#this is what their child would wear actually if the had one | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

max-nico · 2 days ago

Text

A one shot from my DCxGF crossover, for your viewing pleasure

I'm not even gonna lie chat, I did break out my own gf journals for this lol

Tw: slight horror/backrooms vibes, excessive use of question marks

Tim has often been compared to Bruce, despite the man not being his biological father. Jason once told him he acts more like Bruce than Damian does, which he resents by the way. That statement implies that him and Damian act alike in any way possible, which is untrue. Tim is reliable, paranoid, a nervous talker, human. Damian is a demon child, and a danger to everyone around him.

Still, Tim is not exactly helping is argument right now.

He has a little girl hauled up at his apartment. Well, little girl more in height than in age. She's 14, standing at a whopping 5'1, with a personality much bigger than she is. Her hair is brown, long enough to just barely grace her thighs, but choppy, like it's been repeated cut with shears instead of scissors. It was worse when he first brought her in, a birds nest doesn't come close to describing the tangles in her hair.

She's also in Tim's clothes, has been for the past week and a half, but he doesn't mind. He's sure she is getting increasingly annoyed at having to keep up his baggy pants though. It's a little funny, but don't tell her he said that, she might try to kill Tim by putting Clorox in his coffee. Again. It's a long story.

Tim himself is also in casual clothing, just some sweats and a white T-shirt. His mask is also on though, he may have taken the girl in, but he doesn't know if she's trustworthy... yet.

Oh God that sounded like Bruce. Ew. Gross. His siblings can never know, they'll never let him live it down.

"Hey, Mabel."

"Red Robin, perfect timing!" She chirps out, face covered in various different stickers (where did she get those??). "I need you to do me a big, huge, enormous favor."

Her brown eyes are wide and innocent, but he's had enough siblings to know her expression is nothing but trouble. It's the same face Steph wears when she's about to do something stupid on patrol.

"What do you want?" Tim glares.

"Nothing bad! Just... We should go outside, sightsee. I don't know what Gotham has to offer, I'm literally from California!"

"Which makes me ask how you got all the way out here-"

"-Unimportant!" Mabel interrupts, determinedly looking anywhere that Tim isn't. "What is important, is going outside. Now. Like right now."

"Mabel it's the middle of the night!"

"Perfect time to stargaze!"

"You can't see starts in Gotham."

"Well now's a good time to start!"

"Huh?? That doesn't even make sense. Mabel?!"

Mabel is out the door before Tim has the chance to snag her arm. She didn't even put shoes on before taking off. Tim may live in a high to upper class apartment, but it's still Gotham! Walking around anywhere without shoes is just begging for a virus.

He follows behind her like an owner chasing their unleashed dog. Gosh, when did his hallways get so long? He feels like they should've reached the end by now, but Mabel is still way ahead of him. Actually, now that he thinks about it, the rest of the hallway in front of him is dark. Completely shadowed in black. Once he reaches the spot he saw up ahead, it's like it was never dark there in the first place.

Because the lights didn't turn on. Nothing like that, nothing that would make sense. It's just one moment there's completely pitch black, and the next he's standing under the yellow bulbs that always cover his apartment building.

"Mabel!" He calls. "Mabel, I think there's something wrong!"

She doesn't stop running when she hears his shouts, but she does peak back to indicate she's heard him. It's not like Tim isn't trained to be able to run for hours without breaks, but he'd really like to stop now, he doesn't know what's going on. Everyone knows the one thing Tim despises is being left in the dark.

Mabel finally stops a minute or so later, right in the place where the dark meets the light. She's panting as Tim catches up to her, bent over her knees as she wipes a little sweat off her brow.

She's facing the only door with a number (???), a big black 13 written on eggshell white of the wood. He can see the scrunch of her nose, the whirr of her lip between her teeth, the way her hands are twitching by her side. She made the exact same face when she asked Tim to use his shower when he brought her home.

"Ohh shit, time to activate Serious Mable." She groans. "Grunkle Ford is gonna kill me if this door takes us to the nightmare realm."

"The what??"

"Nightmare realm. Keep up, Red."

Then she pushes the door open before Tim can protest. The other side is a giant field of flowers. It would be beautiful if Tim wasn't currently fearing whatever the Nightmare Realm is. Mabel looks overall unperturbed with the outcome of things, he'd even say she looks delighted.

"What the fuck."

Mabel shrugs. "You get used to it."

Distantly, Tim realizes that Mabel's clothes fit now.

Despite being the one wearing shoes Tim can still feel the soft grass under his feet. The petals of various flowers brush his skin in a way that makes him double check that he's wearing any. The need to reiterate what the fuck, is strong.

"Jeez, I really didn't expect to come across a rift this soon. I haven't even had the chance to build a snow globe?"

"What on earth could a snow globe do to help this situation in any way possible???" Tim is trying not to sound hysterical, but he's failing miserably.

"I need something to put this in until I can dispose of it safely."

"To put what in??"

Mabel gestures around her, answering none of Tim's questions. Is this gaslighting? This feels like gaslighting. He didn't even feel this crazy when he found Bruce in the time stream! He's had sleep deprived hallucinations and felt more sane than he does now! As if adding insult to injury, Mabel reaches into the empty space behind her back, mimes grabbing something, and boom. She pulls out a pink book, from thin air.

Guess he knows where the stickers came from now?

Tim may only be twenty years old, but he believes he's earned enough drinks to give a 700 pound man alcohol poisoning. Genuinely, what is going on? Is this his life now? He pulls a Bruce one time and now he's stuck babysitting what can only be some sort of witch, or possibly demon! He's seen a lot in his time, but this takes the cake for overall weirdness.

"We can probably find a Mailbox to get back safely."

Okay yeah, a way out. Tim can focus on that. He can plan. Planning is good.

"Okay we need a mailbox, and we need a snow globe... Got it."

"Great, I knew you were a quick learner!"

So for ten minutes it's wandering. It's feeling the flowers on his legs, the grass between his toes, and watching Mabel flip through her pink book. It's got a shooting star on it, and enough glitter that it blinds him if he tilts his head the right way. Besides that, the walk would almost be nice if he wasn't freaking out right now.

Mabel pauses, lifting her nose from her book. Tim follows her lead, not knowing what else to do.

"There's a cabin over there." She squints out into the field of nothing but flowers. "Where there's a cabin, there's a Mailbox."

"How did you even see that?"

Her nose was in a book, and even if it wasn't, the cabin is barely a black dot in the distance. If Tim's vision was anything less than 20/20, he wouldn't've seen it.

"The flowers."

Sure enough, there's a weird break in the flowers. It's subtle, but they were following a pattern. Tim can see the moment it deviates.

"It's not always reliable, but we were in luck this time." Mabel takes off towards the cabin.

There's more walking. Tim can rapidly feel his legs getting tired, but it's not like he's gonna pass out, so he doesn't voice is complaints. Instead, the walk stays silent between them. The only sound is the soft sounds of their feet and the gust of wind that comes through exactly every five minutes.

As they draw closer, the cabin begins to move. Not in any weird or strange way, no. Just so that it becomes clear there's a giant valley between them and the structure. Of course, the valley is also covered in grass and flowers.

"Okay, less than ideal." Mabel murmurs, putting her book back wherever she got it from.

"It's just a valley. It's kinda far, but it's not like we'll die before we get there."

"No, but we'll have to go up, and that's a huge problem. Well, for you, I'll be fine." She flips her hair with a smugness only Tim himself could rival. "Just make sure you don't look up."

Tim, who's never been good at following orders, just like the rest of his idiot siblings, immediately tilts his head up. His why dies on his throat faster than it comes.

The clear blue sky fades until nothing but eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon eyes

Small hands yank his head back down to the ground, and he spews his dinner over the flower beds.

"One was the one thing I told you not to do?!"

Tim is too busy trying to get the room to stop spinning to answer her.

"C'mon! Geez, what is up with boys and not listening to me?!" Mabel huffs.

He's being pulled farther down, Mabel's tiny arms are pulling him into the valley in front of them. She's muttering under her breath, uncaring if Tim hears or not, but they're both aware he won't. He's still stumbling behind her like a newborn dear.

