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bettyfrommars · 1 year

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On Your Knees

mechanic!eddie x fem!reader

18+only, jealous!eddie, unprotected sex, bathroom sex, mutual pining

The year is 1991. You work across the street from Eddie's garage, and the two of you have been flirting for months. Neither one of you make a move, though, but when Eddie sees you out on a date at The Hideout with someone else, he realizes he doesn't want to share you.

Word count: 3.8k

Song Inspo: No One Like You/Scorpions and On Your Knees/W.A.S.P.

You’re finishing up dinner on a date with a guy you don’t even like, and you’re bored as hell, when you realize that the restaurant he took you to is only two blocks away from The Hideout. Your heart grows arms and legs and does a cartwheel as you think about Eddie. Eddie Munson, the one who turns wrenches at the gas station/mechanic shop across from the cafe where you’ve been working to pay off your student loans. Eddie, the one who calls you Princess, and you hate it, but he calls you that anyway. Eddie, the one who sat with you and made you laugh when you found out your parents were getting divorced. Eddie, the one who has a secret crush on you, but keeps his distance because he thinks you’re too good for him.

Eddie, the guy who hasn't dated anyone all summer because he compares everyone to you, and they all fall short.

Tonight, you’re with Troy: he just graduated with a business degree and his dad owns half of Hawkins. He has an Andrew McCarthy look about him, but he spent almost the entire evening bragging about all of the hot women he’s dated, and reminding you what a catch he his. Before Troy drives you home, you tell him you want to see some live music at The Hideout, that a friend of yours has a band that plays there once in a while.

“Have you ever been to that place?” Troy asks, a disgusted look on his face. “It’s a dump. We’ll probably get hepatitis just from sitting on the seats.”

There is a guy at the door on a stool with long blonde hair and a handlebar mustache wearing sunglasses at night taking the $1 cover. He doesn’t check your ID’s but he does look you both up and down with a grunt as Troy passes him the cash. A waft of cigarette smoke billows out as you enter, the old wood plank floors squeaking under your feet. On stage at the end of the room is a band covering No One Like You by Scorpions, and you notice right away that none of them are Eddie. It’s not until you realize how disappointed you are that you finally come to terms with the fact that you do, in deed, have a thing for Eddie. It was always a possibility in the back of your mind, but now you’re not sure why you didn’t realize it sooner.

It would be too obvious to turn around and leave now, so you ask Troy to get you each a beer. Eddie told you that there are never many people at The Hideout, and he was right, but the crowd that chose to be there was plenty enthusiastic. You were able to find two stools at a small, round table against the wall that was sticky to the touch. You watch Troy wipe the top of his beer bottle of with the inside of his polo shirt. You’re facing the stage, sipping your beer, enjoying the crowd, pretending to hear whatever college glory story Troy is telling you. You were putting your beer down to clap at the end of the song, but then…

There he is, in the flesh: Eddie Munson.

You see him sitting three tables away, near the middle of the room, and just as you realize it’s him—his eyes connect with yours. You have a sharp intake of breath at how good he looks sitting there in his leather jacket with his long hair all around him. Normally, you see him during work hours and he wears his coveralls and his hair back in a ponytail, which you also find sexy as hell.

Suddenly, you don’t want him to see you here with Troy. You don’t want him to think that this date means anything to you. You put your head down as if the beer bottle can hide you. But when you lift your eyes to sneak a glance at him again, you see he’s still looking at you; his eyes shifting from you to the back of Troy. He lifts his beer bottle in greeting, his eyebrow up, his face unreadable. You’d always known Eddie to be quick to smile—always joking with you and teasing you; trying to find any reason to touch you or talk to you when he came around before work, on his lunch break, and sometimes after work if he saw you closing up. But, in that moment, his face was anything but pleased.

You curse under your breath.

“What was that?” Troy asks, his face cringing at the next song (On Your Knees – W.A.S.P.)

You smile because you have no idea what he just said.

Troy chuckles, picks up your hand, and puts the back of your fingers to his lips to kiss them. You don’t even need to check and see if Eddie saw that, because you know he did. You force yourself to count to ten before you look in his direction again.

But he’s not looking at you this time, he’s talking to one of the two other guys at his table. A sexy waitress wearing daisy duke shorts to show off her long legs and a low cut shirt to show off her goods, was at his table, probably taking their drink order. To your chagrin, the hot waitress moves behind Eddie’s chair and bends over to wrap her arms around his neck, resting her chin on his head. Eddie sat there and let it happen; he looked like he was enjoying himself, one side of his mouth kicking up in one of those playfully devilish grins. In a follow up bold move, the waitress slides around to sit in his lap, her arm around his shoulders, her mouth only inches from his.

You jerk your head away so fast, it’s almost like you got slapped. You pretend to watch the band over Troy’s shoulder, not sure if you could handle it if you had to watch Eddie kiss someone else. Just as you are internally screaming at yourself not to look over again—you do it anyway.

The waitress is on her feet now, but Eddie has his arm hooked around her legs, her ass close to his face. With an adoring smile, she runs her hand down Eddie’s hair, and then gives him a wink before she walks away.

Eddie’s eyes snap to you.

You look down at your beer and choke, but turn it into a cough, and cover your mouth with your hand. The thought occurs to you that he was egging that waitress on to get back at you for being there with Troy. What did Eddie have to be jealous about? He never asked you out on a date or let you know he had any romantic interest in you. Sure, you suspected that the feelings between the two of you were growing, but for all you knew, you were misinterpreting things. You both graduated from different high schools, and Eddie liked to joke that you never would’ve given him the time of day back then. You were the prom queen, and he was The Freak.

“You okay?” Troy asks, putting his hand on your arm. “You ready to get out of this shithole?” But he only mouths the word shithole, as if anyone could hear him over the music.

You swallow hard and give an enthusiastic, albeit fake, “yes! Absolutely,” but first you needed to use the restroom; you’re not sure what is going on in your gut, but it feels like a swarm of butterflies wielding knives.

You stumble a bit getting off your stool, but then collect yourself, faking a confident smile. Troy lets you know that he would meet you outside in the car. Feeling somehow justified to do so after Eddie’s handsy nature with the waitress, you kiss Troy on the cheek as you head to the bathroom with your head down.

Ducking into the narrow hallway that was off to the back of the stage, you exhale a long-held breath, steadying yourself against the wall. The hallway is painted black brick, plastered in stickers, hand-drawn band posters, and graffiti. There is a payphone separating the two bathrooms, and when you pull open the door with the outline of a stick figure in a dress on it, you’re relieved to find that it was a one-person bathroom; gas station style. The bathroom itself is filled with graffiti tags and stickers as well, and there are peoples names etched into the mirror, along with phone numbers and curse words.

You make sure the door is locked, and then start pacing back and forth. “Damn you, Eddie,” you whisper to the emptiness around you.

You brace your hands on the edge of the white porcelain sink, meeting the eyes of your reflection in the mirror; they are positioned right under a very crudely carved broken heart outline. “Get a hold of yourself,” you’re still talking to yourself---Eddie Munson is slowly but surely making you certifiable. Everything is cool, everything is great. You’ll make a beeline for the exit, and you won’t have to see which girl he has on his lap now.

You shake your hands out, sigh heavily, and then unlock the door on an exhale.

As you come out, another woman who had been waiting gives you a dirty look and then goes in behind you. Once she shuts the door, you realize that you’re standing out in the dark hallway with Eddie.

He’s leaning casually against the opposite wall with his arms crossed over his chest, and then he lifts his chin at you once you realize that it’s him, a bored look on his face. “What are you doing here, Princess?”

“Hi Eddie. I have to go now,” you say in a rush as you move to walk by him. In response, he stretches his arm out, takes a big step, and plants his hand flat on the wall next to you, using his body to block your path, his wallet chain hitting the brick with a clack.

There is a dramatic pause as it takes you a few seconds to find the strength to look up at him, and meanwhile you stare at the tattered metal t-shirt under his leather. There is a tightening in your chest: part confusion, part fear, and part deep, primal need that makes your core throb.

When your eyes slowly climb to his, you see that the pupils in his chocolate brown eyes are blown, and his lips are parted.

“What do you want, Eddie?” You ask, trying to read the hard set of his jaw.

He moves closer and lowers his head so that your eyes are now on the muscles of his neck, his heart beat visible.

“Is that your boyfriend?” His voice is a low murmur.

In a strange burst of frustration, you cock your head at him, pulling back to meet his eyes again. “What do you care?”

The woman comes out of the bathroom and give you both a side-eye as she walks by.

