#*hustlers pose

[the-real-couchrat]

Part one of “fanart for specific but favorite TAU fics of mine”!

Yet She Still Stood by @sezija

I was going for a victorian mourning dress for The Women, and futuristic formal for Dipper. (Inspired by these posts)

I had the idea that The Women would tattoo (magic, she can make them visible at will) Alcor’s blessing all over herself, as extra psychological torment (because that mark is only given to those he loves and trusts, and she absolutely does not qualify) but it’s not canon in any way, I just made it up.

Reference art by @sezija

Don’t mind the backgrounds please.

Edit:

I forgot to add this earlier, but I made a playlist for it

Also if anybody has suggestions or advice for it, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I struggled with this one for a while.

[gatheringbones]

[“Liz, a cis-lesbian Latina, earned a low income; however, she lived with her wife from whom she was separated, but continued to contribute to her livelihood. Liz also was close to finishing her bachelor’s degree at the time we spoke. When I asked Liz to rate the photo of woman B, a “more visibly trans” Latina, she described the photo in this way:

Liz: Uh . . . this is a wig [on woman B]? [pause] um (laughs) [pause] I don’t know. It’s going to be a [pause] 5 [for woman B]. . . . Because is [pause] she has, I mean she’s a woman. I know she’s a woman, because if she’s dressed up like that and she is, you know, she’s posing like that for the picture, she looks like a woman. So is, she should be considered a woman, but uh in terms of how attracted I am, I’m not because [pause] I see the masculine um [pause; gestures at face]

alithia: Facial structure?

Liz: Yes, facial structure, so I’m not attracted and I also see that it’s obviously a wig. So yeah, but I’m gonna give it a 5, because it’s, I always appreciate and I always uh admire that, you know, they feel like a woman and regardless of what they are, I, I really, I call it bravery. And I love that, but the question is how attracted I am right? Yeah, so I’m gonna give it a 5.

Liz’s response highlights a disapproval of the wig’s visibility as synthetic hair, rather than real human hair. Such a statement points to her desire for a natural look in a woman. Liz’s lack of attraction to a woman due to her wearing a synthetic wig, though, as detailed in chapter 1, is attached to classed and racialized notions of hair and “real” hair. Human hair wigs that use hair grown and harvested from people (mostly women often in the Global South) cost hundreds of dollars, with some even costing up to two-thousand dollars. Transgender women, though, do not always have the financial resources available to afford higher quality wigs that also require higher upkeep than a synthetic wig. Liz additionally highlighted earlier in the interview a desire for a White woman, in particular. While cisgender, White women wear wigs, wigs remain more associated with Black and/or trans women than they do others.

Earlier in the interview, Liz explained to me that education mattered to her in terms of her attractions to women. She preferred “women who have some kind of education . . . They don’t necessarily need to have a bachelor’s degree . . . but at least the intention of pursuing one.” Liz’s lack of attraction to this woman was not simply out of dislike for a particular hairstyle or a particular wig. Instead, Liz’s description of woman B was shaped by raced and classed femininities and notions of desire. Woman B’s wig and aesthetic, in many ways, exemplified what Schippers terms “pariah femininities,” or the embodiment of those characteristics and behaviors that “are simultaneously stigmatized and feminized.” Woman B was hyperfeminine but did not embody hegemonic femininity.

In comparison to Liz, Amanda was a cis-bi, Black woman who lived in poverty, did not have stable housing, and had not completed high school. Amanda was the only cis woman participant to intentionally choose a “more visibly trans” participant. Amanda desired a woman who looks like she parties and goes out to clubs and bars often. She did not find woman B to be more beautiful than the others, but she liked the way woman B dressed. Amanda chose woman B “only because it looks like I’ll have more fun with that person, and then just by the background, it looks like they have that street life like that.” Amanda, then, both chose “visibly trans” women not because of their physical features but more so based off dress in comparison to others who found these women unappealing because of their physical features and clothing. Amanda herself wore clothing like woman B and had brightly colored box braids, and she desired a woman that was a “hustler . . . because you know how to get money.” Amanda’s attraction to woman B because she “looks like [she has] that street life” highlighted her affiliation for pariah femininities. Amanda did not desire a woman who embodied hegemonic femininities nor White, middle-class femininity. “More visibly trans” women like woman B displayed a pariah femininity that, for Amanda, was desirable not because of how it looked but for what it represented.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[sunvisorlingerie]

Hello! Got obsessed with DoL so of course I had to draw my PC. I have a lot of lore for him I wanna post here, but for now enjoy this drawing of my little hustler. He wears school clothes most of the time because he is too busy with #thegrind to wear anything else if that gives you an indication of his character.

Pose based off a Bart Grein photoshoot!

[brianwashere]

Hi! I’m not sure if you’re still taking requests but if you are, can I ask for one, Batfam x vigilante!male!reader. The reader is a teen (younger than Tim and older than Damian). He’s like super smart and knows martial arts and is a total badass. The bat family has been trying to catch him for a year now. The reader just stopped a drug dealing, near the docks and was about to go back to patrolling but nightwing and Robin show up. They fight for a bit and robin kicks the reader in the water. The reader is exhausted too and passes out. Nightwing sees the reader not coming back up and dives in and rescues him. They take him back to the bat cave, put him in like a cell and the batfam starts questioning him. They find out he’s a kid and a orphan and ALSO knows who they are, bruce decides to adopt him (the reader and Robin not wanting that) but Bruce says something like since the readers just a kid and he already knows their identity, might as well adopt him and keep a eye on him. Thank youuuuu, I hope you can do this! Sorry if it’s a bit much <3

YIPPEE!!! First req in a long time :DD I had to churn this out in like two days so sorry if it feels rushed!

Ahahaha ignore that it’s 1:40 am

**I do not own any characters or part of the franchise from DC**

Pairing: Batfam x male!teen!vigilante!Reader

Genre: found family

Summary: go to req

Tw: brief mention of blood, almost drowning, mention of drugs and drug rings

It’s Called: Freefall

Being a vigilante in Gotham was easy. Easy if you were professionally trained in combat. Easy if you had the money to get every little convenient device you wanted.

Neither of which you were.

Both of which Batman and his posee of underlings were.

Sure you’d picked up what you could being on the street, fending for yourself, sneaking into dojos and boxing gyms to observe and practice later yourself. But in the end, you were just some kid trying to make your way in the vigilante scene. Which led you to the situation you were in currently.

You were crouched on top of two metal shipping crates staring down at the drug deal soon to take place. You squinted through the mixture of darkness and heavy rain. A new drug had recently hit Gotham’s streets and you intended to get your answers and drop the contraband by the police station.

You saw the seller take his position. You readied yourself but waited until the buyer showed up. You needed to be sure they actually had the drugs before you went down guns blazing, cracking skulls and kicking ass.

As soon as you saw the drugs leave the jacket you were on them, jumping from your hiding spot onto the seller, tackling him to the ground. The man yelped in surprise and pain while the buyer started running. You spared the buyer a glance, grunting in annoyance.

“Get the hell off of me you freak!” The seller yelled as you kneeled on his arms and back, pinning him to the ground and grabbing the dropped bag of substances. You sighed as he struggled under you.

“Where’d you get this?” You demanded, increasing the pressure on his back.

“None of your business!” He spat.

“Look, buddy. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The hard way involves dangling from Wayne enterprises.” You said through grit teeth.

The man seemed to pale at the threat of heights.

“A-a ring leader…we just call him the boss. I swear that’s all I know!” He practically screamed.

“God what a cliché…” You grumbled to yourself, landing a swift blow to his head and knocking him out. You stood up and stretched, groaning.

‘Jesus—my back hurts.’

You brought the bag down to inspect it before shrugging and shoving it into your backpack. You’ll deal with it on the way home. You glanced back down at the unconscious drug hustler.

“Not your day today, buddy.” You said shaking your head.

Then you heard an abnormal sound in the white noise of the rain. A hard thunk on metal. You stilled. Were they really here? Had they searched for you specifically or did they get the same tip as you?

You tensed, preparing. Someone landed behind you and you whipped around to face them.

‘Nightwing.’

‘This is fine. I can handle him…. No. No I definitely can’t. Ok this is fine this is ok.’

“Ready to finally come quietly?” Nightwing flashed a smile.

You returned it with malice. “Never in a million years, boy wonder.” You laughed to yourself.

His smile faltered and he just shrugged.

“Well you brought this upon yourself.” He said and another person jumped down behind you.

You snapped your head in their direction.

‘Robin. The pipsqueak. Great.’

You backed away slowly from both of them, your eyes glancing back and forth between them. They both move at you suddenly. You jump back and dodge one attack from Robin, simultaneously throwing yourself into Nightwing—luckily it caused him to fumble. Your back hit the ground and you grunted in pain. Robin ran at you and you kicked him away from you.

The little caped rat was launched back, skidding to his knees before getting back into an offensive stance. You scrambled to your feet, taking a defensive position. You grit your teeth and glared at him, prepared.

The fight went on for what felt like hours, especially in a two against one.

You spat on the ground; your muscles ached. You saw the flash of red on the asphalt before the rain washed it away. That distracted you enough for Robin to kick you off the dock into the frigid water below.

The water swamped you all at once. The cold seemed to knock all the warmth from your body. You panicked as you sank further and further down, you were so tired. You just wanted to rest. You kicked and flapped your arms desperately but you didn’t feel in control of them. You couldn’t hold your breath anymore. The darkness pulled your mind further from consciousness and you passed out.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤⋆

C’mon, Nightwing.” Robin said to the dark haired man who was staring into the water.

“He’s not coming up.” Nightwing responded.

Robin looked at his brother and raised an eyebrow.

“So?” He asked indifferently.

“He’s in trouble.” Nightwing seemed to have made a decision in that answer.

“What does it—.”

Robin was cut off by Nightwint diving into the water.

“Dammit, Grayson!” Robin yelled after Nightwing.

About a minute later, Nightwing emerged.

“You’re an absolute idiot.” Robin spat at Nightwing, helping him back onto the docks with the young vigilante in his arms.

“He was gunna die.” Nightwing retorted.

“Great.” Robin started sarcastically. “Now, since you’ve saved him, you can drop him here and let the cops deal with him.”

“We’re not doing that, Robin.” Nightwing responded, tiredly.

“I don’t like what you’re suggesting.” Robin growled.

“Suggested? I didn’t even say anything.” Nightwing chuckled some.

“You’re implying we take him back to the cave.”

“He could have answers.”

“He’s a cretin. Not even worth the trouble.” Robin grumbled.

“Always glad to hear your opinions.” Nightwing said sarcastically, already heading back towards the Batcave.

Robin rolled his eyes and reluctantly followed.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤⋆

You opened your eyes to blaring lights above you.

‘God, what time is it?’

You rolled over to try and shield your eyes from the light.

‘Lights?’

You rubbed your eyes. You felt no mask. Fear spiked your heart. Memory of the drug pickup and fighting two of Batman’s sidekicks and passing out in the water flooded your brain all at once. You shot up and realized you were in a cell.

‘Oh no no no no no no—‘

You quickly stood up and stumbled. You managed to catch yourself on a glass wall.

“He’s awake, circus clown!“

You looked up to see the Red Hood pushing himself off a wall, looking very tired. Your eyes adjusted to the light as he walked to the front of the cell. No point in hiding your face, they’ve all probably seen it. Nightwing joined him, looking a little too pleased for your liking.

“The man himself gunna show up or did he leave his favorite to do his biding for him?” Red Hood asked. However, there didn’t seem to be much bite behind his words.

“I’ve been here, Red Hood.” Batman himself emerged from the shadows with Robin appearing from behind him like a lost puppy. A very…angry puppy.

Red Hood startled some at the sudden appearance, but recovered quickly. The gun wielding vigilante seemed to curse something at Batman but you couldn’t hear.

“Let’s not delay this anymore.” Batman spoke.

