#so my mom asked me about him and I told her what happened

[pitlanepeach]

Radio Silence | Chapter Three

Lando Norris x Amelia Brown (OFC)

Series Masterlist

Summary — Order is everything. Her habits aren't quirks, they're survival techniques. And only three people in the world have permission to touch her: Mom, Dad, Fernando.

Then Lando Norris happens.

One moment. One line crossed. No going back.

Warnings — Autistic!OFC, pushy reporters, Carlos Sainz Sr is a little bit of a villain in this chapter (sry).

Notes — I feel like so much happens in this chapter and I love it. Also: tysm for 500 followers!!🧡

Want to be added to the taglist? Let me know! - Peacn x

2019

She hadn’t planned to cross through the garages; it just happened. Amelia was following a technician back from a briefing when she lost track of the conversation and the path, her thoughts spiralling through gearbox data and tyre deltas.

That’s when she heard it. Her name. Loud. Sharp. 

“Miss Brown.”

She stopped. Pivoted.

Carlos Sainz Sr. stood a few feet away, hands behind his back. 

He wasn’t smiling.

“You are the daughter of our team’s CEO, yes?” he asked.

Amelia nodded. “Yes.”

“You spend a lot of time in the garages,” he said. “Too much, I think.”

She frowned at him. “I— I help.” She told him. 

“Right,” he said, and his face did a strange twist. “But with Carlos, my son, it is important he has focus. Space.”

She stared at him, unsure what he was trying to imply. “Carlos told me that I was allowed in his garage as often as I like.”

“He would,” Sainz Sr. said. “He is polite. A respectful boy. But it is not always good to blur lines between personal and professional.” He paused. “It could cause problems.”

Amelia stood perfectly still.

“I’m not causing problems,” she said, a bit too flatly. 

Sainz Sr. regarded her a moment longer, then gave a short nod. “Good. I hope it remains that way. Distance, por favor.”

He turned and walked off, leaving her standing in the middle of the paddock walkway, her yellow water bottle pressed tightly to the base of her stomach.

She didn’t move for a long moment.

Her chest felt tight, but not like sadness; not exactly. It was the feeling of a… system error. A mismatch. She couldn’t understand what she’d possibly done wrong.

Carlos hadn’t seemed uncomfortable with her presence. He asked her thoughts on setup changes. Let her hover near the monitors during debriefs. He’d even nudged her elbow pre-quali and whispered, “Wish me luck.”

That didn’t feel like someone who did not want her around. 

Swiftly, she made her way back to Lando’s garage. Slow and quiet, avoiding eye contact. Lando waved at her from where he was talking to Jon, but she didn’t wave back. Just sat down beside a stack of unused tyre blankets and stared at the concrete floor.

Her fingers fidgeted, tugged at her sleeves. She didn’t cry. She didn’t really feel anything, other than... a disorienting sense of being wrong.

She thought of the conversation on loop. Trying to decode it. Trying to figure out how she’d accidentally made an enemy out of Carlos Sainz Sr.

She couldn’t focus. Not on the setup sheets. Not on the chatter from the engineers. Not even on the low buzz of the paddock outside.

She started working hard to anchor herself to something familiar. The smell of tyre rubber. The click of Lando’s cooling fan. The buzz of telemetry feeds looping on a nearby monitor. Safe things.

“You hiding, or working?” came Will Joseph’s voice, low and even.

She glanced up. Lando’s race engineer stood a few feet away, clipboard in hand.

“Hiding,” she told him. That’s what it felt like she was doing, anyway. 

Will nodded. Then he crouched down in front of her, elbows on his knees. “Wanna talk about it?”

Amelia tugged the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands. She hesitated. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. But… I think I have made somebody angry.”

His jaw jumped. “Yeah? Someone in the team?”

She gave a small nod.

Will glanced sideways. His voice stayed calm, but there was a weird tightness when he said, “If you want me to talk to them, I will.”

Amelia frowned. “It’s okay. I don’t want to… make it worse.”

“You sure?” He asked.

She looked away. “Yes.” She said, eventually. 

He paused, then stood, still watching her. “Okay. But if you change your mind… you know where I am.”

She nodded. Will turned as if to go, but then glanced back at her again.

“You want to look over brake traces with me?” he asked. 

She stood slowly, gripping her yellow water bottle. “Yes.”

Will gave a small smile. “Knew you would.”

--

It was Sunday, and her garage smelled like grease and old metal and comfort.

Amelia was elbow-deep in the engine bay of her BMW, sleeves rolled up and a thin streak of oil smudged across her cheek. Jazz played softly from the old radio by the workbench, and a fan hummed lazily in the corner, stirring the warm spring air. She was in her zone — focused, grounded, calm.

She didn’t hear the car pull up. But she did hear the familiar sound of her father’s golf shoes on the concrete. 

She turned just in time to see them step inside.

Her dad was in his usual race-less Sunday outfit, white sleeves shoved to the elbows, cap pushed back on his head. Beside him, Lando Norris stood in golf clothes; white polo, khaki trousers, hair a little messy. He looked slightly sunburned.

“Thought we’d swing by for dinner,” her dad told her, a big smile on his face. “We got finished up early today.”

Lando lifted a hand and waved at her. “Hey.”

Amelia stared at him. “You’re wearing real shoes,” she said.

Lando glanced down at his golf trainers. “Yeah. I know. Weird, right?”

Her dad ignored both of them, already wandering over to inspect the engine. “You’ve done the belts,” he noted.

“I did the belts yesterday,” Amelia told him, still staring at Lando.

Having him here felt… odd. This was her space, her house, her garage. The place where everything made sense, where she could retreat from the world and lose herself in the rhythm of machinery.

Then again, she considered, she was always in his garage. This was just the other way around, really.

Lando shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Your dad said dinner was happening. I didn’t really get a say.”

She shrugged. “You could’ve said no.”

“I could’ve,” Lando agreed. He was smiling at her. “But then I wouldn’t get free food. And apparently your mum’s making roast potatoes.”

“She puts garlic in them,” Amelia told him. She turned back to watch her dad, making sure he wasn’t touching anything. Or worse, moving anything. 

“She sounds like a genius.” Lando said behind her. 

Her dad pushed the hood higher, eyes inspecting the wiring, and let out a low hum of approval. “Right. Dinner in twenty,” he said, glancing at both of them, but there was a slight hesitation in his voice. “Lando, you coming inside?”

Lando wiped his hands on his trousers, then glanced back at Amelia, clearly unsure. “Might stay out here for a bit,” he said with a slight shrug.

He paused, eyes flicking between them. He seemed to weigh the situation for a second before speaking again, more slowly this time. “That okay with you, Amelia?” 

She looked over at him. Shrugged. “Fine.” 

Her dad nodded and gave them both one last look before walking out of the garage and toward the house. He started whistling somewhere along the way. Amelia grimaced, shoulders inching toward her ears. 

There was a beat of silence. Amelia crouched beside the car, fingers working a stubborn bolt. Lando just hovered. 

“This place is sick.” He said, eventually. 

She looked at him and then around the absolute chaos that was her workspace. “It’s a mess,” she said.

“Yeah, but like… a cool mess. Suits you.” He shrugged. 

She made a face, nose scrunching, eyebrows lowering. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.” 

“It’s a compliment.” He said. “Like… you fit in here.” 

Oh. Well. That was nice of him to say. Fitting in wasn’t something she usual excelled at.  

The bolt finally gave way with a soft click, and she exhaled, satisfied.

Lando took a step closer, leaning in to peek at the engine. “So what are you working on now?”

She handed him the bolt without thinking. He closed his fist around it. “Timing chain.”

“Oh. Sick.”

“You keep saying that word.” She told him. 

“I’ve got a limited vocabulary,” he said with a half-smile, sliding the bolt into his pocket. She narrowed her eyes. “Mine now. Finders keepers.”

“I hate that saying.” She muttered, not asking for the bolt back. She didn’t need it. Maybe he did. “Do you like chicken?” she asked abruptly.

“Sure.” He nodded.

“Good.” She sighed. “It’s all my mom knows how to cook.”

“Mom,” he repeated, mimicking her accent.

She frowned. “You’re quite annoying.”

He grinned, the lines next to his eyes deepening. “I know. Want me to get you a drink or something?”

Her gaze flicked to her yellow water bottle, standing out like a warning sign against the cold steel of the garage. Then to him. Her mind caught on the image of him picking it up, his hand unscrewing the lid, closing it again. It wasn’t even anything weird. Just… she didn’t like it. Not today.

Her stomach did a small, unwelcome swoop.

“No,” she said, sharp. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” he replied simply. 

She squinted at him. This would be the perfect moment to bring up his social media. She had a whole list saved in her notes app; bullet points and everything. Of things he could post that would improve long-term brand perception, boost fan engagement, attract sponsor interest. She’d even colour-coded it.

But then he leaned a little closer to the engine bay, poked a stray wire with the back of his finger, and asked, “What does that do?”

And instead of launching into a Twitter audit, she blinked. Then sighed. Then said, “That’s not a wire. It’s the gas belt.”

He just looked at her. “That sounds made up.”

“It isn’t.” She crouched beside him and pointed. “It’s part of the pressure regulation loop. If it’s too tight, the fuel intake timing offsets and we lose energy recovery.”

“Oh,” he said, looking down at it. “I thought it was just a spare wire.”

“It’s never just a spare wire.” 

She didn’t plan to spend an hour explaining the entire energy recovery system to a man who literally drove race cars for a living. But she did. And he listened. Asked questions. Didn’t pretend to know more than he did.

Dinner came and went. Her mom popped her head in, said she’d keep their plates warm. Amelia didn’t even realise how long they’d been in the garage until her dad came to check if they were still alive.

“What’ve you two been up to?” He asked.

And Lando, still squatting beside the car with grease on his knuckles, said, “She taught me how a gas belt works.”

Amelia felt her lips twist into a smile before she could stop it.

Her dad laughed, loud and full of something Amelia couldn’t place. 

Lando’s cheeks went a bit pink. 

—

By the time the Spanish Grand Prix rolled around, one thing had become evident.

The Renault engine was going to be a problem.

It wasn’t just an occasional glitch or a minor calibration error — it was systemic. Structural. A pattern beginning to take shape. Carlos had already been forced to retire from the first two races. Lando hadn’t made it past lap twenty in China. And now, in Spain, he was pulling into the garage mid-race with smoke curling out from the rear. 

Amelia didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The telemetry screens told her more than enough — voltage spikes, temperature climbs, the dreaded red-highlighted warnings blinking across the console in angry bursts.

She watched from her usual spot, perched on the edge of the engineering desk with her notebook balanced on her knee. The frustration in the air was sticky. 

This was becoming predictable. Usually, she would like that — this was not one of those times.

After the race, she found herself lingering in the quiet corner of the garage, sketching out hypothetical flow improvements in the margins of her notebook. She didn’t work on the engines — not directly, not yet. But she could see the shape of the problem, the flaw in the systems approach. She could feel it humming under her fingertips like a code waiting to be cracked.

Across the paddock, celebrations echoed from the teams that had made it to the finish. The podium champagne had already been popped. But in Lando’s garage, it felt like they were all waiting out a storm that they already knew was coming.

She pressed her pen to the page and underlined a note she’d written hours ago, before the race had even started.

"Energy efficiency doesn’t matter if the engine won’t survive the lap."

She sighed and capped her pen. In the background, someone was wheeling the scorched power unit away for inspection.

Maybe she should’ve warned them louder.

— 

She found him in his driver’s room, slouched in a chair with his legs stretched out in front of him. His helmet was discarded on the floor, and he was still in his fireproof suit, half-zipped. Amelia hesitated outside the door for a second, wondering if she should just leave him alone. But Lando had left his water bottle in the garage, and Amelia wasn’t the best at letting things slide. She wasn’t sure why it felt important to bring it to him, but it did.

She knocked softly on the already-open door before walking in. Lando didn’t even look up. He was just staring at the wall. 

“I brought your water,” Amelia told him. 

He looked up at her then. “Thanks,” he muttered as he reached for the bottle, shoving the straw into his mouth and taking a long gulp. “Second DNF in five races,” he said, his voice rough. “Rookie season, and this is what I get.”

After a second of hesitation, Amelia sat on the beanbag chair across from him, folding her hands neatly in her lap. She didn't say anything at first — just looked at him. She wasn’t sure how this worked, whether she needed to talk first or wait for him. 

Eventually, Lando exhaled through his nose and kept going, his words starting to pick up speed. “I don’t even know what went wrong this time. One minute, I’m fighting for position, and then it just… dies. The engine. The whole thing. It’s like I’m cursed, or something.”

“Curses aren’t real,” Amelia said, frowning. “Drink more water. I think you might be dehydrated.”

He laughed, but it was short, and it didn’t feel genuine. “Yeah, well. Maybe I deserve to be dehydrated.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she sighed, reaching up to itch her neck. She was pretty sure that she’d started to develop a stress rash somewhere around the tenth lap. 

“I know it doesn’t,” he muttered, rubbing his hand over his face. “I just… I keep replaying it. I did everything right. I kept the pace, I managed the tyres, I even—” He stopped himself, jaw tight. “I’m trying so hard. Every week. And it still ends the same way.”

Amelia tilted her head. “Trying hard doesn’t guarantee results. Statistically, a mechanical failure is not a reflection of your driving ability.”

“Yeah, but people don’t see it like that, do they? Sponsors don’t see it like that. Fans don’t see it like that. They see a DNF next to my name and think “Ah, that lad’s shit. Couldn’t even finish the race.”

“They’re wrong,” she said, voice steady. “You can’t control the engine.”

He looked at her, like he was searching for something on her face. “That’s not really comforting, you know.”

“I’m not trying to be comforting,” she shrugged. “I’m telling you the truth.”

A beat passed. Then he let out a breath and leaned his head back against the wall, his shoulders finally sagging a little. “Still… it sucks.”

She watched him for a moment, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I made a chart,” she told him. “About Renault’s historical DNF rates. You’re not even in the worst percentile.”

He blinked at her, and for the first time that day, a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You made a chart?”

“I like charts,” she said. “They help me make sense of things. Maybe they’ll be able to help you too. I colour coded.”

Lando unfolded the paper and scanned it, a soft breath of laughter escaping him. “You’re actually unbelievable.”

Amelia blinked. “In what way?”

He didn’t answer that, just kept smiling at the paper like it had done something remarkable. Which it hadn’t. It was a simple data set, neatly formatted, with pink for DNF, green for points finishes, and orange for races affected by mechanical issues but still completed. She had used bold font for his name and added a tiny asterisk explaining why none of it was technically his fault.

“You should remember that every time your engine has survived, you have finished in the points,” she said, because facts were important when emotions got loud. “And the season’s not over yet.”

Lando looked up at her. “Thanks, Amelia.”

His voice was quiet, yes, but there was something else layered in the tone, something that made her chest feel tight in a way she couldn’t immediately categorise. She frowned, not at him, but at the sensation itself.

There were variables she didn’t have control over. Facial expressions. Tone. Context. She could usually work it out when someone was mad, or distracted, or lying. But fondness… that was harder. It was inconsistent. Often irrational. Frequently confusing.

She pointed at his water bottle because that was easy. “You should still drink the water.”

He smiled again, this time more to himself, and shook his head. Then he picked up the bottle and unscrewed the lid, just like she knew he would.

As he drank, Amelia watched him carefully. Maybe, she thought, tucking her hands back into her lap, she just needed to collect more data in order to be able to fully understand Lando Norris.

— 

iMessage — 17:09pm

Max F. Sorry about the shit luck, mate. Engine again?

Lando Norris Yeah. Just shut off mid-corner. Didn’t even get a warning this time. Proper embarrassing.

Max F. Not your fault. That Renault engine’s a grenade with wires.

Lando Norris Yh that’s what Amelia said kinda She made a chart

Max F. A chart?

Lando Norris Yeah. With colours Fucking cute

Max F. Whipped. 

Lando Norris

Yh 

— 

She liked the Mercedes hospitality unit. Neutrally designed, air-conditioned, and smelled faintly of eucalyptus. She liked that a lot.

Amelia walked slowly, phone in hand. 

There was no sign of Lewis or Roscoe when she stepped inside, just the low hum of quiet conversations and the click of cutlery. She turned left, toward the usual corner where Roscoe liked to sleep in the sunbeam from the long vertical window.

She didn’t make it that far.

“Amelia.”

She blinked. Then blinked again.

Toto Wolff stood halfway down the hallway. In a dark polo. Arms crossed. He was very tall. 

“Hello,” she said. She meant to say it with some level of confidence, but it came out more like a question.

“I was hoping we might speak.” His tone was hard for her to read. 

She tilted her head, a slight frown growing on her face. “I’m supposed to go and see Roscoe.”

“He will not mind waiting. I am told he is a very patient dog.” Toto said. 

She wasn’t sure what to say to that — Roscoe was not, in any sense of the word, a patient dog. She also didn’t really want to argue with Toto Wolff. 

So she just gave a small nod and followed him when he gestured to a nearby side room. It was empty. A single chair. A single table. It felt a bit like an interrogation room. 

Toto sat. Amelia did not. She hovered just near the wall and folded her arms tight against her chest.

“I understand,” he began, “that you have declined my offer. The junior engineering placement.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

There was a pause. His brow furrowed, just slightly. “You did not think it was a good opportunity?”

“I thought it was an excellent opportunity,” she said honestly. “But I already have a place at McLaren. The team like having my input.”

“That they do,” he said. He didn’t sound offended. He sounded like he was calibrating. “And Lando?”

She blinked. “What about him?”

“He seems to like having you around especially. I have noticed that you spent your time primarily on his side of the garage.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant, so she didn’t respond. She could feel her fingers starting to curl in against her arms. She tightened her grip to stop it.

Toto exhaled through his nose. “I will not press. I simply wanted to say, the door is still open. Mercedes does not forget talent.”

“I know,” she said. “My dad doesn’t either.”

There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. Possibly a smile. Possibly a tic.

“I see. Then I will stop trying to, how do you say in English… poach you.”

“That would be good,” she said. “My dad would get mad if he found out.” 

Toto raised an eyebrow. “You did not tell him?” 

She shook her head. “No. I need to go now. Lewis and Roscoe are waiting.”

“Of course,” Toto said, standing. He offered a handshake, which she pointedly ignored.

She left the room and continued on down the hallway until she found Roscoe, sprawled across the carpet like a throw rug.

She dropped to her knees and scratched behind his ears.

“Hello. I have missed you very much,” she whispered. Roscoe huffed, then rolled over.

Lewis rounded the corner a second later with two smoothies in hand. One was green, and the other was pink. She hoped that the pink one was for her. He glanced over her shoulder, where Toto was walking away, his phone pressed to his ear. “Oh dear. Did you get ambushed?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I escaped.”

— 

Two races later, she found herself in Canada.

She was en route to the Red Bull motorhome — they always had the best coffee vendor, and no one ever seemed to mind when she slipped in — when someone stepped into her path.

“Miss Brown? Amelia?”

She blinked. The man was tall, holding a Viaplay mic, all teeth and polished camera charm. 

“We’re doing some quick paddock interviews — would you mind answering a couple of questions?”

Amelia hesitated. She wasn’t in team kit. Just a plain black hoodie and her headphones around her neck, though the headphones did have the McLaren logo engraved onto them. She glanced over his shoulder. The cameraman was already adjusting focus.

“I’m not a driver,” she said, pushing the words out through a chest that suddenly felt tight.

He laughed, like she’d made a joke. “No, of course — we know. You’re Lando Norris’, uh, data engineer, right? And Zak Brown’s daughter?”

Her fingers tightened in her sleeves. “I’m only officially one of those things,” she replied. “I am not Lando’s data engineer.” 

“Still. Very involved in McLaren. We’d love a few thoughts on the upcoming qualifying session. From your perspective.” He was still smiling. 

Amelia’s teeth squeaked with the force that she was grinding them together. Her heart was ticking fast, too fast. She didn’t like being filmed. She didn’t like… whatever this was. 

She especially didn’t like when people used polite voices to try and back her into a corner.

“I didn’t say I’d do the interview.” She said, eventually. 

“Just one or two—”

“She said no.”

The voice came from behind her. Flat. No hesitation or inflect. 

Amelia turned her head. Max Verstappen was standing next to her, hands in his pockets, jaw tight. He wasn’t looking at her — his eyes were locked on the reporter.

“We’re just asking—”

“She doesn’t work for a team. She doesn’t have to answer your questions.”

“Ah, Max, come on, we’re live in—”

Max took one step forward. The cameraman slowly lowered the lens.

“I do not like to repeat myself.” He said. He didn’t sound angry, but there was nothing kind about the way he said it. 

The reporter faltered. “Right,” he muttered, stepping back. “We’ll… catch someone else.” They disappeared down the paddock, the cameraman not even bothering to stop the recording properly.

Amelia stared at Max.

He didn’t look at her right away. Just let out a breath through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck. “They should not be bothering you. That was very shit of them.”

“I’m not very interesting,” she told him, her voice barely a mutter as she tried to collect herself. “There’s no point putting me on TV.”

“You’re on TV more than you think,” he said, glancing sideways at her. “Especially when Lando’s around. People are very interested in you both.”

She frowned. “What?”

Max looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

It sounded like it might matter, but if he said that it didn’t, then she wasn’t going to bother asking more about it.

Instead, she tilted her head upward in his direction. He was much taller than he looked when he was in his car. “You’re Max Verstappen.”

He squinted a little under the sun. “Yeah. I am.”

“Why did you help me?” She asked. 

He shrugged, like it was obvious. “Because I don’t like people getting cornered. And Dutch media are, ah—assholes, sometimes.” Then, his mouth curved slightly, something close to teasing. “And because Lando would kill me if I let someone mess with you.”

She just stared at him.

Her stomach did something strange and fluttery that she didn’t like at all.

Max must’ve caught the look on her face because he looked away immediately, regret passing across his features like a cloud. “Anyway,” he added, tone turning brisk, “don’t let them bother you. You’re not public property.”

“I know that,” she said, a little too fast. “I just… forget sometimes. That I’m allowed to say no.”

He nodded once. “You are.”

Then he gave her a brief, crooked grin. “I’ll see you around, Amelia.”

And with that, he disappeared into the Red Bull motorhome, as though nothing unusual had happened at all.

Amelia stood there for a few seconds, her skin still prickling from the confrontation, her thoughts spinning in all directions. The iced coffee no longer felt essential. She turned sharply on her heel and made her way back toward McLaren.

The motorhome wasn’t quiet, or even particularly peaceful; but it was familiar.

It was safe.

—

Lando’s garage was louder than usual.

Or maybe Amelia just wasn’t settled yet; her ears hadn’t quite adjusted, and everything felt like it was pressing in from too many angles. The buzz of the generators, the thud of tyres being stacked, the distant screech of an engine on an out-lap. None of it was new, but it all felt sharper today. She tugged her sleeves over her wrists and walked the perimeter of the garage, not because she needed to check anything, but just because she needed to walk.

Lando was leaning over the front wing of his car, talking to his race engineer. His voice had the kind of ease that came only after a good FP3. He glanced up when she approached.

“You okay?” he asked, brow ticking up.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He didn’t believe her. She could see it in the way he paused, fully paused, mid-sentence with Will, and turned his body slightly toward her.

“You sure?”

She considered lying. Or deflecting. She was usually very good at both.

Instead, she told him, “I ran into Max.”

Lando blinked. “Verstappen?”

“Yes.”

He looked vaguely alarmed. “Did he—? I mean, are you—what happened?”

Amelia folded her arms across her chest and looked past him, toward the pit lane. “Viaplay tried to interview me. I wasn’t wearing anything official. I said no, but they kept asking questions. Then Max showed up and made them leave.”

“Oh.” Lando’s face shifted, obvious concern first, then something much tighter. “That’s… are you okay?”

“Max said that Dutch media can sometimes be assholes,” she added matter-of-factly. “His words.”

“He’d know that better than any of us.” Lando said. 

She looked at his hands, noticing that his veins were very blue. “He also said you would kill him if he let them mess with me.”

Lando coughed, and Will made a choked sound somewhere in the back of his throat.

“Did he?” Lando asked, ears already pink.

She nodded. “Yes.”

Will looked like he was trying not to laugh, which was odd, because she hadn’t heard anyone make a joke. Lando gave a little shrug. Will nudged him with an elbow, and Lando muttered, “Fuck off, mate,” under his breath.

She sighed, looking off toward the data screens. “I didn’t even get my iced coffee.” She mentioned. 

Lando leaned a little closer to her. “You want one now? We can go get it together.”

She shook her head. “No. Just… I want to stay here. Until quali starts.”

His smile got softer. “Yeah. Okay. You can do that.”