The travelling is even slower after that. With Tim halfway out of commission, and Mabel using all her strength to drag him where they need to go, they're no longer making any semblance of good time. At some point Mabel gets a blind fold from somewhere (again ???), and covers Tim's eyes as they climb up the other side of the valley.

"Okay Red Robin, are you listening?"

"Yeah." Tim croaks.

Mabel moves his hand from being clasped in hers to clasping it around her shirt.

"I need my hands, but don't let go no matter the cost. I run? You run."

Tim will not be making the mistake of not listening to her for a second time. He will regret the first for the rest of his life. There will never be a time where he sleeps without nightmares after that.

"Got it?"

"Yeah." His voice is so hoarse it sounds painful.

There's the sounds of shuffling pages, and then the sound of writing, and then of a creaky door. The silence between this moment and the next is deafening. Tim feels sick again, but a rusty click saves him from dry heaving. There's another creaky door sound, and then a relieved sigh from Mabel.

"We're going in the cabin." Is all she says.

Tim can't see the cabin through his blindfold, but he can hear the sound of material other than wood under his and Mabel's feet. Clearly, he needs to stop expecting normal things, like a wooden cabin having wooden floors. He thinks he's walking on carpet, which isn't too outlandish, but the cabin didn't seem modern enough for that from the outside.

"What's your apartment number?"

"325."

And then they're running again. Tim still barely feels well enough to hold himself up, but Mabel said to keep up, and he'll be damned if he doesn't. He ignores the green of his face and the rolling in his stomach. He can throw up when he gets out of here.

The stop is abrupt. Tim is almost sent careening to the ground, but Mabel catches his elbow before he can eat shit. He's dragged through- what he assumes is- a door by his arm. The smell of his own apartment is so overwhelming he wants to collapse.

"Is this-" he gags, "Can I take my blindfold off?"

"Just be careful, you might start crying blood."

"Noted."

Slowly, he pulls down the black fabric, taking a moment before opening his eyes. Mabel is the first thing he sees, guilty, small, and sad, like a puppy caught eating out the trash. Then his eyes begin to sting and water. He loses her visage before he can fully memorize it again.

"This must be the bloody tears."

"It sure is!"

Tim gags again. "Bathroom." He doesn't wait for her reply before hobbling to his toilet and practically ejecting his entire stomach.

It's half an hour later that he finally feels well enough to clean himself up. He changes his clothes, washes the blood off his face, and pretends he just got done with a regular patrol. Sure it's barely 12am, and yeah, every time he closes his eyes he sees the sky from the flower field- but it's fine! Everything is fine! Just don't ask him about it or he might throw up again!

He takes a little while to compose himself again before going out to see Mabel. She's completely silent while writing in her bright pink book, very out of character for the girl Tim knows Mabel to be. He doesn't interrupt her though, he just plants himself beside her and watches her pen move.

Dear Grunkle Ford,

It's November 4th for whenever you get to read this. I did not go to Nightmare Realm, just like you said not to, but my new friend did get a glimpse into it. I was kinda mad at him at first, but now I just feel bad. He's been puking his guts out for like ever now. It's because he's a bad listener, just like Dipper (⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠つ⁠⊂⁠(⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠) but that's okay, it's like having a little piece of home with me here!

Anyways, here's the important science stuff that you care about now Σ⁠(⁠ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠) we entered a pocket dimension withi

"Someones been calling your phone nonstop, and you have the most annoying ringtone in the world." Mabel sasses, but it's clear she just wants to write without an audience.

"Sure thing."

He'll leave her be, but he will get to look in that notebook of hers, eventually. There is nothing you can hide from one of the world's greatest detectives, not even a magical disappearing book.

It turns out his whole family has been calling him non stop. There are countless text messages and missed calls on his lock screen. He sighs, Tim already knows he's going to be in so much trouble. Not that he can get in trouble anymore! He is an adult! With a job!

That fact really doesn't stop the dread from making his stomach sink.

"Hey, Dick."

"Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne!" Oh he is in so much trouble. "What the hell is wrong with you?!"

"Dick I-"

"No don't 'Dick' me, son! First your trackers go offline, and then your fucking vitals skyrocket! Then you don't answer anyone's calls, texts, we tried PAGING you! No answer on coms, your laptop, tablet, or home computer! Tim, we thought you were DYING!"

He felt like it, too.

"No Dick, I just got caught up with something, I'm perfectly fine. I'm back at the nest, a little nausea to sleep off, no biggie."

"... I'm coming over."

"Dammit Dick- no don't do that. I'm fine, I will see you tomorrow. Dick- Dick?!" Dick hangs up the phone.

Well, shit. What does he do now?

Still figuring out how to write them, so sorry if they're too OOC U⁠ ⁠´⁠꓃⁠ ⁠`⁠ ⁠U

The Mailbox is a reference to an actual gravity falls creature. You can ask it any question and it will have the answers. It's all knowing and all seeing.

Dick calls Tim son bc he picked up Bruce calling himself and Damian son

Not proofread as usual ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Feel free to add to this post/hit up my askbox, or just ask questions in general (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠)

34 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 3 days ago

Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information can be found at Starved for Care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 notes · View notes

greenerteacups · 3 days ago

Note

I'm so excited to see you write party scenes!!! Either ones from canon like Slug Club or new ones you introduce. Love a party! Love merriment and festivities! Love impulsive decisions made under the influence! And the party outfits (if it's a formal one)!!! I know you're going to feed us.

Related question: What do you think of that one coral-pink dress Hermione wears to the Slug Club party in the 6th movie, or of the way they adapted her wardrobe in general? I've always found it a bit odd/OOC, and wondered when she bought the dress and for what purpose. But then, maybe wizarding affairs are more formal, so I guess she could've purchased a dressier (and pink) muggle dress for special occasions. It's still a little more cleav than I'd expect her to show, though. Draco would lose his mind.

Thank you!! I love a party scene. They're so deliciously messy and fun. I have had an outrageously good time drafting several splendid party scenes in Book 6, and I should frankly be arrested.

The dress from the movie is definitely a showoff dress, which i think is a fun new direction for her. Up to that point, movie Hermione was styled very girlishly, which tracks since she was (1) SUPER underage for most of filming, (2) generally not coded as a super fashionable character in the books. I was actually relieved that Hermione didn't become alluring and stylish in the films just because she's The Girl One. She's allowed to be feminine and have a feminine style without being unrealistically sophisticated or fashionable. Personally, I read Hermione as a little bit preppier than the movies do, but they're making a valid choice! The important thing to me is that Hermione dresses like a teenage girl. She wears sweaters and blouses and jeans. It's casual, it's moderately feminine, it's presentable, but it's not oversexualizing a child (especially one being performed by another child, one who was very much in the public eye and generally oversexualized when she was wildly underage). Her dress in the Goblet of Fire movie is nice to me because it's pretty without being too revealing; it's a great dress for a fifteen-year-old girl to wear to her first party (as she is at the time of the Yule Ball).

In that context, the choice to have Hermione wear a more revealing dress to the Slug Club is a bit odd, because she doesn't have similar costuming patterns before or after. In the dress's defense, I will say that it would make sense in the story of HBP for Hermione to be trying to recalibrate how others perceive her and deliberately choose a "showier" dress because she wants others (i.e. Ron) to start seeing her as a sexual being, or bluntly, a girl. She's also visibly uncomfortable for most of the party — because of Cormac, not necessarily because of the dress, but having an odd costuming choice lends to the sense of dissonance the audience gets watching Hermione in the scene. It makes her feel out of her element, and she's obviously not thrilled about being there in the first place. (We might ask more of Watson's performance to give us that sense of "discomfort in her own skin," but I don't want to critique the actress here; achieving an effect in a scene is always a joint effort, and YMMV.)

All this to say odd, but it's not obviously out of the ordinary. That being said, I think I just have a different interpretation of Hermione than the movies do in general, and so I naturally lean towards different costuming choices (although I do have to admit that I love the pink.)