You swallowed. His gaze pierced through chest and saw right through you.

‘Start what?’

“What’s your name?” Batman’s voice was gruff.

“Like hell I’d—“ You started.

“Yo! Red Robin!” Red Hood called to the other other Robin somewhere out of your view.

Your full name, alias, and address was listed within the second. Your heart fell to your stomach and crawled back up again. Nausea punched your gut.

“Tell us all you know about the drugs and the ring relating to them.” Batman’s tone wasn’t aggressive, but you weren’t fooled. This was a command.

“Dunno anything…” You slurred out. Christ, you hurt everywhere.

“I don’t believe you.” He responded.

You rolled your eyes. Sure, you were lying but you just wanted to go home. To nap. Oh my god a nap sounded great right now.

“They call it amethyst. It’s a narcotic. It’s new but sweeping the streets fast. That’s all I know.” You grit out.

“Where are your parents, kid?” Batman asked.

“Don’t you know, since you apparently know everything?” You growled at him.

“I do. I just want confirmation from you.” He responded calmly.

“Six feet under at Gotham Cemetery. You can take up my behavioral issues with them. I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to hear about them.” You told him sarcastically.

Batman was quiet, thinking. Robin suddenly seemed to catch onto something.

“No! No! You’re not going to—!” He yelled.

Batman approached the cell and slipped off his cowl. Your eyes widened. You tried to speak but you couldn’t.

“You’re too young to be on your own. You’re younger than my second youngest. How’d you like to live with me and my family?”

You shook your head from you stunned state.

“What!” You gaped.

“No!“

“No!

Both you and Robin exclaimed in unison. Batman—who was apparently Bruce Wayne, by the way—smiled some.

“Seems it’s that or foster care.” He said, seeming to not even consider the possibility of putting you in foster care.

“You’ll fit right in.” Bruce Wayne seemed to find it amusing.

He typed a code into the keypad and the door opened. You blinked and stepped out hesitantly. The other three sidekicks were watching you. One with muted excitement, one with indifference, and one with outrage.

“I’ll get Alfred to set up a room for you. I’m sure you’re tired.” Bruce Wayne said.

Your head was still reeling. Sleep? That sounded more excellent than anything else you could be offered. You sighed. You shouldn’t start composing yet. You just got unofficially adopted by the richest man in the city. Things could be worse, right?

[twistedpink]

Happy 1000 followers Hun!

Here have some Hyena

Ruggie who swipes your snacks calling it payment for posting about him on socials.

Ruggie who poses for art and you find the outfits you gave him are never returned. They're his now!

Ruggie who never comes home when your rolling through diamonds and knee deep in everyone else's cards but his. All the while his banner teases you with that hyena smile. Maybe try donuts to lure him home?

Ruggie who appreciates you joining his ocassional hustle...until he leaves you in the dust. He needs the cash more than you, survival of the fittest right?

Ruggie who, despite everything he's put you through, always saves a purr for you with half lidded eyes as he snuggles against your side with that laugh that never leaves your mind. He knows you won't leave him darling. Right?

Ruggie who sees you hustling on your socials and grins. Next thing you know he's trying to mooch off your success and get some new clients to do work for. He's dirt cheap, promise!

Ruggie who knows how hard writer's block and lack of ideas for posts can be. Don't worry he has a great idea, come play hookie with him!

Ruggie who sits with you on the rooftops, half eaten sandwich in his mouth cause he's always on the run. Always having to survive. But those eyes and freckles, that infectious grin never fades for you. Every joke and tease hides more than most ever see.

Ruggie who's tail flicks when you're near. He'd never admit it but, he's worried you'll leave. That you'll move on. He's just a scavenging hyena after all. He doesn't have anything to make you stay.

Ruggie who walks away before you can, he's always been a runner and his legs twitch when he sees the window once open, slowly closing.

Ruggie who kicks rocks and lets his teeth grind as he considers what to do.

Ruggie who is always there when you need a hand and hadn't even asked this time. No you don't see him glaring at the others, you're seeing things.

Ruggie when it's late and he needs to sleep but can't cause all he can do is lay there and pull at his hair. Bed head the next morning is awful as he applies products from the sample tubes he swiped.

Ruggie who always stops by just to check in on you,

"Tch, don’t go lookin’ at me like that ...people’ll start thinkin’ I’m sweet on ya or somethin’. Not that I am, just sayin’ ya know ...could happen."

Just to make sure that window isn't locked.

Hope this makes you roll in the feels darling! The hyena is proud of a fellow hustler 💓😎

TYSM!!!!! Better than anything I could write to celebrate, I’ll be rereading this alllll day babe <3333

[magazinewankersworld]

Angelique dos Santos

Born in São Paulo, Brazil in April 1969 and also known under the name Angelique, she moved to Germany in the early 1990s to start her adult industry career. Initially she posed in pictorials for men's magazines. Soon after she began her hardcore career with pictorials in Rodox, Color Climax, Blue Climax and Busen among others. Moving to the US around 1994, she appeared in a pictorial for Score magazine with other US big breast magazines following including Swank's Big Boobs, Bra Busters, Honey Cups, D-Cup, Bust Out!, Hustler Busty Beauties and Gent. In 1995 Angelique ventured into the world of adult videos and eventually appeared in 20 videos, mostly for Big Top Video. However she also became a primary model for the Score Group internet model consortium doing online pictorials and videos, appearing in two Score's Boob Cruises as well as creating her own website, Busty Angelique. She eventually left the industry around 2010.

[janetbrown711]

Melatonin

Louie can't sleep after an adventure gone wrong, his mother's words echoing in his head like the worst worst record, and so he seeks solace with his dear old Uncle Donald.

Ao3 Link

Louie was tired, which wasn’t surprising for 2:17 in the morning. It had also been a long, long day of adventuring and he had been grateful when he finally was able to throw himself on his bunk bed.

Unfortunately though, Louie couldn’t sleep.

His back and legs ached something fierce from all of the above-average amounts of running and walking and climbing he had to do, and there was this weight on his chest that caused his heart to pound, keeping his eyes and mind on alert.

Insomnia was nothing new for the youngest duck brother, of course, but that didn’t make it any less annoying (especially with Dewey’s tendency to snore). He’d normally just go on his phone and scroll through social media until his eyes decided to close, but it didn’t feel right tonight. No, his feed was too full of Webby and Dewey’s photos of their adventure. Photos of Scrooge, Huey, and Della were on every post, with Louie having to swipe through to find any with him in them.

That wasn’t their fault though, Louie really hadn’t been in the mood today for hiking mountains and fighting bears and bear-like monsters to find some mystic honey stirrer. The photos of him were blurry and embarrassing, unlike the usual where he’d at least pose with the treasure or he and Webby had some kind of fun side quest.

A chill ran through Louie that made him sit up and sigh, rubbing the bandages around one of his hands as he tried to think of what to do.

He could go to the kitchen and if Duckworth wasn’t too busy ghost-sleeping, he could make him some tea..? No, no, Louie hated tea more than Scrooge hated to waste it. Something else then… like watching YouTube? No, his feed was overrun with videos about Doofus Drake and Scrooge McDuck sightings and hustler videos that Louie really didn’t have an interest in (at least… not right now). He could try counting sheep, but– but there was something else on his mind playing on repeat instead.

“C’mon Louie, it’s just one more mile, don’t get lazy on me now.” His mother smiled at him, hands on her hips and a bouncy energy that just made him even more tired by the second.

“Yeah, Louie! C’mon, it’ll be totally cool to see the top of the mountain,” Huey encouraged too.

“If I don’t die before then,” Louie panted, leaning back against a tree.

Della tsked and rolled her eyes. “You sound just like your uncle, you know that?”

Louie perked up at that, but before he could say anything, Dewey punched him in the arm as he and Webby sped by.

“See ya later, slowpokes!” he called out mockingly as Webby made a face.

“Hey! We’re supposed to be on the lookout for bears, you two!” Della laughed and hurried to go join them.

“Hey–! Wait for us!” Huey shouted and started scurrying off too, and Louie had no choice but to follow.

…Louie didn’t know why his mind was focusing on it– it wasn’t a big deal, really. They all made it eventually, even if Louie missed the “big reveal” and family photo op. They had hundreds of those, Louie being gone from one or two or however many at this point wasn’t a big deal. He was the lazy one, after all. Consequences, simple as that.

“If you want to be part of this family, you got to–”

Louie shot up and out of bed, startled by his own memory as the pounding in his chest only increased.

“It’s just a stupid memory, Louie. Just shut up and go back to sleep,” he muttered to himself before checking if he’d awoken his brothers. Thankfully, the answer was no, so Louie was left to… well, as much as he wanted to, he was in no condition to go back to bed. He was still stuck in “fight or flight” mode, so he needed to walk around– maybe to find some melatonin.

As good as that sounded though, he knew the numerous bathrooms barely even had toilet paper, much less medications due to how stingy Scrooge was. If there was melatonin to be found, it probably expired in 1986 and probably had a nightmare shadow creature trapped inside for extra measure.

Then again, Uncle Donald always kept his melatonin and other vitamins stocked, so maybe Louie could just go to the houseboat to check? Hopefully he could do so without waking his uncle, but if he caught him, it wasn’t like he’d get in trouble.

Louie bit his cheek, finding his phone and unplugging it to check the time, annoyed but not surprised it had only been two minutes. With a sigh, Louie put his phone in his pajama pocket, and quietly crept out of his room into the halls of the manor.

Nights like these always made the mansion feel haunted– more than by Duckworth, anyways. His uncle was crazy old and so was his choice in curtains and decoration. While Duckworth and Beakley kept dust away, the moonlight had this uncanny way of pointing out every crack and crevice that was previously unknown. Plus, the quiet made the creaking wood and pipes a lot more noticeable, and with Louie, being in the state that he was, picked up the pace to avoid it as much as possible.

Thankfully, the courtyard wasn’t too hard to get to and soon, Louie was back sneaking his way on the houseboat like it was nothing.

While it took a second to get used to, the familiar sway and creaking of the houseboat was comforting for the young duck, and he couldn’t help but smile as he made his way to the bathroom’s medicine cabinet for raiding.

In there, he found a half empty bottle of aspirin, a thing of tums, an empty paper cup, some mouthwash, but no sign of any melatonin.

“Well… frick,” Louie muttered to himself, closing the mirror and nearly jumping out of his skin when he heard footsteps just outside.

“Hello?” called out the tired and scratchy voice of Louie’s uncle.

Busted.

“Sorry, Uncle Dee, I was just looking for some melatonin to nab.” Louie’s face was red as he flicked the light off and stepped out to the small hallway.

His uncle smiled pitifully at him. “Can’t sleep?”

Louie shook his head.

“I keep that in my room now since you three moved out.” Donald chuckled. “I can grab it for you, and I can make some tea too, if you’d like.”

Louie bit his cheek. It was getting late, but as much as Louie wanted to just take the melatonin and hope his feelings would just drown out, he couldn’t deny having a cup of sleepytime tea with his uncle would help.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Louie gave a crooked little smile, which made his uncle chuckle again and ruffle his hair before going to the kitchen. Louie followed, sliding into the circular booth and watching as his uncle pulled out the dented old kettle and filled it with water.

“Have you gotten any sleep at all?” his uncle asked, watching it fill.

Louie shook his head. “No, not really… I’m more surprised you’re awake though, I really thought it would be an easy in-and-out.”

“You’d be surprised how raising triplets and being ex-navy can affect how light you sleep.” His uncle winked and turned the water off.

Louie snorted. “I think Mom could sleep through a bombing.”

“Yeah, that’s Della all right.” Donald’s voice wavered a bit, though he quickly turned to muttering in frustration as it took a second before his stove would light. It eventually did, and once that was all settled he sighed and leaned against the counter. “So what’s keeping you up this time, Lou?”

“Oh, you know… adventure stuff, I guess,” Louie danced around the details, picking at the bandage on his hand.

