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dankusner · 5 months ago

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Dallas police say Charles Albright is the coldest, most depraved killer

See No Evil

Charles Albright patiently waited behind an unbreakable glass wall, watching as the prison guard escorted me through three sets of steel-barred doors.

“I apologize for not being able to shake your hand and say hello,” he said, formally rising as I approached his window in the visiting room.

“They do not allow me to have face-to-face visits.”

The steel doors clanged shut.

Then the man whom the Dallas police had called the coldest, most depraved killer of women in the city’s history gave me a long gentle stare, his dark deep-set eyes never wavering, an encouraging half-smile on his lips.

At 59, he had a finely sculpted face and carefully groomed gray hair.

Even in his prison uniform, he looked positively distinguished.

“Ask me anything you want,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you anything that’s not true.”

Throughout his life, Albright had been described by many who knew him as the portrait of happiness, untroubled and troubling no one.

He was, they said, a kind of Renaissance man—fluent in French and Spanish, a masterful painter, able to woo women by playing Chopin preludes on the piano or reciting poetry by Keats.

It was simply impossible to believe that he could have viciously murdered three Dallas prostitutes in late 1990 and early 1991.

The person who should have been arrested, Albright’s friends and lawyers insisted, was Axton Schindler, a paranoid, fast-talking truck driver who lived in one of Albright’s rental homes.

The evidence pointed to him, they claimed, not to their beloved Charles Albright.

Perhaps Albright was a touch eccentric, but he was certainly harmless; he was even squeamish when it came to violence.

“You won’t find any woman who’ll say anything other than that I was always a perfect gentleman in their presence,” he said softly.

Behind the glass wall, he wore an almost childlike expression—weak and perplexed and, yes, oddly appealing.

“I was always trying to do things for women. I would take their pictures. I would paint their portraits. I would give them little presents. I was always open for a lasting relationship.”

In most cases, serial killers are brutal, woefully uneducated young men, lifelong sadists who kill for their own twisted reasons.

How, then, could someone so charming, so exceedingly polite, suddenly decide in the later years of his life to become a blood-thirsty sex monster?

“Look, I’ve known Charlie for thirty years,” sighed one Albright friend, a retired Baptist minister.

“In all that time I think I would have seen his dark side slip out at least once. Believe me, if he really was a psychotic killer, he couldn’t have kept it a secret all this time—could he?”

December 1944: Life With Mother

He was known as the most good-natured, eager-to-please of children, a precocious boy who could do just about anything: name all the constellations in the sky, catch snakes without getting bitten, even perform a tap dance routine onstage at the famous Texas Theater.

“Charlie was like a Pied Piper to the rest of us kids,” a childhood friend recalled.

“We always wanted to see what he would do next. He was just so much damn fun.”

In 1933, when he was three weeks old, Charles was adopted by a young dark-haired woman, Delle Albright, and her husband, Fred, a Dallas grocer.

The Albrights lived in the all-white middle-class neighborhood of Oak Cliff, then a beautiful residential area across the river from downtown.

According to the story Delle would later tell Charles, his birth mother was an exceptional law student, just sixteen years old, who had secretly married another student and had become pregnant.

When the girl’s father found out, he demanded that she annul her marriage and give up the baby for adoption; otherwise, he would cut her off from the family.

Delle Albright made sure that Charles knew she would never abandon him.

She pampered her boy: She kept goats in the back yard so he could drink goat’s milk, which she said was better for him than cow’s milk.

Yet sometimes her mothering went to extremes.

When Charles was a small child, she occasionally put him in a little girl’s dress and gave him a doll to hold.

Two or three times a day she would change his clothes to keep the dirt off him.

Afraid that he might touch dog feces and get polio, she took him to Parkland Hospital to see the polio patients locked in huge iron lungs.

“You can spend the rest of your life here,” Delle would solemnly tell her son.

When he was less than a year old, Delle put him in a dark room as punishment for chewing on her tape measure.

When he wouldn’t take a nap, she would tie him to his bed.

When he wouldn’t drink his milk, she would spank him.

Indeed, people around the neighborhood talked about Delle Albright’s odd, grim nature.

No one could ever remember her buying herself a dress.

She kept a scarf over her head and wore clothes from Goodwill. Although she and Fred were far from poor, she usually scrimped at mealtimes, even picking up the old bones the local butcher threw in a box for his dogs.

She could use them, she would say, for soup.

Not that Charles ever openly complained.

He always appreciated that his mother taught him manners.

Delle told him to speak politely about other people or “say nothing at all.”

She told him to respect women, especially when it came to sex.

She lectured him about the way his father acted “greedy” with sex:

Whenever Fred saw her in the bedroom in her bra and panties, he tried to grab her.

She was going to have none of that, and she was going to make sure Charlie never tried anything like that with his girlfriends either.

As he grew older, she insisted on chauffeuring him every time he was on a date.

She would even call the girl’s parents to let them know that her son would not do anything untoward.

If Delle seemed overprotective, friends said, surely it was because she had never raised a child before.

Charles himself recognized how fiercely she wanted him to succeed.

Each morning, before the school bus arrived, she had him practice the piano for at least thirty minutes.

She taught him so much reading, writing, and arithmetic that he was moved up two grades in elementary school.

Delle also introduced Charles to the world of taxidermy.

When he was eleven years old, she enrolled him in a mail-order course—the Northwestern School of Taxidermy, taught by Professor J. W. Elwood.

“You are beginning to learn an art that is second only to painting and sculpturing,” Professor Elwood wrote in the first book of lessons Charles received.

“A true taxidermist must be an artist.”

As Charles set to work on the dead birds he found, Delle was right beside him.

She showed him how to use all the tools: the knife used to cut the skull, the little spoon used to scoop out the brains, the scalpel required to cut away the eyes from their sockets, the forceps that pulled out the eyes.

She even skinned the first bird for him, teaching him not to cut too deep.

Dutifully, Charles spent hours on his taxidermy courses, stuffing and mounting his birds, making them look as life-like as possible.

Then he would be ready for the crowning touch—the eyes.

He used to go to a taxidermy shop and stare at the boxes and boxes full of gloriously fake eyes: owl eyes, eagle eyes, deer eyes.

He loved their iridescent gleam.

He wished he could collect them the way other boys collected marbles.

Yet Delle wouldn’t let him.

Taxidermists’ eyes were too expensive, his frugal mother would say; there was a better, cheaper way.

She would open her sewing kit, look for exactly what she needed, and get to work.

Then she and her son would place the birds in the oak china cabinet in the front of the house.

They were, indeed, Charles Albright’s first works of art, just as the mail-order booklet had promised.

Everyone who came to the house would peer into the cabinet to see what he had done. And there, peering back, would be his birds, beautiful, life-like . . . and blind.

The birds had no eyes.

Instead, sewn tightly against their delicate feathered faces, were two dark buttons, each shimmering dully in the living room light.

Even today it is difficult to imagine Charles Albright as someone who would savagely murder prostitutes and remove the eyeballs from their corpses.

As a child he was pampered and protected by his adoptive parents, Fred and Delle.

Yes, it was odd that Delle sometimes dressed up young Charlie in girls’ clothes.

Yet as a teenager in Oak Cliff, he was a devoted Boy Scout.

“You never knew a prostitute in Dallas?” I asked.

He shook his head, baffled by the question.

“Never! I knew absolutely none of them. At the time I was arrested, I couldn’t tell you the names of the motels they stayed in, any of the motels’ locations, or anything else. It is a crime that the police never put me on the lie detector to find out what I did know and what I didn’t.”

“Could the prostitutes possibly have seen you somewhere?”

“None of these girls had ever seen me. They never saw me drive slowly by like I wanted to pick somebody up. Believe me, if I had anything to do with any prostitutes in Dallas, I would tell you.”

December 1990: Mary Pratt

The first victim turned up in an undeveloped, almost forgotten lower-class area of far south Dallas.

She was a large woman, 156 pounds, naked except for a T-shirt and a bra, which had been pushed up over her breasts.

Her eyes were shut; her face and chest were badly bruised.

Apparently, the killer had thought it best to beat her before firing a .44-caliber bullet into her brain.

A resident of the neighborhood was so horrified by what he saw that he rushed inside his home and brought out a flowered bed sheet to cover the body.

A police officer on the scene immediately recognized the woman as Mary Pratt, age 33, a veteran prostitute who worked the Star Motel in Oak Cliff.

While it was not unusual for the “whores of Oak Cliff,” as the police called them, to get their share of beatings—almost nightly, a girl would complain about a trick “jumping bad” on her, punching her, kicking her, even trying to run her over with a car—for a whore to be murdered was unusual, especially when it happened to be someone as well liked as Mary Pratt.

Mary wasn’t one of the brazen hookers who stood in the street and flagged down tricks.

Because she rarely had any extra spending money—the money she got usually went for drugs—she never bought sexy clothes.

Standing quietly on her corner she wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, and small T-shirts that showed off her breasts.

Occasionally, at the end of a night, she asked one of her regulars to drive her to her parents’ home in the south Dallas suburb of Lancaster.

Mary’s parents—older retired people—never knew about her other life.

They would call out good night as she climbed into her childhood bed.

Pratt’s file was handed to John Westphalen, a short, ruddy-faced homicide detective at the Dallas Police Department.

With his thick East Texas accent and a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco permanently packed in his cheek, Westphalen looked more like a rustic county sheriff than a street-smart urban cop.

In homicide circles he was something of a character:

Defense attorneys loved to complain about his blustery, intimidating interrogation tactics.

But Westphalen was also one of the department’s most tenacious investigators.

He took one look at the Pratt file and realized the case would depend more on good luck than on good detective work.

Pratt’s killing was a “dumped body” case—one of the hardest types of murders to solve.

She had obviously been killed in one location and dumped somewhere else.

There were no witnesses to either the killing or the dumping, no murder weapon, little forensic evidence, no fingerprints, and no apparent motive.

Considering the kind of felonious characters who nightly swing by the Star Motel, Mary Pratt could have been shot by just about anyone.

Accompanied by his partner, homicide detective Stan McNear, Westphalen drove to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office to watch the autopsy of Mary Pratt.

It was a routine trip; both men knew the autopsy would show a gunshot wound as the cause of death.

As Dr. Elizabeth Peacock, one of the staff’s younger pathologists, put down her coffee cup to begin the examination, Westphalen and McNear stood a short distance from the blue plastic cart where Pratt’s body lay.

Peacock noted the needle tracks on Pratt’s arms, the Playboy bunny tattoo on her chest, the bullet hole in her head.

She opened Pratt’s right eyelid. Then she opened the left.

“My god!” she exclaimed. “They’re gone!”

There were no eyeballs, no tissue—nothing.

Mary Pratt’s eyes had been cut out and removed so carefully that her upper and lower eyelids were left undisturbed.

Peacock was dumbfounded.

This was not an operation taught in medical school.

The killer had to know how to slip a knife around the eyes, making sure not to injure the adjoining skin, and then cut the six major muscles holding each eye in the socket, as well as the rope-tough optical nerve.

With the eyelids shut, it was impossible to tell the eyes were missing.

Surely, whoever did this had to have had a lot of practice on someone, or something, else.

Quickly Westphalen contacted the FBI’s Violent Crimes Apprehension Program unit.

Through its computers, the FBI keeps data on the nation’s most unusual, depraved mutilations—bodies chopped up, organs removed, even eyes punctured with a knife as a result of a frenzied attack.

But an FBI agent told Westphalen that he found no listing anywhere of such a surgically precise cutting.

Longtime Dallas cops take pride in acting utterly unaffected by anything that comes their way.

But this time, Westphalen couldn’t help it.

“What kind of person,” he asked McNear, “would want a girl’s eyeballs?”

September 1952: Class Clown

When Charlie Albright transferred to Arkansas State Teacher’s College in Conway, Arkansas, it didn’t take him long to become one of the school’s most popular students.

He was remarkably well rounded: president of the French club, business manager of the yearbook, member of the school choir, halfback on the football team.

When he signed up for a drawing course, the art professor was so impressed with Charlie’s good looks that he made him the class model.

Yet Charlie wasn’t known as just a goody two-shoes.

He was the all-American fraternity boy, a great college prankster.

One time he sneaked into the home economics building, got a load of food out of the refrigerator, and cooked a steak dinner for his buddies.

Another time, on a dare, he broke into a physics professor’s office in the middle of the day, picked the lock on his cabinet, stole what was known around school as “the unstealable physics test,” raced downtown to make a copy of it, and had the test back in its place within an hour.

The professor, who was teaching a class next door, never suspected a thing.

Frankly, Charlie Albright had to feel some relief in being away from home.

He was considered a very bright boy in Dallas—he graduated from Adamson High School at fifteen—and he was something of a celebrity.

When Charlie was fourteen, Delle and Fred purchased a piece of property in their neighborhood and gave it to Charlie.

Charlie sold it to buy more lots, and the Dallas Times Herald published a story about him under the headline WORLD’S YOUNGEST REAL ESTATE MAN AMASSING NEST EGG FOR COLLEGE.

Yet Charlie’s love for mischief had tainted his reputation.

He had received bad deportment grades in school for shooting rubber bands and crawling out of study hall.

He had “accidentally” set fire to his chemistry teacher’s dress. And he had flunked a few courses because he was “too bored” to study.

(Of course, if his mother had found out, he would never have heard the end of it. So he sneaked into the school office, filched some report cards from a desk, filled them in with all A’s, and proudly showed them to his parents—his teachers’ and principal’s signatures perfectly forged.)

It was minor stuff, really.

It wasn’t like he went to jail.

As Charlie himself would later explain, “I just didn’t know what I was doing. If anybody tells the truth, they will say I never did a mean thing in all my life. But I did a lot of mischievous things just to show off for the older kids.”

Well, there was the time he was caught breaking into a neighborhood church.

Then there was the time he was caught breaking into a little store and stealing a watch.

And there were the visits he and his mother received from Alfred Jones, a twenty-year-old psychology student working part-time as a Dallas County juvenile probation officer.

But what did Jones know back then? And what right did Jones have to say, forty years later, when he was a well-known psychologist in Dallas, that of the dozens of juveniles he saw back in the forties, the one he remembered most clearly was Charlie Albright?

“He could divorce reality sufficiently from his value system,” Jones said, “so that he could tell you something false and at the time actually believe he was telling you the truth.”

Maybe, one of Charlie’s relatives said, he pilfered things from stores because his mother was so stingy. Or maybe he just wanted to rebel against her. Granted, Delle Albright did whatever she could to keep a close watch on her son. She took him to the Methodist church each Sunday. She made him go to bed, even when he was in his teens, at eight each night. Whenever she chauffeured him on a date, she watched him so closely that he would joke about the way she drove “with her eyes on the rear-view mirror.” Charlie loved his mother—that much was clear. But there were little things that sometimes bothered him. He was never certain, for example, that his biological mother had been the brilliant law student that Delle claimed she was. He so hated Delle’s cooking that he would stuff his food on a ledge under the table or give it to his dog. Delle fussed over him so regularly, he said, that he began to get headaches. (Delle decided the headaches were from bad eyesight and promptly made Charles wear glasses, even though he had twenty-twenty vision.)

Yet Delle couldn’t protect Charlie the first time he left home. Right after high school, he enrolled in North Texas State College in Denton—but by the end of his freshman year, he was arrested for being a member of a student burglary ring that broke into three stores and stole several hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. Charlie swore he stole nothing. The other boys, he said, had asked him to keep some things in his dorm room for them. How was he to know the things were stolen?

Delle Albright went to the store owners and tried to reimburse them for what was taken. She tried to persuade the judge to let her act as Charlie’s lawyer. She even asked that she take his place in prison. Yet the boy went to prison for a year, spending his eighteenth birthday there. Delle, meanwhile, worked to keep the matter hushed up, so that no one in her neighborhood knew that Charlie Albright had become a convicted felon.

Arkansas State Teacher’s College was Charlie’s chance for a new start. As he told a probation officer, he was going to mend his ways. He began to date a lovely young English major, Bettye Hester, and made plans to marry her. He did truly brilliant work in science; although he hardly studied, he made an A in his human anatomy course. It was said around school that Charlie Albright was going to go far. He even talked about going to medical school and becoming a surgeon.

But Charlie never stopped playing the role of class clown. Of all his great pranks, no one would forget the one he played on his friend Andrew (not his real name). In a fit of anger, Andrew had broken up with the most beautiful girl on campus, a woman with almond-shaped eyes. After the separation, he tore up several photographs of her and threw them in a trash can in his dorm room. Weeks later, Andrew got a new girlfriend and asked her for a photo. One night, while Andrew was staring at his new girlfriend’s picture, he realized that something was wrong. He looked closer. It seemed that her eyeballs had been cut out and replaced with—Good Lord!—the eyeballs of his old girlfriend. In disbelief, Andrew looked up at the ceiling. There staring down at him, was another pair of his old girlfriend’s eyeballs. More eyeballs were above the urinal in the men’s bathroom down the hall. No matter where Andrew turned, he was confronted by the sight of his old girlfriend’s almond-shaped eyes.

The story soon raced through school. That jokester Charlie Albright had pulled the old photographs out of the trash and saved her eyeballs for just the right moment. Did any of his fellow students, in retrospect, find the stunt a bit strange? Of course not, they said. It was pure Charlie. Who else could have been so inventive? From left: At Arkansas State Teacher’s College, Charlie was a great prankster and a star football player. At Crandall High School, he was everyone’s favorite science teacher and football coach. And he was a model boyfriend for his last love, Dixie Austin.

“Why do you think the eyeballs were missing?” I asked.

“I don’t understand either.” He sighed. “Why the eyeballs?”

“Well, what kind of person would be able to cut out the eyeballs of some hooker?”

“Someone who is sadistic? Just one mean son of a gun? I don’t know the purpose behind it, unless that person thought the women wouldn’t be able to see without their eyes in the next world—which is sort of ignorant.” December 1990: A Clue

Because the police had not released any information about Mary Pratt’s missing eyeballs, her death had only warranted a two-paragraph story in the back sections of the local newspapers. In fact, when patrol officers John Matthews and Regina Smith began their daytime shift on December 13, just a few hours after Pratt’s body was found, they had not even heard about the crime.

Only two and a half months before, the two officers had been assigned to a newly created beat on Jefferson Boulevard that included Pratt’s streetwalking territory. Once the most popular shopping district in Oak Cliff, Jefferson had deteriorated over the previous 25 years, a victim of urban blight. Some storefronts were shuttered; others were barely profitable. The Texas Theater, infamous for being the site where Lee Harvey Oswald hid out after the Kennedy assassination, was padlocked. Matthews and Smith’s assignment was to provide a police presence for the area—to become acquainted with the merchants, shake a lot of hands, and crack down on small-time crime such as burglary, car theft, shoplifting, and prostitution. In police circles, it was far from a glamorous beat. Other officers, used to the action of the streets, considered it more of a public relations position.

Each morning, Matthews and Smith began their day by cruising down Jefferson, herding the prostitutes back toward the Star Motel. On a busy day, about forty women—mostly black, some white, and a few Hispanic—worked the area, charging anywhere from $15 to $50 for a “flatback” (straight sex). The Star was not a high-class call girl operation; Matthews snidely called the forty-room motel “the prostitute condominium.” The women there, most of them drug addicts, would have sex in a customer’s car in a nearby alley or use a room shared with other prostitutes. Then, money in hand, they would walk down a well-worn dirt path to one of the nearby dope houses and purchase heroin or crack. After a quick hit, they would be out on the street again. Some hookers would work nonstop for two or three days—never changing their clothes, never even taking the time to eat—until they finally crashed back at the motel or in the house of their “sugar daddy” (a regular customer who cared for the woman enough to provide her with food, clothes, and a place to sleep).

Such a dreary scene did not faze Matthews, a stocky, no-nonsense 28-year-old; little on the streets did. The son of a patrol officer in New York State, he had grown up with cops-and-robbers stories. He had been with the Dallas Police Department since he was 21, when he went to work patrolling Harry Hines Boulevard, one of the city’s high crime and prostitution areas. On the other hand, when 31-year-old Regina Smith decided to become a police officer, she had never fired a gun, seen a dead person, or even been in a fight. She was a former supermarket cashier, a graduate of a two-year fashion merchandising college, and the single mother of a 6-year-old child. Nonetheless, inspired by a newspaper story about the need for more black female police officers, she entered the Dallas Police Academy in 1988. Her instructors berated her for wearing too much jewelry, mocked the way she shot a gun, and laughed when she couldn’t finish her push-ups, but she refused to quit. After graduation she was assigned to one of the rougher night shifts—and still she wouldn’t quit.

On the Jefferson beat, Smith discovered she had a knack for talking to prostitutes. She wanted to talk to them; she felt it was her duty as a police officer to try to improve people’s lives. “Tell me, girl,” she would say to a new prostitute, “what are you doing whoring out here? You know you can make more money working at Burger King than you do here.” She even started a “hook book,” a kind of photo album that contained the mug shots of the whores on the street. She would wistfully leaf through her hook book the way some people pore over their high school annuals.

On this particular morning, Smith was not surprised to see Veronica Rodriguez, a brazen charcoal-eyed prostitute who would try to flag down tricks even when she knew the cops were watching. Usually, when she spotted Matthews, she would lean forward so he could see her cleavage and say, “How ya doing, Officer?” Rodriguez, barely 26 years old, had lived a miserable life. She had been arrested for prostitution numerous times, once when she was nine months pregnant. Although that baby was stillborn, she was the mother of at least one child—a baby born on a raggedy bed in a whore motel down the road from the Star.

As Matthews pulled the squad car alongside Rodriguez, Smith rolled down her window. She noticed a nasty gash across Rodriguez’s forehead and what looked like a thin knife cut across the front of her neck. “Girl, what happened to you?” she asked. “Don’t arrest me,” Rodriguez gasped. “I almost got killed!”

Rodriguez told the officers that the previous night, she had been picked up by a trick, driven a long way south to a field, and raped. The man—a white man, she said—then tried to kill her, but she escaped and ran toward a house. The man at the house just happened to be someone she knew. He also just happened to know the man who was trying to kill her.

Matthews and Smith gave each other a look. Rodriguez was a notorious liar. No doubt she had been in some kind of fight, but in the middle of nowhere she ran right into the house of someone she knew? This was probably another of Rodriguez’s “pity stories,” which she often told the cops so they would feel sorry for her and leave her alone.