So she stood there, adjacent to him, not speaking; just listening to the familiar rhythms of the garage. Tyres being moved. Headsets crackling. Mechanics calling out numbers and adjustments.

She watched Lando pick up his gloves and flex his fingers into them, testing the fit. Quiet. Focused.

And then she turned, and for a split second, panicked. Her water bottle had been moved. She looked around quickly, breath hitching.

But Lando cleared his throat and caught her attention. He walked over to the back of the garage and pulled it from underneath the counter. “Put it in the mini fridge,” he told her. “Didn’t want it getting warm.”

She took it from him, stared at it for a long time, and then smiled. 

— 

iMessage — 5:08pm

Mom Hello, darling! Just checking in. Hope everything went well today x

Amelia Hello, mom. I have a question. How do you know if you have a crush on somebody?

Mom I think this conversation would be much easier on FaceTime. Are you back at the hotel yet?

Amelia No. Lando asked me if I’d like to go get burgers after qualifying and I said yes. Dad was busy so I didn’t tell him. I texted him though.

Mom Is Lando driving you to get burgers?

Amelia Yes. He is a very safe driver in a normal car. He drives exactly at the speed limit. I was a bit worried that he would speed, but he doesn’t :)

Mom That’s very nice, honey x

—

iMessage — 5:12pm

Tracy Brown (Wife) Zak Brown. You have some explaining to do.

Zak Brown (Husband) What’s going on, honey?

Tracy Brown (Wife) You tell me! Your driver has taken our daughter out on a date and you’re none the wiser!

Zak Brown (Husband) What? Which driver?

Tracy Brown (Wife) He is driving her, Zak. To go and get burgers. She texted you.

Zak Brown (Husband) SHE TEXTED ME “ALL GOOD” I THOUGHT THAT MEANT SHE WAS SAFE IN HER HOTEL ROOM UNDER TEN BLANKETS WATCHING A BARBIE MOVIE 

Tracy Brown (Wife) Nope. She’s in a car. With LANDO NORRIS. They’re going for a burger date.

Zak Brown (Husband) I’m calling his father. That little shit head. 

Tracy Brown (Wife) Don’t be dramatic. They’re just getting food. I think she likes him. It’s cute.

Zak Brown (Husband) Cute? Are you serious? The media are going to be all over this. 

Tracy Brown (Wife) Have you seriously not noticed? They’ve been the talk of the paddock for weeks! They’re attached at the hip. I don’t know how we missed this 

Zak Brown (Husband) I think I’m having a heart attack And also a stroke. 

— 

Amelia had already deconstructed her burger; bun on one side, lettuce on the other, everything organised into neat piles. She wasn’t sure if that was weird or not, but Lando hadn’t commented, so she assumed it was fine.

She cleared her throat, tapping her straw against the side of her milkshake. “I’m sorry if I’m in your garage too much.”

Lando blinked at her mid-bite. “What?”

“I just… I know it might be annoying. I don’t want to get in the way. But since I’m not really allowed in Carlos’ anymore—”

“Wait. Hold on.” He put his burger down, brows pulling together. “What do you mean you’re not allowed in Carlos’ garage anymore?”

She picked up a fry, broke it in half, and frowned down at her tray. “Carlos’ dad told me, in China, that I wasn’t welcome in there. So I’ve just been staying in yours.”

There was a long pause. Then, “Fuck that.” Lando said. He was digging his phone out of his pocket. 

Amelia blinked at him, taken aback. “What are you doing?”

“I’m texting Carlos.” He stared down at his phone, typing furiously. “That’s absolute bullshit. You’re not just allowed in my garage, Amelia, you’re wanted there. You practically run the place. I mean, I was wondering why you didn’t spend any time in Carlos’ anymore, and he’s been thinking this whole time that he did something wrong.”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t run anything—”

“You do.” He cut her off, still a little frantic. She stared at him. He took a deep breath. “I’m serious, Amelia. Everyone listens to you. Even Will. Which is terrifying.”

She bit her lip, worrying as she glanced at his phone. “It’s okay, though. I like your garage better, anyway.”

Lando smiled at her. “Good. But still. He can’t just get away with that. Carlos appreciated your input — he told me so. And you belong wherever you want to be, yeah?”

Her face felt warm. She reached for another fry, more for something to do with her hands than out of hunger.

“Also,” he added, a little more casually than before — but she didn’t miss the way his jaw was set, or how his voice had tightened just slightly. “Next time someone tells you that you’re not welcome somewhere you want to be… just tell me, alright? I’ll handle it.”

She tilted her head, frowning slightly. “Handle it how?”

“I don’t know,” he said, grabbing another fry. “However I have to.”

— 

iMessage — 7:48pm

Lando Norris oye

Carlos Sainz qué pasa

Lando Norris did your dad seriously tell Amelia she wasn’t welcome in your garage?

Carlos Sainz ¿qué? when??

Lando Norris few races ago. bahrain she just told me she thinks you don’t want her around

Carlos Sainz no jodas I never said that I just thought she was busy I will talk to him. 

Lando Norris she didn’t wanna say anything

Carlos Sainz

I am glad that she did. 

tell her I never said that and that she is welcome any time

Lando Norris yh. already told her but yeah, sort your dad out mate 

Carlos Sainz voy a hacerlo ahora mismo this is nonsense

Lando Norris cheers mate

Carlos Sainz de nada are you with her right now?

Lando Norris we’re just getting burgers no biggie 

Carlos Sainz Liar.

NEXT CHAPTER

[charmed-asylum]

Jj

I love how JJ literally running from responsibility but he will lose his shit if or when he finds out her stripping or Rafe . But she trying to talk to you can u n urs friends are more important. U miss a job interview for fishing oh yeah im gonna hate this man w a hand full of gold ready to swing it at someone

“JJ frowned but didn’t answer right away. He knew he was being a little unreasonable- but in his defense he was just a teen. His silence however told her everything. She looked at him and momentarily took in his appearance, his messy blond hair, his summer kissed skin; she envied him a little, the way he was always out and about, not worried, never stressed. She muttered, turning on her heel.”

I think I agree w reader and many people that not only we dealt with this but somehow things change on age like when we was JJ AGE did we not want to do the same but somehow things telling me we didn’t

Then I think back to again sad truth a lot of people deal with this not because they wanted to but even with it being hell they had no choice. JJ should know and he not making it easy for them acting way he does what if she died or walk off he be alone. “ . Sometimes she wished she could turn back time, move back to when she didn't even know about all of this, before she showed her dad she could look after herself - and JJ… maybe then she wouldn't have this constant weight on her shoulders.” Then if not all this bills and what not her dad damn wtf wrong w this family in my mind she and JJ have different moms so shit mom had to leave her w this shit. “She’s gripping the wheel tightly, her thoughts tangled in the mess of overdue payments, an empty fridge, and a father and brother who barely acknowledge her existence unless they want something” this speaks volumes like all of this hub yes . Like this whole thing while these two MEN don’t care much for her just use her I feel that this will make it easy for Rafe at end of the day she use to having to take care of men not once be pamper sad but true even when Tommy ask her you trouble she thinks of her dad and brother which haha u care so much but don’t do shit w ur hand out wow but I feel this is going to blow up in his face or rage get jealous n become that boyfriend I know too ahead of my self haha.

Why Tommy way more cool then I imagine one would be like I’m thinking player club type not Mafia w a heart, “I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

Neither is ungrateful dickd

And then he does shady shit tommy Tommy . Damn way they had a long as convo w no words when Rafe first came in I even scream and drop my phone like I didn’t see it coming . Way that dance happened im sorry while he playing w her idk what relationship she had w him before or in school how she was but he in deep nah bc if he want to get back at JJ TAKE PICS N POST no no no he wanted this and only him maybe berry but bc he there to be witness but im sure even that not gonna last it’s not his style damn that dance im sure next time it won’t be the same nope not at all. I’m hook 🪝

Bunny

Rafe Cameron x Maybank!Reader

summary: Struggling to keep her and JJ’s home afloat, Y/N turns to the only option that guarantees fast cash- stripping at a club on the Cut. But when Rafe Cameron catches her in the act, he sees the perfect opportunity to tighten his grip around her life.

a/n: I actually said I'd never do another series again but here we are 😼. Looollll anywho, Y/N literally is literally a walking definition of older child syndrome and her and Rafe hate eachother so much stop. This is gonna be such a good enemies to lovers get me outta here

warnings: mentions of drugs, smoking, drinking, a strip club (duh), naked women, drug dealing, aggressive behaviour.

(P2)

The faucet dripped steadily, each drop hitting the rust-stained sink with an echo that filled the quiet of the house. Y/N stood in the cramped bathroom, arms crossed, lips pressed together in frustration as she watched the slow but relentless leak. 

Another thing broken. 

Another thing they couldn’t afford to fix.

She let out a slow breath, running a hand down her face before turning sharply at the sound of footsteps thudding through the hallway. She knew them well—JJ, heading for the door, heading out. Again.

“JJ.” 

Her voice was firm, but it barely slowed him down as he moved through the house, searching for his keys. He muttered, pushing past the worn couch and shoving a hand into the pocket of his frayed shorts.

“Not now, Y/N, alright?” 

“JJ, seriously.” 

She stepped into his path, arms out now, forcing him to stop. 

“Can you just- can you talk to me for five seconds?”

“What?”

His blue eyes flicked up to hers, but there was impatience in them, already halfway gone even as he stood in front of her. Y/N clenched her jaw, gesturing back toward the bathroom. 

“Shit’s breaking faster than I can fix it. We need money and I can’t do this alone.”

“I’ll figure something out, okay?” 

JJ sighed, rubbing a hand down his face as he stepped around her, heading toward the door again. She let out a humorless scoff watching her brother avoid the conversation- once again.

 “What about that job interview at the gas station I told you about last week?”

She’d told him about it last monday, she could still remember begging the manager to give him a chance, given his reputation- well it wasn't the best. JJ’s shoulders tensed slightly, and for the first time, he hesitated. 

“Uh… yeah, about that…”

Y/N’s stomach dropped. She already knew the answer before he finished his sentence. She spoke slowly, warning in her tone.

 “JJ” 

“Look, me and the Pogues were fishing, and we kinda… lost track of time.”

He winced, rubbing the back of his neck. Y/N shut her eyes, exhaling sharply as she lifted her hands to cover her face. 

“Are you serious?”

“I mean, technically, I did show up. Just… a little late.”

JJ let out a half-hearted chuckle, like maybe that’d soften the blow. She dropped her hands, shaking her head as exhaustion settled deep in her bones. 

“Jesus, Jay. Do you even care?”

JJ frowned but didn’t answer right away. He knew he was being a little unreasonable- but in his defense he was just a teen. His silence however told her everything. She looked at him and momentarily took in his appearance, his messy blond hair, his summer kissed skin; she envied him a little, the way he was always out and about, not worried, never stressed. She muttered, turning on her heel.

“Forget it” 

“Y/N—”

But she was already walking away, back toward the bathroom, back toward the leaking faucet, back toward everything she had to deal with alone. JJ hesitated for a second, watching her go, then sighed and yanked open the door. And then it shut behind him, leaving Y/N standing there in the silence. She swallowed hard, blinking back the stinging frustration behind her eyes.

"Yeah," she muttered to herself, voice barely above a whisper.

 "Guess I'll figure it out myself."

After a while she had given up on the leaky faucet, cleaning up the house- to the best of her ability- before settling down in the kitchen.The stack of bills sat on the dining table, a messy pile of final notices and overdue warnings. Y/N stared at them, her fingers running over the edges of the envelopes, as if touching them could somehow make the numbers smaller, make the debt disappear. The utilities, the rent- hell, even the grocery bill? It was all piling up faster than she could keep up with. Sometimes she wished she could turn back time, move back to when she didn't even know about all of this, before she showed her dad she could look after herself - and JJ… maybe then she wouldn't have this constant weight on her shoulders.

With a sigh, she dropped her head down onto the table, resting her forehead against the cool surface. Think, think, think. There had to be a way to come up with money, something quick, something that didn’t involve relying on JJ, because clearly that wasn’t an option either now. Her mind raced through possibilities, but every idea led to a dead end. The front door swung open and then slammed shut. Y/N didn’t even lift her head as heavy, stumbling footsteps made their way inside. 

She knew that gait all too well. 

Her jaw clenched as her father mumbled something incoherent under his breath, his words slurred, laced with whatever shit he had put in his system tonight. She stayed still, hoping, praying, that he’d just pass out somewhere and leave her be. Without a word to her, he shuffled through the house, disappearing into her bedroom. Y/N pursed her lips, lifting her head slightly as she listened to him rustling around in there. She knew better than to go after him. Whatever he was looking for- money, booze, something to pawn- she wasn’t about to get in his way.

Instead, she pushed back from the table, standing up slowly, her hands pressing against the wood as she steadied herself. The house was too quiet now, except for the occasional sound of drawers opening and closing in her room. Her stomach twisted. She needed to get out of here, needed to fix this mess before it swallowed her whole.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She’d been driving with no real destination, letting the silence of the night and the hum of the engine settle her thoughts. She’s gripping the wheel tightly, her thoughts tangled in the mess of overdue payments, an empty fridge, and a father and brother who barely acknowledge her existence unless they want something.Then, as she’s driving through the dimly lit streets, she passes by it. The neon sign flickers, casting a dull pink glow onto the pavement, and without even thinking, she slams the brakes. Her car comes to a sudden stop in the middle of the empty street and can feel her seat belt digging into her chest momentarily, her heart pounding as she stares at the building.

It’s not like she’s never thought about it before. 

She’s heard things, seen the type of girls who walk in and out of there, all done up with money to spend. And right now, she has nothing- nothing but overdue bills and a house falling apart. Her hands grip the steering wheel, knuckles turning white. A part of her wants to just drive away, pretend she never even considered it. But another part of her- the part that’s desperate, the part that’s sick of drowning- knows this might be her only shot. She swallows hard, taking a deep breath before finally pulling her car to the curb. She sits there for a second, hands still on the wheel, staring at the entrance, she brings her hand up to rub it down her face, hand resting over her mouth as she thinks. 

Really thinks.

Then, before she can change her mind, she kills the engine and steps out.

The night air is cool against her skin, but it does nothing to settle the heat rising in her chest. Her heart is hammering, her stomach twisting as she closes the car door behind her. The pavement feels unsteady beneath her feet as she walks toward the entrance. The music from inside is faint but pulsing, the bass reverberating through the ground. She hesitates, staring at the worn-down exterior and the neon sign buzzing overhead. As she approached the door, something caught her eye- a flyer taped to the window, the bold letters glaring at her in the dimming light.

NOW HIRING

This is insane. 

She shouldn’t be here.

And yet, she doesn’t turn around, instead her fingers flex at her sides before she pushes the door open, stepping inside. The shift in atmosphere is immediate. The air is thick with perfume and alcohol, the dim lighting casting deep shadows across the room. The club isn’t packed- it’s late on a weekday- but there are still men scattered around, cash in hand, eyes glued to the stage. A girl moves fluidly under the colored lights, her body illuminated by pinks and blues as she wraps herself around the pole. Y/N swallows, forcing herself to keep walking, past the wandering eyes of men who glance at her but don’t linger. She doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, only that if she stops now, she’ll most likely lose her nerve.

She spots a bar toward the back and makes a beeline for it, hands slightly clammy. A woman stands behind the counter, pouring a drink for some guy in a suit. Y/N waits until she’s done before leaning in slightly. 

“Hey, um- do you know who I talk to if I’m looking for a job?”

The woman lifts a brow, gaze flicking over Y/N, taking her in. Then, without a word, she jerks her chin toward a door near the back as she picks up a glass on the counter and starts drying it. 

“Through there. Ask for Tommy.”

Y/N nods, her pulse jumping as she turns toward the door. This is it. She can still leave, still pretend she never came here. But instead, she takes a breath and pushes the door open. The door swings shut behind her with a dull thud, muffling the thumping bass from the main room. The air back here feels different- less suffocating, it’s dimly lit, the walls lined with old vintage posters of strippers and liquor crates, the faint scent of cigarettes lingers in the air.

Y/N’s eyes adjust quickly, landing on a man seated behind a cluttered desk, lazily counting a stack of cash. He looks to be in his late forties, broad-shouldered with thinning hair and a face that’s seen its fair share of rough nights. A half-smoked cigarette dangles between his fingers. He doesn’t look up immediately, just exhales a cloud of smoke before finally lifting his gaze to hers. His eyes sweep over her, slow and calculating. 

“You lost, sweetheart?”

“I saw you were hiring.”

Y/N shakes her head, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket.That piques his interest. He leans back in his chair, eyeing her with something between amusement and scrutiny. 

“That so?”

“Yeah. I—I need a job.”

She nods, trying to keep her voice steady. Tommy taps his fingers against the desk, sizing her up. 

“You ever danced before?”

Y/N hesitates for half a second, “No.”

He smirks like he expected that answer, responding with a slow nod as he places the money he was counting into an envelope labeled ‘Bambi’. 

“You got any experience bartending? Serving?”

“...I'm a waitress at the country club.”

His brow lifts, and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to laugh in her face. Instead, he sighs, rubbing a hand down his jaw, momentarily pausing as he closes up the envelope, puts it onto a pile and looks up to her. 

“So, what? You just walked in here hoping I’d throw you on stage?”

“I’m a fast learner.”

Y/N presses her lips together, shifting on her feet. Tommy watches her for a beat, then gestures toward the empty chair across from him. 

“Sit.”

She does, moving forward and lowering herself onto the chair in front of him, the leather squeaking a little as it makes contact with her bare thighs. He studies her in the dim light, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray. 

“What’s your name?”

“Y/N.”

“Well, Y/N,” he says, dragging the word out like he’s tasting it. “You don’t look like a girl who just woke up one day and decided this is what she wanted to do. So tell me- what are you really doing here?”

“I need the money.”

Y/N clenches her jaw. Tommy hums, nodding like that doesn’t surprise him as he taps the ash of his cigarette on the edge of an empty whiskey glass. 

“That part’s obvious.” 

He leans forward slightly as he continues, resting his elbows on the table. 

“But I need to know what I’m dealing with. You got people who’ll come looking for you? A jealous boyfriend? Strict parents? Any reason this might come back to bite me in the ass?”

Y/N hesitates, because the truth is- complicated. JJ wouldn’t approve, not in a million years, his sister working in a strip club? There was no way he would be happy about it, but the more she thought about it, he’s barely around- and besides she is the older sibling. And Luke? She doubts he’d even notice with the way he’s always high out of his mind. Yet deep down she knew, if he did find out it certainly wouldn’t end well.

“No,” she says finally. 

“No one’s coming after me.”

Tommy watches her carefully, like he’s weighing her answer. Then, with a slow nod, he exhales another stream of smoke and flicks his butt of his cigarette into the glass. 

“Alright, Y/N… I’ll give you a shot.”

Relief floods her chest, but it’s short-lived as he continues.

“First things first- you start off small. No stage, not yet. You’ll work the floor. Waitress, maybe some private rooms if you’re up for it. Tips are yours, but the house gets a cut. If you prove you can handle yourself, we’ll talk about dancing.”

Y/N nods, ignoring the way her stomach tightens at the mention of private rooms. She can handle this. She has to. Tommy gestures toward the door. 

“Come in tomorrow night. Nine o’clock. One of the girls will show you the ropes.”

“Okay, thank you.”

He hums out as Y/N stands up, gripping the back of the chair briefly before letting go. As she turns to leave her hand reaching out for the door handle, Tommy’s voice stops her.

“One last thing, sweetheart.”

She glances back.

“I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

His gaze is sharp, knowing. Y/N doesn’t reply. What could she possibly say to him? She just nods once and steps back through the door, back into the neon-lit haze of the club.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The dressing room hummed with chatter, the air thick with the scent of perfume, body shimmer, and a mix of fruity smoke drifting around. Mirrors lined the walls, reflecting girls in various states of getting ready- adjusting lingerie straps, applying a final coat of lip gloss, securing thigh-high stockings into garter belts. Y/N sat at one of the vanities, leaning in close as she fixed the last flick of her eyeliner. Her figure was wrapped in black lace, tiny straps and sheer panels leaving just enough to the imagination- but she still had a few finishing touches to go. Naomi- better known as Bambi- was beside her, placing her straightener down and popping her gum loudly as she smirked at Y/N through the mirror. 

“You’re getting faster at this,” She mused, eyes flicking down to Y/N’s hands as she fastened a delicate silver choker with a small heart pendant around her neck. 

“First week, you were takin’ forever in here. Now look at you. A real pro, Bunny.”

Y/N rolled her eyes but smiled, smoothing out a stray strand of hair before reaching for her gloss. She teased, voice light but with that tired edge that never quite went away these days.

“Yeah, yeah. You gonna pat me on the head next?” 

“Mmm, maybe after your first private dance of the night. If you’re good girl.”

Bambi grinned and Y/N huffed a laugh, pressing her lips together to even out the gloss. A month and some into this life, and she wasn’t sure if she was settling in or just getting better at pretending she had. It was easier now- knowing the regulars, knowing what songs meant what, knowing how to smile just enough but not too much. The money helped. 

God, did the money help.

She glanced down at her phone, screen lighting up with a notification. 

JJ :  Staying at John B’s 

JJ  :  See you tmr

JJ  :  Good luck at work!!!

Y/N stares at the screen for a moment, her stomach twisting like it always does when she thinks about how much she’s keeping from him. He thinks she picked up an extra night cleaning shift at the country club since that’s what she told him. He has no idea that while he’s crashing at the chateau, she’s slipping into heels and stepping onto a stage under flashing neon lights. She locks her phone, pushing the thought away. 

Guilt won’t pay the bills.

“Busy night, you think?”

She spoke as she ignored the message, flipping the phone over and looking back at the girl next to her. Bambi gave a lazy stretch, rolling out her shoulders. 

“Always is on a Friday. High rollers’ll be in. You might get lucky.”

“Yeah, real lucky.”

Y/N scoffed, grabbing her perfume and spritzing it lightly over her collarbones. Bambi side-eyed her, then leaned in with a smirk. 

“Come on, Bunny. You might actually have fun tonight. If not, at least make it worth your while.”

Y/N just hummed, adjusting the strap on her heel as the familiar pulse of bass-heavy music leaked in from the club floor. The music thrums through the floor as Y/N steps out of the dressing room, the familiar pulse of bass settling into her bones. The club is alive tonight- packed booths, the bar swarmed with men flashing cash, neon strobes flickering over clinking glasses and loose laughter. Bambi walks beside her, adjusting the strap of her bra as she surveys the crowd. 

“It’s a good night,” she muses, eyes gleaming as a man waves down a waitress with a fat roll of bills in his hand. 

“Everyone’s in a generous mood hmm.”

 “Looks like it.”

Y/N hums, already spotting a few regulars scattered through the crowd. The air is thick with perfume and cologne, the scent of whiskey and something heavier and smokier lingering beneath. Girls weave through the crowd, balancing trays of drinks, draping themselves over men who let them. The DJ’s set switches, the bass rattling the room, A voice calls from near the DJ booth, and Bambi nudges Y/N with her hip, a smirk tugging at her lips as she sends her a little kiss.

“Knock ’em dead, baby.”

Y/N exhales, rolling her shoulders back as she steps into the chaos of the club. The energy is thick tonight- bodies packed around the stage, eager hands already tossing bills, the bass thrumming deep in her ribs. She grips the pole, the cool metal grounding her for a brief moment before she moves.The nerves are familiar but distant now, part of the routine; she’s used to it- the way the outside world fades the second she steps onto the platform.

Her body flows with the music, slow and teasing at first, rolling her hips as she wraps a leg around the pole and lifts herself with ease. She spins, the world blurring for a second, heels gliding effortlessly over the platform. A whistle cuts through the noise. A few more bills flutter at her feet.

She twists, sliding down with a deliberate drag before pushing herself back up, hooking her knee and arching her back; thighs squeezing the pole as she extends her body in a perfect line. The music pulses, dictating her movements- fluid and sultry. For a moment, there’s nothing but the heat of the lights and the electric charge of the crowd.

But then as she lifts her gaze mid-spin, her eyes catch on something in the far corner.

Two men in a booth, half-hidden in the dim lighting. They sit relaxed, a quiet presence amidst the chaos, yet people keep coming up to them- leaning in, hands subtly exchanging cash, small bags slipping from one palm to another. She doesn’t need to look too closely to know what’s going down. She presses her palm to the pole, as her feet hit the platform again, hips swaying slowly, her focus slipping back to the crowd in front of her, but something gnaws at her, pulling her attention back. Then, the lights shift, a quick flash of neon, just bright enough to cut through the shadows, and she sees him.