His uncle’s eyes landed on it, and based on his reaction, it seemed he hadn’t noticed his injury at dinner. “Are you okay? What happened? Did Huey or Webby do the bandaging? Or was it Dewey? Not that he does a bad job, he just always forgets the Neosporin–”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, Uncle Dee– really,” Louie forced a smile. “It’s just a minor scrape, I promise.”

“You know, I’ve always told Scrooge you boys need better gloves and gear just so situations like this don’t happen.” Donald shook his head and left the kitchen, muttering under his breath the whole time.

Welp. Better than a scolding to stay safer, Louie thought to himself as he closed his eyes for a second.

When he opened them again, his uncle was back with a first aid kit and a bottle of melatonin.

“Here, let me look at it,” Donald asked, taking a seat next to Louie.

“It’s fine, Uncle Donald,” Louie tried to assure him, but his uncle didn’t relent, taking his hand and quickly unwrapping the bandage.

His uncle frowned, inspecting it. “This doesn’t look like a regular scrape. What happened?”

“It was just a sharp rock, I swear.” Louie looked away to try and mask the lie.

Donald didn’t seem to believe it, but focused his efforts more on adding some neosporin to his cut before finding a suitable gauze pad, bringing Louie momentarily relief.

“Who wrapped this the first time? And how long was it between hurting yourself and getting bandaged?” Donald interrogated.

“Dewey when we got back to the plane, I guess– it’s really not a big deal, Uncle Donald, I’m fine,” Louie tried to push, but he could see Donald’s eye twitch.

“No one had a first aid kit? Not even Huey?” Donald asked, eyebrows furrowed.

“He ran out using it on Webby and Dewey and Launchpad.” Louie shrugged. “Seemed only fair to let them have it this time anyways, since I’m usually the one taking all the supplies.”

Donald frowned, now taking the roller bandage and wrapping his wrist twice before going diagonally to the outside of his pinky. “I don’t like you thinking like that; your safety and health matters just as much as anyone else’s– even if you’ve got worse luck and tire out quicker.”

“Sure,” Louie sighed, looking at the kettle and seeing the steam starting to escape, a squeal imminent.

“I’m serious, Louie. I don’t want you talking like that. You deserve as much love and care as anyone else.” His uncle looked at him seriously, but the ten-year-old avoided eye contact.

Donald frowned, finishing the bandaging just as the kettle began to squeal and put a brief pause to go deal with that.

“If you want a place in this family–”

Stop. Just stop, Louie hissed in his mind. He hated that stupid video and that stupid memory. It was so long ago, there really wasn’t a point for it to be on repeat like it was. Yeah, his mom joked that if he hadn’t been so clumsy on the last adventure then Huey wouldn’t have ran out of bandages, but like… that was different. Louie was fine. It was fine. It was cool.

“So are you going to actually tell me how you hurt yourself, or are you going to keep me guessing all night?” Donald sighed, pouring the hot water into two mugs.

“It was a sharp rock, I promise.” Louie bit his cheek.

“Right.” His uncle’s shoulders sagged, before he shook his head and set the kettle down. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Adventures are hard sometimes, I get it– plus, I know I can be a little protective–”

Louie laughed.

Donald rolled his eyes. “Okay, maybe more than a little protective, but you know… someone’s gotta.”

Louie’s smile faded and his eyes went back to his hands.

His uncle hummed in amusement as he got the tea bags and began brewing before returning with mugs in hand to the booth. “I’m sorry today was rough. I wish I could’ve been there.”

Louie waved his hand. “You would’ve gotten hurt a lot more than me.”

“Yeah, but at least Della knows to carry three extra kits whenever I’m around,” Donald laughed, and a lump formed in Louie’s throat.

“Right, yeah.” Louie tried to ignore it, tapping his fingers on the glass as he urged the tea to brew faster.

When it was done, he could feel his uncle's eyes on him as he took a sip of tea, searching and scanning like they had many times before. It was how he eventually learned to detect Louie's schemes, and it never failed to make Louie feel small.

To his surprise though, instead of saying anything, Donald wrapped an arm around Louie and pulled him to his side, kissing his head and hugging him tight. It made the lump tighten and tears threaten to form, the pressure building so tight Louie might just burst.

“I love you, Louie. You know that?” his uncle whispered.

Louie could only nod.

“I love you very, very much, Lou. I care about your health and safety, and I want you to be happy more than anything else in the whole wide world, do you understand?” Donald continued.

Louie nodded again, his lower lip beginning to tremble.

His uncle hugged him tighter. “Louie, I want you to tell me what’s hurting you. You don’t have to give details– but know that nothing is too much for me, okay? I want to help you… please…”

The ‘please’ shattered Louie’s resolve. He opened his mouth to speak maybe three times, before he eventually croaked it out:

“Why… doesn’t mom… like me..?”

Donald let out a quiet gasp, filling Louie with instant regret that broke him down into a sobbing mess in an instant.

“Oh, Louie.” His uncle pulled Louie onto his lap now, hugging him tight as he rocked back and forth while the ten-year-old just buried his face in his chest.

“S-sh-she– It-it’s like– She likes H-Huey, a-and Dewey, a-and even Webby– b-but– b-but–”

“I’m so sorry, honey.” Donald hugged him a little tighter, and Louie could tell he was crying too.

“I-I keep screwing u-up– a-and it’s like– i-it’s like she ca-can’t even tell a-and she just– she hates me, Unca’ Donald, she hates me,” Louie wept.

“Della doesn’t hate you, Louie, she just doesn’t understand, I promise,” Donald tried to assure, but Louie just shook his head.

“Sh-she keeps– she keeps calling me lazy a-and she makes fun of me wh-when I fail a-and even get hurt– it hurts so much, Unca’ Donald, it hurts so much,” Louie confessed, a wave of sorrow crashing down with the realization.

“I’m so sorry, Lou…” his uncle’s voice cracked. “I wish she didn’t. I really, really wish she didn’t– but old habits die hard, I’m so sorry.”

It took Louie a moment to process what his uncle said, and when he did, he sat up a bit. “Y-you mean she does that to you too?”

Donald nodded with a sad smile. “Everyone does, but Del and Scrooge especially. I used to joke that’s the only reason they kept me around.”

Louie’s heart managed to break a second time and he practically leapt to hug his uncle. “M’so sorry, I-I never meant to– I just– I’m so sorry, Uncle Donald.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, Lou. I’ve learned to accept it.” Donald rubbed his back.

“But you shouldn’t have to! I-it sucks– I hate being just a joke to them, a-and you’re so much more than that too!” Louie broke the embrace again.

“Louie, you aren’t a joke to them, I promise. You have that wonderful mind of yours that’s always so good at planning and scheming and escaping and they value that tremendously.” Donald put his hands on Louie’s shoulders.

Louie looked at the ground. “Even mom..?”

Donald gave a long sigh. “Your mom is… new to this. She doesn’t understand how you work yet and assumes you won’t take it personally, like how I would act– but that doesn’t make it right. She loves you, but she just doesn’t know how to, and I’m sorry that hurts you…”

Louie looked away, his mom’s words echoing again in his mind.

“If you want to be a part of this family, you gotta stop.”

“She… she said if I wanted to be a part of this family, I had to stop scheming– had to stop the one thing I’m good at,” Louie whispered.

He could see his uncle’s shoulders tense. “When did she say that..?”

“When you were gone after the ‘timephoon incident’.” Louie sniffled, wiping away hot tears as he stared at his mug.

Donald gave another long, heavy sigh. “I’m so sorry, Louie. I wish she understood you, I really, really do…”

“Sh-she also– I hurt my hand because she didn’t see me slipping. She didn’t help me– sh-she assumed I’d be okay, but I’m not okay– it’s not okay, Uncle Donald, it’s not.” Louie shook his head and curled up to Donald’s side, and his uncle wrapped an arm around him.

“I’m so sorry, Lou. Della just gets so wrapped up in her own head, she has a hard time recognizing people aren’t always at her level.” Donald rested his head atop Louie’s and squeezed him.

“I-I felt so alone today– I hate feeling alone,” Louie confessed more.

“I know, Louie, I know. And if it helps, you’ll always have me no matter what, okay? There’s nothing you could do to make me hate or leave you. You’ll always be my little Louie, and even if we get separated, I’ll always find my way back– even if it’s the moon,” Donald pointed out with a soft smile.

“Thanks, Uncle Donald.” Louie nuzzled closer. “I wish mom understood you too.”

His uncle laughed weakly. “Maybe one day… but in the meantime, I’m lucky to have you.”

Louie couldn’t help but laugh a little too. “I’m lucky to have you too, Uncle Donald.”

The pair of them sat in silence for a while, with Louie curled extra tight to his side and Donald holding him nice and close. It was calming, especially with the slow eb and flow of the pool water. All that crying had exhausted Louie, and he figured his uncle likely felt the same. However, Louie couldn’t even imagine going back to his bunk now, not when he felt his uncle needed him as much as he needed Donald.

“I’ll try and talk to her. It’ll be slow and I don’t know how she’ll take it, but I’ll talk to her,” Donald suddenly spoke up. “Uncle Scrooge too, for that matter.”

Louie wiped his eyes and shook his head. “You don’t gotta do that, it probably won’t change anything.”

“I have to try, Lou.” Donald looked down at him. “You’re worth at least trying.”

Louie didn’t have a response for that, so he just nuzzled back close and there was quiet again.

Louie liked the quiet. It was much better than the eerie silence of the manor, and how it would always be broken abruptly by some creaking wood or wind whirling down the chimney. On the houseboat, the sounds were constant, like a lullaby. The splashing of the water, the squeaking old metal, the soft hum of the old AC unit– it always knew how to put Louie to sleep.

“Uncle Donald?” he suddenly spoke up.

“Yes?”

“Can I… stay here with you tonight?” Louie glanced back up at him.

Donald’s face melted into a soft smile. “Of course, Lou. You’re welcome here any time.”

“Good.” Louie smiled too, before yawning.

His uncle chuckled before yawning himself. “Looks like we should get going to bed, huh?”

“I could stay up longer,” Louie lied, making his uncle roll his eyes.

“Drink some tea before you take that melatonin, I don’t want it going to waste,” Donald lightly teased before getting up and drinking more of his own.

Louie nodded, beginning to chug before he remembered he really wasn’t that big of a fan of tea, and so set it down again. “Is… that enough?” Louie asked.

Donald laughed. “Yes, yes, it’s fine, I’m just joking, no need to force yourself.”

Louie smiled before struggling to open the bottle of melatonin. Noticing this, his uncle walked over and helped him retrieve the yellow pill, which Louie took with a little bit of tea. After that was done, Donald cleaned up their mugs and set them out to dry. Once that was settled, Louie took Donald’s hand and the two of them went to cuddle the rest of the night away.

[thugguzzler]

Yeah, there that but on the Bright Side you know where He is tonight so Half-Full Homie.

[camisoledadparis]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … January 31

1729 – A Prussian baker is executed for fellating another man who later died, according to the court, of "exhaustion."

1797 – Austrian composer Franz Schubert was born (d.1828). He wrote some six hundred Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. He is particularly noted for original melodic and harmonic writing.

While Schubert had a close circle of friends and associates who admired his work (including his teacher Antonio Salieri and the prominent singer Johann Michael Vogl), wider appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited at best. He was never able to secure adequate permanent employment, and for most of his career he relied on the support of friends and family. Interest in Schubert's work increased dramatically in the decades following his death.

Schubert was significantly influenced by his close-knit group of male friends, known as the Schubert Circle. His relationships with an older school friend Joseph von Spaun, the young poet Johann Mayrhofer, and the wealthy young sensualist Franz von Schober were the most important of his life. He and Schober often lived together for extended periods.

