bad thing.

Stiles did his best not to panic as he thought through things, wondering what he had fucked up, because he just knew he had fucked up a little something. Maybe he had come on a little too strong last night, maybe he had gotten too comfortable with his crush, maybe—

“I was thinking that maybe… we shouldn’t be faking this anymore.”

—or maybe, he had fucked up a whole lot of everything.

Stiles felt his heart sink through his shoes as he swallowed his bread, his appetite suddenly gone. He brushed his hands on his jeans, giving a few short nods, swallowing again as he pushed back from the table a little bit. He thought for a moment that he should argue against it, but Derek had a sad puppy expression splashed across his face, and Stiles wasn’t strong against that on a good day.

“Oh.”

He could feel Derek’s eyes tracking him as he started to move, standing up and starting an easy track around the kitchen, flexing his fingers before he rubbed his palm with his thumbs, an old habit he had thought he had kicked back when he graduated from Berkeley.

“I think, uh, maybe you should wait until you’re back in New York to tell your family?” Stiles started, missing the tiny smile on Derek’s face before it melted into a look of confusion. “You should tell them I broke up with you, not the other way around, I don’t mind being the bad guy,” he added, staring down at his hands.

“Wait, Stiles—“

“No, seriously, it’s fine,” Stiles interrupted, putting a smile back on his face, because he knew this was going to be coming at some point. Derek had made up their entire relationship, and Stiles had worked hard to remember that the reality of it was… that it wasn’t reality. He was the one with the inconvenient crush, he was the one who had gotten stupid. This was all on him, and taking the high road to bow out gracefully would be too.

Or, at least, it should have been. But Derek had abandoned his seat as well, halfway following Stiles in his trail around the kitchen, putting his arm out against a countertop to stop Stiles at a turn.

“I said I wanted to stop faking, Stiles.”

Hell, when had Derek gotten so close to him? Stiles blinked as he backed up against the counter, Derek’s arms closing him in, and suddenly he was getting an up close and personal look at Derek’s lips, and his eyes, and the way the blush was going back up his ears, and—

...why was Derek blushing?

“I never said anything about wanting you to leave.”

But why would Stiles be staying if… oh. Oh.

Realization dawned on Stiles’ face as Derek blushed and looked down, moving his hands a little bit closer against the counter, and Stiles felt a shiver run down his spine as he felt Derek’s thumb settle right along his hip. He had to clear his throat before he could speak, swallowing down the hope that was threatening to bubble over, chewing on his lip as he put one hand on Derek’s chest, the other gently tipping his head back to look him in the eye.

“Dude, if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you gotta spell it out, I’ve had a crush on you for like forever and if I’m mis-reading this—”

“I told you. I’m your boyfriend, don’t call me dude.”

Stiles laughed again, elation making him feel light and giddy, finally breaking eye contact with Derek as he felt his own blush burn through the back of his neck.

“Stay, Stiles. You belong here. With me.”

Rather than even try to form a coherent response, Stiles dropped one of his hands, cheeks still a ruddy color as he looped a finger into one of the belt loops on Derek’s designer jeans, pulling him just that much closer.

“Derek?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

“Oh, thank God—"

—————

Yeah, Stiles thought hours later, still feeling the warmth of Derek’s smile against his lips as howls sounded off around the Hale House, moonlight swirling around him from the vantage point he had on the porch.

This was exactly where he belonged.

[spritewrites]

Breakfast Threats (Squealing Santa 2k20)

Fandom: Haikyuu

Characters: Kozume Kenma & Kuroo Tetsurou (Kuroken)

Word Count: 1.8k

A/N: This is my submission for Squealing Santa 2020, organized by @ticklygiggles​!! My assignment was @secretleeblogging​, who requested lee!Kenma wake up tickles. I LOVED doing this assignment, Kenma’s my favorite character and especially soft sleepy Kenma is everything to me. Happy holidays, hope you enjoy!!

Kozume Kenma was absolutely, 100 percent certain that the sun was a malicious force of nature specifically designed to ruin his day. No benevolent fire orb could ever be so rude as to burn into his retinas with that much intensity. It had to be the work of some evil spirit; maybe a demon, maybe a homophobic ancestor, who could say? Definitely something out for vengeance, because whatever was coercing the cosmos to shine all their light directly through his window at all hours surely sought his demise.

He scrunched his nose, wincing, and tried to explain this phenomenon to the lanky lump of messy black hair and volleyball muscle beside him. Tetsurou would understand.

Unfortunately, between the sun and the pillow and the muscle, the best language he could manage was “Time s’it?”

Beside him, the lump moved. A long arm reached over Kenma, fumbled, and grabbed a phone. Kuroo Tetsurou, in all his bedhead glory, blinked blearily at the screen. “Eight.”

Kenma groaned, turning onto his stomach and burying his face in his pillow. “S’too bright.” He heard Tetsurou yawn, and selfishly peeked one eye open to catch a glimpse. His boyfriend was sitting up, shirtless and glowing in the early morning light, all tousled hair and red lips. Kenma hid his smile in the pillow.

“Need coffee,” Tetsurou grumbled. “Want any?”

Kenma shook his head, pulling the blankets further up around his shoulders. Artificial energy was the last thing he needed; what he really wanted was more sleep. He was dimly aware of the weight next to him on the bed disappearing and soft footsteps making their way out the bedroom door, accompanied by mumbled words that sounded suspiciously like “More for me.”

With a sigh, Kenma relaxed into the plush sheets. Mornings, especially mornings after he’d been up late playing games, were never his thing. Bright mornings like this one were extra trying on his vision, which was nearly nocturnal after years of gaming. Still, the prospect of being able to fall back asleep and wake up later to a hot breakfast from Tetsurou was too delicious to resist. Already he could feel himself drifting off, slipping back out of consciousness and into the soft embrace of sleep. 

It didn’t feel like a moment had passed when something was shaking his leg. Somebody was speaking, but it didn’t really matter who, not when his bed was as warm as it was. Just a few more minutes, he thought to himself.

“C’mon, kitten,” Tetsurou insisted, sounding equal parts annoyed and fond. “You got an extra two hours, it’s time to get up.”

“Mmf,” Kenma grunted eloquently, shoving his face deeper into the pillow. Another shake of his leg made him squirm, irritated. “Little longer.”

“You’ve had long enough; our breakfast is cold.”

There was a brief pause as Kenma formulated and internally executed an elaborate multi-pronged argument, which ended up finally exiting his mouth as “Microwave.”

“Okay, fair,” Tetsurou replied, and damn him, Kenma could hear his smile. How dare he tease when the stakes were this high? Extra sleep was pretty much a matter of life and death. “Guess I’ll have to make you.”

Kenma still wasn’t entirely conscious, but some tiny alarm went off in his sleep-addled brain. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make him furrow his brow and curl his toes beneath the sheets. “…Can’t make me.”

“Oh?” There was something in Tetsurou’s tone that Kenma couldn’t put his finger on. Amusement, maybe? Mischief?

Suddenly, he felt the warmth of the blankets tugged away, leaving only Kenma in his pajamas on the bare mattress. He curled in on himself, whining in protest. “Hey!”

“See?” Tetsurou teased, holding the bedding teasingly out of reach. “This is how your breakfast feels. Cold, sad…”

“Give em back,” Kenma groaned, aware of how petulant he sounded but too exhausted to care. “Lemme sleep!” 

“Sleep is for the weak.” The mattress creaked, and Kenma felt a soft weight settle on his legs. “And you’re strong, aren’t you, kitten?”

Before he could reply, Kenma felt Tetsu’s presence on his legs shift and move closer to the head of the bed. Cold fingers snuck under his hoodie and waltzed up his spine, sending goosebumps racing to follow. He tensed, clutching the pillow. Oh.

“Tetsu—”

“Mm?” Tetsurou replied, all innocence. His strong body slid up Kenma’s, easily slotting into place on top of him and letting the weight of his body drape over his boyfriend. Kenma twitched as Tetsurou’s strong legs straddled his hips – soothing as the feeling was, he was also hyper-aware that he couldn’t squirm away. The fingers on his back spidered back down, effortlessly light in their touch.

Kenma took a shaky breath. “W-what’re you—”

“Told you I’d make you.” Tetsurou’s smirk pressed up between his shoulder blades, and Kenma had to stifle a gasp. “You’re not ticklish, are you, sweetheart?”

“I—” The fingertips changed direction again, trailing back up his back, but skating dangerously close to his sides this time. Kenma gritted his teeth, fighting an inevitable smile. “You – you know the answer! Tetsu—”

This time, when the touch on his spine reached the nape of his neck, it stayed there, circling the soft part of his back where his neck met his shoulders. With a squeak, Kenma’s shoulders hitched up by his ears.

“Don’t you dare,” he hissed.

Tetsurou’s reply was so close to his ear that it was barely a whisper, ruffling his hair and making Kenma absolutely shiver. “You brought this on yourself, kitten.” 

With that, Tetsurou’s fingertips curled, prodding carefully into the sides of his ribcage, and he began to press smiling kisses all over the back of Kenma’s neck. Kenma, for his part, did not fall into laughter immediately; rather, he let out what could only be described as a squeal and began kicking wildly. Fortunately, his ribs weren’t so bad that he couldn’t hide the laughter building in his chest. Unfortunately, the sleepiness that still clouded his mind had left him weak, soft, and seemingly even more ticklish than usual. Still, it wasn’t until the kisses migrated north to his ears, nosing into the gaps in his hair, that his squeaks turned into real giggles, high-pitched and sweet and absolutely delightful to Tetsurou.

“You’re so cute when you laugh!”

“Please, please, I – enough with the ears!”

“You have the cutest ears; I can’t not kiss—”

“You—” Kenma snorted into the pillow— “you obsess over ears?”

“Hmmm…” The kiss that Tetsurou pressed into the nape of his neck was whisper-soft. “Only yours.” 

Kenma could feel his face burning, but didn’t dare lift his head lest Tetsurou see the redness on his cheeks and tease him about that, too. His concern didn’t last long, though, as the tickling in between his ribs moved to become squeezing at his sides, and he nearly gave then and there.

“Monster,” he gasped through his laughter, trying to kick. “Absolute menace, truly–” 

“Now, Kenma,” Tetsurou chided, giving Kenma’s hipbones a squeeze and relishing the cackles that the action produced. “I don’t think you’re really in a position to be throwing around insults, are you?”

While his point certainly held up, Kenma wasn’t exactly in a rational place mentally. He was lost in laughter, hardly able to think through a haze of ticklishness, and his usual line of defense against attacks such as these (wild thrashing) was being significantly hindered by Tetsurou’s presence on his back. He tried kicking once more, but it was more of a flailing than anything else, and his boyfriend’s strong legs easily countered the attack.

“Careful,” Tetsurou teased, reaching back to give one of his knees a quick squeeze (and producing a delicious howl).