Rafe Cameron.

And he’s looking right at her.

Leaning back in the booth, one arm draped lazily over the seat, a glass of whiskey in his other hand. Her breath catches in her throat, her grip faltering just slightly as she steadies herself. But it’s too late. Her moment is stiffer now, the tension stretched between them, across the crowded room, and he’s locked in the way he watches her. Unblinking. She can’t tell what he’s thinking but she knows one thing for certain- 

He knows exactly who she is.

Y/N forces herself to keep moving, to stay in rhythm with the music despite the ice-cold feeling creeping up her spine. But it’s impossible to ignore the weight of Rafe’s stare. It lingers burning through the dim haze of the club. She glides down the pole, making sure to keep her expression smooth- indifferent. Her heart is hammering against her ribs, but no one in the audience would know it. They see only the show, the slow hypnotising sway of her hips as she lands back on the stage, the way her fingers tease at the hem of her lace bra before she moves toward the edge of the stage dropping to her knees. The song is winding down. One last arch of her back, one last deliberate sweep of her hands up her thighs before letting the final beat pulse through her body.

Applause, whistles, the sound of crisp bills hitting the stage.

She scoops up what she can as she stands, but her mind is barely there. Not when she can still feel the weight of him watching. As she steps offstage, she risks a glance toward the booth again.This time Barry is grinning, chatting with some guy in a backwards cap who’s slipping a wad of cash into his pocket. And Rafe- he’s still looking at her, Y/N’s breath catches as their eyes meet again and this time, he smirks. It’s small, almost lazy, but there’s something in it that makes her stomach flip.

Shit.

She rips her gaze away, hurrying toward the bar, barely registering the sound of heels clicking against the floor or the music thumping through the speakers. She drops her earnings into her basket at the end of the bar- before grabbing a glass of water. Her hands are steady as she lifts it, but her heart is pounding wildly. The bartender gives her a once-over as she wipes down the counter. 

“Damn, Bunny- y'look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You have no idea.”

Y/N exhales, pressing the cold glass to her lips. Her eyes drift back to Rafe before she can stop herself. He’s talking to someone else now, some guy in a backward cap, shaking his hand as something small and discreet trades between them-

Fucking hell.

She jumps at the sudden touch on her arm, nearly spilling her drink. Whipping around, she exhales sharply when she sees who it is.

“Jesus, Tommy.”

“What’s up with you?”

“Nothing- It’s nothing.”

She responds as she shakes her head slightly, Tommy doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it slide.

“Someone put in a request for you.”

“Who?”

Y/N wipes her palm against her thigh, trying to shake the uneasy feeling creeping up her spine. Tommy leans in slightly, his voice calling out over the music as his head nods in the direction she was just looking. 

“Rafe Cameron.”

Y/N freezes and Tommy notices her stiff shoulders instantly. 

“Something I should know about?”

“Um… I think he and his friend are selling coke-”

“—I know” 

Tommy says easily as he picks up one of the clean empty glasses on the bar, putting it away. Y/N frowns at his words. Since the first day she’d started working here, he had stated to her he had ‘zero-tolerance’ for any of the girls doing coke… so how come now, Rafe Cameron was allowed to walk in here and make this his personal dealing spot. 

“But I thought you—”

“I made a deal with them,” he shrugs, “keeps people coming in, keeps them buying drinks. Business is business Y/N.”

“Right.”

Y/N purses her lips as he speaks and Tommy studies her for a moment, then gestures towards where Rafe was sitting, once again passing over something she couldn't quite make out to a man in a white shirt. 

“I can send someone else, but you’ll lose out on the cash for the night.” 

His voice has that slight edge to it, the one that tells her he won’t be making a habit of exceptions. She hesitates. She could probably say no. She should say no. But then she thinks about the pile of bills waiting for her at home, the ones she still doesn’t know how she’s going to all pay.

“I—” She clears her throat. 

“It’s fine.”

“Good. He’s waiting.”

Y/N exhales, setting her glass down with a quiet clink and then she turns, smoothing out her hair, checking her reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall. Rafe still leaned back in one of the lounge chairs, legs spread, arm slung over the back of the seat. Barry is beside him, but he isn’t paying attention to whatever he’s saying. His eyes are already on her.

Watching. 

Waiting.

She swallows hard, ignoring the way her pulse kicks up as she straightens her shoulders and starts moving toward him. Her heels click against the floor, her movements slow and she can feel the weight of his gaze. When she finally stops in front of him, Rafe tips his head slightly, a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

“Hey there, Bunny.”

Y/N clenches her jaw at the sound of his voice- low and smooth, edged with amusement. She doesn’t let it show, though. Instead, she gives him the same sultry smile she’s perfected for every other man who’s sat in front of her.

“Cameron” 

She says, tilting her head slightly, letting her fingers trail lightly over her bare thigh. Rafe grins like this is all some kind of joke. Like she isn’t standing in front of him in six-inch heels and a barely-there outfit, about to dance for him like she doesn’t know exactly who he is.

"Didn’t think I’d ever see you here"

His voice is smug like he’s savouring every second of this. Y/N bites back a retort. She wants to tell him to fuck off. Wants to ask him what the fuck he’s doing here, why he put in a request for her.

But she doesn’t. 

Because she can’t.

Her fingers twitch by her side as she takes a step closer instead, smoothly moving into his space. Rafe doesn’t move back. If anything, his smirk deepens as he spreads his legs a little wider and Barry chuckles beside him, knocking back the rest of his drink before running his hand over his head. He mutters, already moving to stand.

“ 'ight I’ll leave you to it,” 

But before he can leave, Rafe shakes his head, a smirk pulling at his lips,

"No, no—stay man."

Y/N’s stomach twists. She doesn’t want an audience, especially not Barry, she doesn't even want to be doing this in the first place. The club is still packed, neon lights flickering across the space. There are men scattered around, girls in their laps, some whispering things in their ears that’ll have them reaching for their wallets without hesitation. Y/N has done this a hundred times now. She knows the drill.

But this- this is different.

She inhales slowly as she notices Barry sitting back in his seat, eyes racking over her body and she has to restrain herself from rolling her eyes. She hesitant, her inner conflict gnawing at her mind but eventually she lets out a small breath a moves forward, swinging a leg over Rafe’s lap, lowering herself onto his thighs, moving her hips in a way that’s meant to tease. She lets her hands trail up his chest in a way that’s meant to be practiced and seductive. But then- his hand comes to rest on her hip.

Her whole body tenses.

Rafe notices. Of course he does. His thumb presses against the curve of her hip, just enough to make her teeth clench. Y/N forces a tight-lipped smile, shifting on his lap just enough to make it look like part of the dance- but really, it’s an attempt to put space between them. Her voice stays low, sharp beneath the sultry act.

"There’s a no-touching policy."

Rafe’s smirk doesn’t falter. If anything, it deepens. His fingers stay right where they are, his grip on her hip solid, unmoving. He tilts his head slightly, blue eyes gleaming with something threatening.

"None of the policies here apply to me, Maybank."

He speaks out as his finger slips under the strap of her black thong, tugging on it and letting it snap back into position, the feeling causing a sharp sting on her skin. The way he says her last name- it’s teasing, taunting. Like he enjoys the way it sounds in his mouth and Y/N can’t help but clench her jaw at the thought, heat creeping up her neck.bShe doesn’t let her movements falter though, even as his words sink into her skin like a slow-burning ember. Her ass grinds down onto his lap intone with the song blaring out through teh clubs speakers, her fingers trailing over his shoulders, a practiced motion, a distraction- for herself more than for him.

“That so?”

She murmurs, voice light, teasing, playing into the role she’s supposed to be in. Rafe lets out a quiet hum, his thumb stroking over the thin fabric of her outfit.

“Mhm. I don’t think Tommy would wanna lose his best customers, do you?”

She bites down on the inside of her cheek at his words but th rhythmic roll of her hips never stops. She knows he' s pushing her.

It’s in his nature.

Barry lets out a low whistle from his seat which is followed by a chuckle. Her eye's drift over to him sitting his legs spread wide as he takes lazy sips from his drink.

“Damn didn’t peg you for this line of work Maybank. Not that I’m complainin’.”

Her spine stiffens, at she meets his eye's- yet she refuses to give them the satisfaction of leaving before the song is finished. Her focus shifts to Rafe, on the smug expression he wears as he watches her, like he’s got all the time in the world.

Like he’s enjoying this far too much.

Y/N exhales sharply through her nose. He’s trying to get under her skin. And it’s working. Rafe grins, his grip on her hips unwavering he taunts, his other hand sliding down to her thigh, drifting awfully close to her inner thigh as he tilts his head slightly.

“What’s the matter huh? You dance for all these guys, but you’re nervous around me?”

The song drags on, seconds feeling like minutes. Her body moves on instinct, performing for him, back arching as she struggles not to unravel under his gaze. And then, just as she starts to think she can get through this without losing it- he leans in. His breath fans against her ear as he speaks, voice just low enough for only her to hear.

“Wonder what your brother would think if he saw you like this.”

His voice is casual, but there’s something sharp behind it, something that makes her stomach twist. Her jaw tightens.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Just seems like something he’d wanna know,”

Rafe doesn’t even acknowledge her as she speaks, his full attention locked onto the way her hips are still grinding against him. He muses, tilting his head.

“Bet he thinks you’re a little cleaner or somethin' huh?”

Her pulse thrums in her ears, but she doesn’t let it show. Rafe’s smirk deepens, catching the movement. His fingers drum now against her knee.

“Relax, Y/N. I’m just making conversation.”

“Yeah? Funny, doesn’t feel like that.”

She scoffs under her breath. He hums, tilting his head as he takes her in, eyes darting down from her face. Her stomach knots, but she refuses to cower under his gaze. Instead, she leans in just enough that only he can hear her. “You know,” she murmurs, voice dripping with saccharine sweetness,

“most guys just pay and keep their mouths shut.”

Rafe tutted, a slow, mocking sound, then, before she can react, Rafe casually plucks a few crisp fifty-dollar bills from the stack in front of him. His fingers ghost along the curve of her waist before he shoves them right between her pushed up tits, tucking the money into her bra. Heat rushes to her face- not from embarrassment, but from the pure, seething hatred bubbling up inside her. Her jaw tightens, and she shoots him a glare so sharp it could cut glass. Barry, watching the whole thing unfold, bursts into laughter, slapping his knee like it’s the funniest thing he’s seen all night.

“Country Club” he wheezes, “she gon' kill you man”

“Nah,” he drawls, eyes flicking up to hers.

“She likes it.”

Rafe just smirks, leaning back lazily in his seat and she scoffs, the sound sharp and dripping with disgust, before snatching the money from between her tits and throwing it straight at him. The crisp bills flutter uselessly against his chest before falling into his lap, but she doesn’t care.

She doesn’t want his money- doesn’t want anything from him.

She shifts to push off his lap, to put distance between them, but Rafe moves faster. His hand snaps around her wrist in an iron grip, yanking her back down before she can escape. A sharp gasp slips from her lips as she stumbles into him, her free hand landing against his chest to steady herself.

He’s close now.

Too close.

Rafe’s smirk fades slightly, replaced by something more irritated as he stares up at her. His fingers tighten around her wrist, his grip just bordering on painful, a silent warning.

“I’d be real careful, Bunny”

Rafe murmurs, his voice low and laced with something that makes her stomach uneasy. Her breath catches, but she refuses to look away, her glare burning into him. He tilts his head slightly, his smirk creeping back as he studies her reaction.

“You wouldn’t want your brother to hear about this little conversation, would you?”

The words hang heavy between them, and she swallows hard, her pulse hammering. Y/N sits there, her body tense, her expression carved from pure, unfiltered hatred. Every fiber of her being screams at her to move, to slap that smug look off his face, but she doesn’t. Because if Rafe tells JJ… she doesn’t know what she’d do.

He watches her, sharp and calculating, before plucking the discarded money from his lap. He folds the crisp bills between his fingers in half, before bringing them up to her face. His eyes stay locked on hers, and his lips curl into that insufferable smirk.

“Open up”

He murmurs, voice taunting but firm. Her jaw clenches and she doesn’t move. Amusement flickers in his gaze, but there’s something else there too- something that tells her that she'd not got much choice now. He lifts a brow, daring her to defy him and she hates herself for it, but after a long, thick moment of silence, she slowly parts her lips. Rafe hums in satisfaction, slipping the folded-up bills between her teeth.

“Atta girl”

He muses as she bites down, his fingers lingering just a second longer than necessary before he pulls away. He leans back lazily in his seat, studying her with open amusement, eyes flicking between the money in her mouth and the fire still burning in her gaze. She can tell he’s so fucking satisfied. The song finally comes to an end, the heavy bass fading into the low murmur of conversation and clinking glasses. The second the last note plays and a new one begins, she jerks her wrist free from his grasp, ripping her hand away like his touch burns her.

Her mind is racing- anger, humiliation, and something else she doesn’t want to name all tangling together in a storm inside her chest. She stands abruptly, plucking the money from between her lips with two fingers like it’s tainted. Without even sparing him a glance, she turns on her heel, ready to put as much distance between herself and Rafe Cameron as possible.

But then- she feels it.

The sharp smack lands right on her ass, firm and unapologetic. A small gasp passes her lips and the audacity of it sends white-hot anger surging through her veins, and she whips around so fast her hair nearly follows the motion. Barry is already laughing, a deep, wheezing sound, blowing out a thick puff of smoke as he watches the scene unfold like it’s the best entertainment of the night.

And Rafe?

Rafe just grins up at her, infuriatingly relaxed, his expression unreadable save for the smug amusement dancing in his eyes. Then, as if he hadn't already done enough, he puckers his lips, blowing her a lazy, taunting little kiss to her. She stares at him, disgust and fury twisting in her chest, her fists clenching at her sides- heart thumping heavily in her chest as she becomes certain of one thing.

She’s never hated anyone more in her life.

taglist: @xoxosblogsblog @moonywhisp3rs @i-love-gvf @my-name-is-baby @ltristessedureratoujours @stoned-writer @mariamadison6-blog @rafecameronswhoore @lovelytoomusic @rafesgurl @mysticbby2009 @vanessa-rafesgirl @silkenthusiasts @partygirl14 @amterasuu @xoxo-ada @icaqttt @willowpains @ivysprophecy @mauvesmax @larema121 @ggraycelynn

[stevesgother]

i adore chalkboard hearts! could i see steve and reader explaining to abby shes gunna be a big sister 🥰

here is this for you darling <3 thank you so much for reading steve harrington x fem!reader

"Mommy?" Abbey asks as she mindlessly roots through the bathroom drawers, looking for nothing in particular, "What is this thing?"

You barely spare a glance from where you're applying your makeup in the mirror above the sink. Ever since the wedding, Abbey has made it her life's mission to never not be right next to you. 'Misdirected jealousy', your mom had told you. It didn't matter what you were doing: cooking dinner, folding laundry-- bathing, for Christ's sake-- Abbey would be there.

That's why you don't register that your daughter is holding your clean, but used nonetheless, pregnancy test. But Steve does, when he pokes his head around the door to check in on the two of you.

"Hey, you almost--oh-- Abbey don't touch that!" He says, all in one panicked breath.

You finally chance a look at what she's holding, immediately understanding Steve's reaction. Without another thought, you quickly snatch it from her innocent hands.

Abbey's still looking up at you inquisitively. She did ask you a question, after all.

"Oh, this? This is-- uhm, it's a, uhm--"

"It's a thermometer!" Steve saves.

"Then why can't I touch it?" She pushes further. You should've known better than to think she would drop it that easily.

"Steve checked my temperature with it a couple of weeks ago, so now it has all my sick germs on it." Both you and Steve make sour faces to really sell it, though you can't see his from where he's perched behind you.

"Hey, Ab," Steve prompts, "I have something really important I need your help with,"

Her ears perk instantly, "Yeah?"

"I need you to go into the kitchen and get some things out to make sandwiches while I talk to your mom, do you think you can do that for me?"

"Uh-huh!" She beams, Steve's request appealing to her newfound craving for independence.

"I don't know," Steve lilts playfully, "You sure you're up for it?"

You're forever in awe at how he manages to make the most mundane tasks feel like an impossible mission; how he turns everything into a game. You'd kill to be a fly on the wall of his classroom all day, content to watch him perfectly in his element.

"Yes! I am!" Abbey giggles as she tries to weasel by Steve where he stands blocking the doorway. He lets her think she overpowered him when his legs finally give way to her freedom from the bathroom.

Steve takes one more glance over his shoulder, "We need to tell her," he says in a hushed sort of tone.

"I know," you pinch the bridge of your nose, "It's just, what if--"

"Nothing's going to happen, sweetheart." He reassures you with two strong arms wrapped around your waist, "The doctor said the ultrasound looked great, and you're not a high-risk pregnancy. You said you had no complications with Abbey, right?"

"Right, but--"

"No 'but's I'm not gonna let anything happen to you-- either of you. You know that." Steve guides your head to nestle in the crook of his neck, enough so that you can't see that he's scared, too.

"She's going to find out eventually," he reminds you.

"You're right," you sigh.

"Per usual." You pinch his side in retaliation, making him yelp.

"Let's have lunch, then we'll tell her?" You ask, lifting you head from the safety of his chest.

"If that's what you want to do, then that's what we'll do.

--

You don't work up the courage to speak until Abbey's halfway through her PB&J, but Steve picks up the slack for you. He's perfect like that.

"Abbey, babe-- there's something Steve and I want to talk to you about," you tell her, trying to keep your tone lighthearted, but your voice still wobbles slightly with nerves.

Both of them turn to face you then, Abbey's mouth full and Steve sending you a look that says You've got it, I'm here.

God, you don't even know where to begin.

"Do you remember-- right before we had that big party where mommy and Steve got married-- when I got sick during dinner time?"

Abbey nods, idly licking jelly off of her tiny fingers; waiting for you to continue.

"Well... I thought it was just because Steve's burgers tasted yucky--" She giggles and Steve lightly kicks your foot under the table, "Really, it was because I have a baby in my belly, and the baby was making me feel sick."

You can practically see the gears turning in her head; she's certainly old enough to understand what it means to be pregnant, but maybe not quite the logistics of it yet.

Both you and Steve wait with bated breaths to see how she'll react. You're bracing for the worst, but all she asks is, "Is the baby still in there now?"

You have to stifle a laugh, not wanting her to feel silly for asking questions, "Yes, it is. That means you're gonna have a little brother or sister,"

She takes another bite of her sandwich, mostly indifferent. You don't know what you were expecting, but this nonchalance was probably the last thing.

Steve decides to take the reins for a moment, hoping to coax a little more of a reaction out of her, "How does that sound?" He asks, shaking her shoulders playfully.

"Good, but-- will we still be able to go to the park?"

Maybe you had been totally overthinking this, "Of course," you tell her, "And the baby can come, too!"

"Does the baby have to come?" She asks, just the slightest bit of whine in her tone, resting her tired head in the propped-up palm of her hand.

"Not always," Steve chimes in, "You'll still get plenty of time with us without the baby, too. We don't want you to worry about that, okay?"

She nods, "Okay," sipping her chocolate milk casually from its straw. "Can we go play on the swings after I'm done?"

"Uhm, yeah, I think we can manage that," Steve smiles at Abbey first but looks to you like 'That's it?'. You only shrug in response.

--

"Did we totally butcher that?" You ask Steve later that night from where you lay waiting for him in your shared bed.

He answers you with his toothbrush hanging haphazardly out of his mouth; making eye contact through the bathroom mirror, "No, honey-- I think kids are just like that sometimes."

You groan, "I feel like a bad mom..."

"Hey," he spits into the sink, wiping his mouth on the nearest hand towel, "None of that, okay? You're a fantastic mom."

Even from across the room, Steve can sense your slurry of racing thoughts. Ones of insecurity and worry for the future of your family-- of your daughter, whom you'd swore would always be your greatest priority.

He makes his way to the edge of the bed where you're curled in on yourself, "It's not just you anymore, love," his hands brush a stray tear you hadn't even realized has fallen.

"What if she feels like-- I don't know, what if she feels like I'm replacing her?"

"Listen to me, I promise you-- Abbey is never going to question whether or not you love her." Steve's hand moves from your face to land gently on your belly, "And neither will she,"

You breathe a teary chuckle, "You seem awfully convinced it's a girl,"

"Yeah, well-- call it father's intuition."

Hearing him refer to himself as a father sends butterflies erupting in your belly, "Thank you, Stevie."

"Hey, I'm serious. Everything's gonna work itself out, alright? Ab just needs a little time to warm up." You nod in agreement, "I'm tellin' ya, once we start getting those cute little baby pajama things-- she's gonna be pumped."

You laugh at his unsuccessful search for the word 'onesie', but you don't correct him. You know he's right, and even if he's not, you're sure now more than ever that there's not a thing in this world you can't conquer together.

taglist - @soulxiez @sadieshairbrush @the-witty-pen-name @ilovetaquitosmmmm @micheledawn1975 @cherryc1nnam0n @paleidiot @adaydreamaway30 @mrsnarnian @negomi123 @twinkling-moonlillie @royalestrellas @jamdoughnutmagician @cali-888 @kolsmikaelson @1deverland @borhapparker @alexa4040 @chiliwhore @weonlysaidgoodbyewithwordss @paddockspookie42 @foxes-n-frogs @j-mlover383 @i-love-gfv @the-fairy-anon

[mariacallous]

Carlin Casey first considered the idea of human starvation when he was seven years old. Back then, in 1992, his mother, Mary, read aloud to him and his little sister, Karina, from an unusual bedtime story, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” The family led a life of relative abundance. At their pueblo-style home in California’s Coachella Valley, Mary blasted Madonna in the kitchen as she made her kids burgers or big plates of spaghetti, lighting candles and burning essential oils (“for the vibes,” Carlin told me). Curled up in bed, listening to his mother describe Anne Frank’s privations, Carlin wondered, what was it like to experience a hunger so cutting? “Now, when I look back on it,” Carlin said recently, “I think maybe that was my mom’s way of trying to warn me—trying to prepare me for how cruel the world can be.”

The memory returned to Carlin years later, in August of 2022, when his then partner, Eric, drove him to Banner-University Medical Center, in Tucson, Arizona. The pair walked into the emergency room. There, Carlin found his mother, looking skeletal in a hospital bed, wearing a diaper. When he’d last seen her, that spring, Mary was a healthy hundred and forty-five pounds, her cheeks bright. Now she was so emaciated that Carlin gasped. “She looks like a famine victim,” he told Eric. He stepped closer.

Mary’s hair—once long and lustrous, a lifelong point of pride—was matted to her head, Carlin noticed. She weighed ninety-one pounds.

“What happened to you, Mom?” Carlin asked.

Mary could barely speak. She worried that Carlin wasn’t actually Carlin. She’d spent the whole night screaming in pain and fear. Her jailers, she believed, might come back for her. “You don’t understand,” she told her son, who she thought might be a robot, or a co-conspirator. “They’ll do whatever they want!”

Carlin told his mom that he would investigate. He’d figure out how she had wound up in such a dire condition, and he’d identify who, exactly, was responsible.

“They aren’t going to let you,” Mary replied. She tried to weep, but her body was too dehydrated to make tears.

Carlin had no idea he was stepping into a scandal that involved health-care corporations with, in at least one case, an annual revenue of roughly a billion dollars—a scandal that implicated core institutions of American public life and affected a shocking number of victims across the country. At its worst, the wrongdoing involved state-sponsored homicides of the most vulnerable citizens, covered up by private companies and county officials.

At the hospital, Carlin had a conviction he later came to regard as painfully naïve: that he could expose whatever horrible thing had happened to his mom, and put a stop to it.

“You wait and see,” he told Mary. Carlin trusted that he could bring about a reckoning.

More information can be found at Starved for Care.

Growing up, in San Diego, Mary Faith Casey could easily access delight. She’d accompany her mother, an amateur astronomer, to the planetarium, or spend long days with her older sister Michelle, climbing around the exhibits at the natural-history museum in Balboa Park, where their mom had a job playing reel-to-reel films. In high school, Mary grew interested in fashion. She’d sew miniskirts and halter-top dresses out of glittery fabrics she bought at a thrift shop, and she wore her shiny blond hair past her waist. Michelle noticed Mary’s depth of feeling. “She was a very sensitive, very kindhearted child, and empathetic to the point of extremes,” Michelle said. “She was also naïve to her physical beauty, so I often felt I needed to protect her.”

The girls’ mother, Phyllis, struggled with bipolar episodes, so Mary lived with her father, who’d served in the Air Force and worked in supercomputing. Mary’s siblings were scattered across various living arrangements. As Mary and Michelle grew older, they would visit their mom every other weekend in Pacific Beach, where the girls would walk to the ocean and sometimes hitchhike home without Phyllis seeming to mind. “It was Mary who fought to keep us together as a family,” Michelle said. “That was her rescuer instinct.”