Citing the composer's dissipation, his lack of female love interests, his passionate male friendships and several oblique references in his surviving correspondence, Maynard Solomon has argued that Schubert's primary erotic orientation was homosexual. The immediate reaction on the part of many musicologists and music critics, who often simply refused to consider the evidence, revealed a deep-seated homophobia among many specialists in classical music. But in recent years the notion of a gay Schubert has become if not commonplace, at least much less controversial. Schubert's alleged homosexuality and its effect on his music are subjects of continuing debate among music historians and critics.

1914 – Edward Melcarth (d.1973) was a painter, sculptor, illustrator, lecturer and teacher, born in Louisville, Kentucky, as Edward Epstein Jr. Edward Melcarth who dared to live as an openly homosexual man and not hiding his support for communism did not earn a significant place in modern art’s canonical history for exactly those reasons.

He was active on New York’s burgeoning, post-World War II art scene; his work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s and at Manhattan galleries over a decades-long timespan, and he knew just about everyone, including the multimillionaire art collector and Forbes magazine publisher, Malcolm Forbes; his circle also included many other artists as well as countless, now nameless hustlers, sailors, beach bums, and representatives of working-class “trade” who posed for his pictures and with whom he had sex.

Summer Morning

Melcarth was born Edward Epstein to Jewish parents in Louisville in 1914. After his father died, his mother, whose family discouraged her from becoming an opera singer, remarried a wealthy British aristocrat. Edward, who would reject religion and change his surname to that of an ancient Phoenician god, was educated in London and at Harvard University; later he studied art in Boston with the German-born painter Karl Zerbe.

The gay, Kentucky-born artist Henry Faulkner, the photographer Thomas Painter, and Melcarth lived together in New York for some time during the decades following WWII. They shared friends, artistic interests — and sexual partners, too.

Painter was one of the research subjects who provided testimonials about his own and his homosexual associates’ sexual activities to the pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey. His reports were detailed, and from them we learn that Melcarth's appetite for sex was rapacious.

In the late 1960s, Melcarth left New York and settled in Venice, where he focused on making sculpture and died in 1973. At some point during his New York years, he had met Malcolm Forbes, who became a regular collector-patron and, after Melcarth’s death, acquired a large quantity of his works, and has been the source of many expositions of Melcarth's art.

1948 – Paul Jabara (d.1992) was an American actor, singer, and songwriter of Lebanese ancestry.

Paul wrote Donna Summer's "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday (1978) and Barbra Streisand's song "The Main Event/Fight" from The Main Event (1979). He cowrote the Weather Girls hit, "It's Raining Men" with Paul Shaffer.

Jabara was in the original cast of the stage musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. He took over the role of Frank-N-Furter in the Los Angeles Production of The Rocky Horror Show when Tim Curry left the production to film the movie version in England. He appeared in John Schlesinger's 1975 film, "The Day of the Locust", where he sang the production number "Hot Voo-Doo"

In 1979, Jabara won both Grammy Award for Best R&B Song and the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the song performed by Donna Summer, "Last Dance". Jabara's album Paul Jabara & Friends, released in 1983, features guest vocals by a then-20 year old Whitney Houston. It also includes the song "It's Raining Men". That song was later re-recorded several years later by drag supermodel RuPaul and Martha Wash. Wash sang on the original recording as part of the group the Weather Girls.

Jabara co-founded the Red Ribbon Project in 1991, and is credited with conceiving and distributing the first AIDS Red Ribbon.

Paul Jabara died of AIDS in Los Angeles at the age of 44 on September 29, 1992.

1952 – Brad Gooch is an American writer.

Born and raised in Kingston, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Columbia University with a bachelors in 1973 and a doctorate in 1986.

Gooch is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He has lived in New York City since 1971. His 2015 memoir Smash Cut recounts life in 1970s and 1980s New York City, including the time Gooch spent as a fashion model, life with his then-boyfriend filmmaker Howard Brookner, living in the famous Chelsea Hotel and the first decade of the AIDS crisis.

Gooch is married to writer and religious activist Paul Raushenbush; they have one child.

1973 – Portia Lee James DeGeneres, known professionally as Portia de Rossi, is an Australian-American actress, model and philanthropist, known for her roles as lawyer Nelle Porter on the television series Ally McBeal and Lindsay Fünke on the sitcom Arrested Development. She also portrayed Veronica Palmer on the ABC sitcom Better Off Ted and Olivia Lord on Nip/Tuck. She is married to American stand-up comedian, television host and actress Ellen DeGeneres.

De Rossi, born Amanda Lee Rogers in Horsham, Victoria, Australia grew up in Grovedale, a suburb of Geelong, Victoria, and modelled for print and TV commercials as a child. In 1988, at the age of 15, Rogers adopted the name Portia de Rossi, by which she remains best known; in 2005, she explained that she had intended to reinvent herself, using the given name of Portia, a character from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and an Italian last name.

De Rossi was married to documentary film-maker Mel Metcalfe from 1996 to 1999, initially part of a plan to get a green card, but she did not go through with it. She said that "it just obviously wasn't right for me". In a 2010 interview on Good Morning America, she explained that as a young actress, she was fearful of being exposed as a lesbian.

From 2000 to 2004, de Rossi dated singer Francesca Gregorini, the daughter of Barbara Bach and the stepdaughter of Ringo Starr. She said that most of her family and Ally McBeal castmates did not know she was a lesbian until tabloid pictures of the couple were published. She declined to publicly discuss the relationship or her sexual orientation at the time.

De Rossi and Gregorini broke up in late 2004 because de Rossi began dating Ellen DeGeneres, whom she met backstage at an awards show. In 2005, she opened up publicly about her sexual orientation in interviews with Details and The Advocate. She became engaged when DeGeneres proposed with a three-carat pink diamond ring. They were married at their Beverly Hills home on 16 August 2008, witnessed by their mothers and 17 other guests. On 6 August 2010, Portia filed a petition to legally change her name to Portia Lee James DeGeneres. The petition was granted on 23 September 2010. She became a US citizen in September 2011.

In 2010, de Rossi published the autobiography Unbearable Lightness which talks about the turmoil that she has experienced in her life, including suffering from anorexia nervosa and bulimia and being misdiagnosed with lupus.

1979 – Daniel Tammet is an English essayist, novelist, poet, translator, and autistic savant. His memoir, Born on a Blue Day (2006), is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada.

In 2016 he published his debut novel, Mishenka, in France and Quebec. His books have been published in over 20 languages. He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Tammet was born Daniel Paul Corney, the eldest of nine children, and raised in Barking and Dagenham, East London, England. As a young child, he suffered epileptic seizures, which remitted following medical treatment.

He participated twice in the World Memory Championships in London under his birth name, placing 11th in 1999 and 4th in 2000.

He changed his birth name by deed poll because "it didn't fit with the way he saw himself." He took the Estonian surname Tammet, which is related to "oak tree".

At age twenty-five, he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre. He is one of fewer than a hundred "prodigious savants" according to Darold Treffert, the world's leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome.

Tammet holds the European record for memorizing and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. This sponsored charity challenge was held in aid of the National Society for Epilepsy (NSE) on “Pi Day”, March 14, 2004, at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK.

He was the subject of a documentary film titled Extraordinary People: The Boy with the Incredible Brain, first broadcast on the British television station Channel 4 on 23 May 2005.

He met software engineer Neil Mitchell in 2000. They lived together as domestic partners in Kent, England, where they had a quiet life at home with their cats, preparing meals from their garden. He and Mitchell operated the online e-learning company Optimnem, where they created and published language courses.

Tammet now lives in Paris, France, with his husband Jérôme Tabet, a photographer whom he met while promoting his autobiography. Tammet is openly gay.

2017 – Thousands of gay and bisexual men who were convicted of now-abolished sexual offenses laws in Britain have been posthumously pardoned under a new policing law, the Justice Ministry announces. The law, which received Royal Assent on this day, is named after British WWII codebreaker Alan Turing, who committed suicide following his conviction for gross indecency and was posthumously pardoned by Her Majesty the Queen in 2013. It also makes it possible for living convicted gay men to seek pardons for offenses no longer on the statute book.

[astoldbychae]

The Multihyphenate Hustler // Ashlee Torée Brand

Lead Bartender at ONYX Del Sol Valley (Dino's Strip Club)

Bottle Girl at Ultra Lounge

Simfluencer

Boutique Owner (currently online/saving money for a storefront)

Also sells items from her closet on Trendi

Listen, It's the way Dino is surrounded by literally the most beautiful women at the club.😩

💕poses by @afrosimtricsims & @namei-co

[taggedmemes]

SENTENCE MEME THE GOLDEN GIRLS / SEASON 01 EPISODE 01

they were too ugly to look at.

all the single men under 80 are cocaine smugglers.

i had the shock of my life today.

at that age, you don't even have to be pretty and you're pretty.

i just felt like one of the girls.

i caught a glimpse of myself and i almost had a heart attack.

he's very gallant, a perfect gentleman.

if you have to ask, it does not matter anymore.

what do we have for collateral, a gay cook?

we'll become bag ladies.

i guess i'll know when i hear it come out of my mouth.

this isn't a belch, this is marriage.

if he was alive, he probably would not like it.

since he's dead, i don't think it poses a problem.

i'm perfectly capable of managing by myself.

i'm a totally independent person.. i need money for a cab.

it destroyed the part of her brain that censors what she says.

you know what that does to hearts that only beat a few times a week?

the man is a scuzzball.

we were all so lonely and then by some miracle we found each other.

it was not the resurrection, it was hardly a miracle.

there are too many years left and i don't know what to do.

when he died, she made a date at the funeral.

i know he's dead, i'm not crazy.

i just like to talk about him in the present tense sometimes.

long engagements don't make sense.

i hope he trips and falls into a volcano.

i thought it was robbers so i hid my jewels.

how about a shot of gin with a beer back?

i'm so happy and so sad. kind of a happy-sad.

public bathrooms are so difficult for me.

i can't stand the thought of leaving you.

you got yourself mixed up with a real hustler.

you're a beautiful, loving, trusting woman.

maybe i'm hoping the shock will be too much and i'll just drop dead right here.

when i go, put me in a sack and leave me on the curb.

i realized i was feeling good because of you.

you're my family and you make me happy to be alive.

[saiilorstars]

Ch. 36: A Magician

[Story Masterlist] // [Aitana’s Masterlist]

Fandom: Criminal Minds // Pairing: Spencer Reid x OFC

Taglist: @ocappreciationtag​ @arrthurpendragon​​​​ @anotherunreadblog​​​ @maaaaarveeeeel​​​ @stareyedplanet​​​​​​​ @averyhotchner​ @foxesandmagic​ @kmc1989​​​​ @midmourn​​​​​​

If you’d like to be a part of Aitana’s taglist, please let me know!

Also available on Fanfic ○ Ao3 ○ Wattpad

Aitana felt utterly guilty having to miss the preliminary presentation of the newest case, but nobody would make it harder on her by being stingy about it. Her classes for the new quarter were slightly more overwhelming than the first.

"I promise I will get my act together," she declared once they were in the jet. She was quick to look over the file Penelope so graciously put together for her at the BAU.

"You're fine, Aitana," Emily rubbed Aitana's arm comfortingly on her way to an empty seat. Aitana hadn't even sat down, instead choosing to lean against the side of an empty seat to read the file.

They were heading to Kansas, right to the center of tornadoes, something Aitana silently dreaded. She was not one for tornadoes of any kind.

"If this unsub is using tornadoes as a forensic countermeasure, then Kansas certainly is the ideal setting," said Morgan.

"Tornadoes do pose a significant threat," Spencer chimed in, "During this year's super outbreak back in April, there were 336 confirmed tornadoes in just several days, resulting in over 300 lives lost."

"Hey!" Penelope's face popped on the monitor behind them.

"Tell us something good, mama," Morgan said, though he knew there wasn't much to say on this matter.