#greenteacup asks #hermione granger

20 notes · View notes

dol-dogboy · 1 day ago

Text

Percy infodump incoming I’ve been thinking of him, his relationship to gender, and his ever so selfish and hypocritical views on the world

They’re such a product of their environment, the new gender system perfectly exemplifying everything about gender that makes them so insecure bc like. They ain’t a man or a woman, but no one else can process the concept that he’s neither. So instead they go with the second best option of “man”, because it’s better than being seen as a woman at least— and even then, as soon as his pants come off, it’s like the illusion breaks and suddenly everyone thinks he’s some crossdressing girl. And it infuriates them, so part of the reason why they want to become so powerful and intimidating is because at least then maybe people will be too scared to question him

The fact that he’s intersex makes it worse, because then when people view him as just a cross dresser then they see him as a FREAK too!! Deep voice, extremely tall, tdick, flat chest… can’t even look like a girl in the ‘right’ way. Which he then rationalizes that the intimidation will fix that too. Just gotta get more powerful. Just gotta be more in control.

This all manifests in him being someone who has actually never been able to fully explore his own gender, since they took on the role of “man” as a way to separate themself from womanhood when they came to the orphanage. So now they’re in this spot where their gender identity is half-baked and all of the insecurities just start piling up. He already found himself to be ugly as a child due to his mothers harsh criticisms, but that added paranoia of being seen as a woman has just made them all the more hyper aware of the thoughts and feelings of other people (even though they come off as someone that doesn’t care about what other people think— which they usually don’t. It’s just that this is a very sore subject for them)

It’s part of why he doesn’t like dressing in more ‘feminine’ ways, or wearing skintight clothes, because even the minute possibility of being seen as a woman makes his skin crawl. Hypothetically they could actually explore being more gender nonconforming if they actually got to be at a point where they’re comfortable in their own skin but. That would take some insane au fuckery for them to ever be at that spot

Insecurity in general is a big theme with Percy, he’s an inherently spiteful and envious person that lets his emotions out on others even when they don’t deserve it. Even when he was actively suicidal he was still pretty nasty towards others he deemed ‘better’ than him. Celes is the biggest example of it, she did nothing but unintentionally excel at all of the things that Percy was insecure about— and because of that Percy has had a one sided resentment towards her since they were children. If he is jealous over you then it’s YOUR fault in his eyes. How DARE you be better than him, how dare your very existence serve only as mockery in his eyes. Because he’s selfish, it doesn’t matter if the other person is suffering in other ways— he’s locked onto that insecurity of his and ignores all else. Tunnel vision

Percy is constantly throwing a pity party for themself, because they suffered in the past, because they’re suffering NOW, then that means they’re allowed to inflict as much harm upon people as they want. They’re above criticism because this town sucks anyways, so really the citizens deserve to get their faces beaten in. A flimsy excuse made by someone who attacks indiscriminately for the most part. They just use people like punching bags and then want to get away with zero consequences..

Because he’s suffered so much, you know? What do you mean you’ve also suffered? Who cares. That doesn’t matter. Just shut up and take the beating

He’s a hypocritical mess that’s overcompensating for the things that he’s lacking in by beating down the people that do have what he wants. And that’s why he’s so fun to write <3

#yappin tag #dol pc #percy the crook #also like. they grew up in a small town comprised mostly of cis people #the trans knowledge is pretty limited #so theyre apathetic towards the idea of being a man and they’re like ig that’s good enough. maybe everyone feels like that #<- another grab for control on his part. actually everyone assuming my gender was all according to my master plan!!!#sniles sneetly at u. do you care him. I care him

17 notes · View notes

arttsuka · 10 months ago

Note

Cowboy Octavius is just the singer Red Leather right down to the daddy issues thank you and goodnight!

You are so right

73 notes · View notes

imexperiencinggrowthgetoverit · 1 year ago

Text

Amity Park: US MOST HAUNTED!

Amity Park: The Faceblind City!

except the westons

#like #if Danny didnt want his parents knowing then he’d just have to keep silent around them and hope they dont notice his body shape and language #which- in this specific idea I had -I think they would actually notice over time #I miss me some Accepting Parents TM #also this idea started from a wild ass dream I almost fell into #where Ellie is being cared for by a homeless children’s shelter and won’t release her to Phantom because clearly that isn’t his daughter #they look nothing alike! but then Bruce Wayne is in town and is like I’m Sorry Maam Whats the Problem? cuz he overheard #and was baffled when she confirmed taht she said that #like he’s seeing a child who looks identical to this man with exception of minor features and the costume her dad’s wearing #he is SO confused #which does lead to Red Robin on a rooftop somewhere like #what the hyuck. the entire city- except for this poor guy -is faceblind!#is that genetic? and then he becomes hyperfixated so Oracle has to take over the actual operating part of their investigation as RR is gone #dpxdc #dcxdp #didnt intend to tag this as that actually but like ill just make a separate post for the non-crossover one #also 100% allowed to screenshot-reblog and transcribe my tags cuz I’m too tired and too far in

81 notes · View notes

thatrandombystander · 2 years ago

Text

Just got back from watching a production of Les Mis and yeah man to love another person really is to see the face of God 😭😭😭

#my favourite musical. last time i saw it was in..... 2015? around there #i have... some criticisms for this production but it made me cry a lot and left me dehydrated so it's still a win!#les mis #ramblings of a bystander #ok but seriously who decided to cast what looked like two south east asian sisters as child cosette and child eponine #and then adult eponine was also south east asian but cosette was NOT and was a full white woman #bizarre choice. we have so many characters to keep track of you should not be confusing my ability to follow them #a bit TOO many extras and too much activity on stage during sort of ensemble scenes #that made it a bit difficult to locate who was actually speaking/singing a couple times #javert was just a touch too stiff in his body language. actually a few missed body language opportunities #that would have helped clarify what was happening I'm just lucky to really know it all already #REALLY didn't like fantine's characterisation and delivery on a few lines but otherwise she was fine #also i can't believe enjolras first appeared on stage NOT wearing red and then had a costume change for the les amis cafe meetup #just put him in red straight away? why did grantaire also have a costume change to completely different color scheme at one point.#...it WAS a good production I'm just nitpicking. because it's my fave so i have OPINIONS #jean valjean was fantastic!#anyway. I'm gonna make myself some dinner now. and then see what I've missed

9 notes · View notes

ursaspecter · 11 months ago

Text

🌓 halfmoonhorror Follow

wtf i'm literally shaking and crying right now i just saw silver bullets for sale on temu why the fuck are there silver bullets on temu

🪢 knotexplosion Follow

Hey. Hey. Look at me. Do you genuinely believe Temu of all places is going to have genuine sterling silver bullets for sale? TEMU. Wish and Shein's bastard child?

🌓 halfmoonhorror Follow

they had wooden stakes on there too i'm actually fearing for my and my partner's lives right now

🦇 count-fuckula Follow

Yeah I bought some wooden stakes from Temu and they broke instantly. I wasn't even using any force to put them in my lawn as it rained quite recently. I wouldn't worry too much about any silver bullets you find. They're probably just silver plated.

🍖 roadkill-meatloaf Follow

Can confirm- Temu silver isn't real and can't hurt us. I bought a bunch of silver jewelry off there because I can't afford anything the legitimate stores are selling and when I tried them they barely even burned. Not worth it.

🍯 bearly-hanging-on Follow

Why on earth would you, a werewolf, buy silver jewelry???

🍖 roadkill-meatloaf Follow

well for me it's a sex thing.

🪢 knotexplosion Follow

Why would you voluntarily wear jewelry from Temu? Did you at least sanitize it first???

🍖 roadkill-meatloaf Follow

Uh... I licked it first. Werewolf saliva can disinfect surfaces right?

🪢 knotexplosion Follow

YOU WHAT

🦇 count-fuckula Follow

Oh my g-d just because werewolf saliva can make your wounds heal faster doesn't mean it works miracles!!!

🪢 knotexplosion Follow

Wait how would you know that?

🦇 count-fuckula Follow

@.daddy-fenris is not the brightest sometimes.