“I cahahan’t,” Kenma wailed, burying his face once more in a pillow that was now wet with tears of laughter. “Please, Tetsu, please–”

“Are you going to get up?” asked Tetsurou, who had just found a wonderful spot on Kenma’s waist that made him hiccup.

“I—I—” Kenma giggled helplessly. He could feel his cheeks started to ache from smiling, but something in his pride kept him from giving in. “You’re teasing, I—Oh, not there, Tetsu, plehehease!”

“Please what?” came the reply, but Kenma was laughing too hard to answer. “Please tickle you more?” 

“Wahahait, I can’t—” 

“Can’t what?”

Kenma snorted, twitching under his boyfriend as a rogue fingernail found its way into his underarm. As merciless as the tickling was, the relentless teasing was almost infinitely worse.

“You’re—that tickles, Tetsu—”

“Does it?” asked Tetsurou, amused. “Almost enough to make you come have breakfast with me?” 

“I—ugh, fine, yes!” Kenma finally shouted between bouts of giggles.

Grinning triumphantly, Tetsurou pressed one last ticklish kiss to his boyfriend’s ear and rolled off him. Finally, Kenma turned over, blinking in the morning sun, face flushed and streaked with tears of laughter. His ribs heaved with the effort of replacing the lost oxygen, but he couldn’t seem to wipe the smile off his face. 

“That… that was rude.”

Tetsurou reached over to boop his nose, earning a swat and a weak chuckle. “Just be glad you surrendered when you did, kitten. Your toes were next.”

Kenma tried his best not to curl his toes at the thought, but Tetsurou’s knowing look told him that he’d failed. “You can’t—stop making fun of me, alright, I was asleep and you practically tortured me.”

Tetsurou hummed thoughtfully at that, brushing some of Kenma’s hair out of his face. “Never told me to stop, though, did you?”

Crap. Kenma froze, face burning. Tetsurou, on the other hand, burst into laughter.

“Aww, does my little kitten like being tickled?”

“Shut up,” Kenma hissed, but Tetsurou was practically rolling with giggles.

“That’s so adorable—”

“Enough teasing!”

“Oh, come on,” Tetsurou smiled, giving his boyfriend’s forehead a quick kiss. “You’re just bitter that I won.”

“M’gonna get you back, you know,” Kenma grumbled, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes and revealing a competitive shine. “Except a billion times worse.”

Tetsurou snorted derisively, but Kenma would have to be blind to miss the way his eyes widened. “I’d like to see you try – hey!”

The finger that had wedged itself just south of Tetsurou’s ribcage gave an experimental wiggle, and Kenma’s lips quirked at the sound his boyfriend made. Flushing, Tetsurou wrapped a hand around the intruding touch and pushed it away, playing up his puppy eyes to his full ability.

“Can it at least wait till after breakfast?” 

Kenma raised an eyebrow. “You have two minutes.”

“Two?!”

“Better be quick, sweetheart. One Mississippi… two Mississippi…”

Tetsurou was out of the room in a second, socks slipping on the hardwood and leaving Kenma snickering into his hoodie. After a moment, he plucked a blanket from where it had been discarded at the end of the bed and pulled it up over him, sighing and wiggling his toes in the warmth. Hmm.

Maybe three minutes.

[route22ny]

Inside DC’s Secret Covid Morgue

Written by Luke Mullins

April 21, 2020—The clerics have been sworn to secrecy. On this warm morning, they’ve come to a vast and empty parking lot, instructed not to tell anyone of its location. The pitch of asphalt is unusually secure, hidden behind a 12-foot chain-link fence that’s been swathed in sheets of black tarp to prevent anyone from peering through. At the front gate, armed soldiers stand guard.

Inside, large trailers are arranged behind tented canopies and banks of lights. Metal ramps are affixed to each trailer so that stretchers can be wheeled in. The interior walls of the trailers are lined with seven rows of metallic shelving, sturdy enough to support thousands of pounds. The temperature is 24 degrees.

The clergymen gather with a handful of city officials in front of the canopies. They form a circle, each six feet apart from the next.

Reverend Andre Towner of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ.

Imam Talib Shareef of Nation’s Mosque.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom–The National Synagogue.

Dr. Donell Harvin, a top official at DC’s homeland-security department.

Kimberly Lassiter, a supervisor at the medical examiner’s office.

And Dr. Roger Mitchell, the chief medical examiner himself.

Wearing masks and rubber gloves, they bow their heads. Tomorrow, the first body will be sent here. Today, a blessing.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

One by one, the clerics offer prayers, solemn exhortations for strength and humility, courage and dignity, resonating above the grinding hum of the trailers. Imam Shareef invokes the victims—“Their deaths,” he says, “are not to be in vain.” Reverend Towner prays for the workers, that their bodies will be protected from the virus, that their minds stay healthy during the difficult days ahead. Rabbi Herzfeld stresses the righteousness of the mission. “In Judaism,” he tells the group, “we believe that the greatest kindness is to care for the dead.”

***

It’s an ominous time in the nation’s capital. Several miles away, federal officials are dismissing warnings about the deadly airborne pathogen that has exploded out of Asia. Their unwillingness to act has impelled local governments across the country to launch their own scattered efforts to prevent Covid-19 from decimating their communities. In the District of Columbia, where African Americans make up 46 percent of the population, the task is especially urgent, given the virus’s disproportionately cruel impact on people of color.

Over the previous month, the city has been locked down as panicked residents watch their leaders navigate a 100-year crisis in real time. Mayor Muriel Bowser shuttered businesses. The DC Council pushed through legislation to extend unemployment benefits. Health-department officials opened testing sites and implored residents to wear masks and keep their distance. But away from public view, a weightier matter has come to preoccupy a little-known but essential corner of the bureaucracy: the caretakers of the dead.

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys. You’re not going to get discounts or big thank-you signs. The work we do, we do in silence.”

It’s a problem of space. As Drs. Mitchell and Harvin prepared for the pandemic, they realized that the city’s morgue didn’t have the capacity to handle the surge of fatalities that the virus would leave behind. And so, over the previous few weeks, they hustled to secure the land, equipment, and manpower necessary to build an additional facility.

The clergy who led prayers on the day the field morgue opened were there to make sure the space didn’t violate the tenets of their three distinct faiths, and to consecrate the site as one. Then the work began. Over the next two and a half months, Harvin, who describes himself as the “general in charge of the death troops,” and his top deputy, Lassiter, who has recovered bodies throughout DC for more than two decades, will oversee the makeshift mortuary. By the time the spring surge is through, 404 Covid victims will have passed through the site.

Still, through it all, almost no one in the city will have any idea the Covid morgue exists. The work is carried out in strict secrecy; staffers are instructed not to disclose the site’s location or tell anyone what takes place there, not even their own family members. A mistake—such as a body being released to the wrong family—would be humiliating for the mayor and the city. News footage of workers moving the dead could upset victims’ families, opening new wounds, or lure gawkers to the site. As much as anything else, though, the silence reflects the professional ethos of those who perform this work for a living. While they’re dispatched to every hurricane and school shooting, their efforts take place entirely behind the scenes. They are the first responders you never see.

The District of Columbua invited an imam, a rabbi, and a minister to consecrate the morgue.

***

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys,” Harvin tells each new set of workers to arrive at the Covid morgue. “You’re not going to get discounts or big [thank-you] signs. The work we do, we do in silence. Not even the family members of the victims will know what we do. There’s a pride in that. There’s a silent pride in that,” he says. “You’re taking care of someone’s grandmother, grandfather, husband, daughter, son, and that’s a higher calling.” When it’s all over, they’ll return to their previous jobs or assignments and no one will ever know what they’ve done here. “It’s a heavy burden,” Harvin says. “It’s a very heavy burden.

“[But] the world is watching,” he assures them, “whether they see us or not.”

***

Donell Harvin is 48 years old, with a sturdy build and flecks of gray in his goatee. He’s married to a physician and has four daughters. He lives in Howard County and spends most of the year looking forward to his annual scuba-diving trip.

Over the last 30 years, Harvin has been an eyewitness to some of America’s darkest moments. As an EMT, he responded to the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993; after joining the New York Fire Department, he was there when the towers were destroyed in 2001. As a deputy director in New York’s medical examiner’s office, he led the effort to identify victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in 2012, at the request of Connecticut officials, Harvin assisted with forensics after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

His path from first responder to frontline bureaucrat began in the Bronx, where he spent his teenage years. After dropping out of high school, he got a GED and then a college scholarship from the Children’s Aid Society, enlisting as a paramedic. Though he loved the work, as a young father he began to worry about his safety. He was caught in shootouts while tending to accident victims and lost colleagues in ambulance crashes. On 9/11, his wife and daughters saw him on TV, racing away from the rubble, and then didn’t hear from him for 24 hours. Upon seeing their faces when he finally got home, he knew it was time for a change.

Harvin went back to school and earned a master’s in emergency management. Landing a position with New York’s chief medical examiner, he became an expert in mass-fatality management—the grim business of identifying and processing victims of large-scale tragedies. He also came to know Mitchell, and the two worked together on Sandy Hook. Two years later, when Mitchell was hired as DC’s chief medical examiner, he recruited Harvin.

Donell Harvin, who was at Ground Zero on 9/11, helped devise DC’s Covid death-handling protocols.

***

Their immediate task in the District was to turn around an office plagued by mismanagement. But an equally important project loomed. The previous year, Washington had been shaken by tragedy when a mentally disturbed government contractor gunned down 12 people at the Navy Yard. Although the medical examiner’s office had properly managed those deaths, officials realized that a larger or more complex disaster would have overwhelmed its capabilities. The city needed a mass-fatality division robust enough to absorb the kind of tragedy that Harvin and Mitchell hoped Washington would never face. They went about building it—securing federal funds, adding staff, and running mass-casualty drills.

By early 2020, Harvin had been in Washington six years. He’d since left Mitchell’s office and finished a PhD in public health. He was teaching at Georgetown and had become chief of homeland security and intelligence at DC’s homeland-security agency. But the imminent arrival of Covid meant the District was facing the catastrophe he and Mitchell had trained for, the biggest mass-fatality event in the city’s history.

On March 2, Harvin went to DC’s Emergency Operations Center for the first day of formal briefings about how the city would navigate the pandemic. Halfway through the morning, he found a quiet spot in the hallway and placed a call to his mother. “This is going to be bad,” he said.

***

The city morgue is located at 401 E Street, Southwest. In any given year, only a fraction of the fatalities that occur in DC pass through the facility. When a person dies of natural causes at a hospital, nursing home, or hospice, a physician will typically sign the death certificate and release the body to a funeral home. It’s usually only those who die alone or in unnatural or suspicious circumstances whose bodies go to the morgue, where medical examiners determine the cause and manner of their death.