When Mary reached her mid-twenties, her life took a glamorous turn. She fell in love with a handsome tennis player who coached celebrities at a local country club; they soon got married. The newlyweds designed a comfortable home, filled with Mexican pottery and delicate, cactus-patterned tile, and surrounded by bougainvillea blossoms and palm trees. Mary gave birth to Carlin in 1985, and to Karina four years later. The young couple went to parties at desert estates, for which Mary would blow-dry her feathered bangs and wear bedazzled jackets with shoulder pads. Through her husband’s tennis coaching, the two sparked a friendship with the Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, who flew the couple to Europe on their private jet. In the summertime, the Caseys travelled to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where the kids splashed around in Hayden Lake and rode Jet Skis with their mom.

Mary’s personality began to palpably shift as the kids approached adolescence. Mary had brought her mother, who had suffered multiple mental-health crises, to live with the family; Phyllis then fell ill with metastatic lung cancer, and Mary served as her caretaker. Mary’s marriage deteriorated, and after her mother died, in 2000, she became severely depressed. Mary had experienced previous mental-health dips—two bouts of postpartum depression, for instance. But this time she began drinking heavily, and developed a new volatility from which she couldn’t seem to return. “Before, she’d have outbursts, but she could always get back into mom mode,” Michelle told me.

Mary and her husband divorced in the early two-thousands, when the kids were in their teens, and sold their house in the desert. Karina had gone to live with her dad, and Carlin with Mary’s younger sister Kaj. After her marriage ended, Mary fell for one physically abusive man after another. “It was self-punishment,” Michelle said. Mary lived off the funds from the sale of the house for a while, but soon she found herself sleeping in women’s shelters and hotels, and she landed in jail on vagrancy charges. She had been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and was later diagnosed as having schizophrenia. At times, she went on medication and, to family members, seemed more like her old self. But she was bothered by the attendant weight gain and lethargy. “I feel half dead, and I can’t be creative,” she’d tell Michelle. So she’d let her medication slip. Initially, Mary would have a flash of pleasure as “the natural high of her mania returned,” Michelle told me; she could stay up late using her collection of gel pens to craft vibrantly colored cards for people she loved. Inevitably, though, the same cycle of addiction and incarceration would repeat.

From jail, Mary would send sweet letters to her kids, festooned with hearts and stickers. “I love you,” she’d write Karina, “with the heart of a lion.” She’d often include an earnest token of maternal care: a rectangular card that promised, “This coupon entitles Karina to mucho hugs and kisses,” or a “Prayer for Stress” that read, “Quiet my anxious thoughts.” Both her children struggled. When friends from high school asked Karina where her mom was, she’d keep it vague—“San Diego,” she’d say. She and Carlin held out hope that their “real mom” would return: the good-natured woman who’d sewn their Halloween costumes by hand (a green T. rex for Carlin one year, and a sequinned disco queen for Karina), and who, whenever they were sick, held a Gatorade bottle to their lips and a washcloth to their foreheads. “When she was on her medication, her daily life was completely different,” Karina told me. “We could tell right away when she’d been off it. She’d go into a tunnel, and we had to protect ourselves.”

By the time the pandemic began, Mary, in her early sixties, was homeless. Carlin, now in his thirties, had recently moved to Tucson, and Mary followed him there. Carlin found this stressful. “She was good at disturbing my peace,” he told me. She hallucinated that Carlin had been kidnapped and tried to break into his home to rescue him. Police arrived at the scene, interviewed Mary, and let her go, but she wound up in police custody again the next day, after assaulting a man who’d tried to help her. She was released on probation, the terms of which required her to maintain an approved residential address. But Mary lacked a job and slept in a tent encampment in a park. She hadn’t fully processed that, in Tucson, her homelessness could be treated as a crime.

On April 30th, 2022, a security guard at a local business plaza called the police to report Mary as a nuisance. The police found an outstanding warrant for Mary, tied to her failure to register her address. Officers arrested her on a probation violation and drove her to the Pima County Jail.

Mary declared her mental-health troubles to jail-intake officials. An administrator logged her as “alert,” “responsive,” and “cooperative,” and recorded her affect as “flat.” Soon afterward, she told a nurse that she was “extremely disappointed” with herself, and was suffering from severe depression. When Michelle, who lived in Encinitas, California, learned of her sister’s latest arrest, she reached out right away to Mary’s public defender, Darlene Edminson, saying, “Tell Mary we love her, and we’ll do what we can to help.” Michelle and Kaj felt certain that they’d hear from Mary soon. Instead, the family was met with “radio silence,” Michelle told me. “That was the beginning of the end.”

If you’ve ever considered calling for help during a loved one’s mental-health crisis, you’ll know the potential terror of getting law enforcement involved. People with untreated mental-health issues are sixteen times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than others approached by law enforcement, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that works on behalf of people with severe mental illness. Your friend or family member might get harmed by police, or they might get jailed in the midst of a psychiatric episode—a far more common outcome than a police killing, but one that can also prove lethal. “This could honestly happen to anyone,” Carlin told me. “Mental illness doesn’t care how wealthy you are.”

For decades, America relied heavily on psychiatric asylums to treat—or, in many cases, to warehouse and neglect—people with serious mental-health conditions. Then the grand project of “deinstitutionalization” began. In signing the 1963 Community Mental Health Act, President John F. Kennedy promised that dysfunctional asylums would be emptied out and replaced with a robust, well-funded network of outpatient-treatment providers and community behavioral-health services. But the funding for that vision never materialized. Instead, new policies criminalizing poverty and addiction swept up people in severe psychiatric distress, who often ended up in county jail—where, with the rise of the cash-bail system, they might languish for months or even years, simply awaiting their day in court. The number of people jailed pretrial has nearly quadrupled since the nineteen-eighties; people with mental-health issues tend to be detained significantly longer than the rest of the population. Today, the nation’s three largest mental-health providers are New York’s Rikers Island, L.A. County’s Twin Towers Jail, and Chicago’s Cook County Jail. According to a recent report by the Pima County administrator, more than half the people locked up at the local jail have, like Mary, a mental-health condition that requires medication.

After Mary was arrested, Michelle and Kaj bought her items from the commissary online: a tube of cocoa-butter lotion, a pack of playing cards, some Kraft jalapeño spread, a flour tortilla, and a pair of reading glasses. Mary’s family also tried to put money in her online account for virtual messaging, but they were told that she wasn’t eligible for the service. Weeks passed, and Mary remained incommunicado. She had entered some mysterious vortex.

In May, Mary’s jailers brought her to a court appearance, where she admitted to her failure to reside at an approved address; the court found her in violation of her probation and sent her back to jail to await sentencing. Her jailers didn’t bring her to subsequent mandatory court dates, including a hearing in late July, to determine if she was mentally competent to be sentenced.

Finally, on August 16, 2022, nearly four months after her arrest, Mary entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. The judge had no inkling of Mary’s former radiance. Still, he seemed stunned by her skeletal frame.

“What are we going to do, Mary?” Judge Howard Fell asked. Mary, who’d been chatty and energetic just months earlier, was too far gone to speak.

“She is, as you can see, a shell,” Edminson, her public defender, said. “She needs care immediately. She looks like she’s dying, Your Honor.”

Fell said, “I know.” He set aside Mary’s charges and sent her to the emergency room. There, doctors began an effort to save her.

Carlin and Karina hastened to the hospital, with Karina driving from the Coachella Valley, where she still lived. Mary looked, as Carlin put it, “like a Holocaust person.” Her legs and feet were covered with open sores. She moaned, “Torture!,” and cried out, “I don’t have an esophagus!”

For nearly a month, the hospital tried to bring Mary back to life. Then its ethics committee convened to discuss her case. When Mary was admitted, she had been suffering from “severe” malnutrition, a physician noted. Any further interventions on her behalf, the committee concluded, would be “medically futile.” Mary was released to hospice care. The family loaded her into a rented van and took off for Kaj’s house, in San Diego. Karina was, like her mother, an unrelenting optimist. “She’ll recover,” she told herself. “How could she not?”

Carlin had begun to investigate his mother’s fate. “I kept wondering, who was working in the jail, and why weren’t they doing their job correctly?” he told me. He eventually learned that her medical care at the Pima County Jail wasn’t handled by the county alone. Instead, the county had contracted with a private company, an Alabama-based firm called NaphCare. “We can’t just let this slide,” Carlin told his partner, Eric. “This company’s treatment is absolutely careless.”

Eric, a former paralegal who sold purses online, was doing his own research. The more he learned, the more appalled he was by the corporate model for correctional health care. Local jails, as the holding pens for people whom our society would seem to want to disappear, tend to be governed by a simple philosophy: Let’s spend as little as we can. But the severe medical and mental-health needs of the jailed population make this a daunting task. Jail deaths, too, pose a steep cost; they often lead to litigation.

Since the seventies, private companies have offered a solution by taking health care out of the counties’ hands. Often, a company like NaphCare signs a contract with a county to provide medical and mental-health care at a capped cost; any additional money expended on care comes out of the corporation’s earnings. The companies often try to control their costs by understaffing, Eric concluded from his research. According to a 2020 examination of jail-death data by Reuters, jails that provided health care through the top five companies in that market—including NaphCare—had death rates that were eighteen to fifty-eight per cent higher than those of jails whose medical services were publicly managed. Of the five companies studied, NaphCare had the highest death rate across a three-year period. Eric spent nights at his laptop, downloading legal filings against NaphCare that alleged horrific deaths from neglect or substandard care. “I kept wondering, why on earth did Pima County hire them?” Eric said.

Eric had an idea for Carlin: they should file a “notice of claim” against Pima County officials, asking them to preserve all records tied to the case. Eric wrote up a twenty-four-page notice to the county; in it, he asserted that NaphCare was a “clear and present danger” to people with health problems in the Pima County Jail. He wondered what would happen if the facility in question were an amusement park or a day-care center. What if, year after year, such a place “continued operating in this manner, with this level of human misery, neglect, and death”? The answer, Eric wrote, was obvious: “It would be shut down in a heartbeat.” (A spokesperson for NaphCare said, “Our goal is transparency, and we have a robust mortality and morbidity review process. We have taken over healthcare operations for many of the most challenging correctional facilities in the nation, and we have lowered the rate of mortality in those locations over time.” The Pima County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment for this story.)

After filing the notice, Eric turned to finding the Casey family a lawyer. He compiled a list of twenty potential firms. One, a small practice in Seattle called Budge & Heipt, was unusually seasoned in holding corporations and counties accountable for jail neglect.

“This isn’t our first rodeo with NaphCare,” Erik Heipt told Carlin and Eric, on an early call. His firm was representing the family of a fifty-five-year-old named Cindy Lou Hill in a lawsuit against NaphCare; Hill had died of a ruptured intestine while awaiting trial in Spokane, Washington, after abysmal care at the county jail. (NaphCare was ordered to pay roughly twenty-seven million dollars in damages; the company has appealed the judgment.) “This is a multibillion-dollar industry dominated by a few major players,” Heipt’s colleague, Ed Budge, explained. “NaphCare is one—they were getting nearly eighteen million a year to provide medical and mental-health care at the Pima County Jail.”

The firm also had experience with cases involving starvation. Recently, Budge & Heipt had represented the parents of an eighteen-year-old named Marc Moreno. Marc’s father had taken him to a county mental-health crisis center during a serious episode. A counsellor there found Marc talking to angels and turned him over to police for a ride to the hospital. Instead, officers took him to the county jail, on two outstanding misdemeanor warrants for a traffic violation. The jail, which had outsourced its medical care to a private company that’s now called Wellpath, put Marc in an isolation cell and took little action when he stopped eating and drinking. He died eight days later, of dehydration; records show that he had lost thirty-eight pounds. (Wellpath settled the case for four and a half million dollars, but did not admit wrongdoing.)

Budge & Heipt started representing the families of people who’d been neglected by jail medical staff in 2003. “For the first fifteen years of doing this work, we weren’t contending with the trend of privatization,” Heipt said. “Now the corporate presence is the norm, and sometimes the operations of the entire jail can be private.” The firm was inundated with such cases, and could litigate only two or three each year. The intake form the lawyers had received about Mary Faith Casey stood out. Most of all, the lawyers noticed the precipitous drop in Mary’s weight under county custody. Heipt recalled thinking that this was the res ipsa loquitur of the case. He told me, “In Latin, it means ‘The thing speaks for itself.’ ”

After leaving the Tucson hospital, Mary’s family set up a nursing station for her at her sister Kaj’s house. There, Karina mirrored her mother’s nurturance from years before: she pressed a washcloth to Mary’s face, and held Gatorade to her lips. Karina painted Mary’s toenails fuchsia, and cooed sweetly, “Are you a little kitty cat?,” as she curled up beside her mom and stroked her head.

“Slowly, she became more trusting,” Karina remembered. “She’d say, ‘I really want a quesadilla,’ and I’d make it for her.” At night, Karina slept beside Mary, just as they’d done in the Coachella Valley.

That first week after Mary’s release proved oddly healing for Karina. Mary apologized for how out of control her life had become. Karina said, “I’m not mad at you, Mom.” She fixed Mary’s rat’s-nest hair, which required a pixie cut that made them both laugh. Karina’s aunts also doted on Mary, bringing her Pringles and poundcake. “I think all of the women around her made her feel safe,” Karina told me.

On a Thursday evening, Karina was eating Chips Ahoy! cookies when her mom said, “I want some!” Karina was glad to hear it; she fed the cookies straight into Mary’s mouth. “She was so happy,” Karina said, recalling how they’d both giggled as they snacked. The next morning, Mary did not wake up.

The coroner’s office arrived that afternoon. As two men hauled Mary’s body to a van, a country song by Chris Stapleton, “You Should Probably Leave,” played on a portable radio that Kaj had bought for Mary:

I know you, and you know me, And we both know where this is gonna lead. You want me to say that I want you to stay, So you should probably leave.

The exit music felt fitting to Karina. Mary’s cause of death was found to be protein-calorie malnutrition, an apparent result of her prolonged starvation in the county jail. Now, Karina and Carlin both felt, the work of understanding what had happened to their mother could begin in earnest. How many others might have starved to death?

During the past year, I found it hard to explain, to family and friends, a strange truth. I was reporting on places where starvation and dehydration deaths had unfolded across a span of weeks or months—but these were not overseas famine zones or traditional theatres of war. Instead, they were sites of domestic lawlessness: American county jails. After meeting Carlin and Karina, I identified and scrutinized more than fifty cases of individuals who, in recent years, had starved to death, died of dehydration, or lost their lives to related medical crises in county jails. In some cases, hundreds of hours of abusive neglect were captured on video, relevant portions of which I reviewed. One lawyer, before sharing a confidential jail-death video, warned me, “It will stain your brain.” It did.

The victims were astoundingly diverse. Some, like Mary, were older. Some were teen-agers. Some were military veterans. Many were parents. In nearly all the cases I reviewed, the individuals were locked up pretrial, often on questionable charges. Many were being held in jail because they could not afford bail, or because their mental state made it hard for them to call family to express their need for it. (These jail deaths would not have occurred, several lawyers pointed out to me, in the absence of the cash-bail system.) Others were awaiting psychiatric evaluation or a court-mandated hospital bed. Often, the starvation victims were held in solitary confinement or other forms of isolation, which is well proved to deepen psychosis. Some were given no toilet and no functioning faucet, or were expected to sleep on mats on concrete floors, in rooms where the lights never turned off.

My search for these cases began with a tip about Mary’s death. From there, I set out to answer Carlin and Karina’s question: Was their mother’s starvation an anomaly, or a sign of something larger? I came upon another case, and then another. Eventually—after interviewing more than a hundred sources nationwide, visiting with surviving families, travelling to jails in Michigan, Louisiana, Arizona, and Tennessee, and uncovering thousands of legal records, from medication logs to autopsy reports—I’d accumulated a file that included deaths from starvation, dehydration, and neglect in county jails across nearly every part of the country.

One victim, a thirty-eight-year-old mother named Shannon Hanchett, ran a beloved bakery in Norman, Oklahoma, where locals called her the Cookie Queen. A lawsuit alleged that she died after being locked in a processing cell where she lacked sufficient water and hardly ate for eleven days. She’d been arrested during a mental-health episode at a cellphone store. According to medical records I reviewed, she’d lost thirty pounds while in jail.

Another victim, Keaton Farris, was a twenty-five-year-old nature enthusiast from Lopez Island, off the coast of Washington State, near my parents’ home. Keaton had a supportive family and an exuberant mind. “He loved getting his hands dirty in the garden, and he was a flower guy,” his father, Fred, told me. Online, Keaton gushed about his love of the Salish Sea, beside which I’d spent many days as a teen: “Thanks sea, for being so big, blue and neat. You too Sun, for your brilliant awesomeness.” He died of dehydration and malnutrition at the Island County Jail, in northwestern Washington. Jail officials had cut off the water to his cell for four days. Keaton’s death was a reminder that not all the cases involved jails that outsourced medical care to private companies. The sheriff of Island County, Mark Brown, apologized to Fred and acknowledged, in a public report, that his own staff was responsible. Fred told me that, both before the apology and after, he had protested regularly outside the jail, often joined by a crowd.

Nearly every starvation or dehydration victim had been arrested in the midst of a mental-health crisis, often on petty charges tied to their psychiatric distress. In Jackson County, Indiana, Budge & Heipt reached settlements with the county and a private medical contractor, Advanced Correctional Healthcare, on behalf of the family of a twenty-nine-year-old victim named Josh McLemore. McLemore’s family had sought help when he was having a particularly bad episode of schizophrenia, and an ambulance took him to a hospital. But McLemore pulled a nurse’s hair. A security guard saw the incident and called the police, who arrested him. According to the family’s lawsuit, no medical or mental-health intake was performed at the jail, and McLemore, who was held in a windowless cell, began to fear food and water. In three weeks, he lost forty-five pounds. At that point, a staff member tried to get him medical attention, but it was too late. McLemore died of starvation and multiple organ failure. (Both the county and Advanced Correctional Healthcare denied wrongdoing.)

Several of the people whose cases I examined were, like Mary, criminalized for being unhoused, or for falling asleep where they weren’t allowed to do so. In Florida, a twenty-three-year-old named William Herring was arrested for sleeping on a bus-stop bench. He lost eighteen pounds in fifteen days in the Broward County Jail, where Armor Correctional Health Services was the health-care contractor, before dying of what the medical examiner deemed suicide by way of “prolonged fasting.” Alan Thibodeau, a single father who had been his parents’ caretaker, got arrested during a mental-health episode in which he wandered into a stranger’s home and fell asleep. “This was so, so preventable,” his family’s lawyer, James B. Moore III, told me, explaining that Alan had entered the jail at a hundred and seventy-eight pounds; he died there, under the care of a private medical company called Southern Health Partners, weighing barely a hundred. “He had a really strong support group and family who loved him,” Moore said. “He didn’t fit the profile you might assume.” (Armor and Southern Health Partners did not respond to requests for comment.)

One symptom of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other mental-health conditions can be a refusal to eat and drink. According to a paper recently published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, “food refusal” and starvation are “an important but underappreciated consequence” of psychosis. In county jails, people suffering from acute mental-health distress sometimes stop eating; they may fear, as Mary did, that their jailers are trying to poison them. Others simply decompensate to the point that the simplest acts of self-care, including eating and drinking, become impossible. When people like Mary are deprived of proper psychiatric medications, therapy, and other treatments, and placed in restrictive confinement, incidents of starvation and dehydration aren’t anomalies. Instead, they are predictable medical emergencies, requiring swift intervention by trained clinicians. “When someone in a jail stops eating or drinking, it’s extremely dangerous,” Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me. “It’s a crisis that requires moving someone immediately out of solitary confinement, or out of a traditional jail setting, and into a psychiatric facility, for close clinical care and observation.”

Together with Eliza Fawcett and Matt Nadel, at the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, I identified more than twenty private correctional-health-care companies that were responsible for providing care in jails where deaths from alleged neglect occurred. As Moore put it to me, “The private medical providers have different names, but it’s the same results.”

Moore told me that many of these companies’ psychiatrists meet with ailing inmates virtually, from out of state, for only a matter of minutes, leaving entry-level nurses to oversee care in the jails. “You can’t have a licensed practical nurse running a jail for three hundred people who have more mental-health needs than ever before in history,” he said. “It generates profit for providers. But it’s designed to fail.”

Other legal experts told me something similar. “Right now, we have multiple starvation cases, and multiple dehydration cases, too,” Dan Smolen, a civil-rights attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said. “I believe this is the civil-rights violation of our lifetime.”

Smolen stressed that the wrongful-death lawsuits against private medical providers in jails may represent only a small fraction of cases. “A lot of these deaths go unreported,” he said. Sometimes the victims get transferred to a hospital after they lose consciousness in their cells; the resulting fatalities usually get left out of jail-death logs, as Mary’s was. Other times, the responsible parties engage in active subterfuge. In a half-dozen cases I examined, companies or counties falsified records, deleted crucial surveillance videos, or purposely purged documents. After Marc Moreno’s death, for instance, a judge censured Wellpath (then called Correct Care Solutions) for “obstruction of the truth through the permanent deletion of countless emails”; the company, the judge noted, had “decided to begin a new document destruction policy in the middle of litigation over a teenager’s death.”

What’s more, jail-death data are surprisingly hard to obtain. In most states, the details are not publicly accessible. When my colleagues at the Investigative Reporting Lab and I filed more than two dozen public-records requests with local sheriffs, many stonewalled us; most didn’t seem to keep clear data on starvation cases. We sought detailed records, for instance, on any fatalities in Los Angeles County jails since 2015 that showed a cause of death related to dehydration or starvation, offering up a long list of search terms. We heard back from the sheriff’s department: it was “unable to identify any records as responsive” to the request. But, when it later provided a list of all in-custody jail deaths in the county, we discovered cases such as that of Sergio Silva, who, at thirty-three, died of “dehydration due to history of mental confusion.” (His cause of death was listed as “natural.” So, too, we found, are the vast majority of starvation and dehydration deaths in jails.) We also requested a list of inmate deaths at the Pima County Jail since 2019 associated with a similarly long list of search terms, and we asked that, if such data were not available, we be given a list of all deaths by natural causes or else all jail deaths. The sheriff’s department replied, “We do not have any inmate deaths that meet this criteria.” We later discovered that at least twelve people, most of them under fifty, had died of “natural causes” during the time span we’d specified. Where had the evidence of these deaths gone?

Starvation deaths, though often unreported, do not go unwitnessed in jails.“These deaths are so prolonged, with tons of people observing them, and each death could easily be stopped at any point in the time line,” Smolen said. “So it’s crazy that that many people would allow this to happen.”

In such cases, law-enforcement officers—but also, at times, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, mostly working for private corporations—watch for days, weeks, and months as ailing people waste away in their care. Many of these deaths could have been prevented by providing people like Mary with their required prescriptions, or by insuring that they were able to attend their court dates (which, quite often, might have led to their release). Even once the victims stopped eating or drinking, they still might have been saved by swift clinical intervention and psychiatric hospitalization. Most of the victims’ names likely remain unknown. As Eric, Carlin’s former partner, put it to me, “I often think about how rare it was that Mary at least had a family that was in a position to file a legal claim.”

Sometimes the victims screamed out for help or for water. Holly Barlow-Austin did both in the days before she died, at forty-seven, in the Bi-State Justice Center, in Texarkana, Texas. Barlow-Austin had serious health issues that the jail’s private operator and medical contractor, LaSalle Corrections, neglected to treat, leading to sudden blindness. She found it difficult to locate the food and water in her cell and began to go without it. In jail footage that I reviewed, obtained by Budge & Heipt, she realized that she’d knocked over a precious cup of water with her foot, tried to drink from it, and curled up in a fetal position when she found that it was empty. Another day, she screamed and waved her arms, seeking help from a nurse. The nurse looked at her, then left, jotting, according to records, “0 needs voiced” and “0 distress noted.” Barlow-Austin died the following week, of meningitis and other complications. (LaSalle Corrections and other defendants agreed to a seven-million-dollar settlement.)

In some instances, these individuals suffered a fate I would have thought impossible in the twenty-first-century United States: they were left to be fed on by insects and rodents. The body of Lason Butler, a twenty-seven-year-old dehydration victim in South Carolina, showed “possible postmortem rodent activity.” (According to a civil lawsuit, Butler’s mother had tried to contact her son; a corrections officer allegedly told her, “All we can do is pray for him.”) In Memphis, Tennessee, I visited the jail where Ramon McGhee died, at forty-two. McGhee’s mother had purchased pizza and hamburgers for him from the jail’s commissary. She told me that McGhee didn’t receive the meals, or his psychiatric medication. According to McGhee’s preliminary autopsy report, he was plagued with “extensive insect infestation.”