🌕 daddy-fenris Follow

oh my god IT WAS ONE TIME why do you have to put me on blast right now

🦇 count-fuckula Follow

The world needs to know. Roadkill please go see a doctor or a vet or something.

🌓 halfmoonhorror Follow

i feel like this is taking away from the real issue at paw

🪢 knotexplosion Follow

Can't you see we're having a conversation here?

🌓 halfmoonhorror Follow

IT'S MY POST???

🍖 roadkill-meatloaf Follow

Not anymore it's not

#unreality #fake post #dashboard simulator #werewolf #werewolves #monsterblr

15K notes · View notes

seat-safety-switch · 8 months ago

Text

When we were kids, we didn't have access to cool power tools. Every summer, when the soapbox derby race was coming, we'd break into my neighbour's garage while he was at work. Then, we'd use his drill press, lathe, table saw, all the fun tools. Over the course of a week, a race car was produced, which is more than the workshop ever made during the rest of the year.

Sure, we could have asked him if we could have borrowed his tools, but no doubt he would want to be there to supervise. And then he'd want to help. We'd never get done while we were busy indulging the suburb-tinged fantasies of someone who didn't take wood shop and chose instead to idly worship at the altar of Television Presents: The Fantasy of Bob Vila in adulthood.

One year, Old Man Garrett got a security system. Probably this was because Ted (fucking Ted) didn't clean up the sawdust that one time like we asked him to. The old man must have seen the footprint, and realized that he did not wear size-seven Nikes. Child thieves, casing his precious table saw! Now, our humble breaking-and-entering had become significantly more difficult than "reach a coat hanger under the door and pull the emergency release."

With the help of some of the high-school kids who were taking electronics class, we managed to defeat the security system. We did so using an ancient Japanese technique known as "distract Old Man Garrett while he's setting it, and then cut the wires to the panel." I think it loses something in translation, but you get the gist of it. That year's car was especially sweet.

In adulthood, I got drunk and bragged to some work buddies about our little scam. They responded in abject horror, because I was still occupying the weird hump in the middle of a normal distribution of "acceptable crimes." It was terrifying to them to see one of their own, one of the suburbanites, speak openly about largely-harmless property crimes. What if we had been hurt, they shrieked. Around the water cooler, I would become a pariah, unless I could make amends.

I did hunt down Old Man Garrett after that, still feeling the sting of rejection. He was still on the property, and he still had a beautiful collection of immaculate cabinet-making tools in the garage. I rang his doorbell and, when he answered, I told him the whole story. He laughed.

"I knew it was you dumb shits from the beginning," he bragged. "Fucking Ted -"

"Fucking Ted," I echoed, unconsciously.

"Fucking Ted left his library book on building race cars behind on the workbench that first year. You didn't let him drive, did you?"

I shook my head. "We ran the car into him if the hockey-stick brakes ever failed."

We had a good laugh about the whole thing that evening, and I returned to work with my soul cleansed. It's just a pity Ted didn't know how bad he actually was at crime, before he tried to knock over that liquor store and all.

#best of

7K notes · View notes

fireinmoonshot · 2 months ago

Text

touchy | joaquin torres x reader

Pairing: Joaquin Torres x Reader Summary: Joaquin has a thing where he always likes to have a hand on you whenever you're together – holding your waist, holding your hand, a hand resting on your thigh. You finally decide to confront him about why. Warnings: Mentions of food, a kind of spicy make-out scene. Word Count: 1.6k A/N: I had this idea and I just had to write it. It's shorter than my other Joaquin fics but I had so much fun writing it and I really just wanted to get something else for Joaquin out for you guys! Please send in requests for him if you have any! 💗

One thing you never expected when you started dating Joaquin Torres was how touchy the man was – there was barely any time when the two of you were together when he wasn’t touching you in some way.

It surprised you at first. He never came across as that kind of person. He was the definition of a Golden Retriever boyfriend. But then you’d be standing with him at a party and you’d feel his hand wrap around your waist, or whenever you had to cross the road, he’d hold your hand (not unlike your parents used to do when you were a child), or when you were at home watching a movie on the couch, his hand would rest on your thigh.

After several months of this, you finally decided to ask him why.

“Joaquin, can I ask you something?” You call from where you’re sitting in the living room, your eyes flickering up from the book that was on your lap – the one you’ve been trying to read and failing, owing to the fact that your boyfriend has been strutting around your apartment shirtless ever since he got out of the shower.

“Course you can, angel,” he calls back from the kitchen.

Out of the two of you, Joaquin is the cook of the family. You hadn’t trusted him in the kitchen at first – he had always seemed the type of person to accidentally chop off a finger because he was too distracted. But so far, no such accidents had occured and he was much better at making a delicious meal than you were.

You were quick to close your book and get up from the couch, padding through the hallway into the kitchen to see him standing at the bench, chopping something up on a cutting board in front of him – still irritatingly shirtless.

“Cooking shirtless is dangerous, you know,” you say, announcing your presence.

His eyes flicker up towards you. “For you or for me?”

You give him a look. “For you, pretty boy. I’m not the one holding the knife.”

Joaquin grins at you before putting the knife down, wiping his hands on the cloth on the bench beside him and grabbing the apron hanging over the back of one of your bar stools. “Should I put this on then? Someone clearly isn’t enjoying the show.”

“Baby,” you roll your eyes at him jokingly, crossing the room and snatching the apron out of his hands. “You know that’s not what I meant. I meant you could get burned by oil or slip and cut yourself or… well… there are plenty of dangers to cooking shirtless.”

Joaquin smirks, wrapping an arm around your waist and pulling you to his chest so you’re pressed together. “Angel, all those things you just listed are also things that could happen to me if I were wearing a shirt. You know that, right?”

You can’t help the way you pout at him. “Not my point, Joaquin.”

He grins and presses a quick peck to your lips. “Was that what you were coming in here to talk about?” He asks, his thumb swiping gently back and forth over your waist.

“No, actually,” you hum. “I was coming here to talk about this.” You motion in-between the two of you, at the contact between your bodies. You’re not not a fan of it – of course you love it – but it does amuse you, the fact that your boyfriend always wants to have a hand on you at all times.

Joaquin raises his eyebrows. “We playin’ charades? Am I meant to guess?”

You laugh a little. “No, silly. This. The way I walked into the kitchen and you swept me up into your arms immediately. The way you always have a hand on my back when we walk somewhere. The way you put your hand on my thigh when we’re on the couch. The way you’re touching me all the time.”

Irritatingly, your words have the opposite effect than intended and Joaquin steps away from you, removing his hand from your waist. You immediately miss the warmth of his body, the feeling of his hand on your waist, and almost reach back out for him.

“You don’t like it?” Joaquin asks, eyebrows furrowed in worry.

You hate the look on his face – the way he looks like a wounded puppy. His usually playful eyes look sad, full of fear and you can read his expression immediately. He thinks that by doing these things, he’s made you uncomfortable.

“Baby, no – I love it!” You attempt to rectify the situation. “I just was curious about why.”

Unable to keep looking at his sad puppy dog eyes anymore, you step forward, cupping his cheeks in your hands gently. His hands tentatively rest on your waist, as if he’s afraid you’re going to move away at any second but he simply can’t help but to touch you, just a little.

“You’re so touchy and I love it, Joaquin. I love having your hands on me all the time, I swear. Just now when you took your hands off my waist it was like… like it was suddenly winter and I was freezing cold without them. I just wanna know why you do it,” you explain further, making sure you keep eye contact with him.

Joaquin frowns a little. “I guess I never really thought about it,” he replies. “I think I kinda just do it without meaning to. I just love the feeling of having my hands on you, feeling your warmth, reminding myself that you’re beside me. And I mean…” He clears his throat. “Have you seen yourself, angel? Why would I not wanna touch you at any given opportunity?”

It’s like his confidence makes a return to his body, then. His grip on your waist gets tighter and he pulls you closer, forcing you to drop your hands from his face. They rest on his shoulders instead as he backs you up a little so you’re leaning against the counter. His body is pressed against yours again, like it was only minutes ago. The warmth you’d missed before falls over you like a sheet of pure comfort.