You follow suit and duck to the side to move around Eddie, but he is quick to switch positions---stretching his arm out so that the flat of his palm meets the opposite wall with a smack, his metal rings clinking together. The smell of his cologne mixed with leather and tobacco intoxicating you like a drug about to send you on a high to outer space.

Fuck, I can’t let her leave, Eddie thinks to himself, his mind racing, his heart about to explode out of his chest with the massive crush he has on you. For the past couple weeks, he’s been trying to build up the courage to ask you out, but then he would look down at his dirty hands and drive back to his messy trailer and push the thought out of his mind. But, seeing you on a date with someone else, someone other than him, flipped a switch that turned him into a bit of possessive, jealous asshole, and he didn’t like that side of him. It also set off an alarm deep in his gut letting him know that he was already in deep with you, and he hadn’t even kissed you yet.

“Why was he touching you?” He glances up at his hand on the wall, but then flicks his gaze back down to you, lingering on your mouth, expecting an answer.

“Are you in charge of who gets to touch me now?” You rest your shoulder on the wall, returning his eye contact with a defiance that makes him the first to look away.

Eddie’s jaw muscles tighten, his back teeth grinding—he felt like he was losing control. The need for you to be his—to belong to him—tightened like thorns around his heart more and more every day.

“Listen, Eddie,” you soften, remembering that this is the guy who makes you mix tapes and leaves his tip money in the shape of origami animals. “I went on a date with him because he asked me. And I’ve been really...lonely,” you were a bit ashamed to say that last part, but it was true.

Eddie softens too, hearing your voice tremble.

“If it makes you feel any better,” you continue, shrugging your shoulders. “Being with him only made me realize how much I’d rather be with you.”

The look you give him moves him in a way he could not have predicted. In the time it takes for him to exhale the breath held tight in his chest, Eddie cups your face in his hands, and backs you against the far wall, his mouth covering yours, moaning as you slip your tongue between his lips, meeting his desire with equal force.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” he whispers against your mouth.

You grab him by the belt loop and yank him closer. “You can have it, all of it,” you say, breathlessly. You can tell his hands are hovering, not sure if you want him to touch you in other places, and so you reach down and cup between his legs, a bit taken aback at the size of the cock growing in his jeans.

“Holy shit,” you say as you glance down.

“Yeah, sorry,” he says in regards to his size.

“Don’t be sorry,” you assure him. “I want it inside of me.”

Eddie pauses to make eye contact with you, swallowing hard, the need for you tightening in his balls. You both glance at the empty bathroom and simultaneously start to move, shutting and locking the door as soon as you can. The romantic in Eddie can’t help but think that this isn’t the ideal place for a first time with you, but you’re both too horny—too ready. He can feel how ready you are soaking through your panties as he reaches under your dress to stroke you.

Eddie has you against the door of the bathroom, his tongue searching your mouth, moaning, while his fingers rub you on top of your underwear before slipping them aside to stick one finger in.

Your breath catches, and Eddie groans at your resistance, at how tight you are.

“Fuck, sweetheart,” he mumbles against your mouth. “I want to taste you.”

He drops to his knees, taking your underwear with him as you hold your dress up at your waist. He takes one more look up at you, still not believing this is really happening. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he gushes, just as his mouth buries into your folds, his tongue dipping down to fuck your hole. You put your hand to his hair and cling to it. He brings one finger up inside of you again, finding a little less resistance, as he sucks and flicks his tongue on your nub.

“Oh my god...Eddie...just like that…”

You hear people out in the hallway, but one uses the payphone and another one goes into the men’s restroom. You can feel Eddie’s hand with the chunky rings resting on your thigh, and you reach your hand down to intertwine fingers with his as he ventures to sink a second finger inside of you. You cry out a little, and his eyes snap up to look at you, but then he realizes it was a cry of pleasure as your opening spreads open for him, swelling to meet his needs.

Your leg starts to tremble; you release his hand to pull down the front of your dress and cup your breast, plucking at your nipple.

“Baby..I think I’m about to….oh fuck…”

Eddie takes your core into his mouth and flicks it with his tongue at a rapid speed, filling you with two fingers as your arousal drips down your inner thighs.

“Wait...wait….” you stop him, and reluctantly he tilts his face back to look at you; his mouth and chin glistening with your juices. You grab his chin. “I want to cum with you inside me.”

Eddie’s cock jerks in his jeans at that suggestion, even though he intended to make this all about you.

“Please, baby,” you plead with him, still holding him by the chin, and then he rises to his full height and prepares to wipe his mouth off with the back of his hand before he kisses you, but you stop him.

“I want to taste me on you,” you tell him, as your mouths collide again, murmuring about your mutual need for each other. Eddie feels like the tip of his cock is about to blow off with how turned on he is by you.

Eddie turns you around, reaching around to play with your clit as he does so, your head tilting back to kiss him. You press your cheek against the door and pull your skirt up, your underwear still around your knees, arching your lower back so that your ass lifts up to him.

He spanks you with the flat of his hand, and then rubs it; he opens you up with his thumbs to look at your perfect asshole. He runs a finger from your swollen lips to your backdoor, watching you shiver at the sensation.

He undoes his belt and drops his black jeans and boxers just enough, clutching his throbbing hard cock. You look behind you at the weapon in his hand and start to rock your hips back, begging for it.

Eddie squeezes some precum to the tip and then rubs it along your soft, soaking hole, feeling it grip him and suck him in. Your tight entrance makes him shiver as he clutches your ass with a grunt, his rings slightly pinching your skin. He thrusts it in half way and you toss your head back.

“Oh my god, fuck fuck, oh my goddddd….” you can feel the orgasm mounting again, unfurling like a band of firecrackers at the base of your spine.

Someone knocks on the bathroom door.

“Out of Order!” Eddie growls back at them.

His hips are rocking now, sending his cock deeper and deeper inside of you, “holy fuck, you feel so good,” he groans with a curse, moving faster now, watching your juices soak his cock.

A few more thrusts and you are bracing yourself against the door, muttering about how good it feels, pushing your ass back into him so that he can bottom out inside of you, cursing and groaning as he does so.

“That’s it,” he tells you, your skin meeting with a satisfying slapping sound. “That’s my good girl.”

You reach down and rub your clit as you reach the brink, your body vibrating, the heavy beat of the music thudding in your chest.

“Eddie...Eddie baby...I’m...I’m…” And then you go momentarily limp and he holds your hips as you stupify for a moment, seeing white behind your eyelids, soaking his cock with your cum, mumbling, as a whip inside of you snaps.

Eddie’s orgasm isn’t far behind, he hisses at the way your walls grip him as you cum, hearing your whimpers of pleasure.

His hips start to pump at twice the pace, pouring into you, his wallet chain slapping his jeans. “Fuck, I’m about to...where do you want me to…”

“Inside of me, oh god, inside of me….”

A few more thrusts and he starts to explode, sending his seed deep inside of you, kneading the skin on your ass as his pelvis curves against you. He trembles as he gushes, his hand traveling up to cup the back of your neck.

Heaving deep breaths, he pulls you back against him, kissing your neck, fondling your breast, his cock not ready to leave the tight grip you have on him. “My cum is so deep inside of you, you belong to me now.”

You turn your head to look up into his eyes and he kisses your mouth and then your nose, holding you there.

Someone bangs on the door again, and this time they rattle the handle.

You both share muffled laughs as you quickly pull yourselves together.

“Sorry, toilet was broken,” you yell, checking your face in the mirror.

When you’re both ready, Eddie reaches back to take your hand in his before he unlocks the door.

On the other side of the door is Troy. He’s frowning, and then his face drops, his mouth going agape as he sees the state of you two and his brain scrambles to register what he is looking at.

“What the hell is going on?” He barks at you, incredulous. You find it amusing that Troy was worried about catching germs from merely sitting on the seats, and here you are getting raw-dogged in one of the bathrooms.

Eddie keeps a firm grip on your hand, pulling you closer to him, as he checks Troy in the shoulder on his way out. “She’s with me now,” Eddie tells him. “Don’t ever touch her again.”

You shrug your shoulders at Troy, and give him an ‘oops’ face as you follow Eddie’s lead back to his van, back to more debauchery.

#eddiemunson #eddie munson smut #stranger things #stranger things smut #eddie munson oneshot #the hideout #fem reader

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legend-the-dumb-jock · 4 months

Text

Andrew flexed in the mirror of the gym. It was slow work but he was finally seeing progress in his muscles building. All he wanted was to be like the bodybuilders he had seen so much online. Like the ones of the men that on the posters around the gym. And he was finally beginning to see the results of his hard work. Finished up his reps and was walking back to the locker room to freshen up when he had a sharp pain in his side. Almost as if he was struck with a needle. Getting into the bathroom he looked at his side.

