#murdock mallory

[sammys-magical-au]

2, 9, 13 + both An Expected Encounter and Sinking Heart, please? It's been a while since I've come across an ask game 💞

 [Ask Game]

Ayyy thanks for this 😊😊😊 it’s been a while since I’ve gotten asks for fic related stuff 💖

An Expected Encounter:

2 - what scene did you first put down?

~ I wasn’t much of a jump-from-one-scene-to-another type of writer at the time that I wrote this, and since the fic is really only one scene, I kinda just wrote it all in an evening 😅

9 - were there any alternative versions of this fic?

~ Not necessarily an “alternative” version but I did (and still do) plan on expanding on Sam’s dealings with Murdock (and the rest of the Pentas Family 😉) a little bit, specifically with how they teamed up against the alien meat dealers to get revenge on them. I think I sort of considered adding that to the original fic but ended up not doing that bc I wanted to save it for later.

13 - what music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

~ I’m not much of a music person when writing, and I can’t think of any songs that directly inspired this/got me in the mood to write it. I also can’t really think of any songs that would pair well with the fic except for *maybe* Mx Sinister from I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME - which I admittedly haven’t listened to all the way through but it kinda gives off the same vibes as the fic to me 😊

Sinking Heart:

2 - what scene did you first put down?

~ This was still at a time when I didn’t jump around much between scenes, so the first scene I wrote is the first one in the fic 😅

9 - were there any alternative versions of this fic?

~ I was originally gonna include more stuff with the monster (aka Frank) and possibly some bits with Lucas’ death and the Rookie and Crumbs on the island (like in the secret ending of the game) but I changed my mind bc I thought a softer ending was more what I was shooting for. But that’s not to say there won’t be a Sinking Heart sequel at some point 👀

13 - what music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

~ again, not really much of a music person with writing, BUT the Sinking Iron soundtrack would be the perfect thing to listen to while reading this fic 😁

[thingsasbarcodes]

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law 1x08 - Ribbit and Rip It

[loosesodamarble]

The Birth of a King

Summary: This is the story of how an ancient king was born and of the legacy he created.

Genre: general

Word count: ~2100

..........

Centuries ago, in a land which has since lost its name to the passage of time, there lived a young Lord.

The land which the Lord ruled over was one that carried many burdens. A drought which left crops frail and few. Plague had stolen away too many innocent lives. Even the living were left as frail as the elderly, so much so that they couldn’t work as they once did. Towns at the edge’s of the Lord’s territory were victim to attacks from wild beasts and bandits alike.

The Lord saw the troubles of his people. It frustrated him terribly. What could he do for them? He had too little wealth to hire soldiers to drive away the evil-doers. He could not command the rain to fall. There was no way to restore the strength of the sick and impaired.

As the land struggled and the Lord searched for a way to help, he happened upon an old legend of a dragon. The dragon of legend could grant power to humans and would do so if they were sought out with an earnest heart.

“It’s just a fairy tale, m’lord!”

“Regardless of how truthful it is, we can’t risk you going away!”

“My liege, send us instead.”

The Lord shook his head at his advisors and stated with the firmness of stone, “I am the lord of the land. It is my people that suffer. It should be myself pleading to the dragon, if they in fact exist.”

Thus, the Lord set out in search of the dragon. He rode the finest steed through hills and valleys for any trace of the great dragon. As tired as the Lord grew and as dangerous as the journey was, he never lost heart, for his people’s future rested on his shoulders. The Lord, eventually, found the dragon’s lair high in the mountains.

“Majestic” was the first word to come to mind. The Dragon was larger than a house and shined like the golden sun. So too like the sun did it radiate warmth and light.

The Lord offered his horse to the Dragon, for he knew he couldn’t merely demand the ancient being’s aid. The Dragon granted the Lord to approach and speak his case. The plight of the Lord’s subjects was recounted. As the Lord spoke, the Dragon sensed that his heart was pure and intentions were true. Once the account ended, the Dragon agreed to grant a favor, a dragon’s boon, to the Lord.

“Drink my blood and what powers you require shall be granted unto you. If the burden is too heavy for your shoulders alone, pass it onto others the way I have shown you. Be aware that this boon comes with conditions. The first is unavoidable: commanding the nature of the world is taxing. Blood is the sacred force of power and thus, you must regularly consume it—fresh and pure—to maintain your strength.”

The Dragon sunk its head low to look the Lord dead in the eyes. The Lord felt the very ground shake from the heavy tone the Dragon spoke with.

“The second condition is one I give for the world’s sake. Listen close and listen well. Should any human use my boon for their gain alone, all who bear the power shall be cursed. Neither life nor death shall take you as their own. The sun’s rays from which I was born will seal your strength. The purity of silver will burn your tainted flesh. And the wrath of the living will not be quenched until all with my power cease to be, with their corrupted hearts pierced through and their heads taken from their necks for their thoughtless evil.”

The Lord agreed to the terms. Though the Dragon’s blood tasted bitter and burned in his mouth, the Lord managed to swallow it and made the Dragon’s might a part of him.

During the journey home, the Lord tested the full extent of the Dragon’s boon and prepared to teach whoever he would share the power with.

With the Dragon’s boon, the land slowly came out of hardship. The Lord was careful to give powers to as few people as possible, only his closest advisors and subjects he evaluated to be upstanding individuals. Those who were granted the power gained the strength of ten men and sharpened senses like an eagle’s hunting eyes or a hound’s nose. The Dragon’s boon also allowed the boon bearer’s bodies to heal from even the most grievous injuries.

The greater powers of the Dragon’s boon were as follows. The skies—rain and wind and lightning—became subject to human command, allowing the Lord to end his land’s drought. The minds of beasts could be commanded, allowing hunters to drive off predators that would do harm or draw in prey to feed the people. Lacking skilled knights, the Lord passed on the power to command blades and shields with their minds to fight bandits to a group of his subjects and trained them to fight that way. Raising the dead was a gruesome power but it was used to speak with the deceased to hear any final regrets and resolve them. The power to peer into the minds of others and compel them to speak made the trial of criminals child’s play. Those found guilty would be placed under the influence of curses—later known as maleficium—to punish their wrongdoing while still sparing them from death. The Lord hadn’t been sure how to make use of shapeshifting at first but it turned out that his subjects were willing to act in the place of sickly plow oxen or pack mules. These seven powers were shared with a good handful of noble heart though only one, the Lord first granted the boon, could wield all at once.

With the Dragon’s boon, the nameless land prospered.

Those bearing the Dragon’s boon partook a portion of blood each day, the greater the use of power the more blood they required; a sparrow could make a man confess his crimes while summoning a day’s worth of rain required feasting on the blood of a grown stallion. Otherwise, they lived and died as normal humans would, no more than fifty years to any man or woman.

The Lord who first received the Dragon’s boon passed the responsibility of protecting the whole of the power to his Son before dying. The Son humbly took his father’s place and kept a careful eye on the boon bearers.

Tales of powers granted by a dragon spread as rumors to neighboring lands. One Nobleman’s ear was turned toward those stories and desired to make use of them himself. He ventured to the nameless land. He watched the people and saw those carrying the boon of power. He eventually gained an audience with the Son and requested for a share of the power.

“Surely there is more use to these almighty gifts than merely pulling carts through streets as a horse or causing a little spring shower,” the Nobleman remarked. “Imagine the wars that could be won if you didn’t have to concern yourself with the lives that could be lost on the battlefield. You could bend a tyrant’s will so they bend the knee to you!”

“Conquest is not the purpose of the boon,” replied the Son. “It was given in the name of service and in the name of service it shall be used. I cannot share the power if those are your intentions.”

The Nobleman refused to accept such an answer. He slipped a poison to the Son’s wife and children, promising an antidote in exchange for the power he sought. Because the Son loved his family so dearly, his heart needed only to falter for a moment. He cut his hand and offered his blood, and the boon’s power, to the Nobleman.

Not even a moment after drinking the blood and feeling his body fill with inhuman strength, the Nobleman attacked the Son, breaking his neck in one fell strike. He took the complete power of the Dragon’s boon for himself. Furthermore, he left the wife and children to rot from poison. With blood on his hands, the Nobleman awakened the Dragon’s curse in every boon bearer.

Their hearts stopped. The sun’s golden rays sealed their powers, only to be used at night. Silver pendants and rings scorched the wearers as the holy metal rejected their new, monstrous state. All knew at once that their fates had been sealed.

At evening, the Nobleman presented himself before the citizenry of the nameless land and declared himself their new ruler, the King of the Night. Those who voiced dissent, be it humans without power or those with the boon, were met with death.

The King of the Night turned those with the same lust for power as he and began a conquest of terror. Whenever the sun went down, he and his undead soldiers trampled enemies beneath them. Villages drowned in torrential rains. A squad of only ten or so undead could raise weapons for a hundred hands to slay an army of a thousand. Maleficium spread incurable plagues to people who would stubbornly refuse to submit. Even if the enemy complied, their minds were twisted or stolen away entirely by the King of the Night’s otherworldly compelling.

The rampant use of his power brought about intense bloodlust, one that the blood of beasts failed to quench. His hunger grew and grew until he sank his fangs into the flesh of an unfortunate servant. And that, at last, sated the King of the Night. With that revelation, the King of the Night encouraged his subjects to feast on humans as well.