Initially, Harvin and Mitchell planned to use this same approach for the pandemic, relying on hospitals—where the bulk of virus-related deaths would take place—to serve as de facto Covid morgues. But they quickly revised their thinking. For one thing, little was known about how contagious the disease might be postmortem. Would storing victims at hospitals risk infecting staff? At the same time, Harvin learned from former colleagues in New York—which was being ravaged by the virus—that hospitals were too overwhelmed to manage the bodies properly. The result was an appalling spectacle: forklifts carrying pallet-loads of bodies outside hospitals, decedents stacked on top of one another in trailers. At one point, police discovered nearly 100 rotting corpses in unrefrigerated U-Hauls parked by a Brooklyn funeral home. As the funeral home’s owner told the New York Times, “I ran out of space.”

The city handles the body of every Covid fatality, a process meant to ensure victims don’t pile up at overwhelmed hospitals, as in New York. Above, an autopsy room and viewing area at the city morgue.

***

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for this type of disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up. “We saw that with Hurricane Katrina—bodies just left out there,” Harvin says. “And that’s a stain on our society.”

So Harvin and Mitchell made a decision that would set them apart from most coroners and medical examiners in the country. Instead of depending on the hospital system, the chief medical examiner’s office would assume responsibility. Every single person who dies of Covid in DC would be sent to Harvin and Mitchell’s team—a protocol that remains in place today.

By studying the mortality rate and projecting infection levels for the city, the men estimated that as many as 3,500 residents could perish in the pandemic. Or one in every 200. Putting aside the magnitude of the suffering, the math presented a serious logistical problem: The city morgue had an official capacity of only 205. The solution was apparent—they would have to build the Covid morgue.

Harvin immediately began acquiring the materials he’d need. He ordered six refrigerated trailers. He borrowed mobile light towers for nighttime work and generators for power. He acquired PPE, Porta-Potties, drinking water, 500 gallons of hand sanitizer, and heavy-duty body bags specially designed for mass tragedies, 4,000 in all. For families who couldn’t afford funerals, the District agreed to pay for cremations. And to prevent a backlog of fatalities, the city shortened the time it would hold unclaimed bodies before they could be cremated, from 30 to 15 days.

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up.

Meanwhile, Harvin combed the local and federal bureaucracy in search of an additional 30 workers—to volunteer. The Army agreed to detail members of its mortuary-affairs unit, which had operated similar morgues in combat zones. A trade association found out-of-state funeral directors who wanted to pitch in. DC’s Medical Reserve Corps, a group of volunteers willing to assist in health-related emergencies, provided workers. The DC Guard and the Air National Guard sent personnel.

As he rushed to get things in place, the virus was already spreading through Washington. Harvin felt the same sense of foreboding he’d experienced six years earlier when he was waiting for Hurricane Sandy to make landfall. “It’s like a slow-moving train,” he says. “You know it’s coming and you can’t stop it.”

***

While Harvin was acquiring equipment and manpower, his top lieutenant, Kim Lassiter, spent two days driving around the District, scouting possible sites for the morgue. At her last stop, she got out of her car and peered through the fence. The property had everything. It was city-owned land—a parking lot for DC employees, empty because staffers were now working from home. It was large enough for the trailers, and it could be secured with tarps and guards. Most important, the site was inconspicuous: You could drive right past it and not realize it was there. “This is perfect,” Lassiter thought.

Lassiter, a 54-year-old grandmother with a soft smile, is the second-longest-tenured medical examiner’s employee, with nearly a quarter century on the job. In the 1990s, she lifted the victims of gang wars off street corners and washed the blood from their wounds at the morgue. In 2002, she used x-rays to identify the remains of Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern whose murder had become the subject of national fascination when it was alleged she’d been dating a married congressman around the time of her disappearance. And in 2008, Lassiter carried the remains of four children—ages 5, 6, 11, and 17—from the house where they’d been decomposing for seven months, after their mother, Banita Jacks, became convinced they’d been possessed by demons and killed them.

Lassiter came to the work by way of her own personal tragedy. She grew up in a housing project in Prince George’s County, with five brothers and sisters. Her father wasn’t around, and her mother, who worked in healthcare, struggled to do it all on her own. She eventually fell victim to drug use. It was up to Lassiter—the eldest of the children—to run the household. She cut class three days a week to watch her siblings. At 12, she got a summer job to support the family. Even after she graduated from high school and entered the workforce, there were periods when she would drop everything to nurse her mother through the various chemical fogs and illnesses that encumber the life of an addict.

In 1987, when Lassiter was 21, her mother passed away. Lassiter was called to the hospital. A nurse escorted her to the elevator, and they rode down to the basement. There, in a frigid room, Lassiter found her mother lying motionless on a stretcher. Her eyes were still open. “I felt like,” Lassiter remembers, “she was waiting for me to show up.”

Kim Lassiter, a 25-year veteran of the medical examiner’s office, ran the Covid morgue day to day.

***

The nurse explained that her mother was being taken away for an autopsy. Lassiter didn’t know anything about the process, and the news frightened her. “If I could have gone with her through that,” she says, “I would have.”

Following the funeral, Lassiter obtained custody of her siblings, whom she supported through her job as a clerk at the US Department of Health and Human Services. A few years later, her life took an unexpected turn when she spotted an alarming story in the newspaper: The DC chief medical examiner’s office had released the wrong body to a grieving family. The incident sounded both outrageous and intriguing; more than anything, it reminded Lassiter—by then a mother herself—of when her mom had been sent to the morgue. She called the office, talked her way to a supervisor, and asked if she could help. She joined the office as a volunteer.

This was the late 1990s, and the agency was considerably smaller than it is today. Lassiter was quickly hired and eventually promoted, becoming one of seven technicians responsible for a full sweep of duties: fielding intake calls from police, snapping photographs at death scenes, transporting decedents to the morgue, and assisting with medical examinations and autopsies. She viewed the work not as some macabre responsibility but as an expression of love. While she hadn’t been able to care for her own mother after her death, she now looked after the deceased loved ones of others.

When arriving at a place of death, Lassiter is vigilant about wearing a blank facial expression, to acknowledge the gravity of the circumstances. She offers condolences, then completes her tasks—attaching the toe tag, placing the deceased into the body bag—at a diligent pace so as not to prolong the trauma of those looking on. Once an autopsy is complete, she uses tight, neat sutures to close the incisions. She then washes the stains from the body and wraps it in a crisp white sheet.

Occasionally, when working alone, Lassiter has found herself speaking out loud to the bodies. If she hits a pothole while driving someone to the morgue, she’ll apologize. I’m sorry. Upon entering the morgue’s cold-storage facility, she sometimes greets the people being kept there. Good morning. When examining a crime victim’s body—particularly when it’s a child’s—she often pledges to help get justice. I’ll do everything in my power to find the evidence needed to make whoever did this to you pay.

The hardest days are the ones when she finds herself face to face with someone she knows. One morning, as Lassiter was preparing for autopsies, she checked the manifest and saw a familiar name. It was an older woman, a friend of her mother’s who’d looked out for Lassiter as a child. She walked into the cold-storage room, slid the body out of its cabinet, and said goodbye. It was the only time she ever broke down crying at the morgue.

***

April 22, 2020—The day after the religious leaders consecrate the site, the Covid morgue begins to stir with workers in face shields, gloves, and white protective suits. It’s been six weeks since DC recorded its first case of Covid, and the death toll has exceeded the city morgue’s capacity. Now the first wave of bodies is arriving.

The process begins with a phone call. A hospital official, or sometimes a police officer, contacts the medical examiner’s office. Lassiter, who is chief of the transport unit, dispatches her team to the scene. Two workers, in full PPE, arrive in a black, unmarked van. They present paperwork for the physician’s signature. In the hospital’s morgue, they take custody of the body. Opening the body bag, they attach identification. They zip the bag closed and spray the outside with disinfectant, then place it into a second, heavy-duty body bag. They disinfect it again. The workers lift the decedent onto a stretcher and paste an identification tag onto the bag. They slide the stretcher into the back of the unmarked van.

Every body arriving at the Covid morgue is first accounted for at the intake tent, then transferred to a refrigerated trailer.

***

At the Covid morgue, the workers move the decedent onto a table in the intake tent. Here, they weigh the body, to help confirm identification, and enter the victim’s name into a computer. They wheel the decedent across the blacktop and up into one of the refrigerated trailers. Next, the transfer. If the victim is heavy, the workers—at least two, sometimes four—lift the body onto one of the lower shelves. If the person is light, they place the body on a higher shelf. The staff use internal coding—6D, 2A—to record the exact location. They exit the trailer, remove their protective suits, and put on fresh ones.

A victim typically remains at the Covid morgue a few days, rarely longer than a week. During that time, a separate team calls family members to help them through the paperwork. Once burial arrangements are made, the funeral director schedules a pickup. The workers wheel the victim out of cold storage and into a second tented canopy—the release tent. They again wipe down the outside of the body bag. They again spray it with disinfectant. The funeral director pulls up. They load the dead into the hearse.

***

Though it was difficult to find volunteers, Harvin had assembled what he called “a coalition of the willing.” The active-duty Army morticians and military reservists, the citizen volunteers, the funeral directors, along with medical-examiner staffers and UDC students. While many had backgrounds in mortuary services, others did not. “We had people,” Harvin says, “who had never touched a dead body before—never seen a dead body.”

When each new group of volunteers arrived, Harvin—“the general in charge of the death troops”—brought them together to discuss the effort. The victims had come to the Covid morgue after suffering lonely and terrifying deaths—hooked up to breathing tubes, surrounded by masked doctors and nurses. “These people often were dropped off at the hospital, and they couldn’t see their loved ones for two or three or four weeks,” he continued. “They expired around complete strangers.” The staff’s goal, Harvin told the troops, was to provide each person with a dignity in death that they didn’t experience during their last days of life.

The operation has depended on volunteers—students, funeral directors, military reservists with no prior training.

***

Then he turned it over to Lassiter, who ran the day-to-day operations. She instructed new volunteers how to implement the values Harvin had espoused. When carrying the deceased, move deliberately and with caution. Keep the body as horizontal as possible. Do not, under any circumstances, stack one on top of another. Check, double-check, and triple-check the manifest to make sure each victim is in the correct rack. And pay respect through your words. Lassiter never refers to the deceased as “corpses” or “cadavers” or “cases.” Instead, she calls them “my people.”

“That’s the only way I can get [the workers] to treat them the way they would treat someone that they love,” Lassiter says. “Because it makes them see how special these people are to me.”

***

Gerald Slater, 86, was a television executive at PBS and WETA.

Richard Paul Thornell, 83, was a Howard law-school professor who helped establish the Peace Corps’s first-ever program, in Ghana.

Jose Mardoqueo Reyes, 54, was a refugee of El Salvador’s civil war and a beloved internet-radio broadcaster.

Luevella Jackson, 87, was among the first female bus drivers in DC’s public-school system.

Samuel Shumaker III, 90, was an Army colonel who also taught English and creative writing at UDC.