"Ok, so local P. D. Have ID'd your victims. I'm putting this all on your tablets if you'd like to follow along." Penelope gave them a couple seconds to gather the tablets before continuing. "First up is Jason Meredith, 16-year-old runaway from Garden City, Kansas. Mom said he took off over a year ago. Next up is Eric Janelle, 15-year-old foster kid from Wichita. He's been gone 3 weeks. Oh, both of these kids have records for possession and prostitution."

"They were street hustlers," Rossi remarked. "At-risk kids. This could be a sexual predator."

"An extremely violent one if the unsub is responsible for the damage done to the bodies, especially those missing limbs," Hotch said.

"Well, now, he could be keeping the body parts for some sort of fetish," JJ theorized, prompting Penelope to audibly gag.

"Oh, ok, eew! That is my cue. I'm here if you need me with my binary machines that don't say gross things!" And with that, Penelope signed off.

Just as the team began to put their tablets down, a decent turbulence rocked the jet. Aitana nearly slipped from her comfortable spot. It happened twice after that. Rossi even felt the need to do a silent prayer for their sake.

"I didn't know you were a bad flyer," JJ said, noting how pale Rossi had gone in these last minutes.

"I'm not. I just hate turbulence," Rossi clarified.

"You know, turbulence very rarely causes planes to crash," said Spencer, although Rossi still didn't loosen up.

"That does me absolutely no good at the moment. Thank you."

Spencer didn't let Rossi have a moment to rest before he started spewing out some facts. "What we really need to worry about are microbursts, sudden downbursts of air associated with thunderstorms. But a small craft like this, if we hit one of those at the wrong altitude —" He mimicked the sound of a crash,, going as far as gesturing it with a hand as well, "—pulverized."

Rossi was downright terrified with what he was hearing. The others were close to laughing. "I beg of you to make him stop," he pleaded with JJ sitting beside Spencer.

All JJ could do was shrug in that situation. Nothing stopped Spencer once he got started, absolutely noth—

"Hey Spencer, can you sit with me for a bit?" Aitana had stopped beside him with her file in her arms. "I have to tell you something."

JJ bobbed her head as she reconsidered her initial thought. Spencer didn't question Aitana; he simply nodded and moved with her to the seats at the end of the jet.

As soon as they sat together, Aitana spilled what she'd been holding in for a while. "She set a date."

For the first time in his life, Spencer had no idea what Aitana was talking about. "Huh?" It felt so weird not knowing — not remembering? — what she was talking about with him. Alarming, even.

"My grandmother — she booked a flight. It's official now. She's coming to see me dance."

"Oh." Spencer felt relief washing over him. The alarm went away as well. Aitana's grandmother had expressed interest in seeing her dance competition since it was the first time Aitana would dance in years. "Well that's great, isn't it?"

Aitana's face seemed far from it. "I told you Spencer. What if I'm not good anymore? It's been years…"

"But you've been practicing for months now," Spencer reminded her. He couldn't believe he was having this conversation again.

"I know!" Aitana let her head fall against the table with a thud! Spencer wondered if she would have a bruise on her forehead later on. Right now, her curly hair was splattered all around her head.

"Um, well…" Times like these, Spencer hated even more that he royally sucked at conversations like these. He wished he could help Aitana more but he seemed to have even more trouble with her in comparison to the rest of the team. He tried his hardest to come up with at least one decent thing to say to Aitana but she pulled her head up from the table too early.

"I'll have to practice more. I'll have to move some things around but I can do it." She nodded to herself, clearly reciting it in order to believe it. "Yeah, I can totally do this. Totally."

All Spencer did was nod with her but inside he felt completely useless for her. He didn't like it at all.

~ 0 ~

The scene was a mess. Aitana, Emily and Morgan walked through the crime scene with the lead detective on the case. It was a terrible sight. The tornado had taken everything around and chucked it out in random places — in pieces. Aitana couldn't help shudder every now and then.

"The guy was torn up pretty bad. Thought we'd find his arms, but we never did," said a detective as they walked through the dirt path, "Found him right over there." He made a nod up ahead but with the condition of the place, it was hard for the agents to pinpoint the exact spot.

"Well, the unsub definitely has his own mode of transportation," said Morgan as he glanced back in the direction they had come from. "This is way off the beaten path. And the first victim, Jason Meredith, was found over 30 miles away."

"And you say you were able to clear this place before the storm hit?" Aitana wouldn't hide her disbelief in the alleged claim. The way everything was destroyed made it hard to believe anything could be done prior to the tornado. "I didn't know you could do that for tornadoes."

"When we get enough lead time, we try to clear all the mobile home parks," said the detective, "The last place you want to be in a twister is in a trailer. We close off the main roads, too."

"Ok, so the unsub either found a way in or he was already here and he hid during the evacuation," theorized Emily, "That, or the body got sucked up into the funnel cloud and was thrown here from someplace else."

"Either way, he came into close contact with this storm," Aitana said,, "Maybe even close enough to put himself in danger. Or he waited someplace safe for it to pass and came back and dumped the body."

"No, I think the storm itself actually means something to this guy," Morgan's comment made the group pause.

"You don't think he's just using it to cover his tracks?" asked the detective.

"I played ball in college with a guy from Indiana. He said he and his boys used to get drunk and then chase storms. Said it was the closest they could get to the true power of God."

"I saw an F3 when I was in high school. He wasn't kidding," the detective agreed.

"People willingly chase tornadoes?" That time, Aitana didn't even attempt to hide her shudder. "What kind of morons do that?"

Emily spared her a smile. "Ok, so he's impulsive, probably young, maybe a loner with nothing to lose. We should be looking at actual storm-chasers. Where can we find them?"

"They mostly work with the university," said the detective. "You think this guy's educated?"

"Well, he knows enough about the weather to use it to his advantage," Morgan shrugged. It was the logical step from there. "So far it's working."

~ 0 ~

Returning to the precinct, the group regathered to relay what each side had learned. Unfortunately, it wasn't a lot.

The first victim only gave the group the idea that the unsub had been, at one point in his life, a street boy. From the morgue, they learned that the unsub tied victims and amputated them postmortem. The crime scene told them the unsub was almost an expert chasing tornadoes, knowing how to use them to his advantage.

By the next day, they had another victim to look at. This time the young man was in limbs, sprawled on the ground with the torso missing.

Aitana started to think it was better to stay in the precinct. The scenery and the limbs mixed together made things twice as bad. She could still feel the lingering chill of the past storm.

"Name's Gary Dyson," the detective read off his notes. "Sixteen. Runaway from Kansas City. A couple of my guys have seen him before. ID.'d him off the tattoos on what's left of his arms."

"This particular area get hit with a tornado last night?" asked Morgan.

"Thunderstorms came through. Warnings went out, but no twisters."

"And yet this place is still a mess," Aitana remarked, setting her hands on her hips. "But the weather's gotta be the trigger. He's following the patterns. We track the storms, we find the unsub."

"Forensic evidence has been washed away," the detective said as a means of discouragement.

Spencer thought differently. "But behaviorally, it's the most intact crime scene we've encountered so far. It's the same blow to the head, but no cuts, no abrasions."

"Except he's missing his torso," Morgan pointed out. "It was only a matter of time before he missed one."

"Tornadoes are extremely unpredictable and sometimes last only a matter of minutes before they dissipate. The fact that he was able to leave his previous victims directly in the path of one is astounding," said Spencer, putting a lot of emphasis on it to get his point across.

"So the conditions were perfect last night, but his tornado never came," nodded Aitana. "It's only been 4 days. He's accelerating. And the weather's driving him to do it."

"Guys, we know that fetishists are loyal to the body parts they take, but I think that this unsub is loyal to the whole of these parts," Spencer said as he moved around the limbs, eyeing them carefully for their specific position, "If you were to take the missing pieces from all the victims so far, you could almost assemble an entire body."

"Ah, so we're doing Frankenstein now…" Aitana blinked slowly, letting her hands come on her sides. The precise case just kept getting better and better.

With the new knowledge they has from the latest victim, building a preliminary profile was easier and quicker.

"We're looking for a white male in his mid- to late-20s," Hotch led the group first, "He's mobile and he travels great distances to follow storms. He's probably in a truck or a van."

"We believe he may live in that vehicle. It's probably beat up, maybe rusted from the elements," Rossi said next.

Everyone ignored JJ's cell phone going off. She quickly cut the call off anyways. "Jeffrey Dahmer, serial killer, was under the delusion they he could create young male sex zombies that wouldn't resist his advances," she then said.

"And when Dahmer's test subjects died, he kept their body parts as souvenirs," went Emily.

"Skulls, hearts, even genitalia," added Spencer.

"Restoring body parts is no small task. They're gonna get ripe fast," Aitana said, "He needs lots of ice, salt, maybe, something to preserve them. And he's paying for all that stuff somehow. He doesn't have the social skills to hold a job for long, so he's most likely a day laborer, handyman, or anything transitory."

"We think he's using the weather as a forensic countermeasure to destroy evidence, but we also think he might be some sort of symphoraphiliac," said Spencer, prompting one of the officers to interrupt.

"Sorry, symphora what?"

"Symphoraphiliacs — they're sexually aroused by disaster. Usually fires or traffic accidents. In this case, the weather must enhance his excitement."

Once again JJ's cell phone started buzzing. This time, she took off to go answer it.

"He hunts street kids, so he may be from a similar background," Emily went on, "And he's most likely uneducated, but he's still charming enough to engage his victims."

"We'll talk to the press," Hotch said both as a fact and as a warning for the other officers not to go anywhere near the media.. "You should warn any transient kids you might know. As this weather gets worse, so will the unsub."

The team quickly dispersed the rest of the officers to begin the search. Weather was indeed getting worse by the minute and so soon enough, their search in the night would come to an end.

"Hey, is JJ alright? I haven't seen her in a while," Emily said the others once they were gathered in the meeting room. JJ had been gone for a while, ever since they delivered the profile and had yet to be seen.

"Me too," Morgan just now realized.

"Maybe she's handling another assignment," Rossi said just as Aitana walked into the room.

"I'll tell you what I'm done handling," the brunette woman said and planted her hands on the table, "The media."

Bemused, Emily asked Aitana what was wrong.

"I hate tornadoes," Aitana spat, her lip curling with disdain. "Half the questions I got were about the tornadoes. Like, I'm so sorry but I can't control the weather." Her eyes looked up at the long windows high above them. The night was dark and yet constantly illuminated by the crashing thunder.

"You're scared of tornadoes," Rossi corrected her.

Aitana pointed at him. "Absolutely. I can handle anything else but not tornadoes. And then with this media stuff, it complicates everything even more. I can't get through to some newsites because of the tornadoes cutting the power off. And then, you know, you get the stupid questions about the weather."

"Okay, Sprinkles, why not have a seat," Morgan gestured to the open seat beside him. "I'll protect you from the big bad tornadoes."

Aitana rolled her eyes but her facade of annoyance was cut short when thunder crashed again and she jumped. The others chuckled.

"I want to go home," Aitana said with an unimaginable wide pout. She did indeed take the seat next to Morgan. The latter couldn't help but laugh again.

"Hey," Spencer came striding into the room with Hotch behind him. "I know how the unsub first got started." He went directly to the clear board at the end of the table and grabbed a marker. "So the first victim was found missing his right leg, the second, both arms, and the third had no torso." He drew a simple stick figure to represent the limbs they had found so far. "So that leaves the left leg and the head unaccounted for. We can assume the head would be the most difficult piece to find."

"That part would have to fit an unsub's fantasy perfectly," Rossi said. They could leave that for last on their list of priorities.

Spencer agreed with Rossi. "So he'd most likely save it for last. Now, what that tells us is there's a victim out there we haven't found yet who's missing his left leg."

"Or the unsub hasn't acquired it yet," reasoned Emily.

"True, but most body part collectors evolve to this level, and in many cases they exhumes bodies for parts before they start killing."

Bearing that in mind, the group called in Penelope to start the search.