The boon bearers gave into their inhuman hunger and the blood of countless innocents was spilled. The actions of the King of the Night and his subjects gave rise to certain tales. Pale and fanged monsters. Creatures repelled by silver. Beings who escape death time and time again. The “vampire” was born.

Some details regarding vampires were mistaken observations. Devout souls who were forcibly turned despaired before their former faiths, leading to the belief that vampires were weak to holy symbols. Garlic was never a weakness but the pungent scent did irritate the sharp senses of vampires. Misinformation of vampires burning in the sun spread because vampires fled the dawn to keep their powers if only for a few minutes more. That is the nature of the world, though, for the facts to be twisted as they are spread and misunderstood.

Vampires terrorized humanity for years… Decades… Centuries…

Until eventually, humans unwilling to succumb to fear of the King of the Night and vampires found one another. With their shared knowledge, they developed techniques and strategies to hunt the vampires. They coated blades and arrows in silver to do as much harm to the monsters as possible and ensure their deaths by decapitation and piercing. They found that the silver coating also meant vampires could not manipulate the weapons. So too did silver fastenings on clothing prevent such control. Silver piercings were also upon those who hunted the creatures, as they would weaken mental manipulations and maleficium, the greatest of the vampires’ powers. Those dedicated to eradicating the blood suckers became known as the Vampire Hunter Society.

The war between vampires and Hunters was not a short one. Though the Hunters’ silver weapons killed many vampires, the vampires’ inhuman strength and powers killed far more Hunters. Vampires, with their ability to heal and immunity to natural death, outmatched the humans who could not regain lost limbs or put their bones back into place.

There were vampires who didn’t fall to evil. Those among the first to be turned and survived their “king’s” initial slaughter or those turned against their will tried to use their power to oppose the forces of evil. Their good deeds, however, did not spare them from death. Sometimes it was by the hands of the Vampire Hunters. Other times, the King of the Night executed the “traitors.” The King of the Night saw all that his kin did and could even control their actions to fight with more ferocity.

For that reason, the Vampire Hunter Society believed that if the King of the Night were to be slain, then the war would come to an end.

All who tried to slay the King of the Night failed. Centuries of fighting had made him strong. Greater than any man. More like a force of nature. Some Vampire Hunters feared that there was no way to defeat the King of the Night. That vampires would be a terror to humanity for the rest of time.

However, the Dragon’s words would be fulfilled. One day, in a future yet to be, there would arise the sun to dispel the reign of night.

[inkdrinkerworld]

hi babe! i recently had surgery and am in desperate need of comfort, would it be okay if i asked for a comfort fic with matt murdock or any of the criminal minds men with similar circumstances?

thank you so much even if this is not possible, have a beautiful day/night

- salem 🤍

i went for spencer for this one, i hope your surgery went well babe <3

"Slow down," Spencer says worriedly, hands reaching out to help you stand up from couch.

"Spence, I'm not broken." you slow your movements anyway, placing your hands in Spencer's as you stand straight.

"No, but you're fragile right now. Your body needs rest to heal."

You nod, "Can my body heal in the sun? It's a pretty day out."

Spencer smiles, kissing your forehead. "Will you let me carry you?"

"It's ten steps."

"Yeah but there's a drop." you relent, letting Spencer lift you carefully into his arms. You still smell like the hospital, clean and surgical and you think that's to do with the constant round of medication- maybe even Spencer's insistence on sanitizing his hands before he cleans up your stitches.

"Thanks Spence," on the patio, there's a couple bowls of fruit. From what you can see, there's apples, berries and nuts. You look at Spencer a question on your face.

"They help with cell regeneration, which could help with healing the stitches quicker."

You smile, big and bright. Spencer nuzzles his nose into your jaw. "Thank you for taking care of me."

Spence pulls away from your jaw, brown eyes wide with adoration. "I'll always take care of you." he gives you a tender kiss. "Do you want me to read you something? You can lay in my lap." you wiggle on the swing, laying your head on Spencer's lap in lieu of an answer.

He grabs the bowls and hands one to you, keeps one for himself and pulls his book from beneath the swing. "Alright where were we?" Spencer thumbs through the book, smiling when he finds the spot. "I'm fine, Mallory said. Back in New York."

You close your eyes as you eat and Spencer reads, not at all minding the sun on your face or on the stitches on your leg.

[pupsmailbox]

DEATH︰REAPER ID PACK

NAMES ⌇　abaddon. achlys. acrimony. adrienne. agnes. ajax. altar. ambrosia. angel. annika. apollo. ash. atticus. autopsesse. autopsette. autopsie. autopsy. azrael. bellona. blair. blaise. bones. brains. bram. cadaver. caddie. cain. carrion. casimir. casper. cassius. catalyst. catrina. charon. ciaran. claud. claude. claudia. coraline. cryonic. damion. dawn. deathe. deathesse. deathette. decease. demise. desdemona. desmodus. dolores. doom. draven. drow. edward. emeric. engel. ephraim. ether. ethereal. eve. exigent. fatesse. fatette. gareth. grave. graves. gravesse. grim. grime. grimes. grimesse. grimm. grimme. gwendolyn. hades. jesper. kilian. laud. lilith. lily. lola. lorelai. lucien. lucifer. lurk. macabre. maggot. magnus. mallory. mara. marie. marion. marionnette. martyrdom. mel. monody. morena. morgan. morganna. morgue. moribund. mort. morte. mortesse. morticia. mortimer. mortis. mortisse. mortuary. mortue. mortum. muer. murdock. myrtle. nikola. noire. noirette. nox. orpheus. perdita. perish. persephone. perseus. phantom. pierce. plague. plaguette. plaugesse. pluto. priscill. pyre. ran. reaper. reapesse. reapette. rhys. rigorre. rose. sacrifesse. scy. scythe. scythette. selene. seraph. sic. smierc. specter. thanatos. thorn. vacuous. valentine. vamp. vampyr. vendetta. vessel. victor. viktor. vincent. wounde. woundesse.

PRONOUNS ⌇　abyss/abyss. angel/angel. bite/bite. blade/blade. blood/blood. bo/bone. bone/bone. brain/brain. bur/burial. cad/cadaver. ci/cir. coffin/coffin. cor/corpse. crow/crow. dae/daem. dae/daemon. dea/death. dead/dead. death/death. decay/decay. dem/demise. die/dire. doom/doom. dust/dust. end/ending. fang/fang. fatality/fatality. fate/fatal. fog/fog. fright/fright. gho/ghost. ghoul/ghoul. gore/gore. grave/grave. grave/yard. graveyard/graveyard. gri/grief. grief/grief. grim/grim. guide/guided. holy/holy. hunt/hunt. ick/ick. kill/kill. leth/lethal. lo/loss. morbid/morbid. mort/mort. mortician/mortician. mourn/mourn. necro/necrom. night/night. omen/omen. pain/pain. para/paranormal. per/perish. plague/plague. reap/reap. reap/reaper. reaper/reaper. rebirth/rebirthed. rot/rot. rot/rotten. sacrifice/sacrifice. scy/sycthe. scythe/scythe. skull/skull. slay/slay. soul/soul. spec/spectral. suff/suffer. thy/thy. tomb/entombed. tomb/tomb. tragic/tragic. vamp/vamp. wilt/wilt. wound/wound. zomb/zomb. ☠️ . ⚰️ . ⛓️ . 👻 . 💀 . 🩸.

[itsss4t4n]

Who I write for /Rules

Masterlist

I'm new-ish to writing (i used to write fanfiction when i was like 13. i'm 19 now and write very rarely) but I really wanna do it again.

So this is a list of characters/fandoms I write for as well as some rules for asks. Some things may be missing from this list so if you dont see something on this list, feel free to ask. :))

Do add as much detail as you want to a request and please ALWAYS have at least some sort of prompt, as i'm really not good with coming up with storys on my own yet.

I WILL NOT DO SMUT SO DONT REQUEST IT! I might however do spicy stuff (Nothing more than making out or somewhat implied stuff tho).

My writing will be mostly pg 13 but please still be careful if the fic-warnings include sensitive topics, and i might repost some 18+ things so be careful when navigating my blog.

Please be nice and have manners when requesting.

Also please include what gender/pronouns you want the reader to have (i write for all genders). If its not included I will default it as gender neutral. :)))

I also write poly relationships and AUs.

Some things I will not write include: Pregnancy, toxic/yandere, student x teacher, love triangles.

(Also english isnt my first language, and even though, in my opinion, i speak it really well, if they are any mistakes, thats why.)