Florence Gilkes, 97, was a loving wife and aunt, as well as a dedicated fan of the Washington Football Team.

Iraj Askarinam, 76, owned a restaurant in Adams Morgan, where he regularly provided free meals to the homeless. They called him “Mr. Spaghetti.”

***

By May, the pandemic’s bleakest days had arrived at the morgue. The daily influx of new decedents fluctuated—eight one day, 19 the next. As the volume swelled, the workers came face to face with the breadth of the city’s suffering. They began recognizing the last names of victims they’d been dispatched to retrieve, and it dawned on them that these were additional members of already devastated families. Payton McFadden, a UDC premed grad, describes the crushing duty of traveling to a DC hospital to collect the body of a Covid-positive baby: “We had went and gotten one of the [baby’s] family members one week prior. [Covid] was slowly but surely matriculating through the whole house.” In a searing example of the District’s racial inequality, 74 percent of the fatalities were Black. “I will never forget this as long as I live, ever,” Lassiter says. “It just took so many people at one time, so suddenly.”

A Chicago-area funeral director who asked to be identified only by her first name, Stacey, came to Washington to volunteer. She served in the medical examiner’s main office, calling families and guiding them through the process of finalizing death certificates and retrieving loved ones. On one occasion, she spoke with a man whose father was in the Covid morgue, and he dissolved into tears. The man explained that they’d been estranged for years. It was only recently that they’d finally begun speaking again. “We do help carry that burden of grief,” she says. “And it’s hard.” On another day, she had a series of conversations with a police officer whose mother was at the disaster morgue. When the officer suddenly stopped returning her calls, Stacey got hold of his wife, who told her he’d been hospitalized with Covid himself. Nearly a year later, she still wonders about him. “It is always in the back of my head,” she says. “I don’t know [if] he made it through.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. A worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend.

As the morgue’s lead official, Harvin was spending up to 12 hours a day at the site. “Everyone’s talking about Covid and fatalities, and it’s just numbers to them. We’re actually dealing with them,” he says. “I have a PhD and I’m in there putting on gloves and a [protective] suit and I’m helping the crews move bodies in and out of trailers. It’s visceral for us.”

The staff feared for their own safety. “The scariest thing was [potentially being] exposed ourselves,” says Denise Lyles, supervisor of the investigation unit. Lassiter grew terrified that she’d infect her family. “I have a husband that goes out and he works. I was concerned about him,” she says. “Grandchildren that are asthmatic, concerned about them.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. While checking the manifest, a worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend. Harvin and Lassiter did what they could to look out for their staff’s mental health. At the end of each day, Lassiter pulled people aside to see if anyone was experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, connecting them with counselors or chaplains. Over time, even veterans of the medical examiner’s office began struggling with the weight of their mission.

After several weeks at the site, Harvin found that when he returned home from work, he would drift into a haze. He had no appetite. He stopped engaging his wife in conversation. He passed entire evenings staring blankly into the television. “I don’t even know what I’m watching,” he recalls. “I had no motivation.”

Harvin, of course, had worked mass tragedy before. After hijackers flew the first plane into the World Trade Center, he approached the South Tower on foot. From two blocks away, he saw bodies falling from the sky and his entire body froze. He couldn’t take another step forward. Minutes later, there was a deafening sound and the tower disappeared into a cloud of gray debris. Out of the rubble came a speeding ambulance. Harvin jumped into the back along with dozens of other firefighters and cops. As they neared the North Tower, Harvin turned to one of them. “Doesn’t it look like this one’s leaning?” he said.

He spent the next two days at Ground Zero searching for survivors and recovering the dead. The experience was so traumatizing that he vowed never to return to the site. But he found the work at the Covid morgue even more emotionally taxing. “I survived September 11,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was going to survive this.”

“There were so many women. So many mothers there.”

While he was able to walk away from Ground Zero after the attack,the pandemic was taking new victims each day. Every time Harvin arrived at the Covid morgue, he confronted a fresh supply of misery, and there was no end in sight. “Your mind and your soul get worn down far long before you body [does],” he says. Recognizing that he was experiencing depression, he turned to colleagues at the homeland-security department and found solace in chatting with them virtually.

For Lassiter, the pain manifested not as psychological trauma but as profound sadness. The heartache was always there, growing more intense over time. May 9—Mother’s Day—was the hardest. It had always been a tough one, the day her own mother’s death was most painful. But there was an additional heaviness now; she couldn’t stop thinking about everyone at the Covid morgue. “There were so many women,” she says. “So many mothers there.”

Though she was scheduled to be off, Lassiter didn’t feel right staying home on that particular day. She left her house in Prince George’s County and made the 25-minute drive to the site. Arriving at the morgue, she put on a protective suit and greeted the workers. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “It’s Mother’s Day,”

“I know,” she replied, “but I came down because I wanted to really thank you for what you’re doing.” She understood that some of them were mothers themselves, and she appreciated them for spending the day at the site.

Lassiter walked over to the cold-storage trailers and turned to face her people. “Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms,” she said. As she returned to the car, she noticed a lightness of spirit.

“It felt kind of like a sign of relief,” she says. “Just to speak out. To let them know that someone cares.”

***

June 2020—As summer approaches, the pace at the Covid morgue begins to slow. Fewer victims are arriving; the number of bodies in the trailers is declining. By the end of the month, the volume is thin enough that it can be handled at the city morgue. Washington’s first wave of Covid has reached its conclusion.

It’s time for Harvin to shut down the disaster morgue, at least for now. But before doing so, he organizes a final ritual. On July 7, 2020, Rabbi Herzfeld, Reverend Towner, and Imam Shareef return to the site. They were present at the beginning, and Harvin wants them here today, too.

The faith leaders gather by the intake tent as a group of three dozen workers form concentric circles around them. They offer prayers of thanksgiving that the work is coming to an end. “It is at death that the earth receives its treasures,” says Imam Shareef. “And we want to honor the facility that now has allowed for individuals to be returned back to the earth.”

After the ceremony, Lassiter assembles the men and women on her team to thank them for their two and a half months of service. When she finishes, a soldier who was assigned to the site pulls a patch off his flak jacket and approaches her. “This patch has been around the world,” he tells Lassiter, “and I want you to have it.”

Though the pandemic rages on, Harvin and Lassiter can’t help but feel a certain triumph. They haven’t misidentified any bodies. None of their team has contracted Covid. They know they may be back. But in a dark and painful year, this is a good day.

Months later, Lassiter will remember it, the special pride she felt that despite dozens of workers toiling and thousands of pounds of equipment rumbling, despite 404 fatalities passing through, word of the Covid morgue never reached the public. Her colleagues hadn’t enlisted for accolades. They’d pressed through the fear and the grief in order to care for the innocent victims of a historic pandemic.

“It felt good,” Lassiter says. “Even if no one would ever know about it.”

It’s been nearly a year since the pandemic struck Washington. In the first four months of lockdown, the city lost three times as many jobs as it did during the 2008 recession. By July, small business revenue had been cut in half. Metrorail ridership has plunged by as much as 90 percent. Over the coming four years, the District is anticipating a budget gap of roughly $800 million. All told, more than 933,514 people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia have contracted the virus, and 15,148 have died.

Today, Covid fatalities are being processed at the city morgue in Southwest DC; although the number of deaths is once again elevated, it’s well below the peaks of last spring. At the disaster morgue, the light towers have been hauled away and the generators have gone silent. The trailers are resting on a deserted blacktop. Each day, thousands of cars pass right by the site, oblivious to what happened there. If they knew where to look, though, the drivers could see something that Harvin made sure to leave in place. The DC and US flags, rising above the fence.

***

This article appears in the March 2021 issue of Washingtonian.

[mel-at-dusk]

SEX, LIES AND CHEAP COLOGNE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF ABERCROMBIE & FITCH’S SOFTCORE PORN MAG

The story of how an oversexed, strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was a shrewd businessman, but he didn’t always make the best decisions. Between the blatantly racist T-shirts he signed off on, the child thongs he called “cute” and the series of public statements he made admitting that his brand intentionally excluded anyone who wasn’t “cool” and “good-looking” with “great attitudes and a lot of friends,” it’s no wonder that he spent the majority of his reign at Abercrombie in hot water. (For the uninitiated, Abercrombie made what fashion writer Natasha Stagg calls “sexy versions of the clothes kids already wore to school: T-shirts and jeans, stuff you could toss a football in or throw on the grass if everyone decided to go skinny-dipping.” More importantly, as she writes in her book Sleeveless, it was “for those who were casually peaking in high school.” It, meanwhile, peaked in the 1990s.)

An exception to Jeffries’ questionable CEO-ing would be A&F Quarterly, the glorious, controversial and questionably pornographic “magalog” he created at the height of the brand’s popularity in 1997 in order to connect “youth and sex” to its image. Woven in amongst surprisingly thoughtful interviews with A-list humans like Spike Lee, Bret Easton Ellis, Rudy Guiliani and Lil’ Kim was a cascade of naked photos from photographer Bruce Weber which showed nubile youngs in various states of undress. They were frolicking, they were caressing and they were deep in the throes of experimenting with types of sex that — at the time — had never been portrayed by mainstream brands.

With issue titles such as “XXX,” “The Pleasure Principle” and “Naughty and Nice,” the Quarterly dove headfirst into the risque. During its 25-issue run between 1997 and 2003, it printed interviews with porn star Jenna Jameson, offered sex advice on how to “go down” in public and suggested — on multiple occasions — that its readers dabble in group sex. One issue published an article on how to be a “Web exhibitionist,” another featured a Slovenian philosopher barking orders to “learn sex” at school and big-dick Ron Jeremy even stopped by to talk about performing oral sex on himself and using a cast made from his own penis.

The actual Abercrombie clothing being modeled in the magalog was an afterthought, appearing in Weber’s photos as more of an impediment to nudity than an actual, purchasable item. The whole thing was, as journalist Harris Sockel put it in an Human Parts essay, “20 percent merch, 20 percent talk and 100 percent soft-core aspirational porn.”

None of this would have been vexing had a more adult-oriented brand been the ones hawking it, but Abercrombie & Fitch was — and still is — marketed toward suspiciously toned teenage field hockey players named Brett. Though he might have looked like a man in his big salmon-pink polo, Brett was but a child. Abercrombie was fond of saying its clothing was for college-aged clientele, but we all knew where its real haute runway took place — inside the crowded halls of every middle school in Ohio.

The Quarterly, too, was intended for college kids, and to prove it, Abercrombie shrink-wrapped it in plastic and sold only to those over 18 for $6 a pop. You could buy it as a subscription, of course, but it was more commonly found in-store, nestled alongside A&F’s cargo shorts and “thongs for 10-year-olds,” a questionable placement that prompted concerned parents, conservatives and Christians to accuse Abercrombie of sullying their children’s minds with impure thoughts.