Gritting through his teeth the pain didn’t seem to be going away. If anything it was getting worse. Putting pressure on his side to try and get some relief was all he think to do but it did nothing to alleviate the pain that seemed to be spreading through his body. He began to scream out in paín. He tried to walk to the toilet because he thought he was going to vomit but wasn’t able to as he was doubled over in paín.

He began to sweat. Gritting his teeth as the pain coursed through his body. His vision was blurry. He was moaning and grunting as the pain intensified and continued to spread through his body. He wasn’t even aware that some dark spots had began to show on his shoulders. Ones that were common among the gym juice junkies in the gym. A wave of pain rushed through him and seemed to subside. He was able to open his eyes for the be first time in several minutes.

Something felt weird. Looking down at this feet they began to itch. His eyes widened in horror when he see black hairs beginning to push out of them. While his toes thickened and his feet grew larger. Hair grows over the tops of his feet toes. Connecting with leg hair that bream to grow thicker and thicker by the second. While his skin tone began to shift.

Andrew flexed his larger feet not knowing that they just grew from a size 11 to a size 16. Matted in sweaty hair. Something that was sure to make his feet smell and stay warm no matter what he did. The pain continued. Spreading through his body as his muscle mass began to increase. His abs bulging and his chest forming a shelf. His arms bulking up as his face began to shift and change race. Standing in the barroom while his body began to reach its final changed he heard someone clapping.

Turning to look over his muscle back he seen a twink with what would only be described as a voodoo doll. He bang to rub more on the stomach of the doll and Andrew felt his own stomach pulsate as if it was being rubbed. He looked at the twink again, sweet forming a pool under his now heavier darker body. The twink pulled the stomach forward and Andrew’s own pulled out forming a roid gut! Andrew began to back slowly against the wall while the twink continued to force his body to change more and more. Becoming for of the over blown Arab body builder the twink wanted him to become. Andrew’s life would now be nothing but the whim of the other man. Forced to become whatever creation the other man wanted.

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starsandgutters · 16 days

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30!

Hello! Apologies for the delay, I have been unexpectedly busy this week.

30. - Only One Bed

“If this is supposed to be my trip, how come I don’t get my pick of the rooms?”

“We gave you the nicest room, Kevin. Stop being a bitch,” Allison says.

“I’ll take one of the other rooms then. Why wouldn’t one of the couples take this room?”

“We already have our rooms,” Dan says, leaning against Matt’s side. “And since we didn’t know Erik was coming when we booked it, Aaron’s the spare.”

“Can we stop arguing and go to said rooms? I’d love to set all these bags down,” Matt says.

“I can carry my own.”

“Oh no, baby. I got it. I’d just also like to set ‘em down.”

“Shall we at least go look at the room?” Aaron’s gone flush from having so much attention on him. “Maybe there’s a couch or something I can sleep on.”

Kevin turns his frown on Aaron. He doesn’t really want to shun Aaron away to sleep on the couch. That’s the problem, after all. It’s not that he doesn’t want to share a bed with Aaron Minyard; it’s that he’s actually rather partial to the idea. Which means this can only end disastrously, because Aaron definitely does not want to share a bed with him.

“Sure.” Kevin sighs. His tantrum hasn’t been getting him anywhere anyway, he might as well. Andrew has fixed him with a look of murderous rage, but honestly, Andrew looks like that a fair deal of the time so Kevin really pays him little mind.

“Alright Foxes.” Dan claps her hands. “Shall we say half an hour to check the rooms and get settled, and then we regroup back here for a quick lunch before hitting the slopes?”

“Is it wise to eat before that kind of exertion?” Kevin asks.

“Need energy for exercise,” Neil says.

“And besides, you won’t be exerting yourself that much on the baby slopes,” Allison says with a laugh. “You’ll be taking it easy until you graduate from pizza and fries.”

“What does that mean?” Kevin gets no answer as the Foxes break off, all talking excitedly about skiing. He looks at Aaron, who is lingering like a silent storm cloud at his side. “Do you know what that means?”

“It’s the shape of the skis.” Aaron holds his two pointer fingers up. “Fries is when they’re parallel. Pizza is a triangle.”

He tilts his fingers in so the tips touch together, forming a triangle. It makes sense now that someone has taken the time to explain. Kevin supposes it’s probably obvious, but he hadn’t considered the shape of a pizza slice. He tends to think circle when it comes to pizza. Aaron doesn’t look irritated by his ignorance. Well, no more than the base level of annoyed Aaron always looks. Kevin appreciates this. Appreciates that he is patient enough to explain when Kevin doesn’t get things, even if they feel like they should be obvious.

“Have you been skiing before?”

“Oh yeah, my mom used to take me all the time.”

“Really?” Kevin’s brow furrows. That doesn’t sound like the idea of the twins’ mother that he has.

“Yeah. Every summer, when we holidayed at our villa in the alps.”

“Oh.” Kevin realises Aaron is being sarcastic. “Ha ha.”

Aaron heaves a sigh and hoists his bag up, trailing towards the elevators. The rest of the Foxes have already piled on, but Matt holds the door for them. They stop at a few different floors, filtering off to their rooms, until it is just Aaron and Kevin left. Once they get off on their floor, they have to follow the corridor right down to the end. Aaron slides his keycard through the door and shoulders it open, pausing in the doorway.

“Holy shit.” He drops his bag by the door and jogs across the room. Kevin steps in after him, to find Aaron looking out the massive window dominating one wall, overlooking a view of the slopes. It’s a stunning view, a door in the centre of it opening onto a balcony. Kevin leaves his own bag and crosses the room. He stands beside Aaron. The sunlight reflecting off the snow makes everything brilliantly bright. Kevin has seen a lot of outdoor spaces by now, but this, this is so starkly different from the Nest. There’s a sense of irony in them using a place like this as the excuse for his hand.

Aaron tires of the view first, turning away from the window. He pads across the room and then Kevin hears the noise of his body thumping down on the bed.

“I think we’re safe,” Aaron says. “You could fit us in this three times over.”

It says a lot for how taken they were with the view that they missed the bed at first glance, because it really is quite sizable.

“Do you have a side preference?” Aaron sits up, moving to the edge of the bed. Kevin shakes his head. Aaron indicates the right side, the side furthest from the window. “Can I have this one?”

“Sure.”

“Or I could probably sleep over there.” There’s not a couch in the room, but there’s a sunken seating area around a faux fireplace heater that is layered with cushions. “We could just ask for another blanket.”

“It’s fine. Like you said, the bed is massive. No big deal, right?”

“Sure.”

If Kevin’s entirely honest, he’s actually glad things have worked out the way that they have. He did a fair display of bitching for show, but he didn’t love the idea of being alone in a room by himself. He probably would have spent very little time in the room; going to bother Andrew or Neil, or Aaron and Nicky if Andrew and Neil were busy. Which would have been a waste when Allison has clearly splashed out to get him such a nice room. He should probably get her something in return. Neither of them are very good at expressing care with words, but they both know money talks.

Aaron has collected his bag from by the door and is unpacking it. He hangs some of his clothes up, folds others in the drawer. Kevin doesn’t really think about unpacking on vacation. It’s like travelling for away games. It’s just easier to live out of his suitcase. Though he’s not usually in hotels for as long as they’re going to be here. A whole week.

“Do you wanna hang your stuff up too? There’s plenty of hangers left.”

“Sure,” Kevin says with a sigh. “Might as well.”

Kevin’s surprisingly achy when he gets back from their first ski lesson. He knows he’s more than fairly fit, but he’s spent the day using his muscles in a way he’s not used to. On top of that, despite the sun blazing down on them, it’s still cold. His hand is aching a bit from it, but not enough to impact its use. Meanwhile Aaron seems chilled to the bone. They all wore ugly puffy snowsuits, but Aaron layered clothes beneath his, wore a beanie under his hood. When they stopped in the lounge for hot chocolates afterwards, Aaron sat so close to the big fireplace Kevin was concerned his snowsuit might catch fire. He clutched his mug to his chest, leaning his face over the steam, trembling.

Even now, he’s still shaking every so often. Kevin lets him have first shower. Aaron spends a long time in the bathroom, and when he comes out he’s flushed red. Kevin finds the room full of steam from the sheer heat Aaron must have been showering at. When he finishes his own shower, Aaron is wearing a sweater over his pyjamas and sitting close to the faux fireplace. Kevin doesn’t understand. To him the heat in the room feels comfortable. He pulls on a pair of shorts and a shirt more from consideration than any real need for them.