Heartbreak high

Harper Mclean

Quinni Ghallager-Jones

Darren Rivers

Spencer "Spider" White

Anthony "Ant" Vaughn

Malakai Mitchel

Sally face

Sal Fisher

Travis Phelps (male or gn readers)

Larry Johnson

Ashley Campbell

Harry Potter

Fred Weasley

George Weasley

Charly Weasley

Bill Weasley

Cedric Diggory

Olliver Wood

Draco Malfoy (+6th year only)

Theodore Nott (+6th year only)

Marauders

James Potter

Sirius Black

Remus Lupin

Regulus Black

Evan Rosier

Barty Crouch jr

Pandora Rosier

Lilly Evans

Marlene Mckinnon

Hogwarts Legacy

Sebastian Sallow

Ominus Gaunt

Gareth Weasley

Poppy Sweetings

Imelda Reyes

Die drei fragezeichen / the three investigators

Bob Andrews

Peter Shaw

Justus Jonas

Skinny Norris

Twilight

Jasper Hale

Emmet Cullen

Carlisle Cullen

Esme Cullen

Rosalie Hale

Alice Cullen

Sam Uley

Paul Lahote

Charlie Swan

Leah Clearwater

Jacob Black

Pjo

Let me know if you want book or show

Percy Jackson

Annabeth Chase

Luke Castellan

Clarrisse La Rue

Selena Beauregard

Charles Beckendorf

Ethan Nakamura

Nico di Angelo (no romantic fem readers)

Rachel Elizabeth Dare

Will Solace

Travis Stoll

Connor Stoll

Hazel Levesque (no romantic)

Jason Grace

Leo Valdez

Piper Mclean

Magnus chase

Magnus Chase

Samirah al Abbas ( no romantic)

Alex Fierro

Blitzen

Hearthstone

Mallory Keen

TJ (Thomas Jefferson jr)

MCU (Avengers)

Bucky Barnes

Steve Rogers

Tony Stark

Sam Wilson

Natasha Romanoff

Yelena Belova

Peter Parker (tom holland and andrew garfield)

MJ

Wanda Maximof

Piedro Maximof

Clint Barton

Scott Lang

Stephen Strange

Kate Bishop

MCU ( Guardians of the galaxy)

Peter Quill

Daredevil (Season 1)

Matt Murdock

Karen Page

James Wesley

X-men universe

Deadpool

Wolverine

Francis

Xavier

Mystic

Angel

Kurt

Venom

Eddie Brock

DC

Harley Quinn

Jason Todd

Dick Grayson (any version, young justice, robin, nightwing,etc.)

Wally West (youngJustice)

Artemis (young justice)

Roy Harper (young justice)

Disney Descendants

Mal

Evie

Carlos devil

Jay

Benjamin Beast

Chad Charming

Audrey Rose

Jane

Lonnie Fa

Uma

Harry Hook

Gil

Rise of red

James Hook

Hades

Bridget

Ella

Cloe

Red

Morgie

Kingsmen

Eggsy

Tiny Pretty things (Netflix)

Bette Whitlaw

Oren Lennox

Shane Madej (no romantic fem readers)

June Park

Jennifers Body

Jennifer Check

Colin Gray

Ever after high

all characters

Redacted Audios

(no x reader, just ships)

literally all characters

[them4lware]

opened ; death/grim reaper npt pack ! target ; anonymous user . . . ⚠︎ loading file, please wait . . . ⚠︎ ⚠︎ names azrael ; morgan ; cain ; macabre ; persephone ; lucifer ; perdita ; mara ; dolores ; mel ; coraline ; lily ; mortimer ; lola ; mallory ; achlys ; vendetta ; draven ; bellona ; blair ; mortis ; murdock ; abaddon ; morena ; casimir ; pyre ; blaise ; ran ⚠︎ pronouns dae/daem ; dead/deads ; bo/bone ; reap/reaps ; scy/sycthe ; grim/grims ; gho/ghost ; mort/morts ; skull/skulls ; tomb/tombs ; dea/death ; mourn/mourns ; dust/dusts ; ci/cir ; lo/loss ; gri/grief ; crow/crows ; wilt/wilts ⚠︎ titles prn who deals the final blow ; the hooded (noun/one) ; the reaper of souls ; the angel of death ; the eternal (noun/one) ; prn who is waiting patiently ; the friend of the vultures ; prn who is adorned with black roses ; prn who brings death ; the silent (noun/one)

⚠︎ end of file ⚠︎

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sebastian Murdock at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump trashed Detroit in comments he made while speaking in the city. In a rambling, low-energy speech that went on for nearly three hours at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump complained about Vice President Kamala Harris, including her “60 Minutes” interview, and warned that if she’s elected, the entire country “will end up being like Detroit.”

“The whole country’s going to be like — you want to know the truth?” Trump said. “It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” Earlier this year, Trump also reportedly bashed Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held back in July. “Milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city,” he said at the time. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan slammed Trump’s latest comments and said the city is on an upswing. “Detroit just hosted the largest NFL Draft in history, the Tigers are back in the playoffs, the Lions are headed to the Super Bowl, crime is down and our population is growing,” Duggan posted on X, formerly called Twitter. “Lots of cities should be like Detroit. And we did it all without Trump’s help.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) told Trump to “keep Detroit out of your mouth.” “Detroit is the epitome of ‘grit,’ defined by winners willing to get their hands dirty to build up their city and create their communities—something Donald Trump could never understand,” Whitmer wrote on X. “So keep Detroit out of your mouth. And you better believe Detroiters won’t forget this in November.” State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) was even more direct in her response to Trump. “As a proud elected representative of tens of thousands of Detroiters: Fuck this guy,” McMorrow said on X. “Don’t come back.”

Speaking at the Detroit Economic Club in Detroit, Michigan on Thursday, Donald Trump pushed the racist dogwhistle that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Kamala Harris gets elected.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Donald Trump craps on Detroit during speech in Detroit

[ao3feed-fratt]

NSFW ABC: Matt Murdock

NSFW ABC: Matt Murdock https://archiveofourown.org/works/59275960 by JSmutts Learn all of the blind lawyer's dirty secrets... Words: 1903, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Series: Part 12 of NSFW ABC: MCU Fandoms: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: M/M Characters: Matt Murdock Relationships: Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock/Augustus "Pug" Pugliese, Matt Murdock/Mallory Book, Matt Murdock/Melvin Potter, Luke Cage/Jessica Jones/Matt Murdock/Danny Rand, Matt Murdock/Peter Parker, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Matt Murdock/Turk Barrett, Matt Murdock/Anatoly Ranskahov/Vladimir Ranskahov, Matt Murdock/Ben Pointdexter, Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios Additional Tags: NSFW Alphabet Challenge, Aftercare, Breeding, Come Shot, Secrets, Guilty Pleasures, Incest, Hate Sex, Body Part Kinks, Voice Kink, Body Hair, Intimacy, Rough Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Spit Kink, Masturbation, Sex Tapes, Kinks, Blindfolds, Ice Play, Public Sex, Office Sex, Marking, Love Bites, Blow Jobs, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Sex, Gay Sex, Face-Fucking, Missionary Position, Quickies, Bisexual Matt Murdock, Sex Toys, Underwear, Underwear Kink, Scents & Smells, Loud Sex, Penis Size, Dream Sex via AO3 works tagged 'Frank Castle/Matt Murdock' https://archiveofourown.org September 28, 2024 at 11:14AM

[lovelybishop]

Character/Fandom List

(Updated February 5th, 2023)

*I DO NOT WRITE FOR CELEBRITIES.

*Strikethrough means currently not accepting requests for said character/fandom

*If you see a character that is not listed, please ask! I’m sure I write for that character, I just forgot to put it on this very long list!

*If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!

—

DC Extended Universe

Suicide Squad (2016) / The Suicide Squad (2021)

Abner Krill/Polka-Dot Man, Christopher Smith/Peacemaker, Cleo Cazo/Ratcatcher 2, Floyd Lawton/Deadshot, Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn, Rick Flag, Robert Dubois/Bloodsport

Birds Of Prey

Dinah Lance/Black Canary, Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn, Helena Bertinelli/The Huntress, Roman Sionis/Black Mask

Fear Street Trilogy

Cindy Berman, Deena Johnson, Heather Watkins. Christine “Ziggy” Berman*,Kate Schmidt, Nick Goode*, Ruby Lane, Samantha Fraser, Simon, Tommy Slater

*Please specify which actor

The Last of Us (HBO)

Joel Miller, Tess Servopoulos

The Good Place

Chidi Anagonye, Eleanor Shellstrop, Janet, Jason Mendoza, Michael, Tahani Al-Jamil

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Movies

Ajak, Alexei/The Red Gurdian, America Chavez, Bruce Banner/The Hulk, Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, Christine Palmer, Clint Barton/Hawkeye, Darcy Lewis, Doctor Stange Variants, Drax the Destroyer, Druig, Gamora, Gilgamesh, Hela, Hope van Dyne/The Wasp, Ikaris, James “Bucky” Barnes/The Winter Soldier, James “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine, Jane Foster, Jimmy Woo, Katy, Kingo, Lady Sif, Loki, Makkari, Mantis, Maria Hill, May Parker, Melina, Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Nebula, Nick Fury, Peggy Carter, Peter Parker Variants, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Phastos, Phil Coulson, Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver, Sam Wilson/The Falcon/Captain America, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, Sersi, Shang-Chi, Sharon Carter, Sprite, Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange, Steve Rogers/Captain America, Thena, Thor, Tony Stark/Iron Man, T’Challa/Black Panther, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, Valkyrie, Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Vision, Wanda Maximoff Variants, Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, Wong, Xialing, Yelena Belova

Disney+ Series

*This list is for characters who have not appeared in any movie (with the exception of Captain Carter.)

Agatha Harkness, Bruno Carrelli, Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, Joaquin Torres, Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, Kate Bishop/Hawkeye, Layla El-Faouly/Scarlet Scarab, Madisynn King, Mallory Book, Marc Spector, Mary MacPherran/Titania, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, Maya Lopez, Mobius, Monica Rambeau, Nikki Ramos, Peggy Carter/Captain Carter, Ralph Bogner/”Pietro” Maximoff, Star-Lord T’Challa, Steve Grant, Strange Supreme, Sylvie, Taweret

Agents Of Sheild Series

Melinda May, Grant Ward, Daisy “Skye” Johnson/Quake, Leo Fitz, Jemma Simmons, Lance Hunter, Bobbi Morse, Alphonso “Mack” Mackenzie, Lincoln Campbell, Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez, Deke Shaw

Netflix Series

*I plan on watching all Marvel Netflix Series. Though Because Matt Murdok was in No Way Home and She-Hulk, I still will write for him.