As such, the Quarterly became the subject of a mounting number of boycotts, protests and controversies that some believe were responsible for its eventual demise. By the time circulation peaked at 1.2 million in 2003, it had been denounced by organizations like the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the American Decency Association, Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Women and, of course, the Catholic League.

Yet the outrage against the Quarterly was matched — if not exceeded — by its cult following, who found its frank portrayal of sexuality to be transcendent. Journalists, artists and the teens whose hands it fell into adored the magazine, and its rarity — plus its utter absurdity — makes it a sought-after collector’s item to this day.

At the same time, few people know about the Quarterly and even fewer realize what it meant to the generations of young people discovering themselves and their sexualities through the unlikely lens of branded content. As journalist Emily Lever puts it, “There’s no weirder way to learn about sex than to pick up a magazine by Abercrombie & Fitch — a brand for hot, mean mostly white kids who shoved you into lockers — but, I guess I’ll take it?”

This is the story of how an oversexed and strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers.

AND IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ASS

The first issue A&F Quarterly debuted in June 1997. With 70-ish pages of full-color hard bodies, it was relatively tame compared to later editions, but it quickly became popular when Abercrombie’s nubile clientele realized it was a paper-backed portal into an adult world of sex, nudity and the kind of unbridled sensory hedonism their parents warned them about. As rumors of its legend began to spread, people began to wonder: What the hell is A&F Quarterly, and why is it printing ass for teens?

Emily Lever, journalist and chronicler of the Quarterly’s absurdist philosophical leanings: A&F Quarterly was an in-house magazine put together by Abercrombie & Fitch that published a who’s who of literati to accompany their images of young adult and teen bodies in order to hawk expensive distressed jeans and polo shirts to kids who would shove you inside a locker.

Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project: From what I recall, it had a Bruce Weber-y vibe — gorgeous young men and teens unapologetically objectified, a leering retro pin-up element, also sort of like the highly stylized, sexed-up, nostalgic 1980s and 1990s black-and-white Guess ads. Men — boys, really — were photographed without their shirts, elaborately muscled abs, sometimes naked.

Harris Sockel, in his Human Parts essay: [It was] Playboy crossed with Fratmen.com and a bit of Field & Stream. The Quarterly made my hormones do a kick line across my frontal lobe. I wanted to nibble the soy ink for snack until sunrise. To absorb it so deeply I sweat grey drops onto my pillow. To rip a page from that issue and fold it into a paper flower and stick it all the way up my ass until it came out my mouth.

Lever: Yeah, it was hot. But it was also extraordinarily literary. It featured big-time thinkers, writers and philosophers — stuff that was supposedly intended to expand your mind. It was way too high-brow for the average Abercrombie teen, and its existence made almost no sense given what the brand represented.

Savas Abadsidis, editor-in-chief, 1997-2003: There was nothing else like it. We were the first mainstream brand to combine playful, irreverent, intellectual content with sex and youth in this beautiful, high-art magazine format. Was it controversial? Sure. But it made the entire country take notice.

What they didn’t necessarily see, however, was what was going on behind the scenes. Not only were we the first brand to do this kind of advertising, we were also the first big brand to normalize gay culture for a mainstream audience, expose America’s youth to some of the era’s most progressive thinkers and use our platform to address sexuality in a useful, hands-on way. And you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from Abercrombie. That’s what made it so cool.

It all began in 1996. I was 22 and working at a temp job for a prominent New York architect who happened to be friends with Sam Shahid, a big-time creative director for Calvin Klein, Banana Republic and later, Abercrombie & Fitch. He was looking for an assistant. I had taken a deferment to go to law school and was looking for a job for that interim year, so I applied. I got in.

It was a horrible gig at first. Just awful, Devil Wears Prada-type stuff. I left crying many nights. But I had two things going for me. The first was that Abercrombie had a really small office in the West Village. Mike Jeffries, the president and CEO of Abercrombie, used to come in. He wore flip flops, had a desk made out of a surfboard and began each sentence with the word “Dude.”

Mike Jeffries, ex-CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, speaking to Salon in 2006: Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.

Abadsidis: I didn’t know it at the time, but Mike was gay (I wouldn’t find out until much later). I think that was part of the reason why he and Sam — who was also gay — took me under their wing. They actually didn’t realize that I was, too — it’s not like we all sat around a bonfire at Fire Island and talked about how us gay guys were infiltrating Abercrombie — but that dynamic dovetailed nicely with Bruce’s photography for both the brand and the Quarterly, and it certainly set the tone for what was to come. I was grateful to get what amounted to an unofficial apprenticeship from both Mike and Sam, and eventually, they had me doing much more involved tasks than I was hired to do.

One of them was sitting in on important meetings. At the time, Mike was inviting all these different editors from magazines like Interview, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone to come in and brainstorm ideas for what the Quarterly could be, but their ideas were flat. They felt like ideas coming from 45-year-olds writing for college kids, and I could tell Mike was getting frustrated by how little they seemed to grasp what he wanted.

One day in a meeting, one of the magazine editors threw out an idea. Without even acknowledging him, Mike turned to me. “Savas,” he asked. “What do you think about that?”

My mind raced — I could tell he was testing me. If I flubbed the answer, I’d be done. I briefly considered censoring myself, but then I thought better. What did I have to lose? I was young. Surely, I’d find another summer job. “I don’t think it’s a great idea,” I told him.

Apparently, that was the right answer. Mike practically threw the guy out of the room.

After that, I started to think more about what I’d want to see out of a magazine. I was just out of college as a French comparative literature major at Vassar, and I was super into that sort of 1950s-style Esquire journalism with the dapper closing essay. I was deep into The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, 1990s-era Details, MAD Magazine and 1980s pop star mags like Tiger Beat, too — those were all an influence. I also loved philosophy, social theory and comics. And graphic novels. You know — college stuff. Then it hit me: If the magazine was for people like me, why not get actual college kids — not 50-year-olds — to create our content?

I suspected my ideas were what they were looking for and knew they’d look fresh compared to what other editors were throwing out, so I decided to take a risk. I got up at 2 a.m. and typed out a 20-page proposal for what I thought the Quarterly should be. The next morning, I faxed a copy to Mike. I left another on Sam’s desk.

About a (very anxious) week later, Sam called me into his office and told me to pick up his phone. Mike was on the other line. As I reached for the receiver, he leaned over to me and said, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

I didn’t even have time to comprehend what that meant before Mike’s voice was in my ear. “Congratulations, kid,” he told me. “You get one shot.”

Shortly thereafter, I was promoted from Sam’s assistant to the completely green, 23-year-old editor-in-chief of the Quarterly. It was a Jerry Maguire moment. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time.

They gave me a month to put together a staff and get the first issue out. Bruce Weber was named as its exclusive photographer — he’d already been shooting ads and campaigns for Abercrombie — and Sam was the creative director. As for me, I knew I’d need an editorial staff, and stat.

HOLY SHIT, THERE ARE NO LIMITS

Abadsidis quickly throws together a team composed of two college buddies, Patrick Carone and Gary Kon, who he describes as “pretty funny and stuff.” Carone became the only straight guy on the editorial side. Kon is Jewish and gay. The three of them vow to stay as true to the idealized college experience as possible with their content — even if it means chasing white whales.

Abadsidis: I can’t remember the exact starting budget, but it was upwards of a few million, probably much larger than most magazines get for their first issue! But our budget was also Bruce’s budget. He was getting advertising money, so we were well taken care of in that regard.

We weren’t really expected to turn a profit, though. That was never the point. Come to think of it, I don’t even think we tracked how much the magazine impacted clothing sales, although from what I can remember, clothing sales bumped up double digits every quarter after we launched (for a while, at least). [This statement is unverified.] But that didn’t matter: Our mission was just to set the brand image and make people aware of us. That was our version of success. We were also our only advertiser for a while, so we could get away with a lot of stuff that other publications couldn’t.

Gary Kon, managing editor, 1997-2003: When Savas offered me the job, I jumped at the opportunity. I’d already interned for Sam, and I’d have to scan hundreds of Bruce Weber images that he shot for Abercrombie as part of the job. And I fell in love with his work. It was the visual connection that seduced me. Weber’s photos were like a new Greek mythology; the men and women depicted in the photos were both idealized and sexualized. As a gay kid, who was pretty comfortable by that time in my own skin, I had no problem recognizing the eroticism in his work.

Abadsidis: Me, Gary and Patrick was definitely something special. I don’t think I’ll ever have an opportunity to create anything like that again. I was a huge comic book fan. If I had to describe it, it’s the closest thing I’ll ever come to Stan Lee’s Marvel comics bullpen. Pretty much everyone I hired was super unique. We weren’t all gay (maybe half of us were) but few of us really adhered to the Abercrombie image.

I think Sean came on in 2001.

Sean T. Collins, managing editor, 2001-2003: I was a little skittish about it at first because Abercrombie & Fitch represented everything I was not. They marketed, almost exclusively, to the lacrosse players that called me names I cannot repeat. It was very preppy, and that was not me at all.

I was alternative, maaan. I was a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. I wore a lot of black. A&F was everything I wasn’t, and in a way, everything that had tormented me as a kid. The irony of me working for them was palpable, but what I learned very quickly was that at the Quarterly, you could do anything that you wanted.

One of my first articles was an interview with Clive Barker, the writer and director of Hellraiser (he also wrote Candyman). Now, if you’ve seen Hellraiser, you can imagine just how far of a departure a sadomasochistic horror film was from Abercrombie & Fitch, but getting him to sign on was easy. He’s gay, and at the time, he was super ripped. I think he appreciated the extravagant gayness of the Weber stuff in particular. He was also a photographer, and his husband was, too. I think he recognized what was going on with the photography.

We had an unlimited expense budget, so I took him out for drinks at the Four Seasons. I talked to him for hours, and then he invited me to go back to his house and hang out and see his art studio. He had three mansions in a row on Sunset in Los Angeles, up in the hills. One for his office, one for his actual domicile and one that was a painting studio. I got to see that. I was just a 23-year-old kid. This was my first job out of college, and I felt like Cameron Crowe from Almost Famous. After that, I was like, “Holy shit, there are no limits.”

Kon: I have to credit Savas with pushing us to work without limitations. We were very lucky. At some point during my tenure, I realized that as long as we worked within our (sizable) budget, we had almost full autonomy. We could plan trips to Hollywood to shoot our favorite actors. We could travel to Thailand to reenact our version of The Beach. We could tag along to London or Rome or wherever Bruce was shooting the catalog. We could stroll into the office at 11 a.m. and work until 11 p.m.

Collins: If I wanted to talk to Bettie Page, the pinup model from the 1950s, they’d be like, “Okay, sure.” If I wanted to feature Underworld, my favorite electronic music band, it was, “Sure, go ahead.” It was total editorial freedom, which was so strange knowing how specific of a person the “Abercrombie type was.” I’ve been writing for two decades now, and I’ve never experienced anything like it since.