Yet two days later, on an afternoon drive past the Star, Matthews and Smith saw Rodriguez again. She was sitting with a balding middle-aged white man in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. While Matthews went to one side of the truck to get Rodriguez and escort her to the squad car, Smith went to the other side to speak to the man. She asked him for his driver’s license, which he produced: His name was Axton Schindler, of 1035 Eldorado. When Smith ran Schindler’s name through the computer, he came up clean, except for some unpaid traffic tickets. Suddenly, Rodriguez started shouting, “Oh, don’t arrest him! That’s the man who saved me from the killer! That’s him!”

The officers looked at the address again: 1035 Eldorado. It was not out in south Dallas, where Rodriguez’s attack allegedly took place. It was in an Oak Cliff neighborhood, just a five-minute drive from the Star. The man—a sort of nervous guy who spoke incredibly fast—said he had no idea what Rodriguez was talking about. He said he had known her for years and was just giving her a ride to the motel. He didn’t protect her from any killer. He didn’t even have sex with her. He was just a long-distance truck driver doing her a favor. Rodriguez, the officers decided, was lying once again. They carted her to jail for prostitution and hauled Schindler in for his unpaid tickets.

Although Matthews and Smith would not know it for months, a clue to the murderer’s identity had fallen right in their laps. September 1969: Con Man

Charles Albright was 36 when he began teaching high school science in Crandall, a small town east of Dallas. The principal at Crandall, who had been looking for a teacher the entire summer, was ecstatic when the astute young man called him up right before the school year was to begin. According to his college records, Charles Albright had a master’s degree in biology from East Texas State University and was working on another master’s in counseling and guidance. He was also about to enter ETSU’s Ph.D. program in biology.

Albright’s students found him fascinating. On field trips, he could recite, in flawless Latin, the scientific name for every plant he came across; he could split open a rotted log and talk about each insect he found inside. He drove a green Corvette to school and wore lizard-skin shoes. (A few girls, smitten by his charm and masculine looks, wrote him love letters.) He even helped coach the football team. After a heroic play by one Crandall player won a game for the school, Albright lifted him up and carried him off the field.

How, the principal would later ask, was anyone supposed to know that the promising young teacher had forged all of his transcripts? He was simply flabbergasted when an ETSU official told him that Albright had never even earned a bachelor’s degree. Everything—his degrees, his teacher’s certificate—had been faked. Apparently, he had slipped into three different offices at East Texas State, grabbed all the necessary forms, copied them, added his name, forged signatures, and then sneaked them back into the files. He had even stolen the registrar’s typewriter so the typeface on his records would look the same. Had an ETSU administrator not realized that he had never met the Charles Albright whose name kept popping up on the school’s list of graduate students, Albright would have gotten away with the scam.

When Albright was confronted, he grinned ruefully and admitted to the crime. He needed to bend the rules a little, he explained, in order to get a teaching job. After he quit Arkansas State Teacher’s College—well, okay, he was kicked out for being caught down at the train station with suitcases full of stolen school property, including his own football coach’s golf clubs—he didn’t think he was going to get a second chance to prove how smart he was. By then, he had married his college sweetheart, Bettye, and she had given birth to their daughter. Frankly, he didn’t have time to begin all over at a university. It was a crying shame, he said. If only he could have finished his degree, there was a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who would have hired him to do biology research.

Because the forgery was a victimless crime—and because Albright himself, according to one ETSU administrator, was such a nice, repentant fellow—the university decided to keep the transcript scandal out of the newspapers. It was embarrassing, after all, that a school could get bamboozled. Albright pleaded guilty to a fraud charge and received a year’s probation.

As the seventies began, Albright was back in his old Dallas neighborhood with his wife and daughter, living in a house not far from his parents’ home. Once again, no one had any idea of what he had done. The Charlie Albright the neighbors knew was a happy-go-lucky figure who could master anything but simply didn’t care about settling down in a nine-to-five job. He had some money from his parents, and his wife had a job as a high school English teacher. He was free to latch on to one new project after another; he rarely had a job that lasted longer than three months. He worked as a designer for a company that built airplanes. He worked as an illustrator for a patent company. He was a well-regarded carpenter. He collected wine bottles from the famous Il Sorrento restaurant in Dallas, hoping to start his own winery. He bought a lathe and made baseball bats. He collected old movie posters. He regularly went to the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel to get autographs from the stars performing there. On a lark, he went to a Mexican border town and became a bullfighter—“Señor Albright from Dallas,” the posters read.

Albright still had a Pied Piper–like ability to captivate people. After visiting a friend who worked at the beauty salon in a Sanger Harris department store, Albright promptly went off to beauty school, got his beautician’s license, and then persuaded the salon to hire him, with no experience at all, as a stylist. Albright took to calling himself Mr. Charles. He would spend at least an hour with each woman to get her hair exactly right.

When Albright told his stylist friend that he was also an accomplished artist, the friend paid him $250 to paint a picture of his wife. Albright was indeed a good painter; self-taught, he had won a prize at the Texas State Fair for his portrait of a dark-haired woman in a long green gown. His goal, he said, was to be like Dmitri Vail, the famous portrait artist of Dallas.

Albright worked for weeks on the woman’s painting without finishing. He insisted that he needed to keep working on one special feature, the most difficult part of the painting. Tired of waiting, the friend decided to go to Albright’s house to look at the work in progress. There, in the living room, was the six-by three-foot portrait. It was richly colored and remarkably realistic. The woman’s hair, her mouth, her nose, her ears, her neck—everything was finished. Well, not everything. The stylist stared curiously at his wife’s painting. In the center of his wife’s face were two round white holes.

After all this time, Albright hadn’t even begun working on the eyes. It was as if something held him back, as if he preferred the portrait to remain as it was on his living room easel. “Charles,” asked the friend, “when are you going to paint the eyes?”

“When I am ready to,” Albright replied.

Months later, Albright finally painted the eyes. He then painted them again, to get them just right. He painted the proper shadows under the eyelashes; he gave the eyelids just the right droop in the corners; he shaded the eyeballs to make them look perfectly round. When Albright was finished, his friend could not believe how well the painting had turned out. It was, he realized, a mesmerizing portrait—especially the eyes. His wife’s eyes were so perfectly recreated that they seemed to follow a person across the room

“There’s no question you love eyes,” I said.

“Well, I do want to paint fine eyes. That’s every other artist’s weakness—they can’t paint eyes.”

“Would you ever love eyes enough to—”

“No, no, I’ve never taken the eyes out of anything. I’ve never had the desire to. To me, what matters is what the eyeball looks like in the woman’s face, or the guy’s face—not what the eyeball itself would look like.”

“Could you figure why someone might want to keep the eyeballs? Would they want them as a sort of a souvenir?”

“I don’t think anybody would want to keep eyeballs. That would be the last thing I would want to keep out of a body. It would be a hand or a whole head, maybe, if you were a sick artist and you thought the woman was fabulous. You might not want to see that beauty go to waste.” February 1991: Susan Peterson

The second victim was found on a Sunday morning, on the same south Dallas road where Mary Pratt was dumped. Like Pratt, she was mostly naked. Like Pratt, she was a prostitute. Her name was Susan Peterson, age 27. She had been shot in the head, chest, and stomach. Her eyelids were closed.

Because her body was discovered on the other end of the road, just outside the city limits, the jurisdiction for the case fell to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department. A detective named Larry Oliver, who had not heard about the Pratt killing, was called to the scene. Eerily, the same scenario unfolded. Oliver accompanied the body to the autopsy room, where a pathologist began the standard external examination. The pathologist opened one eyelid, then the other. He motions for Oliver to come closer to the table. Oliver couldn’t believe what he was seeing: The dead woman’s eyes had been expertly cut out.

When the pathologist mentioned that the Dallas Police Department had had a similar case just two months earlier, Oliver did some checking. Within 24 hours he traveled to the police department’s homicide offices to see John Westphalen. Soon there were meetings with sergeants and lieutenants and with the chief in charge of homicide. While police officials deliberately avoided the phrase “serial killings” to describe what was happening—Westphalen kept referring to the killer as “a repeater”—everyone in the room knew what they were hunting for: a twisted, brilliant murderer, someone who dropped bodies on quiet residential streets, where they were certain to be found the next morning.

At that point, a contingent of detectives favored keeping a lid on the story. If the press discovered that the killings were linked and turned the spotlight on the Star Motel, the killer might get nervous and start picking up women from other areas. But homicide supervisors decided that the police department had a greater obligation to warn the community that it might be in danger—even if it meant warning low-dollar hookers. Besides, publicizing the case might bring in some leads. Lord knows, there was little else to go on.

As flyers were posted around the Star asking prostitutes to stay off the streets, detectives met with the press to discuss the two killings. Although no information was officially divulged about the missing eyes, word quickly leaked to reporters that the women’s faces had been strangely mutilated. “The guy was almost surgical in the way he did it,” one detective told a reporter. To the police department’s dismay, a media frenzy ensued. The prostitute murders sent the city’s imagination into overdrive; calls came in from reporters all over the country.

As John Matthews and Regina Smith sat in their squad car reading the front-page newspaper stories about the prostitutes’ deaths, they too were shaken. These were women from their beat, women they were supposed to protect. They knew Susan Peterson: She used to be the most beautiful white prostitute in Oak Cliff. Although her five years on the street had taken their toll—her once-alluring smile had turned winter-hard and her body had grown plump—she was still able to put on her brown go-go boots and denim miniskirt and pick up ten to twelve tricks a night. And she was a fearless hooker. She threatened other prostitutes who tried to work too close to her corner. She even cursed Matthews and Smith when they tried to move her off Jefferson Boulevard. Like a good pickpocket, she was an expert at clipping a trick—stealing money from his billfold while he was having sex with her. If the killer could get Peterson, Matthews and Smith said, then he could get any of the women. They surmised that the killer knew every corner of the whore district, all the alleys and all the streets. He was able to pick up Peterson and vanish within seconds. He also must have been one of her regular customers. Otherwise she never would have let her guard down. Certainly she wouldn’t have allowed him to shoot her three times. She would have pulled out a razor and fought back.

This time when Matthews and Smith pulled up to the Star, the prostitutes didn’t keep their distance. They poured out of their rooms, surrounded the squad car, and began to pass on their own personal lists of suspects. The women talked about their kinkiest tricks, the men who wanted to tie them up or whip them. Smith made her usual impassioned speech, asking the girls to get off the street, but the black prostitutes, at least, were not buying it. “He’s after the white girls, honey, not us,” they said. Oddly enough, the black prostitutes saw the killings as an opportunity for them to get more business.

And then there was Veronica Rodriguez. Rodriguez had been telling a lot of people—reporters, other prostitutes, and Matthews and Smith, as well as other officers—any number of stories since the killings began. At first, she said she had witnessed Mary Pratt being shot. Then she said she had met a man who had only bragged about having killed Pratt. Then she said she knew nothing at all about Pratt’s death. About her own rape in the south Dallas field, she no longer said the killer was white; now he was Hispanic. Then she said he might have been black. Almost everyone who spoke with her thought she was “brain-fried” from drugs.

What bothered Matthews, however, was that Rodriguez had never changed her basic story about being attacked. Usually, she would forget whatever pity story she had told the day before. Did someone really try to kill her in that field? Could the man who supposedly saved her, Axton Schindler of 1035 Eldorado, know the killer too? Or could Schindler have something to do with the killing himself? Could it be that the real reason Rodriguez was changing her story was simply because she was afraid?

Matthews and Smith didn’t know what to do next. They had already told the homicide division that Rodriguez claimed to have information about Mary Pratt. They had mentioned the attack and the possible Axton Schindler connection. With that, they figured they had done their job; it would have been way out of line for the two young officers to cross into homicide’s territory and conduct a murder investigation on their own. Later, Westphalen would say that he never got the officers’ tips. Among all the phone calls, all the messages, all the reports flooding in, the name “Axton Schindler” never crossed his desk, he said.

Whatever the case, a potential break was slipping away—and the killer was preparing to strike again. According to one of his softball teammates, Albright (bottom right), would “back down” if another player challenged him: “He literally could not stand the idea of fighting.” March 1985: Dark Secrets

The incident was kept very, very quiet. There would be no trial, no headlines. The district attorney had arranged for him to serve a probated sentence of ten years, which meant no jail time. Probation was fine with him—just as it was in 1971, when he was arrested for forging some cashier’s checks, and in 1979, when he was caught shoplifting two bottles of perfume. In 1980, when he was sent to prison for stealing a saw from a Handy Dan, he had to serve six months. But then, at least, his mother could tell everyone that he was leaving Dallas temporarily to take an important job at a nuclear power plant in Florida.

This case, however, was different. If the news got out, it could humiliate him. Not that he was guilty, he kept saying over and over. He had never touched that little girl. The girl’s family was just looking for a scapegoat—and they had picked him, Charlie Albright, one of the most dedicated members of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in East Dallas. He had first met the family in 1979, when he began singing in the church choir. People admired his voice, even if it was untrained. In one hushed service, he performed the tenor solo, “Comfort Ye My People,” from Handel’s Messiah. Soon he was acting as a Eucharistic minister, standing before the altar in a robe, reading Bible passages, helping with Communion—almost like an assistant priest, for goodness sake. He loved to help people; everyone knew that. The monsignor at St. Bernard’s called him Good Old Charlie. Albright was known to slip a $100 bill to someone who was down on his luck. After he met the little girl’s family, he brought them a big box of steaks. He dressed up as Santa Claus and gave the girl and her siblings presents. Did anyone seriously believe he would sneak into her bedroom and molest her?

The girl’s parents tried to keep the matter quiet—especially at the church—because they did not want to stigmatize their daughter. But they also wanted Good Old Charlie to pay. Albright worried that if he fought them, the story would leak. So on March 25, 1985, in a nearly empty Dallas courtroom, he stood before a judge and confessed to “knowingly and intentionally engaging in deviate sexual intercourse” with a girl under the age of 14. He was 51.

For the first time, Charles Albright’s mask seemingly had slipped. Was there, on the other side of his gentlemanly Jekyll-like personality, a kind of sexually perverted Hyde? Women who heard the story couldn’t believe it. After Albright dissolved what he called his loveless marriage to Bettye in 1975, he developed a reputation as an old-fashioned ladies’ man. He was still getting by with odd jobs and family money, but women saw him as a grand romantic figure, someone who showered them with flowers and music boxes and candy. To one woman, he recited from memory all 42 verses of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” by John Keats. To another, he gave a slew of presents, along with a fully decorated Christmas tree. Women found him virile and sexy; one said he could do six hundred pushups without stopping. Yet Albright never made a sexual advance toward a woman until she asked him to first—at least that’s what he proudly told his friends.

In late 1985, Albright fell in love with Dixie Austin, a pretty, shy widow whom he had met on a trip to Arkansas. It was one of the most romantic times of his life. At dinner, he charmed Dixie with stories about nature and art. He showed her the autographs he had collected from Ronald Reagan, Marlene Dietrich, and Bob Hope. He took her hunting in the country for salamanders. His dream, he told her, was to find a new species of salamander that could be named after him. Sex with Albright, Dixie later said, was gentle and satisfying. He never talked dirty to her, and he never wanted her to do anything that might be considered unconventional. He certainly did not sneak off and have affairs.

By the time he met Dixie, however, Charles Albright had already created another life for himself. Although he masterfully hid his secret from everyone who knew him, he was a veteran of red-light districts all over Dallas. To some prostitutes, he was a whoremonger—a regular trick. To others, like Susan Peterson, he was even a sugar daddy. At Ranger Bail Bonds, the company she used to bail her out of jail, Peterson listed Charles Albright as her cosigner on bond applications. On one form, she listed him as her best friend in the event that she skipped town and the bondsmen had to hunt her down.

There is also evidence that Albright was a friend of Mary Pratt’s long before she became a prostitute. In the early eighties, Mary lived in a south Dallas neighborhood where Albright’s parents had long ago invested in cheap rental property. At the time, Albright was temporarily living in one of the rental homes. According to several sources, Albright had a brief fling with one of Pratt’s female friends and brought that woman and Pratt over to his house for parties.

Other prostitutes say that when Pratt started turning tricks at the Star, Albright became one of her customers. Pratt told them that “Old Man Albright” was a good trick, willing to pay a little more than the going rate. Soon Albright was making the rounds. With some of the girls, he had a platonic relationship. He would pick them up, talk to them, take them to get a hamburger, and drop them back off, never even attempting sex. With others, he had standing sexual appointments—always in the afternoons, when Dixie was at work as a sales clerk at a gift shop in Redbird Mall.

Every Friday afternoon, for instance, he had sex with a married woman who hit the streets after her husband had gone to work and her children were at school. Albright, whom she called Pappy, felt sorry for her, she said: “He was a sweet gentleman. If I ever needed extra money, I would call him and he would drop it off.” But the married woman said that by late 1987 she had to put an end to her dates with Albright because he began to get more and more aggressive. She said he asked her to beat him—“to spank him like a child.” Another prostitute, Edna Russell, remembered meeting Albright when her friend Susan Peterson asked her to do a “double.” She said she and Peterson went with Albright into a motel room. There, he handcuffed them to the bed and began hitting them with a belt and an extension cord, all the while shouting, “Scream, bitch! You know you like it!”

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Albright’s life began to spin out of control after the death of his parents, Delle and Fred. Without them around to look out for him, a repressed part of Albright may have finally unleashed itself. He and Delle, who died of cancer in 1981, were not close in her last years. Delle was disappointed in the way her son had turned out, while Albright found her to be a pest—especially when she would bang on his door early on Saturday mornings to get him to help her with one of her little fix-up projects. But as his final gesture of devotion to his mother, Albright went out and bought a dress for the undertaker to put on her body—the first new dress he had ever seen her wear. Surprisingly, he wept at her funeral, wracked with grief or maybe guilt over the way he had let her down.

He also cried at Fred’s funeral a few years later. Frankly, it had not been until after Delle’s death that Albright and his father became close. Albright remembered how Delle constantly nagged at her quiet husband, bickering with him about problems around the house. With her gone, Fred seemed more relaxed. Several nights a week, Albright would take him to dinner at a nearby cafeteria.

After Fred’s fatal heart attack in 1986, Albright inherited at least $96,000, along with all of his parents’ homes and property in south Dallas. For what friends said were sentimental reasons, he kept the property in his father’s name. To bring in some extra money, he rented out one of the tiny ramshackle frame homes, on a street called Cotton Valley, to a truck driver named Axton Schindler. Known as Speedee because he talked so fast, Schindler was a singularly weird individual. He stacked the rooms of his house with trash up to three feet high. He put an automobile engine in the living room. He lived without electricity and running water: He used a Coleman lantern for light and bottled water to wash himself. Albright’s friends said he should get another renter, that Speedee was too unusual. But the always agreeable Albright, who had met Schindler through a female friend, said he wasn’t that bad of a fellow, so he let him stay.

At this point, Albright had made the decision to move back into the old family home in Oak Cliff, which, like the rental homes, was still listed in the property rolls under Fred’s name. Although the neighborhood had grown somewhat shabby over the years and the house was definitely in need of a new paint job, Albright said the place would do nicely. He brought his new love, Dixie Austin, down from Arkansas, and together they settled in for a quiet, romantic life.

The address of their home was 1035 Eldorado.

“You know Irv Stone, the head of the Dallas County forensic science department, which studies physical evidence found at crime scenes?”

“Yes,” he said. “We played on a softball team together. He was sort of a standoffish person. Everyone would call him ‘Dr. Stone.’ So finally I said something to him about my supraorbital foramen bothering me. He’d say, ‘Huh?’ I’d say, ‘You know, where the ophthalmic division of the trigeminal nerve comes through and feeds my eyebrow up here. It’s really been bothering me.’ And Irv, sort of cocky, said, ‘I hate to inform you that I am not a medical doctor.’ I’m surprised he didn’t know his anatomy.”

“What were you describing, the area above your eye?” I asked.

“Yes, the little ridge there, right where the nerve comes through.” March 19, 1991: Shirley Williams

John Westphalen had filled up four black spiral notebooks with notes on the prostitute murder case. He had gone back and reexamined the crime scenes. Special undercover units had been sent to stake out the prostitution areas and run computer checks on the license plates of vehicles that cruised by, just to see if the owners might have any unusual criminal records. Everything added up to zip. This was a killer in total control, a man who refused to panic. “We’ve got to answer three questions,” Westphalen said again and again at meetings about the case. “Number one, Why is he after prostitutes? Number two, Why were both bodies dumped on that same street? And number three, Why are those eyes cut out?”

Sitting around Westphalen’s battleship—gray metal desk in the heart of the fluorescent-lit homicide office, detectives started throwing out theories. Maybe the killer had gotten AIDS from a prostitute and was out for revenge. Maybe he believed the old superstition that a murderer’s image always remains on the eyeballs of the person he kills. Maybe he believed a dead person’s eyes would follow him forever. Or maybe the killer took the eyeballs to fuel some sexual fantasy. Maybe he wanted to eat them—or cook them. The only thing Westphalen knew for sure was that the killer came out late at night, was strong enough to drag those girls in and out of a car, and had surgical skills. He also probably needed a well-lit room to do his surgery. Hell, somebody said, maybe this guy is a whacked-out doctor.

Suddenly, in the early morning hours of March 19, the killer changed tactics. On Fort Worth Boulevard, another whore hangout a few miles from the Star, a black prostitute named Shirley Williams emerged from the Avalon Motel, where she worked as a maid during the day and turned tricks at night. According to another prostitute who saw her, Shirley was wearing jeans and a yellow raincoat and appeared to be in a stuporous drug high as she tottered alone on the sidewalk.

She was found at six-twenty the next morning, dumped on a residential street half a block from an elementary school in the heart of Oak Cliff. As children walked to school, they could see the naked woman crumpled against the curb. An unopened condom was beside her body. “Go look at her eyes and tell me if they’re there,” Westphalen said to the medical examiner’s field agent at the scene. The field agent flipped open the eyelids. “Gone,” he said.

Westphalen turned to his partner, Stan McNear. “We’ve got number three,” he said.

The autopsy on Shirley Williams’ body would show that the surgery had been hurried. The broken tip of an X-Acto blade was found embedded in the skin near her right eye. But there were still no witnesses, no murder weapon, no fingerprints. Worse, the killer had now murdered a black woman, and he had moved locations. Just as the detectives had feared, the publicity about the case had sent the killer away from the Star and his south Dallas dumping ground. There was no telling where he would hit again. Albright’s first two victims were found in south Dallas. They were Mary Pratt (top left), a well-liked prostitute who would stand quietly on her street corner and wait for tricks to drive by, and Susan Peterson (top right), a fearless hooker who would threaten other girls and curse the cops. His third victim, Shirley Williams (bottom left), who worked as a maid during the day and turned tricks at night, was found in Oak Cliff. Veronica Rodriguez (bottom right) initially told the police that Albright had tried to kill her too, but she changed her story.Ric Moore October 1990: A Son’s Vengeance

In the autumn before the killings began, Charles Albright was the model of domestic propriety. During the day, he put his carpenter’s skills to use around the house, installing new cabinets for the kitchen, adding a skylight in the bathroom. If he was preparing to become a modern-day Jack the Ripper, none of his friends or family had any idea.