Spider-Verses

The Amazing Spider-Man

Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker/Spider-Man

Into the Spider-Verse

Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Olivia Octavius/Doctor Octopus, Peter B. Parker/Spider-Man

X-Men

Alex Summers/Havok, Bobby Drake/Iceman, Charles Xavier/Professor X*,Ellie Phimister/Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Erik Legnsherr/Magneto*,Hank McCoy/Beast*,James “Logan” Howlett/Wolverine, Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix*,Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler*,Marie D’Ancanto/Rogue, Nathan Sumers/Cable, Neena Thurman/Domino, Ororo Monroe/Storm*,Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver, Psylocke*,Raven Darkholme/Mystique*,Scott Summers/Cyclops*,Wade Wilson/Deadpool, Warren Worthington III/Angel*

*Please specify which actor.

Free Guy

Guy, Millie Ruck, Walter “Keys” McKey

The Office

Jim Halpert, Pam Beesly

Wednesday

Ajax Petropolus, Biance Barclay, Enid Sinclair, Gomez Addams*,Larissa Weems, Marilyn Thornhill/Laurel Gates. Morticia Addams*,Tyler Galpin, Wednesday Addams, Xavier Thorpe, Yoko Tanaka

*Please specify which actor.

Star Wars

Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, Bix Caleen, Bo-Katan Kryze, Boba Fett, Captain Phasma, Cassian Andor, Cobb Wanth, Din Djarin/The Mandalorian, Fennec Shand, Finn, General Hux, Han Solo, Jyn Erso, Lando Calrissian, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala, Poe Dameron, Princess/General Leia Organa, Qi’ra, Reva Sevander/Third Sister, Rey, Rose Tico, Zorii Bliss

Stranger Things

Dustin Henderson, Eddie Munson, Eleven Hopper, Jim Hopper, Jonathan Byers, Joyce Byers, Lucas Sinclair, Max Mayfield, Michael Wheeler, Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley, Steve Harrington, Will Byers

*I do not write for Billy Hargrove

[wouldntyou-liketoknow]

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Masterpost

What’s up? I’m 22, autistic, omniromantic-demisexual, and use She/Her pronouns. Storytelling is really important to me, and the stuff I make is almost always dark, unhinged, and macabre.

This is a list of all the stories I’ve written so far (and I’ll be making updates in time with future stories). The characters I mainly write for are YouTuber Egos; those of Nathan Sharp/NateWantsToBattle, Markiplier, MatPat, Thomas Sanders, etc.

_____________________________________________________

T̅̈ͥhe P̥e̵n̶̬̬t̲̲ä́͘s͈͈͢ Fͤãm̼i̥lͩy̜ [Tͥh̴ͦ͠e̸̸̥ F̻́utu͒́́r͂e͖͒̐ M͙oͦb̬̈́̒ P̠̩̕r͛͋̈́ȯj͇e̤c̴t̾̇]

The Pentas Family Encyclopedia

Murdock Mallory (My personal headcanons)

(Goretober 2022) Day 2: Cannibalism (Caliban, Murdock, The Newcomer)

Running on Empty (Caliban, Murdock, R.D.)

God, Being an Accessory to Murder is Exhausting (Sam Ryder, Murdock, Caliban)

What’s That Saying About Cinnamon Rolls. . ? (Azalea, Caliban)

Update the Letter Board! (Azalea, Murdock)

Toxic Tutorials (Azalea, The Newcomer)

(Goretober 2023) Day 3: Broken Bones (K.O., Murdock, Caliban)

(Goretober 2023) Day 4: Amputation (Caliban, Murdock, R.D.)

(Goretober 2023) Day 7: Needles (Azalea, Murdock, Caliban, K.O.)

HALLOWEEN 2023 SPECIAL: Bloody Tricks and Even Bloodier Treats (Sam Ryder, Azalea, K.O., Murdock, Caliban)

(Goretober 2024) Day 2: Operation (Murdock, K.O.)

(Goretober 2024) Day 4: Burst Vessels (Garret Wyre, The Newcomer)

(Goretober 2024) Day 5: Submerged (Parker Thenope, Murdock)

_____________________________________________________

Fǎ̘nm͌ad̗e̋ͭ̑ E̍͞g̾ös̀͌

Caliban Crawford (My EgoPat)

Azalea Crawford (My Nerdy Nummies Ego)

K.O./Kaiser Oasis (My CrankEgo)

Garret Wyre (My Mick Lauer Ego)

Parker Thenope (My Nathan Sharp/NWTB Ego)

Val Ocitie (My Lio Tipton Ego)

Two-Toes Johnny/Johnathan Shine (My Muyskerm Ego)

Phoenix Rhong (My Safiya Nygaard Ego)

Miles C. Peyote and Howie Thetaxi (My Dawko and 8-BitRyan Egos)

Jay Aienyouess (My Thomas Sanders Ego)

The Newcomer

R.D. (My StephEgo)

……….

S̹̫t̥a̖͔ṉ̡́̚͠n̗̦̝̘͒̓͞in̵̬ͧ́̈́̌̕g̡̫͂ͮ͜ T͌h̸e̲ͤ̚ͅ Un̬͉̓͊̎̓ca̶̙̰ͩͮ͜ṉ̡͓ͬny͇͌͌͞͡

Cruz Freitas (A LixianEgo that I made as a gift for @sammys-magical-au ; one of my Semi-Cultist characters)

Sol Magee (An Ash Ego; specifically one of my Semi-Cultists)

LeviathanPat (another EgoPat of mine)

Sylphanie/Sylph (another StephEgo of mine)

Moses Norbert and ColosSeptic (An CrankEgo and SepticEgo; respectively one of my Semi-Cultists and Abomination-Ego)

_____________________________________________________

C̛̪ͤasͩ̓u̜ảl͈ Fį̙͜c̚sͥ͊

From Candygram to Requiem (Noah Walker and the Paranormal Investigators from Random Encounter’s Phasmophobia The Musical)

What’s a Detective Without a Case? (Noir!Engineer Mark, Noir!Mack, Noir!Captain)

Nobody Likes Rude Clients (Patty, Delux/Porniplier)

Caught Between a Monstrosity and An Abomination  (EldritchPlier, LeviathanPat, The Reader)

Just Another Night at Sparky’s (Ness, Jack, Mason)

When a Tomb Becomes a Womb (Part 1: Rings) (The Creature/Callum, Lisa Swallows)

When a Tomb Becomes a Womb (Part 2: Honeymoon) (The Creature/Callum, Lisa Swallows)

There Are Some Cons to Being an Archeologist... (Penn/Pennsylvania James, Illinois, LeviathanPat)

A Couple Nights Later. . . (Penn/Pennsylvania James, Illinois, Caliban, Azalea, Murdock)

It Might as Well Happen! Life is Already So (Old) God(s)damn Weird! (Cruz, EldritchPlier, Penn/Pennsylvania James, Illinois, Sam Ryder)

Talking in Your Sleep (Sam Ryder, LeviathanPat, Sylphanie/Sylph, Sol Magee)

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S͂̋̕eͨ̓r͈ͣ̄ieͮs͔̃̓ Fi̹̅cs̋

……….

Terminal Case of the Ol' Switcheroo (a crack-crossover that @insane4fandoms and I are collaborating on, where I write snippets to attach to the comics they draw. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the FNAF Movie's own Ness was mistaken for MadPat and abducted by my EgoPat, Caliban. Now the two of them are working together in a race to track down Mad and catch him before he can harm the Schmidt family.)

Part 1 (Ness, Caliban, MadPat, Mike Schmidt)

Part 2 (Ness, Caliban, R.D., MadPat, Mike Schmidt)

Part 3 (Ness, Caliban, MadPat, Mike Schmidt)

Part 4 (Ness, Caliban, MadPat, Mike Schmidt, Jack/Cabbie!Cory, Abby Schmidt)

Epilogue (Ness, Jack/Cabbie!Cory, Mike Schmidt, Abby Schmidt, Caliban, MadPat, Murdock, The Newcomer)

..........

My Goretober Ventures So Far. . .

……….

Gifts for a Bat (an ongoing saga of snippets based off of @that-bat’s awesome Resident Evil: Village AU, where the mutated personifications of Nate, Mark and Matt are Lords serving under Mother Miranda and Ethan Nestor/CrankGamePlays is playing the role of Ethan Winters.)

Part 1: A Spider-Human Monster and A Necromancer Walk Into a Bar… (Nate/Lord Ophio, Matt/Lord Loxosceles)

Part 2: Chaos, Compromises, and Meal-Prep (Ethan Nestor-Winters, Matt/Lord Loxosceles, Mark/Lord Isurus)

Part 3: A New Face In Town (Nate/Lord Ophio, Hunter/The Baron)

……….