Abadsidis: Everyone wanted to be in it, too. At first, it was just indie musicians. But then, in the second issue, we snagged Lil’ Kim. That’s when I knew we’d made it big. She was into it — she loved everything about the Quarterly. A lot of people did. The whole high-brow/low-brow thing was really appealing, and the idea of going to college, reading good books, getting drunk and having sex felt uniquely nostalgic and fresh in the context of America back then. Clinton was getting impeached for getting a blow job. It was just a weird, puritanical time, and the Quarterly gave people a national platform to let their freak flag fly.

We had Rudy Guiliani, early Britney Spears, Paula Abdul. There was the New York issue where we talked about the Harlem Renaissance. Spike Lee — one of my idols — asked me if he could be in it. He’d done advertising, you know? I remember him being like, “Yo, this is the deal. I’ve got to give you mad props. This is the dopest thing out right now, advertising-wise.”

We had big-time philosophers and literary figures, too. They were great. We wanted to mimic the experience of being in college and having your mind expanded, so we got writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Cunningham on board. There was a whole Sex Ed issue plastered with musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a friend of a professor’s from college. I believe Jonathan Franzen was in there, too.

Jonathan Franzen, award-winning novelist and essayist: I gave hundreds of interviews between 1997 and 2003, almost all of them at the request of various publishers. One of them must have thought it was a good idea to talk to A&F. The fact that I apparently did (I don’t remember it) signifies nothing except that I felt grateful to my publishers.

Collins: We got a lot of weirdos, too. John Edward, the guy who talked to dead people. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club. At the time, it didn’t have the meathead reputation that it does now. It was legitimately looked at as this piece of anti-corporate, anti-capitalist art, the irony of which was just delightful given that we were a capitalist brand trying to sell polo shirts and $90 ripped jeans.

Abadsidis: The only guy who refused an interview was Donald Trump! I have a feeling his 90-year-old secretary had something to do with it. Though we were technically a magalog and did belong to the brand, our stuff was just really visionary. David Keeps, who was the editor of Details at the time, always defended the Quarterly as a real magazine and publicly said that we were doing more innovative stories than most “real” magazines at a time.

ASPIRATIONAL HOMOEROTICS

It’s no secret that the photography and creative direction of Weber and Shahid contained homoerotic undertones. Irreverent, minimal and moody, it was suggestive without being literal, spinning entire storylines into a single frame. At the same time, it was too idealized to be “real.” The queerness that their photos showed was, as Collins puts it, “aspirational,” meaning that like the mostly white, ab-riddled models instructed to sell cargo shorts by taking them off, they didn’t necessarily represent the full reality of what queerness actually was.

Still, the photos that the Quarterly published during its seven-year run did more to normalize and represent queerness and non-monogamy than any other mainstream brand at the time — weird, considering that Abercrombie’s target market was hegemonic suburbanites whose parents bred genetically pure golden retrievers and had cabins in Vail. Without these photos, the Quarterly might have read more as a minor-league Esquire or Ivy League MAD Magazine, but with them, it became one of the least-discussed, most under-appreciated items queer history.

Collins: Our editorial content — which almost functioned as a parody of so-called “Abercrombie people” — was always accompanied by this extremely beautiful photography that was also extremely queer. But it was never explicitly so. It was all this nudge, nudge, wink, wink stuff. I don’t know how you could miss it, though. The homoeroticism was so overt.

Abadsidis: You’d have had to have been blind not to consider the imagery homoerotic (though, it was really in the eye of the beholder). We had the Carlson twins posing on the cover and riding a motorcycle. We had a drag queen named Candis Cayne. There was a lesbian couple kissing at a wedding.

Kon: David Sedaris, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, Avenue Q, Stan Lee, Peaches, Fischerspooner… you could teach a queer theory class with everyone we featured.

Abadsidis: At the same time, we never labeled anything as “gay” or “lesbian” or “queer.” We never came out and said, “Welcome to our gay magazine!” and we never had a meeting where we were like, “Okay, guys, let’s figure out how to make this thing gay.” It was more nonchalant. The imagery implied it without saying it.

Hampton Carney, A&F Quarterly spokesperson, 1999-2003: The message we were sending was clear: “You do you, whatever that is. Have fun!”

Abadsidis: That was a very 1990s thing.

Collins: There was a specific brand of Abercrombie gayness that got shown, though. The word that they always used to describe Abercrombie as a brand was “aspirational.” They didn’t want to make it like an everyday, normal-people brand. They wanted it to be associated with money, glamour and that WASP-y aesthetic. So all the gay raunch of it was presented within the context of what appeared to be a very square, nuclear family: white, wealthy and secure.

At the same time, that was really when same-sex marriage was kicking off as a political issue. I think you can see a commonality in how Abercrombie was essentially making an argument that you could be a normie and also be gay. That was a newish thing at the time (though I’m barely an expert as I’m not gay myself). Still, I can’t help but see a resonance between coming up with this clandestine content that normalized being gay at the same time this big political fight that was brewing.

Maybe being more forward about it would have come across as “too political.”

Abadsidis: Part of me wishes we’d gone a little further with being more outwardly queer, but I don’t think the time was right. Maybe with a braver CEO — no one at the time was brave enough to take on queerness or gay rights as a mainstream brand, including us — and that’s why few people remember the Quarterly as the sort of transcendent queer thing that it was.

Kon: It’s never been credited as such, but the Quarterly is really an item of gay history. I don’t think we were pushing a “gay” or “metrosexual” lifestyle on people as much as we were showing that it already existed, even out in Middle America. Perhaps that’s what made people uncomfortable. We took that thread of counterculture and taboo that ran through the imagery and continued it into the editorial content. We dealt with topics like drinking, drugs, religion, politics and sex. Again, these are issues young people dealt with daily, but were rarely editorialized.

At Vassar, there was a yearly party called The Homo Hop. It was one of the biggest parties of the year and leaned on Vassar’s history as a women’s college. I bring this up because, on the night of my freshman Homo Hop, I was instructed that each student had to do something sexually that they had never done, and one drug that they had never done. It wasn’t that you had to be gay, but you had to experience something that was new and different. I think that translated well into the Quarterly. Yes, there were a bunch of gay guys writing and shooting and drawing images. But we were simply trying to expose Cargo Short Brett to ideas, images, artists, books, writers and directors that he may have never heard of before. Our shared experiences would become his.

Collins: It was culture jamming, really.

Abadsidis: It was also very “college” to be fluid or experimental without labeling it. I think it’s safe to say that college is one of the gayest places there is in life, maybe not sexually, but definitely in terms of having your mind expanded about different types of people.

Carney: I was in a frat. I’d see fraternity brothers streaking across campus together. It was never a big deal. There are a lot more people in the middle of either extreme of sexuality than people talk about. We’re not one and 10 — we’re one through 10, if you will. That kind of stuff has always happened on college campuses, and that’s the kind of mentality we had around sex. We just happened to editorialize it really beautifully.

Collins: There’s a Barbara Kruger print that reminds me of the mood we were trying to capture: It reads: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” That’s basically what Abercrombie & Fitch was. It was an intricate ritual that allowed sunkissed lacrosse players to metaphorically touch the skin of other men.

Carney: You know what’s funny, though? It was never the gay stuff people had a problem with. It was everything else.

LET THE CONTROVERSIES BEGIN

For almost every moment of its seven-year life, The Quarterly was a controversial publication. Parents, politicians and conservative-types didn’t appreciate its no-holds-barred approach to rampant fucking, and they could not, for the life of them, understand how such an adult magazine was making its way into the hands of their precious teens (who were probably jacking off to dad’s Playboys long before the Quarterly came along, but I digress). There was approximately one year — 1997 — where the amount of people it pissed off stayed below a critical mass, but after a certain somebody published a story that vaguely suggested underage kids drink, it was off to the races.

Abadsidis: We got in our fair share of trouble with Christian groups and concerned parents right off the bat. Let’s take one of the earlier issues — I believe it was Summer of 1998. It was my story. Basically, I suggested that people could do better than beer and that they should “indulge in some creative drinking.” There was one drink I made up called the “Brain Hemorrhage” and a few others you could play a drinking game with. We also included a spinner insert people could cut out.

None of it had anything to do with driving, of course, but the issue was called “On the Road.” It was a sort of beat-focused, Jack Kerouac thing, so some people interpreted that as us promoting drunk driving (though we did nothing of the sort). Also, the kid on the cover was underage. He was 16, if I remember correctly. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) didn’t like that.

Karolyn Nunnallee, vice president of public policy for MADD: We had been really focused on underage drinking and had been instrumental in getting the country’s legal drinking age raised to 21. Then Abercrombie & Fitch comes out with this weird magazine that basically said, “Don’t go back to college drinking the usual beer. We’re going to show you a new way to drink.”

Not only did they have this drinking game, but they had recipes for these mixed drinks for young people to partake in. I was like, “Abercrombie & Fitch? Aren’t they in the clothing business?” What in the world were they doing? I mean, they were a high-end brand, not Walmart. Why would they take their focus off of clothing and put it toward alcohol? Were their clothes not good enough that year or something?

Needless to say, we weren’t happy with them. Curse words were handed out. We sent a letter to them and started a whole media campaign about it. We went on as many news media outlets as we possibly could with the story of how incensed we were.

Abadsidis: I was sure I was going to get fired over that. We had to remove the page with the spinner out of every single issue across the country. We apologized, of course, but it ended up backfiring against the protesters — that incident gave us so much publicity. It put us on the map. It also made us a target for conservative types. They hated us. After MADD, boycotts of Abercrombie started flaring up all over the place. That’s around the time we hired Hampton to do PR.

Carney: It was my job, at the time, to defend the brand. I’d go on talk shows like Entertainment Tonight or Today Show and explain away our latest controversy (there were a lot). It wasn’t hard, actually; each time, I’d give them what was more or less my go-to response: “It’s a beautiful publication intended for college-aged kids.” And that was the truth! It was way ahead of its time and was absolutely meant for people 18 and up.

Though not everyone saw it that way. The sex and nudity really got to people. A lot of them definitely thought we were making porn. That was the constant complaint: We were deliberately putting porn in the hands of young kids.

Lever: The Quarterly featured about the same level of nudity as a European yogurt commercial. Which is to say, a lot. It was a “clothing catalog” with almost no clothing. Of course [American] people thought it was pornographic!

Carney: Okay, sure — there were photos of like, six girls in bed with one guy and more than a few spreads that enthusiastically suggested naked non-monogamy — but it wasn’t porn. It was tasteful. And let me tell you — nothing we had in there was surprising to kids.

Abadsidis: The models ranged from 16 to 20. It was erotic. It was art. I don’t think there’s anything pornographic about the Quarterly unless you think that nudity, in and of itself, is pornographic.