It’s not long before they start to crash out from their long day. They spend the better part of an hour doing their own things: Aaron playing his games sitting as close to the fireplace as he can, Kevin reading a book in bed until his eyes get bleary. When he switches off his lamp, Aaron also moves to get into bed, removing his sweater. The bed is so big that though Kevin feels the vibration of the blanket moving on Aaron’s side, the lift of it doesn’t even disturb his side. Aaron slips in and curls into a ball. He tugs his side of the blanket right up to his chin, tucking it in around his face. After a moment, Kevin hears the swishing noise of his feet moving beneath the blanket, rubbing against each other. He closes his eyes, tiredness weighing down on him. He’s close to the precipice when he feels Aaron shiver, a slight tremble running through the mattress from the movement.

“How are you cold?” Kevin mumbles. He’s got the blanket at his waist, the heat of the room enough for him.

“I just am.”

“It’s basically stuffy in here.”

“We’re not all human furnaces.”

“Mmph.” Kevin rolls over to face Aaron. He can’t see him in the dark, but he knows the vague space he takes up. “Come here.”

“What?”

“Isn’t body heat like the quickest way to warm up?”

“Fuck off. I’m not going to cuddle with you. I’m fine.”

“Whatever.” Kevin tucks one of his arms under his pillow, burrowing his face into it. The pillows are fat, plush, incredibly soft. The bed is perhaps the most comfortable one he’s ever laid in. He closes his eyes. He has almost fallen asleep again when he swears he can hear Aaron’s teeth chatter this time. “Aaron.”

“What?” Aaron’s voice is sharp, vicious. Defensive.

“Just fucking come here if you’re cold. We don’t even have to touch, but surely being closer will let the heat build up faster.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“Well I can’t sleep with all the shivering.”

“Bullshit. You could sleep through a volcanic eruption.”

Kevin thinks that is probably hyperbole, but he has been known to sleep through quite a lot. If he fell asleep, he probably would sleep through all of Aaron’s shivering and teeth chattering, but it’s hard to fully relax when he can tell Aaron is so cold beside him.

“A volcanic eruption would be less annoying.”

He feels the blanket shift and hears the sound of movement beneath it. Aaron huffs.

“Did you just try to kick me but your little legs can’t make it across the bed?”

“Fuck you.”

Kevin laughs. Aaron gets out of the bed, throwing the blanket back dramatically. Kevin hears his footsteps move through the room, the soft curse as he stubs his toe on something.

“What are you doing?”

“Going to sleep in the stupid cushion pit thing so you can’t blame me for keeping you awake.”

“You’ll be more cold. You don’t even have a blanket. Come back.” Kevin waits. Aaron doesn’t answer him. “Aaron, get back in the bed.”

He hears a soft huff from across the room. Kevin takes a long inhale, raising his eyes to the ceiling. Aaron is so fucking stubborn. Kevin wonders what would get him to come to bed. He considers just going to sleep and letting him sulk in the cold, but apparently skiing has unveiled a sympathetic conscience in him. Or maybe that’s reserved solely for Aaron.

“Do you want me to go ask at the desk if they have a hot water bottle or something?”

“No.”

“It’s a fancy hotel. They might have electric blankets.”

“No. We don’t need to make a fuss.”

“Then stop making a fuss and come back to bed.”

There’s a drawn out sigh across the room, then the slow patter of feet back towards the bed. Aaron’s pretence of stoicism shatters when he dives for the bed, burrowing under the blankets again. Kevin lies back down, shifting further across the bed.

“Stay on your own side,” Aaron says sternly. Kevin exhales loudly, but obediently flops back to his side. He gives up. Let Aaron freeze for all he cares, Kevin is too tired to keep arguing in circles with him. He looks off towards the wall of windows. The curtains are drawn, but there’s a dark blue glow from around them. Kevin’s heavy eyes close on him. He intends to reopen them, but they simply refuse to cooperate.

Kevin is not usually the first to wake in the morning. Even when he’s supposed to be up, it often takes him a long time to drag himself from sleep. He thinks it’s the stifling heat that has him groggily tripping into consciousness this morning. His body is sticky with sweat, his shirt clinging to his back. Helplessly, Kevin kicks the blanket down from the left side of his body. There’s a warm presence on his right side, and when he forces his sticky eyes open, he realises it’s Aaron. He’s shifted closer during the night. He is still curled into himself, his forehead near Kevin’s bicep, but he’s sleeping a lot more peacefully than last night. No shivering in sight. In fact, there’s a pleasant looking flush across his cheeks.

Kevin turns his head. He watches Aaron with sleepy contentment for a few moments. It is strange to see him so relaxed; all the harsh lines of his expression softened out in sleep. His lips are just barely parted, his eyelashes fluttering every so often. He makes a soft sound in his sleep and shifts further forward, his forehead actually pressing to Kevin’s skin. Kevin feels his heart stutter over a beat. Aaron makes another soft sound and Kevin quickly closes his eyes, pretends to be asleep before he is caught staring.

He doesn’t know if Aaron does wake up, because he very quickly actually does fall asleep again, and next time he stirs, Aaron is already up and dressed for the day.

Kevin is starting to think skiing is perhaps not for him. There’s just. So much to consider. In ways he does not usually have to consider moving his body. He is determined to at least be passable at it though, and so he stubbornly sticks at it, even if he has yet to qualify from the bunny slopes. Irritatingly Neil seems to be taking to it with a natural grace Kevin does not possess. Aaron is much more fearless in his efforts, but he’s started to express an interest in snowboarding instead, chatting at length with the instructor.

“Well, I don’t usually mix snowboarding with the ski lessons, but if you wanna hang around for a bit afterwards, I’ll give you a go on my board.”

“Yeah?” Aaron grins. Kevin imagines a very small and purposefully targeted avalanche taking out their ski instructor. This thought brings him some joy and comfort until he ends up having a fall. Neil laughs as he whizzes past. Aaron stops to help haul Kevin up out of the snow. “Okay?”

“Sure. It’s just snow.”

Aaron gives Kevin a flat look in response to his tone. His face is incredibly pink. Nose and cheeks raw. He looks cherubic. Kevin wants to push him over into the snow.

“Whatever.” Aaron pushes off and skids down the slope after Neil. Kevin glances back at the ski instructor, sending him a glare for good measure, before he follows the others. Andrew is watching from the lounge window. Neil managed to talk him into trying the slopes yesterday, but he enjoys the cold even less than Aaron. Instead he’s drinking his weight in hot chocolate. Kevin would complain about it if he thought it would do any good, but he knows Andrew simply won’t listen to him.

They have dinner together. Aaron asks the server if they can have a table near a fire or a radiator, and then presses his chair right up against said radiator when they do sit. He rubs his hands together beneath the table. Kevin has a wild impulse to reach over and take them in his. He keeps his hands to himself.

“How did your snowboarding go?” Kevin tries to keep his voice even, not looking at Aaron.

“It was great. Cam’s lending me a board to try on the slopes tomorrow. I think it’s easier, not having to focus on two skis and poles.”

“That’s nice of him,” Kevin says, in a tone that suggests Cam has committed war crimes.

“I mean, I guess he just has access to the lodge equipment. I don’t think it’s his board or anything.”

“Hm.” Kevin pops the menu up in front of his face so Aaron can’t see his unimpressed scowl.

They gather in the hot tub that night for drinks. Kevin’s not drinking, but he tags along since he doesn’t want to be in the room by himself, and the hot water is pleasant on his aching muscles. Andrew and Neil set up camp on a couch nearby, under a shared blanket. Andrew is still drinking hot chocolate, though it could be spiked, but since neither Neil or Renee are drinking, Kevin feels less left out. Renee has even ordered them matching mocktails. Kevin had some concerns about the sugar levels in the drink, but since she took the effort to consider him, he keeps his mouth shut for once.

Aaron submerges right down in the water, just leaving his nose up to breathe. He glares at Allison when she makes a joke about his height, but doesn’t argue. Kevin knows it’s probably more to do with the cold that he hasn’t seemed to be able to shake from his bones since they got here. He sits beside Aaron as everyone else is coupled up, tries to ignore the way their arms and thighs are brushing together as Aaron’s endeavour to not touch Matt sitting on his other side drives him into Kevin’s space. Kevin tries not to think about the fact Aaron doesn’t seem to mind touching him. He steals carefully timed glances at the freckles on Aaron’s strong shoulders, doesn’t let himself look for more than a handful of seconds.