You can’t keep the smile off your face at his words and actions. “That’s kinda cute, Joaquin,” you admit. “That you do it without thinking about it. Like I said, I love the feeling of you having your hands on me too.”

“Cute?” Joaquin looks at you with raised eyebrows. “You think I’m cute?”

It’s hard not to smile at his tone. “Yeah, adorable. You’re like a little puppy. You were looking at me before with the most puppy dog eyes I’ve ever seen on a person. You looked so sad, I just wanted to pick you up and–”

Before you can finish speaking, Joaquin cuts you off by pressing his lips to yours. You moan at the sudden feeling of his lips, the feeling of his tongue swiping against your bottom lip. The way that his hands grip your waist tighter, one of them roaming up your back to grasp at the back of your neck so he can kiss you deeper.

The edge of the counter digs into your back but you barely even notice the feeling. One of your hands moves to run through Joaquin’s hair – it’s short, but long enough for you to grip, the other on his back. The feeling of his muscles against your palm only makes you want to kiss him more. The last thing you want to do is break apart for air.

Your breath hitches as he squeezes your waist again, forcing your lips apart. Both of you are breathing heavily, though the break doesn’t last long. Joaquin wastes no time in kissing you again, but this time his lips move from yours to your jaw. He presses soft, gentle kisses along the side of your jaw and down your neck. You tilt your head backwards, giving him better access. When your hand grasps onto his hip, he gasps a little and you can’t help but smile at the sound.

“See?” You mutter breathlessly, tilting your head forward again to meet his eyes. “I told you that cooking while shirtless was dangerous.”

Joaquin laughs at that, a gorgeous smile finding its way onto his face. You look at him, at the sweat on his forehead, the look of lust and love in his eyes, the way his chest moves up and down quickly, his breath still heavy from your small make out session. He’s easily the most gorgeous man you’ve ever laid eyes on… and he’s all yours.

He moves his hands down to your waist again and before you can do anything about it, he’s lifting you up so you’re sitting on the counter and pushing your legs apart so he can stand in-between them. At this angle, you’re basically the same height.

“I see no problems here, angel,” he flashes that gorgeous grin again before messily pressing his lips to yours again. He pulls away quickly though, much to your disappointment. “Now that we’ve established that I’m not cute, I am going to continue cooking you dinner. I’ll let you go back to your book.”

“Oh no,” you shake your head, turning to watch him as he returns to the cutting board. “I have a much better view right here than I do in the living room, baby. Besides, someone has to supervise you to make sure you stay safe while cooking like that… it’s bound to be a hard job but I’m pretty certain I’m up to the challenge...”

#joaquin torres #joaquin torres x reader #marvel #marvel x reader #captain america brave new world #captain america brave new world x reader #joaquin torres x you

2K notes · View notes

dumbbitchgalore · 2 months ago

Text

Old Man!Price craves a pretty little housewife to waiting for him at home 🎀

As John gets older, he has this visceral urge to domesticate you that it also seems obsessive of him.

Hand in hand, John'll bring you back home to his cottage in the Cotswolds causing your eyes to widen at the home in front of you. As if your pinterest board has come to life, stained glass windows and a garden full of peonies.

“God, this is exactly how I imagine my dream home to be like,” You say in awe before shrugging your shoulders, “Well that is if money wasn’t an issue.”

Your words earn a chuckle from John as he ushers you inside, giving you a tour of his home while you such over every little detail.

‘Oh, that backsplash is literally my dream!’

‘Oh my god, a reading nook?!’

‘No way, you have a bloody walk in the pantry?!’

The smirk ever leaves John’s face as you continue to gush over his house well into dinner.

John is a very committed and detail-oriented man and that is why he needed to get everything perfect according to your Pinterest boards. He never leaves anything up to chance so all he did was look through your phone, browse your inspiration boards getting an idea of what you’d call home.

His plan was coming into fruition. John had the house and now he had you inside of the house now all he has to do is to ‘accidentally’ get you pregnant. But there was a nagging fear at the back of his mind, a fear of potentially ruining an unborn child’s life with his obsession. As much as he wanted you to be at home taking care of his kids and tending to his house, John did not want to be a bad father.

Every time he’d fuck you raw, John would try with all his might to cum deep inside of you over and over again until your pretty cunt could no longer hold his cum in anymore as it seeps out of you causing John to plug you up with his fingers. But every single time, John would back out at the last minute opting to cum on your back or something.

He wanted to baby trap you but at the same time, he didn’t want you to blame him for everything that might go wrong in his life. The guilt will weigh too heavy for him to think that he ruined your chances of a better life without him.

So when tonight you suggest for John to wear a condom because you forgot to pick up your birth control, John doesn’t hold back. He on longer has that stupid harpy of a voice in the back of his mind telling him not to ruin you and to ‘fucking not destory the one good thing in your bloody life, John!’

Rutting into you like a teenage boy who stuck his cock for the first time into an actual cunt, John thrusts were quick and deep bringing you to the brink of an orgasm over and over again only to stop his hips for a few seconds to once again pummeling into you, his cock bully your sweet, sweet insides.

For once John is grateful for a condom, cumming inside you without a guilty conscience knowing that the condom didn’t let his cum paint your insides. He slumps against you, rolling onto his side as he holds your body flushed against his own, kissing your forehead and muttering words of thanks for ‘putting up with his old arse.’

It came to a shock when John sees the positive pregnancy test in your hands, the two blue lines mocking his efforts to not get you pregnant. A day later, he takes you ring shopping and proposes that same night.

Now who’s gonna tell John that you were the one who poked holes in his condom?

2K notes · View notes

eomayas · 10 months ago

Text

distracted • hjs

pairing: husband&dad!joshua, wife&mom!reader, established relationship

genre: smut 18+ MINORS DNI!!!!!!!!! fluff, parent au, non-idol au

synopsis: reader is literally just feral for joshua

warnings: pwp, p in v, oral (m receiving), riding, praise, dirty talk, soft!dom!josh, breeding, josh calls reader a ‘slut’ (lovingly) once, reader & josh are parents, reader losing her mind over josh mainly. JOSHUA ARMS. unedited ;)))

a/n: i’ve experienced extreme joshua brainrot lately then did an extreme deep dive of jarms (joshua arms) until 2 in the morning. i am unwell and need him like a fish needs water

joshua pushes the shopping cart that holds groceries, and your daughter in the front of the basket, down the aisle. you trail a step or two behind them, mind a bit foggy and… distracted. you don’t know what it is, he’s just wearing a plain, white tshirt and blue jeans—he’s worn it before—and you’re running errands together like you always do. but today is different, and you can’t seem to comprehend a single thing going on around you, or really look at your husband without feeling mild insanity.

first, you’d wandered into the store in a daze, forgetting that joshua was grabbing the shopping cart with your daughter, after having sat in the front seat watching him drive for twenty minutes. his hand sat steady at ten and two, ever the safe driver when your daughter was present, though at stop lights he would sometimes grab your hand or settle his palm on your leg. you felt lost since the morning, woke up with your mind cloudy and your brain foggy just at the mere sight of him.

then, you couldn’t remember a single thing on your grocery list. in your clouded state, you must’ve forgotten the list in the kitchen; it wasn’t a big deal, except for the fact that you literally couldn’t think about a single thing that you needed to buy, and you are usually the one leading the pack around the store. so the three of you have been wandering around the grocery store for longer than you want to be, circling back to the same aisles you’ve already been on because you can’t remember what it is you need to buy.

now you’re back in the dairy aisle, unsure of why you’re back because youve already grabbed milk and cream cheese, so you’re just standing in front of the cold, double doors without a single thought in your head. “yogurt, maybe?” joshua tries, pausing his conversation with your child to help you out. you blink once, twice before mumbling out a ‘right’ and pulling the doors open and grabbing a container.