Our President has come unusually close to one site of this scandal. In the summer of 2023, Donald J. Trump rolled up in his motorcade to the Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was booked and fingerprinted on multiple felony charges, as Inmate No. P01135809. Last spring, a fund-raising e-mail contained a signed personal statement from Trump describing his experience. “I want you to remember what they did to me,” it read. “They tortured me in the Fulton County Jail, and TOOK MY MUGSHOT.”

Trump wasn’t wrong about the Fulton County Jail’s capacity for torture. The previous year, a thirty-five-year-old named Lashawn Thompson had been sent, pretrial, to the jail, where NaphCare was the medical provider. Thompson, who was assigned to the mental-health unit, never made it out. Malnourished, dehydrated, and deprived of his prescribed medications, he died of neglect, including “severe body insect infestation.”

“Those circumstances were far from isolated,” Kristen Clarke, then an Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, said in July, 2023, as she announced a civil-rights investigation into the jail’s conditions. “Following Mr. Thompson’s death, evidence emerged that the mental-health unit where he died was infested with insects and that the majority of people living in that unit were malnourished and not receiving basic care.” According to an internal NaphCare report, every single person in the mental-health unit—some hundred individuals—suffered from lice, scabies, or both. “Greater than 90% of affected inmates were significantly malnourished with obvious muscle wasting,” the report continued. This January, the D.O.J. sued Fulton County for the jail’s “abhorrent, unconstitutional” conditions; the county agreed, in a settlement, that the jail would come under federal oversight.

NaphCare remains the jail’s medical provider, and received nearly thirty-seven million dollars from Fulton County last year. The company’s C.E.O., Brad McLane, told me that the jail was “one of the most difficult places we’ve operated,” and that “the safety and security issues were severe.” He added that NaphCare had been responsible for bringing many of the abuses there to light: “We sounded the alarm over the issues that we were seeing, as far as the lice, scabies, and ectoparasites, multiple times,” McLane said. “I believe we’re doing better, but we had some periods of time where we were at the point of ‘If this doesn’t change, we have to just end this contract and leave.’ ”

Fulton County is hardly unique. What I found in a year of studying deaths related to starvation, dehydration, and neglect is hard to describe as anything other than a pattern of widespread torture of people with mental-health issues in county jails. In Shannon Hanchett’s case, Smolen, who filed the lawsuit, watched more than a hundred hours of footage from her last eleven days of life, at a jail in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, where health care was provided by Turn Key Health Clinics, which has since rebranded as TK Health. During this time, the Cookie Queen, a mother of two, had been placed in a concrete cell with no toilet, sink, or bed, where she fell deeper into psychosis. At one point, Smolen said, no one opened the door to Hanchett’s cell for five days straight. She was rarely given water and discarded much of her food. Finally, jail staff found her naked and unresponsive on the floor. Smolen told me that he watched as jail and medical staff mocked Hanchett, laughed at her, and dragged her from one place to another, semiconscious, to determine what to do about her condition. They left her in a medical cell with a cup of Gatorade, which she was unable to drink. According to a nurse’s records I reviewed, Hanchett stated, “They are going to kill me.” The next day, she was found dead. According to the Oklahoman, a state medical examiner ruled her cause of death as “natural,” likely caused by a heart defect with dehydration as a contributing factor. (A judge initially indicated that, without additional evidence, he would dismiss Smolen’s lawsuit; after obtaining the sealed surveillance footage, Smolen filed an amended complaint describing what he’d seen. A representative for TK Health told us the company could not discuss details of the case but “vehemently disagrees” with the complaint’s assertions. The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.)

In some cases that I scrutinized, medical examiners concluded that the death was a homicide. In San Diego, Lonnie Rupard, a forty-seven-year-old father who was arrested on a parole violation, died at the county jail after losing a third of his body weight amid untreated psychological distress. “While elements of self-neglect were present,” the medical examiner ruled, “ultimately this decedent was dependent upon others for his care; therefore, the manner of death is classified as a homicide.” After the dehydration death of thirty-eight-year-old Terrill Thomas, in a Milwaukee jail, three staff members were criminally prosecuted for having left Thomas without water for a week; they reached plea deals that involved jail time. In a highly unusual twist, the medical contractor involved, Armor Correctional Health Services, was also criminally prosecuted, successfully, on seven counts of intentionally falsifying medical records and one count of abusing or neglecting a resident in a penal institution.

Increasingly, families have argued that their loved ones’ deaths should be recognized as killings—or even as intentional murders. Such was the case for Rodney Price, who devoted his life to working in California prisons as a corrections officer, only to have his own brother, Larry, die of starvation and dehydration in solitary confinement in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Larry, who suffered from schizophrenia, owed a hundred dollars to get out on bond.

Rodney had always valued his older brother’s “loveful” attitude: how he enjoyed imitating the Three Stooges and sharing jokes and updates from Fort Smith, where they’d grown up. When Rodney saw the autopsy photographs of Larry, he told me, “it blew my brains open.” Rodney had, as part of his job, monitored prison conditions to insure that people with mental-health issues were placed in proper, legal confinement. Now he flew back to his home town to interview county officials and detectives investigating Larry’s death. He gathered reams of notes in a big blue binder, to prove that his brother had endured months of solitary confinement without proper medication; across the front, Rodney wrote, in thick marker, “#JUSTICE FOR LARRY EUGENE PRICE JR” and “#121 POUNDS.”

Rodney hired Budge & Heipt to help him sue Sebastian County and Turn Key, the medical provider at the jail. He also wanted to push for policy change, suspecting that more losses would follow his brother’s. (I later confirmed his fear, uncovering a Navy veteran’s apparent death by neglect in an Arkansas jail.) “I think of what happened to my brother as a murder,” Rodney told me last summer, from his home in Elk Grove, California. “A murder by officials who never took responsibility. Who is going to hold them accountable? The state? No. The feds? No. The only one who is working to hold them accountable is my attorney, and myself. And this is America?”

Some nights, after trying to manage his stress by running or rollerblading, Carlin would stay up late in bed on his phone, researching the Pima County Jail. On Instagram, he found a Tucson-based group called No Jail Deaths. The group had a list of demands, and a clear mission statement: “To get justice for the lives lost in the Pima County Jail,” it read, “to memorialize each person the jail has stolen from us.”

Carlin appreciated that the group engaged in acts of civil disobedience. Dozens of locals, many of them moms and wives of the dead, had been holding regular vigils and protests in front of the jail. Mostly, they gathered peacefully, holding candles and laminated posters featuring images of those who had died there. But, the winter before Mary starved, the sheriff’s deputies had declared that the protesters were engaged in an “unlawful assembly” and tried to boot them off the property. Some eighty people had refused to budge. They’d blown vuvuzelas, struck a jail-shaped piñata, banged pots and pans, set off fireworks, and called out the names of their loved ones, according to the Tucson Sentinel and the Arizona Daily Star. Carlin sent the group a message: Could he get involved?

Last February, Carlin gained another ally. Budge & Heipt had hired a former A.C.L.U. litigator, Andrea Woods, who had extensive experience suing county jails for civil-rights abuses. Woods arrived for her first day at the firm’s Seattle office to find a sixteen-page memo in her e-mail about Mary Faith Casey. “This is your case,” Budge told her.

The firm had already obtained more than a thousand pages of jail records in Mary’s case. Right away, Woods noticed alarming details. On April 30th, the day of Mary’s arrest, an emergency medical technician notified NaphCare that Mary was “REQUESTING TO BE PLACED BACK ON PSYCH MEDICATIONS.” But Mary, as far as Woods could tell, did not receive them. She was seen by a NaphCare nurse that day, but the nurse, Woods alleges, did not insure that Mary got prompt access to a psychiatric provider. According to Woods, NaphCare’s records indicate that, for much of the time that Mary was jailed, the company did not have a chief psychiatrist for the site, despite the fact that its contract with the county required it to do so.

Within weeks, Mary, untreated, had stopped eating regularly, according to other jailed women, who informed the staff. In late May, she finally saw a NaphCare mental-health worker for an initial evaluation. He observed that she was having trouble with “perseverating, loss of interest, and rumination.” He filled out a “treatment plan” for Mary, which recommended meditation and “deep breathing.” The worker thought Mary showed “good insight and desire for improvement,” and he recommended that she see a psychiatric provider to get the prescription medications that had helped her to function in the past, with her long list of clear diagnoses: post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and more.

Still, Mary went weeks, and then months, without her medications, Woods found. On June 8th, a behavioral-health staffer for NaphCare wrote her colleagues an e-mail with the subject line “Concerns,” explaining that she was worried about an “older gal”—Mary—who was “weak,” “feeble,” and “despondent,” and who, according to peers, “eats/drinks very little if anything.” On June 12th, a nurse prescribed an antidepressant, which, alone, was inadequate. On June 25th, when NaphCare staff checked Mary’s weight, they found that she was down to a hundred and six pounds. In mid-July, the nurse who prescribed the antidepressant noted that Mary was lying in bed, “deteriorating” and not responsive, and decided to discontinue her sole psychiatric medication, calling for follow-up “in 30 days.” He referred her to the medical team for “significant weight loss.” By August, Mary showed little will to live. “I am stuck,” she told a nurse, crying out in pain. “I can’t walk, and they do not believe me.” Jail records noted that she “was having trouble speaking and kept licking her lips to get moisture.”

Mary had been in the Pima County Jail twice before, in 2020. The facility had a contract with another health-care company, Centurion, at the time, and her experience was different. When she was first booked, that October, jail-intake officials recognized her acute mental-health needs right away. (Mary had mistaken the intake professional for Karina, and kept saying, “Mommy loves you.”) Within forty-eight hours, Mary was moved to Sonora Behavioral Health Hospital, where, after being given proper medications, she was described as “talkative” and “cheerful.” In her psychiatric progress notes, Mary’s chief complaint was that she was “helpless, passionate, and romantic.” By late November, she was booked back into the jail. Within the first ten days of her confinement, she saw a mental-health practitioner with prescribing authority, and she was promptly medicated, never missing a single dose, according to Woods. She gained weight and left in better health than when she’d entered.

This time, Mary looked famine-struck and spoke mostly in pained moans. When a mental-health worker expressed concern and pleaded with her to eat, Mary replied, “I tried to drink the Ensure but it tasted like glue. They’re putting glue in the Ensure to punish me.” In August, she was sent to the hospital four times. “I think she is stable to return to jail,” a note in her medical chart read. During Mary’s final hospitalization, before she was released to hospice, she sobbed that she had “ruined everything.” She’d wet the bed, she explained, and she thought that this was “why she does not deserve her health.” She reported severe hopelessness. She said that she was hungry, but didn’t “know what to do about that,” because “she would not be able to swallow anything.”

What stood out to Woods was how many paid professionals had witnessed Mary’s decline across her nearly four months of starvation and heard her cry out in distress. “The company was way, way, way below the standard of care on mental health,” Woods told Karina.

Both Carlin and Karina found the slow-moving nature of their mother’s crisis one of the hardest details to accept. Mary, Carlin told me, had always been a protector. “She was always helping homeless people,” he said, “to the point that it bothered me!” When he was in middle school, he said, she “would take this one homeless woman shopping at Mervyn’s, the department store, and buy a bunch of clothes for her.”

Karina agreed that her mom’s empathy for strangers could be so intense as to verge on a liability. She told me about how, when she was seven, they were cruising down a cactus-lined thoroughfare in the desert when Mary spotted a minivan pulled over in the dirt. A man appeared to be physically abusing and berating a woman beside the car. “My mom pulled right over and told the woman, ‘Get in!’ ” Karina said. “The woman didn’t speak English, but she grabbed her infant from the back of the car and came running over to our car.” Mary hit the gas. “She was driving all crazy, like a bat out of hell,” Karina recalled. “Don’t worry, we’ll lose him!” Mary shouted. Escaping the abusive man’s tail, Mary sped to a nearby hotel, where she rented the woman and her child a room for the night, hugged the woman, and said, “You’re safe now.”

One afternoon, after Woods had gone through Mary’s case file, she gathered the family on Zoom and shared a surprising document. On June 5, 2022, three urgent requests had appeared in Mary’s name. But the “audit photo” on the intake forms wasn’t of Mary. In her place was a much younger person, with dark, warm eyes, thinly pencilled brows, and a wide, shiny forehead. Another incarcerated woman appeared to have impersonated Mary, in a desperate attempt to get her some help.

“Have not been feeling well,” a medical complaint, filed at 7:36 P.M., read. “Have not been eating nor drinking my theeth [sic] hurt my body hurts I need to be seen asap please.”

The second message, a few minutes later, was a mental-health request. “I need help,” it read. “I feel like I’m too far gone and no one can help me I need too [sic] be seen asap please I feel miserable.”

The third request sought dental services. “My mouth hurts really bad,” it read.

After Woods presented the documents, Karina grew emotional. “If they’d done something to respond, we probably wouldn’t be here now,” Karina said. Instead, Mary’s weight had dropped, by August 4th, to seventy-six pounds, according to records. That day, Mary’s cellmate, a different woman, told a mental-health practitioner that Mary hadn’t eaten or used the toilet in four days, and that, when she’d offered Mary some fruit, Mary had whispered, “It won’t go down.” A few days later, Mary finally got her psychiatric medications. She was seen by a psychiatrist, who placed her on a full slate of the sorts of drugs that had helped her before.

Karina found some small comfort from learning that others had tried to save her mother. “It’s broken my heart, for the longest time, because I knew if my mom had seen anyone in the state she was in, she would have helped—she would have gotten herself in trouble or risked anything, if it came to that,” she said. “When I see how NaphCare did nothing for my mom,” she said, “I think, Is that the level of treatment their family members would deserve?”

The strangers’ attempts to help bolstered Carlin’s faith, too. He wanted to know what it would take, in civil litigation, to prove that NaphCare had violated the Constitution. On April 25th of last year, Budge & Heipt filed a landmark civil case, on behalf of Mary Faith Casey’s estate, against NaphCare. The suit also named Pima County; Sheriff Chris Nanos, who oversaw the jail; and several medical providers who had treated Mary through NaphCare—two doctors, two nurses, and a mental-health professional. (The medical providers have all denied wrongdoing. Pima County and Sheriff Nanos filed a motion to dismiss several claims in the case, which was largely denied.) The case alleged that NaphCare’s policies and practices at the Pima County Jail—including inadequate staffing and poor psychiatric screening—had caused Mary “to receive constitutionally inadequate care” and “ultimately to die.” “What we’re trying to do with this case, and so many others, is to make it really expensive for jails—and, even more so, for private health-care companies—to kill people,” Ed Budge told me.

(The NaphCare spokesperson said that federal privacy law prohibited the company from discussing Mary’s case in detail, but that the version of events outlined by Budge & Heipt was “inaccurate” and “demonstrably false.” She added, “Patients sometimes refuse care or medications. While we make an effort to educate, encourage, and support compliance, we must also respect their legal right to refuse treatment.” The spokesperson noted that “the individual you are inquiring about was transferred to two separate hospitals on four different occasions—and was repeatedly returned to the facility by hospital staff.”)

Mary’s family saw their mission as even larger than penalizing poor medical care in jails: they wanted to change how people in mental-health crises get handled by the justice system. They were heartened to hear that, last fall, Rodney Price had succeeded in holding his brother Larry’s jailers accountable in Arkansas; the Price family had won a record-setting six-million-dollar settlement against Sebastian County and Turn Key. (“There’s no good way to spin it, so why try?” Hobe Runion, the county sheriff, told me of Larry’s death. “It’s horrendous, and I can’t make excuses.”) But Mary’s family shared Rodney’s conviction that real justice would have to go well beyond an isolated payment. Michelle, her sister, felt clear about this. “We know that Mary is one of many,” she said.

Working with the researchers at the Investigative Reporting Lab, I studied more than forty lawsuits involving claims of starvation, dehydration, and severe neglect, filed against more than a dozen correctional entities and county governments. We found that, again and again, taxpayers ended up paying multimillion-dollar settlement bills for actions that killed off members of their own communities. But most major correctional-health-care providers, too, were saddled with millions of dollars in liability, raising the question: would it have been so expensive, after all, to provide adequate psychiatric care for people like Mary?

Three of the largest correctional-health-care corporations—Corizon (now YesCare), Armor, and Wellpath—have filed for bankruptcy in recent years. Wellpath, which filed this past November, has been hit with more than fifteen hundred lawsuits claiming inadequate medical care of incarcerated people. “A big part of this industry’s business model is filing for bankruptcy, cleansing their balance sheet of responsibility for their misconduct, and then starting all over again,” Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, a nonprofit that fights the commercialization of corrections, told me. I asked Tylek, a former investment banker who has studied hundreds of correctional-health-care contracts, if she thought the industry was lucrative. “It’s only lucrative because the industry is based on stealing,” she said. “They’re stealing billions of taxpayer dollars and not providing constitutionally required services to the people in their care, services they were contracted to provide. They are using the bodies of incarcerated people to extract wealth.” (A spokesperson for Wellpath said that filing for bankruptcy had allowed the company to improve its financial organization and better serve its patients. YesCare did not respond to a request for comment.)

I met Ryan Dreveskracht, a civil-rights lawyer, at a beer garden in Seattle. His firm, Galanda Broadman, was suing NaphCare for several cases of alleged medical neglect in jails. He’d taken on the case of Javier Tapia, for instance, who’d lost his lower leg after a blood clot went untreated at the Pierce County Jail, in Washington State. “Tapia was made to sit in solitary confinement while his foot and leg literally rotted off,” Dreveskracht said. (This month, a federal jury ordered NaphCare to pay twenty-five million dollars to Tapia. NaphCare said it plans to appeal.) Dreveskracht wanted to talk about the McLane family, which owns the company—about the founder, Jim, and his son Brad, who’d stepped into the C.E.O. role after an esteemed career at the Department of Justice. “As a family-owned company, they’ve been totally insulated from accountability,” he told me. “It’s just like the Sackler family and opioids—they’re making money hand over fist. But no one knows their name.”

Brad McLane, however, proved willing to talk with me. He shared his vision for how private contracting, done right, can improve the quality of care in county jails. “One strength we offer is economies of scale,” McLane told me recently, on a Zoom call from his office, in Birmingham, Alabama. “If you’re just one county working to provide health care in the jail, you’re going to have limited resources,” he said. “One of the things we’ve built over our thirty-five years is that we have over eighty corporate nurse practitioners and mid-levels who are working around the clock.” McLane expressed pride in NaphCare’s efforts to test new models for mental-health care. He touted, for instance, NaphCare’s Mental Health Stabilization Unit, at the Hillsborough County Jail, in Florida, through which the company provides treatment to severely mentally ill people in a less restrictive setting.

In his youth, McLane had little interest in his family’s correctional-health-care business; he was passionate, instead, about “saving the environment.” After graduating from Georgetown Law, he became an attorney at the Department of Justice. “I was doing a lot of Clean Air Act enforcement, trying to clean up coal-fired power plants,” he told me. But then his younger brother, who was slated to take over NaphCare, died unexpectedly, and McLane agreed to assume his place. “There are definitely a lot of things I’ve had to unlearn to be good in this job,” he said. “You do the best you can to continually improve and learn, and accept that sometimes we do have, obviously, losses in the jails.”

Though many civil-rights attorneys see health-care contractors as distinctly responsible for such losses, they rarely consider the companies to be the only or even the central reason for dysfunction in county jails. “Why should people working in jails be the ones having to deal with the convergence of so many social crises—poverty, education, housing, and the total lack of access to mental-health care?” Margot Mendelson, the executive director of the Prison Law Office, in Berkeley, California, asked me. Mendelson strongly opposes the privatization of jail health care—“It’s a repulsive social choice to put a dollar sign on this public system,” she said—but, in her view, the much bigger problem is that jails are “totally ill-suited” to being mental-health-care providers. “Where is the infrastructure that isn’t the jail, to address the mental-health crisis we’re in?” she asked.

NaphCare recently underwent a national expansion. “There’s unprecedented demand for our services,” McLane told the Birmingham Business Journal last June. The company has created what it calls a Proactive Care Model, which it advertises, online, as a method “to identify medical and mental health concerns during intake for early treatment intervention.” McLane also told the Journal that NaphCare is eager to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence to manage jail health care. “We’re looking at developing a chatbot for jails and prisons,” he said, “that will interact with our patients in terms of helping them with their mental-health needs.”

Carlin Casey believes that, given how human employees have failed to provide proactive care to his mother and countless others, NaphCare chatbots won’t suffice. He finds the company slogan jarring: “We Treat Everyone How We Want to Be Treated.”

In the Business Journal interview, McLane was asked, “If you could give your 18-year-old self one piece of advice, what would it be?” McLane’s advice was sound. “Just enjoy the time you have with friends and family and people you care about,” he said. “They’re not around as long as you might think they’re going to be.”

Last June, I made my way to the radiant heat of the Coachella Valley, to visit with Karina on her mom’s home turf. Karina had offered to give me a tour in her S.U.V. “Still surrounded by palm trees and cacti,” Karina said, pointing to her childhood home. We idled in front of her bedroom window, where her mom had read Anne Frank’s diary to her and Carlin, and where she’d learned that human beings could starve. “It terrified me!” she said, of the book. The block was dripping with blooming jacarandas, and magenta flowers that made me marvel.

We stopped at a coffee shop near the country club where Karina now works, helping corporate C.E.O.s race sports cars. She carefully placed a stack of letters on the table. Nearly all the envelopes were bright with crayon drawings of hearts, or filled with rainbow “Smooch Smooch” stickers, or stuffed with confetti. In each letter, Mary wrote, from jail, of her love for “my Bee” or “my honey” or “my Baby.”

One letter was particularly hard for Karina to reopen. Months after her mother’s death, she’d been cleaning off a table when she spotted an envelope with her own handwriting. She’d written to Mary at the Pima County Jail on Mother’s Day, and had always assumed her mom had received the note.

“I want you to know that despite the challenges you’ve faced you have so many beautiful qualities about you as a mother and person,” Karina had written. “You have always been the most caring, loving and giving woman.”

The letter continued, “I hope that we can get closer in time, and things turn around for you. Maybe some year even spend Mother’s Day together!!”

Karina realized that her letter had never reached Mary. The jail had returned the envelope, rejecting the type of stamp Karina had used.

I asked Karina what she thought Mary would think of the lawsuit against NaphCare and Pima County. We were back in the car and driving past the spot on the highway where Mary had once pulled over to help the woman who was being abused by her male companion. “She’d see this case,” Karina said, laughing, “and say, ‘Hell yes, fuck those guys, and shut them down.’ ”

Last summer, I also flew to Tucson. Carlin had hoped to show me his mother’s writings, too. But his spirits were down, and he wasn’t sure that he could do it. In the meantime, I’d made plans to meet with some of the women who’d been leading recent protests at the Pima County Jail. All around the country, I knew, groups of grieving family members were mobilizing like this. Often, they were winning significant fights against jail expansions. One of the most active participants in No Jail Deaths, a woman named Stephanie Madero-Piña, offered to take me to the jail, where she’d held up a bullhorn at multiple protests. She wanted the community to know what had happened to her former husband, Richard Piña. Years ago, Piña had proposed to her live on the radio, as the station played “Chapel of Love.” He later developed an addiction, and, during a stint at the jail in 2018, he contracted an infection, Madero-Piña said. He was transferred to a hospital, where he died. “He’d been sick for about three weeks,” she’d told the crowd at a protest. “If he’d gotten any kind of medical, he probably could have lived.”

When we met, Madero-Piña wore pink eyeshadow and a beautiful purple dress; her long, freshly curled hair draped down her back. She mentioned that her husband wasn’t the only loved one she’d lost at the jail. Her niece’s boyfriend, twenty-two-year-old Jacob Miranda, had also died there, of a fentanyl overdose.

“You may think this won’t happen to you,” she said. “You may think, Oh, not my kid. But, I’m promising you, that’s not the case. It’s hard for us mothers to do the work that we are doing, but, if we can save some other people from this pain, it will give some kind of meaning to our loss.”

Later, Madero-Piña and I ventured to the park where Mary had lived in the months before her arrest. Madero-Piña often distributed food and supplies at the park, and we met a few of the people who spent nights there, in tents or sleeping bags, beneath large palms. The police, several older unhoused people explained to me, were making their lives increasingly difficult by staging regular raids. “They took my propane burners for cooking, and that was an essential part of my life,” one man, who’d been unhoused for more than a year, said. The police stripped him of other valued possessions, too. “My dog is everything to me. I lost her bedding and her food and her heat-sensitive shoes. They came at 6 A.M. with two bulldozers. I lost everything.”