The Sides of A Nightmare (short drabbles inspired by @fangirltothefullest’s amazing Sanders Sides Little Nightmares AU)

The Actor (Creativity “Roman” Sanders/Red, Character!Thomas Sanders)

The Professor (Logic “Logan” Sanders/Indigo, Creativity “Roman” Sanders/Red, Character!Thomas Sanders)

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R̸̨̾a̝̒ͣn̮͒͡d̔̈́o̗͇m̜ J͔u͔͞n̤ͥ̕k͋

My EgoPats Meeting the Canon EgoPats

My EgoPats Meeting the Canon EgoPats (Brought To You by Incorrect Quotes)

Incorrect Quotes: ISWM (Parts 1 and 2) Edition

Incorrect Quotes: ISWM Edition (The Second One)

How Mack Snapped and Became the Way He Is in Part Two

ISWM Meets Pokemon

Matt and Ro are Soul-Siblings, So…

Matt and Ro Are Soul-Siblings, So... (But It's Kinda Dark This Time)

Headcanons for Phantom and Monarch Being Allies(?) Since Nate and Amanda Are Friends

Characters and Headcanons and References, Oh My!

What’s This? Natemare is EVOLVING!

I’d Like To Adopt These Side-Characters, Please (And Also Make One Arbitrarily To Appease The Vibes)

RE8 AU Incorrect Quotes

How a Lot of My Followers Probably Reacted to My Hyperfixation on Caliban

RE8 AU Incorrect Quotes [Part 2]

A Fictional AI Argument That No-One Asked For

[sammys-magical-au]

Murdock: during a nuclear explosion, there’s a certain distance of the radius where all the frozen supermarket pizzas are cooked to perfection.

Caliban: there’s also a distance where the people are perfectly cooked!

K.O.: THE FLAVOUR ZONE!!

Sam: there is something horrifically wrong with every single one of you.

{@wouldntyou-liketoknow 💖}

[bledf1rst]

MALLORY DAVIES / starter [...]

for @thorrncrowned / matthew murdock

to   have   the   survival   instincts   of   a   wet   paper   bag   was   to   be   mallory   davies,   lured   under   the   pretenses   of   some   poor   lost   soul   needing   help   and   mal   being   helpless   to   follow   because   of   her   bleeding   heart.

she's   helpless   when   she's   lead   to   a   particularly   out-of-place   well.   whatever   structures   had   been   built   around   it   had   been   reduced   to   debris   and   ash.   she   isn't   even   in   the   boundaries   of   gotham,   anymore.   and   she's   helpless   when   she   peers   in   to   the   endless   abyss   and   two   incorporeal   then   corporeal   hands   push   her   shoulder   blades   and   send   her   careening   over   the   edge.   mallory   YELPS   and   closes   her   eyes,   expecting   to   hit   solid   ground.

but   the   falling   stops.   mallory   is   unharmed.   she   hadn't   even   felt   herself   land.   she   sits   up,   shaking   so   badly   it   takes   a   whole   fifteen   minutes   for   the   tremors   to   stop.   another   ten   for   her   to   calm   down   and   take   stock   of   her   situation.   she's   in   city   streets.   there's   wet   asphalt   under   her   legs.   but   it's   not   GOTHAM.

where   had   that   spirit   sent   her?   her   anxiety   ticks   up   again   without   warning,   and   mallory   scrambles   to   her   feet.   her   pulse   is   a   hummingbird   in   her   ribcage,   pounding   blood   a   racket   in   her   ears,   and   she   exits   whatever   alley   she's   in   because   she   doesn't   recognize   where   she   is   but   she   doesn't   make   it   very   far.   someone's   flashing   a   knife   in   her   face.   she's   being   robbed.   she   holds   her   hands   up   in   surrender   and-   she   doesn't   have   much   to   give   him,   really.   her   purse   is   in   her   car.   in gotham. she   tries   to   offer   up   her   phone,   but.

the   screen   is   cracked   and   black.   like   she   HAD   landed   on   it.   it   confuses   her   further   and   she   doubts   it'll   turn   on.

"   sorry-   "   she   blurts,   and   it's   just   her   luck   that   all   this   is   happening   while   she's   trapped   in   some   unfamiliar   place,   "   -i,   i   don't   have   anything   else.   "

[xtruss]

The Murdaugh melodrama has been marked by one brutal swerve after another. Illustration by Valentin Tkach

The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders

In isolated, poor regions of South Carolina, coming from an élite family offered a feeling of impunity. Did this license lead Alex Murdaugh to commit fraud after fraud—and then kill his wife and son?

— By James Lasdun | January 16, 2023 | January 23, 2023 Issue | Letter from South Carolina

In the early hours of February 24, 2019, a seventeen-foot-long fishing boat entered a narrow coastal inlet near Beaufort, South Carolina. It was foggy, the passengers were navigating with a flashlight, and they had been drinking all evening. At around 2:30 a.m., a bridge loomed up in the dark, and the boat hit pilings before running up the nearest bank, with a gashed hull. Three of the six people on board, all young adults, were thrown into the icy water. Two resurfaced, but there was no sign of the third, a nineteen-year-old named Mallory Beach. Her body was found a week later, in a marsh a few miles away.

There was some uncertainty at first about who was steering the boat at the moment of impact, but it was known to be one of two young men. Both had consumed alcohol, though the survivors reported that one of them, a nineteen-year-old named Paul Murdaugh, was more inebriated than the other. He had slipped into an aggressive alter ego, nicknamed Timmy by his friends. One of the passengers later testified, “When they can tell he’s drunk, somebody will say, ‘All right. Here comes Timmy. We got to go.’ ” The boat belonged to Paul’s family, and he was behind the wheel for most of the evening. However, Paul’s friend Connor Cook had sometimes taken over while Paul stepped away to argue with his girlfriend, eventually hitting her. Whoever was steering faced dire consequences if found responsible for the accident. But there was a significant disparity of power and privilege: Connor was a construction worker, and Paul was a Murdaugh.

The surname, pronounced “Murdock,” was a potent charm in the state’s southernmost region, known as the Lowcountry. Since 1920, three generations of Murdaughs had presided as solicitors—prosecutors—over the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, while also amassing a small fortune from private litigation through the family firm. The solicitorship passed out of the family in 2005, but Paul’s father, Alex, served as a volunteer in the office and apparently retained close ties to local law enforcement.

Four of the survivors of the boat accident were brought to the hospital, where an officer entered Paul’s room to take a statement. Paul was just starting when his father and his grandfather barged in. “I am his lawyer starting now,” the grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh III, told the officer, according to law-enforcement records. “He isn’t giving any statements.” While Randolph stood watch, Alex Murdaugh began wandering around the hospital, in an apparent effort, as one witness put it, “to orchestrate something.”

A towering ginger-haired man, Alex was hard to miss. Numerous witnesses observed him going in and out of the survivors’ rooms. A hospital employee heard him repeatedly warn Connor Cook not to say anything. In a later deposition, Cook recalled Alex promising him that “everything was going to be all right. I just needed to keep my mouth shut and tell them I didn’t know who was driving.”

As the investigation continued, however, Cook and his parents came to suspect that the Murdaughs were trying to pin the blame on him, possibly with the connivance of local law enforcement. Fortunately for Cook, the other survivors eventually testified with near-certainty—in one case revising a previous statement—that Paul had crashed the boat, and in April, 2019, Paul was charged with three crimes, including boating under the influence resulting in death. But the Murdaughs’ ability to shape events was far from exhausted.

Judges in South Carolina are elected not by voters but by the state’s General Assembly. To defend Paul, who pleaded not guilty, the Murdaughs hired Dick Harpootlian, a powerful state senator and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Harpootlian’s edge is his built-in advantage with the judges,” a prominent Charleston attorney told me. An acquittal for Paul could have placed Cook under a cloud of suspicion, and permanently muddied the question of culpability in Mallory Beach’s death.

But there would be no trial. On the night of June 7, 2021, the case took the first in a series of brutal swerves that were to become its hallmark. Paul and his mother, Maggie, were found dead outside the kennels at Moselle, the Murdaughs’ seventeen-hundred-acre hunting estate. It was Alex who reported the crime, calling 911 shortly after ten o’clock. He told police that he’d just returned home after spending most of the evening out. Paul had been shot at close range twice, with a shotgun. Maggie had been shot multiple times, with an assault rifle.

Like most observers, I assumed that the murders were vengeance (or preëmptive justice) for Beach’s death. A radically different possibility was raised by a local media site, fitsNews, which reported that Alex was a person of interest in the killings. But the claim was widely dismissed as a baseless slur against a grieving husband and father.

Three months later, another swerve: Alex again called 911, telling the dispatcher that he’d been shot in the head by a stranger while changing a flat tire on his car. His story seemed to confirm the existence of a wrathful nemesis stalking the family. But a passerby who also called 911 reported that the scene looked like a “setup,” and Alex’s story quickly unravelled. While the fabrication was falling apart, the Murdaughs’ law firm—known by the unfortunate acronym pmped—disclosed that he had been pushed out of the firm a day before the incident, for allegedly misappropriating funds. In an interview on the “Today” show, Harpootlian, who was now representing Alex, declared that his client was suffering from opioid addiction, and had used a significant portion of the stolen money to buy drugs. Alex was in rehab, full of remorse and asking for prayers. And he’d revised his account of the roadside incident: he claimed that, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife and son, he’d persuaded a distant cousin who did odd jobs for him, Curtis (Eddie) Smith, to shoot him dead and make it look like murder, so that his surviving son, Buster, could collect on a ten-million-dollar life-insurance policy. Cousin Eddie had botched the job.