“mommy, that’s not the right one!” your daughter whines when you drop it in the basket. she’s frowning at you, eyebrows crinkled the same way joshua’s do. god. you make the mistake of looking up at him, and your entire body flushes you meet his gaze. his eyes are soft but questioning, asking if you if you’re alright without actually saying it. no, i’m not, you think to yourself, discreetly sweeping your hand up your neck to check your pulse. it’s fast, and you’re definitely still alive.

joshua watches you with mild concern; he’s noticed your strange, avoidant behavior since this morning when he got back from the gym. you had looked almost surprised when he walked into your bedroom, like you weren’t expecting him back. your eyes widened, and your lips parted like you were going to say something but nothing came out. he beat you to words, anyway, giving you a soft ‘good morning’ that made you blush—he’d ignored it because you seemed… off—and kissed you on the lips. he thought he really smelled with the way you rushed your lips off of his and rolled out of bed, nearly tripping over your own feet. joshua grabbed you so you wouldn’t fall, and he felt you tense in his hold, a frown etching on his features. he brushed it off and asked if you wanted to shower with him, expecting a ‘yes’ from the look that flashed through your eyes, but you instead mumbled something about having to make breakfast before hurrying out of the bedroom all together. you basically avoided him all day since then, never really looking at him or talking to him directly—none of which you do on a constant basis.

the yogurt was, in fact, incorrect down to the brand and flavor. “i’m sorry, baby,” you say to your daughter, running a hand over her hair before grabbing the yogurt to swap it out for the correct one, this time taking a few seconds to scan everything in the fridge. you appreciate the cold air from the refrigerator, as it cools you down from the rush of heat you feel along your face and neck. you take a breath and tell yourself to get a fucking grip before dropping the correct item into the cart.

“daddy, can i get ice cream?” your daughter asks joshua as you start ambling through the grocery store. you cut your eyes at your daughter for not asking you, but you know it’s because joshua never says no to her.

“of course, princess,” and you watch with pure adoration as he places a kiss on her forehead and she just giggles, scrunching her shoulders up to her ears. joshua is a good husband, but he’s an even better father, and you love watching him interact with your daughter. they have a special connection that you love to witness, a secret language just between the two of them. it’s moment like this where you want another kid—or maybe it’s part of the hazy mess you’re in because of his sheer existence.

you follow behind joshua towards the ice cream aisle. the shirt he wears is tight on him, straining against his biceps and shoulders. you can make out his back muscles depending on how the light hits the fabric, and you feel even crazier than before. his muscles have been the source of your you distracted state today. joshua has always been muscular, and he’s always worked out, but something about him recently has flipped a switch in your brain that has made you feel absolutely feral every time you catch a mere glimpse of his arms—which is quite literally every day. this morning it was too overwhelming, him coming home and shedding his jacket to reveal himself in a simple black tank top that looked a size too small, and gray sweats that made you feel like you needed to go to confessional.

another rush of cold air pulls you out of your lustful daze and you stand at the back of the shopping cart as joshua shuffles through the cartons of ice cream, asking your daughter her input. you try to keep your eyes focused on your daughter, anything else, but cant help when they drift over to your husband, his arms flexing each time he grabs a pint and displays it to your daughter. joshua casts a glance at you, a smile that says can you believe this? when you daughter shakes her head for the fourth time, despite not asking to look for herself. you blush under his gaze, heat spreading down your neck and chest before settling in your stomach.

"i thought you liked the oreo one?" you say to your daughter, voice slightly hoarse. you smooth a hand over her hair to give yourself something to do, hands a little clammy from all of your nerves working overtime.

"i do..." she trails off, turning to look at you with a tiny pout on her lips.

"tell daddy before he freezes," you say, placing a soft kiss on her cheek. just the mere reference to joshua feels heavy in your mouth, makes your stomach flutter for reasons you can't really explain.

joshua places the pint of oreo ice cream into the cart, circling around to the front and playfully ticking your daughter under her chin. she giggles loudly and you smile as you watch her become a spitting image of her father. arms cage you between the carts handlebar and a firm chest, and suddenly your eyes are no longer on your kid but on the strong, veiny forearms that belong to your husband. “excuse me,” he murmurs, a teasing lilt to his voice like he knows that you’re losing your mind at the simple sight of him.

wordlessly, you gently grab his right arm to remove yourself from his entrapment. “hey,” joshua says softly, reaching out for your wrist as you move swiftly to get away from him. turning, goosebumps arise on your skin, and you tell yourself that it’s because his hands are ice cold. “you okay, honey?” your stomach flips and you press your lips into a small smile, nodding.

joshua stares at you for a beat before leaning down a few inches, silently begging for a kiss. you nearly combust at the thought, not trustworthy of yourself to behave normally in public. but his eyes are fond, and you love him so much and want him so bad that you raise up on your toes and brace yourself on his shoulders before delivering a soft, quick peck to his lips. you’re proud of yourself for holding back, but joshua isn’t satisfied because he stays leaned over in the spot you kissed him in for a few seconds after the fact that you’ve pulled away. if you were at home, he’d yank you back to him but because you’re in public he files that grievance away and straightens up.

“i want a kiss,” your daughter pouts, cutely crossing her arms over her chest. since she doesn’t specify from whom, both of you lean in and press kisses to her cheeks. her giggle ripples through you, filling your stomach with butterflies and your chest with a type of love reserved only for her. you’re momentarily pulled away from your joshua shaped daze, until his hand is settling on your lower back. it chilling, his touch, and it’s not because his hands are ice cold from standing in the grocery store freezer for two minutes.

a shiver runs up your spine and you slip out of his grasp, not paying attention to where or what you’re walking into until joshua is pulling you back into him, his hand splayed across your stomach and your back colliding with his chest. “babe, watch out,” a woman pushing a cart stops short, a look of remorse on her face.

“oh my god, did i hit you?” she asks, and you figure you must look injured or something, because she looks genuinely concerned for your wellbeing. the flush on your face is not due to the fact that you were almost ran over, but because joshua hasn’t moved his hand from your stomach and hasn’t put any distance between your back and his front. he stays pressed against you, holding you firmly in front of him, his hold tightening ever so slightly.

“n-no, i’m alright,” you manage, lips tingling. “i swear.” you add when her eyebrows don’t drop from her hairline. at that, she seems to believe you enough snd offers you a smile and a curt nod before hurrying down the aisle.

“are you alright, honey? you’re trembling,” joshua says, his deep voice like melted wax running down your back. you make the mistake of looking up and over your shoulder at him, his palm pressing into your lower belly.

he peers down at you with soft eyes, ready to question you again until your tongue darts out to wet your lips before you tuck your bottom lip under your top one and nod. he knows the look in your eyes all too well—hunger, but not for food—and heat pools in his chest. joshua is much better at hiding his desire for you, especially in public and in front of your child, and he’s able to keep his expression the same, pretending he never saw that look in your eye. “i’m fine,” you’re shuffling away from him again, this time checking to make sure you’re not seconds away from being ran over with a shopping cart.

somehow, you three mange to finish your shopping trip without anymore mishaps. it requires circling back to the same aisles more than once because neither you nor josh can remember what you wanted to buy, but at least you can say you’re done. joshua loads the groceries into the trunk while you buckle your daughter into the backseat. she yawns, stretching her little arms up and out. “sleepy?” you ask her, a small smile on your face.