But on October 1, Albright did something that, even for him, seemed a little peculiar: He took a job delivering newspapers in the middle of the night for the Dallas Times Herald. Albright told Dixie, who by now was his common-law wife, that he needed more spending money. He had never been good with his finances; in four years he had gone through his inheritance, and he had yet to get a full-time job. Because Dixie got a monthly annuity check and worked daily in the gift shop, she paid most of their bills. Dixie wasn’t exactly pleased with Charlie’s decision—she said she couldn’t get a good night’s sleep with him gone. But Albright said it would work out fine. He would wake up around three in the morning, deliver papers on an Oak Cliff route between four and six, and then be back in bed by six-fifteen.

He and Dixie agreed that most of the money he made would go for the trips he took with his softball team. The well-built Albright was one of the better players in the city’s senior slow-pitch softball league. He played for both a day team and a night team, and he was chosen as an outfielder for a local all-star team that went to the Senior World Series in Arizona. Albright, of course, was the league’s most colorful personality: He wore red shoes while everyone else wore black, and he twisted a coat hanger inside his cap so the cap would sit perfectly upon his head. He brought a cooler of soft drinks to every game for the other players to share. At the end of the game, there was nobody who could regale an audience with a funny story the way he could.

“No one ever saw Charlie upset—I literally mean that,” said a man who managed one of Charlie’s teams in the fall of 1990. “He went out of his way to try to be liked,” said a longtime friend who also played ball with him. “Every now and then there would be some jawboning during a game, maybe a scuffle between two players from opposing teams. But if somebody came after Charlie, he would back down, as if he was scared. He literally could not stand the idea of fighting. He would rather give you a present. Every time he saw one of my daughters, he gave her a gift or a ten-dollar bill.”

Because Albright’s former teammates were so fond of him, it is difficult even today for them to talk about a certain incident that took place a few months before the murders. Many of them still deny knowing anything about it; others say they have only heard about it secondhand. But at least two men have confirmed that Charlie Albright let his mask slip again.

At the end of one game, some players for the Richardson Greyhounds, Charlie’s day team, were sitting around the ballpark, shooting the breeze and eating some candy that Charlie had brought, when two women in a car drove slowly by. After the men joked that the women must be prostitutes, the team’s manager shouted, “Hey, Charlie, you’re single. Why don’t you take after them whores?”

Albright said, “Hell, I’d kill them if I could.”

Stunned the men turned toward their mild-mannered friend. On his face was a dark scowling look. “What do you mean?” the manager said, trying to keep the conversation light. “We’ve got to have whores. It keeps men from chasing married women.”

“The hell it does!” Albright snapped. Then he marched off to his car and left.

It was the first time anyone had ever seen Albright show any kind of anger. When the team assembled again for practice a few days later, the manager tried to apologize. “We were just shooting the bull,” he said.

“Well, that’s a touchy subject with me,” Albright replied. “My mother was a prostitute.”

He was not talking about Delle, he said, he was talking about his birth mother. The other men were speechless. Was this just one of Albright’s tall tales? In the months to come, a number of people tried to verify the story, including an FBI agent and a private investigator working for Albright’s defense attorney. They learned that while his biological father could not be traced, his biological mother was a nurse who had lived and died in Wichita Falls. Perhaps she never was the brilliant law student whom Delle Albright had described to her son. But there was no way they could determine if she had ever been a prostitute. Albright’s relatives, in fact, insisted that after a lengthy search through court records, Albright had been thrilled to find his biological mother. As an adult, he had visited her several times in Wichita Falls and had brought her gifts. He had even introduced her to Fred Albright and to his own daughter.

Yet somewhere in Albright’s mind, the connection between prostitution and motherhood had been made. It is possible that Charles Albright was wrestling with a very twisted version of the Madonna-whore complex, unconsciously seeking revenge on the mother figures who disappointed him by associating with prostitutes—the worst possible women he could find. On one hand he seemingly cared for prostitutes like Susan Peterson and Mary Pratt. He helped them financially, bought them dinner, and gave them presents. On the other hand, he wanted to punish them. Perhaps he hated what they had become. Perhaps he hated what he had become in their presence.

Whatever the reason, if Albright had truly decided the time had come to kill, he had put himself in a perfect position to do it. His paper route gave him an excuse to be out at night. He had prostitutes who trusted him enough to let him take them on a little trip. He had his parents’ old property just a ten-minute drive south of the Star, where, unseen, he could carry out the murders and mutilations. And because the property was in his father’s name, nothing could be traced back to him.

There was only one flaw in the plan—one Albright didn’t even know about. Charlie’s truck-driving tenant, Axton Schindler, had decided a few years back not to list his south Dallas address on his driver’s license. As he liked to say, he preferred to keep his privacy; he wanted the government to stay out of his business. Instead, he put down 1035 Eldorado, the address for Charles Albright.

“The police told me you had a number of true-crime books in your house,” I said.

“Oh, hell, there were other books—books of poetry, several Bibles, cookbooks, all kinds of books on art, watercolors, oils, and some books on science. It was as well-rounded a library as you wanted to find.”

“But in any of those murder books you read, did you learn why a serial killer acts the way he does?”

“Well, just for the sheer pleasure of killing a girl, I would imagine.”

“A serial killer,” I said, “would not have—”

“Would not have dumped them on the street where they would be easily found,” he quickly said. “Look, if I made up my mind I wanted to be one, I wouldn’t have been caught on the third killing. If I had decided to be a serial killer, I sure would have been a good one. You can ask anybody about anything I have ever done. I tried to be the best at what I did.” March 22, 1991: Caught

Once word of Shirley Williams’ killing spread, the Star Motel turned into a ghost town. Some prostitutes, black and white, told officers John Matthews and Regina Smith that they were leaving Dallas. Others said they were getting out of the business. A few women, so desperate for drug money that they couldn’t leave, moved together to a street corner next to the home of a man who promised to serve as their lookout and bodyguard.

Cruising the area, Matthews and Smith spied a black prostitute, Brenda White, a seventeen-year veteran of the neighborhood. White tended to work alone on a street corner in front of a church, away from the other prostitutes. The officers decided to stop and make sure she knew about the murders. “Girl,” Smith said, “don’t you know there’s a killer loose? He’s now killing the black girls too.” “Well, I’m going to get my black ass out of here,” White replied. “I just had to mace a man who jumped bad on me the other night.”

White told the officers that a few days before, a trick in a dark station wagon had pulled up alongside her and that she had gotten inside the car. He was a husky-looking white man with salt-and-pepper hair, cowboy boots, and blue jeans. “Let’s go to a motel,” she told him. “No,” he said. “I’ve got a spot we can use.” As a way to protect herself, White never allowed a new trick to take her anywhere but a whore motel, so she told him to drop her off immediately. Suddenly, “a change came over his face,” she recalled. “It was like anger, rage. He said, ‘I hate whores! I’m going to kill all of you motherf—ing whores!’” Before he had a chance to grab her, White shot a stream of Mace into his face, threw open the door, and jumped out, breaking the heel of one of her favorite red leather pumps.

For the rest of the day, Matthews and Smith could not shake White’s story from their minds. They flipped through their notebooks. They thought about everything the whores had told them since the killings began. Always, they returned to Veronica Rodriguez’s rambling talk about being raped.

The next morning, as they were checking in for work at their police substation, Smith said, “We need to run a computer check on that Axton Schindler.” Because county government computers contain more information about citizens than city computers, she and Matthews drove to the Dallas County constable’s office near Jefferson Boulevard. There, a deputy constable on duty, Walter Cook, agreed to help them. Seated around the terminal, the officers asked Cook to type in Schindler’s address: 1035 Eldorado. The name Fred Albright popped up as the owner of the property.

Fred Albright? Where was Axton Schindler?

Cook punched in another code. It turned out that this Fred Albright also owned property on a street called Cotton Valley. Wasn’t Cotton Valley in the very neighborhood in south Dallas where the first two prostitutes were found? Cook kept typing. Fred Albright, the computer reported, was dead.

Matthews and Smith stared at the screen: The only clue in the case led them to a dead man. Then, after a pause, Cook said softly, “Maybe this has something to do with a man named Charles Albright.”

Several weeks before, Cook explained he had come to the office early one morning and had answered a call from a woman who would not identify herself. The woman had been friends with Mary Pratt, she said, and through Pratt had met a man whom she briefly dated. He was a very nice man, she said, but he had an odd love for eyes. She also happened to mention that he kept X-Acto blades in his attic. Cook asked for the man’s name. “Charles Albright,” she said.

If any other constable’s deputy had been helping Matthews and Smith that day, the link to Albright might never have been made. But good fortune prevailed. Cook typed in another code, and personal information for Charles Albright popped up on the screen: “Born—August 10, 1933. Address—1035 Eldorado.”

Somehow, they said, Schindler and Albright were connected. Perhaps Albright was Schindler’s “friend,” the one who had tried to kill Veronica Rodriguez. Their hearts racing, Matthews and Smith rushed to the county’s identification division and asked to see Albright’s criminal record. The officers discovered a string of thefts, burglaries, and forgeries and the charge of sexual intercourse with a child. The clerk then pulled out a mug shot of Albright, a photo of a rather handsome well-built man with grayish hair, angular features, and deep-set dark eyes—just like the man Brenda White had described. In the picture, Albright was frowning, his face perplexed, as if he was surprised he had been caught.

The clerk wondered why Smith was so excited. “Honey,” Smith said, “I think we’ve got the killer.”

On their way to the homicide department, Matthews and Smith rehearsed everything they wanted to say. They could not seem unprepared, Matthews insisted; it was nervy enough for two raw patrol officers to visit the legendary Westphalen and tell him they believed they had found the killer—although they had no solid evidence to prove it.

Westphalen greeted them politely. Matthews started, then Smith interrupted, and soon they were both talking at once. Westphalen sighed. “Calm down,” he said. “Let’s take it slow.” A few minutes later, after they had finished their presentation, Westphalen decided they were on to something. He put together a photo lineup of six mug shots and told Matthews and Smith to show it to Brenda White.

Immediately, Smith and Matthews tracked White down on her usual street corner and asked her if she recognized any of the men in the mug shots. White unhesitatingly pointed to Albright’s picture and said he was the man who had attacked her. A little while later, they showed the same lineup to Veronica Rodriguez. According to Matthews, when Rodriguez got to the third picture—Albright’s—she started trembling. Suddenly fearful, she refused to identify anyone. Matthews called Westphalen with the bad news. Rodriguez is so afraid of the killer, he said, that she won’t pick out his picture. ��Bring her down here to see me,” Westphalen growled.

Westphalen knew if he could not get Rodriguez to break, he wouldn’t have the evidence to go after Charles Albright. Brenda White’s story offered only the prospect of a misdemeanor assault charge. But if Rodriguez identified Albright, the Dallas police could file charges for attempted murder, get a search warrant, and look through his house for evidence that might connect him to the three murders.

Smith and Matthews dragged Rodriguez downtown. In a small interrogation room, Westphalen stared with his icy blue eyes at the crack-addicted Rodriguez. Rodriguez began to shake again. Tears poured out of her eyes. She wouldn’t look at the pictures laid out before her. Trying to control his anger, Westphalen took a different tack. He told Rodriguez about the three girls, how they were brutally killed, how the police couldn’t get the killer off the street without her help. “This is so easy,” he said. “Pick out the picture of the guy who assaulted you, and we will get him and put him in jail, where he can’t hurt you.” Slowly, Rodriguez looked over the mug shots. While Westphalen and another officer watched, she reached for Albright’s photo, turned it over and signed her name.

At two-thirty in the morning on March 22, as a gentle rain fell on Oak Cliff, a team of tactical officers burst through the front door of 1035 Eldorado. Despite the home’s shabby exterior, the treasures of Charlie Albright’s eclectic life decorated room after room. One cabinet was filled with exotic champagne glasses, another held delicate expensive Lladro figurines of pretty young women. On one wall were Life magazine covers and valuable Marilyn Monroe movie posters.

As Charles Albright was handcuffed and led away, he never said a word. Stumbling out of bed in her nightgown, Dixie Austin looked incredulously at Albright and then back at the police. Unable to imagine what the man she loved could have done, she began to scream. December 1991: Convicted

For a long time after Charles Albright’s arrest, most everyone involved in his case wondered whether the police had enough evidence to convict him of murder. Despite a withering all-night interrogation by Westphalen, Albright refused to confess to anything. He acted as if he had never heard the names of the murdered prostitutes. Police searched through every square inch of the south Dallas properties. They searched his Oak cliff house six times. The FBI even brought in a high-tech machine that could see through walls. Although the searches produced an array of interesting items—carpenters’ woodworking blades, X-Acto blades, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, at least a dozen true-crime books—they never came up with the eyeballs. Behind Charlie’s hand-built fireplace mantel, police discovered a hidden compartment filled with pistols and rifles. None, however, turned out to be the murder weapon.

Nor could police find anyone who would admit to seeing Charlie with the three prostitutes on the nights they were killed. Dixie claimed that on the nights in question, Charlie did not leave the house early for his paper route and that he always came home on time. As the trial date arrived, Veronica Rodriguez decided to testify as a witness for the defense. She claimed that she and Albright had never been together and that Westphalen had coerced her into picking Albright’s photograph from the lineup. Axton Schindler continued to deny that he had saved Rodriguez from Albright. He said a Hispanic man named Joe had brought her to his door.

But Toby Shook, a low-key 33-year-old prosecutor working for the Dallas county district attorney’s office, had a trump card. For the first time in its history, the DA’s office was going for a murder conviction based solely on controversial hair evidence. Days after Albright’s arrest, the city’s forensic lab reported that hairs found on the bodies of the dead prostitutes were similar to hair samples taken from Albright’s head and pubic area. As evidence goes, hairs are not as conclusive as fingerprints—it’s impossible to tell how many other gray-haired men’s hairs might look similar to Albright’s hairs under a microscope—yet in this case, the lab kept running tests. Lab technicians said that hairs found on the blankets in the back of Albright’s pickup truck were similar to hair samples from the first two prostitutes killed, Mary Pratt and Susan Peterson. Hairs found in Albright’s vacuum cleaner matched the hair from the third prostitute killed, Shirley Williams.

An additional piece of the puzzle came from John Matthews and Regina Smith. The officers found a prostitute, Tina Connolly, who claimed that Albright was one of her regular afternoon customers on Fort Worth Boulevard. She never saw him cruise after dark, she said, except for one time—the night Shirley Williams disappeared. Connolly took Matthews and Smith to a secluded field near Fort Worth Boulevard where Albright used to take her for sex. There, they spotted a yellow raincoat, just like the one Williams was last seen wearing, and a blanket. Hairs on the coat and blanket matched Albright’s hair.

Albright’s defense attorney, Brad Lollar, tried to convince the jury that the case against Albright depended on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence. The killer, he said, was probably Axton Schindler, who just happened to skip town the week of the trial. Admittedly, the police had many unanswered questions about Schindler. Westphalen had spent hours interrogation him, trying to determine if he assisted Albright in the killings or was at least aware that Albright was murdering women on the rental property. But there was nothing to tie him to the case except for an empty .44-caliber bullet box found behind the house, which Albright might have dropped there himself. When Schindler’s and Albright’s photos were shown to dozens of prostitutes, none recognized Schindler, but many recognized Albright. Nor were there any hairs found on the dead prostitutes that could be linked to Schindler. Most important, no one who had ever met Axton Schindler could imagine he would have the slightest skill required to perfectly remove a set of human eyes.

Albright never testified. Throughout the trial, he sat quietly in his chair, his shoulders slumped, like a weak, humbled figure. Shook, in his closing argument, derisively called Albright “this former biology teacher, bullfighter, college ace, smart man who just can’t seem to have a job.” But Shook warned the jury not to underestimate Albright—that he had grown much smarter during this trial, that if he ever got out of jail, he wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.

On December 19, when the jury returned with a guilty verdict and a life sentence, Dixie collapsed in the courtroom. Albright’s friends avoided the reporters in the courthouse hallway; it was as if they did not want to be blamed for having lived with a vicious killer without recognizing him for what he was. But a stunned Brad Lollar, who genuinely thought he was going to get his client acquitted, strode tight-lipped out of the courtroom. “It’s always a miscarriage of justice,” he told the press, “when an innocent man is convicted.”

He was confident, he told me, that he would win his case on appeal. Another judge, he said, would see through the lies told at the first trial. He leaned forward in his chair and grinned optimistically. He couldn’t complain about prison life, he said. He was reading two books a week on the Civil War; he was taking notes for a book he wanted to write on the wives of Civil War generals. He was busy working as a carpenter in the prison woodworking shop, coaching the prison softball team, and writing letters to Dixie. He had just sent a request to Omni magazine for a back copy of its first issue because there was a painting on the cover that he liked. He grinned again and told terrifically funny stories about how crazy the other inmates acted. For a moment, it was hard for me to remember exactly what Charles Albright had been accused of doing.

But then I’d lock on the image of an eyeless young woman lying faceup on a neighborhood street. Why would such a kindly, lighthearted man want to cut out a prostitute’s eyes? Why was he so plagued by eyes, that potent and universal symbol, the windows to the soul? In the ancient myth, Oedipus tore out his own eyes after committing the transgression of sleeping with his mother. Did Charles Albright, a perverted Oedipus, tear out the eyes of women for committing the transgression of sleeping with men? Perhaps he removed their eyes out of some sudden need to show the world he could have been a great surgeon. Maybe he dumped that third body in front of the school to show his frustration over never having become a biology teacher. Or maybe a private demon had been lurking since his childhood, when the eyes were left off his little stuffed birds. Just as he long ago wanted to have a bagful of taxidermist’s eyes, maybe he decided to collect human eyes for himself.

“Oh, really, I have never touched an eyeball,” Albright declared again, for the first time becoming indignant with me. “I truly think—and this may sound farfetched—that the boys in the forensics lab cut out those eyes. I think the police said, ‘We want some sort of mutilation.’” Almost cheered by his reasoning, he returned to his psychologically impenetrable self. Whatever secrets he had would remain with him forever.Longreads Crime Dallas

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dhierro · 5 months ago

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What is the Home Decor Store in Dallas?

Transforming a house into a cozy and inviting home is a delightful journey. In Dallas, a city brimming with creativity and style, an array of home decor stores awaits to inspire and delight homeowners. These havens offer a treasure trove of unique items, from custom steel doors and custom iron doors in Dallas to exquisite iron windows and beyond. Exploring these stores is an adventure in itself, where you can discover the perfect pieces to infuse your living spaces with personality and charm.

Unchecking Your Artistic Expression

Dallas is a hub for artistic expression, and its home decor stores reflect this vibrant spirit. These havens offer a diverse range of pieces, from handcrafted artwork to artisanal furniture, allowing you to curate a space that truly resonates with your aesthetic sensibilities. Whether you prefer bold and contemporary designs or timeless and classic elements, these stores have something to captivate every style preference.

Blending Form and Function

While aesthetics are undoubtedly crucial in home decor, functionality should never be overlooked. Iron windows and doors in Dallas not only add an elegant touch to your abode but also provide durability and security. These sturdy elements blend seamlessly with various architectural styles, creating a harmonious fusion of form and function.

Embracing Sustainability and Craftsmanship

In today’s environmentally conscious world, many home decor stores in Dallas prioritize sustainability and craftsmanship. They offer eco-friendly products made from responsibly sourced materials, allowing you to create a beautiful and ethical living space. Additionally, these stores often showcase the works of local artisans, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the region and supporting the local community.

Personalized Touches for a Unique Home

One of the greatest joys of exploring home decor stores in Dallas is the opportunity to personalize your space. From customizing iron windows and doors in Dallas to commissioning one-of-a-kind pieces, these stores cater to your unique vision. By collaborating with skilled craftspeople, you can bring your design dreams to life, creating a truly distinctive and remarkable home.

In addition to their artistic offerings, many home decor furniture stores in Dallas specialize in functional elements such as iron windows and doors. These sturdy and elegant features not only enhance the visual appeal of your home but also provide durability and security, blending seamlessly with various architectural styles.

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completeoverhead · 8 months ago

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When to Replace Garage Doors in Dallas and Richardson, TX

The garage door plays a vital role in one’s home's security, curb appeal, and convenience. Over time, wear and tear can take a toll, leading to the need for replacement. Knowing when to replace the garage door and what factors to consider can help one make an informed decision. Homeowners need to have a clear picture of when they should stop spending on repairs and consider replacing the old garage door with a new one. The following are the things to keep in mind: Signs it's Time to Replace the Garage Door: Visible Damage: If the garage door is visibly damaged, such as dents, rust, or warping, it may be time for a replacement. These issues can not only affect the home's appearance but also compromise the security and functionality of the garage door. Frequent Repairs: If one frequently repairs the garage door, it may be more cost-effective to replace it. Constant repairs can add up quickly and indicate that the garage door is nearing the end of its lifespan. Loud or Unusual Noise: A garage door that operates loudly or makes unusual noises may have worn-out components that need replacing. Upgrading to a new garage door can provide quieter, smoother operation. Energy Efficiency: Older garage doors may lack proper insulation, leading to energy loss. Replacing the garage door with an energy-efficient model can help reduce heating and cooling costs. Safety Concerns: If the garage doors in Dallas and Richardson, TX, lack modern safety features, such as sensors that detect obstructions, replacing them with a newer model can improve the safety of the garage. Factors to Consider When Choosing a New Garage Door: Material: Garage doors are available in various materials, including steel, wood, and aluminum. Each material has its advantages and disadvantages in terms of durability, maintenance, and aesthetic appeal. Style: The style of the garage door can significantly impact the home's curb appeal. Homeowners must choose a style that complements the architectural style of their home, whether it's traditional, contemporary, or rustic. Insulation: Insulated garage doors can help regulate temperature and reduce noise, making them ideal for homes with attached garages or living spaces above the garage. Windows: Windows can add natural light to the garage and enhance its appearance. Consider the placement and design of windows to ensure they complement the home's overall look. Security Features: Look for garage doors with modern security features, such as tamper-resistant locks and rolling code technology, to keep the home safe and secure. Cost: Garage door prices can vary based on material, style, and features. Set a budget and choose a garage door that meets the needs without exceeding budget. Replacing the old garage door can improve the home's appearance, security, and energy efficiency. Look for signs indicating it's time for a replacement, and consider the material, style, insulation, and security features when choosing a new garage door.