"Garcia, can you look for grave robberies in tornado alley over the last 5 years?" Spencer directed as soon as she was ready.

"Okey-dokey. Searching. Oh…that's a shockingly big list. Who knew grave-robbing was so on trend?"

Unfortunately, the entire team did.

"How many of those involve the bodies of teenage boys?" asked Spencer.

"Uh... None."

"What about morgues and funeral homes?"

"Again, that is a list that should not be that big. Mostly stolen embalming fluid, though."

"It's often used like PCP, Garcia," said Morgan.

"I'm feeling optimistic about the youth of America. There are no teenagers involved in this either."

"Let's just skip to the grain then," said Aitana right before she asked Penelope to try a new search involving stolen body parts, more specifically the left leg.

"Ok, eew!" Penelope practically shuddered. "See, this is why I can't talk about how my day was at dinner. Breakfast, lunch. Aitana, you scare me."

"I wasn't the one who thought of it," grumbled Aitana, "Spencer did."

"Ah, that makes more sense."

Spencer deadpanned the phone.

Penelope went on to read the information she had found on their missing left leg. "A left leg was stolen off a body a year ago at the Riggio Funeral Home in Tulsa. They never found who did it."

"Garcia, what was the weather like in the area at the time?" asked Hotch.

"Uh, thunderstorms and tornadoes. An F2 cyclone hit right around there, and then the robbery took place after they evacuated."

"It's gotta be our unsub," Emily concluded much like the others had.

"Wait, there's more. The guy whose leg was stolen, he was a 47-year-old father of 2 who died of leukemia."

"That's a huge jump. Preferential child sex offenders don't usually stray from their preferred age range," said Rossi. Most of them were confused as well.

"It's not about the sex at all. He used the body from the funeral home to develop his M. O," said Spencer, "So he could live out his fantasy and kill in a storm."

"It still doesn't explain what or who he's building," Morgan reminded them of the big remaining hole in their case.

"That could range from a friend to a family member to a partner," Aitana shrugged. "Unfortunately we won't find that out until we get more on the unsub. Aka: the head."

~ 0 ~

As the night progressed, the storm grew worse. Aitana actually felt for Emily and Rossi who had been tasked with talking to the storm chasers near the local university. At the same time, though, she was thrilled that she didn't need to step outside the precinct. She would much rather lock herself in the conference room doing more research.

Outside in the bullpen, JJ was still trying to find flights home. Morgan and Spencer joined her out of sheer confusion of her presence.

"There's no flights anywhere," JJ informed them with a heavy sigh. Henry was out of the hospital, yes, but she still needed to be there with him. She couldn't really concentrate on anything else besides her son.

"Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow," Spencer said as a means of comfort. All JJ could do was nod and hope he was right.

"Okay, so, what do you guys need help with right now?" she asked in an effort to try and distract herself.

"We're waiting for Prentiss and Rossi to come back from the university," Morgan said, "And I think Serrano and Hotch are going over the media proceedings."

"Uh, not exactly…" said JJ with narrowed eyes as she watched Hotch leave the conference room.

"Aitana did say the broadcastings weren't going well," Spencer nodded, "They must have gotten side-tracked again with the weather."

"Mm, maybe we should go see what happened," JJ suggested.

Morgan was taking a few steps forwards but peering towards the conference room instead. "Serrano's still inside. She does not look very happy." He smiled knowingly.

"With the situation, who is," muttered JJ before taking off after Hotch.

Spencer went to follow when Morgan grabbed his arm, subtly keeping him back. "What are you–?"

"Hotch doesn't need all of us crowding around him," Morgan said, letting go of Spencer's arm. "I think one of us should go into the conference room. And by that I mean you." Spencer was making a face when Morgan went on. "Serrano said she's afraid of tornadoes and right now it looks like she's about to pass out from fear."

"That bad?" Spencer curiously asked. He tried leaning forwards enough to catch sight of the room but Morgan blocked his way.

Morgan shrugged. "Don't know, but maybe a few distractions wouldn't come bad." He patted Spencer's arm, giving him the space to go.

"What am I supposed to do?" Spencer cluelessly asked. Morgan went ahead and started ushering Spencer forwards.

"You're a genius – think of something." Morgan's wise words were of no use to Spencer.

Before he knew it, Spencer was walking through the door and startling Aitana. She looked back from the clear board with widened eyes. As soon as she saw who it was, she relaxed.

"Sorry," she bit on her bottom lip, "I'm a little jumpy right now."

Spencer thought Morgan was absolutely right. Aitana was pale as a ghost, ready to collapse out of sheer fear.

"Can I – do you want some coffee?" Spencer asked, thinking that at least a cup of warm coffee would be a kind of comfort for Aitana. Unfortunately, Aitana shook her head.

"My stomach is in literal knots," she said, rubbing circles over her stomach. "I think I should stay away from caffeine."

"Oh, um…sorry…" Spencer rubbed the side of his neck, feeling embarrassed that he wasn't able to think of something else on the spot. Morgan was right – he was a genius, why couldn't he think of something fast?"

"It's not your fault that I'm a scaredy cat," Aitana's voice was shaky. She yelped when thunder crashed. It further proved her point. "I'm sorry." She preferred to turn away to avoid further embarrassment.

Spencer felt for her. "It's alright. Everyone's afraid of something. And, actually, we need fear."

"Ha," Aitana's tone was full of disbelief.

"We do," Spencer insisted. "Fear is what helps determine how we stay safe. It's linked back to basic survival."

"Well, I'm trying very hard to stay safe then…or whatever…" Aitana was uncharacteristically sour and because Spencer knew it was from fear, he looked around for something.

This time, it came naturally to him.

"Hey Aitana, what did you find here?"

The question would of course make Aitana turn around. When she did, Spencer was sifting through some papers on the table.

"Oh, um, casualties of the tornadoes so far," she replied. She moved to Spencer's side, watching him pick up a pencil she left lying on the edge. "Don't tell me – you found a mistake?" She wouldn't put it behind her to make silly, stupid mistakes right now.

"Don't worry," Spencer said easily. He reached inside his left pocket and took out a coin.

"Are you going to buy something from the machines?" Aitana asked. Their attempts to order take-out had long been abandoned. They were running on the soda and chip machines in the bullpen.

"Maybe later." Spencer seemed focused on his pencil. He was rubbing the eraser furiously against the coin. Suddenly, the pencil was going through the coin.

Aitana's eyes couldn't have been any wider. "What the hell?"

Spencer smiled cheerily at her. He had her attention now. He showed her the full angle of the coin and Aitana swore the pencil was going all the way through the coin and yet when Spencer separated the two objects, the coin was intact.

"No!" She exclaimed, snatching the coin from him to examine it herself. "That's not – how did you do that!?" Her eyes were snapping up at him, mouth hanging in an 'o' shape.

Spencer couldn't help but laugh, albeit gently. "I told you I do magic tricks."

"No you don't! You're not a wizard!" Aitana stomped her foot yet started laughing herself. "This isn't Harry Potter!"

"No, it's not," Spencer agreed with her. He gently plucked the coin from her hand and in return gave her the pencil to hold. He put the coin down on the table and knowing that he was going to be doing another trick, Aitana leaned close to watch carefully.

Spencer rubbed a hand over the coin slowly and in circles. He then started lifting his palm off the table until only his middle finger rubbed the table. And then suddenly, the coin was gone.

"No way!" Aitana practically shrieked, pulling Spencer's hand right off the table completely to inspect herself. "How the – you are a wizard!"

"I'm actually not," Spencer said as if the news was heartbreaking to him. It elicited a soft laugh from Aitana. It sounded…nice.

"How do you do that?" Aitana asked through her laughs.

"Magic..."

"Oh, right, right," Aitana bobbed her head, "A magician never reveals their secrets."

"I mean…" Spencer shrugged with his own wide smile.

Aitana jumped with another crash of thunder. It drew her attention towards the windows again. She gulped. Spencer was fast when he left the room, coming back only a couple seconds later. Aitana hadn't even noticed it with the constant crash of thunder.

"Aitana," he called to her gently. Her gaze flickered back to him; he was standing right in front of her. He had the coin again and a sharpie.

"What are you…?"

"Just focus on my hands, okay?"

Aitana's eyes drifted to the windows for a second. "But the…"

"Trust me," Spencer insisted, motioning her to pay attention.

Aitana nodded and started watching him instead. He tapped the cap of the sharpie three times against the coin in his palm. At the third, his hand seemed to jump and suddenly the coin was gone.

Aitana's eyes dazzled at the magic. "Where's it…?"

Before she could finish her question, Spencer uncapped the sharpie and showed Aitana it was empty inside before somehow dumping the coin on his palm. He'd somehow gotten the coin to fall out of the cap after all!?

Aitana's dazzlement lit up her entire face. "Oh my goodness! You did that! You really did that!" She would have to get over asking how he did it because she would probably never understand. Plus, why ruin the magic?

Spencer was a grinning mess much like Aitana. It was odd how elated he felt seeing he successfully helped Aitana forget the ongoing storm outside. He didn't think he ever felt like that before. And when Aitana sheepishly asked him if he could show her another one, he was more than willing to keep showing her tricks for the rest of the night if it meant taking her mind completely off the storm outside.

~ 0 ~

That same night, the team got word that another boy had been taken, although with a huge difference from all the previous victims.

"So the younger brother of Shaun Rutledge, Billy, says that a young white guy in an RV attacked him with a crowbar in the rain," Aitana relayed her notes to the group as soon as she was done talking with the family. There were very big concerning factors that pointed to a spiraling from the unsub.

"He's changed his victim selection criteria," JJ voiced Aitana's thoughts. Penelope had already done some digging on their victim. "The boy he grabbed gets straight As, plays football, even volunteers at his church. So he wanted him so badly, he was willing to leave a witness?"

"Very," Aitana replied, "Billy says the unsub tried talking to them at least twice before attacking. And in different spots."

"Which suggests he's losing touch with reality and his delusions are starting to take over," said Spencer, prompting the concern to rise.

"What is it about this kid that was so attractive to him?" asked Emily. There was nothing specifically pointing to a clear answer.

"He was teenage and Caucasian like the others," Aitana said, throwing a thumb over her shoulder to point at the clear board. "Other than that, there's not much of a difference."

"So then what the hell is driving this guy?" Morgan was left to ask.

A few minutes of silence fell over the group as they worked to figure out the answer. In the end, JJ came up with a theory.

"What if he's trying to recreate someone he loves? It is an emotion that drives us to extremes. If he's trying to recreate someone, it's probably somebody he loved and lost."

"That would make sense," Aitana nodded slowly, "And Shaun was with his little brother…"

The group called in Garcia asking her to go over past victims and tornadoes in search of a victim that would fit their unsub's current profile.

"Okay, so there's only 10 victims with younger brothers who survived," Penelope informed them after a deep and thorough search.

"The unsub might have been a high-risk kid," said Hotch, "Garcia, how many of the survivors have criminal records?"

"I got two for you. First up is 27-year-old Justin Harris, had a DUI in 2008. Next is 22-year-old Travis James. Ooh, little troublemaker. Shoplifting, possession, and prostitution. Oh, my. And all when he was a minor."

"You got a home address or a vehicle registered in his name?" asked Rossi, thinking this would be their unsub, much like the others.

"Uh-uh. None."

Morgan went down a different path. "You got a photo on this guy?"

"It's on your tablet right now!"

Each of their tablets dinged with a notification. Morgan picked up his and turned the screen on. Aitana brought him the composite sketch that Billy had described of the unsub. It was a perfect match.

"In 2001, Travis James lost his big brother Tucker and his mom Jan when a tornado hit the McCleary Trailer Park in Enid, Oklahoma," Penelope briefly read aloud.

"That's just south of here," Hotch said "So our guy's a local."

Suddenly, the lights went out, leaving everyone in the dark.

"Hang on, Garcia. The power just went out!" Hotch warned the technical analyst before she decided to send them more information.