Aaron’s actually one of the first to retreat, once Andrew and Neil wander off together. Kevin can see him building himself up for the transition from warm water to frigid night air. He swings out of the hot tub and immediately wraps himself in a big towel. There’s some protest from Nicky about Aaron being a spoilsport, but Kevin is glad that he can also use that as an excuse to go back to their room. Aaron has another hot blast in the shower before getting dressed for bed. He keeps a hoodie on over his pyjamas and climbs right into bed, cycling his legs beneath the duvet as Kevin goes to the bathroom to carry out his own bedtime routine.

“Insisting on staying all the way over there again?”

“Yes,” Aaron says, and clicks off the light. Kevin huffs in irritation, turning on his lamp so he can read a chapter before bed.

Aaron is asleep by the time he sets his book down, curled tight into a ball, the odd shiver still running through him. Kevin puts his hand to his back, featherlight, barely touching him for fear of waking him. He feels the next tremor to course through Aaron’s body. Kevin sighs and moves closer. He pulls the duvet up, tucking it in tight around Aaron, then lies with his back facing him, only a couple of inches between them, in the hopes it will help build some heat up.

Kevin may not be a pro skier anytime soon, but he thinks he’s finally getting the hang of staying upright. He’s even been set loose from the bunny slopes. He and Aaron ride the ski elevator up to one of the bigger slopes. Kevin looks to the sky because looking at the distance between his feet and the ground is making him anxious. Aaron is constant movement, looking over the side, around them, leaning forward to look down between their legs. Kevin curls his hands into fists around his poles to resist the urge to grip Aaron’s ski suit in case he falls.

“We have to be ready to go once we get up here,” Aaron says.

“I know.”

“Go, Kevin.”

“I am,” Kevin snaps, while he is actually definitely not doing that.

“Go.”

“Give me a second.”

“No time. Let’s go.” Aaron pushes him off as Kevin’s air catches in his lungs. He stumbles, but Aaron steadies him as he plops down beside him, wobbling on the snowboard Cam lent him.

“I was getting there!”

“You can’t hesitate like that,” Aaron says, and starts to slide away from Kevin. He reaches up to fix his ski goggles over his eyes, flips Kevin off, and then starts to speed down the slope. Kevin is much slower, but he follows.

After dinner that night, they gather for drinks again. This time just in the lodge bar, seated close to the fire. There’s too many of them for the size of the couches. Aaron ends up crammed between Kevin and the arm of the couch. At first any contact seems to be solely due to the lack of space, but after Aaron has a few drinks, Kevin feels like he’s leaning into him more. He wonders if he’s just projecting his thoughts onto the situation as he nurses one drink.

Despite the handful of drinks Aaron has, and the multiple rounds of shots he partakes in with Nicky and Matt, he’s steady on his feet as they make their way back to the room. Though it does take him two attempts to get the keycard to open the door. Kevin had hoped at least the alcohol might warm him, but tonight the shivering is worse than ever once they’re settled in bed. Rather than the occasional burst of it, it's constant, accompanied by Aaron’s shaky breathing. He’s fully burrowed under the blanket tonight too, only a tuft of blonde hair visible before Kevin hits off the lamp.

“Aaron,” he says, after listening to this for what feels like a small eternity.

“What?”

“Your stubbornness is getting ridiculous. Come here.”

“Fine.”

Kevin expects Aaron to simply shuffle across to the centre of the bed, so they can share the same cavern beneath the blanket, rather than being in their own separate caves. He’s therefore surprised when Aaron slides across and collides with his chest. Rather than back up, Aaron burrows closer. He tucks his hands to his chest between them instead of draping them around Kevin, but they’re still definitely verging on an embrace. Kevin is still for a moment, scarcely daring to breathe. Aaron shivers. Kevin automatically wraps his arms around him. He hugs Aaron to his chest, rubbing a hand up and down his back. Aaron is tense in his hold for several long seconds before he relaxes with a sigh. He tucks his socked feet between Kevin’s calves, and slowly the trembling of his body subsides.

Kevin waits until Aaron is breathing softly. He noses at the front of his hair, pushing it back until he can rest his lips against Aaron’s forehead. It’s not a kiss. He does not purse his lips. His mouth just lingers against Aaron’s forehead. Kevin breathes in the scent of his hair. It’s the musky scent of the lodge’s shampoo, not the sharp smell of mint and tea tree oil Aaron's usual shampoo smells like. Part of Kevin is disappointed. That when he has this chance he’s not getting to breathe the authentic Aaron Minyard smell. Mostly he’s just enjoying the weight of Aaron in his arms before he falls asleep.

“Get off me. Kevin!”

Kevin wakes to Aaron shoving at his shoulder. They’ve shifted during the night. Aaron has ended up on his back, with Kevin splayed across his chest, face burrowed into the side of Aaron’s neck. He grumbles, scarcely awake. Aaron is warm, and Kevin likes Aaron. He does not like being awake right now. He does not want to be awake. He wants to be sleeping on his Aaron pillow. He tries to nuzzle closer to him.

“Kevin. I told you I wasn’t going to fuckin’ cuddle you.”

“You’re the one that started it,” Kevin mumbles, words slurring into a yawn. Aaron goes very still, probably pouring back over the memory of last night. Good. He remembers then. He can stop blaming Kevin. “Didn’t you sleep better?”

“That’s not the point.”

“How is it not?”

“This is weird. We don’t do this.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It is! It’s… we don’t do this.”

“How’s it weird?”

“It’s weird because we do not do this, Kevin. Get off me.” Aaron pushes at him until Kevin does shift off him with a grumble. Aaron immediately pushes himself to the far side of the bed. Kevin thinks he’s being needlessly dramatic, but it’s also too early for Kevin to be having many thoughts on anything, so he only rolls over and settles down to go back to sleep.

Aaron is already at breakfast when Kevin gets down. He’s sitting at a table with Cam, talking animatedly about something, smiling and laughing. Kevin very much does not like that. It is so rare for Aaron to openly express his emotions like that. Kevin sees it, every so often, but it took a long time before Aaron let his guards down around him like that, and it’s not always a common occurrence. Kevin hates that this random ski instructor gets to see this side of Aaron within only a few days. He hasn’t put in the hours!

Kevin could sit with Andrew and Neil. He sees them come through the door as he’s carrying his plate down. Neil talking away to a sleep ruffled Andrew who looks barely more awake than Kevin feels. Kevin does not sit with them. He pretends not to see them, walking down to Aaron’s table and setting his plate down firm enough that it bangs against the table. Aaron starts, even though he saw Kevin walking over. Right. He doesn’t react well to sudden loud noises. Shit. Kevin forgot about that in his irritation. Aaron glares at him. He was not glaring at Cam. Kevin suddenly feels a lot less apologetic about the plate slam.

“Heya Kevin, how are the bigger slopes treatin’ ya?” Cam looks at Kevin with a toothy grin. Kevin looks back at him with hollow eyes and hopes he chokes on the bacon that is definitely not an ideal breakfast for someone working an active job.

“Fine.”

“When he can get off the ski lift,” Aaron says, huffing in amusement. Kevin sends him a dark side glance.

“Ah yeah, it can be intimidating getting off the lifts at the start.”

“I’m not intimidated,” Kevin grits out. Cam gives him a consoling smile as he stands, lifting his plate.

“I’ll leave the board out for you again Aaron.”

“Great, thanks.” Aaron grins up at Cam. Big enough to show off his dimple.

Kevin stabs his eggs with more force than necessary.

That night Aaron sleeps curled stubbornly on his side of the bed.

“Bet you’d cuddle with Cam,” Kevin mutters bitterly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Aaron is by the faux fireplace in the morning. He’s wearing a hoodie over his sweater, and is so close to the heater he’s almost touching it. Kevin groggily makes his way over, collapsing into the pile of cushions. His muscles are loud about their discomfort today and there is a twinge of pain in his left hand. He thinks he might skip the slopes.

“How are you so cold all the time?”

“Bad circulation.” Aaron shrugs. “It’s like once the cold gets into me it’s hard to get it out again. It’s okay when I’m moving around, generating heat, but once I stop I feel it.”

“It’s not usually this bad.”

“I’m not usually spending all day out in the snow.”

“Fair.” Kevin catches his left hand in his right, rubbing his thumb over it.

“Does your hand hurt?”

“It’s fine.”

“Is it really fine or is it Neil Josten fine?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Josten fine then. Did you bring your brace?”

“No.”

“Right. Why would you bring your brace?”