#garage doors in Dallas and Richardson #TX

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ultraheydudemestuff · 1 year ago

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Harold B. Burdick House

2424 Stratford Rd.

Cleveland Heights, OH

Cleveland native Harold B. Burdick was known for designing 28 houses in Shaker Heights. Although he was best known for his English Tudor designs, Burdick stands out for his eclectic designs in Colonial, French, and Neoclassical styles. Born in 1895 to Halbert and Mariette Bennet Burdick, he graduated from Cornell University School of Architecture and served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I, where he became interested in aviation and served as an instructor for the U.S. Army Air Service at Love Field in Dallas and Barron Field near Eberman, Texas.

After the war, Burdick returned to Cleveland and joined Walker & Weeks—a firm known for its Neoclassical, Italian Renaissance, Moderne, and Art Deco architectural styles over four decades. While with the firm, he helped in 1919 with the design of the Federal Reserve Building on the corner of Superior Avenue and East 6th Street, and then worked with Meade & Hamilton before starting his own practice. Burdick’s first major design came in 1924 with a 4,571-square-foot French Provincial home on 19000 South Woodland Road in Shaker Heights. Many of his Shaker Heights designs can be found on Shelburne Road and Shaker Boulevard.

Perhaps Burdick’s most unique design was his own Cleveland Heights home at 2424 Stratford Road. He designed and built the glass block International Style home in 1938. He designed the house as a prototype for an economical, quality house. Its streamlined 1,688-square-foot design features some pioneering first for the 1930s—an electric kitchen, the first domestic use of fluorescent lighting, open spaces, and walls made of glass and mahogany panels. The home was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 17, 1974, was a 2013 winner of the Cleveland Heights Historic Preservation Award, and is a featured home on the Heights Heritage Tour. Burdick died at the age of 51 on May 24, 1947. He left behind his wife, Marjorie, and two children. He is buried in Lake View Cemetery.

Harold Burdick not only designed and built this house for his own family, but also as an example of an International Style, mass-produced home. By using modern architectural concepts and manufactured materials, he hoped to create a prototype for a mass-produced house for middle income living. The later years of the Depression in the United States saw a blossoming of the International Style – the style of Gropius and his group at the Bauhaus in Germany, and of Corbusier in France. Built in 1938 for an estimated cost of $12,000, the Burdick House is a very rare example of a Midwest residence designed according to the principles of this short lived but interesting architectural mode.

The International style shows itself in the use of glass block walls and ceiling-to-floor plate glass windows, thus proclaiming its steel frame construction. No masonry or wood construction could do this. The second floor deck over the garage with its slim curved railing is suggestive of an ocean liner, as well as the esthetic Corbusier set up in his 1923 Vers Un Architecture. Burdick used modern manufactured materials for his construction in an effort to link home construction with mass production, thus reducing costs. There is no hardwood in the house. Stucco and flooring are laid on Masonite board and the ceilings are Celotex. All interior walls are paneled to avoid having to maintain plaster. The entire frame is supported on steel beams and the interior walls are movable.

In this American version of a “machine for living,” cabinets are built in and all doors slide into the walls on ball bearing tracks. The rooms wrap around a vertical core that contains the stairs, chimney and utilities. Yet there is ample space where it is needed, and a feeling of spaciousness for the activities of the family. The Burdick house was built in 1938-39 as a prototype for an economical middle-income house. Modern materials not commonly used in domestic architecture at that date were used in the construction, such as Armenite (a masonite board) and linoleum, plywood and plywood veneer walls, and stainless steel. Curved deck railings and some curved interior walls suggest the modernistic aesthetic of the ocean liner and streamlined vehicles. The house is framed of steel, and its most characteristic feature is the large expanses of plate glass and glass-block windows. The house also incorporated one of the earliest uses of fluorescent lighting and had an all-electric kitchen. Located in a typical neighborhood of traditional houses in Cleveland Heights, the house stands out because of its simple rectangular shape, bare stucco walls, and large windows. Burdick lived in the house from 1939 until his death in 1947.

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steeldetailingconstruction · 2 years ago

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pastelwitchling · 2 years ago

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I’ve combined about four prompt requests here, and they are;

A completely insane version of Michael searching for his betrothed? Thank you 😊

hello if you're still taking prompts I was wondering if you'd be willing to write a reunion fic for Malex for when they finally find Alex wherever he is? Thank you!

Hey idk if you're still taking promotes or not. If not I respect and understand and If you are. I was wondering if you could write one where their all hanging out and Dallas wonders what made Michael fall in love with Alex or what he loves about Alex.

I just love when Michael's love is on full display and I thought it would be adorable for Michael to get that cowboy love sick look in his eyes telling them his for Alex

Also can you please write something where Max Michael Liz and alex find out about Is and Kyle and their reactions

***

Michael was vibrating. The image of watching Tezca pull Alex into the ground had been replaying in his head for the past several hours. Michael felt like it had been years, and the longer he went without Alex safe and sound in his arms, the faster the decades raced by.

He was dying. He hung his head, his palms pressed against the steel table at Deep Sky, trying and failing to control his breathing. It might’ve been because of his fevers, but . . . he knew better. It was not having Alex here, knowing he was in danger and not knowing how to protect him, not even knowing if he was . . .

“AGGHHH!” he screamed, and the room around him blew apart. Chairs and tables were thrown into the walls, the windows cracked, and Max, Isobel, Liz, Eduardo, Kyle, and Bonnie stumbled as the ground shook.

“Michael, calm down!” Max warned. “We need this place running if we’re going to find Alex!”

Michael whirled around. “Why are we still here?” he demanded. “We should be tearing Tezca apart until she tells us what she knows!”

“Michael, you can’t,” Bonnie shook her head miserably, her eyes glassy. “She’s too strong for that, she’ll know you’re coming. If she took your boyfriend –”

“Alex,” Michael growled. “His name is Alex, don’t treat him like another part of your stupid plan!”

“I’m not! I swear, I just . . . if Tezca took Alex then it’s because he’s a part of the Alighting somehow.”

“The radar will pick up Tezca’s heat signature,” Eduardo said. “We’ll go after her, we’ll get Alex back.”

“If he’s been missing this long, then she needs him for something,” Liz tried. “She wouldn’t hurt him –”

“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!” Michael screamed, and the building shuddered again. He stormed towards the door. “I’m done waiting here, I’m gonna go find my boyfriend.”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Max demanded, following him. “Uproot the entire town until someone tells you where Alex is?”

“I’m just gonna find Clyde and kill him from the inside till he talks.”

“He didn’t know about this!” Bonnie pleaded to deaf ears. “He couldn’t have!”

“Michael, stop a second!” Isobel demanded, catching his arm.

“DON’T!” he warned, and Isobel let go, stepping back with wide eyes. “The love of my life was kidnapped the day he left home,” he said, his voice trembling with anger, “and I didn’t know. I should’ve felt it the second it happened, the second he was hurt . . . and I didn’t.” He inhaled roughly. “So don’t tell me to calm down, and don’t tell me to wait, because you have no idea what this feels like.”

“Okay,” Isobel said, holding her hands up. “Okay, you’re right, I have no idea. But look at me—look at me, Michael. Would we ever let anything happen to Alex? Would we risk his life? There’s nothing you can do out there, you have to trust us.”

Michael ran a hand over his mouth, shutting his eyes only to be plagued by the image of Alex trapped underground. He flinched, falling back against the wall and clinging to his glass necklace.

“Alex is my best friend,” Kyle finally said into the silence. He’d been standing there with his arms crossed, watching the monitors as the radar spun, jaw clenched until now. “If I thought there was even a chance of finding him outside, you don’t think I’d be looking? But Alex’s best chance is here.”

“Valenti—”

“I know you need him,” Kyle cut him off calmly. “But you have to think about what he needs right now, and he needs you to calm down, do what you do best, and think.”

Michael swallowed thickly, the edges of the glass cutting into his palm. He licked his lips, forcing in one shaky breath after another.

“Think . . .” he murmured, and came up to the computers, looking through them. “I can—I can make something to make it go faster. Max, give me your phone.”

Max raised a brow at him, but handed it over at once. “I’m not getting this back, am I, MacGyver?”

“No,” Michael said, all his thoughts on Alex, his hands working like lightning. “And when we find Tezca,” he said, already connecting to the computer’s radar, “I’m gonna make her sorry for touching him.”

Michael’s genius had been on overdrive. No later than five minutes, his extension to the radar helped pick up a signal that they suspected was Tezca. Whether or not they were sure didn’t matter as Michael had taken one look at the location and run for his truck. He had Max who’d managed to make it into the passenger seat and Kyle who’d thrown himself into the back as Michael had raced away from Deep Sky.

“He’s okay, Michael,” Max tried, one hand gripping the edge of his seat to protect from Michael’s sharp turns. “If he wasn’t, you’d feel it.”

Michael’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “I know Alex is busy, but you’d think he’d check in.” He’d said those words just days ago, wanting nothing more than Alex and not caring how whiny he sounded. He’d wanted Alex at his side, his hand on his forehead, his kisses on Michael’s temple. He’d wanted Alex curled in tight next to him with Michael’s head on his shoulder, hugging him tight and breathing him in, Alex’s whispers in his hair, assuring him everything would be okay. That he would fix everything. Then Michael had found out about Alex being taken and his powers exploded out of him in a frightening way.

All this time, Alex had been trapped, scared for his life, probably sure that Michael had noticed his silence and gone to look for him hours after he’d left. His eyes burned, but he inhaled sharply, keeping the tears at bay. He would beg for forgiveness later. Right now, he just had to find Alex.

Michael brought the truck to a screeching halt outside the cave. His necklace glimmered and shined, aching for its other half. Eduardo soon drove up behind them, Isobel, Liz, and Bonnie at his side, but Michael was already entering the cave. Max warned him to stay behind him, to stay alert, but he didn’t see any sign of Tezca, despite this being the place where her heat signature had showed her to be.

There was only the darkness and cold of the cave. Michael shivered. The idea of his Alex being anywhere in here, all this time, his hope of Michael saving him dwindling . . .

Michael’s powers rose to the surface frighteningly quickly, and the ground began to shake. Rubble was just starting to fall from the walls when he saw it; a light at the end of the cavern, flickering purple, blue, pink, green, orange—and at the center, the Lockhart Machine.

Except it was different than the last time he’d seen it. It was engulfed in colorful lights, those of the spaceship glass, connecting to a figure lying unconscious on the floor.

Michael’s heart nearly stopped. “Alex,” he breathed, running to him despite his aching body, the fever and fatigue that never quite went away completely but which vanished at the sight of his boyfriend. Michael fell to his knees at his side, turning him over to find his face and hands covered in scratches and bruises, his knuckles and fingers scraped and coated in dry blood. He’d fought to escape.

Michael looked to the machine that was connecting to Alex, and his eyes barely twitched before it shattered to pieces. But Alex wouldn’t wake up.

“Alex,” was all Michael could say, his voice trembling. Alex was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day he’d left, his skin was ice-cold to the touch, and his head fell against Michael’s arm as Michael held him against him. He pressed a shaking hand to his chest. His heart was barely beating. “Alex, wake up. Come on, baby, wake up, please.”

But Alex wouldn’t. His piece of the spaceship glass hung off his neck, glimmering as it came into close contact with Michael’s, but Alex remained still.

“What’s happening to him?” Kyle demanded at once, kneeling at his side, checking Alex’s pulse.

“Alex,” Michael murmured, shaking him slightly even as he held him tighter. “Please, baby, wake up. Come on, wake up for me.”

“Michael,” Isobel tried, her voice faint. “Let me enter his mind, maybe I can wake him up from there.”

“We don’t know what his mind looks like right now,” Max warned. “We could end up making it worse.”

“Well, we have to do something!” Bonnie demanded.

“I know that,” Liz managed, her own words shaking like she was trying not to cry. “I know, just let us think for a minute!”

“There’s no use,” a soft voice said, and Tezca emerged from the shadows. “He’ll be dead before long. He’s already served his purpose.”

“Yeah?” Max moved to stand between them, shielding Michael and the others from Tezca. “And what purpose is that?”

“This machine,” she said, kicking a piece of the shattered Lockhart Machine aside, “needed a pure heart to power it. Of all the faces it’s come across, it chose him,” she jerked her chin at Alex. “The purest of them all.”

“Power the machine for what?” Liz spat, her voice trembling, her eyes glassy.

“Don’t you understand yet?” she tilted her head, smirking. “The Alighting. The machine isn’t just a radio to my triad, it’s a radio to all of us. We were spread out over the galaxy. You think Earth was our only landing spot? But they’ve all been waiting, ready for war, to start over. And they know where to come now, because of him.” She tilted her head at Alex, her smirk widening. “To think, so much power in a human. Your sacrifice will not go by ignored, Alex Ma—”

Tezca cut off with a choke. Her smug and cruel expression fell to something shocked and pained and . . . afraid. Good.

Michael held Alex tighter to him as he turned Tezca’s organs inside out, as her nose bled and her body convulsed. “Don’t. Say. His. Name.”

His voice was cold and distant even to him, and even the others looked torn between relief and concern over what Michael was doing. He didn’t care. Alex was still freezing and asleep in his arms, his breathing nonexistent. Michael’s entire body shook as he felt something much angrier and larger and worse than a panic attack coming.

Tezca tried to speak, but she only spat blood instead. She tried to move, but she was frozen in place. Michael had said he would kill her, and now he would . . . but then Max knelt in front of him, blocking his view of Tezca and squeezing his shoulder.

“Alex,” he reminded him. “Michael, you can still save him. Focus on saving him. Hey!” he squeezed harder, breaking Michael’s concentration and bringing a world of noise back to his ears. “Alex needs you.”

Michael looked down and swallowed thickly. He pushed a trembling hand up Alex’s shirt to his chest and spread his fingers over Alex’s heart. Their necklaces lit uncontrollably as they came into contact. Alex had never taken his off.

Michael clenched his jaw and thought about nothing but his love for him. How Alex must’ve clung to his own necklace, thinking of Michael, hoping for him, having faith that he would save him. His eyes burned and filled with tears faster than he could control or consider them.

“Alex,” he croaked, his nails digging into Alex’s chest, a warmth spreading underneath his palms. How Alex must’ve thought of Michael as he’d been pulled underground, how he must’ve said Michael’s name over and over to keep from giving up, how he must’ve cried and silently hoped that Michael would find him. Because they’d finally found a home and neither of them could give it up.

With his other arm, Michael pulled Alex in tighter, Alex’s head resting in the crook of his neck, Michael leaning his head on Alex’s own. “I love you,” he cried, “please wake up. Wake up for me, Alex.”

Your dreams, and your heart. Always.

“WAKE UP!”

At once, an array of bright lights shot out from Michael’s palm and Alex bolted up, eyes wide and gasping. He put a hand over his chest as he groaned, and looked around at the others. His expression was lost, confused, startled, then he said, “What happened?”

Michael saw his handprint peeking out from Alex’s collar, right where Alex was resting his own hand, his other still on Michael’s knee, as if instinctively seeking out his touch. A sob escaped his lips before he threw himself at Alex, his arms wrapping tight around his shoulders, his face in the crook of Alex’s neck.

“Alex Alex Alex Alex,” he breathed out, crying all the while and unable to stop. Michael heard more cries and sobs and sniffling behind him, but he didn’t dare let go of Alex. Slowly, Alex put his hands on his waist.

“I was . . . underground,” Alex murmured, still trying to regain his memories. “I . . . tried to fight back, I—”

“Shh,” Michael whispered, putting a hand in his hair and turning to nuzzle his ear, breathing as much of him in as possible. “It’s okay, don’t talk. Just save your energy.”

A few seconds passed, then Alex slumped in Michael’s hold, wrapping his arms more tightly around his waist. “I want to go home,” he murmured.

Michael swallowed and kissed his neck before he nodded. “We will. You and me, Private, we’re going straight home.”

Michael wouldn’t let go of Alex for a second. Tezca was captured, suffering from internal injuries that Eduardo, Kyle, and Liz were trying to heal, but Michael was taking Alex home. After a long hot bath and getting him in his sweats, Alex had all but collapsed into bed with a groan and a whimper that only Michael could hear.

Alex clung to Michael’s waist, unwilling to be apart, and Michael knew there was nowhere else he could be until he knew Alex was safe and sound. He wrapped him in his arms and lied next to him, raking his fingers through his hair as he slept, Alex’s face in his collarbone, Michael’s lips against his brow.

Michael watched him sleep, watched his brows twitch every once in a while and his eyes flutter and another whimper escape his lips. He shushed him softly, brushing his hair back with his fingers. He kissed the spot between Alex’s eyes, his nose, his cheek.

“Sleep, baby,” he whispered softly against the shell of his ear. “I’m right here. I’m right here.”

Alex clung a little tighter to Michael and settled once again. Michael couldn’t help but again take in his bruises and cuts. They were cleaned, some of them bandaged, and Michael hitched his leg up around Alex’s, bracketing him and keeping him close against his chest.

His hands trembled as anger, fear, misery, hope, joy all surged within him at once. He’d almost lost Alex—he’d almost lost Alex—and he was sure he was going to explode. The objects around the room trembled and rose from their surfaces. Michael shut his eyes tight, trying to control himself, trying to remind himself that Alex was alive and safe now. He wanted to hold him hard enough until it hurt them both, until he could be assured that Alex was back and this wasn’t an illusion, but he didn’t want to wake Alex or disturb his sleep in any way.

Then Alex hugged his waist tighter and sleepily kissed his neck. “Hold me, baby,” he murmured, as if hearing Michael’s thoughts. “It’s okay. Hold me tight.”

Michael shivered, exhaling shakily before he did what he’d been longing to do for the past hour, and clutched fistfuls of Alex’s shirt, roughly running his hands up and down Alex’s back, wrapping his legs around Alex’s thighs and holding him tight enough to bruise.

Alex only moaned at the touch, snuggling deeper into Michael as if he couldn’t get close enough either. A sob escaped Michael’s lips and he pressed wet kisses to Alex’s hair, his forehead, his temple, his cheek, his nose, his jaw, his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he cried against Alex’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, baby. I should’ve known, I should’ve—I should’ve come for you sooner—”

“Shh,” Alex said softly, kissed Michael’s lips, and cupped his jaw. “I knew you’d come. And you did. You saved me, Michael.”

Michael’s lower lip trembled, and he turned into Alex’s touch, holding his wrist tight and kissing his palm. “I love you,” he murmured, and kissed the inside of his wrist. “I love you so much.” Another kiss on his forearm. “I love you, Alex, I love you.”

Alex chuckled sleepily as Michael kissed up his arm, his shoulder, his neck, his jaw. “I love you more,” he whispered, hugging Michael’s back and urging him lower to kiss his lips.

Michael was already moving to hover between his legs. “Not possible.” He moved down, leaning his body into Alex’s, eager to feel every inch of him, when the door suddenly swung open.

“See?” Isobel demanded to a flustered Dallas. “I told you he’d be on him before he was even awake. Would you get off, he still needs to heal!”

“I can help him heal faster,” Michael said to Alex’s laughter. So relieved to hear that sound, Michael slumped down on top of Alex, pushing his face into Alex’s hair and listening.

“Wow,” Dallas brought in the tray he was holding. It looked like he and Isobel had put together tea, cookies, some sandwiches, and painkillers. He set it on the nightstand. “You really are in love. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you were always obvious about it, but—”

“He’s obsessed with him,” Isobel said irritably, swatting at Michael’s hip until he let Alex sit up. “Here, Alex, I made you my famous cucumber and cream cheese.”

“Thanks, Isobel,” Alex smiled indulgently, but kept a hand in Michael’s shirt, keeping him close. As if Michael would ever go anywhere else.

Michael rested his chin on Alex’s shoulder as he ate slowly, breathing him in. Alex’s stomach couldn’t handle much after days of just being fed a handful of berries that Tezca would throw at him in caves. Michael had insisted on knowing everything, even as every word had cut deeper into him.

He hugged Alex’s waist and kissed his shoulder. No one would ever lay a finger on him again.

“Stop staring at him for two seconds!” Isobel demanded. “He can’t eat with you watching him!”

Michael smirked up at Alex, who met his gaze with a wink and an amused smile. “But he’s so beautiful,” he murmured. Alex’s expression softened and he pecked Michael’s lips.

“That all you like about him?” Dallas teased as he sat down next to Isobel on the edge of the bed, and patted Alex’s arm kindly. “’Cause I think he’s pretty badass, putting up with that psycho as long as he did.”

“Badass,” Michael agreed. “Smart, kind. So, so good . . . his heart and in bed.”

Alex sputtered on his sandwich and Dallas quickly poured him some tea. Michael grinned and kissed his neck. “And beautiful.”

“You’re such an ass,” Isobel sighed. “Let’s add patient to his list of attributes, shall we?”

“That, too,” Michael said.

“Please stop.”

“Are we all meeting in here?” Liz popped her head in. Max and Kyle followed, and Kyle, to Michael’s annoyance, ruffled Alex’s hair and told him he’d missed him. The bedroom was officially too crowded, but if it made Alex only curl in deeper against Michael, then he was all for it. He put an arm around Alex’s shoulders as Alex settled again. At his next question, Michael understood why he was desperate to get so close.

“What happened to Tezca?”

“She’s stable,” Liz sighed. “We’ve kept her sedated with the yellow pollen. Bonnie’s with Eduardo at Deep Sky, trying to find Clyde.”

“I don’t think he had anything to do with this,” Alex murmured, brows pinched like they did when he was thinking hard. “There was a point . . . when I thought he was going to find me . . . but Tezca cut him off halfway. I couldn’t talk, let alone scream . . . but I heard her say something about how he and . . . the other one—”

“Bonnie,” Liz supplied.

“Yeah. She said he and Bonnie were too sensitive. That they’d wreck everything if they found me. He probably never even knew what she was really planning.”

“We had the same suspicion,” Max nodded.

Michael pulled Alex in tighter. “He better hope he didn’t know anything,” he said darkly, keeping a firm hold on Alex to keep himself from exploding again.

Alex put a hand on his stomach, his thumb brushing his bellybutton, a subtle and quiet way to calm him.