“no,” she says, vehemently shaking her head. you chuckle hum a sound of disbelief before dropping a kiss on her forehead and going to the front seat. the trunk closes and you suck in a breath as you watch him in the rearview mirror. he brushes his hand through his hair, and even through the mirror and the tint of the trunk window, you can make out his bicep muscle flexing with the motion.

it’s nearly pathetic how horny you feel just looking at him—like an overgrown teenager who just got into their first relationship. except you’re an adult, married to this man, and this behavior is no longer considered ‘cute’.

joshua gets into the front seat and smiles at you, leaning over the console to give you a kiss. his hand rests on the side of your neck, and you wonder if he’s trying to check your pulse, to mess with you. you keep your hands to yourself, because if you touch him, you might never stop.

pulling back from your mouth, he looks into your eyes before flicking them back down to your lips. joshua starts to lean in but seems to remember you’re not alone, and sits back in his seat, his hand lingering on your neck for a moment before he starts the car and asks your daughter if she’s ready to go.

the car ride is quiet, save for your daughters yawns and insistence that she is not tired. she makes most of the noise, talking about random things that you and joshua entertain with ease. he watches her in the review mirror with real, unconditional love in his eyes. it does nothing to help your situation, and just makes you want to give him another baby.

when you arrive back at your house, you quickly get out of the car, grateful to get out of the stuffy, suffocating feeling of being in the front seat. you walk around the back and help your daughter out, ready to carry her inside until she exclaims, “i want to help!”

you ser her down on the ground and she runs over to joshua. you watch him give her two of the lighter bags of groceries, and raises her arms to show you, a big smile on her face. you smile back and press in the garage code and tell her to go inside of the house, seemingly leaving you and joshua alone. you sidle up next to him, and joshua lightly bumps his hip into yours. “hmm?” you question without looking up from the numerous bags in the back of the car.

“why are you avoiding me?” he asks, and the directness makes your hands clam up.

“i’m not avoiding you,” you say, taking a few grocery bags and backing up from him.

“you quite literally are.”

you stare up at him, his eyebrows knitted together in slight irritation. “i still love you, if that’s what you’re asking,” you clarify. his features soften and his shoulders relax a bit. those shoulders. your eyes drifts down his figure, lingering on his flexed forearms, veins bulging out from the tension of carrying the grocery bags.

joshua watches you obviously ogle and check him out, his entire figure relaxing at his realization. “oh, i get it now,” he teases, a slow smirk sliding across his lips.

“get what?” you play dumb, taking a tentative step backwards before turning around and trying to keep your walk casual as you walk through the garage. it’s so obvious you’re trying to keep space between the two of you, putting anything in the way to keep you off of him.

“that you wan-“ joshua cuts himself off because you push open the door that leads you into the house. he clears his throat and closes the garage door before following behind you into the kitchen. your daughter is standing on her tippy toes trying to reach a cupboard that’s way to high for her, concentration etched on her face. “need help, bub?” he asks, setting his bags down on the counter.

“i can’t reach,” she whines, yawning immediately after. joshua lifts her up into his arms and opens the cupboard for her abd allows her to put the item away. “i’m tired, daddy.” she rests her head on his shoulder, tiny arms encircling around his neck.

you watch them and you feel your heart grow three times in size, like the grinch. joshua coos at her and pats her head before agreeing to put her down for a nap. you busy yourself with unloading the groceries, stomach flipping at the thought of having at least an hour alone with your husband. you can’t believe how depraved you feel.

joshua comes back downstairs a few minutes later, right when you’re putting the last thing into the fridge. “you finished?” he asks. you nod, heart hammering in your chest as he walks over to you. his hands drop onto your hips, pulling you flush against him. you keep your eyes straight ahead, leveled wirh his chest, and joshua dips his head down to meet your eyes. “see: you’re avoiding me.”

hear creeps up your neck and you shake your head. “i’m not.”

“don’t try to gaslight me,” he teases, making you roll your eyes and finally look up at him. “there she is.” he murmurs, leaning down a few centimeters to connect your lips. your hands flatten against his chest, and he walks your backwards into one of the kitchen counters. joshua leans over you, trying to press you flat against the surface despite the lack of space.

“shua,” you breathe once you pull away when he unbuttons your jeans.

“what, you’ve got somewhere better to be?” he asks, arching one of his eyebrows.

“i… i have to do laundry…” you say halfheartedly. joshua laughs at this, dropping his forehead against yours. “i’m serious!” you say, but you’re smiling too. “i want to go back to avoiding you.”

joshua pulls back to look down at you, making a face that says for what? “i thought you wanted me to fuck you?”

“yeah, i’m afraid nothing will keep me off of you if we start,” you say honestly. joshua blushes deeply, a boyish grin on his face. “i want you so bad—i think i might be ovulating? i don’t know. i just want you so. bad.” you punctuate the last part with the press of your knuckles into his chest.

“you’re ovulating?” it’s like bells went off in his head.

“maybe, i don’t know. i don’t keep track of that shit. i just need an explanation for how i feel,” you say, hands sliding along his chest absentmindedly.

joshua raises both of his eyebrows at you, fake shock on his face. “maybe because you have a super hot and sexy husband who is also a really good father? just a hunch.”

“no, i don’t think that’s it,” he rolls his eyes at you and you giggle, balling his shirt up into your fists and pulling him down to you. joshua grips onto the counter to steady himself, his hold tight enough to turn his knuckles white. he presses his pelvis into yours, his his erection pressing against your leg.

joshua wraps an arm around you and splays his hand across the small of your back. he presses you down onto the counter and you grip his shoulders tightly, craning your mouth away from his to breathe out, “not here.” he pulls you up from the counter and looks down at you, his chest moving up and down quickly. you can practically see the gears turning in his head as he thinks about a place to fuck you that won’t bring attention to the two of you. “laund-ah!” he swoops you up into his arms easily, already carrying you in the direction of your laundry room before you can even get the entire word out.

you wrap your legs around his waist as you buzz with need and anticipation. you let yourself revel at being carried by him after lusting over his arms all day. he carries you like you’re weightless, with his his hands resting under your ass for support. “god,” you whisper to yourself, pressing a kiss into his neck.

“i love you,” he rasps as he enters the laundry room. he shuts and locks the door behind him before dropping you onto the washing machine. his hands are flying to undo the buttons of your blouse and you pull him closer using your ankles that are still wrapped around him.

“love you more,” you murmur, helping him with removing your top. “your turn.” your urge, pulling the hem of his shirt.

“sure you can handle it?” he teases. you flush and lightly push at his abdomen. “don’t wanna make you pass out or anything.” he smirks at you, loving to watch you squirm.

“i can handle it,” you say, feeling so embarrassed to even be in this position. luckily, joshua is sweet to you above all and draws you in for a kiss. you skate your hands up underneath his shirt, nails lightly scratching against his torso. “take it off.” you mumble against his lips, hands pushing up the material of his shirt. you feel like you could rip him out of the fabric.

joshua pulls back and makes an entire show of getting undressed. he runs a hand through his hair and purposefully flexes his bicep as he does so. if this was any other time, you’d roll your eyes and call him annoying. but today, all you can do is watch and try not to drool.

he pulls his shirt over his head and tosses it into an empty laundry basket nearby. you waste no time leaning forward and pulling him into a kiss, threading your fingers through his hair. you move to kiss his jaw and then his neck, your hands sliding down his body. you kiss across his chest, going lower until the position becomes uncomfortable. lightly shoving him, you hop off of the washing machine and drop to your knees in front of him.

joshua watches you with dark eyes, holding onto the edge of the machine. you fumble with his belt, hands shaking with anticipation of finally having him, and he makes no effort to help you out. your hands work too fast, and you mess up when you try to pull the buckle open for the second time. “i’ve got all day,” he say smugly. you ignore him, and finally pull his belt free. you work his pants down to his ankles, leaving. him in just his briefs. you let out a breath and look up at him with pure lust. “as pretty as you look right now, you’d look much better with my cock in your mouth.”

quickly, you pull his underwear down and let them pool together with his pants, hands flying to grab ahold of his member. you pump him a few times, flicking your eyes to look up at him. joshua gives you a slight nod, signaling you to start sucking, and you eagerly oblige. sticking your tongue out, you lick up the precum that dribbles out of the tip before you wrap your lips around the head and push him into your mouth, cheeks hollowing as you go. a groan escapes joshua’s mouth and he gathers your hair into a makeshift ponytail.

you drag him into your mouth inch by inch, your eyes never once leaving his. his chest heaves up and down, moving faster and faster the closer you get to taking him all the way. tears prick in your eyes when he hits the back of your throat, but you keep going until your nose nearly presses into his hips. “shit,” he whispers, leaning more of his weight into the washing machine.