Alex and Eddie were promptly charged with attempted insurance fraud. But the picture soon blurred again. About two weeks after the incident, Alex showed up for a bond hearing with no sign of injury to his head. (When I asked Harpootlian about this, his response was terse: “Good hair.”) In the “Today” interview, Harpootlian indicated that the suicide-exemption clause in Alex’s policy had expired. There was no reason to fake a murder. Meanwhile, Eddie was denying everything. “If I’d a shot him, he’d be dead,” he told reporters.

I’d been interested in the case since the murders of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, but it was this inexplicable roadside incident which turned me into a full-on Reddit-scraping, podcast-devouring follower. Years ago, I wrote a novel in which the protagonist sets up a similar suicide-disguised-as-murder scheme for an insurance payout. I’d worried at the time that this turn was a stretch, and it had nagged at me ever since. But here was real-life vindication of my plotting, with the added twist that even the underlying suicide story appeared to be a fiction. The narrative seemed to be entering the realm of deepest noir, complete with serial fake-outs, intimations of corruption, and a true psychological puzzle at its center. Who was this jolly-looking, ruddy-cheeked attorney, smiling like Santa in one family photograph after another, his arms draped lovingly around his wife and sons?

I flew to Charleston and drove across the coastal plain to Hampton, the Murdaugh seat for a century. The terrain there is the gray-green of Corot landscapes, but flatter and drabber, with Dollar General stores and El Cheapo gas stations instead of viaducts and windmills. Hampton has seen better days, and a former Westinghouse plant stands as a poignant monument. The laminates it once manufactured were close to indestructible (they were used for bowling-alley floors), but the plant itself is in ruins.

The only other structures of any scale in town are the red brick edifices of the First Baptist Church, the law office where Alex used to work, and the county courthouse. A courthouse guard showed me the trial room, pointing out ancestral portraits of Murdaughs staring down at the jury box. I asked him what he thought of Alex. “Real nice gentleman,” he said, but declined to speak further. Nearby, a county employee explained to me that some locals were too afraid of Alex to talk openly.

By now, Alex’s lawyers had confirmed that their client was indeed a person of interest in the killing of his wife and son. No motive for an act of such inconceivable horror had been offered. People reported that Maggie had consulted a divorce lawyer weeks before the shooting, but that hardly amounted to an explanation for the slaughter. (Harpootlian has said that there is no evidence for the claim.) Online forums were full of theories, but they seemed derived more from Norse myth than from human psychology: a typical conjecture proposed that Paul had murdered his mother during an argument, then was killed by his enraged father. (Alex’s attorneys declined to respond to questions about many of the allegations. He has generally denied wrongdoing and has disputed facts about his case in the media and in court.)

I was trying to avoid what Faulkner called the outsider’s “eagerness to believe anything about the South not even provided it be derogatory but merely bizarre enough.” In particular, I wanted to resist any idea of the ongoing saga as a tale of some purely gothic malevolence. Jack Fanning, a former environmental consultant from Charleston, suggested that an understanding of the local landscape might offer some insights—if not into the events themselves, then at least into the Murdaugh family and its peculiar position in the Lowcountry.

Fanning and I met in Hampton and drove toward the Combahee River, crisscrossing swamps where he had often fished and camped. Logging trucks plied the narrow blacktop. The scrawny logs strapped on the flatbeds, Fanning told me, were loblolly pines that had been grown for pulp—“a nasty industry.” He laid out a stark history of the region. Rice plantations, dependent on slave labor, had given way to cotton, corn, and soy—crops that depleted the soil. The land, further leached of nutrients by chemical fertilizers, was eventually too poor for much besides the loblolly pines, clusters of which stood on the flat scrub, awaiting the chainsaw. With the loss of agricultural jobs, local lawmakers struggled to attract other industries. Medical-waste disposal, tire grinding, and other grim occupations joined the logging and pulping trades.

Personal-injury lawyers also flourished, with one firm in particular profiting from the trend: pmped. It had perfected a litigation strategy that took advantage of an unusual state provision allowing residents who had suffered an injury to sue in whatever county they chose, as long as the company had a presence there. The injury could have occurred anywhere in South Carolina. The provision was rescinded in 2005, but by then Hampton County had become a mecca for plaintiffs, with obliging juries frequently awarding multimillion-dollar verdicts in suits brought by pmped. (A 2002 article in Forbes cited a medical-malpractice case that ended with a fourteen-million-dollar payout—thirteen times the national average for similar cases.) Big corporations began avoiding the area. Walmart developed plans to open a store in Hampton, but after discussions with a lawyer the idea was abandoned, according to Forbes. Companies that couldn’t leave—such as CSX Transportation, whose railway tracks run through Hampton—often found it more convenient to settle when pmped filed a suit against them. Better that than face a Murdaugh-friendly jury.

As this racket was explained to me, I was reminded of the Hitchcock adaptation of du Maurier’s “Jamaica Inn,” in which a rapacious squire and his gang plunder any vessel unwise enough to enter their remote Cornish cove. Seclusion certainly seems to have been a key element in the Murdaugh story. Bill Nettles, the U.S. Attorney in South Carolina under President Barack Obama, told me, “It’s important to understand how isolated that part of the world is. It’s insanely poor. And there’s no industry, aside from suing people.”

More jolting swerves followed the murder of Paul and Maggie, as the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division announced that it was examining two more fatalities potentially connected to the Murdaughs. The first, from 2015, involved a young nursing student, Stephen Smith, who had been found dead in the middle of a road near Hampton, with a serious head injury. Superficial appearances suggested that he’d run out of gas, begun walking home, and been accidentally hit by a vehicle. But none of the usual evidence of a hit-and-run had been found. “I saw no vehicle debris, skid marks, or injuries consistent with someone being struck by a vehicle,” a highway-patrol officer at the scene reported. Days after the killing, Smith’s mother told the police she’d heard that Paul and Buster Murdaugh were behind it. Officers investigated the tip, and the possibility of a hate crime emerged: Smith was gay, and his name was linked with Buster’s in the gossip mill of former high-school classmates. (Buster could not be reached for comment.) But before the officers could track the rumor to its source, the pathologist in the case described Smith’s death as the result of being struck by a motor vehicle—contradicting the opinions of the county coroner and at least one highway-patrol investigator. No Murdaughs were ever questioned.

The second fatality involved Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaughs’ housekeeper for twenty-four years. In 2018, she died after apparently tripping on the steps outside the house at Moselle. In 2022, investigators obtained permission to exhume her body. Authorities have yet to reveal any evidence of foul play in the deaths of Smith or Satterfield. But a long-concealed insurance matter arising from Satterfield’s death provided the public with a major revelation: Alex’s alleged financial crimes had extended far beyond misappropriating office funds. Moreover, it appeared that some significant members of the Lowcountry’s business and legal community had facilitated his deceptions for years.

Satterfield’s connection to the wider story was discovered by accident. In October, 2019, a local reporter named Mandy Matney revealed that, while sifting through court documents about the Murdaughs, she’d stumbled across a wrongful-death settlement related to the housekeeper’s demise. More than half a million dollars had evidently been awarded to her two sons, Tony and Brian. Tony read Matney’s article and was shocked: neither he nor Brian had been told of the settlement. All they knew was that after their mother’s death, the previous year, Alex had approached the family with a generous-seeming proposition: he would help them sue him over their mother’s death, in order to collect a large sum from his insurance. (He had a homeowner’s policy with Lloyd’s.) To that end, he’d recommended a lawyer named Cory Fleming. He didn’t tell them that Fleming was his close friend.

Eric Bland, a malpractice attorney whom the Satterfield brothers hired after learning of the settlement, talked me through the cold-blooded scheme behind the scheme. In the fall of 2018, Cory Fleming learned that Lloyd’s would pay out in full on Alex’s policy. The law required Fleming to inform the personal representative of the Satterfield estate about the settlement. At the time, the personal representative was Tony. But, for the plot to work, Tony had to be replaced by someone in Alex’s pocket. Alex and Cory Fleming told him that the case was getting complicated, and that he should let a professional banker become the representative. Needless to say, they had a name to suggest.

For years, pmped had been doing business with the Hampton-based Palmetto State Bank. The bank’s chief operating officer at the time, Russell Laffitte, had accommodated—and profited from—numerous unusual financial dealings by Alex. In earlier transactions, Laffitte had played the part of the personal representative. But in this instance it was a vice-president, Chad Westendorf, who signed on. Westendorf had no experience in the role, but that was fine: his job was to know nothing and to say nothing to the Satterfield brothers about any money coming their way. (Lawyers for Laffitte and for Fleming declined to comment.)

Law firms often partner with outside organizations to craft structured settlement plans for their clients, in order to guarantee long-term income and to minimize taxes. pmped had regularly worked with a reputable Atlanta-based insurance company called Forge Consulting. But Alex created a shadow version of the company, opening at least two “doing business as” accounts at Bank of America under the name—wait for it—Forge.

When the Lloyd’s check arrived, Fleming deducted fees for himself and for Westendorf, then sent the remaining $403,500 to one of Alex’s Forge accounts, apparently confident that, in the event of an investigation, he could claim that he thought he was sending the money to Forge Consulting. In all likelihood, neither he nor Alex ever believed that their actions would be challenged. It took the deus-ex-machina event of a drunken boat crash for Alex’s finances to come under the scrutiny of local reporters.