Isobel seemed to sense the tension because she looked from one face to the other, lingered on Kyle, and blurted, “So! Anyone hear about me and Dr. Cheekbones shacking up?”

Silence. Kyle covered his face with his hands and groaned. Max and Liz looked to each other, then they looked to Michael and Alex as if to ask if they knew.

“Just drinking my tea here,” Dallas murmured into his cup. “Minding my own business and drinking my tea.”

Then Michael gaped, “Valenti?!”

“Aww Kyle!” Liz grinned. “I’m so happy for you!”

“Really,” Kyle shook his head, “we don’t need to make a big deal out of—”

“So how long have you two been sleeping together exactly?” Max asked awkwardly, as if knowing he should say something, but not knowing what.

“A few days,” Isobel said. “Makes me wish we’d been doing it for years though.”

“Is!”

“Okay,” Max shut his eyes. “That question was a mistake.”

“Gotta love chamomile,” Dallas muttered.

“You know what I want?” Alex finally said on a sigh. He smiled wearily at Isobel. “A double date. The four of us. After I can walk around again.”

Isobel grinned, grateful, and leaned in to kiss Alex’s cheek. She wiped away the lipstick mark with her thumb. “You got it, Captain Sexy.”

“Hey,” Michael swatted her hand away, “hands off, he’s mine.”

And just like that, the tension in the room was gone. Kyle sat down on Alex’s other side, nudging his shoulder with his own and ignoring Michael’s possessive glares. Alex rested his head on Michael’s shoulder amidst the chatter of the rest of the group.

“Thanks for bringing me home,” Alex whispered.

Michael swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. There was so much he wanted to say back, so much he had to say. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for being my home. Thanks for loving me.

But somehow, he had a feeling Alex already knew all of that. So instead, he just held him tighter, kissed the crown of his head, and whispered back, “Always.”

***

Some of you might’ve noticed that I’ve turned off my ask box and that’s because I want to finish with all my prompts before I open it again.

Also if you like a fic please reblog/comment/share. It always makes the world of a difference.

#alex manes #michael guerin #malex #malex fic #roswell new mexico #roswell nm #tyler blackburn #michael vlamis

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starlitangels · 2 years ago

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Lord and Lady - Part 3

Not quite a long time coming, but it’s been a bit and I had this one ready. 3.5k words (almost exactly!) (Part 1)(Part 2)

—

Baaabe

I stared with a slightly slack jaw at Asher as he emerged from his suite’s bedroom in the suit Everly Tanner had provided for him. It was dark grey with a deep red tie that made the amber of his eyes darken. He adjusted the coat and did up the two buttons. “You’re staring,” he stated.

“Sorry.” I tore my eyes away.

“Do I look that bad?” he asked.

“The contrary, actually,” I said. “It, uh… suits you. Pun not intended.”

Asher raised a single brow, like he didn’t quite believe me, but he didn’t push it. “You look nice too.”

I’d never owned anything as expensive as the outfit that Lady Tanner had provided for me. Most unempowered people never had reason to. It wasn’t necessarily comfortable, but I couldn’t knock the lady’s taste. She’d chosen colors to go with my complexion and had gone for a formal but simplistic style.

Xavier knocked on the door to Asher’s suite. “If you two are quite finished getting ready, we need to get going,” he called.

Asher fidgeted with the tie again—but in a move that surprised me, offered me his arm. I reached out for it, paused and drew my hand back, before deciding screw it and taking his elbow.

He escorted me to the door and pulled it open.

“Well. Don’t you two just look the picture of a peachy couple,” Xavier said sarcastically. “Let’s go.” He pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against and headed down the hallway. Asher set his other hand on top of mine on his elbow like he was searching for strength from me before we both moved to follow Xavier to the elevators and then down to the parking garage, where the car was waiting.

—

Angel

“Wow. Man’s got taste,” I said as the gates to the mansion opened and revealed the grounds and the building itself. The grounds were sprawling—but not wasted. Several gardners worked in vegetable gardens and fruit tree orchards as Dallas drove me down the long drive toward the mansion.

Which was really more of a castle. I counted five towers and the fountains seemed to be made to look like a moat. The building was pale stone. Not quite marble. The mansion was at least five floors, if the rows of windows were anything to go by. It wasn’t a wide building, but it was tall and I imagined it stretched backward farther to give it more space. Wings extended on either side of the mansion from the front entrance. I guessed the one on the right was the ballroom, and the one on the left a formal dining room for hosting large amounts of people.

A banner hung from a balcony just over the double front doors, but it was Morgan Kyne’s crest, not the broken link symbol of the Imperium. Good for him, I thought.

“You’ve visited Lord Kyne’s residence before, haven’t you?” Dallas asked.

“Not this one,” I answered. “He moved here not long after I first met him.” Damien and I had been teenagers, then. Sofia had still been the Queen-Imperial. Morgan Kyne was six or seven years older than us and came into power young. His parents had been mildly influential in the Imperium, but he’d revealed his powers as a Seer when he was eighteen and rocketed up the ranks in a short span of time.

Dallas nodded in understanding as he pulled up to the front doors. “Here we are,” he said.

I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Morgan Kyne and Everly Tanner had fierce reputations. I wouldn’t lie to myself about being apprehensive.

“Good luck, Your Grace,” Dallas said.

“Thanks Dallas,” I replied.

He got out of the car and circled it to open my door for me. I climbed out, slinging my backpack onto my shoulder. Dallas closed the door behind me and moved to the trunk to get my suitcase.

The front doors burst open to reveal three people.

Morgan Kyne and Everly Tanner I recognized, but the man standing behind them I did not. He had piercing pale blue eyes and thick, overlong dark hair that faded to silver at the ends. The Imperium symbol was pinned to his shirt next to the Kyne house crest. He stood at easy attention as Everly rushed toward me.

“You made it!” she exclaimed, beaming broadly. She was barefoot in a deep wine-purple dress that fell to barely above her knees. That long white hair of hers hung loose and flowing as ever as she pulled to a stop in front of me, holding her arms out. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Your Grace.”

I threw myself into her embrace, letting her arms wrap tightly around me. I buried my face in her bare shoulder. Warm, soft, close contact like I hadn’t felt from another human since…

“How are you?” I asked. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

“We’ve been well, both of us. Y’know, just doin’ our thing.” She smiled. It had been several years since I’d seen Everly. Her reputation as Morgan’s ruthless lieutenant had grown in that time, but the kindness in her eyes—so dark blue they were violet—seemed to remain. The last time I saw her, she and Morgan had come down to Dahlia to attend Queen Sofia’s birthday ball. We’d met sparingly over the years since she and Morgan had joined forces, but she’d always been warm and bright to me. A gifted Illusory, I was told. “How are you?”

“I’ve… been better,” I said. “But I’m alright.”

She pulled back from the hug enough to peer deep into my eyes. Piercing into my soul like she could see every little piece that made me who I was. A few lines appeared in her forehead as her eyebrows tilted and concern painted her features. “What has he done to you?” she whispered.

“I don’t know what you mean—” I began.

Her sharp, skeptical look shut me up immediately. “The hell you don’t,” she said. “Look at that ugly robe thing. You look so stiff and formal. Take it off.” She tugged at the ties on the red silk robe Damien usually had me wear to denote my status. I let her untie the top one and undid the second one myself, letting the garment fall off. She snatched it and handed it to the guard with the two pins on his shirt. “That’s better,” she assessed, eyes sweeping the business-casual outfit I’d worn beneath.

“Thanks?” I said.

“Come inside,” she insisted. “Dinner’s almost ready. I hope you don’t mind, we have some other guests joining tonight. One of them is unempowered. Both from Dahlia, actually.”

More people from home. One of them like me. “I don’t mind.”

“Didn’t think you would.” She smiled and led me toward the interior of the mansion. “Xavier, would you take our suzerain’s bags to their room, please?”

The guard with the frosty eyes nodded with a, “Yes, my lady,” and took my backpack and suitcase and disappeared down the corridor.

“Your Grace,” Morgan greeted, opening his arms for an embrace. “A pleasure to have you in our home.” I wrapped my arms around him. He looked much the same as he had the last time I saw him. Short hair so black it was blue in the lower lighting, waxed out of the way. Ocean blue eyes so bottomless it was easy to forget I was looking at them if I stared too long. Pristine suit with a red tie. His house crest adorned the gold tie bar.

“Thanks for getting me out of Dahlia,” I replied. His hug wasn’t as warm or familiar as Everly’s, but I still drank up the intimate contact like a parched person downed water. He released the hug and gave me a smile.

“It’s an honor to convince His Majesty to allow you to visit,” he said.

Everly leaned against his arm, her hair falling over his black suit. “I imagine you’re tired,” she said. “Go wash up and change into whatever suits you for dinner. I’ll send a staff member to your rooms to guide you down to the dining room whenever you’re ready.”

I glanced around the interior of the mansion. The entrance hall alone was practically the size of a ballroom with a pair of sweeping stairs arching back and away toward a second-story mezzanine that led to two hallways on either side. “Yeah, I’m going to need some guidance to get around this place.”

“Don’t worry. It’s every bit as big as you think it is, but we don’t use most of it unless we’re hosting a party,” Everly said. “You’ll get the lay of it pretty quick with how much is actually in use.” She turned and called over her shoulder, “Wexler!”

A 5’6” blond young man appeared—seemingly from nowhere—and scrambled over to us. “Yes, my lady?”

“Take our guest to their room, would you?”

“O-of course, Lady Tanner.” Wexler bowed to me. “Your Grace. A pleasure to have you here. If you could follow me, please.”

—

Asher

He couldn’t help himself. He and this funny, kind, passionate unempowered human had grown close over the last few weeks. He couldn’t help but stare at them in the fetching outfit Lady Tanner had given them. The two of them were sitting in a fancy parlor with Lord Kyne and Lady Tanner, waiting on the king’s consort to finish changing for dinner. Lady Tanner had changed from the short wine-purple dress she’d worn earlier to a floor-length, deep violet evening gown covered in swirls of even darker violet sequins with a plunging neckline. As usual, she was perched on the arm of Lord Kyne’s chair. He looked the same as he had earlier in the day.

Yet, despite the beauty of these two high-ranking Seers, all Asher could focus on was the single unempowered human in the room, who was holding a champagne flute like they all were, but not drinking it. Smiling and shining softly in the low lights. They were making friendly conversation with Lady Tanner, who seemed much less conniving and wicked in this closer, more intimate space. She laughed more genuinely.

The unempowered human kept Asher from focusing too much on the Seers. The formal clothing looked good on them. On some level, Asher had found them attractive the moment he caught sight of them after Milo and Christian ran them down outside the Imperial Academy of Dahlia. At the time, he’d barely had a moment to notice.

But as the weeks had gone by, he’d taken the time to see them for who they were. Gabe Shaw had said—when Asher was just a boy—that unempowereds weren’t so different from empowereds. People are people, Ash, Gabe had told him once, not long after he’d first learned how to shift when his powers manifested. Looking at the unempowered human sitting on an armchair near him, watching them laugh and smile wide, those words came back to him.

I’m in love with you, he thought. Our world would never approve of us being together, but I can’t bring myself to care. I want you. More than I’ve ever wanted… damn near anything in my life. And—

The door opened. “Oh. Am I late?” a voice asked.

Asher’s attention snapped to the door. A blond young man was ushering another person through the door. The blond was a Freelancer—Asher recognized the aura. The other newcomer…

His blood drained out of his face, leaving his ears and nose cold.

They gasped upon seeing him as well. “Asher?!” they demanded.

Lady Tanner raised a fine white brow. “You two have met?” she asked.

—

Angel

My mind reeled. I barely processed Everly’s question. Asher. When young Nate Wexler had told me that the other guest from Dahlia that wasn’t unempowered was a shifter alpha, I never would have guessed that alpha was Asher. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Not since his pack had resigned from their security commission with the palace. I’d neither seen nor heard from the Shaw pack since…

My throat tightened and I felt like I could barely breathe.

David’s green eyes. A warm smile like rays of sunlight shining down on me. The attitude that I’d spent months chipping away at finally melting, revealing the care he kept hidden from the world. A pair of strong, callused, but gentle hands cupping my face, promising me he’d keep me safe, no matter what. Furtive glances at each other from across rooms, quickly looking away. Damien never seemed to notice. Whispers in dark meeting places. “You’re an angel sent to save me,” he’d said, barely louder than a breath.

The night the pack resigned their commission—Damien almost caught us. Tank—David’s packmate—thinking fast to cover for us and draw Damien’s attention elsewhere. The entire Imperial palace would have burned to the ground that night if Damien had seen.

Nothing had ever really happened between me and David. Just a friendship that I’d always longed to deepen. Strengthen the connection I hadn’t shared with Damien in ages. David had kissed my hand once. I still dreamt of the feeling of his lips on my skin. Still fantasized about what they might have felt like pressed to my own mouth.

Seeing Asher again sent memories of David and our stolen, secret moments crashing into my head like storm waves against the side of a ship barely staying afloat.

“Y-yes,” I managed to choke out.

“My pack used to do security work for the palace,” Asher supplied to Everly. “We met briefly.”

Asher was a bit different from how I remembered him. His eyes were harder. The light that used to glimmer in them had dimmed—but not gone out completely. He had more visible scars on his hands and face and he’d put on some muscle. That curly black hair of his was longer and shaggy, but still cared for. If I didn’t know any better, I would have said his jawline had gotten more square and pronounced as well.

He seemed to be unwilling to look away from me, like seeing me was bringing back his own memories of David. The unempowered person—I assumed—he was sitting near reached out and set a hand on his knee with a gentle, “Asher?”

He broke eye contact with me, and it was like a spell was broken. I was no longer frozen in place, paralyzed by the past.

I met Everly’s concerned gaze. “G… give me a minute,” I said.

Turning on my heel, I bolted from the room.

—

Everly

I kicked off my high heels, pulled up my skirt, and ran after the king’s consort, calling after them. I knew without even needing to peek into their future that blindly running out of the room like that would get them lost in the house. They still didn’t know that I was a Seer, rather than an Illusory, so I threw up an illusory wall in the hallway around the corridor to get them to slow down.

By the time I rounded the corner after them, they were on their knees on the carpet, face in their hands.

I knelt beside them, putting my hand on their shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked gently.

They shook their head. “S… Seeing Asher again—” They choked on a sob. “It brought back memories.”

“I didn’t realize you knew Asher that well.”

“Not memories of Asher. Memories of his pack’s alpha before him. David.”

“David Shaw,” I said. They nodded. I knew the name by reputation, even this far north. He’d become alpha young after the unexpected passing of his father and had quickly made a name for himself and his pack. One of the most powerful shifters in the country, if not the most powerful. “You knew David?”

They met my eyes through their tears. They said nothing.

“You loved David,” I said as realization hit me. “Does Damien know?”

“I don’t think so. The last time I saw David, Damien almost caught us together. But one of David’s packmates distracted him. The pack resigned their commission with the palace that night. A few months later, I got the news that David and that packmate were both killed fighting a trio of vampires.”

I wrapped my arms around the consort’s shoulders, holding them as they shook, and dropped the illusory wall. They didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sorry. If I’d known—”

They shook their head again. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does. It does to me. I want my guests to be comfortable in my home. Not plagued by the memories of those they’ve lost.”

“We all lose someone to the Imperium,” they said, voice thick with tears.

“I know.” I adjusted my position so I was sitting, rather than kneeling. “Did I tell you how I lost my mother?”

They met my eyes. “No.”

I took a deep breath. They needed to hear this. “I’m not an Illusory, Your Grace. Like Morgan, I’m a Seer. A Seer Obscura, actually. But I’ve pretended to be an Illusory since my powers manifested. I lost my mother because of my Sight and I vowed it would never happen again.”

“What do you mean?”

“I used my Sight to… improve my rank in the Imperium, pretending to be an Illusory, while I was still a teenager. Made enemies. One of those enemies tried to get revenge on me. I can’t See my own future. The actions of others that get close to me also get hazy to predict the closer they are. I couldn’t see the revenge coming for me. The assassin.

“They attacked my mother when she tried to defend me. She died of her injuries.”

“What about now? Don’t you still use your Sight to maintain your rank while pretending to be an Illusory?”

“Yes. But now the only people I care about can’t be hurt by the enemies I’ve made,” I said. “My mother died and I closed myself off. I became cruel on the outside to protect what little care I had left on the inside. My mother was the only immediate family I had left. I never knew my father and never had siblings. We all lose people to the Imperium, but I’m never going to ever again.”

The king’s consort stared at me again, eyes full of pain. “I’m sorry.”

“I am too.” I held out a hand. “Would you like to come to dinner, or would you rather take a meal in your room?”

They shook their head and got to their feet. I pushed myself to my own. “I’ll come to dinner. After the initial shock, I think it would be nice to speak to Asher again.”

“Whatever makes you more comfortable, my suzerain,” I said.

They shot me a look. “Don’t call me that. I hate the titles.”

“Very well… troublemaker.”

They smiled. “That’s more like it.”

—

Angel

“How long were you planning on me staying?” I asked Morgan and Everly as dinner was served.

“However long you wish,” Everly replied. “You’re welcome to stay here for months, if that’s the break you need from the Imperial palace.” She smiled, and I could swear her teeth were somehow whiter than her snowy hair.

“Why?”

Morgan gave me the wicked smirk that always meant he was up to something. “Oh, because the thought of Damien seething and unable to do anything to get you back is deliciously entertaining for the both of us,” he said flippantly.

“But also because you deserve the break,” Everly put in. “You should be allowed to be who you are. Under no pressure or scrutiny from anyone else—least of all that hothead who thinks he can control everything.” She had a similar smirk tug on her face as Morgan’s.

“I’m not stupid, Morgan. You’re both playing some sort of angle. What is it?”

Everly glanced to Asher and the unempowered human seated beside him. “Would you care to tell them?” she asked.

“Tell me what?”

The other unempowered human in the room leaned forward. “This world is hanging on by a thread. We may not survive to the end of the decade.”

I listened with shock painted on my face as the human and Asher explained what was happening to the Meridian.

“You staying here is helping us put pressure on Damien,” Everly finally admitted. “You are, of course, our welcome guest and free to leave whenever you’d like. But you being here makes Damien more inclined to listen to us when we start talking him into putting sanctions on where and how magic can be used. We have to slow down how much is being ripped from the magical plane or our entire plane of existence will dissolve as the magical plane merges into ours.”

I met the eyes of everyone around the table slowly. Taking in iris color and sincerity in each gaze.

I rested on Morgan’s last. “I’ll stay,” I said.

There was that smirk again. “Splendid.”

#Redacted ASMR #fic #Redacted Imperium #Redacted Morgan #Redacted Asher #Redacted Babe #Redacted Angel #Starlit Fic

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projectmyspace · 3 years ago

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Anthony goes to jail chapter 1: the courthouse tank

Posted : 2007-10-06 12:42:00 AM Created : 2007-10-06 12:45:00 AM Visible to : Public

I wrote this blog post in 2007 and at the time had every intention of finishing it. I may have or I may have not. I haven’t found the continuation in my blog search as of this posting. I will think about possibly continuing the story, although I don’t quite remember all the details….

Wait… actually I Ido remember quite a few moments worth sharing, and I vividly remember the people I had the pleasure of connecting with. It will be for those people, one in particular that is no longer with us, that I think I will write a continuation…. So, for now you can start right here…..

Happy Saturday readers!

Writing this blog is a bigger deal to me than just about any other written this year. I just want you all to know that as much humor and light heartedness you will find in it, understand that the end result is nothing for me to take lightly, and I know this…I just feel that the best way to tackle this is through humor. With that said… Here goes nothing:

The day began for me around 7 am, with a nice bus ride, a breakfast taco at El Rey in downtown, and an appearance in front of Judge Harmon in the courthouse on San Jacinto. Blah blah this happened, blah blah that happened, and long story short…I began my two day experience as a prisoner in the Harris County Jail.

In true Paris Hilton form, I was taken by the bailiff to the courthouse holding tank dressed like a diva…Black polo shirt, blacok shiny shoes, black slacks, and black leather organizer (which was later taken to inventory by the bailiff). I did what everyone told me to do, and I wore white under things, because county jail orange attire is kind of scratchy feeling for people who choose to go commando. Now, the bailiff sat me down on a bench in holding, which was right next to the window looking in to the holding tank for inmates already processed and waiting for their court appearance, and handcuffed me to the spot. I remember my nerves calming down a little when this cute and adorable looking young thug knocked on the glass, flashed me the cutest smile, and gestured to me with his shoulders as if to say, "WHAT'D YOU GET?". I held up my free hand with two fingers and mouthed the words "TWO DAYS". Then I was put into a small single person holding cell on the other side of the room, where I spent a good 90 minutes making sailboats and flowers out of the roll of toilet paper in the room. I know I fell asleep for a bit in here, and it was here that my focus on the time of day began to fade away.

…(Now, for those of you who have never been in this situation, I just want to say that as you read this, you will notice that the passage of time spans for a good 21 hours, but the official process an inmate goes through should technically only take 45 minutes…its hard to explain, but hopefully you'll catch on)…

Eventually, the bailiff comes and leads me through a steel door, where I am put in line with the other people who are all wearing orange except me. One of the guys asks him if we will get something to eat, and he said that it was 12:30, and lunch time was over. We get in an elevator, and I am put into the first of five holding tanks throughout my journey. These are cement rooms…with silver toilets and cement benches against the wall.

Now, in here, I spent the day observing all the people brought in from the courthouse throughout the day…all of us were in street clothes, and one was dressed in a white suit, who I later found out came here from Dallas to reset his court date and got arrested. There was a buck toothed self proclaimed crack fiend among us, who fixed race cars and apparently was locked up for water pollution charges…yes, that's what he said…He kept us entertained with stories of hookers, crack, oil in the soil and what we should expect when we get processed. Another guy was thrown in with us for getting caught fudging a drug test. He was adorable, and apparently he got busted because his catheter bag strapped to his pee pee had a leak and ran out on the floor in the test facility lobby. Another man was the sort of gramps of us all…he was 63, and he apparently had some old warrants…he was cool to listen to, as he had spent 15 years in his youth in Huntsville, and he had some crazy stories to share.

By the time we left this first tank, it was 5 pm in the evening. We were all escorted underground to the booking area of county jail, and here is where I am leaving it for now…Trust me though, there's much more craziness ahead to talk about.