“I didn’t know I would need it.”

“Because it’s not like your hand hurts every year when the temperature drops”

“I’ll survive, but I think I’ll skip the slopes today.”

“There’s a town not far from here. We could go check it out.”

Kevin blinks, surprised. He hadn’t expected Aaron to stick with him if he passed up on skiing. Aaron seems to be enjoying being out in the snow far more than him.

“Uh. Sure,” Kevin says, and Aaron may be struggling to build heat, but Kevin’s face feels plenty warm.

Everyone decides they’ll go into town today when Kevin mentions their plans. He’s a touch annoyed. He kind of wanted it to be just him and Aaron, but they scatter into different groups once they get into the town anyway, breaking off to explore the shops. Kevin spends the morning wandering around the tourist shops full of homemade trinkets or mass produced fridge magnets with Aaron, but he loses track of him after lunch.

“Here,” Aaron says when he reappears, handing Kevin a support bandage. “Put that on.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I had to look for the local pharmacy. It’s way on the other side of town. I fucking hiked to get you that, so you had better wear it.”

Kevin hates wearing a support. Hates admitting he needs it. Hates the reminder of his injury.

He puts it on with no fuss.

As the sun sinks towards the horizon and they get ready to head back to the lodge, Kevin shrugs off his coat and puts it over Aaron.

“You’ll get cold.”

“I’m fine. I’m actually sweating, but you’re shivering already.”

Aaron glances warily at the others, but the allure of Kevin’s lingering body heat in the coat must be too much to resist. He pulls it on over his own coat and zips it right up to his chin. Andrew is staring at them. Kevin pretends not to see.

Aaron is sitting in the cushion pit. A lot of the others have gone to the hot tub again, but Aaron passed up, so Kevin did too.

“It’s nice until you have to get out of it,” Aaron had said. Kevin doesn’t really care about that, but he was tired and had already spent all day with the group. He wanted the quiet peace of their room.

He drags the duvet off the bed and brings it over to the cushion pit, spreading it over them. Aaron glances up from playing his Switch. Kevin settles down beside him with his book. Aaron readjusts the blanket, a small smile on his face. Kevin lifts his book higher to hide his own smile.

When Kevin wakes up it takes him a moment to realise where he is. He and Aaron must have fallen asleep by the faux fireplace. Aaron is curled against his side. Kevin stretches out his back with a whine. He wants to just wrap himself around Aaron and go back to sleep, but now that he’s woken up, the lamp being on is annoying him, and he’s aware of how stiff his back feels. Forcing himself up, Kevin moves his book and Aaron’s Switch aside. He turns off the faux fireplace. He moves the duvet back to the bed.

Aaron’s brow is furrowed when Kevin comes back to him. Kevin wonders if he’s missing his sources of heat. He crouches down and carefully slides his arms under Aaron’s neck and legs, then hoists him up. He pauses once he’s got Aaron in his arms, scarcely daring to breathe. Aaron sleeps a lot lighter than him. Kevin’s not sure how he’ll respond if he wakes up to this. Thankfully, Aaron just turns his face to Kevin’s shoulder with a soft sound.

Kevin carries him carefully across to bed and lays him down on his side. He pulls the blanket up over Aaron, goes to brush his teeth, then crawls into the other side of the bed. Aaron makes a whiny sound of protest in his sleep as the bed shifts. He rolls towards Kevin, hand reaching across the distance between them. When it catches the material of Kevin’s shirt, Aaron tugs weakly. Kevin is weaker than Aaron’s sleepy grip, immediately moving across towards him.

“Mm.” Aaron nuzzles his face against Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin once again holds his breath until he’s sure Aaron is asleep.

He wakes in the morning to Aaron rubbing his thumbs over Kevin’s hand. Kevin’s left arm is draped over Aaron’s waist, and Aaron has his hand between his, massaging around the scar. Kevin goes still for a moment as he processes what’s happening, then melts against Aaron’s back, pretending to be asleep. Aaron felt the tension in him though. He goes still in response, dropping Kevin’s hand. Kevin whines, tightening his arm around Aaron’s chest.

“Kevin?” Aaron whispers. He sounds mortified.

“Mm?” Kevin noses at the back of Aaron’s head, his hair tickling his face. When Aaron tries to wriggle away, Kevin holds him in place.

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“It’s weird.”

“Why?”

“We don’t-”

“What if we did?”

“What?” Aaron stops squirming, going completely still again.

“What if we did? Feels nice. You sleep better when you’re warm. No one can see us.”

“So what, I’m your dirty little secret?”

“What? No. You’re the one being weird about it.”

“Because it is weird.”

“Mmm not.” Kevin presses his face against Aaron’s hair. He didn’t wash it last night. It's sweaty from being under his beanie yesterday, a human scent that Kevin enjoys. His hand rests on Aaron’s stomach, feeling it shift with each of his breaths.

“I don’t cuddle with people I’m not-” Aaron tries to roll towards Kevin, but they both freeze when his hip brushes against Kevin’s half hard morning wood. This time it is Kevin who recoils across the bed.

“Sorry. It’s not- That’s not-” Embarrassment makes him angry and defensive. “I can’t help it!”

“I know,” Aaron says, his expression warring between amused and appalled.

“You know?”

“Yeah, obviously I know.”

“Oh.” Kevin swallows hard. “Is that why it’s weird?”

“What?”

“The… this. The bed. The cuddling. It’s weird because I like you?”

“You what?” Aaron sits up abruptly, the duvet falling around his waist.

“You just said you knew!”

“I know you can’t control your morning erection! It’s a testosterone surge. I didn’t mean- You don’t like me.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You can’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!”

“Why? Why would you-? Why?”

“Because!”

“Wow. Clarifying. Thank you so much, Kevin Day.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. You tricked me.”

“How did I trick you?”

“You said you knew.”

“How would I know that?”

“I don’t know! You know things. You just do. You’re smart and observant like that. You knew where the pharmacy was.”

“I used Google!”

“Ugh. Whatever. Pretend this conversation never happened.” This time it is Kevin who pulls the duvet over his head. Maybe he can suffocate himself with it. After a pause that seems to last five years, the blanket moves. Kevin expects Aaron to get out of bed, but instead he joins him under the blanket, their breath shared in the space between them.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“What?”

“Pretend this conversation never happened.”

“What?”

Aaron huffs. He reaches out and touches Kevin’s cheek. He looks at him in a way Kevin can just tell means this okay? Kevin does his best to return a look that says yeah yep cool awesome not really sure what’s happening but keep touching my face. Aaron must interpret some positive reinforcement from that expression, because he leans in across the space and kisses Kevin firmly on the mouth. Aaron draws back slowly, but Kevin is already addicted. He surges after him, pushes Aaron onto his back, uses his body as an additional layer of heat as he leans over Aaron and determines to find out what his tongue piercing feels like against Kevin’s tongue.

“That’s Ursa Major,” Aaron says, pointing up. They’re on the love seat on the balcony. It’s the first time they’ve actually come out to it. Aaron is wearing Kevin’s hoodie over his own. He’s sitting sideways on the seat, legs over Kevin’s thighs. Kevin has wrapped the blanket around them as they look up at the stars together, breath fogging on the air.

“Isn’t that the Big Dipper?”

“The Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major. It’s the back of the torso, and that long bit is the tail. Though it’s longer than bears’ tails generally are.”

“Oh wait, I know the myth about that. In Greek mythology it is the constellation of Callisto. She had a shit time.”

“Most women in mythology do.”

“She was a devoted follower of Artemis. One of the myths says Zeus disguised himself as Artemis to seduce her.”

“Swell guy, Zeus.”

“She became pregnant. Lost her place in Artemis’ hunters. As with all of Zeus’ affairs, Hera was furious. Turned Callisto into a bear. When her son Arcas grew up, he almost killed her while out hunting. To save her, Zeus threw her into the sky by her tail. That’s why it's stretched out.”

“Obviously,” Aaron says. After a moment, he adds: “One of Jupiter’s moons is called Callisto.”

“Jupiter was the Roman name for Zeus.”

“It all comes full circle.”

“What are the others called?”

“Jupiter has 95 moons.”

“Yes. That sounds like Zeus.” Kevin smiles when Aaron huffs at his joke.

“There’s four main ones. The other three are Io, Europa, and Ganymede.”

“All named for his lovers.”

“It’s cool how much impact mythology still has on our world.”