you bob your head up and down, pulling back and stroking what doesn’t fit. you swirl your tongue around the tip, cheeks hollowing to create more suction when you suck on the tip. joshua moans lowly above you and tells you how good you’re doing. his eyes flutter shut, squeezed shut in pleasure and his chin drops down to his mouth. you want his eyes on you, want him to watch you as you make him feel good, so you purposefully scrape your teach against his dick to get his attention.

his eyes fly open as he jerks back from you, glaring at you when you smile around him. “brat,” he spits and tightens his grip on your hair. you sigh through your nose and press your thighs together, cunt throbbing with need. you keep bobbing your head, speeding up slightly and taking more of him into your mouth. when joshua presses your head down, you relax your throat and let him take control, hands moving to hold onto his thighs. “good girl.” he grunts, holding your head down on his dick for a few seconds until you gag, and then he pulls you off of him.

he does this a few more times, his cock twitching against your tongue. tears gather in your eyes but you power through, determined to make him cum. he pulls you down onto him, cursing each time he hits the back of your throat. “fuck, you take me so well. i’m c-close,” tears slip down your cheeks and mix in with the spit and cum. your face is a mess, but neither of you care.

joshua fucks his cock into your mouth, holding your head steady in his hands. you dig your nails his thighs to combat the ache in your jaw. he thrusts into your mouth until he can’t take the feeling of your warm mouth around him anymore, his cum shooting into the back of your throat. you keep your mouth open to catch all of his seed, some of it gathering around the corner of your lips. “s-swallow,” he demands when he pulls his cock away from your mouth.

you obediently swallow, and he whines in the back of his throat. “goddamn, i love you,” he holds his hands out to you and helps you up onto his feet. he wipes the corners of you lips with his thumb and shoves it into your mouth, lips parting when you suck on his thumb like you just did his cock. “youre such a slut.” he murmurs, a loving gaze in his eyes.

a trail of saliva connects your lips to his thumb when you pull it out of your mouth. “promise?” you ask.

joshua smiles and pulls you into a kiss, his tongue slipping into your mouth. his hands make use of unbuttoning your jeans and shoving his hands down your pants. your panties are damp, and he’s a bit shocked and honored that you’re this wet for him. “i need you,” you whine, peppering kisses down his neck. you don’t even want his fingers, just want him inside of you.

“i know,” he rasps, slipping a finger between your folds. you shudder when he touches you, his finger playing with your arousal and brushing over your clit, just to make you jump. you clench around nothing, and it’s nearly painful how turned on you are.

“joshua!” you whine, nipping at his neck. his hand immediately grabs onto your hair and yanks, a hiss emitting from your lips followed by a smirk.

“needy brat,” he grumbles, walking the two of you over to the work bench in the room. he drops onto it and spreads his legs invitingly. you quickly step out of your jeans and underwear, his eyes roaming over your body. “you’re a beautiful, y/n.”joshua says sincerely; at the end of the day, he is simply a lover boy.

you smile at him and quickly drop yourself onto his lap, straddling him and wrapping your arms around his neck. you reach between the two of you and position yourself over his cock. his hands grip onto your hips tightly and guide you down onto him, bottom lip drawing in between his teeth.

“ah-fuck!” you cry when you sink onto the tip, the initial stretch rippling through you.

“you’ve got it, baby,” he encourages, thumbs rubbing sift circles into your hips. you bite down on your bottom lip, hands gripping tightly onto his shoulders as you sink lower and lower onto him. “goddamn, girl.” he grunts, hips bucking when you clench around him.

when you manage to take all of him, you sit still and catch your breath, head resting on his shoulder. joshua unhooks your bra and you lean back to slide it off your arms. “you okay?” he asks, hands groping your chest.

“uh huh,” you rasp, taking it as a sign to start fuckign him, licking your lips and raising your hips before dropping onto his lap. “fuck, shua.” whimpers leave you lips as you fuck yourself onto him, using his shoulders as leverage to move yourself up and down. joshua relaxes into the wall, his grip on your hips loosening as you gain momentum and find a rhythm.

“you’re so tight,” he groans, one of his thumbs finding your clit and rubbing slow circles around the sensitive nub. “been thinking about fucking you all day.” joshua sighs and rubs your clit quicker, eyes peering up to watch your facial expressions. “you need me as bad as i needed you?” he mumbles, voice low and husky.

“more,” you pant, still bouncing up and down on him. your cunt clamps around him like it’s trying to keep him there. “shuaaa!” you whine, thighs burning. you sit on his lap, rolling your hips into his.

he chuckles breathlessly, rolling his other thumb over one of your nipples. “yeah? tell me,” he grins at you devilishly, this side of him only coming out in your intimate moments.

“so bad,” you cry, grinding down onto his lap. “w-wanna give you a-another baby.” you squeeze around him involuntarily, a knot forming in your stomach. joshua twitches inside of you at the mention of having another child.

“yeah? want me to fill you up?” you whimper and nod, legs starting to shake. “want me to fuck you full of my cum until you’re pregnant again?” he lets go of you breast to place both hands underneath your ass. he lifts you up and drops you down, a show of his strength as he fucks you up an down onto him.

joshua grumbles filthy things into your ear; tells you that he’s gonna fuck you until you can’t walk, that he’s gonna stuff you full, that’s he’s going to give you another baby tonight. “f-fuck! i-im gonna cum,” you cry, throwing your head back in pleasure. he bucks his hips up into you, hitting that spongy spot inside of you repeatedly.

spots blur your vision and your cunt spasms around him as you reach your climax. it hits you like a thousand bricks, and you’re shaking in his arm and crying out his name. you expect him to stop, but he keeps thrusting up into you, drawing out your orgasm further. you can hardly think through the waves of pleasure, which is why you hardly register that he’s lifted you up until you’re placed on a cold surface.

joshua drags you to the edge of the washing machine and slams his cock into you, nearly knocking the wind out of you. “o-oh my god,” you gasp, tears brimming in your eyes for the second time tonight. “you feel so good!”

he drives his hips into you brutally, his fingers digging into the fat of your thighs. “f-fuck, i’m not gonna last,” he groans, dropping his head into your neck. he kisses your skin and lightly bites, though not hard enough to leave marks. you cling to him, arms secured around his shoulders like you may fall if you dont hold on.

his thrusts get sloppier by the second, indicative of his nearing climax. “i love you,” you breathe, nails clawing at his back. he grunts, whining out curses as he cums inside of you, his dick twitching between your walls. he stills, fingers applying bruising pressure to your hips.

after a few moments, he lifts his head from your shoulder and looks at you, a tender smile on his face. he presses his lips to your gently, sighing against you as he goes soft. “shit,” he pants, followed by a light chuckle.

you can’t help but giggle back, running a hand through his hair. he doesn’t want to pull out, not yet at least, wanting to make sure his cum stays inside of you as long as possible. he lets go of your thighs and wraps his arms around you, squeezing you into his chest. you kiss the column of his throat, right on his adam’s apple and rubs soft circles into your back.

“we should clean up,” he murmurs, starting to draw back from you. you make a sound of disagreement and squeeze around him on purpose. “b-brat.” he stammers, curling away from you.

he pulls out of you with a lewd squelch, both of you turning light shades of pink at the noise. he helps you off of the washer and you lean against it. he finds a random towel and comes back to wipe between your legs before cleaning himself off and tossing it in the same basket he threw his shirt in. “i guess i could start a load,” you say, looking at all of the discarded clothes, making joshua laugh.

he helps you gather them up and drop them into the washer. you add in the detergent and slam the top closed. except, when you go to start the washer, joshua places a hand on your back and presses you flat against the washer and slots his knee between your legs to spread them open. you don’t get a chance to prepare yourself because he’s pushing into you again, a strong arm wrapping around your middle to hold you steady as he fucks into you from behind, determined to get you pregnant tonight.

#svt smut #svt imagines #seventeen x reader #svt x you #svt x reader #seventeen x you #seventeen smut #joshua x reader #joshua fluff #joshua smut #hong jisoo #hong jisoo x reader #hong jisoo smut #hong jisoo fluff #svt fluff #seventeen fluff #svt scenarios #seventeen imagines #seventeen scenarios

4K notes · View notes