As you will all find out with each entry in the blog, jail is not fun, and overall, the hardest part was honestly the waiting, and waiting, and waiting…by the final blog entry this weekend, you will also see that after all that I went through, I officially never made it into an official jail cell…its hard to explain, but you'll soon see how horrible the county jail system is set up. For now, though, I am tired…so tonight I'll talk about booking, the strip search, and life in tank two of processing…happy weekend, campers!!

Stay cool!

Look hot!

Read it like a rock star!!

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spookyspaghettisundae · 3 years ago

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Steele Resolve

Over 300 billion years into the future.

"Get out," Dallas told Darkwing.

He eyed her suspiciously, then she shoved him—captain of this ship—out of his very own cabin. Punching the control button by the door, the panel slid shut in between them in a flash, shutting out both him and the glaring light from the corridor.

She stifled a laugh as the hypersteel barrier muffled his yapping—something about being a living god, among other things, rattling on as he audibly turned and wandered away, babbling all the way to the Avian's cockpit.

Dallas waited till he was far enough away, then listened at the door even longer. Ensuring she heard no signs of the cat, the psychotic robot, that disgusting engineer, or—most importantly—the girl.

The ship's star-drive churned, causing all surfaces to subtly vibrate while it steadily propelled the combat vessel through space. It meshed with the rushing of blood in her ears. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light in the cabin, generated only by arrays of glowing buttons, some of them steady, others blinking.

Half a minute felt long enough.

She slid into the swiveling chair that was bolted down onto the floor in front of a quantum entanglement communicator terminal.

The assassin tilted her head back and forth and her neck cracked both times.

With the routine of a spy, she slung out her trusty old ballistic revolver, flicked a concealed switch with her thumb, and slapped the archaic weapon against an open palm.

Then—again. And a third time.

A scrambler chip clicked out of the gun's grip.

She slipped it out and quickly inserted it into one of the terminal's slots. Tapped the power buttons and fired up the device.

The soft blue glow of the screen in front of her illuminated the entire dark chamber she sat alone in. A sigh of impatience escaped her as she awaited the loading bars of the chip's overrides to reach completion on-screen and guarantee her the use of a secure channel.

Meanwhile, a window popped up, listing all recent encrypted text messages she had received from her contacts over the course of the past time units. One of the message subjects read, "DIE BITCH", sent by a certain "Dragon." Many others reflected the bridges she had recently burned and flattered her with other colorful threats and creative insults. Fueled by professional pride, and mixed with a newfound sense of liberty, she smiled to herself and dismissed the entire window with a languid swipe.

Clickety-clackety-clickety-clackety—

Her fingers hacked away at the keyboard with an uncanny speed and precision. Hit the key to transmit with excessive force, a sound of polymers and metal snapping together that cut through the quiet, stale air of the captain's cabin.

Her heart began to race as she awaited response. The ensuing seconds dragged on like molasses, even if they were only few.

A screen, cropped out within the screen, flicked open and displayed a sea of static. The silhouette of her handler turned visible, emerging from within the visual noise, but never fully surfacing in full definition. Masked behind a helmet that emitted an ominous cross-shaped red glow, cast in shadows by a hood.

An agent of the Holy Lahasan Empire.

"Steele? You now also owe me some explanations," said her handler on the other end of the connection, that shadowy silhouette speaking to her from far across the galaxy, distorted by the distance and dampened by the mask.

Dallas leaned back into the chair, unknowingly sinking into it like the many times that the captain had done before, sinking into a spell of deeper contemplation.

She clicked her tongue and finally replied, "Things did not go quite as planned. There were some—complications."

"According to my intel, Agent Reeve was disintegrated in a blast caused by archaic explosives."

Dallas' mien darkened, turning into a frown. "All due respect, but Rourke was an asshole, and—"

"With all due respect, your personal opinions need to leave, exiting through the nearest airlock right now. Not only are you living on borrowed time for your treason against the Empress, but you have a jarring track record of valuable agents dropping dead around you."

"That sounds like your problem, not mine."

The handler's voice dropped in volume, slowed down to a grim crawl. "You remember the cortex bomb I had implanted in your spine, right?"

She scowled at the screen, unable to find any eye contact, instead focusing on the red glow of the cross.

"Come on, I'm too valuable to you. You wanted the best tracker in the universe, which is why you pulled me out of cryo-prison."

"And I am constantly re-evaluating that decision."

Dallas held her tongue. Her chin jutted out and she fidgeted in her seat until her fingers encountered the calming cool of the stainless-steel surface of the old lighter, hidden in her pocket.

"Moving on. Report your progress on retrieving subject K70001-34966."

Dallas decided to play it cool.

She had to play her cards right.

"What a mouthful. We are talking about some girl. Don't you wanna abbreviate that name a bit?"

"No."

Hesitating to answer, she patted her jacket down until she retrieved a palm-sized silvered case from another pocket. She pressed a button on it, and it clicked—also analog and mechanical—triggering its finely-engraved lid to swing open.

Removing a thin cigar from the other three inside it, she lit it up, puffed a few times, and then blew a mouthful of smoke towards the QEC's monitor. The agent awaited her response, but she regained some confidence just in the thought that constantly tested his patience to the point of annoying him.

He had to put up with her.

Threats aside, she was, in fact, the best woman for the job.

"I've gotten pretty damn close. I think it's a matter of weeks, or even days now."

"Be more precise," growled the handler.

"Look, I found out how she's getting around, alright? By stowing away on other people's ships. I'm closely on her trail now. We almost had her too! Sadly, for Rourke, he got killed in that explosion by some idiot that had nothing to do with the job. There was a shootout at this place on—"

"Most of that was in the report. Share more pertinent details, or get to the point," he ordered.

"It's just a matter of time till I can bring her in."

Now he remained silent, processing her meager report. It must have been better than nothing.

"You had best not disappoint. You know we—"

"Yes, yes. Borrowed time."

He said nothing.

Dallas' nostrils flared, blowing smoke out of them.

She squinted and smirked, then asked, "I offed Youssell for you like you requested, right? That wasn't exactly on the books, was it?"

This time, the agent failed to respond.

"Right, and now you're having me track down and retrieve some kid that you lost in the first place."

Though the hood, and helmet, and eerie mask with its cross-shaped glow fully concealed his face, she could practically hear him gritting his teeth as he replied, "Because of your meddling, Steele."

"Well, you have to agree that it's a bit—uh, how to put this—a bit outside of my usual expertise to find people and get them back alive. So, you'll have to kindly stick a thumb up your ass while you wait and give me some time to improvise and succeed. I mean, you do want the kid alive, right?"

More silence followed. Dallas blew more smoke at the monitor, wishing she could be blowing it into his face.

"So, my word—you're getting her alive—or you'll find me as a corpse floating through open space. That is a promise. But if you want this to work out, you'll have to trust me." Saying that, her smirk widened as she feigned every ounce of confidence she could put on display.

With an abrupt flash, the screen within the screen winked out of existence, and the static noise from the scrambled transmission went dead. The handler had ended the communication without giving Dallas any further notice.

"Oh, my. Lovely. Fuck you too, Prince Charming."

She basked in the cold blue glow of the terminal's screen and puffed some more from her slender cigar. She tried to focus on thoughts about how to proceed—of where to go from here. But instead of finding clear ideas and reaching decisive plans of action—something she was usually adept at—pesky memories kept welling up instead.

Thoughts also regularly circled back to the cortex bomb implanted in her spine, but the older memories eventually overshadowed them.

* * *

"I will not ask you again," said the inquisitor.

His hand crept towards a button on the wall outside the cell.

The girl trapped inside, identified on the monitor next to the white energy barrier as "Delinquent K70001-34966", drooled and writhed on the cold metal floor of that cell. She did not respond to the inquisitor's threat.

He pushed the button once more, causing the girl on the floor of the cell to convulse under waves upon waves of searing pain that washed over her, illuminated by bright yellow, crackling energy. Each surge of electrical discharges caused her to spasm until she threw up. Then she collapsed again, one cheek resting in the tiny pool of vomit. Covered in sweat, she lay there, curled up in a pathetic and helpless heap.

This was the umpteenth time that he had used the interrogation interface to torment the young woman trapped within.

The shock trooper standing guard by the inquisitor looked on in disbelief. Her gaze bounced back and forth in between the inquisitor standing outside the cell, coldly and callously operating this abominable torture device; and the helpless young woman who groaned pitifully as she twitched on the floor of her cell, not once having answered his questions, and not once having begged for mercy.

"I missed the memo on the M.O. of how you handle these things. But it's far from palatable," the guard said to the inquisitor.

The masked inquisitor turned to confront the assassin posing as a guard.

"Memo? Palatable? What the devil are you blathering on about?"

VLA-VLAM!

The barrel of the energy rifle in the hands of the false guard glowed.

She had shot the inquisitor twice in quick succession.

One to the chest to send him reeling, the other to the head to take him out.

To her chagrin, his masked helmet with the glowing red cross emblazoned on its front had absorbed some of the shock from the energy weapon, and he stumbled backwards, reeling—but still quite alive.

Damned energy weapons, Dallas Steele thought to herself, encased in the hijacked power armor of the guard. And this was why you can only count on ballistics, she thought next, even though time had slowed to a crawl.

He was too slow on the uptake though, too slow to raise his weapon and retaliate in time. She jacked up her weapon's cadence with a flick of her wrist, unloading a full salvo into his center mass.

VA-VA-VA-VA-VLAM!

The inquisitor collapsed into a lifeless body in the narrow corridor outside the holding cell, the metal of his armor clanked against the hard floor.

She approached him, poked him with the muzzle of her rifle, and confirmed on her helmet's HUD that his vital signs were bottoming out.

Next, she punched the cell barrier controls. The white force field between her and the girl flickered, then it dissipated entirely.

Hunching down over the young woman inside the cell and holding out an armored hand in offering to help her get back up on her feet, she simply commanded, "Get up."

K70001-34966 took her hand, trembling, feeble, and weakened. The false agent helped the young woman limp along through the narrow corridors, using the powered armor's strength enhancements to effortlessly brace the girl's entire weight as she stumbled alongside her.

A voice crackled, coming in over the false guard's armor-integrated headset, "Agent Heinlein, report in. We registered a weapons discharge in the holding area, and Inquisitor Valstrum is not responding. His vital signs are tanking. What the hell is going on back there?"

"Uh, it was some sort of, uhm, equipment malfunction," Not-Agent-Heinlein lied through her helm's intercom. "Investigating it right now."

"We registered seven discharges and you are moving from your post. What kind of—"

"Factory code zero-zero-zero," she quickly talked over the operator, cutting the communication off with a hard reset of her intercom, and shutting him out.

She dragged the girl along as she picked up the pace.

K70001-34966 was pretty out of it. Drooling, bare heels sliding with squeaks over sleek metal floors.

The dozen or more shocks must have rendered her groggy. No matter—she had nothing to do with the mission anyway. Dallas just had to take a moment to silence that pesky consciousness that was knocking on the mental door, begging to be let in from the prison inside the back of her head.

Once they had reached an emergency escape pod, Dallas shoved the girl inside, causing her to tumble forward and fall back down onto the floor, not unlike she had been in the holding cell. Leaving her no time to recover, the false guard shuttered the docking mechanism and ejected the pod. For a brief few seconds, she saw the girl looking back at her helmet-clad face, going wide-eyed with surprise. A jet of steam shot in between them, obscuring that glimpse.

The next moment, the angular pod jettisoned off at breakneck speed as its boosters activated and it shot off into space, hurtling towards a thriving terrestrial planet pockmarked with a brightly lit complex of clustered urban zones. And all around it, the Sea of Stars.

The intercom in the hallway crackled, whined, and then the operator shouted at her over it, "There will be a court martial—"

VA-VA-VA-VLAM!

Four shots had ripped through the corridor and caused the exposed intercom console to explode into a shower of sparks and fizzing.

The false guard ripped her helmet off in annoyance. Her face was covered in a sheen of sweat.

This job was a bust. She would have to cover her tracks. She would have to kill every single person left on this ship.

As two scout troopers rounded the corner, Dalla popped out of cover to greet them with bursts of hyper-charged plasma shots, cleanly removing the head of one of them in the first burst, and ripping the other apart, cleaving his upper body from the rest of him.

One of them had reflexively shot back with a salvo of his own. The powered armor could only absorb so much impact and energy.

Her leg and ribs throbbed, she coughed and grinned and mostly gritted her teeth to ignore the waves of pain, surging from those uncomfortably hot spots, wondering for a moment if it was worse than what the girl had gone through.

Dallas limped away through the claustrophobic corridors. Her breathing had turned raspy. A maniacal laugh emerged from her throat, ending in a hacking cough.

She had never fucked up a job this badly. She was a killer, sure—but she had some rules. Some principles.

No kids.

That was her only condition.

Why did they have to be torturing a kid aboard of this damned transporter? She wanted to kill the guy who had fixed her up with this "milk run".

Her vision blurred. Next, she coughed, blood splattered on the panel by the door. She punched the controls, it slid shut in a flash. She limped away, towards the droning and deafening noises emitted by the engine core.

Tried to make sense of the engineering console and all its blinking lights and inane strings of letters and numbers that said rather little to a woman of her trade.

The outlines of the blast door glowed brightly as someone tried to force the doorway open, using a fusion cutter, from the other side. Trying desperately to get inside to stop their murderous stowaway from sabotaging their star-drive.

Dallas gave up in her failed effort at trying to override the engine's security protocols.

She aimed the plasma rifle at a set of power couplings, closed her eyes and turned her head away. Pulled the trigger.

VA-VA-VA-VA-VA-VA-VA-VA-VA-VLAM!

Sparks and metal pieces flew all over the place, causing her to flinch.

The weapon not only glowed, but steam also rose from its barrel now.

"Critical system failure," a monotonous computer voice announced over the ship's intercom speakers. It continued to repeat the warning, over and over again. The bright white lights went out, replaced by red lights rhythmically rotating and casting everything in an eerie state of emergency.

A revolving alarm sound began to bleat, piercing Dallas' already throbbing skull. The edges of her eyesight blurred, closing in quickly.

They got inside, but the next moments turned into a haze.

A rush of unfiltered instinct—killer instinct. A perfect storm of honed reflexes, augmentations, and pure skill. A ballet of carnage.

Three more bodies hit the floor, clanking, and clattering, and groaning. One of them even yelled for his mother before she snuffed him out with a sudden stomp from her armored boot.

She remembered leaving bloody handprints whenever she pushed herself off the walls of the corridor, methodically making her way back to the escape pods, locking each and every blast door behind her as she progressed, shutting out the sounds of pursuers, of troopers in powered armor chasing her through the transporter's winding hallways.

Just before she lost consciousness, she remembered seeing the ship shrink. Smaller and smaller, as the escape pod she had jettisoned herself with flew farther and farther away from the imperial transporter.

Only moments after the vessel transformed into bright explosions and space debris within the blink of an eye, her eyelids weighed a million tons and she blacked out.

The next thing she remembered, she was on some forsaken planet's surface with a breathable atmosphere, staring down the barrels of high-powered pulse rifles of MilSec soldiers, surrounded by Imperial attachés.

They already had her wrists wreathed in the purple glow of energy shackles, lifting her up and dragging her off, taking her into custody.

"Hello, boys," she said, groaning, then cackling until it was clipped off by her pained coughing.

Unbeknownst to her then, her future handler stood there, amid the attachés. The ominous red cross glowed from the front of his masked helmet as he watched the grunts do the heavy lifting, peeling her out of the damaged suit of armor and confirming that the emergency gel would prevent her from dying.

At this point in time, she did not know him yet, but he recognized her. Had seen her mugshot as a wanted criminal more than once.

Looking back, she knew. In that moment, he already formulated plans for her.

But first, she had to go into cryo. After that, installing the bomb in her spine would follow.

—Submitted by Wratts

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roguedallas · 3 years ago

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@roguegl1tch: ❝ show yourself. ❞

❝ target is in sight, will begin final pursuit on foot in about thirty minutes — or as soon as he realizes he’s fucked. ❞ lips pull back with a sneer, dark eyes scanning smoke-stained room for the hundredth time as he checks over and over again every possible escape route for paranoid prey. he knows you’re coming, but he doesn’t know that you’re already here. the motel is small, but not the smallest, and kinda shitty, but not the shittiest — decent pickings for someone so obviously on the run from a man no one wants to be running from. windows? locked. curtains? drawn. alleyway gate? conveniently blocked off by god knows whose car. only two routes left for when target inevitably attempts to flee — the interstate running east and west, or flat fields that expand for miles to the south. either way, he’s fucked.

twenty minutes until hacker’s assumed return to current abode. few pieces of furniture are rearranged to hunter’s advantage — nightstand and its furnishings have been moved to the bathroom, dresser and crt atop it are shoved up against door to the bathroom, lamp and chair provided for a measly reading nook are separated to opposite corners. no obstacles between you and your target now, nothing for him to knock over or hide behind.

ten minutes until the thorn in roco’s side finally gets pulled. the lights are off, and the scene is set. squeak of old leather breaks the deafening silence for just a moment as he takes a seat facing the doorway before carefully adjusting the winchester resting in his lap to face point of entry. sure, it’s not loaded, but your new friend doesn’t need to know that. the piece on your hip isn’t loaded either, but no one needs to know that. maybe after you ‘prove your loyalty to the company’ they’ll quit holding your fucking hand like some inept toddler. digits curl tightly ‘round cold steel, the movement almost imperceptible in a darkness that swallows the room whole save a sliver of light from a streetlamp peaking through the curtains, dividing the room into two halves. it’s nearly showtime.

there’s a noise at the door. form remains still as a soft ‘fuck’ is heard from just outside, shaky hands fumbling as they try to unlock the door. he’s tired, at his wit’s end, and he can barely manage to turn a key in a lock. tattooed fingers quietly flex and unflex, knuckles popping in the pitch black as he waits to finally make contact. there’s a voice saying to ‘stay calm’ that filters in from his earpiece but he doesn’t need to be told that, and he doesn’t need to validate that order with a response. they’re in his domain now, and even if they just pretend to understand what he is, then they’ll leave him alone until it’s time for extraction.

the doorknob turns, hinges whining in resistance as paranoid hacker quickly slips into the room — armed with an aluminum bat. there’s an urge to smile at this vain attempt to protect himself from the inevitable. silhouette freezes barely three feet from the still open entrance, head on a swivel as a mask is hastily pulled on. he knows something’s off, but that’s fine, it’ll just make this whole thing easier for you. a shrill, distorted sound of panic reverberates through empty space, and even in the dark dallas can see gl1tch’s knees start to shake. tracker lets out a soft sigh from his corner, and the foreign noise sends prey spinning around to face him, weapon outstretched in dallas’ direction.

❝ show yourself. ❞

❝ well that’s a little rude, hm? did you forget your manners? no pleasantries for little ol’ me? ❞ he’s mocking him, but it’s so easy to fall into old habits — to just start talking as a distraction. there’s no response from the other, but that’s fine, it’ll just make this whole thing easier for you. movements are slow — calculated, as he sets the rifle down next to him, ❝ now hold yer’ horses, don’t start swingin’ just yet, ❞ hands are raised palm out, ❝ i’m unarmed, kiddo, ❞ somehow, he’s almost telling the truth. shadowy figure rises smoothly, taking small steps forward until meager streetlight illuminates him in a band across his face.

❝ speechless? yeah, i’d be too if i were you, ❞ teeth bare in a predatory grin, heartrate jumping as hacker takes a single step back, ❝ ohhhhh be careful now, if you hit me with that bat you’ll make me real fuckin’ mad, and you don’t want that, so i’ve got another idea, ❞ gaze strays to open doorway before moving back, tongue poking out to wet his lips as he pauses to take a breath before offering a smile and one last word, ❝ run. ❞

#roguegl1tch #✪ → ⌈𝐄𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐀 𝐒𝐌𝐎𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐆𝐔𝐍⌋ ic / ask.#✪ → ⌈𝐈 𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐈𝐓 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐓𝐎𝐔𝐂𝐇 𝐎𝐅 𝐀𝐒𝐘𝐋𝐔𝐌⌋ v / roco.#early roco dallas is a hot fucking mess but he's still damn good at his job lol #god spencer if you see me writing 800+ words for you dw about it KDFJGHDFG #sometimes.... i Do have the braincell....

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mychemicalxmen · 4 years ago

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Unfinished Business

hey so I find crt’s recent interactions with the tua fandom to be sus as hell and it got me thinking about the most plausible way I could see him comin back in s3 and the conclusion I came to is a way-shorter and way-simpler version of whatever the hell this is so uhhhh here

2.9k, klave/klave-adjacent

... ... ...

“Is this really a good idea?”

Allison’s words are gentle as she stands in the doorway of Klaus’s room. Well, not his room, per se, but the grey-walled, undecorated space that would’ve been his bedroom in a timeline gone by. The Sparrow Academy doesn’t seem to be a huge fan of homey-ness. They’d ever-so-kindly granted the Umbrellas two nights’ stay in these cold cells while they gathered their bearings and prepared to face the new world they’d fantastically screwed up.

Klaus smiles at her question. “That’s hardly stopped me before, right?”

Allison rolls her eyes and drops her hands onto her hips. “I’m worried about you, okay?”

“Don’t be,” Klaus answers with a swatting gesture. “It’s been easy-peasy since I’ve dropped the pills. Parlor tricks. Did this song and dance tons of times for Madame.”

“Also, we need to unpack your relationship to ‘Madame’ at your earliest convenience.”

Klaus raises an eyebrow mischievously. “What happens in Dallas...!”

Allison sighs. “Okay, well, if things start to get, y’know, mega-spooky panic-time, you’ll just yell, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

“Hey.” Allison’s voice is suddenly calmer. Klaus’s gaze snaps up to meet hers. “You’re sure about this?”

Klaus lets himself breathe for a moment. Tension fights to seize his limbs. He’s really about to do it.

His first six months of sobriety were the absolute nightmare that he knew they would be. They were all the sleepless nights, trembling hands, emotional eruptions, and torturous visions that he’d predicted.

But at some point, his powers became less like a stubborn faucet, run by an on/off switch with not much in between. With time (and Ben’s encouragement), he’d come to better understand his link to the other side. He’d learned how to cut and re-engage the connection at will, how to find faces in the crowd, how to call one forth, and how to sleep peacefully.

Most nights.

“I’m sure,” he says solidly.

He checks himself over, tugging his brightly striped shirt into place, tucking in his dog tag, and running a hand through the hair he’d half-considered chopping off the second he made it home. When he looks back up at Allison, he‘s feeling a bit less brave. “Do I look alright?”

Allison nods with a little grin. “You look great.” God, he wishes they’d reconnected far before this Dallas fiasco. She just cares so much. “Good luck,” she says.