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood did, apparently. In 1999, she called for a boycott of Abercrombie & Fitch because its “Naughty or Nice” holiday issue “contained nudity” and “even an interview with a porn star.” That porn star was none other than Jenna Jameson, who at the time was well on her way to becoming a household name. A so-called “child prodigy” occupied the neighboring page, sparking accusations that the Quarterly somehow intended to connect children to porn.

A cartoon of Mr. and Mrs. Claus experimenting with S&M across from the statement “Sometimes it’s good to be bad” didn’t help, nor did the “sexpert” who offered advice on “sex for three” and told readers that going down on each other in a movie theater was acceptable “just so long as you do not disturb those around you.”

The Illinois Coalition of Sexual Assault joined Wood’s boycott. Later that year, Michigan attorney general (and eventual governor) Jennifer Granholm sent a letter to Abercrombie complaining that the “Naughty or Nice” issue contained sexual material that couldn’t be distributed to minors under state law.

Carney: There were four states that tried to ban us after that. I remember Granholm. She was my arch-nemesis at the time — we really got into it. I respected where she was coming from, of course, but our whole thing was that we weren’t showing anything that wasn’t actually happening on college campuses. And I’d already made it pretty clear to the press that the magazine wasn’t for minors.

Also, it’s not like we were the only magazine talking about or showing sex. You could find all the exact same stuff in Cosmo or Playboy — it’s just that we were a clothing brand, and one whose major customer base just so happened to be teens and young adults. No one expected that from us. Brands weren’t “supposed” to be talking about sex period, let alone to teens and young adults. But we took it upon ourselves to pioneer a more open, honest view of it. That’s the wrinkle that made it so interesting.

We did come to an agreement with Granholm. We decided to wrap the magazine in plastic and make it available for purchase only to those over 18, that way, it’d be even more clear that we weren’t “selling porn to the underage.”

Kon: I believe it was one of the few times the company acquiesced.

Collins: Other than that, don’t remember getting any instruction from Savas, Mike or Sam to tone it down. It was kind of mutually assumed that we weren’t going to apologize for the sexual nature of our content. We knew we had to keep things sexy, as it were — that was our whole thing.

We weren’t deliberately trying to piss off people, but we were trying to push the envelope, and there was definitely an element of deliberate trolling of conservatives and Christian groups. It was a good thing if we pissed them off. It created the controversy that made the brand seem edgy and dangerous, which is what you want if you’re trying to appeal to young people.

Carney: We were also just showing real things that happened at college. And as anyone who’s been to college knows, it’s not just about reading and writing papers. It’s also about sex. Not only that, of course, but we’re sexual beings. We respond to images that are sexual. We were trying to take the stigma away from that and acknowledge that it’s not a bad thing to do.

But no matter how clear we made it, our stance on sex polarized people more and more. I could tell, because almost as soon as I started speaking on behalf of the magazine, strange things started to happen to me. I got stalkers. People left me messages saying I was going to hell and I’d have no afterlife. I got hate mail to my house. One person left a package containing their dirty, stained underwear at the front door of my apartment with a note saying they’d be “coming by later” to “talk to me about it.” I had to call the police on that one.

I was the face of the publication, so I got the vast majority of the harassment. But I didn’t mind. It was my job to take the fall, and I heard and respected every single person’s complaint and talked to them about it. Plus, for every message I got banishing me to hell, I got another from a journalist or a fan begging me to save a copy for them. People collected them. They really loved it, precisely because it was so sexual.

Abadsidis: Mike didn’t flinch about any of this stuff. He wanted to defend it because he could see it was working. We weren’t about to tone anything down (at the time).

Flash-forward to June 2001. The Twin Towers are still standing tall, tips are being frosted and Apple has just unleashed iTunes onto an unsuspecting populace. A&F Quarterly, now in its fourth year, is in hot water once again. Having survived a number of boycotts, lawsuits and controversies since its inception, it’s now in the midst of weathering another minor national conniption over its use of nudity.

Jeannine Stein, describing the Summer 2001 issue in an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article called “Nudity? A&F Quarterly Has It Covered”: [It’s] explicit in ways that most catalogs and fashion magazines are not, and its use of male nudity is uncommon among general-interest publications. It features 280 pages of young, attractive men and women alone and together, in serious, romantic, sexual and party modes, wearing lots of A&F clothes, some A&F clothes and sometimes no clothes at all. Among the coffee-table book-ish photos by Bruce Weber is a man, covered only by a towel, surrounded by five women; a woman at the beach reclining body-to-body with three men; a back view of a naked man getting into a helicopter (we haven’t quite figured that one out yet); and a few topless females.

There are many naked butts and breasts.

Abadsidis: We also had photos of nude women in a fountain — which were inspired by Katharine Hepburn skinny-dipping at Bryn Mawr College — and a whole set dedicated to the Berkeley student that spent a day naked in class. It was par for the course for us, but even though we’d done the whole shrink-wrap and over-18 thing, people still felt it was too sexual for branded content.

In response, an unexpected alliance formed between cultural conservatives and anti-porn feminists to boycott Abercrombie & Fitch over the Summer 2001 issue of A&F Quarterly. According to Wikipedia, the offending issue included “photographs of naked or near-naked young people frolicking on the beach,” “top-naked young women and rear-naked young men on top of each other” and an “interview with porn star Ron Jeremy, who discussed performing oral sex on himself and using a dildo cast from his own penis.” Once again, Wood was at the helm.

David Crary, journalist, excerpt from a 2001 Associated Press article: Illinois Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood — a Republican who has been sparring with A&F since 1999 — announced the boycott campaign last week in Chicago. She has recruited a diverse mix of supporters more familiar with facing off against each other than with working together.

Wood, writing on her website in 2001: A&F is glamorizing indiscriminate sexual behavior that unsophisticated teenagers are not possibly equipped to weigh against the dangers of date rape, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

Michelle Dewlen, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women, speaking at one of Woods’ press conferences in 2001: It’s not a catalog. It’s a soft porn magazine.

Rev. Bob Vanden Bosch, head of Concerned Christian Americans, as quoted by the AP: It’s very important for people to get involved. The exploitation of sex and young people in A&F’s catalog isn’t only atrocious but also a psychological molestation of their teenage customers.

Quart: It was predatory in a few ways, really. One was that it confused the corporate identity of Abercrombie and the advertising with the editorial. It preyed on young consumers not understanding the difference between editorial content and sales content. Back then it led, I saw, to a way that girls were objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves. It ultimately led to boys also objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves — not to the same extent, but far more than they were when I started reporting Branded a little more than two decades ago.

I have the stats on the male body image dysmorphia at the time in Branded (which has only worsened). Then, male body shaming and “manorexia” was on the rise, for the first time on a mass scale. It couldn’t help for the most popular brand at the time to have a dedicated giant glossy magazine filled with pictures of male teenagers with zero body fat half undressed.

Abadsidis: I mean, sure, as much as any advertising does. It wasn’t like we were leading that charge. Any effect on self-image was certainly unintentional, but I do think it did make people want to be athletic. You definitely saw a lot of guys trying to look like that during that period, especially as time went on. If you look at the first few issues, the guys aren’t that built. Ashton Kutcher was actually in the second one — that was his first big break — and they get increasingly more cut from there. That whole era is when men’s body issues started to come out.

Lever: I’d also submit that all this was controversial because it was pre-internet. The internet mainstreamed sexual content in a way that makes A&F or other “scandalous” ad campaigns (like the 2003 Gucci ad with the model’s pubes shaved into the shape of a G) seem quaint, even obsolete. Like, do you remember that Eckhaus Latta ad a few years ago that scandalized people for five minutes because it showed people having real (albeit pixelated) sex? Neither does anyone else.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK TEACHES SEX ED

Always filled with philosophy, social theory and intellectually minded topics that likely soared over the heads of most Abercrombie consumers, the Quarterly outdid itself in the Fall of 2003 with its penultimate issue. A gorgeous romp of summer-spirited abandon accompanied by some delightfully incoherent, Dada-like musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, it connected a “back-to-school” theme with a pretty clear directive to fuck. Yet, the information it presented was actually rather safe and tame, a reality which confused and irritated Quarterly staff. Their content was legit, so why was everyone up in arms?

Abadsidis: The “Sex Ed” issue was the second to last one that we did. It got some of the most criticism, and was supposedly the reason everything was finished. I literally had stuff in there cited straight from the University of Michigan’s freshman student handbook on sexual conduct, and it still pissed people off! Then, of course, there was Žižek.

Lever: Žižek identifies as a radical leftist. He’s very famous for his work on cultural theory and critical theory. He analyzes all kinds of topics in his signature, impenetrable — but also approachable — style. And when I think of him, I think of his very distinctive manner of speaking, that some people have described as being on cocaine constantly. But he’s definitely kind of a cult figure, a favorite of people who consider themselves highbrow, but also fun.

He’s really touted as the greatest anti-capitalist of our time, and yet, here he was, “sexually educating” the mean girls and boys of your high school, in a brand catalog whose entire goal was to ensnare young people for the purpose of selling them distressed jeans.

According to the magazine’s foreword, the editor wrote to Žižek and said this: “Dear Slavoj, enclosed please find the images for our back to school issue. We’ve never had a philosopher write the text for our images before, so write what you like. We’re looking for that Karl Marx meets Groucho Marx thing you do so well. Thanks, Savas.”

Abadsidis: I love Slavoj. He was friends with one of my professors from school. He only had 24 hours to write this, so we actually sent someone to London where he was to drop off the images we wanted him to write text for. They hung out for a day and then flew back with what he’d written.

Lever: It was basically a series of insane, absurdist ramblings pasted over really hot naked people.

Žižek, excerpt from A&F Quarterly’s 2003 Sex Ed issue: Back to school thus means forget the stupid spontaneous pleasures of summer sports, of reading books, watching movies and listening to music. Pull yourself together and learn sex.

Lever: I mean, that’s like the first episode of every teen TV show, where these three nerdy boys start high school and they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to be cool this year guys. We’re going to lose our virginities.” It’s very formulaic. But there’s more.

Žižek: The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike… with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?

Lever: The “go learn sex at school” part really struck a nerve with conservatives. But I don’t think it was that transgressive. Fourteen-year-olds are receiving messages to have sex all the time — what did it matter if some Eastern European anti-capitalist was hitting them over the head with it through the pages of a polo shirt advert?

Abadsidis: Fox News got involved, if I remember correctly. That was one of the few times I actually got pissed off about how an issue was being covered. I mean, the information in there was handed out to students by an actual university. Half the issue was quotes from this really influential philosopher. But for some reason, people really took offense to the language of it. That whole year [2003] was just a bad one for us.

THE LAST HORNY CHRISTMAS

For its final trick, the Quarterly released a holiday issue featuring 280 pages of “moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex and more.” It had oral sex, group sex, sex in a river, Christmas sex and pretty much every other type of sex you could think of, all which followed an earnest letter from Abadsidis which read: “We don’t want much this year, but in keeping with the spirit, we’d like to ask forgiveness from some of the people we’ve offended over the years. If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian American Association, N.O.W.”