At the same time, thunder crashed. Aitana regretfully squeaked; she was back on the fear train. She startled again when she felt something on her back. Seconds later, she realized it was Spencer who had placed his hand on the middle of her back.

I'm such a child, Aitana said to herself. And yet she couldn't deny the comfort she felt knowing Spencer was right beside her. She preferred not to think more about it. Maybe the dark isn't such a bad thing.

The lights didn't return but the generators kicked in and allowed for the continuing use of the internet.

"Garcia, I think we're good. Keep going," Hotch instructed the blonde.

"Sometime before this evil tornado touched down, Travis, along with 5 other boys, testified against a one Roscoe Gulch. It appears that this Gulch character was a notorious pedophile in the area, and he was a resident of the same trailer park as Travis and his family. I'm looking at police reports now. It looks like brother Tucker had confronted this Gulch person lots of times. He even broke the creep's nose once."

"He was protecting his little brother," Emily nodded, knowing well that this must have been the reason the unsub took Shaun earlier.

"Ohh. And then the plot thickens. According to a statement from Travis, right after Gulch was acquitted, he and his brother went to Gulch's mobile home. A fight ensued. Travis said it was like his big brother went crazy. He heard tornado sirens soon after. He then ran to a drainage pipe nearby. After that, Tucker and Gulch somehow got trapped in the mobile home when the twister hit. Travis said he saw the mobile home get swallowed up by the tornado. And when he came out there was nothing left."

"Garcia, how old was Tucker when he was killed?" asked Morgan.

"Seventeen. He was found in pieces. It took his DNA and dental records to I. D. him. Travis went into foster care and he was reported missing in 2003. He ran away."

"Ten years ago his brother got ripped apart, and now he's trying to put him back together?" Rossi said, sounding utterly confused. "But why start killing now?"

"Garcia, send me current weather reports for the area, including radar images if you have them," instructed Hotch. He moved around the table to pick up a tablet.

"Ask and you shall receive. It is on your tablets!"

"With the weather in the area, he's going to be so excited, he won't wait," Hotch said to the others. "He'll take the boy to the closest area with the most activity."

When thunder crashed again, Spencer glanced at the windows. He paid close attention to the lightning now beginning to fall. It was all coming down quicker and stronger.

"It's Frankenstein," he realized,, eyes falling on Aitana who was doing her utter best to focus on her tablet and not the weather around them.

"What?" JJ prompted for the explanation.

"Aitana said it first," Spencer's words pulled Aitana's eyes off off her tablet.

"What I say?" she raised an eyebrow. "Besides my childish squeaks, of course."

"You said it way in the beginning — Frankenstein." Spencer blamed himself for not paying enough attention earlier. If he had, they could've ran with Aitana's guess long before other victims got caught.

"I say a lot of things," Aitana said nervously, "Half of them are probably stupid—"

"No," Spencer quickly dismissed such a statement. "You were onto it. The unsub isn't just trying to put his brother back together, he's trying to bring him back from the dead. He believes that tornadoes have the power to take life, so conversely, they should have the power to restore it."

"He genuinely believes in Frankenstein?" Aitana almost scolded herself for being so surprised. This wasn't the craziest case they handled.

"We need to get going now," Hotch directed the rest of the team to start getting ready.

They each gathered their thickest jackets, which weren't all that thick with this kind of weather.

They piled half and half in two cars and set out on the road. The storms were up and ready, getting stronger by the minute. Aitana would know — she was holding one tablet in her hand as Penelope updated them on the statuses.

"I found your trigger!" Penelope announced over the comms. "A year ago, a tornado ripped through a cemetery near Tulsa. One of the 53 graves that was disturbed was that of Tucker James."

"Ah, well, there's the reason for Frankenstein," Aitana said,, gripping the edges of the tablet. That last lightning sounded way too close to them. And unfortunately Morgan had to drive right to it.

"Garcia, those storm chasers at the university we talked to, they should be out in full force. I'm sending you their number now," they heard Hotch from the other car, "Tell them to be on the lookout for the unsub's RV. And, Garcia, patch into their radio chatter. They'll know where the storms are. We need to head into those areas with the most precipitation!"

"Mhm, so make a right at the next intersection," instructed Penelope, "It should be Pawnee Road."

"Hey, how exactly are we supposed to chase this storm?" asked JJ curiously. None of them had truly discussed the matter until now.

Spencer was more than helpful with the clarifications. "The unsub won't actually chase the storm. To get close to it, you have to get in front of it. It's a little like playing chicken."

"Well I don't like this game," Aitana promptly announced. She couldn't possibly sound anymore like a child and she was eternally grateful that nobody was pointing it out.

"Uh oh," they heard Emily say. "It's frozen!"

A moment later, Aitana did the same thing. She banged the side of her tablet, an old family habit when devices stopped working. "No internet! The weather must be affecting the upload."

"I'm patching Garcia in," Hotch informed the others. "Garcia, we just lost our Internet and we need you to guide us into the storm."

"Consider me your eyes and ears, sir!"

Aitana put her tablet down and resigned herself to stare out the front window. Morgan kept driving forwards until Penelope started giving them directions.

"Ok, guys, a twister has been spotted near Rose Hill just south of your position. The storm-chaser dudes are calling it a landspout!"

"We don't want that one," Spencer was quick to say, "Landspout tornados are relatively insignificant. Look for hook echoes on your monitor."

"Hey, hook echoes. Yeah. Ok, I'm gonna do that. Just tell me what they are!"

"Tell all of us please," they heard Rossi say, causing a small round of chuckles.

Spencer went ahead and explained it anyways. "They're swirling hook-like radar signatures that look surprisingly like what you'd expect them to."

Penelope did her diligence and searched for it on her monitors. "Ok. Uh... No, I don't see anything like that."

"They'll likely form in those red and violet areas on the map."

"I don't see anything that looks even remotely like that – oh wait! Yes, I see it. Oh, that's gotta be it!"

"Where, Garcia?" called Hotch.

"Oh, no, no!"

Everyone could feel the panic setting in Penelope's voice.

"What? What is it?" asked JJ.

"There are two!"

"We'll have to split up," Hotch decided quickly, "Which way, Garcia?"

"Uh, ok. Half of you can stay in your current heading. The other half, make a right on Meadowlark Road!"

"Morgan, take Meadowlark Road," Hotch instructed the other car, "We'll keep going."

"Got it." Morgan took a swift turn to the right as soon as it came up.

A moment later, Penelope called in again with the news that Morgan's car was the closest to their unsub. Morgan had no choice but to pick up speed despite the horrible weather. Aitana's heart raced as soon as she saw an actual tornado up ahead. It was far, yes, but to her it might as well be in front of her.

"What's that up there? Near the old house!" Spencer pointed to a flashing light in the same direction as the tornado Aitana watched.

"That's gotta be him," JJ said, spotting the shape of an RV next to the old house.

Morgan came to a stop as quickly as possible and then the four were climbing out just as fast. Behind them, the lead detective was also getting out of his car to join them.

"Travis James!" Morgan called to the brunette man across from them. "FBI! Put the weapon down!"

Their unsub turned out to be almost young looking. He was holding Shaun at knife – or jack hammer – hold.

"You get back!" Travis yelled at them urgently.

"We can't do that, Travis!"

"I said get back!"

"Are you hard of hearing or something?" JJ snapped.

Aitana silently drew back. Spencer figured it was the close proximity of the tornado getting to her and he thought it was just fine if she decided to back out. They could take it.

"Just let Shaun go and we can work this out!" Morgan insisted.

"That's his name, you know. He has a little brother, too," JJ called out. She had to scream to be heard. The tornado was closing in on them.

"We know you saw them when you attacked them," Spencer took his turn, "Let him go!"

Aitana was trudging around the RV as fast as possible but the wind was challenging her from all angles. Her hand slammed against the RV to keep her steady. She head to lower her head to avoid debris beginning to fly with the wind.

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon! She pushed against the wind, finally making a turn around the RV.

"Just go!" Travis exclaimed. "Get out of here, please!" The agents and detective could hear the franticness in Travis' tone, the urgency to complete his plan.

"Travis, Tucker would not want this!" Morgan insisted. "He would want to protect you like he did with Roscoe Gulch."

"That bastard was guilty!" Travis spat.

Aitana was coming up behind Travis, her body shaking both out of fear and cold and yet her hands were gripping her gun.

"Just let him go and we can help you," JJ said.

"We don't need your help!" Travis spat.

"Well if you don't, I'll have to shoot you!" Aitana called out, forcing Travis to look behind and see her.

"We need to get cover now!" The lead detective was telling the others. Thunder was turning stronger as the tornado grew only minutes away.

Aitana could feel the cold practically turn to ice on her back. Blinking steadily became hard as images came to her mind, images she tried her hardest not to remember.

"Travis, c'mon!" called Spencer, "You need to put the weapon down! The tornado's coming!"

Travis growled and shoved Shaun forwards. As soon as the teenager was free, JJ scrambled to pick him and bring him to their side. Meanwhile, Travis swung his ax at Aitana, forcing the brunette to fire. The bullet went straight to the ground but the force of her fire threw her back.

Travis didn't seem to care about anything else, not even the open shot he had at the agent. He picked up the plastic bag of body parts he'd collected and started straight for the tornado.

"Let's go! Let's go!" The lead detective yelled, now running for the nearest shelter which luckily had been unlocked.

Aitana had just sat up when someone grabbed her arm and yanked her off the ground. She fell into Spencer's arms, barely taking in a breath when Spencer was already pulling her towards the shelter. They were the last ones inside. The detective shut the doors right on time because the tornado was right on them. Wind howled and things crashed. All the group could do was wait it out, in the dark, and in the cold.

Aitana leaned back against the wall, her fingers digging in her hair. Images flashed in her mind again without permission.

Darkness. Howling. Agonizing wait.

Without realizing it, her breathing became the heaviest in the cellar. Everyone else did – she was going to start panicking for real.

Like before, Aitana startled at a foreign sensation. Someone's hand took hers and gave it a comforting squeeze. Aitana slowly glanced to her right and made out Spencer nodding encouragingly at her. She took in a series of shaky breaths, focusing on that and only that. But she did squeeze Spencer's hand like she was dying.

~ 0 ~

For the rest of the night, the team was remanded at the precinct. Even getting to their hotel was out of the question with the tornado. Still, things were more lighthearted now that their job was done for the time being. It was different…sort of.

When they returned, Aitana had sat herself down in the corner of the conference room and had not come out nor moved since then. She had taken to counting, both in English and Spanish – at least that's what Emily told the others when she walked past the room on one occasion. She was truly afraid, nobody would deny that.

"Hey."

Aitana stopped on 50 and looked up from the table.

Spencer stood there holding a coffee cup in his hand, motioning it to Aitana. "I found some tea," he told her with a small smile. "My choice would've been Chamomile because that's good for the nerves but I couldn't find that one."

"Thank you but I still can't eat," Aitana shook her head. "Or drink."

"Mm," Spencer started coming with a little sway that Aitana picked up on. "Not even if I had some…chocolate?" Because a moment later, he was taking out a small chocolate bar. "Dark chocolate helps reduce stress, anxiety, all that stuff…and it's actually really good. Most people don't really like the bitter taste but I think it's pretty good." He stood in front of Aitana's chair, holding out the two options in his hands.

"Now it really feels like Harry Potter," Aitana said with a little smile on her lips. "But I really can't stomach anything right now."

"It's your own brain telling you that. You should take just a small bite, or sip?"

Aitana figured she should stop being rude when Spencer had been a lot of help lately. One little bite wouldn't be so bad. "Thank you," she whispered as she took the chocolate bar.

"I'm sorry we're stuck here," Spencer said, watching Aitana take a bite of the chocolate. He really needed her to eat something. JJ had pointed out earlier that no one had seen Aitana eat since morning. They were halfway through the night now.