“Love you, sis.” He blows her a lazy kiss as she leaves and closes the door behind her.

He paces around the room, steeling himself for the process. Like he said, it’s no big deal. Easy peasy. Even with that hiccup with alcohol, he’s clean enough to pull it off. He shakes out the last of his nerves with a couple tiny hops before settling in the middle of the room.

He stands firmly, feet apart, and drops his head. He squeezes his fists and lets the energy start to crackle between his fingers.

With all the insanity of this timeline, he needs to know what happened in 1968. He needs to see Dave.

It’s tougher to contact someone not already in the room. He focuses everything he has, and the energy pulses faster and stronger. Come on, come on…

“Klaus?”

He looks up with a start.

There he is, standing four feet in front of him. Those torn-up fatigues. Those searching blue eyes. That curly mess of blonde hair he hasn’t seen for three years.

Dave.

Klaus can’t keep the dumb smile off of his face.

“Hey there, soldier,” he practically whispers.

“Hey yourself,” Dave says - happy, though clearly disoriented. “Guess you weren’t making up all that ‘future’ junk after all.”

Klaus’s affirmative laugh is airy. But when his eyes trail down to the cavity in Dave’s chest, his heart aches in regret.

His jaw aches too. What a week it’s been.

“I have... so much to ask you,” Dave goes on. “It’s been a long time.”

Klaus swallows. Here goes. The million dollar question.

“Uh… How long of a time, exactly?”

He unconsciously holds his breath.

Dave glances to the side. “...Right around when JFK was shot. Must’ve been ‘63?”

Klaus exhales and sits on the bed, face blank.

Dave is wincing at his own memories. “God, I was such a dumb kid, I’m so sorry that you—”

Klaus isn’t hearing him. He’s too caught up on that number. 63.

If the Umbrella Academy doesn’t exist, Klaus Hargreeves doesn’t grow up in the same home as Five Hargreeves. He doesn’t get kidnapped by assassins. He doesn’t get his hands on a briefcase. He doesn’t go to Vietnam.

If the Umbrella Academy doesn’t exist, neither does the Dave that fell in love with him.

His Dave is gone. Really gone.

This Dave was the timid hardware store employee he’d tried to get through to, striving to save his life and instead locking in his fate a few days early. This Dave is still the same person as the other one was. Same upbringing, same interests, same compassion, same smile, same violent death. But...

“—a strange time for anyone. You know how it is.”

Klaus tunes back in to Dave apologizing for his cringey adolescence. “No, no, yeah, I get it, don’t worry about it.”

In the pause that follows, Klaus feels his throat tighten and hot tears threaten to drop down his face.

Within the same pause, Klaus realizes the obvious. Dave is a ghost.

Kiddos and grandmas, or anyone who’s achieved either nothing or everything that their life had to offer them, they get the window to move on right away. One-way ticket to the Great Beyond, or the next life, or whatever the hell it is. Ultimate FastPass, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. Klaus has learned that spirits don’t tend to stick around on earth unless they have unfinished business. Sometimes they don’t even know what they need to do to start fresh, and that’s always the worst. Those souls become the bitterest, the loudest, the most tortured. Those were the ones who gave him hell in the mausoleum, with question after question that he couldn’t even begin to answer.

Dave seems to have managed okay. Probably spends a lot of time watching over his friends, his sisters, his neighbor’s cat. Klaus wonders what he could possibly have left to do.

“Major case of unfinished business you got there, huh?” Klaus asks. “Been waiting around, what, fifty years?”

Dave squints. “Well, it’s hard to feel it. Time works a little funny over here.”

“Right, of course it does,” Klaus recalls stupidly. He sniffles and swipes a hand under his eye as nonchalantly as he can. “Ah. Any idea what the little brat is waiting for you to do?”

Dave gives a tentative chuckle. “Brat?”

“Oh, Big G, the almighty, you know,” Klaus clarifies. “The bitch on the bike. I met Her once or twice. We’re not too chummy.”

Dave shows startlement, then shakes his head, acknowledging that this information should hardly faze him at this point. “Um. Yeah. Don’t know what She wants yet. Though She’s actually a cowgirl for me.”

“Of course She is.”

And that’s the idiotic comment that causes Klaus’s voice to crack.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dave asks. He hazards a few steps closer.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

“No... Nothing,” Klaus stammers. He briefly covers his face and lets out a groan. “Ughhh, it’s going to sound crazy.”

“Really think you can beat ‘Time-Traveling Cult Leader with Prophetic Dog Tags and Tidings of Death’?”

“It wasn’t a cult,” Klaus mumbles in futility. He drops his hands and gives it his best shot. “The first time I met you - first time I met Dave - was in a totally different timeline, in 1968. That’s how I knew all that stuff about you. And you died the same way, except I was there the first time. The other time. The same time?”

“You and ...’Other Dave’.... fought together,” Dave offers.

“Yes!” Klaus confirms, relieved that he’s making sense. “Yeah, exactly. Which is why I tried to stop him - you - from going.” He indicates Dave’s abdomen. “And, obviously, I failed. But because of some stuff my family screwed up along the way, you never fought with me, so I remember a lot more than you do, and it’s all just...” He gestures helplessly. “A real kick in the dick.”

Dave tilts his head in a mix of sympathy and confusion. “That... does sound pretty crap.”

Klaus doesn’t expect it when Dave sits next to him on his bed.

“You want to tell me what I missed?”

“Oh, no, no, no, Dave, you don’t want that. That’s a long story.”

Dave shrugs. “I’ve got some time to kill.”

Klaus manages a smile. Talking will keep him from crying.

He tries his best to tell everything chronologically, but almost every step of the beginning requires some Hargreeves Family Lore that he reluctantly recaps as efficiently as possible. Dave is an exceptional listener. Always has been. He lets Klaus ramble on and on and asks little questions now and again to get a clearer picture. Klaus appreciates Dave’s effort to form a coherent narrative out of the scattered snapshots that time has left him with.

Klaus stumbles with pronouns. He makes a point to refer to His Dave with “him” as opposed to “you”, but he can’t help but slip a few times in the middle. Dave seems to understand.

Klaus tells him about the day they met. He waters down the Time Police part of the tale and focuses on what came after. Dropping into the tent at dawn. The casual conversation on the bus. The strange instinct that he got to stick around for a few days.

He tells him about soldiering. He tells Dave how focused and respected he looked on the battlefield. But he also tells him how kind he was to new recruits.

He tells him about their first R&R together in Saigon. He tells him about the vibrant bar and the strangest music and the secluded back hallway.

He tells him about the nights in the jungle they’d stayed up and dreamed up plans for when they’d go home together. He tells him about the day those plans fell apart. When Klaus runs out of story to tell, he just stops. Dave looks at him thoughtfully. Klaus can only imagine what must be running through his head. He knows it’s not judgement, or embarrassment, or anger, or loathing. Dave is too sweet for any of that.

Dave is too good for the rotten fortune that found him, time and time again.

“I’m sorry,” Klaus says.

“For what?”

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t save him,” Klaus answers. He fumbles again. “You. Him? Young Dave?”

“I’m getting a headache keeping track of it myself,” Dave admits.

“You,” Klaus settles on. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

Dave looks into him for a breath. Then, he reaches out and touches his arm. Klaus wants to dissolve into dust.

“I think I understand why I loved you,” Dave says.

A bittersweet laugh tumbles ungracefully from Klaus’s mouth. He tries not to draw attention to the new round of tears that spills over with it. “You do?”

“Yeah. I do.” Dave gives him the gentlest smile. “You shouldn’t be sorry. You tried so hard. I could’ve had more courage, fought back, ran away, something, but I just... wasn’t ready.” He glances down. “And I wasn’t going to be.”

Klaus’s hand closes over Dave’s on his arm.

“But I always remembered you,” Dave adds. “I always thought you were brave.”

“Goddamn, I was convinced I’d pushed your Big Awakening back a good two months, at least.”

“Far from,” Dave assures. His eyes crinkle with the flash of a memory. “I’m... not sure if I should tell you this.”

Klaus cocked his head. “Well, shit, Davey, now you have to.”

“I’m assuming Other Me told you something about Bill, right? Met in junior year, moved to Austin after school, always a bit of suspicion there...”

“Yeah?”

Dave’s face reddens slightly. “I mean, it wasn’t anything serious, but there were a few weeks when I was home, before this last tour...”

Klaus’s eyes widen. This was not an event on his timeline. He mocks outrage and pushes Dave’s hand away. “David Joseph Katz—!”

“The point is,” Dave poorly stifles a laugh, “I had hope. That it was gonna be alright, and that after this round, I’d be back in America for good, and I’d find my place.”

Hope.

Klaus supposes hope is nice. It’s just not terribly helpful with the way things panned out. In the world where Dave still didn’t make it home. In the world where he’s stuck here, waiting for a way to move on. In the world where he’s still around to see how little good that hope did him. And frustration starts to churn Klaus’s stomach, even though he knows...

“...This really wasn’t your fault,” Dave says, reading him just as perfectly as he could in ‘68.

Klaus hadn’t noticed how long he’d fallen silent for. “I know,” he mumbles, and logically, he does. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. There had to be a timeline out there where everything ended up alright, where him and Dave lived happily together just like they’d talked about, but he is never going to find it now.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “And I still love him. Christ, he made one of the deadliest shitshows in American history the only place I wanted to be. He made me the happiest that I’ve been in a long, long time. He made me feel so treasured. So... strong.”

When the tears return a third time, he stops trying to hide them. He carelessly wipes the heel of his palm across his cheek.

“I wanted to tell him all that,” he finishes. “He gave me something so special that I don’t think I’ll get again.”

A sob escapes Klaus. Dave patiently waits for him to work it out.

“I know I’m not him,” Dave starts, “But for what it’s worth, I think he’d know you still love him. I think it’d destroy him to be apart from you. But I don’t think he’d want you to destroy yourself.”

Klaus knows the spiel that’s coming, and so badly does he want to dismiss it all as disgusting cliche. But he also knows Dave’s sappy tendencies well enough to know that, in this case, it’s probably accurate. Hell, he’s hearing it from the man himself.

“If you couldn’t get back to him, I think he’d just want to know you were happy,” Dave says. “You know? That you kept moving and kept taking care of yourself. And kept looking for the kind of love you deserve.”

Dave shifts to face him more directly. His eyes are bright with intention. “You have so much life left in you. You deserve a new chapter.”

Klaus feels beaten and weary all over. His mind is finally slowing down to the present.

When Dave subtly opens up his arms, he eagerly takes the offer to wrap him in an embrace.

This is the last he’ll see of him. He can feel it. He tucks his chin over Dave’s shoulder and clings onto the fabric of his vest, eyes shut, trying to commit every sensation to memory.

Dave returns, lightly weaving his hand into Klaus’s hair. Klaus recalls with a weak grin that he knew Dave would be fond of the new length.

It’s safe and sacred and almost everything that he’d planned for on that day he’d desperately wandered the mansion halls, calling out for any help he could get, twisting a bundle of rope in his quaking hands.

He hears a whisper of a wind chime.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” Dave mutters.

The blue glow pierces through Klaus’s eyelids. He pulls back to look at Dave.

He’s crumbling apart, piece by piece, and drifting away. Bright light speckles the entire room.

“Klaus?” Dave asks. His voice is soft but threaded with slight fear. “Is this...?”

“Yeah, it is,” he answers. He tightens his grip on Dave’s arms. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For letting me say goodbye.”

A beat passes. Then, understanding washes over Dave’s face. He pulls Klaus close once again, stroking his hair.

He presses a kiss onto Klaus’s forehead.

Klaus doesn’t watch him go. He only opens his eyes when his arms are at last empty.

Specks of glittering blue light still float through the air. Nothing else remains but the wrinkle on the bedspread where he was sitting. Klaus’s face still feels warm where his lips were placed just moments ago.

Klaus buries his head in his hands. “Allison,” He calls out. The sound is pathetic. He clears his throat and tries again. “Allie?”

He hears her heeled boots click down the hall. He can’t bring himself to look up when she opens the door. “You okay?”

“It’s over,” he summarizes.

“What do you need?”

A joint. A fist full of pills. Five shots of tequila. A good sock in the head so he can go back to that pre-Technicolor hellscape and tell that bitch on the bike what he really thinks of Her.

“Can you just sit with me for a minute, please?”

Allison closes the door and obliges.

They talk, slowly and softly, about absolutely nothing at all, while Allison smooths her hand against Klaus’s back. They stare at the cold tile floors together for a long time. Klaus asks if it would kill the Sparrows to hire an interior decorator.

#no beta we die like carl #tua #klave #the umbrella academy

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superman86to99 · 5 years ago

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Adventures of Superman #505 (October 1993)

REIGN OF THE SUPERMAN! The Reign is over, and Superman does what we’d all do after being dead for several weeks and coming back to life: no, not visiting your parents, making out with Lois Lane.

Or more than making out, since the next page starts with a caption that says “Later...” and lets us know that they both had to take a shower. (NOTE: Check Don Sparrow’s section below for artist Tom Grummett’s definitive take on what happened in that scene.)

Their post-resurrection bliss comes to a stop when they remember a little detail: Clark Kent is still presumed dead. How are they gonna explain his return without making the extremely smart residents of Metropolis suspect that Superman and the guy who looks like Superman but with glasses are actually the same person? Superman’s mind immediately goes into “wacky bullshit excuse” mode and he starts spitballing ideas, like claiming Clark lost his memory, or was carried by underwater currents, or was abducted by aliens. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that last one would work, since there have been THREE major alien invasions in the past few years, but Lois thinks no one would be dumb enough to fall for that sort of thing. Really, Lois? No one?

At this point, Superman picks up some supervillain activity with his super hearing, so he gets dressed and goes there (though it would have been pretty intimidating for the criminals if she’d shown up in that shower rug). A bank uptown has been taken over by Loophole, a S.T.A.R. Labs accountant who stole a gizmo that allows him to phase through walls. When Superman shows up to arrest him and his henchmen (are they all villainous accountants?), Loophole literally puts his first through Superman’s chest, instantly killing him. RIP Superman, again.

Nah, Supes just swats Loophole away and breaks the gizmo, causing him to get his crotch area stuck inside a vault door. Now he has to change his supervillain name to “DickVault”.

(I freaking love Maggie Sawyer, btw.)

After that, Superman goes to one of the areas trashed by his fight with Doomsday and helps clean up the junk that’s still laying around there. It’s then that he finally reunites with his best friend and most valued ally: Bibbo Bibbowski. (Jimmy Olsen’s there, too, unfortunately.)

Bibbo also introduces Superman to the dog he named in honor of his home planet, Krypto -- and it’s Krypto who provides the most significant moment in this issue. The little mutt starts barking at some debris from a destroyed building, leading Superman to examine it with his X-Ray vision and find some kids underneath.

Turns out the kids had been trapped there since the Doomsday fight, leading some random passerby (fine, Jimmy) to wonder if Clark could be stuck in a similar situation. Superman and Lois look at each other... giving Superman an idea and providing the premise for next week’s issue.

Character-Watch:

First appearance of Loophole (real name Deke Dickinson, C.P.A.), who would become a running joke in Karl Kesel’s Superman and Superboy comics. While his phasing powers are tech based, he also has the metahuman ability to somehow convince attractive women to be his girlfriends/henchwomen despite being a balding little dweeb. In this issue he’s dating a blonde named Sheila (who wears a mask, so maybe she’s actually hideous), but I’m pretty sure he had other girlfriends in future issues.

Plotline-Watch:

As I said... holy shit, five years ago: no one draws Supes coming back to Lois after an extended absence like Tom Grummett. This scene is almost a remake of the one from that issue when Superman comes back from his time traveling jaunt. There’s also a callback to Man of Steel #25, when Lois hears a tap on her window and thinks it’s Superman, but it’s just some dumb bird. This time she gets it the other way around:

Don Sparrow says: “There’s a cute visual callback to the last time Superman returned after a long absence on page 18, when Superman is reunited with Jimmy. It’s a near identical pose to Action #643, where Superman returned from exile in space (and in that moment, infected Jimmy with Eradicator-based space sickness, womp womp).” I think he’s instinctively throwing Jimmy up in the air, hoping the cold of space will kill him. Unfortunately, both murder attempts were unsuccessful.

As seen above, Maggie Sawyer wasn’t too convinced that “Fabio” here was Superman at first. That changes when he calls her “Captain” even though she was recently promoted to Inspector, and she’s like “only a dead man wouldn’t know all the precise ranks for the local authorities!”

The surviving non-Supermen are seen arriving at S.T.A.R. Labs for medical care after the Engine City showdown. Don again: “There are some mild continuity issues stemming from Superman #82, which perhaps wasn’t completely finished being drawn while Tom Grummett worked on this one, as Steel’s costume is almost entirely intact, when we last saw it a week ago, it was in tatters. Ditto the Eradicator, who was a wizened husk, and now is apparently a scorched Ivan Drago.” Let’s assume Supergirl worked her clothes-shifting magic on Steel’s armor and the Eradicator’s, uh, hair.

There’s a short scene where Superboy is visited by his reporter pal Tana Moon, who tells him she quit WGBS and is leaving Metropolis. Awww. Goodbye, Tana. Or should I say... aloha?

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor Jr. has a scene with Dr. Happersen where he says he intends to control or destroy anyone who wears the “S” symbol. Basically, if he can’t date them, they should be dead. He also instructs Happersen to help Cadmus’ Director Westfield get in contact with disgraced genetician Dabney Donovan. Get ready for a whole lot of clone-related shenanigans in the near future.

And now, more Don Sparrow-related shenanigans after the jump!

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

This issue is another favourite of mine, but I suppose all these issues around the Death and Return are faves when I really think about it. My copy of this issue had the holographic fireworks cover, and it’s a good one. I like that Superman and the Daily Planet are in natural colour, rather than holograms. The cover credit goes Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett and Doug Hazlewood, so I’m not sure what the breakdown was (or if that’s just a handwritten cover credit, just in case?

The story opens with one of my favourite sequences ever, with Lois waking up on her couch, having fallen asleep following the events in Coast City. I love the detail as she opens the curtain, we see her engagement ring, indicating she knows her real fiancée has returned. This sequence is followed up by two pages of splashes of the passionate reunion of the best couple in comics. All beautifully rendered as they float, locked in a passionate, sunrise kiss. Just lovely (so lovely that I am willing to overlook a small colouring error, as Lois has black hair instead of reddish brown for one panel). [Max: I can confirm that they fixed that in the collections.]

What follows is a very cute scene, and one of some debate among Superman fans. There’s no overt evidence of what happened, all we get is a cryptic caption reading “later…”. Again, I give credit for the subtlety of the writers, as they depict this scene in a way that can be read either way: maybe Clark and Lois made love, and the “later” we are seeing is afterglow, or maybe Lois had a shower since she just woke up after sleeping in her clothes. Then, after calling his parents while Lois showered, Clark had a shower himself. I feel like today’s writers wouldn’t feel the need to be so subtle, and might lose the sweetness of this scene.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about my friendship with artist Tom Grummett, and how as a boy, I would wear him out with all my dumb fanboy questions. Once I got older, and our relationship became a little more collegial (just a little closer to collegial, since I in no way consider myself anywhere near his level of skill or success) I would really try not to geek out too much when we would visit. But the one question I had to ask was about this scene, and what their intention, or interpretation of it was, as I was always curious. Once I had explained to him which issue it was (the guy has drawn hundreds, so they might not all spring to mind immediately!) he admitted that his assumption was indeed that they had sex. So there you have it! [Max: Hot damn! Another Superman ‘86 to ‘99 exclusive, folks!]

However you wish to read this scene, the choreography, and facial expressions as they horse around is really sweet and fun, and such a nice, light tone compared to the do-or-die pace the books had been for the last two years or so. Their easy joking, and back and forth banter really do a great job of showing them as a real couple.

It’s a very nice pose on Supergirl as she lifts off, simultaneously spurning Superboy’s romantic complaints.

I quite like the design on Loophole, and his gang. Loophole himself kinda harkens back to the silver age villains of the Flash as Loophole has a unique hairline, is an older man, with a pretty average build, which was rare for villains in the 90s. His gimmick is pretty cool, too, though we immediately see its vulnerability.

The tearful reunion of the now-sober Bibbo and Superman is also a great moment—if anyone rose to the challenge of living up to Superman’s example in his absence, it was Bibbo. I discuss the scene in more detail in the observations later, but the image of Superman whipping away the debris on page 20 is a great visual, with the dust clouds creating great motion and urgency.

On the whole, a great first issue for the return to the never-ending battle, even if it brings us closer to Grummett’s last issue on this title (for a while).

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

Could Superman referring to the Death and Return storyline as a dream, while stepping out of the shower be a reference to Dallas, and their famous about-face after an unpopular season, where Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower, alive and well, dismissing a yearlong storyline as a dream?

A coy semi-reference to perhaps my favourite line in the first Reeve Superman film on page 8, where Supergirl says “Easy steel, we’ve got you, then later adding, “ok, you got me”.

A little more issue-to-issue dissonance with Superboy reversing himself from the end of Superman #82, where he said clearly that Kal-El was Superman, with Superboy pointing out that legally, he’s Superman and not Kal. [Max: I think he’s talking strictly in the legal sense, since he helps Superman deal with the legal problem on the next issue and all.]

For all the times that Superman has used his heat vision on guns (as he does on page 11), we’ve never seen rounds get burned off, firing on their own because of the heat. There might be an idea there.

An odd sorta-cameo by Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon, who Superman apparently defeats in the waterfront district. An eagle-eyed reader asked Larsen about it in issue #6 of Dragon’s own book, and he nixed any proper crossover rumours, saying it was just a shout-out from Larsen’s buddy Karl Kesel. Eventually they’d meet in Superman/Savage Dragon: Chicago, a so-so crossover in 2002.

A slightly bawdy joke from one of the Loophole gang, on page 14, as the moll of Deke Dickson calls Loophole a “weiner”.

GODWATCH: A stirring moment when Superman detects the faintest of life-signs, thanks to would-be super-pup, Krypto, and responds “God willing” when someone asks if anyone is alive in that wreckage. The love and concern in Superman’s eyes when he says he’d “rather die” himself than let little ones perish is a tear-jerker moment for sure. Bonus points for the cuteness of Superman heaping praise on Krypto, with the line “if that dog could fly, I’d put a cape on him…”

Question: Does Jimmy know? He comes up with the solution to the Clark problem very conveniently. Maybe he’s smarter than we (and by we, I mean Max) give him credit for? [Max: It was all Krypto! Okay, I’ll concede that maybe Jimmy is as smart as a dog.]