Bland, the Satterfield brothers’ attorney, began pressing authorities to open a criminal investigation into the settlement. While doing so, he learned that the brothers had been cheated of even more money: Alex had another liability policy, with the Nautilus Insurance Company, which had also paid out. This settlement was for $3.8 million.

“If Alex had just told the brothers he’d won them a twenty-five-thousand-dollar settlement, they’d have thought he hung the moon,” Bland told me. “But he stole every cent.” Alex even stood by as the bank foreclosed on the mobile home where Brian, a cognitively impaired adult, had been living on fourteen thousand dollars a year from a grocery-store job. “The scope of Murdaugh’s depravity is without precedent in Western jurisprudence,” a lawsuit filed by the Nautilus Insurance Company states. (Alex has denied the lawsuit’s claims, but he has agreed to repay the Satterfields.) Nautilus’s declaration may be hyperbolic and self-serving, but the more one learns about Alex the less of an exaggeration it seems.

In the wake of these discoveries, South Carolina officials began looking at Alex’s handling of other large insurance settlements, and a slew of similar thefts came to light, resulting in several dozen charges of financial crimes. The prosecutors’ briefs give an impression of someone living in a trance of entitlement, siphoning funds from any flow of money that entered his field of awareness. Alex allegedly stole from colleagues and strangers, from the able-bodied and the injured, from the living and the dead, from the young and the old, from a white highway-patrol officer and a Black former football player. The latter, Hakeem Pinckney, was a deaf man who became quadriplegic after a car accident, then died after the ventilator at his nursing home was left unplugged. Both calamities generated insurance settlements that Alex apparently looted. Sometimes, prosecutors say, he duped clients into signing disbursement papers for outsized “expenses” against their settlements; sometimes he forged their signatures; sometimes he simply helped himself to vast sums from pmped’s Client Trust Account (which reportedly ran on an honor system).

After Mandy Matney broke the Satterfield story, Alex’s bond was set at seven million dollars. He is currently awaiting trial in jail. His financial assets have been placed under the control of court-appointed receivers. In the meantime, Russell Laffitte, the former Palmetto State Bank executive, has already been tried and found guilty on multiple federal charges, including wire fraud and bank fraud. He and Cory Fleming also face multiple state indictments for fraud and conspiracy. Chad Westendorf, astonishingly, is still affiliated with Palmetto, though in February, 2022, he recorded a deposition for Bland in which he professed levels of professional ineptitude that strain belief: he claimed not to have known the meaning of the word “fiduciary,” even though he was the president of the Independent Banks of South Carolina at the time. He also appeared to implicate a Hampton judge who reportedly had close ties to the Murdaughs, Carmen Mullen, in helping to keep hidden the paperwork related to the Satterfield settlement; there have been calls for a state judicial investigation into Mullen’s alleged “pattern of ethically questionable conduct.” (Mullen could not be reached for comment.) pmped, which insists that it did not turn a blind eye to the activities of its miscreant partner, has repaid all the money Alex stole from its clients, and the once mighty partnership has dissolved. In all, prosecutors alleged, Alex had stolen at least eight million dollars. I asked Dick Harpootlian if he still maintained that much of this money had gone to feed Alex’s opioid habit. “That’s what I said in court,” he replied, carefully. “I don’t know about anything else.”

Alex may have been exposed as a thief, but the double homicide and the other deaths remained unresolved. In July, 2021, police released the recording of the 911 call that Alex had made after discovering his wife and son. By now, most people thought that Alex was faking the panicked voice in which he reported the murders. Carol Black, a lawyer originally from neighboring Colleton County, likened it to the scene in the movie “Fargo” in which the nefarious William H. Macy character practices reporting his wife’s abduction. A novelist friend who’d lived in the area, Padgett Powell, thought that the language itself was off. “My wife and child have been shot badly,” Alex says on the tape, and to Powell this phrasing sounded “archly formal and rehearsed.” I took his point, though I had to wonder how a person would sound if he’d genuinely stumbled onto a scene like that. Would a more casual phrasing, or a less frantic tone, have sounded any more sincere? I was having some resistance to the thought that Alex was putting on an act in the call. The implication—that he really was involved in the murder of his wife and son—was beyond disturbing.

Alex’s lawyers wouldn’t give me access to him, but his cousin Eddie was out on bail, and I decided to pay him a visit. My wife, who had joined me on her way to meet relatives in Beaufort, came along. The drive took us through semi-rural subdivisions with dribs of gray Spanish moss hanging from trees and telephone poles. As we approached Eddie’s sprawling yard, outside the town of Walterboro, we saw the unmistakable figure of Eddie himself, shaggy-haired and whiskery, spreading cinders on his driveway, accompanied by a muscular dog. In addition to the fraud charges, he was facing assault-and-battery charges from the roadside incident. I knew I wasn’t alone in speculating that, if Alex really was involved in the killing of Paul and Maggie, Eddie was a likely candidate for the second shooter.

He looked over as we pulled in, and I waved nervously, preparing to beat a hasty retreat. But he waved back, and my wife asked if she could play with the dog. A smile lit up his weathered face. “Sure can,” he said. A moment later, as she entertained the dog, I found myself in conversation with its owner.

There were no bombshells: for all his unexpected affability, Eddie was careful about what he said, and most of what he told me matched statements that he or his lawyers had already made. We started with the roadside incident. By his account, he’d thought that he was meeting up with Alex to do an odd job, only to discover that he wanted Eddie to shoot him. He’d refused, and wrested the gun from Alex. The weapon had gone off during the struggle, but Eddie was certain that no bullet had hit Alex—suggesting that Alex must have injured his head in some other way. After the scuffle, Eddie said, he had hidden the gun in a place that he intended to keep secret until his “dying day.” None of this was new information, but, when I broached the topic of the double homicide, Eddie mentioned something that surprised me. He claimed that, although he’d spent a lot of time with Alex, he’d never met Maggie and barely knew her sons. (He was close enough to the family, however, to have paid his respects when Randolph Murdaugh III died, shortly after the murders.)

The meeting ended amiably, but in hindsight I suspect that Eddie didn’t give me the whole picture. My best explanation of the roadside incident is that Alex asked him to create a bullet graze on his head, and that Eddie either obliged or witnessed Alex creating the graze himself. (Authorities determined that Alex’s wound was superficial, though his attorneys have said that it was more serious.) Eddie then removed the gun from the scene—also at Alex’s request, so that it wouldn’t contradict the story of a stranger taking a potshot—and subsequently refused to disclose its whereabouts because he knew that it could get him in trouble. Eddie’s apparent willingness to commit these risky acts indicates that Alex may have had some hold over him. This notion is bolstered by a recent indictment linking them in yet another alleged criminal scheme, which involved narcotics and money laundering. Whether Eddie’s comments to me distancing himself from Maggie and Paul stem from this criminal alliance, or from something even darker, is an open question.

Murder charges were finally brought against Alex this past July. Though long predicted, the announcement shook me, instantly contracting the wide spectrum of possibilities to the worst imaginable reality. All talk of revenge killings, or of hit men hired to forestall divorce proceedings, now seemed moot. The indictment portrays Alex as the sole killer, acting with “malice aforethought” and wielding both weapons. No evidence was laid out, but fitsNews and other outlets were soon reporting that video from Paul’s phone had revealed Alex’s presence near the kennels at 8:44 p.m.—more than an hour before he called 911, and within the supposed window for both victims’ times of death. (Alex’s attorneys have said that the video depicts a “convivial” family.) High-velocity organic spatter had supposedly been found on the clothing that Alex was wearing that night. There were reports that he’d asked Maggie to meet him at Moselle that evening, effectively luring her there.

In terms of motive, the most plausible theory had to do with a civil suit filed by Mallory Beach’s family which blamed Alex for lending Paul the boat and enabling his drinking. Shortly before the murders at Moselle, a critical hearing had been scheduled which could have compelled discovery of Alex’s assets—something he’d so far managed to avoid. Given all the fraud he’d apparently been up to in the previous decade, he had reason to be seriously worried about this impending shaft of daylight on his financial affairs. Furthermore, the Beaches’ attorney, Mark Tinsley, had threatened to bring suit against Paul and Maggie if Alex continued stonewalling, which could have forced them to testify under oath about the boozy culture that prevailed at Moselle. “That was where the party spot was in Hampton,” a witness in the Stephen Smith case told an investigator. “A lot of fights, alcohol, drugs.” According to a deposition, beer was kept in a walk-in deer cooler, and underage kids were free to help themselves. Photographs of Paul that have entered public circulation suggest that his parents were comfortable seeing their son staggering around blotto.

“Paul and Maggie were how I was keeping Alex honest,” Tinsley told me. Unfortunately—so the theory went—the threat gave Alex a powerful incentive to get rid of them. This not only would prevent their testimony but could potentially undermine the whole suit. After all, a jury would be unlikely to award a large settlement against a man whose wife and son had just been gunned down. And with the boat crash supplying a motive for someone else to have killed them, Alex would perhaps be viewed as a victim rather than as a suspect—especially if he further deflected suspicion by using more than one weapon.

The theory had an icy logic: kill Paul and Maggie, save self and money. And the vigilante-justice scenario was consistent with his staging of the roadside incident, three months later. Moreover, pmped first inquired about mislaid funds on the very day of the killings, which could have compounded Alex’s feeling of being under tremendous pressure. Yet this explanation again hinged on the idea of a man plotting the death of his own son, and I still couldn’t get my head around that. Paul was certainly a handful. “Holy terror” was about the kindest epithet I heard from people who’d known him—most descriptions evoked a teen-age Caligula. But it’s surely a long way from there to the planned execution of one’s child.