Madero-Piña and I passed out cans of tuna, slices of strawberry shortcake, and other snacks to a few dozen people. Afterward, she told me that she’d recently got the first part of a two-part tattoo. She rolled up her right sleeve to show me. “Honor the dead,” it read. “Next week, I’m getting the other half,” she said. “It’ll say, ‘And fight like hell for the living.’ ”

Carlin was also involved with a mutual-aid group that volunteered in the park; he’d donated clothes, and he hoped to join them on a weekend mission soon. For now, he’d been exercising, practicing songs for a local men’s choir he’d joined, and trying his best to take care of himself. “I’ve inherited a lot of the mental-health problems that my mom suffered from, and I’ve attempted, so many times, to get help from the proper authorities, and it’s been a fucking terrible experience,” he said, over the phone one afternoon. “What is it going to take for society to realize that, if people want to make a change in their life, you should try to help them? The floodgates should open, and the help should come.”

To Carlin, the crisis in county jails isn’t just about starvation deaths like his mom’s—it’s about preventing the mass criminalization of people like her. He wonders, what if we didn’t use jails as our primary mental-health-care providers and instead offered better access to addiction services, mental-health treatment, and housing? In Denver, a nonprofit recently tried giving a universal basic income of a thousand dollars a month to a large group of unhoused people. A year later, nearly half the participants had housing.

In the early days after Mary’s death, Carlin used to crack open a Bible that she had sent him as a gift, not long before she’d starved. On the inside cover, his mother had inscribed a message to him. “You don’t deserve to feel like a lost sheep, stuck and hopeless,” she’d written. She encouraged him to check out Isaiah 43:18. Together, one recent afternoon, we looked up the passage. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past,” it read, addressing how people might live amid impossible darkness:

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness, And streams in the wasteland. 

[aleksa-sims]

RL Story

CW: adult-themed/topic

After the party at N.’s Mom, N., P., and I went out with Ana and her boyfriend. That was a month ago! A lot has happened the last 4 weeks, but actually it all started that day/night, at N’s Mom's.

What exactly happened or what N. and I did, will clarify itself as you read on. However, just 2 days after this party/night, N had to go back to Italy, to play soccer. He was only here for 10 days and most of that time, we were fighting about this stupid thing with Bianca. After N. was gone, I thought he would come back home after a week or so, but as I said, it’s been over a month since he left.

This week Philip was often with me. I took a prep course for my exam because I was on leave and missed a lot. The whole thing took about 2 weeks. The first week my Mom took care of my son and this week Philip helped me. Today was my last day. When I came home, Philip noticed that I was sad, or in a bad mood?

Philip: Did you have trouble studying?

Me: No, it was all fine. And thanks for your help, P.

Philip: Are you still upset about Nico’s departure?

Me: Hm... I guess.🤷‍♀️

Philip: Why can't you just let things be?.. Sure, life sucks sometimes, but.... you're exaggerating, A.! If you continue like this, you will force Nico to choose between you and his soccer career. And believe me, no matter what he decides,...that would be the end of your relationship.

Me: You can’t tell me how to feel!!! What's wrong with you? I will not force N. to stop playing soccer! I LOVE him! I want him to be happy! But you, don't get it, P.! You have no idea what it feels like to truly love someone. 😒

Philip: I am not gonna listen to this shit!! ... Why aren’t you being honest?... Come on! Tell me why you’re really so pissed.... You blame me for what happened between us. Right? 🤨

Me: I-.... I just don't get it?? 😫 Why did we do that? I mean.... Nico and I were drunk but you weren’t, and yet, you.... just slept with me! 🤦‍♀️

Philip: Now listen to me! I know, the truth is not always pleasant. THIS time A., it was not Nico and me, who wanted to shag you! It was the other way around. You, made it all happen!!

Me: I remember what I did and how it happened that we ended up in bed!! I did it for N.!! ... After our fight with Bianca, Nico and I made up, but.... N. didn’t sleep with me anymore. I thought maybe he still doesn’t want me after all? And a few days later at his Mom's we got drunk, bcs we wanted to do something crazy together. And later when we were with Ana in this club, Nico wanted me to do what he wants me to do, so I did it. He told me to hit on you. I wanted to please him and it was fun to do what he asked. Bcs we were both wasted!!! But you weren’t!! You should have just dropped us off at home and left right away. But you have decided otherwise.

Philip: That's not fair!!! He wanted us both to fuck you. He said.... you deserve it. He was mad! But you didn’t get it A.!! You didn’t stop! I even told you myself, but you still didn’t let go of me! He just wanted to see how serious you are about being his slave.

Me: Exactly! And yet you joined in!!!.....But okay! Sorry, you’re right! It’s not fair to blame only you. Nico and I wanted it! Anyway, I don’t want it to be like it was 4 years ago. I’ve been thinking about it the last few days and... I remembered how I felt then. I was so desperate... I don’t want to lose you P. You're one of my best friends. But right now, I really just need a little bit of space... I hope you’re not mad at me or misunderstand me, I just need to... get a way from here for a while.

Philip: Where are you off to? 🤨

Me: Um... My parents have 2 weeks off. They asked me if Lucas and I want to go on vacation with them. I’ve talked to N. about it. He doesn’t know when he can come home yet? Maybe he’ll join us later? Idk?

Philip: Go for it, A.! ... I also need some distance so.... I'm leaving now.

Me: I understand that. But.... are we okay?

Philip: I think that depends on you. As far as I’m concerned, everything’s fine.

Nothing was fine!

Previous/Next

[scribbles97]

The Only Son

@womble1 you are entirely to blame for this after the suggestion of an AU where Scott is the only son in a house of girls... thank you so very much for the idea! Shamelessly stole @akiyta 's Girl!TaG names as I think they are excellent choices. Entirely unedited and scribbled down in half an hour before I fall flat on my face.

When Scott’s first baby sister had been born, he had been smitten from the moment he had set eyes on the little girl with a smattering of dark hair. The pair had been inseparable from that moment onwards, one tiny form protected by her big brother. 

That hadn’t stopped Scott from asking for a brother the second time he was told he was getting a younger sibling. 

By the time the third baby sister came around, Scott had been old enough to understand his parents weren’t explicitly ignoring his pleas for a little brother to play with.

When Alana had come along he simply hadn’t cared. A new sister to love and protect was all that had mattered. 

People had whispered, as they always would, but Scott’s parents had taught him to shrug off those whose opinions didn’t matter. He had walked through life with as much pride as their parents for each of his sisters achievements, and had always been the one to cheer them on the loudest. 

Then the avalanche had happened, and Scott’s cheers had been the only ones that had kept them all going. Virginia had stepped up, filling the gap where Mom should have been for girl things when the youngest two hadn’t wanted to talk to their big brother despite all he knew, but it had been Scott that had shepherded them through each day. 

Until a comment had been made, and a baseball bat had swung, and Scott had needed to explain to his father in the principal's office. 

Apologies had been whispered all round that night, to daughters that had missed their father’s hugs, to sisters that took so much of their mother it was sometimes hard to bear, and to a son that had tried to be everything to them all. 

Scott had still carried the baseball bat around school, a blatant threat to anyone that dared to hurt any of his family. 

When he had joined the Air Force, the bat had no longer been needed. 

Virginia had yelled at him about it more than once, ever persistent that she could look after herself and that she didn’t need her big brother to hover. He didn’t understand, she told him, because he was a boy. 

Scott did understand, he knew how the minds of the men that circled his sisters worked, and knew what they wanted. He read the comments sections on the articles as the business grew and their profiles gained attention, he heard the men at bars on his downtime. Dad worked hard to keep them all protected, but had long since given up on trying to convince Scott not to worry.

After his discharge from the Force, none of his sisters had complained about his protectiveness. 

At least, not until Dad had gone. 

Georgia had come quietly, familiar with the limelight after her Olympic Gold, and all too aware of how it could twist and warp words into something far more sinister than intended. 

Virginia and Jane had stood with Scott, strong and sure as he could have asked for, even as his legs had felt like crumbling beneath him. None of them had ever questioned each-others place, not with so much at stake with their world crumbling around them. 

It had been Alana that had screamed. 

Their little baby sister who had had a home and a life on the mainland, who hadn’t been willing to give up what little normality she had left in a world that had changed for them all over night. She had kicked and cried in a way Scott would have been proud of if she hadn’t led with the sucker punch to his gut. 

“You’re not Dad! You can’t make me!”

Every fiber of his being had hated that she was right but wrong all at once. 

He was her brother, not her father. 

But he was all she had left. 

He had known before the news had broken just what the tabloids would say, how it would all fall to him in the traditional way - even if society had mostly moved beyond the old customs that involved first born sons. Somewhere deep in his Kansas upbringing it still all rang true - Dad was gone, which left Scott as the man of the house.

Even though it had come sooner than anyone had anticipated, it had been an inevitable eventuality from the moment Virginia had been born. 

It was a reality Scott wasn’t sure he would ever get used to.

[hehe-69]

Bonfire Part 11

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

WARNINGS: BELLA’S WEDDING, EMMET BEING THE HIMBO HE IS, WOLFPACK, EMBRY X QUILL MOMENTS, VERY POORLY WRITTEN PART

I have never struggled so much to write a part as I did with this one. The other parts are soooo much better

Summary: Bella’s wedding wasn’t something you were looking forward to, and true to your gut…it’s a bit on the rocky side.

Tage list: @coldonez

The day of Bella’s wedding was a bit hectic. You had to find a suit for Jacob last minute because he was about to wear JEANS and a dress shirt. Sometimes you wonder what would happen to Jacob if you weren’t around. Likely for the both of you, you’ll never have to find out.

Your mother found one in your dad’s old room, most of his things were still there. You and her made sure nothing got too dusty or ruined by time. It was the perfect fit for Jacob, and it took forever for your mother to convince him to wear and keep it. She told him that she’d rather him have it and wear it than it sit in the closet collecting dust.

Jacob in a suit is something you never thought you’d actually see, it awakens something within you. The fact that it’s your father’s suit is…oddly fitting, your dad knew about your crush on Jacob right away. He’d be happy to see you now.

You and Quill talk about your boyfriends in suits, agreeing that it’s a life changing event. Quill was dressed in a white dress shirt with a suit jacket and some slacks. No tie, very much Quil. “Are you excited?” Quill asks you as you smooth out his jacket. “A part of me is, Bella’s getting married to the love of her life. But, she’s also giving up her humanity for an entirety with Edward. I just worry about her, I don’t want her to end up regretting this decision.” Even though you and Bella don’t talk anymore, you still cared about her and wanted her to best for her.

“I’ll never understand how your brain works. Just remember, it’s just a normal wedding.” Quill says softly. “Just watching your childhood best friend getting married.” You smile at the reminder. “Thanks Quil.”

———

Bella’s wedding is…very extravagant in Bella terms, but it’s also very beautiful. You, Jacob, Quill, Embry, Seth, Billy and Sue all feel a bit out of place with all the vampires who are at this wedding. Thankfully there are also some people from Bella’s life there, her group of friends from high school, her mom and dad, and so on.

It’s really nice, Alice definitely went all out with this one. “Bet you’re glad I didn’t let you come here in jeans and a dress shirt.” You tease Jacob playfully, trying to ease the tension in his body. Jacob glares at you, but there’s no bite to it. “I think we both know I would’ve pulled it off just fine.” You grin at him, at least he’s comfortable enough to be playful back.

“Ugh, if you two are going to be like this for the entire wedding. I’m going to need a barf bucket.” Quill groans out and Embry chuckles next to him. “That’s my cue to start drinking.” Billy laughs and rolls off to find Charlie, Sue following him. “Am I the only one who’s excited?” Seth asks, he’s been looking forward to the wedding for a while now.

———

The wedding ceremony was traditional, no personalized vows just short and sweet. You could see how much they loved each other, Bella has been so nervous walking down the aile but the second she looked at Edward it all melted away.

You were happy for her, in that moment it really did feel as simple as watching her get married to the love of her life. As you sat and watched with the love of yours.

Afterwards you couldn’t help but notice that Charlie almost always had his glass filled with champagne. This man is going to drink very drop of liquor involved in this wedding by the end of the night.

———

While you’re off looking something to eat, Edward comes up to talk to you. “Bella is really happy the both of you could make it.” You jump a bit at the sound of his voice. “Shit, you scared the crap out of me you lurker.” Edward smiles at that, it isn’t the first time you’ve called him a lurker. You have made jokes about how Edward isn’t a hoverer but a lurker, he lurkers instead of hovering like a normal person.

You and Edward used to get along, in fact you almost became friends. Till he abandoned Bella in the woods. Bella told you all about what she went through during the ride to Emily’s house the day you and her were almost mulled by Paul.

He never attempted to speak to you after he returned. The last time you saw him, you were playing peacekeeper between him and Jacob.

You’re a bit confused why he’s gone out of the way to talk to you. Till you look behind him and see Bella watching the two of you, she turns around quickly once she realizes you caught her.

“Bella wants us to get along.” Edward explains akwardly, you glare at him. “Maybe we can start by you agreeing to stay out of my head.” You hiss as you realize he’s read your mind. “Sorry, it’s a habit.” Edward apologizes and looks around awkwardly. “You’re a hard one to read, kind of like Charlie….I know you’re upset with me. But I’d like to try to make amends.” Sighing heavily at that you reluctantly agree to a truce between the two of you.

———

After having the most awkward conversation you have ever had in your life with Edward Cullen, you managed to escape back to your table with Jacob. “What was that about?” Jacob asks you as you sit down next to him. You huff out a laugh, “Just a truce agreement for Bella’s sake, and quite possibly the most awkward conversation I’ve had in my life.”

Jacob laughs as you wallow in self pity. “God I hope he doesn’t try to do that to me. I might end up breaking my vow to not rip him apart.”

———

Speeches, you hated speeches and now you know you hate wedding speeches even more. The second hand embarrassment is enough to make you want to gouge your eyes out as Ranee sings.

Emmets speech is something else. “Hope you’ve got enough sleep these past 18 years, because you won’t be getting anymore while.” No one takes it the way he intends. You cringe and watch as Charlie gulps down his champagne.

Your personal favorite is Charlie’s speech. If anyone could hunt down and kill a vampire it’d be a pissed odd Charlie Swan.

———

“Remind me to never let anyone at my wedding touch the mic.” Quill whispers to you as you and him look for some snacks. “Oh I’ll be the first one up there, I’ll talk about how much you fangirl and drool over Embry.” Quill glares at you playfully. “You wouldn’t dare.” And you grin evilly.

———

Turns out, Emmet is having a blast with the members of the pack that are here tonight. He’s always been more bubbly and energetic than the rest of the Cullens. You’re not sure when Jared got here but the two of them are messing around like they’ve been best buddies for years.

———

Quill and Embry get to SLOW DANCE TOGETHER DURING THE WEDDING!!!!! You try your best to contain your excitement. They get to actually act like boyfriends now, IN PUBLIC!

It’s cute, beyond adorable. Charlie comes up to talk to you as you watch the two lovers. “You and Jacob gonna dance?” Charlie asks as he takes a seat next to you, he almost misses it. “We were going to till Edward stole him for a bit.” You says simply and turn to smile at Charlie, who is sipping on God only knows the number of glasses of champagne he’s had tonight.

“Edwin…still don’t like that kid.” Charlie speaks ‘Edward name’ like it’s a curse. You chuckle at Charlie. “Welcome to the club.”

———

You and Jacob never get that dance. Turns out, Bella is planning on having a normal honeymoon with Edward. Jacob is beyond livid at the idea and the entire pack has to go back to Emily’s. So the night is cut short.

You’re walking to Jacob’s truck to drive it to Emily’s house, when Bella runs up to talk to you. “I’m so sorry Y/N. I never thought that he’d react that way.” You try to stay calm, she hasn’t spoken to you the entire wedding and now she wants to. “It’s okay Bella, I’m only worried about it ruining your night.” You do feel bad for her, it’s supposed to be a happy day, drama free. “I’m fine, I just hope you’re all okay. I never wanted all this to happy. I’m really happy you came.” Bella admits as she follows you to the truck. “I knew you wanted me to be here, so I came. That’s what people that care about you do.” You’re being short with her. To be honest with yourself you don’t want to be here anymore. Bella always makes a mess of things and everyone else has to clean it up. You’re tired of always being the one to do it.

“Just go back and have fun Bella, don’t worry about us.” Your voice is filled with the same fatigue that flows through your body. “You have an eternity left to spend with Edward, go and enjoy it instead of wasting seconds on us.” The bitterness and resentment you have for Edward and Bella’s all consuming relationship wins as you say this to her.

You loved Bella, she was the kind of person you only meet once in your lifetime. She was a kind soul, caring, but when Edward came into the picture everything else in her life faded into nothingness.

You get into the truck and give Bella an apologetic look before starting the engine and driving away.

———

Everyone is inside playing cards, Jacob is outside sitting on the porch when you get there. He took of his suit jacket and his his tie loosen around his neck. He looks like he has been beating himself up for the entire hour it took for you to drive there. Sighing to yourself, you kill the engine and get out to walk towards him.

You sit down next to him, and he moves to lean his head on yours, wrapping an arm around your shoulders. “I’m sorry I blew up like that and ruined the night.” Jacob murmurs, and his tone is low and remorseful. “You’re worried about her Jacob, you have every right to be.” You’re fine is light and full of understanding. “Bella will be okay, Edward won’t let her die. Besides I think she’s too stubborn for dearh.” Jacob laughs softly, then presses a kiss to your head. Before getting up and bowing to you with one hand out. “What are you up to?” You grin as he turns to you with a bright smile.

“May I have this dance?” You grin at him, he did promise you a dance tonight. You hop up and accept the invitation. You and Jacob slow dance, there’s no music but the sound of the night and your own heartbeats…and the sounds of laughter and yelling coming for inside Emily’s house.

“I just wish I could’ve given you a happier night.” Jacob says softly. “I think it’s perfect, drama, secondhand embarrassment, speeches, fighting, romance, what more could I ask for.” Jacob laughs at the slight sarcasm that fills your voice in the last part of your sentence. “I’ll make it up to you.” Jacob whispers and you grin. “Ooo I think I might have some suggestions.”

“HEY QUIT MAKING OUT AND COME PLAY SOME MUGGINS WITH US LOVEBIRDS.” Paul yells from the door. “YEAH WE NEED SOMEONE TO MAKE JARED LOOK BETTER!”

———

You used to think that Bella and Charlie were like a second family, till eventually you grew apart form them. Now, the Wolfpack is the closest thing you have to a real one, they knew you and Jacob were struggling with the whole Bella is gonna be a vampire thing. And there they were, making you play games and have fun with them.

Nothing get better then this. And nothing can come between the bond you all have formed…right?

—————

This was the HARDEST PART FOR ME TO RIGHT. I had nothing planned for this I was so focused on the rest of the story. What little I did completely flew out the window.

So sorry if it’s shit, everything else will be better written and put together. I’m just so happy this part is FINALLY FINISHED.

This is literally just to move the plot along I’m so sorry.

As always feel free to request whatever you’d like to see in future parts.

Thanks for suffering through this part

Love ya🫶

Part 12

[agirlsawalittlerose]

This is Me Trying

ModernAU!Aegon x OFC

Fresh out of rehab, Aegon Targaryen is looking for a way back into music when he meets Victoria, a talented but stubborn singer-songwriter who wants nothing to do with his family’s record label. Reluctantly thrown together, they form an unexpected creative partnership, finding common ground in music and shared struggles.

TW: Alcoholism, Addiction, Sexism

MASTERLIST

CHAPTER 21: What is it about men?

Sara had no interest in playing the uptight friend, nor had she ever found any satisfaction in being the mom of her friend group.  

She just wanted some kind of order in the universe—for things to go the way they were supposed to, for karma to catch up with bad people, and for good people to actually succeed. That was all she hoped for herself, after all.  

She had always told herself it was because she was a Virgo. That was also the reason, she figured, why directors and casting agents seemed to instinctively know she wasn’t the easiest to tame (Leo rising, after all).  

Her Pisces moon, on the other hand, made her particularly susceptible to a third category of people she had only encountered in adulthood: the broken ones.  

She had wondered why she could only truly understand—and be understood by—people who were broken. But then, thinking about the father she had never known, she started noticing the cracks in herself, too. In the way every story she made up had a happy ending. In the way she always felt a quiet, gnawing concern whenever she came across someone broken—someone like her.  

It was the third week in a row that she had found Vic practically passed out on the sofa. The first time it happened, she had assumed it was just exhaustion. Sure, it was a little sad not seeing her at the pub as often, but it was also a relief. Vic was finally doing the thing she had fought so hard for, even if it meant dragging herself to the end of the day too tired to talk—or be talked to.  

But then Sara had noticed the empty wine bottle on the floor next to the sofa.  

And it wasn’t that she wanted to mother Vic or scold her like some nagging friend. But her Pisces moon was screaming at her—loud, insistent, impossible to ignore—that something wasn’t right.  

"You should know that after twenty, sleeping in weird positions destroys your back," Sara announced, slapping Vic’s foot to wake her up as she crossed the room to open the window.

The smell of wine was so strong it almost made her nauseous. Or maybe that was just the growing worry gnawing at her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Vic rub her face and turn over on the sofa. "Tell me about it," she muttered, voice still thick with sleep. "My back is wrecked."

Sara barely avoided kicking the empty wine bottle on the floor. She didn’t have the heart to pointedly pick it up in front of Vic. "Rough night?" she asked as casually as possible, lighting a cigarette by the window.

Vic, now somewhat conscious, sat up with a groan. "I recorded All You Wanted for seven hours yesterday," she said flatly. "I hate it now."

"Shame. I like that one," Sara replied with a shrug.

"I liked it better when Aegon sang it," Vic admitted, scanning the room for something. There was a tinge of something in her voice—something sad—that Sara immediately picked up on.

Once Vic found her bag (and a cigarette), she joined Sara by the window.

"I haven’t seen him around the house," Sara noted. And honestly, that was weird. Those two had been practically fused for weeks, impossible to be around without feeling like an intruder—or worrying she’d walk in on them naked, unapologetically all over each other.

Then the contract came, and Aegon vanished.

"Haven’t seen him since Tuesday," Vic murmured, lighting her cigarette. That was odd.

It was Friday.

"Allen barely lets me breathe, which is fine—I mean, the first show’s in two months—but every time Aegon stops by the label, Aemond suddenly has some urgent, top-secret meeting to drag me to, or he locks me up in the booth for hours," Vic huffed, “It’s almost like he’s doing it on purpose." she said, not really thinking about it, though frustration crept into her voice.

At the end of the day, she was only human. And maybe a good fuck with her boyfriend would’ve been a better stress reliever than downing a bottle of wine every night. Sara couldn’t exactly blame her.

Also Sara was starting to think maybe she was right and Aemond was doing it on purpose.

Maybe Aegon hadn’t been wrong that night at the pub when he clocked his brother’s behavior. And that pompous, arrogant sore loser definitely deserved to be called out on it.

"Well, thank God it’s Friday, babe," Sara said, trying to lift the mood—though her eyes flicked to the empty wine bottle by the couch.

"Yeah, no," Vic snorted. "I have to go to the label even tomorrow." She exhaled a humorless laugh, staring blankly out the window, ash collecting at the end of her cigarette. "And on Sunday, Jen booked a full day with some Hackney photographer so I can film twenty TikToks hyping up the single."

"Sounds awful."

"You don’t get it. She rented an Airbnb—wants to pretend it’s my actual bedroom and have me film videos in pajamas, like I just spontaneously wrote All You Wanted there on the spot."

Sara let out an exaggerated groan of disgust. Normally, that kind of reaction would’ve made Vic laugh—but not today. She kept staring out the window, and Sara was pretty sure that what came out of her mouth a second later was a genuinely miserable sigh.

Fucking Pisces moon. It was always the damn Pisces moon. Now that she saw the full picture, it was all painfully clear:  

She was happy for Vic, of course she was. But none of this was happening on her terms. It should’ve worked out the way Vic wanted—not according to the plans of whichever puppet master was pulling her strings this week.

Sara’s thoughts were cut off by the sound of Vic’s phone ringing, followed by the way she lunged to grab it from her bag, carefully sidestepping the empty wine bottle by the couch—just as she carefully avoided Sara’s gaze.

She answered while stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray on the armrest, mumbling a series of “yeah”s and “mmhmm”s that, for the first time that morning, carried the faintest trace of excitement. And that terrified Sara. That faint spark—how fragile it felt. Like it could be smothered at any second by this goddamn grind turning Vic into a one-woman content factory.