“It is cool!” Kevin sits up so excitedly he almost knocks Aaron off his lap. He grabs him in time, and Aaron in turn grabs the blanket when Kevin’s movement almost flings it off them. “On the way we understand the world, on the structures of storytelling we employ, even in the language we still use today! Like, so much of our etymology is inspired by the Hellenes-”

Aaron gently shifts Kevin’s gesticulating arms enough that he can rest his head against his shoulder. He doesn’t interrupt him, just nestles himself closer, making encouraging humming sounds as Kevin continues to ramble about different words that can be traced back to Greek myths. It is only when Aaron starts to shiver against him that Kevin stops. He bundles Aaron up in the blanket and carries him inside, spilling him out on their bed, where they’ve spent the last couple of nights of their vacation tangled up in each other. Kevin’s going to miss it after tonight, but one benefit of the dorm beds is that they are so small Aaron will have no choice but to cuddle up with Kevin when they share one.

#kevaaron #fox fics

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stabbyfoxandrew · 2 months

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Woohoo i’m in time this week! Could I have some arsonist neil🙏

WIP Wednesday (7/10) | Arsonist Neil / Firefighter Andrew AU (Part 198)

“You get the fuck out of my apartment, go buy the woman some flowers, and hope you don’t sweat through your shirt before she gets to tell you,” Andrew says, jabbing him in the chest once again. “On second thought, maybe you should change clothes before dinner.”

It’s enough to shock Aaron into laughing and Andrew’s relieved.

“Go,” Andrew says, clapping his shoulder and shoving him forward. “We live ten minutes apart and taking out the trash does not take half an hour. Hustle like Kevin Day is bitching at you.”

“Oh fuck.” Aaron says. But he nods and skedaddles out the door so quick he almost bowls over Andrew’s grouchy old lady neighbor in the hallway. And doesn’t even notice. She gives Andrew a strange look, like she can’t believe she’s seeing double. Andrew merely shuts the door in her face and returns to his bedroom. After a couple calming breaths, he dials up 10’s number and puts him on speaker before placing him on the dresser again.

“Hey,” 10 says jovially. “Everything alright?”

Andrew sighs and picks up the paint roller. “It was my brother. Apparently he knocked up his girlfriend and came over here to freak out a little.”

“Oh. Yikes,” 10 says, sharing Andrew’s sentiments.

“Yeah. Not sure what they’re gonna do.” Andrew says as he paints a broad stripe down the wall. Oh, this is going to look like shit… Maybe if he does two coats…

“While you were gone I thought of more guesses.”

“Excellent. Get to guessing, firebug.”

#andreil #aftg #WIP Wednesday #Arsonist Neil / Firefighter Andrew #🕊️#answered #anon

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jgrills · 11 months

Text

⁺◦ะ ୧(𖦹﹏𖦹)୨ ೃ࿔

Before we start !! ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و ♡

-Reader is ALWAYS gender neutral (gn), but it's mentioned that the reader has braids (tenderheaded, like me fr).

-written with a black reader in mind. <3

-Reader's the black cat, but NOT suggestive!!

-Reader has claws

-No warnings, unless you're allergic to fluff, and cussing.

It was a breezy London night, the gentle chatter of the citizens, the cars, the trains going by, and soft sounds of the birds singing. The moonlight shining through your curtains.Your alarm suddenly goes off, with a groan, you sling the covers off of you, your braids all in your face. You throw the clock off of the nightstand, the clock landing on the carpet. You're about to put your slippers on, but-

Slip.

You slip over your slipper, face planting into the carpet with a groan. Your braids are all undone and messy.

'I knew I should've re-braided them yesterday!'

"Hey I heard- Oh.." Your roommate, Etta stands there looking bewildered at the sight of your braids, with her bonnet still on.

"Hey Etta.." You mumble, still not attempting to get up from the carpeted floor.

"WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR HAIR?! WE GOTTA GET THIS FIGURED OUT-"

"Etta, please, I'll just redo it-"

"No! You gotta look good for the street musician, what was his name again?" She looks at you for some sort of answer.

"Hobie Brown"

"And you like him right?"

"Yes- I mean..maybe?? I saw him yesterdayyyy"

"Yeah, so you gotta look good for him!" She starts taking out your braids, you occasionally letting out a 'ouch' or a grunt as she takes them out.

"Do you like him?"

This immediately makes your cheeks darker, and warmer, looking away from Etta's piercing brown eyes.

"I mean, I get nervous..and my heart beats faster? I don't know what it means though"

"It means you love him!"

"Okay, Etta, like you would know- Ow!" Etta pinches your cheek, then lets go.

"Let's just get your dumbass ready"

After a bunch of ows, and complaints from you, your braids are fresh, and your black cat costume is warm and cozy.

Perfect for the cold London night.

"I'll see you at-"

"Just get yo dumbass out before I jump you" She threatens in the mirror, clapping her flat iron playfully at you.

"Alright alright! I'm out!" You quickly jump out and claw down the walls, jumping to rooftops to get to the nearest bank, the cold wind running through your braids.

You see a couple of street musicians, one with an electric guitar, he makes gentle strums and raves on his electric guitar, people handing him money on the way to their location.

He looks so handsome..

His hair? Woah..

"No Y/N! No getting distracted!" You whisper shout to yourself, lightly smacking your head.

You get on the London Bank's rooftop, the moon in the cityscape distracting you by the yellow hue. Relaxing first before you do anything. Crawling into the bank's ceiling, your claws gripping onto the pearly ceiling, looking down at the people in their overpriced clothes.

"We should buy Prada later!"

"Oh my God! Yes we should!"

"Let's just hope Andrew has an eye on the vault, his bitchass has the night shift!" The woman laughs, lusciously holding her jaguar print bag.

You groan quietly, continuing to get lost in the ceilings' floral patterns, you make eye contact with a girl with some butterfly braids, she ends up running away, dropping a key.

The key reflects off the ceiling..

You grab the key, and leap back onto the ceiling, making your way to the banks vault. There, you see a young man, presumably with some dreads, liking a girls Instagram post on his phone.

You quickly kick him in the neck, knocking him out, his phone dropping beside him, you move his head with your heel, making sure he's out.

Yep, out cold.

You snicker, unlocking the vault slowly, red glowing lines await as you open it.

'Really?!'

You manage to dodge the lines, having to do limbo with some of them..

oh shit.

One line is extremely close to your nose, you move slowly past it, letting out a sigh of relief.

'Fucking security' you think, rolling your eyes, getting out a bag, you stuff various stacks of money in the bag, grabbing about 80-120 stacks, you hoist the bag on your shoulders, once again avoiding the cameras and security lasers.

Running out into the cold London air, your braids flying behind you, jumping to several buildings, passing some stacks to the homeless, small businesses, and the local artists around London.

'Oh, I need to save some for Ho-'

You run into a figure, you both fall to the ground, you rubbing your head.

"Oh my gosh! I'm sorry!" You help him pick his electric guitar up, giving him the case back, putting some money in there also.

"It's okay, no problem" He takes his guitar, putting it on his back again. He walks away, humming.

You stand there for a second, looking dumb as hell as you think about the handsome man you saw. Your heart starts beating faster, butterflies flying around your stomach as you climb another building.

You're gonna have a bunch to tell Etta once you get back.

@chessbox

Man, this took so long, this was my first time doing something off of a prompt (by @undobutton's one post on a street musician au Hobie)

Thank you to @forevayafavv for the help writing a black cat reader

honk mimimimi

#Spotify #hobie brown x reader #hobie brown x you #hobie x you #hobie brown #This was #yeah #Chessbox🗯

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justmeinadaze · 1 year

Text

Date Night (A Night In) Steve X You

A/N: I wrote this last night because my period is being aggressive and I just need sensitive Steve to come over and take care of me <3.

Warning: Period, Shower smut, lots of fluff

Word Count: 2022

Steve was surprised when he came home and your car was already in the driveway. As he opened the door, he was met with total chaos.

“Hey!”, he claps his hands immediately silencing the younger Harrington boys. “Why is everyone yelling?!”

“Junior is being mean and won’t let me play the game!”

“It’s not Andrew’s turn. Plus, he’s been playing it since he got home an hour ago!”

“Hey, what’s the rule? What’s the rule?!”, Steve repeats as the boy’s whine.

“If we can’t share, it becomes yours.”, they respond in unison.

“Good. Now, where is Bobby?”

“He’s lying in bed with mom. She was here when we got home and Grandma dropped him off earlier.”, Junior shrugged as he focused his eyes back to the TV.

“Ok, I’ll be right back. You guys are packed, right? Aunt Robin should be here soon.”

He waves his hand at them as they nod, climbing the stairs to find you. When he opens your bedroom door, he finds his youngest fast asleep on his side in front of you. You were asleep as well but you were gently groaning as your nose scrunched occasionally in pain.