A hearing was set for July, at the Colleton County Courthouse, in Walterboro. I flew to Charleston and drove across the now familiar landscape. I can’t pretend that I was growing fond of it, exactly, but I’d begun to see how you might get attached to its stubborn plainness—the spent farmland, with its mounds of logging debris; the flat churches, with their thumbtack spires; the double-wides surrounded by chain-link fences; the pervasive sense of life stripped to its most elemental options, as laid out by the highway billboards: “Serve the Poor Like Jesus,” “Win Settlement!”

TV crews were setting up outside the courthouse when I arrived. Inside, the press was seated in the jury box. Media coverage of the case had grown significantly with every twist. Most of the journalists I’d talked to were appearing on programs produced by the major streaming services, as were some of the lawyers. The national attention was hardly surprising, given the lurid nature of the case. More so was the degree to which pressure from local news outlets had been responsible for breaking the story. Without reporters like John Monk, of the State newspaper; Mandy Matney, who started a podcast about the murders; or Will Folks, the founder of fitsNews, the full extent of Alex’s schemes might never have come to light.

Dick Harpootlian entered the courtroom with his team. Silver-haired and puffy-eyed, he looked simultaneously overworked and primed for action. I’d asked him once about his dual career as lawmaker and trial lawyer. “Lincoln was a very active and aggressive litigator while he was a legislator,” he told me. The exalted comparison may be explained by the company he keeps. Harpootlian, a former chair of the state Democratic Party, has talked of playing golf with President Joe Biden, and his wife was recently made U.S. Ambassador to Slovenia. Eric Bland, the Satterfield brothers’ attorney, told me that Harpootlian is “probably the most powerful person in this state,” adding, “Meanwhile, Alan Wilson”—the attorney general of South Carolina—“is a Trumpster who’s been sued by Harpootlian over masks and so on. That’s why there are so many charges. Wilson wants Harpootlian publicly shamed. This is blood sport.”

A door opened, and Alex was brought in. It was the first time I’d seen him in person. Connor Cook’s lawyer, Joe McCulloch, had told me, “You could drop Alex in any town in the South and he’d get along, because he’s a beefy good ol’ boy.” Photographs of him in hunting camo seemed in keeping with this description. But there was nothing beefy about the tall figure being led past the jury box. Carrying himself very upright, in a loose white shirt, slim-fitting khakis, and tan loafers, with a pair of glasses perched suavely atop his head, he looked lean and sleek and surprisingly put-together. Were it not for the shackles at his wrists and ankles, he might have been walking onto a yacht.

Standing for the formal arraignment, he pleaded not guilty. In response to the prosecutor’s old-fashioned formulation—“How shall you be tried?”—he offered the traditional rejoinder, “By God and my country,” momentarily giving a strange impression of collegiality between them. A portrait of his grandfather, Randolph (Buster) Murdaugh, Jr., hung at the back of the court. (The portrait has been taken down for the trial.) Buster was a notorious reprobate who was linked to an illicit liquor ring. His father, Randolph, Sr., died in what some suspect was a suicide made to look like an accident, staged with the intent of enriching his heirs. Nobody knows what caused his car to stall on railway tracks and get hit by a train one night, but he was in poor health, and his son certainly wasted no time in suing the rail company. Ancestral echoes seem to haunt the family.

There’d been speculation that prosecutors would reveal some of their evidence at the hearing, but Harpootlian opposed discussion of the fateful night at Moselle—“We’re trying to get a fair trial for our clients, not a trial in the media,” he said—and nothing new emerged. Since then, however, he and his legal partner, Jim Griffin, have in fact been making concerted use of the media to prepare the ground for their defense. In one motion, they signalled an intent to sow reasonable doubt about what will almost certainly be a purely circumstantial case—and to present an entirely different murder story of their own. Among other things, they have claimed that, this past May, Cousin Eddie failed a polygraph test in which he was asked if he was present at the killings or knew anything about them. The prosecution has said that Alex’s legal team has misrepresented the test results, but, as with Connor Cook, the Murdaugh team appears to have identified a plausible fall guy. (Eddie has denied all wrongdoing.)

They won’t have to prove anything, of course, only insinuate, but there is material that could put cracks in the prosecution’s case. In June, the narcotics and money-laundering charges were announced. The indictment is short on detail, but it sketches the outline of a scheme in which Alex was allegedly funnelling money into the narcotics trade, with Eddie as his middleman. Harpootlian, far from ridiculing the idea of trafficking drugs as a way of laundering money, appears to have embraced the notion as part of his strategy of defending Alex from the murder charges. In a recent filing, he claimed that Eddie regularly dropped off drugs for Alex by the Moselle kennels—implying that Eddie may have shot Maggie and Paul when, say, they chanced upon him making a delivery.

To convict Alex, the prosecutors will have to offer their own explanation of what happened that night, and it will need to be compelling enough to persuade all twelve jurors that a father who had been demonstrably protective of his wayward son could be capable of shooting him point-blank, twice, with a shotgun, essentially just to buy himself some time. Clearly, in protecting Paul after the boat crash, Alex was also attempting to protect himself. But the prosecutors may need something stronger than a pragmatically mixed motive, stronger even than his serial frauds and betrayals, to make him out as the irredeemably evil monster that they need him to be.

The trial begins on January 23rd. One side will tell a more convincing story than the other, but a definitive account of those moments in the darkness at Moselle is unlikely to emerge, as is any complete answer to the question of how Alex became enmeshed in his alleged crimes in the first place. The explanation currently being floated by the attorney general’s office is that the thefts were in effect a string of Ponzi-like debt repayments, each covering its predecessor, originating with a series of bad land deals. Alex, prosecutors suggest, was likely motivated by vanity: he was a hereditary big shot who couldn’t face being seen as a failure. It sounds believable, if hard to prove, but perhaps more important to understand than Alex’s pathology is why there was so little in place—socially, institutionally, legally—to keep his predatory impulses in check.

Several people I spoke with alluded to a persistence of antiquated class structures within South Carolina’s social fabric. Bill Nettles, the former U.S. Attorney, told me, “For multiple generations, you have had a modern-day caste system. A lot of these people were born on third base in an area where they could simply do no wrong.” The South Carolina writer Juliana Staveley-O’Carroll spoke of an entrenched “pyramidal class system” in the state, which she attributed to its history as a royal province. Will Folks, who worked for South Carolina’s former Republican governor Mark Sanford before founding fitsNews, also drew a connection between the state’s early history and the Murdaugh case. South Carolina, he told me, “has an incredibly corrupt ruling class, and the Murdaughs were part of it.” As Folks saw it, the system of selecting judges was largely to blame. “The judicial branch has become an extension of the political branch,” he said. “We need to have judges chosen by people who don’t control their salaries, don’t set their office budgets, don’t decide on their futures.”

It’s easy to see how a person like Alex Murdaugh could benefit from a system enabling well-connected lawbreakers to hire amenable lawmakers to represent them in front of handpicked judges. A presumption of impunity was likely part of his operating calculus. Even Senator Harpootlian acknowledged that the system of selecting judges was flawed. “There’s probably a better way to do it,” he told me. “But no perfect way. You’ve just got to count on people being honorable.”

Lending weight to Folks’s corruption argument are the bleak findings of a recent investigation by the Myrtle Beach Sun News reporter David Weissman into South Carolina’s so-called factoring business, which allows companies to target the structured settlements awarded to accident victims. As things stand, factoring companies can offer cash up front to victims in exchange for part or all of their settlements, at an average rate of twenty-five cents on the dollar. In one case, judges allowed companies to buy a young woman’s entire settlement in a series of deals, culminating in the purchase of her remaining tranche for about ten cents on the dollar. The woman had suffered brain damage in a train collision at the age of twelve, and the settlement was intended to support her for the rest of her life. In Weissman’s article, a retired judge dryly underscored the state’s tolerance of such practices by saying, “We’re all entitled to make stupid mistakes.”

It’s no surprise that Alex Murdaugh’s alleged schemes flourished in this kind of atmosphere. You have to wonder if he and his accomplices even thought they were doing anything particularly wrong. Mallory Beach’s tragic end opened a window into the self-dealing that pervades the Lowcountry’s oligarchy. One hopes that her death will also spur demands for change in the political structures that facilitate this culture. As Folks said, quoting an Elizabethan witticism to illustrate the degrading effect of the graft and cronyism afflicting South Carolina, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? / Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the January 23, 2023, issue, with the headline “The Swamp.” | The New Yorker

[thevibraniumveterans]

She-Hulk 1.08

“Ribbit and Rip It”

Spoilers!

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1. Under what circumstances did this happen?

2. I have a related question about this below…

3. Look, I could be totally wrong and not even know it. When did this episode take place?!

4. (I meant visual aid. It’s not a cane, per se. My bad.)

5. Ok, we know Wolverine is coming to the MCU, and likely NOT this early. But if what Nikki did is an Easter Egg, I’m not surprised. Even if it’s nothing, hey, anything is something!

[fuddlewuddle]

Ok, so I write a lot, and so if you ever wanna read my stuff

Here’s the link to where they all are

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuddlewuddle/works.

I mainly write Top Gun: Maverick, MCU and some DC, but I have been known to write some other pairings if they strike my fancy.

Enjoy 💜