“I gotta go. Aemond’s picking me up in fifteen,” Vic said, scooping her bag off the couch. “At least we’ll swing by the studio before the torture begins.”

“That already sounds like a way better plan,” Sara said gently. Maybe telling him to fuck off could wait, but it still didn’t explain why that other idiot—his brother—hadn’t tried a little harder.

“Right? And he finally admitted my version of the bassline in Cut Song is better than his,” Vic replied, something lighting up in her again. The sweetness of Aemond’s praise worked on her like a balm—calming, soothing, grounding. It was written all over her face.

Then she was gone, vanishing in a flash. The moment Sara heard the shower start upstairs, she finally picked up the empty bottle from the floor and, as her fucking Pisces moon took over, started dialing Aegon’s number on her phone.

Sara had heard about those red bricks a billion times. She’d heard Vic talk about the mortifying public incident a few months back—how the shame had eventually morphed into pure joy every time she mentioned the life she now shared with the love of her life.

The same love of her life who was now very clearly neglecting her, and with whom Sara absolutely needed to have a word—just to make sure he was putting in the effort Vic deserved. Or else she’d personally rip his balls off. She quickly started scanning through her mental toolbox to figure out what would be the best method for this lovely little task.

“Hey!”  

The voice that greeted her when the door opened was soft and friendly—but it wasn’t Aegon. Instead, it was a blonde girl with big eyes, looking at her with a mix of polite curiosity and the kind of familiarity that said she definitely knew who Sara was.

Well, Sara knew who she was too. Aegon’s sister. She’d seen her a few times at the pub for open mics, though they’d never spoken.

“Hi! I’m looking for your brother,” Sara jumped right in, trying to keep her mission vibes in check.

“The wild card or the psychopath?” the girl asked with deadpan seriousness.

Sara burst out laughing. “Exactly…?” she shrugged, and even though the girl didn’t immediately get what was funny, after a beat she lit up and laughed too.

“It’s for me! Be right down!” Aegon’s voice boomed from upstairs.

His sister motioned for Sara to come inside. The Targaryen place looked more like a five-star restaurant than a home. Of course it did. Aegon was the type of guy made for Louboutins and Christmas in Cuba. Nice catch, Vic.

She led Sara into a huge living room, asking if she wanted some tea while collecting a few crystals from the coffee table and turning them over in her hands. Sara shook her head—tea wasn’t the priority right now—but curiosity got the better of her.

“Black obsidian?” she asked, tilting her chin toward the girl's closed fist.

The girl nodded, still fully committed to making oat milk coffee without letting go of her stones. “For grounding. There’s something in the air I really don’t like lately. Must be my Pisces moon...” she murmured, pouring the milk with care.

Sara barely had time to nod in total agreement—finally someone else who sensed the vibe was off—before Aegon walked into the room.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sara snapped the moment she saw him—maybe a bit too aggressively.

“Hey, you’re the one who showed up at my place—so you don’t get to ask why I’m always soaking wet every time we run into each other,” he said, raking a hand through his dripping hair.

His sister, coffee in one hand and her crystals still clutched in the other, mumbled a quick apology and left them alone in the living room.

“No, genius, I mean what the hell are you doing and why the fuck is my best friend miserable, hasn’t seen you since Tuesday, and you’re just… doing nothing?” Sara shot back, leaning against the kitchen counter.

Aegon rolled his eyes as he dropped onto the sofa. It was painfully obvious that if something was going on, he wasn’t about to just admit it.  

“Look, it’s not like I want to leave her alone and miserable. It’s the label’s schedule and they clearly don’t want me there.”

“Why the hell do you say it like you couldn’t care less?” Sara pressed, arms crossed now, suspicious as hell.

He shot her a look that could’ve fried her on the spot. “You think I don’t care? First they scrap my album again and now it’s like they don’t want me to even see her,” he said, throwing his arms wide in frustration, the anger in his voice more real than she expected. 

Maybe she’d misjudged him. “Every time I try to see her, she’s exhausted. And whenever I swing by the label…”

“She’s in some ‘super secret, totally off-limits’ meeting with Aemond or locked in the booth in the recording room,” Sara finished for him, deflated.

Aegon gestured at her like, exactly, then dropped his head into his hands.

Sara debated for a long moment whether to tell him what she really came to say. She wasn’t sure if he’d understand, or worse, if it would trigger him. She knew his history. Maybe he wasn’t the right person to bring into this mess. But still…

“She’s been drinking a lot lately,” she said softly, her voice barely more than a whisper as she watched his reaction closely.

Miraculously, Aegon’s head shot up. His eyes locked onto hers, intense, urging her to keep going.

“I mean… a lot,” Sara added, needing to make it clear this wasn’t some ‘Friday night wind-down’ thing. This was a bottle of wine by herself—sometimes more—and her passed out on the sofa until morning.

And Aegon understood.

“What shift do you have tonight?” he asked suddenly, like the pieces had just clicked together in his head.

“I’m closing,” she replied.

“Good. Leave me your house keys.”

******

The lights in the studio were low and amber-honeyed, soft enough to blur the edges of things. One of the smaller rooms, the kind wrapped so tightly in soundproofing you could hear your own heartbeat if you sat still long enough. Vic perched on a stool near the mixing desk, sleeves shoved to her elbows, one boot hooked around the footrest, the other planted firm on the ground like she needed at least one part of her to feel steady.

Aemond sat beside her, nursing a mug of black coffee like it held all the answers, nodding along as the rough mix played through the monitors.

Her voice came through raw, frayed in all the right places. Unpolished, but intentional. She liked that. Honesty had a kind of texture you couldn’t fake.

When the track ended, silence stretched, thick and slightly charged. Vic glanced sideways at Allen.

“Well?”

He sipped his coffee first—always had to do that, like opinions required marinating in caffeine—then leaned back, long legs outstretched, casual. Too casual. “It’s good.”

“Good,” she echoed, dry. Her eyes shifted to Aemond, looking for the flicker of something—approval, maybe, or recognition. That steady kind he gave her sometimes when no one else was paying attention.

“Mhm.” His gaze slid to hers. That little glance he did, the one that always felt like it came with subtext in italics. “There’s something in the second verse. Not a flaw, exactly. Just... a moment. It dips.”

“Emotionally?” she asked. “Or melodically?”

“Bit of both,” he said, leaning forward, elbows to knees. “That line about ‘waiting in doorways with empty hands’—that’s the gut punch. But then you back off. The tension’s all built up and instead of snapping the thread, you let it go slack. I’d lean in.”

She hated that it made sense. Hated more that she couldn’t argue.

“I like it understated.”

“Understated’s great,” Allen said, stepping in now, voice softer. “But you’re not meant to sit in the background, Vic. You’re not wallpaper. People should hear you and forget to breathe.”

Something flickered in her. Small. Defiant. Unwilling.

Allen had this talent that Vic found dangerously compelling—he always managed to make her feel like the most precious person in the world. And yet, Vic couldn’t help noticing how things always seemed to turn out the way he wanted.  

Probably part of being a manager, she thought.

She shrugged.

Allen tilted his head. “You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you don’t. Not all the way.”

She looked down at the scuffed toes of her boots. She didn’t have an answer for that.

Allen let it breathe for a moment before going on. “You’re right on the edge of something,” he said. Then turned to Aemond, like calling in a second opinion. “You feel it too, right?”

Aemond didn’t answer at first. Just looked at her—really looked—like he was reading some private translation only he could understand.

Vic shifted under it, not sure if it made her feel grounded or exposed.

“That shoot Jen set up,” Allen said, steering the moment back. “It’s this weekend, yeah?”

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “Why?”

His tone didn’t change. Cool, practiced nonchalance. “Just wondering if you’ve thought about how you want to show up.”

“This the part where you tell me to wear fishnets and glitter?”

He grinned. “Nah. You’ve already got the aesthetic. It’s about owning it. Making it unmistakable. People remember Stevie’s shawls. Debbie’s bleach. Sometimes the right look cements a moment into myth.”

She didn’t reply, but didn’t roll her eyes either. Just held his gaze a second too long, until she could feel herself starting to believe he meant she could actually become a myth.

Allen leaned against the console, arms crossed, smile like he was in on something. “You know hair theory?”

Vic looked at him sideways. “Hair theory?”

“Yeah. All the greats have a signature look. Some little detail that makes them unmissable.”

“So I need to shave my head and become someone’s Pinterest board?”

He laughed. Low, warm. “Oh Jesus, not shave! That fringe? The way it moves when you sing—it’s stupid photogenic.”

She almost smiled. Almost. He didn’t even notice how crooked it was from years of DIY trims—or maybe he did and just didn’t care.

“You’ve already got the voice,” Allen said, starting to circle her now, slow like an orbit. “The edge. The truth. But a recognisable look might even give you a little more—” he searched for the word “—swagger.”

That made her laugh, short and involuntary. The way he’d said it was warm, but not suffocating, and Vic thought that if Allen had been her manager back when she was a scared little girl with three thousand hang-ups about her place in the world… maybe things would’ve been a little easier.

“That’s not even a real word.”

“Sure it is. Bite. A little ‘don’t fuck with me’ in your walk.”

She looked at Aemond again, like do you believe this?, but he just gave the smallest nod—the kind you could pretend not to notice if you weren’t ready to take it seriously.

“People should see you,” Allen said, sitting on the edge of the table across from her, “and know exactly who the fuck you are.”

Vic let her head fall back. “Feels a little... calculated.”

“It is,” he said. “But so is walking on stage with a setlist. Doesn’t make it fake. You’re not selling out, Vic. You’re carving space for the real stuff to live.”

Vic stared at him for a second, grateful—really grateful—that he’d hit the exact nerve of her fears, ones that now felt a little childish and a little too idealistic.  

She weighed it for a moment, wondering if there was anything wrong with trusting him completely. Maybe even handing over the reins—at least for the cluttered, tangled parts of her brain she couldn’t seem to sort out in this new life that was moving faster than she could keep up with.

She felt like she was learning how to walk for the first time—that was the right metaphor. And right now, with her legs still shaky and her balance uncertain, the temptation to reach up toward Allen’s outstretched hand was suddenly strong.

“Maybe a bob,” Allen said under his breath, stepping in front of her, reaching out with slow confidence and gently tilting her chin like he was testing the silhouette.

Vic instinctively gathered her hair in one hand. She remembered that night with Sara—drunk, dramatic, declaring with absolute certainty that bad bitches wore their hair long. That Vic didn’t have the bone structure for risks like bobs.  

She thought of Aegon’s fingers tangled in her hair at Ruskin Park, the way he looked at her with that kind of distracted love neither of them was ready to name.

“It’d suit you,” Allen said.

Her head snapped up, surprised by how gentle his voice had gone.

Vic bit her tongue to keep from asking if he really meant it.

After all, he was supposed to believe in her. He had fought to have her on his roster. He’d loved All You Wanted, loved her demo, had thrown himself into her project (God knows what Stevie Nicks would think of that). He’d treated her album like it was a child.

She didn’t answer. Just picked up her guitar and started strumming the same three chords again, a little slower this time. Thoughtful.

Across from her, Aemond stayed quiet, but she could feel his eyes on her—curious, watchful, present. He studied her like a song half-finished, waiting to see where the chorus landed. Then he gave the smallest shrug, as if to say, It’s not a bad idea.

And Allen, well. He saw things. Named them.

If he said it would help, maybe it would.

She told herself it was just a haircut.

But even as she played, her mouth started shaping that half-finished chorus again—the one Allen swore might be the second single.  

And she wasn’t sure anymore if she actually wanted to cut her hair or if she just wanted to hear him say she was doing okay.

“Anyway,” Allen said, stretching like the conversation hadn’t just curled something deep inside her, “that second verse. Think about it. Or don’t. You’re the one in the booth.”

******

Vic didn’t need big speeches or candlelit five-course dinners—if anything, she’d mock the hell out of him for trying. But he could do quiet. Thoughtful. Her kind of romantic.

So Aegon let himself into Sara’s apartment with the keys she'd dropped into his palm that afternoon and got to work.

First: clean up. Not a deep clean—she'd smell that shit immediately and get suspicious—but just enough to make space feel a little softer and relieve her from doing it herself. The coffee table was wiped down. The blanket she always curled up with folded over the sofa, then unfolded and draped again because it looked too staged. The lamp near the sofa clicked on, casting a warm, low glow that made everything feel calmer, even to him.

He set up their old DVD player next.  

Moulin Rouge! still in its scratched plastic case, cover slightly torn at the edge. They’d watched it once weeks ago—she’d cried and tried to pretend she hadn’t, he’d pretended not to notice and then teased her about it anyway. She’d rolled her eyes, called him a little shit, but smiled the whole time.

The menu screen flickered on, Ewan McGregor’s voice caught mid-note, looping endlessly. He turned the volume low and left it waiting.

Dinner was next.  

Takeout—of course. Anything else would’ve felt wrong. She didn’t trust people who liked cooking too much. Thai was safer. Pad See Ew, crispy tofu, green curry—the comfort food she never ordered herself but always stole from his plate.

Now all that was left to do was wait.  

And try not to look like he was waiting.

He paced a little. Changed the position of the chopsticks. Adjusted the blanket again.  

Sat down. Got up. Checked his phone. Zero texts. Nothing from her.  

Not that he expected one.

She was exhausted lately. He could see it in the gaps between their moments—the way she slouched in doorframes, how her sentences trailed off when she thought no one was listening. And if Sara was telling the truth—and she usually was—Vic wasn’t just exhausted. She was slipping. Going quiet in a way that didn’t look like peace.

Aegon hated that. 

Hated feeling like the world was making her smaller when all he wanted was to see her whole.

He needed to grow a pair, set aside his stupid jealousy that she definitely didn’t deserve, stop selfishly obsessing over his damn album, and get back to focusing on what was now his priority: Vic.

So he waited. Quiet, in her space, in the soft light, with a movie and dinner and the tiny hope that maybe this would be enough to make her exhale.

And then—

Keys jingled outside the door.

His chest pulled tight.

The door swung open.  

And she froze. Like her brain short-circuited at the sight of him in her apartment.

She was mid-shrug out of her jacket, bag still half-slipped off one shoulder, hair damp at the ends from a light rain outside. Her eyes darted from him to the couch to the takeout and then back to him, wide with suspicion.

“What the fuck,” she said softly, blinking.

Aegon raised both hands like don’t shoot. “Hi.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked, a soft smile blossoming on her face.

“I broke in,” he said. “Left a trail of destruction. Probably microwaved your fish sauce.”

Vic narrowed her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched. “Is that green curry?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—” She stepped inside slowly, eyes sweeping over the room like she was trying to spot the trap. “Did you set up Moulin Rouge?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Well… Sara’s out. And you haven’t exactly been returning texts, so…”

Her brows lifted, finally catching up to what was happening.

It hit her all at once, visible in the way her posture shifted. The bag thudded to the floor. Her jacket joined it. She clearly wasn’t used to this. Not from anyone. Not something sweet, and quiet, and no-pressure. 

She nudged him with her hip as she passed, heading for the sofa. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

Aegon followed, slower. “You think I’ve been what?” he asked, the laugh in his voice edged with disbelief. “I’ve been trying to see you for days.”

He sat down beside her, close but not touching. “I missed you,” she said finally, voice almost too soft. “A stupid amount.”

Aegon looked at her, studied the edges of her face like he’d been trying to memorize them in her absence. “It felt like the fucking universe was in on it.”

She nodded, something small and sad in it. “It really did.”

They sat there for a moment, the kind of silence that wasn’t heavy, just honest.

Then she glanced sideways, a half-smile tugging at her mouth. “So this is how you say “I missed you too”.”

“I was romantically pursuing you against odds worthy of a tragic Victorian novel, thank you very much.”

She let out a quiet laugh. “A real martyr.”

“So brave.”

They both smiled at the same time, soft and slightly shaky, like exhaling tension neither of them knew they were still holding.

And then he saw it.

The hair.

Shorter. A sharp bob now, grazing her jaw, with a fringe that looked like it hadn’t fully decided what it wanted to be yet. It framed her face in a way that made her look… sharper. Like she was cosplaying confidence and hadn’t fully committed to the role.

He didn’t say anything at first, just stared a second longer than was socially acceptable.

She noticed.

“Oh. Right. Yeah.” Her hand lifted to her bangs, nervous, defensive. “I cut it. It’s fine. Allen wanted ‘a  look’. Whatever the fuck that means.”

Aegon tilted his head. “Do you like it?”

Vic didn’t answer right away. That was the answer.

“I don’t hate it,” she said after a beat.

He leaned closer. Gently reached out, ran two fingers along the edge of her bangs, soft and damp.

“You’re allowed to say you don’t like it,” she muttered, eyes flitting away again. “I won’t cry about it.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” he said, voice softening.

She raised her eyebrows, skeptical.

“I was thinking,” he said, trailing her cheeks with his thumb, “You look like a dangerous French film student,” he said.

She laughed once, sharp. “That’s weirdly specific.”

“I mean that in the best way. You’re like, mysterious now. Might seduce me and then ghost me for three years.”

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered, but she was smiling now.

“I’m serious.” He leaned in slightly, voice lowering. “You look hot.”

Her cheeks flushed. She tried to roll her eyes again, but it didn’t land. Her hands moved to his shirt, tugging him a little closer.

He didn’t resist.

Her lips were right there, and when he kissed her it felt like opening a window. Warm, easy, a little clumsy at first—like they were both trying to remember how this worked after too many days apart. Her fingers slipped into his hair, tugged just enough to make him exhale against her mouth.

The second kiss was messier. Hungrier. Less I missed you and more I need you right now. His hands found her hips, slid beneath the hem of her shirt, skin warm and familiar under his palms. 

She broke the kiss long enough to murmur, “Wait, the movie—”

“Fuck the movie,” he said, already steering them toward the hallway.

“But it’s Moulin Rouge.”

“It’ll still be Moulin Rouge tomorrow.”

“You lit a candle, didn’t you?”

“I was trying to be romantic, Jesus—”

She laughed against his neck, breath catching as he pressed her against the hallway wall.

Their mouths found each other again, and again, and it felt like breathing for the first time in days. Like shaking off someone else’s version of who she was supposed to be.

By the time they reached her bedroom, Moulin Rouge was still looping in the background, the menu music tinny and distant. Aegon barely noticed.

He realised he didn’t care how long it took for her to feel like herself again. He’d be here. Quietly. On her red sofa. In her bed. Wherever she needed.

[sawruhh]

okay so

[princesshair]

.

[pitlanepeach]

Radio Silence | Chapter Two

Lando Norris x Amelia Brown (OFC)

Series Masterlist

Summary — Order is everything. Her habits aren't quirks, they're survival techniques. And only three people in the world have permission to touch her: Mom, Dad, Fernando.

Then Lando Norris happens.

One moment. One line crossed. No going back.

Warnings — Autistic!OFC, mentions of an autistic meltdown, Lando being horrendously down-bad.

Notes — I love to ramble with ya’ll about my fics, so send me as many asks as you want!

Want to be added to the taglist? Let me know! - Peach x

2018

Amelia liked it when the pit garages were like this. Tools neatly racked, screens idle but ready, the scent of fresh tire rubber still hanging in the air — not yet burnt.

Fernando sat on a workbench, sipping his espresso.

She was perched on the same tire she always chose, butter-yellow water bottle in hand. There was enough ice inside to keep her drink cold all day, even under the Abu Dhabi sun. She wore a white cotton dress that would probably be stained with oil by the end of the day — she didn’t care.

"You are thinking too much," he said eventually, voice low, words shaped by the curl of his accent. "I can hear them.”

She turned the bottle slowly between her hands, listening to the ice crash against the insulated metal. “You can’t hear thinking.” She told him. 

"I can when it is this loud," he replied. She frowned, staring at one of the stickers on her water bottle. Either there was a language barrier — or Fernando was some kind of mind reader. “You are worried about the new boys, yes?”

She rounded her shoulders up to her ears in response. 

He shifted slightly, the sound of his espresso cup touching down on the metal bench. “You worry they will not like you. Or not understand you. That they will say stupid things.”

“I don’t care if they like me,” she said automatically, but her voice was too tight around the words. “I just… I don’t want to make them uncomfortable. Because I don’t act the way they will expect, since I’m their boss’ daughter. Or because I don’t always know how to—”

He cut her off with a short sound — not quite interrupting, just catching the sentence before it turned into something more self-deprecating than necessary. “Mi niña,” he said. “You are not responsible for the comfort of two boys. Especially not ones who still trip over their own feet getting into the car.”

She didn’t smile, but the edges of her thoughts softened.

“They come into your garage. You were here first. You are a very helpful addition.” He paused. “And you are never unkind. This is more than most.”

She tightened her grip on her water bottle. “I make people uncomfortable sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed, and his honesty was nice. People always tried to lie to her in a silly attempt to make her feel more normal. “But only the ones who do not listen properly to what you say.” He picked up his espresso again, then added, “And if they do not listen, I will teach them.”

Amelia glanced toward the open garage, where footsteps passed in rapid beats and voices moved in bursts. It was the last race of the 2018 season. Lewis had already secured the Drivers’ Championship. She’d sent a big cake to his house with Well Done for Being Fast written on it. He’d posted a picture on his Instagram, which meant he’d appreciated the gesture.

She glanced at her phone and started chewing on her bottom lip.

Thinking about Lewis only reminded her of the email — unread, unacknowledged — sitting in her meticulously organised inbox.

Toto Wolff had taken it upon himself to email her. From his personal address, not his work one — no “Mercedes” anywhere in sight.

She’d taken one look at the subject line (Unconditional Job Offer / Employment Opportunity) and promptly launched her phone across the room. Miraculously, the screen had survived.

Lewis had warned her more than once that his team principal was interested in her talents. She’d assumed it was flattery. Apparently not.

If her dad ever found out about the email, he’d have a full-blown meltdown — the kind usually reserved for her. A rival team trying to poach his daughter wasn’t just a personal affront; it was a declaration of war.

“Amelia,” Fernando said. 

She didn’t look up right away. 

"Yes?” She asked. 

"Do not worry so much,” he said, tapping the side of his cup. "It ruins the coffee."

— 

The MTC was half-empty, lit with the flat grey light of a British winter morning. Most people were still on holiday. Lando wasn’t most people anymore. 

He tugged at the sleeves of his new team jacket as he walked the corridor past engineering, sneakers squeaking just slightly with each step. It still felt surreal; being here. Not as a junior, not as a maybe, but as a full-time McLaren Formula One driver.

He was so wrapped up in the thrill of it that he nearly walked right past her.

Amelia Brown was crouched beside a cart of sorted telemetry tablets, scanning each one like she was decoding a puzzle, eyebrows furrowed, lips pursed unhappily. Her white trainers were smudged, her dark hair pulled back loosely, and her signature butter-yellow water bottle was sat beside her on the floor.

Lando stopped.

“Hey,” he said, a little too loud for how quiet the corridor was.

She looked up, blinked once, then gave a small nod. “Hello.”

Not cold. Not warm either. Just… Amelia. 

“I, uh… I set two alarms now,” he blurted, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “So I’m never late anymore. Not even accidentally, you know?”

She turned her attention back to the tablets. “Okay.” She mumbled, hardly eligible. 

He waited. 

Right. That was it. 

Just okay.

“You know,” he tried to remind her, smiling because he wasn’t sure what else to do with his face, “because you said I lacked discipline and wouldn’t get the promotion if I kept being late.”

“I did say that,” she said, tapping on one of the screens and letting out an almost silent sigh when the screen remained black. “It was a problem.” 

Still nothing. No smile. No teasing. 

Lando cleared his throat. “Right. Well. It’s not a problem now.”

“Good,” she said.

A pause stretched between them. 

Lando rocked back on his heels. “Cool. Alright. I’ll just— I’ll see you around?”

Still, she didn’t look up. “Highly likely.”

He gave a quick nod and turned to go, cheeks warm.

He’d always thought of himself as pretty likeable. People laughed when he wanted them to. He was decent at reading a room — usually. But clearly, none of that meant anything to Amelia Brown. 

As he walked off, he glanced back without thinking. And, like an absolute idiot, he stumbled a little when he saw her absolutely beam at one of the tablets as it flickered to life, screen lighting up her face like something out of a bloody PC World advert.

Jesus Christ. She was fucking pretty.

Not in a flashy, look-at-me way. Just… quietly, properly pretty. The kind of pretty that made his stomach do something proper dodgy. He dragged a hand through his hair, muttering to himself. “Yeah. Sick. Nice one, mate. You’ve got no chance.”