But the issue didn’t really hit. By fall 2003, Abercrombie was involved in a number of lawsuits and protests related to exclusion and discrimination, which left people cold despite the inviting warmth of a crackling, fireside circle jerk (a Weber offering which, I’m told, can be found on page 88 of the final issue).

Cole Kazdin, journalist, writing in a 2003 Slate article called “Have Yourself a Horny Little Christmas”: The challenge for me, when masturbating with my friends to the nubile nudies in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is trying not to think about serious things like racial diversity; it tends to kill the mood. But because most of the models in the catalog are white and because a lawsuit has been filed against the clothing retailer for allegedly discriminating against a Black woman who applied for a job at the store, it’s hard for the issue not to rear its nonsexy head. [In 2004, Abercrombie also agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of promoting whites over Latino, Black, Asian-American and female applicants.]

Collins: As a brand, Abercrombie did a lot of things that were quite gross. I’m sure you remember when they came out with these T-shirts with these racist stereotype characters on them. You would just see it in the catalog and just be like, “Jesus Christ.” It was awful and stupid and self-defeating, just tone deaf. And we just couldn’t figure out how no one at the company saw the problem with it.

Stagg, excerpt from Sleeveless: Kids in my high school wore shirts that read, “Wok-n-Bowl” and “Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White,” accompanied by cross-eyed propaganda-style cartoons. If you weren’t part of the in-crowd (and white), A&F was oppressive. Non-jocks made their own anti-A&F T-shirts, using the brand as a catchall for exclusionary, competitive behavior and old-fashioned bullying.

Carney: That stuff was indefensible, really. Those were the darkest days of my job — listening to calls and reading letters about how offensive those shirts were. Even though the Quarterly was quite separate from the brand and we had no influence over what they did or what clothes they designed, we did still have to print their stuff at the back of the magazine. It was pretty uncomfortable.

Stagg: By 2006, Mike Jeffries’ most controversial public statement on sex appeal was really just saying what we were all thinking: “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Those remarks were followed by lawsuit after lawsuit, mostly involving staffing discrimination. An announcement about the store refusing to carry anything over a size 10 reportedly marked a noticeable decrease in sales.

Abadsidis: There were a lot of underlying problems at the company. The amount of negative press Abercrombie was getting was getting silly. No matter what we did, we’d end up in the news, especially if it was related to the Quarterly. After so many bad news incidents, it just felt done, like its moment had passed. It was bound to crash at some point.

Gina Piccalo, excerpt from the Los Angeles Times: Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has pulled its controversial in-store catalogs after outraged parents, conservative Christian groups and child advocates threatened a boycott over material they said was pornographic. However, a company spokesman said the move had nothing to do with the public outcry. The catalogs were pulled to make room near cash registers for a new Abercrombie & Fitch fragrance.

Abadsidis: People like to think that the boycotts and Christian protests had something to do with it, but that wasn’t the case at all. By 2003, Abercrombie’s stock was low — something to do with ordering too much denim. The store was having negative sales for the first time. There was the line in the New York Times, who covered our demise, that Mike was “bored” with it.

Collins: We had no warning. We were all there one day, and the next, we were gone.

Lever: The Quarterly was a relic of a different time. I feel like it could never have been made after 2008 for so many reasons — economic, and cultural and political. It would just never fly. It was made before feminism pervaded everything, at a time where you could be completely flagrant about gross patriarchal shit and still get away with it.

It was kind of like this last gasp of a certain conception of what’s desirable — a very hegemonic coolness exemplified by white Ivy League frat kids who got fucked up the night before their philosophy class. That doesn’t have much currency anymore. Abercrombie kept that image on life support until its last gasp.

Now, 20 years later, what’s cool is not that. What’s cool is to have depression and ADD. The ideal is out. The real is in. And the Quarterly, having always existed in the liminal space between, is neither here nor there.

EPILOGUE

In 2008, Abercrombie resurrected the Quarterly in the U.K. for a limited-run special edition to celebrate the success of its European stores. The original team was reunited — Abadsidis, Shahid and Weber — with the hopes that Britain’s more “open-minded approach to culture and creativity” would provide a welcoming substrate on which to re-grow their original ideas of sexual liberation. The issue, “Return to Paradise,” was “more mature” than its American cousin. It was well-received — aside from the usual protests about sex and nudity — but it wasn’t continued.

Two years later, in 2010, the Quarterly was revived again, this time as a promotional element for Abercrombie’s Back-to-School 2010 marketing campaign, which bore the unfortunate title of “Screen Test.” The lead story Abercrombie put out on its website sounded like a cross between American Idol and a gay porn shot: “The staff of A&F Studios opens up to editorial to explain the steps the division takes to find new, young, hot boys. The cattle-call approach to herd young talent ends with the best of the beefcake earning a screen test that ‘could be the flint to spark the trip to the star.’”

Bruce Weber would be shooting, of course. This would become especially ominous after he was accused of a series of casting-couch style sexual assaults by 15 male models beginning in 2017. According to the accusations, he subjected them to sexually manipulative “breathing exercises” and inappropriate touching, insinuating that he could help their careers if they complied.

Arick Fudali, a lawyer at the Bloom Firm, which represents five of Weber’s alleged victims, declined to confirm or deny whether any of the alleged assaults happened on a Quarterly shoot. If they did, they’re not prosecutable as sexual assaults in New York. Because the states’s statute of limitations on reporting rape is only three years, anything that happened during the Quarterly’s run wouldn’t count toward a sexual assault charge (unless a minor was involved, which Fudali also declined to confirm).

No one I spoke with for this story remembers seeing, hearing or experiencing anything like what the allegations against Weber describe, but some expressed concern over how they might affect the legacy the Quarterly leaves behind. “The accusations are pretty grim,” Collins told me. “You feel for the people who are put in that position. People had power over them. It just makes you think, ‘Was any of this worth it?’ Not really, if people were getting hurt.”

As such, it’s difficult to conclude with definitive sign-off about the Quarterly’s legacy. Either it was a bastion of progressive and transversive sexuality that simultaneously trolled and nourished the very audience it sought to mine, or it was the product of darkness and pain. Either way, Sockel sums it up just right: “The Quarterly was discontinued in 2003, after the American Decency Association boycotted photos of doe-eyed bare-assed jocks in prairies and glens,” he wrote in his recollection. “It was nice while it lasted.”

[cloudcover23]

Two Princes Season 3 Episode 1 Reactions:

Scottish dude!

Alright recap - gotta know that all my faves are going to be back

Wenceslaus too!

Jumping right into that song

I didn't like it at first (sorry I'm not the biggest fan of musical theater) but it's growing on me

Amir, you saw him an hour ago, but he wasn't awake? 👀

Rupert - you are so chipper!

Ruffles!

Fanfare!

God Ariel's voice is beautiful

"One can die from being nervous and in just 3 days you might"??? I'm sorry but this is so foreboding

The crowd is throwing flower petals in the air, you can tell

Life is scary, that's why we retreat into this magical world of two princes

Rupert, you make me sad - we were all afraid you wouldn't get to spend your life with him either

Hold up, how many days till the wedding?

Amir! He sounds kind of quiet…

He likes pancakes!

Animals are happy and going crazy

They're brothers!

Rupert can understand them 100%

They're a family!

Hey it's the leaked script…

Omg Amir so sarcastic

Rupert's so worried - me too baby

Yep, as soon as your married nothing bad will ever happen

Omg… tragedy is for single…

Amir, talk some sense into him

Hold him Amir and tell him…

This reminds me of "I'd marry you even if you were a smelly hobgoblin"

Watch out for those salad forks…

Amir makes another promise that he can't possibly uphold

So much background noise! Hush everyone I can't hear Amir!

Back to the room... Breakfast in bed… oh boys

Wait! No syrup in bed! What are you thinking??

PERCY JUNIOR!!!

So important!!!

SUCH a small misunderstanding

Accidental coup - could happen to anyone!

This is the perfect job for Percy. He's in his element

He reminds me of The Emperor's New Groove - no wonder I love him so much

Oh no Cecily

Don't tell me she's moved on? She just chasing after someone new every season? You do you Cecily. I love you still.

LOL! "you had me at…"

Wait… her ex and his boss… is he talking about Rupert?

SHE! It's Joan! Wait, were they actually a thing?

JOAN!

Oh I see what's happening here - oh Cecily you WOULD

Cerci! YES! LOL

Cecily, you are a genius

Oh Cecily… Oh Joan…

(He is super hot)

"we don’t need to make this about me" He IS a new man!

You ARE CECILY

Sing it girl!

Hell yah heels!

Oh Percy, I love you so much

We see you Joan.

Cheerios… Gotta get Premium… wow this is a TTP specific ad!

Legos… uhg where is my credit card… one month trial of Premium here we go

Is that the same door sound effect from last time?

Chamberlain has never sounded so energetic! He's happy

So much happening in the background

Yes, Rupert, there will be a lot of people there - it's a ROYAL WEDDING

95%!

Yah those 5 percenters…

RU!!!! He called Rupert "Ru" It's canon.

Daw Chamberlain! :')

Pat pat

Amir is SO QUIET

You heard it here kids: new love after 40 is impossible.

New Prince?

NEW PRINCE!

Calling out the boys…

DARLING!

You probably knew that - no doubt you've heard of me

Rupert, so modest

Malkia???

Diva realness!

Step in there Amir

Malkia didn't mention Amir?

Maybe she mentioned Chad…

The leaked line!

DID HE JUST threaten Amir???

Dramatic music… Rupert, tell me you heard the dramatic music…

Kingdom in the North!

This guy is… kind of a caricature of a gay guy 😒

Fairies blessed him? He's magical?? Someone predicted it!

He's the reason for the musical…

This is Lavinia's long lost son

The real party prince

His name's AMIR!

Wow - I can see his traffic-stopping smile

Rupert for real? He just threatened your fiance!

Is Rupert so starved for compliments that he forgets how suspicious and worried he was just 5 minutes ago? Amir. Gotta step it up.

Rupert wants the luck…

Amir… we didn't want you to be jealous of RUPERT! No! Come on boys!

Omg Rupert you're so right!

OMG IT'S SO ADOREABLE

Good talking boys.

Not so sure about the outcome of that conversation, but good talking nonetheless. Gotta practice.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong

Oh hey I recognize those violins!

BARABBAS!

Hey ho!

Where's his gang?

Revenge of the Chad! Yes! Get me a ticket!

Scary laughter in the wind

Omg this is scary

WENCESLAUS!

Warn them about what?

Wence, he's drunk - he doesn't get it, spell it out for him.

The end of the world??!?!!!!

AHHH!

Goosebumps

Episode 2 >