#superman #karl kesel #tom grummett #doug hazlewood #superboy #steel #supergirl #S.T.A.R. Labs #eradicator #loophole #maggie sawyer #dan turpin #sydney happersen #tana moon #bibbo bibbowski #krypto #dickvault #the man whose dick is a vault

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wirebeauty64-blog · 4 years ago

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xxisxxisxxis · 5 years ago

Text

Gateway Drug | Part Fourteen

Part Thirteen

Pairing: Douglas Booth!Nikki Sixx x OC

Word Count: 5.2k

Warning(s): Language, mentions of drug abuse, minor sexual situations

Tag List: @oskea93 @vamprlestat @sharon6713 @itsametaphorbriansblog @miriampraez @allie-mcginn @rebeccaphillips14 @nicholeh7 @fandomshit6000 @lilmou5ie @tamedhearts @divaanya @kingbouji3 @evrsncnewyork @6ixx6ixx @ratedrkohardychick91 @floregrohlssard @oldschoolimagineblog @thanks2pete @abaldboi @swoopygorl @justjodeye @liith-ium @caos18blog @ytwahsog @shamlessobsessions @scarecrowmax @toadspleen @random-internet-user-4471 @solohqrry

**Let me know if you want to be tagged**

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June 30, 1983 approached with the speed of a Ferrari. Our wedding day held the same nerve racking energy as skydiving: we knew that jumping was going to be a thrill, but we didn't know whether we had a body of water or pavement waiting for us, or if our parachutes even worked.

"Vivian, are you nervous?" Tansy's mother, Diane asks me as I sit with curlers in my hair, Tansy putting foundation on me and I look at her.

Diane was a Barbie. I'm almost certain that she and Vince actually slept together at some point. She was a former Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader from '62-'63 before she got pregnant with Tansy and moved back to Mississippi. There wasn't a time I ever saw Diane with a platinum blonde hair out of place. Public imperfection equaled social suicide in her eyes and she made sure Tansy understood it down to the science of it. But Diane never tried to stop Tansy's partying because no one else who actually mattered knew about it. Everybody in the public thought she was innocent aside from showing her body in a magazine...until Tansy "accidentally" forgot to cover the tracks on her arms with makeup at one of her photo shoots in 1987. Diane nearly had a stroke —not because her daughter was so deep in a hole she couldn't get out of by herself—but because the world had found out her kid was on heroin and she was embarrassed.

"Depends on what Nikki's response to that question was." I tell her and she laughs.

"I haven't seen him yet." She tells me and I nod, licking my lips.

"I had to get him a couple shots of Jack earlier." Tansy comments, and I look up as she dots concealer under my eyes and pats it in.

"I'd be concerned if he weren't drinking." I reply.

"As long as he's drinking, we're good?" Diane states and I nod, looking at her with a little smile.

"As long as he's drinking, we're good." I repeat. "...unless he gets sober." I add.

"If the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise." Tansy pipes and I look at her.

"That is the most backwoods thing I have ever heard you say." I mumble to her with a little chuckle.

"Mississippi." She reminds me of where she's from.

"Oh, I forget you're from Mississippi." I reply.

"Because she's got a attitude from L.A." Her mother states matter-of-fact, a sour tone to her voice.

"I'm a nice person, Mama." She argues just as Vince and Tommy are opening the door of the bridal sweet. "Guys, tell my mom I'm sweet."

"As taffy." Vince states sarcastically, and Tansy cuts her eyes at him.

"How's Nikki?" I ask Vince and he chuckles.

"He's fine." He replies to me. "We left him with Mick for a second. I was hoping I'd come in here and see some skin." He plops in a chair.

"Vince, do you not think it's inappropriate to want to see your best friend's wife naked?" I ask him, glancing at him as Tansy powders my face before applying mascara.

"You're not married yet, Saint Viv." He retorts, raising his brows.

"No, but you are." Tansy tells him smartly. "Should I go get Beth to come tighten your leash?"

"I'll tighten your leash." His voice is overly sexualized, looking her up and down and she pretends to gag in disgust but he turns it on her. "You've always had the prettiest little gag."

"Dude, I know." Tommy adds, sharing a mutual grin with Vince.

"You morons are disgusting and, Vince, you're drunk." I shoot at them. "Go sober up. I don't need you being messy." I speak sternly, and Vince exhales and stands, stumbling a little before heading back to the door with Tommy to make sure he won't face plant.

The tiny church is hot and stuffy due to lack of air conditioning and while we wait to start, the only thing keeping me from passing out is Tommy fanning me with a paper back bible he snagged from the back of a pew in the sanctuary as Tansy puts my veil in my waved hair.

"You're so pretty." She coos, admiring her hard work on my hair and makeup.

"You are, too." I reply in the same tone, looking at her perfect blonde hair that's curled flawlessly, the very top of it pinned back out of her delicate face. Big blue eyes are a contrast against her flowing emerald green dress that reaches just above her knees.

I finally found my dress just in time for it to be altered and ready for pick up a couple of days ago.

It's slightly itchy, the off the shoulder fitted lace sleeves reaching down to my wrists are slightly uncomfortable, but other than that it's perfect. The skirt of it is a little poofy, but nothing compared to the mountain of tool the first dress I tried on, was.

"Alright, I'm gonna go out there." She tells me hesitantly once the piano starts up, grasping my hand in hers.

I told you she just knew things the way Mick just knew things, and she knew Nikki and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to, she just didn't have the heart to tell us.

"I'm fine, Tansy." I assure her when she silently refuses to let go of my hand incase I need her to hold it due to fear. She just gives me a little smile and lets go, patting Tommy on the cheek before stepping out in the sanctuary.

Tommy's grinning ear to ear, seemingly about to burst.

"I can't believe two of my best friends are really doing this." He exhales through his large smile, looking at down at me. His smile falters a smidge, and he licks his lips, clearing his throat. "You sure you're alright, Viv? No cold feet or anything? Because there's a window up by the ceiling in the bathroom and I'll give you a boost out if you don't wanna do this."

"I'm okay, Tommy." I chuckle and he lets out a breath of relief. "Has Vince gotten sobered up a little?"

"Yeah, I made him chug some water."

It's our turn to walk out now and I hook my arm through his, my right hand gripping at my bouquet of Purple lilies, and I'm practically panting to calm my nerves.

"If you trip and fall, I will, too, so you're not alone or anything." He assures me and I have to keep from laughing loudly.

The church ushers open the door for us, and we slowly make our way down the aisle.

There's people Nikki invited that I've either never met or have seen them hanging out with the guys from time to time.

Diane, Sparkie, and Tommy's girlfriend are seated together beside Beth, Vince and Mick, and even as I'm walking down the aisle, Beth and Roxie are solely focused on shooting Tansy death glares as if they have rabies and want to tear in to her. Tommy’s parents and Doc weren’t able to come, but I highly doubt Nikki’s holding it against them, so I’m not worried with it either.

I don't look at Nikki until we're merely feet away from the alter, then my grip on Tommy's arm tightens to steel and I'm scared to let go because I might just trip and fall.

We get to the alter and stop, the minister asking who's giving me to Nikki. My best friend tells him he is, before lifting my veil and kissing my cheek. I hand my flowers to Tansy and Tommy takes my hand that he's holding, about to pass me to Nikki.

He stops midway, though, to hug me tightly, and I swear his eyes are watering but I don't give it a second thought.

The hug only lasts a few seconds and he's giving Nikki my hand before stepping to his side as his best man.

I'm hit with the weight of all of this the second Nikki's skin touches mine, our grips on each other's hands tightening as we both give out nervous smiles, waiting for the minister to start.

"We have gathered here today to celebrate the joining of Nikki and Vivian in holy matrimony. I didn't have much time to prepare a message being that Miss Kinston contacted me only two weeks ago and asked if she could have her wedding here."A few people, including myself, chuckle as he continues. "But we'll make it work the best that we can." He smiles at me and Nikki, opening his bible. "Before I begin, is there anyone who finds any reason as to why these two should not be joined together as husband and wife? If so, speak now or forever hold your peace." No one says a thing, and he nods at the two of us slightly before starting.

"A marriage between any two people is a direct representation of Jesus' commitment to his church. You will make sacrifices for your wife the way Christ sacrificed himself for his church, while you will love your husband the way the church is suppose to love Christ."

Nikki rolls his eyes and I squeeze his hand, causing him to cut his eyes a little at me while I silently scold him.

"To know love is to know God because God is love. 1 Corinthians states that, 'Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.'" He tells us. "A marriage is not meant to be two halves coming together to form a whole, but two complete people coming together to form a team and a partnership. Your triumphs will be your partner's triumphs to celebrate with you. Your struggles will be your partner's struggles to mourn with you. You two will go through the greatest highs together but also the most heartbreaking lows. You must never lose yourselves or each other in turmoil, however. Support each other, encourage each other, comfort each other, fight for each other. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sin.” He explains and I let out a soft breath, feeling my nervousness start to fade. "Before we start the reciting of vows, I would like to precede with a passage from Ruth. ‘And Ruth said, Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall by my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you." By the time he’s finished reading, I’m nearly tearing up. “The rings, please," The minister motions to Tommy and Tansy. Tommy hands Nikki the small diamond ring for me and Tansy hands me the simple gold wedding band for Nikki. "Nikki, repeat after me, 'I, Nikki, take thee, Vivian, to be my lawfully wedded wife.'"

Nikki takes a deep breath and licks his lips before saying:

"I, Nikki, take thee, Vivian, to be my lawfully wedded wife."

"To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, or for worse."

"For rich, or for poor, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish,"

"Till death do us part."

"Vivian, do you accept these vows promised to you by Nikki?"

"I do." I nod, sniffling.

"Nikki, take Vivian's ring and place it on her finger."

He obeys, his hand shaking slightly as he slides the ring to rest beside the plain silver band he proposed to me with. "With this ring, I thee wed. With all I am, and all I have, I honor you."

"With this ring, I thee wed. With all I am, and all I have, I honor you." He repeats after him.

"Vivian, repeat after me. 'I, Vivian, take thee, Nikki, to be my lawfully wedded husband.'"

"I, Vivian, take thee, Nikki, to be my lawfully wedded husband."

"To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, or for worse."

"For rich, or for poor, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish,"

"Till death do us part."

"Nikki, do you accept these vows promised to you by Vivian?" He asks after I am done with my vows.

"I sure as hell do." Nikki assures us and I squeeze my eyes closed and laugh with everyone else at his blatancy.

"Vivian, take Nikki's ring and place it on his finger."

I do so, my eyes meeting Nikki's and refusing to look away.

"With this ring, I thee wed. With all I am, and all I have, I honor you." The minister states for me to speak to Nikki.

"With this ring, I thee wed. With all I am, and all I have, I honor you." I restate.

"So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate."

I barely hear the cheers and hollering of our guests due to the unexpected urgency Nikki pulls me to him with, wrapping me tightly in his arms as his lips press to mine.

I'm a sobbing mess and I'm not exactly sure why, but I tell myself it's because I'm overwhelmed with happiness.

When he pulls away, he's wiping my tears with his thumbs.

"You taste like booze." I tell him, and he smiles and kisses me again chastely.

Our reception was at Tansy's mother's beach house in Malibu and I apologized to her in advance for the shenanigans that would inevitably take place under her roof.

"Alright, one, two, three." Diane counts off and the "click" of the camera softly sounds off.

"Next!" I motion for Mick and Vince to join Me, Nikki, Tansy and Tommy as we take our wedding party pictures in the formal living room.

"Sooner we get done with this the sooner we can get wasted." Nikki reminds everyone as Mick and Vince step to us.

Mick stands on the other side of Tommy and Tansy as Vince stands beside me and Nikki.

Another "click" initiates Nikki shooing everyone away so me and him can have our own picture.

Just as the camera captures the picture, Nikki's hands curve under my arms and grasp at my breasts, causing my eyes to widen as the flash hits us.

"Nikki!" I scold him, nearly hitting him with my bouquet.

He and the guys think it's hilarious while I'm swatting at him, trying to hold back my laughter.

We calm down so she can take another photo, and like the last time, he's got something slick up his sleeve.

Before I know it, he's lifting the back of my skirt and grabbing between my legs, opting me to squeal and laugh so hard my eyes are squeezing closed once the picture is taken.

He's kissing my cheek when he stands back up, fixing my dress to take an actual serious picture.

It's taken with ease, the last picture left to take is of me and Tansy and once we're done with that, every one of us are ready to go eat food and the guys are ready to get wrecked.

People are soon scattered throughout the house with plates of food, sitting and standing wherever they can get.

"Guys," Tansy mother's says to us, holding her video camera. "Say 'hi'."

Me, Nikki, Vince, Beth, Tommy, Roxie, Mick, Tansy, and Sparkie are all gathered around the coffee table, seated on the carpet.

We look in her direction, Tansy and I give actual smiles to the camera while the boys shout profanities and shoot birds.

"Nikki, are you excited to be a husband?" Diane asks him in a teasing tone and he looks at me and smirks.

"So excited that I just might conveniently accidentally croak of alcohol poisoning tonight." He states, taking a swig of his wine and I give an unamused look at the camera, feeling Nikki take my left hand in his right before I say:

"That's why he's not getting laid tonight." Just after I say it, Nikki's digging his teeth in to my wrist, causing me to snatch away from him as he chuckles.

Everyone's pretty tipsy, and I'm 99.9% sure Tansy, Tommy and Vince are a little coked out while Sparkie tries to sneakily down a couple Quaaludes with his whiskey.

When it's time to the cut the cake, Diane wants a million pictures and to capture it on tape like she did the rest of the wedding and majority of the reception.

"You do not know how to cut a cake." I tell Nikki as we both hold the large knife, trying to find a starting place.

"Hush or I'll cut you." He threatens me in a almost serious tone but I know he means it playfully.

"Shh, people can't know I'm in to kinky shit like that." I mumble.

"I'm gonna start putting a tally mark on my arm every time you cuss just to see if you ever do it more than five times a year." He pokes at me.

"I cuss all the time." I argue as he settles on a place to cut the cake.

"The only time you really do is when we're fucking and I won't count those times or I'll run out of room on my arm in a couple minutes." He replies with a smirk.

"I don't do it that much when we're fooling around."

"Viv, I forget whether my name's 'Nikki' or 'Oh, fuck' anytime we do anything." He states, the two of us cutting in to the thick icing.

Oblivious to our quiet conversation, everybody claps once we get the piece of cake on to the plate I'm holding in my other hand and Diana hands us both forks.

Just as we get the cake on our forks, the both of us are taking our fingers and are trying to swipe cake down each other's faces, laughing like idiots.

It's smeared around his mouth and on his cheek but he's painted the white icing and sponge from my forehead, down my nose and to my chin.

Before I can wipe it off of me, he's licking it off of me.

People whistle suggestively, while others laugh, and I look at Tommy just in time for him to get a Polaroid picture of me wearing my cake and my husband licking it off of me.

Nikki licks off what he can, before kissing me with a wide smile, then grabbing a napkin and wiping the rest off before he wipes it off of his face, too.

I reach up and kiss him again once we're finished actually eating our cake as people each get their own slice, and Tommy finishes his and clears his throat, standing up and clinking his fork against a bottle of Jack.

He's standing on the coffee table in the living room, in our view from where we are in the kitchen, and everyone goes quiet as he says, "Hey, I'd like to say a little something."

I brace myself for his words, no telling what is going to come out of him as he stares at me and Nikki.

"I have known Vivian for a majority of my life. She's super nice, most of the time, and really smart and talented," He says, smiling at me. "I don't know how many of you guys know her all that well but she's not exactly like any of my other friends. She'll go party with us but be the only one drinking water, stay out with us Saturday nights until five in the morning and then get up and go to church every Sunday. Her ideal guy was a preacher's son or some shit and Nikki humped anything. So I didn't expect it to get this far. I thought she would get tired of all our bullshit and leave all of us, or Nikki would get tired of her not being wild enough or something. But she loves Nikki and all of us exactly how we are and Nikki loves her enough to not care whether she's crazy like us or not because she's wild where it counts and doesn’t get on her knees to just pray." People "ooh" at his claim and I feel my face heat up a little bit as Nikki pats me on the head. "Sorry," Tommy reads my expression and gives me a nervous smile before continuing. "Seriously, though, she chose Nikki over her own parents." He adds, looking directly at me. "Which was something I wouldn't be able to do if I were her. Just like I wouldn't be able to do any of this music stuff by myself the way Nikki was doing when I first met him." He switches his attention to Nikki. "They're two of the coolest and strongest people I know and it's pretty awesome that they're married now. So," He holds his bottle up. "cheers to the motherfucking Sixx's."

Everyone says "cheers" and takes a sip of their drinks, including me and Nikki.

Within a few minutes, Nikki’s convincing me to let him try to take my garter off with his teeth so he can throw it to the men at the party to fight over it like animals.

I eventually agree, sitting down, my hands digging in to the fabric of my dress as I hold back nervous laughter because I'm ticklish and I know he'll milking the hell out of it. He's crouched in front of me, picking my right ankle up, looking at me deviously as he presses a kiss to the inside of my ankle.

I already know where's he's going with this and so does everyone else, his buddies egging him on as he continues pressing little kisses up the inside of my calf muscle, heading up the inside of thigh.

I don't know why I expect him to actually stop at the garter but he doesn't.

I bite my tongue to keep from squealing when he gets to the hem of my panties, squeezing my eyes closed and covering my face with my hands as he gives one little bite to my lace covered core before tugging my panties off with his teeth, taking the garter with him as he heads back down my thigh and gets them passed my heeled feet. All the guys are like piranhas as he ties the panties and garter together before throwing them in to the small crowd of men that's gathered.

They fly over the crowd, though, and land on the back couch cushion right by Mick, who's got his sunglasses on and nursing a bottle of Vodka.

There's no one else I'd rather give my panties to. Mick's a God.

When it's my turn to toss my bouquet, some girl and Roxie are nearly fist fighting over it, completely disregarding the flowers themselves as they bicker over who caught them.

Tommy takes advantage of the bouquet that's now on the floor and sneakily grabs it and hands it off to Tansy who runs up to her room in the house to hide them.

We never planned to have a first dance together, however, about another hour in to the reception, Tansy randomly shuts off the record player and puts in to sing a cover of Ben E. King's "Stand By Me", and begs a drunk Vince to accompany her a cappella. Nikki's nudging me out of his lap, from where we're seated on the couch, and sets his drink down.

Before I can ask, "what's wrong?", he's grasping at my hand and pulling me to him with a slight sway, smirking at me when I raise a brow, a little shocked that he's actually dancing with me without me having to beg him.

His right hand rests at my waist as his left holds at my right hand, my left hand resting on his arm.

Tans and Vince are easy to catch a rhythm to, despite the blonde singer's intoxication. Beth's livid at the fact he's interacting with Tansy, though, and Nikki's silently laughing at her pissed off expression.

We're surrounded by people but he's the only person I see right now.

He looks down at me and I feel immense déjà vu. I'm suddenly back at the Starwood, seeing him up close for the first time. We hated each other back then, and now we can't get enough of each other.

My lips and tongue meet his, my arm reaching to his back to pull him as close as possible to me and he does the same, pulling me to him by my waist.

Once we pull away, he's smiling at me, his eyes locking with mine.

I could stare in to his eyes for an eternity. His eyes were so beautiful. They always had this lively sparkle to them. I always thought he had poetic eyes that told a million stories to whoever paid attention. I would've stared in to those eyes longer, had I known that would've been one of the last times I saw that sparkle bursting with enthusiasm and life before they just turned cold, dead and void.

Later on, I'm with Tansy when Nikki comes up to me holding his keys, Tommy and Roxie trailing behind him.

"Are we leaving?" I ask him, about to stand up from where I'm sitting but he stops me.

"Um, me and Tommy were gonna head back and stop by a friends house for a couple hours." He tells me hesitantly as if he's a little and he's nervous of being told "no."

I know a "friends house" means a party and a "couple hours" means all night.

"Nikki, it's our wedding night." I state as if he forgot and he gives me a grin.

"I know, I won't be gone all night." It's a blatant lie and I know it, but he's convincing like he always is.

"Okay, just be careful, please. I'm serious." I say without a trace of leisure and he nods, his smile growing from ear to ear as he and Tommy glance at each other.

He kisses me one last time before turning to go, announcing to everyone he's "fuckin' outta here" and thanks them for coming.

Before Tommy can get out the door I'm snatching him by his sleeve and stopping him.

He snaps around in my direction with wide eyes and I don't give him time to speak.

"Don't be overzealously stupid. Don't let him be overzealously stupid." I threaten him.

"Yes ma'am." He assures me, giving me a shit eating grin.

"I'm serious, Tommy." I snap.

"Chill out, Viv. We'll be fine." He is waves me off before leaving and that nagging feeling I felt when Nikki told me where they were going isn't eased in the slightest.

By the time everyone leaves, including Mick, Vince and Beth—me, Diane, and Tansy are starting to finish cleaning up while Sparkie’s passed out.

“You can head home, Vivian. I don’t want Nikki to get there and you still be a couple hours away.” Tansy tells me and I shake my head.

“He’s at a party. He probably won’t be coming home until morning.” I tell her and she nods.

“Well, me and Sparkie are gonna crash here. You can, too, if you want to.” She offers.

“I probably will. I’m just ready to get out of this dress.” I mumble, glancing at the clock on the wall to see it’s already two o’clock in the morning.

Tansy lends me a T-shirt that practically swallows her whole, and a pair of pajama shorts.

By the time I’ve gotten my makeup off, taken a shower and crawled in to the bed of one of the spare bedrooms, I’m nearly half asleep.

Until the phone starts ringing.

I hear Diane answer it downstairs, her voice just as tired sounding as I feel, but she suddenly snaps out of her sleepy daze.

“She’s upstairs asleep.” I hear her say, and I furrow my brows and sit up. “I’ll go get her.”

Within a moment, she’s opening the door and looking at me with wide eyes and a pale face.

“Doc McGhee is on the line—”

I don’t let her finish before I’m darting past her and almost tripping over myself to get down the stairs to the phone.

“Hello?” I ask, a panic to my voice. I hear him take a deep breath before calmly stating:

“Vivian, you need to get back to town. Nikki’s wrapped his Porsche around a pole.”

#nikki sixx #tommy lee #vince neil #mötley crüe #douglas booth #daniel webber #colson baker #the dirt #the dirt movie #douglas booth!nikki sixx

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