— 

iMessage – Tuesday, 19:47

Lando mate she’s well fit 

Max F. bro 💀

Lando can’t stop staring at her she probably thinks im a right creep

Max F. yeah probably who are you even talking abt

Lando zak’s daughter

Max F.

are you actually brain dead?

you can’t fancy your boss’s daughter, mate

Lando she smiled today not at me but i saw it 

Max F. get a grip

Lando shut up you don’t get it

Max F. it’s a miracle you’ve still got a job 

Lando is this a safe space or what??

Max F. absolutely not you’re delusional, mate she’s so off-limits it’s not even funny

Lando 

🖕

— 

The Browns didn’t really do Christmas — not in the traditional sense. No matching pyjamas, no big family gathering, no chaos in the kitchen over a turkey no one actually wanted. They kept it simple: jazz music, good coffee, and her dad’s usual schtick — “I forgot to buy you anything this year.”

Which was a lie. Obviously.

She found it parked just outside on the driveway. A muted grey, weather-worn 1974 BMW 2002. 

Amelia stood and stared at it for a long time. Long enough that the cold bite of English winter started to seep in through her socks, and the tips of her fingers began to sting.

“Don’t just stand there,” her dad called from the doorway, hands tucked into his dressing gown pockets. “Take a proper look. She’s all yours.”

She took a slow step forward, then another. The car was old, but solid — just the way she liked things. A little rust, some scuffed chrome. It was beautiful. She crouched next to the front fender and ran her hand along the edge, careful, reverent.

“You hate shopping,” she said, still staring at it.

“I didn’t shop,” her dad replied. “I emailed a man named Clive and paid way too much to have him do all the work for me.”

There was a long silence.

She stood, glanced at him, tried — really tried — to meet his eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

He gave a small nod. “You’ll need new tires. And probably a carburettor.”

Her fingers curled tighter around the edge of her sleeves, but this time it wasn’t nerves — it was barely-contained energy. Her thoughts were already whirring; parts lists, toolkits, diagrams, weekends in the garage with grease on her hands and her favourite playlist playing on repeat.

“I— I can order those online,” she said, already calculating delivery times in her head. “And the belts. And the spark plugs. And—” She stopped herself.

He didn’t say anything. Just smiled into his coffee mug that said ‘Worlds Best Dad’ and stepped back inside, leaving her alone with her new car and barely contained excitement.

Her hands started moving at her sides — flapping, stimming, too fast to stop once they began. She shoved them into her pockets, fists clenched tight against the fabric. Closed her eyes.

She took a breath. Let it out slowly.

Old habits died hard. Years at school had taught her to mask her reactions — even the harmless ones — because they made her stand out. Because they made her weird.

She hadn’t just been ignored. She’d been mocked. Not always loudly, but enough to stick. The way she flapped her hands. The way she didn’t make eye contact. The way she talked too much about one thing and not enough about everything else.

There was a reason she’d chosen not to go to university, even though she loved learning. Even though engineering made perfect sense to her in ways people often didn’t.

She could get a degree. She’d probably be good at it.

But it would drain her — the social minefields, the unspoken rules, the overwhelming noise of lecture halls and shared spaces and trying to be something she wasn’t just to fit in.

She’d spent so long trying to pass as normal. To not stim in public. To not talk too much. To not be too much.

Once, a girl in her class had said, in a tone that Amelia guessed was meant to be kind, “At least you’re pretty. You wouldn’t be able to tell that you’ve got, you know… issues.”

She still thought about that sometimes.

How it was supposed to be a compliment.

How it hadn’t felt like one at all.

— 

2019

The lights were off in her dad’s office. Just the soft hum of the monitor on standby, the gentle click of the old wall clock, and the warm, familiar scent of coffee baked into the furniture. She curled up on the old leather couch, knees tucked close to her chest, head resting against the arm. She had her weighted blanket on. Her yellow water bottle was beside her, half-full. The room felt like a safe haven. 

After yesterday, that was all she wanted.

The meltdown had come on fast — she’d been too hot, the lights too bright, someone had changed the layout of the front-desk without warning her, and it had all just spiralled. She hated how quickly she lost herself in the emotions. Hated the looks people gave her when she couldn’t hold it all together.

She’d apologised more than she should have. Her dad told her that she never needed to apologise for being who she was.

The office door opened.

She didn’t move, but her eyes flicked toward the sound. Her dad stepped in first, deep in conversation, and behind him were Carlos and Lando.

“I told you, she’s probably curled up somewhere charging like a phone,” her dad said lightly, then saw her. His voice softened. “Ah. There she is. Amelia — this is Lando. And this is Carlos.”

She blinked. Sat up a little. “I already know Lando.”

Lando almost tripped over his own feet. “Yeah! Yeah, we’ve, uh— run into each other a few times. Around. Just, like—hallways. And stuff.”

He scratched the back of his neck. His face went bright pink.

Amelia stared at him for a moment before she turned her attention to Carlos. “Hello.”

He gave her a small smile. “Hola,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

There was a small pause.

Her dad cleared his throat, cheerful as ever.

“Carlos is one of the good ones,” he said. “No nonsense. I like that in a driver.”

Amelia nodded once. That made sense. She respected no-nonsense people, too.

She tucked her knees back under her chin. “Okay,” she said quietly.

Carlos smiled again, just a little wider this time. Still cautious, but less unsure.

Amelia didn’t return the smile — not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t always remember that she had to. Instead, she reached for her water bottle and unscrewed the lid. 

“You retired in Australia,” she said. 

Carlos blinked, then gave a small laugh. “Yeah. Not the best start to the season.”

“It was the power unit,” she shrugged. “Renault engine. Unreliable. It wasn’t your fault.”

Her dad gave a low chuckle. “She doesn’t miss much. Reads through race data like it’s the morning newspaper.”

Carlos tilted his head slightly. “You work with the engineers?” He asked her. 

“I don’t work anywhere,” Amelia said. “But I sometimes sit in on meetings. And I fix things when they’re wrong. Fernando used to let me be in his garage. He said I was very useful.”

“You are useful,” her dad said automatically, from across the room.

She didn’t respond. Compliments were difficult — they always made her feel like she was meant to do something with them, and she never quite knew what.

She looked at Lando. He was already watching her.

She blinked. His eyes widened a little.

She let out a quiet sigh through her nose. She hated not knowing what expressions meant — what came next, what was expected.

“Well, I’ll take all the help I can get,” Carlos said, breaking the silence.

Amelia took another sip of water. The right words settled on her tongue this time.

“You overshot Turn Nine,” she said, turning back to Lando.

He coughed. “I—Yeah. I know.”

“You let off the brake too early. You always do that when you’re nervous.”

Carlos let out a small, choked sound.

She frowned at him. 

Lando shifted. “I don’t always do that.”

“Yes, you do,” she said, turning her attention back to him. “You did it at Monza in 2018.”

“Okay.” He said. His neck was going red. 

“But you’re getting better,” she added. “You were twelfth. That’s good, considering the partial engine fault.”

He looked at her for a second too long. She didn’t know why. Then he said, “…Thanks.”

She nodded once, and then tugged at her blanket. 

There was a quiet pause — the kind Amelia usually didn’t mind. Lando shuffled his feet. Carlos glanced toward the door, then back to her.

“Right then! I’ll come find you later,” her dad said to her. “We’ll get something nice for lunch.”

“Okay.” She agreed. 

Carlos gave her one last polite nod. “See you around, Amelia.”

She didn’t say goodbye, just looked at him, then at Lando. “You should eat more complex carbohydrates before qualifying sessions,” she told him. “You looked quite pale.”

Lando stared at her. “I—yeah. Alright.” He paused, then added quickly, “It was, uh, nice seeing you again.”

She didn’t answer, but her lips pressed together in a way that, for her, was close to a smile.

— 

iMessage – Thursday, 10:51

Lando i’m fucked like properly fucked

Max F. bro come on

Lando she’s unreal and actually insanely smart

Max F. mate this is such a catastrophically bad idea

Lando she remembered i locked up into turn 9 in monza like three years ago i think i’m in love

Max F. you’re not in love you’re having a breakdown

Lando can’t it be both

Max F. lando i’m staging an intervention where’s jon⁉️ does he know you’re acting like this

Lando jon just keeps saying i should be stretching more he doesn’t care about my emotional wellbeing

Max F. he’d start to care if he found out you were thirsting after zak browns daughter 

Lando gonna make her my wifey 😏

Max F. fucksake lando 

— 

Amelia stood behind the screens at the back of the McLaren pit garages, fingers looped through the sleeves of her jacket. She’d already organised the weekend’s tyre allocation list by compound, colour-coded the data feed to match, and adjusted the ride height figures twice. Not because she needed to — just because she could.

It was her first race of the year.

The first time back since before the winter break. 

The new chassis looked better in person than it had in the renders. She liked the way the papaya paint caught the light.

“Amelia,” someone said softly.

She turned her head slightly. One of the engineers — Greg? Grant? She still hadn’t learned his name. She was terrible at remembering names. 

“Telemetry’s live when you’re ready.” He told her. 

She nodded once and moved closer, careful to avoid the cables that trailed across the floor like snakes.

The numbers lit up on the screen in front of her. Speed. G-force. Delta times.

She exhaled, long and slow. 

“Morning.”

She looked up. Lando.

He was already in his race suit, helmet tucked under one arm, hair a mess and half-damp. He hadn’t had time to dry it properly after his shower.

“Hello,” she responded.

“You’re here,” he said, smiling. Then quickly added, “I mean — yeah, obviously. It’s only the third race. But still.”

She tilted her head. “Yes. I’m here.”

A pause. His mouth opened like he was going to say something else, then closed again.

“Okay, cool,” he said finally. “Sick. Um. Good luck out there.”

“I’m not driving,” she frowned at him.

“Right.” He turned and walked straight into a support beam.

Amelia blinked, then returned her attention to the screen.

Lando’s throttle trace was spiky again. She’d make a note of that.

— 

The garage was quieter now. Not silent though. It was never fully silent. Engineers were keeping their voices low. Tools clinked still, but in a less urgent rhythm. Some of the pit crew were already sweeping up debris from the floor. Wiping away a mess that no one wanted to talk about.

Amelia stayed where she always did, behind the screens, legs crossed on the floor like it helped anchor her in place. Her yellow water bottle sat by her knee, half-empty and warm now. She hadn’t drunk much since the race started.

DNFs always left a strange taste in the air. Bitter. Like metal.

She hadn’t seen the full replay yet, but she didn’t need to. Lando’s car had made it twenty-eight laps before something failed; she’d seen the warning signs creeping into the data before the radio call was made. His voice had been clipped. Tired.

The flap of the garage partition opening made her flinch. She didn’t look up. She didn’t need to.

It was obviously Lando. His helmet was gone, race suit peeled halfway down, sweat-damp fireproofs clinging to his arms. He stopped just beside her.

“I’m fine,” he said. His voice cracked a little. “In case anyone’s, you know. Wondering.”

Amelia didn’t respond.

He hovered.

She tapped the edge of her tablet. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Kind of was.” He dropped onto the floor beside her with a groan, back against the wall. “Clipped the kerb weird coming out of six. Probably jarred something.”

“No,” she said. “You were nursing a power unit issue from lap seventeen. You did what you were supposed to.”

He looked at her, then away again, picking at the velcro on his gloves.

She watched him for a second. Tried to decide if she was supposed to say something else. If there was something people usually said in moments like this.

Nothing came.

So she offered the only thing she could give. Facts. “You did better than the data predicted.”

Lando glanced at her. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

She squinted at him. Hadn’t that been obvious? “Yes.”

He smiled a little. Just with the corner of his mouth. “Cheers.”

They sat there in silence for a while. A few people came over to touch Lando’s shoulder and offer him sympathy. His jaw got tighter every time. 

Eventually, she picked up her tablet and started rewatching his onboard. Then she angled it toward him. 

“You’re going to tell me exactly what I did wrong, aren’t you?” he asked.

She nodded.

He let his head thump back against the wall. “Brilliant.”

—

The motorhome had quieted after media duties and the two-hour race debrief. Lando sat slouched on the drivers' lounge sofa, phone in hand, aimlessly scrolling. Carlos was across from him, arms folded, watching with a look Lando had come to recognise: the I know something you don’t want me to know look.

“I need to ask you something,” Carlos said, tone casual. But the accent gave it weight — Som-theeng.

Lando didn’t look up. “No.”

Carlos chuckled. “You don’t even know what I’m gonna say, coño.”

“I do.” Lando groaned. “And the answer is still no.”

Carlos leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “You like her.”

“What? No, I—” Lando paused, brow furrowed. “Like who?”

Carlos tilted his head. “Come on. Don’t play dumb, amigo. Amelia. You like Amelia Brown.”

Lando scoffed, shaking his head. “Nah. We’ve barely talked.”

Even he could hear the lie in his own voice.

Carlos raised a silent eyebrow.

“I’m just being respectful!” Lando snapped. “She’s—she’s McLaren royalty, basically. And she knows more about my car than I do half the time.”

Carlos shrugged, eyes sharp. “Sí, she’s smart. And I like her. But...” He leaned in, lowering his voice. “You need to be careful, cabrón.”

Lando’s jaw tensed. “Why? Do you like her? Is that what this is?” The words came out sharper than he intended, something hot and ugly twisting in his gut. Jealousy. Stupid, immediate, and impossible to hide.

Carlos blinked. “Ay, no. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Lando didn’t say anything, but the look on his face said he wasn’t convinced.

Carlos sat back, arms folding again. “She’s not a paddock flirt, okay? She’s not like the grid girls or the influencers who want a selfie and a race pass. She is your boss’ daughter. You screw that up, it’s not just her you lose — it’s your job, your reputation, and the respect of thr whole damn garage. If you haven’t already lost your seat.”

Lando looked away, jaw tight. “Why does everyone act like I’m some... idiot teenager with zero self-control?”

Carlos held his gaze. “Because you are a teenager with zero self-control.”

“I’m nineteen!” He argued. 

“Exactly.” Carlos exhaled through his nose. “So, listen to me. If you’re serious? Fine. But don’t start something you’re not ready to finish.”

Lando looked away, jaw tight. “I’m not a total dickhead, y’know.”

Carlos gave him a long look, then nodded. “Bueno. Just remember what I said.”

Lando muttered under his breath, “Still worth it.”

Carlos groaned, grabbing a cushion off the sofa and chucking it at him. “Ay dios mío. You are so getting yourself fired.”

— 

Amelia was sat on the low wall outside the McLaren hospitality unit, sipping from her water bottle, tablet balanced on her knees.

She heard him before she saw him — Lewis never really moved quietly. Valtteri was beside him. 

“Morning, little genius,” Lewis said, slowing to a stop.

She looked up, blinked once. “Good morning.”

Valtteri gave a small nod. “You’re looking well.”

“I’m fine,” she said, glancing back down at her tablet. 

There was a pause. 

She sighed softly before looking up at them both. “You can tell Toto thank you,” she said, tone even. “For the offer. I appreciate it, but I’m not interested.”

Lewis blinked. “Offer?”

“Yes. The job.” She paused. “I assumed he’d told you.”

Valtteri and Lewis exchanged a glance; surprised, a little caught off guard.

“He didn’t,” Valtteri said slowly.

Lewis folded his arms. “He reached out to you directly?”

She nodded. “From his personal email. Not the Mercedes one.” That felt important.

Lewis let out a low whistle. “Damn. That sneaky bastard.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Amelia went on. “And I’m staying with my team. With my dad. Loyalty is important to me.”

Valtteri raised his brows. Lewis looked at her for a moment longer, then gave a slow nod. “Well, he’ll be disappointed,” he said, voice lighter now.

Amelia shrugged. “He’ll be fine.”

“Guess we’ll just have to beat you on track then,” Valtteri added, grinning.

She frowned down at her tablet screen. “You have a significantly better car than us.”

Lewis laughed. “Yeah. Guess we do.” 

— 

“Miss Brown, I’d like a word.”

She turned, blinked, and then frowned.

The team principal for Renault smiled at her, a little too wide — it was off-putting.

“I’ll just jump straight to it. I think you could be a great asset to our team. We’d love to have someone with your brain power. I could offer you a very generous employment package.” He said. 

She blinked at him. She’d been getting these exact kinds of propositions ever since the season started. Every team, it seemed, was suddenly interested in her ‘brain power’. She wasn’t sure what had changed. Maybe they had followed her on Twitter. 

“I am happy where I am,” she said flatly. “Thank you.” 

The man was still smiling, though it was starting to fade just a little. “Are you sure? We’d be willing to work out a very appealing arrangement for you. It could be a great opportunity.”

She wasn’t interested. She didn’t need to be polite. It didn’t take a lot of effort to walk away from the conversation. She took a step back, her fingers clenching around her yellow water bottle.

As she moved past him, she heard him call after her, but she didn’t stop.

Gosh, she thought to herself, as she made her way back to McLaren motorhome. Could none of them find anyone better than a 19-year-old without a degree?

NEXT CHAPTER

[thebendsbyradiohead]

i hate my stupid father so fucking much holy shit this fucker has not stopped bitching about how many dishes & cutlery i use while cooking & how he has to run the dishwasher every day (THE HORROR!!!) as if i’m not cooking food FOR HIM TO EAT i should just let him starve to death instead that would serve him right

[dawei-s]

Close to my grandma's age when she had my dad literally wtf

[fantasticgothicpeachsludge]

*Vent post* you can read the tags if you want

[lizardho]

When I came out, I was SO scared I was gonna get disowned. I wrote a letter to my parents, sent it to their emails, put a physical copy on the counter, and left the house for a few hours to give them time. In that time I tried coffee for the first time, which was a dreadful idea, and got all jittery. I kept waiting for a text or something but nothing happened.

After a few hours, I didn’t hear back from them so I went home. My parents were home and had stacked a bunch of groceries on top of the letter without opening it. They said “hi” and I said “hi” and went down stairs to the basement. I held my dog and panicked about what to do. My sister, who knew that I had written them a letter of great importance, told me they hadn’t read it yet. She also told me she could ask them to do so. I consented to this and stayed in the basement. A few minutes later my dad knocked on the door and poked his soft smooth little nerd head in and said “hey buddy” and I started crying so hard I almost vomited. He came over and gave me a BIG hug and said that it was gonna be OK, he was OK with this, he knew it must have been hard but he was here for me. He told me he and my mom had already talked years before they had me about how if they had to pick between their faith and their child they’d pick their child. It was a very sweet moment. I came out to my mom later that evening and we were both bawling the whole time.

The day after I came out to my parents, I came out to my brother @inbabylontheywept at a Mexican restaurant and he took it like a champ. That evening my mom took me for a walk and looked almost angry - she said she wanted to make sure that I didn’t use being a woman as an excuse to not go to grad school. I told her I wouldn’t and she instantly looked relieved and happier.

My dad, on the other hand, seemed to struggle with it. He kept asking me if I had a boyfriend, and I told him I did not. He kept asking me if I wanted to go clothes shopping with him and I did not. He kept asking me if I would let him go to some of my shows, and I had NO idea what he was talking about.

Finally, 6 months after coming out, of awkward misgendering and questions that didn’t make sense from my dad, he excitedly pokes his soft smooth little nerd head into my bedroom again and says “I found a movie about Your People.” My people. I was absolutely bewildered, but he was so excited and I knew he had been trying SO hard so I watched it with him. It was The Birdcage, and it was amazing. It also was revelatory in that I finally realized why my initially-supportive father seemed to be having such a hard time with my pronouns and stuff - he didn’t know what the difference between trans and doing drag was. After the movie he again asked if I would invite him to one of my shows, and I said, “Hey dad, you know how about half the world is women?” And he said “yeah,” and I said “Well, see, I’m on that half now. I’m not doing drag.” And it was like a switch flipped in his brain. He was like “omg that’s so easy? I was so confused about what to call you when?”

Anyway, my parents are charming and my family has been so kind and patient with me, I like sharing the stories of my little wins with them.

[rieamena]

"mama!"

your seven year old daughter climbed onto your bed, bouncing on the mattress before settling into your warm embrace under the blankets. running a hand through her pink hair, you answered softly, "yes, sweetheart?"

it was almost like your genes didn't put up a fight at all. your child, chikara, was the spitting image of her father, your husband, ryomen sukuna. same hair, same face shape, same facial features, the only thing that seemed to be your contribution was her personality, and even then, sometimes you'll see your husband's characteristic scowl on her little face

"how did you and daddy meet?" "well, it was–"

"what's goin' on in here? conspiring against me?" sukuna's voice filled the room as he leaned against the door frame, a cheeky smirk on his face. you saw your daughter's face brighten up as she jumped down to run to her father, "daddy! daddy! mommy's gonna tell the story of when you first met!" sukuna immediately looked at you, his index finger barely being fully wrapped by his daughter's hand

"she asked me to. guess watching all those romantic dramas with her rubbed off on her." you giggled, earning a scowl from him. "shut it woman. you know i hate them." "yeah..., that's definitely why we watch 90 day fiance every sunday together." "you got a problem with— stop tryna move me brat!"

"but daddyyyyy," she whined, still pushing against sukuna's body, "i don't wanna miss mommy's story!" "we're literally seven feet away from her."

your daughter pouted and stopped trying to get her dad to move. letting go of his finger, and leaving him at the doorway, chikara plopped herself down at your side with wide, eager eyes, "go on, mommy, tell me! i wanna know everything."

you smiled, looking at sukuna, who rolled his eyes but gave a small nod. "alright, sweetheart. it all started one day in the park when i was watching over megumi, and your dad was taking care of his younger brother, yuuji…"

"yuuji?" chikara interrupted, her face lighting up. "uncle yuuji was there too?"

"yep, yuuji was just a little kid back then," you said with a soft laugh. "he was running around, being his usual energetic self, when he tripped and scraped his knee. your dad, being the great caretaker he is—"

"—i was plenty good at it," sukuna muttered

you shot him a look and continued, "—didn't seem too worried. he told yuuji to stop crying."

"i did not say it like that," sukuna cut in, pushing off the doorframe and coming closer to the bed. "i told him to toughen up. gotta learn how to handle a few scrapes."

your daughter giggled, clearly entertained by the back-and-forth. "but mommy's a nurse, so she went over to help, right?"

"exactly. i couldn't just sit there watching, so i went over, knelt down, and started cleaning yuuji's knee. and i told your father—" you paused, giving sukuna a mischievous smile, "—that he should care more about his son instead of telling him to stop crying."

your daughter gasped dramatically, eyes wide with anticipation. sukuna groaned, running a hand over his face. "i knew you'd bring that up."

"and what did daddy say?" she asked, leaning in as if she could hardly wait

"he looked at me and said, 'that's not my son, that's my brother,'" you mimicked sukuna’s low, irritated tone. "i was so embarrassed!" sukuna chuckled at the memory, shaking his head. "you should've seen your mom’s face. all high and mighty, like she was about to call child protection services on me or something."

you couldn't help but laugh, too. "anyway, i patched yuuji up, and to make up for the misunderstanding, your dad suggested we set up a playdate for yuuji and megumi."

"a playdate?"

"yup," you nodded. "though i think your dad might've had other reasons for giving me his number." sukuna scoffed, folding his arms. "that didn’t happen."

you raised an eyebrow at him. "oh? so your eyes didn’t sparkle when i smiled and told you goodbye?" sukuna groaned again, this time louder. "my eyes did not do that."

chikara giggled harder, clearly enjoying the banter. "i think daddy liked you right away!" you smiled softly. "maybe he did. i mean, why else would he take me to a skate park for our first date?" sukuna rolled his eyes. "you said you wanted to learn how to skate. i was just being nice."

"uh-huh. sure," you teased. "and he was so good at it, zooming around, showing off. i'll admit..., he did look kinda cool! i, on the other hand, spent most of the time falling."

"which is why i had to keep catching you," sukuna added, sliding into the empty space next to you on the bed. "mommy fell? did daddy save you?" chikara asked, her face lighting up at the idea

sukuna ruffled her pink hair. "more like i had to stop her from breaking every bone in her body." you rolled your eyes at him. "i wasn't that bad."

"yes, you were," sukuna said, smirking. "you almost took me down with you half the time." smiling at the memory, you leaned in to kiss your daughter's forehead. "but it was fun. and after that, we went out for ice cream, and your dad actually smiled for real that time."

"daddy smiled? really?"

sukuna shot you a half-hearted glare. "i smile."

"not back then you didn't," you teased, poking his arm. chikara turned to her dad, beaming. "i wanna learn to skate, too, just like you and mommy!" sukuna chuckled, wrapping an arm around her

"maybe one day, brat. but you’re probably gonna fall as much as your mom did."

"hey!"

gulp... sorry if sukuna is ooc, im tired and im on my period but i really liked this request so...

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