"It's not your fault. You're not in charge of the weather," Aitana said, cracking the bar in two. She held up the half she hadn't bitten from.

Spencer smiled and took it.

"I'm not a child, I promise," Aitana said, biting on her bottom lip. "I wasn't this afraid of tornadoes before…"

Spencer grabbed a seat beside Aitana and set his snacks on the table. He eyed Aitana, the profiler in him coming out whether or not he wanted it. "What tornado did this to you?" He asked.

Aitana drew in a breath. "I was still in WPP."

"Ah…"

"After I left San Diego, they stuck me in Kentucky," Aitana swallowed hard. "I lived there on my own in this house that was part of a rural town. I didn't make friends there, obviously after San Diego…"

"You didn't want to risk anyone else," Spencer understood. It was a sad logic.

"Yeah. There was a tornado warning and I had to take shelter by myself. I was underground for a whole night, on my own, in the dark…" She shook her head fervently the moment she felt tears stinging her eyes.

That made perfect sense to Spencer. It would feed a fear enough to cause this kind of fright. "And did that happen once?"

"N-o," Aitana choked the answer out. She had to lower her head. She was too embarrassed now.

It was dumb question to ask given Kentucky was known for its tornadoes but Spencer liked to think that maybe while Aitana lived there, she had only gone through that experience once. He was sad to see that it was not the case.

"I'm sorry about that, but you don't have to be ashamed of that," he told her. He lowered his head to try and catch Aitana's gaze.

"Spencer, I'm 27. I shouldn't be this afraid. This is stuff for my preschool-aged nephew."

"Age has nothing to do with fears," Spencer said, "It's actually pretty common. Take my fear for example."

"Germs?" Aitana managed a half smile. "Then I suppose I must be scaring living daylights out of you. You had to hold my hand for about an hour. Sorry."

Spencer laughed gently. He hadn't even thought about that. "I don't usually have the fear when it's about my friends."

"Still, you've helped me a lot today and I really appreciate it but I really should get over it."

"It doesn't work like that, unfortunately," Spencer shrugged. "We can manage it and sometimes with the right kind of therapy you can overcome it but it's not a big deal if you can't. If you can't, then you should at least let your friends help you out."

Aitana finally straightened up in her seat, raising her head up. "Thank you."

"Of course." Spencer broke his half of the chocolate bar and slid one piece back to Aitana. "You really need to eat."

"Alright." She picked up the smaller piece he had slid over to her and took another bite.

"So, why were you counting?" He asked afterwards.

"You know the whole 'count to 10 and the lightning will seem like it's going away' thing? Yeah, that's what I was going for. I just wanted to be extra sure so I counted in Spanish too."

Spencer chuckled. He liked her methods. "Right. Can I count with you?"

Aitana had taken another small bite of her chocolate. "You want to do that? It's boring."

"It's a mechanism for you to feel less afraid," Spencer shrugged, "I want to help. Can I?"

"I mean…of course, I just…I don't know, I figured you'd want to rest after this case," Aitana said, pulling one leg up on her chair. She rested one arm over her knee and proceeded to further break her chocolate up.

"I can read on the plane. Besides, maybe I can learn a little bit of Spanish with you?" Spencer's awkward smile made Aitana laugh. "It's the only language I can't really master."

"It's pretty easy," Aitana said in between chews. "The great thing about Spanish is that the way it's written is the way it's said unlike our dear English language."

"You can see why I get frustrated then," Spencer said, "So maybe we can kill two birds with the same stone. I will help you forget the tornado and you help me learn some Spanish."

"Okay," Aitana nodded, "Va."

"Va?"

Aitana grinned. "Your first Spanish lesson. It means 'alright'. Like, 'you want to go the store'? And you can say 'va'."

"Va…" Spencer repeated as slowly as possible, eyebrows knitting together as he learned the word.

Thunder crashed much too close for Aitana's liking.

"Va, let's start counting then," she said, taking in a deep breath. This time, however, she found it easier to focus than before. Every now and then, her counting would be interrupted with her own laugh. It was hilarious the way Spencer pronounced '13'. Trece.

She forgot all about tornadoes.

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

Today, on November 10th, 1978 - Queen Story!

"Jazz" album released in the UK

👉 The seventh studio album

➡️ 12/12/1978 - Circus Magazine

🔸In praise of ‘JAZZ’

The boys conjure up a bizarre junket by Mark Mehler

On Bourbon Street, in the heart of New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter, the sign reads, “Bob Harrington-Chaplain of Bourbon Street.” Upstairs, the freelance minister administers to the wicked minions below, while across the street, the Hotsy Totsy lounge features naked women parading across an oak bar from dawn to dusk, and next door, the “X-rated Shop” specializes in scatological posters and joy sticks.

This is Freddie Mercury’s favourite American city, where the Mississippi ends its majestic flow and zealots with big dreams fight a losing battle against hustlers, procurers, and all purveyors of sleaze. It is Freddie Mercury’s favourite city because the lead singer and bucktoothed front man of Queen is, above all, an actor. And in New Orleans, anyone can be anyone they want to be. Tonight, October 31, 1978-Halloween-Freddie Mercury and Queen have flown in 80 reporters from the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Japan, to see a show and be a part of a show at the same time. The third concert on Queen’s 28-city U.S. tour is in the ornate Civic Auditorium. Above the stage are listed the names of the mighty: Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Cellini, Durer, Gounod. Out of the soft blue and green lights and smoke, Freddie Mercury struts like a rooster, striking ballet poses, under an astral guitar blare that neatly skirts the sharp edges of rock & roll. The melodies are undistinguished, but the constant tempo changes of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You”, keep an audience awake for nearly two hours of uninterrupted music. The lighting show is one of rock’s most ambitious. Eerie purple lights shine out over the heads of the audience, making their hair seem cloudlike and inanimate. At the midpoint of the show, a smaller stage is lowered from the ceiling and 400 lamps meld into the sheer white plane of curtain light. Freddie is a whirling dervish, dominating every corner of the stage.

“Some people call this song ‘Spread Your Legs’, he tells the audience, introducing ‘Spread Your Wings’. “And I like it that way”.

Starting out in black sequins, he comes out for the first encore bedecked in orange hot pants, dancing around like Peter Pan. For the second encore he’s wearing a revealing, white body stocking. As he wails ‘We Are The Champions’, his voice warbles with mock emotion, and he grasps the microphone for support. At the apex of the triumphant denouement, the top executives of Elektra Records, who have sat smiling throughout the show, arise as one and walk out. Moments later, the show closes with a taping of ‘God Save The Queen’. Body and soul spent, Freddie ambles off stage, drained and spark-less. But Halloween night in New Orleans has just begun.

Back in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, over 400 people have gathered to await Queen and much on a sumptuous table of hors d’oeuvres, such as Oysters Rockfeller and Shrimp Creole. A Dixieland band plays uninspired jazz jingles, until, shortly before midnight, the Olympia Brass band comes marching through the hall accompanied by Queen-the mercurial Mercury, the winsome Brian May, the puckish John Deacon, the velvety Roger Taylor. Suddenly, like a giant circus orchestrated by a deranged ringmaster, a legion of strippers, vulgar fat-bottomed dancers, snake charmers, drag queens, and bizarrely festooned revellers, begin to strut their stuff before the assembled masses. Freddie Mercury is besieged by hungry autograph seekers, groupies and fame-worshippers. People begin shielding their clothes, as an ever-imaginative photographer snaps Freddie signing the bare backside of a willowy transvestite. Freddie begins sucking on his giant overbite nervously, and by 2 a.m., he is mercifully gone. Brian May, who seems to be the true organizer of the night’s carnival, is cornered by persistent Japanese newshounds. “It’s wonderful,” he keeps saying. “It’s so nice to be back.” As the evening wears on, epicene men and butch women act out charades of power that would have embarrassed Hemingway. Three obese black women in g-strings do a pathetic bump and grind, and another female participant amuses a small gaggle of onlookers by putting a cigarette in an unlikely place. People leave to check out the scene on Bourbon Street and drift back to the party like cigar smoke. At 4 a.m., a Queen security guard, haggard and irritable, inquires when it will all be over. “Queen wants the naked disco dancers going to dawn,” informs his partner. And it does. The following day, Queen reappears at a press conference at Brennan’s, one of the French Quarter’s most elegant restaurants. Again, it is Roger Taylor and Brian May who dominate the conversation, as Freddie Mercury seems vaguely preoccupied. The subject of all this is ‘Jazz’, Queen’s new album, which contains no jazz. “People think we take ourselves a lot more seriously than we actually do,” says Roger Taylor. ‘Jazz’, Queen’s reunion with former producer Roy Thomas Baker, offers ‘Mustapha’, an up-tempo Hebrew rocker; ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, a song that owes a lot to Pure Prairie League’s ‘Amie’; and more indulgent rhapsodies like ‘Jealousy’ and ‘Bicycle Race’, with its topical references to Star Wars, Jaws, and Superman. The ad campaign, like everything about the Band, goes to the limit of good taste: 11 bare-chested, major-league-yabboed women racing bicycles.

“It’s cheeky”, admits Freddie, “naughty, but not lewd. Certain stores, you know, won’t run our poster. I guess some people don’t like to look at nude ladies.”

Freddie, 32, was born in Zanzibar and educated in India, and was a childhood table tennis and hockey prodigy. He studied art and became a graphic designer and illustrator, having given up piano lessons in the fourth grade. But he continued singing, fronting his first band at 14 and forming Queen with Roger and Brian in 1970. After the routine easy grilling, Mercury is cornered outside. “You seem to be removed from the character up on stage. Is that really you?”

“No,” says Freddie, “of course it’s an act.”

He denies pandering to gays; or for that matter, to anyone. He hints at a quiet, restless man who needs to step outside of himself for ego-stimulation.

“I have fun wearing all those costumes,” he says. “I can really cut loose up there”.

Freddie is then swiftly ushered out, and again, Brian May is left behind to field the endless questions of the Japanese. The two-day junket, painstakingly directed by and for Queen, ends with a few straggling journalists eating Bananas Foster and being more cynical than usual. Outside, on Bourbon Street, a folk singer entertains an empty house of red velour seats, affirming that a falling tree makes a sound whether it’s heard or not. Which conjures up something Brian May had said about Queen constantly seeking “direct communication with our audience.” For all the words that describe Queen’s trip to New Orleans, direct is surely not one.

[cruesuffix]

Vince with his Karen haircut during the gen swine era was something else…

Also how did they manage to pose for hustler with a complete nude woman. If you know how graphic hustler you’ll know what I’m talking about

his karen cut was kinda iconic tbh! like… everyone needs a lil cunty bob in their life! also, i know hustler is like a more hardcore version of playboy (i think…), so that cover was probably very on brand for the magazine. i will say, this wasn’t their first time posing with a naked woman before (at least some of them… not all of them *cough *cough mick.), but it was definitely their first time doing it for a magazine! i wonder if vince whisked that girl away to the bathroom during breaks… i’ll answer that hypothesis: yes!!

[detectiveangel]

need to enter the club like tyrone power playing a hustler posing as an exiled russian prince in café metropole (1937). need this.

[shadoedseptmbr]

got asked about whether or not Aedan knew Kai Leng before ME2 and this little conversation popped up in my brain-

"Leng, I've told you before, we are in the killing people for a living business. Thinking about offing your coworkers at the company picnic doesn't make you special, it just makes you a bad choice to bring the dip."

"While you happily toddle around, waiting for someone to praise you for being the last person standing in a brawl so you can pose for another air brushed photo op." He sneered, "You're lazy, Shepard. Every moment, every interaction counts. We all know your presence is due to a few highly placed friends. Or a favor paid on your knees." She let a tiny smile play on her lips and grinned when his eyes narrowed. so fuckin' easy "I can't be lazy and a hustler, sugar. Make up your mind." Whatever he'd been about to hiss back was lost; he clamped his mouth shut as Commander Harbottle cleared his throat behind her.