When Steve lifted the covers to grab his son to let you rest, he noticed you had laid a towel under your hips. He softly caressed your face before lifting Bobby and carrying him down the stairs.

##############

You stirred a little while later to the sound of your name.

“What? Huh? Fuck, the boys…?”

“Baby, baby calm down. It’s ok. They’re with Robin. Here, I brought you some pain meds.”

You gladly took them, chugging down the glass of water Steve brought up with him. He sat on the bed, chuckling as you wrapped your body around his back like a snake. “Is it bad again this month?” He sighs when you nod. “Do you think you should—”

“No… no. It’s fine. Nothing too abnormal.”

Since high school Steve knew your periods killed you. They were bad then but as you got older it seemed to knock you on your ass less. After having Junior, though, it steadily got worse again. The months when it had you in bed, wincing, and crying scared him to death. He hated seeing you in pain.

“Honey, I know you’re scared to talk to the doctor but—”

“Steve! I don’t want to talk about this right now, okay!?”

He exhales again, watching as you try to get out of bed but fail. Steve comes around to your side, carefully lifting you in his arms, and carries you to the bathroom. As you use the toilet you can’t help but laugh at him as he leans against the sink.

“You don’t have to stand in here with me. I’m not broken.”

He smiles at your tone. “Yeah, but I find any mystery in a marriage to be overrated.”

You giggle at him before completing your needs and standing to scoot towards the sink. Steve places his hand on your lower back mostly to let you know you had support if you felt shaky.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just…hormones.”

You grin up at him as he delicately pulls you into a hug, kissing the top of your head. “Y/N, I get it. I know… you’re worried about what she might say when it comes to more kids but… Honey, I just want you to be healthy and happy.”

“I know. One of the reasons I love you.” You lean back to look up at him and he bends slightly to kiss your lips.

“So, since we can’t go out for date night, I had an idea. I was thinking we could watch a movie and eat in bed.”

“Oh, Steve Harrington. You spoil me.”

He grinned coyly as he lifted you, carrying you back to the bed.

“What feels more comfortable? Lying on your back or side?”

“Honestly, the medication is kicking in and now that my lower half doesn’t feel like it’s trying to escape through my skin I’d like to sit up, please.”

Steve laughs as he gently places you down on the mattress. You watch with pure admiration as he moves around the room, organizing things on the dresser so the wall behind it was completely clear. He disappeared downstairs, coming back with a box of pizza and bag full of goodies.

“Will you marry me?”, you sigh happily as you reach into the bag and pull out the candy he knows you crave during this time.

“I already did! There was a whole ceremony and everything.”, he grins. “I’d gladly do it again though.” He grabs his phone as he climbs on to the bed, focusing his eyes on the screen before him. You smile as you watch his eyebrows furrow together as he concentrates; just like he did in high school when he was working on homework.

“Ok, I think I got it. You want to see something cool?” You nod at his question before he taps at the screen and suddenly The Goonies starts playing on the wall in front of you. Steve chuckles as he watches your eyes light up with amusement.

“I may or may not have bought a projector and hid it for an occasion such as this.”

You beam over at him as you curl up into his side. His arm wraps around you as his palm comes down to absently rub your back.

Throughout the movie, you find it hard to keep your eyes in front of you. Every time Steve’s fingers move along your skin, you feel electricity shoot through your body. He takes a drink from his glass and your eyes focus on his Adam’s apple as it bobs within his very kissable throat. Your own hand absent mindedly rubs against his chest, watching it rise and fall slowly as he breathes.

He had changed into comfortable clothes before waking you up and you could faintly see the outline of cock as the fabric of his shorts rested against him.

“Whoa, baby.”

You blinked back to the moment when his other hand reached over to grab your wrist. You hadn’t even realized the palm you had on his chest has gradually glided below his waist.

“We, uh, you’re going to get me going if you keep doing stuff like that.”, Steve smiled down at you as he placed your hand on his stomach.

“Can we?” You slid your fingers under his shirt, running them along his skin.

“Honey, I…you’re in pain—”

“Not as much right now and they say orgasms really help with cramps.” He exhaled a breathy laugh as he licked his lips trying to contain his pleasure at the thought. “I just… I need to feel you desperately for some reason. Well, hormones I imagine but…” You both chuckle as the hand behind your back comes up to run through your hair.

“Okay. I’ve never…we’ve never…”, Steve stuttered, completely unsure of how to proceed.

“I think we would both be more comfortable in the shower. Less mess to.”

His lips lean over to kiss your forehead. “You know I don’t mind it getting messy.” You giggle as he climbs out of bed and lifts you in his arms again, carrying you towards the bathroom.

Steve turns on the water, making sure its warm before keeping an eye on you as you disrobe and step in. Even the small actions of watching him stumble around to take off his own clothes was turning you on even more. You weren’t sure if he did it on purpose to make you laugh or he was just that graceful but it was part of what made Steve him and you loved it.

As soon as he climbed in with you, you immediately clasped your arms around his neck, bringing his lips to yours. You were quick to get him in the shower but as soon as his arms were wrapped around you, you felt like you could stay like this forever.

His lips chased yours as you kissed down his chest to his stomach, his fingers tangling in your hair behind your head.

“Baby, babe…”, he whispered as you began to lower your body below his waist. “You don’t have to… trust me. You kissing me like that…I’m fucking hard as a rock.” Steve tilted your head so he could place your lips back on his. “I want to feel you, honey. Can I pick you up?”

When you nod, he tenderly situates your arms back around his neck before reaching down to grip the back of your thighs and lift you, locking them around his waist. You feel him shift between your legs and you drop one of your hands to help guide him into your entrance.

“Fuck, Steve.”

“Jesus. Hold on to me, baby.”

After you do as he asks, he begins thrusting into you as his fingers cling to your body. You moaned into his ear as you felt the tip of his cock hit that sensitive spot inside of you repeatedly, setting your skin a blaze.

“That feels so good. Oh my god.”

Steve grunts into your neck as his mouth trace along the side. You lightly tug on his hair, placing his forehead on yours, your pussy fluttering around him as his pants hit your lips.

“Harder, Steve. Please.”

He holds you tightly as he drops one your legs from around him and pushes your back against the tile.

You whimper as he pumps into you vigorously, your eyes leaving his face to lustfully scan down his body as your palm slides down his hairy chest and back up to his neck. Steve’s eyes meet yours with a small smile.

“I love—mmm—when you touch me like that.”

“You’re so fucking handsome. I can’t help it.” He chuckles as he kisses your lips. “Make me cum, baby. Please. I need you to make cum.”, you whisper.

His head falls to your shoulder as he chases both your highs.

“F-fuck, yes, Steve. Just like that. Cum with me. Please…” You repeated your last word in his ear over and over until felt the coil in your belly snap as your arms held him tightly to you. His rhythm stuttered and he moaned loudly into your skin as he released his seed inside of you.

Both of you stayed like that for a while, you relishing in the closeness of the man that you fell in love with.

“Are you okay?”, he murmured as he lifted his head to look down at you.

“Better than.”

Your answer makes him smile as his grips your hips, slowly pulling out of you. “Let me take care of you, honey.”

You stand there patiently under the warm water allowing him to clean you as he periodically leaves gentle kisses along your skin.

After he turns off the shower, he holds your hand as he helps you out of the tub and quickly dries you off.

“Okay, babe, do your thing and get dressed. I’ll wait for you out here.”

You giggle at the sight before you as you step out of the bathroom. Steve had thrown on a pair of boxers and was laying haphazardly over the bed with his leg hanging over the side. He was smiling at his phone as he lazily brought a piece of pizza to his mouth.

“You’re such a dork.”

His grin grows as he gestures for you to come lay with him. As soon as you do, he shows you his phone displaying a picture Robin had sent to him of all three boys watching a movie with her girlfriend.

“What are they showing them?”

“Killer Clowns from Outer Space.” You both laugh as he wraps his arm around you, bringing your head to his bare chest. “After we finish this, we should watch that.”

“I’m down.” You lean up to kiss his cheek and jokingly turns his head just in time to capture your lips. “How did I get so lucky to have you?”

“Oh, sweetheart. I wouldn’t know. I ask myself that every day about you.”

########

Date Night Series

#steve x reader #steve harrington #stranger things #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington smut #steve harrington fluff #joe keery #joe keery smut #joe keery fluff #fan fiction

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number-of-kings · 7 months

Text

Surprise, Captain!

Cross posted to ao3

Neil is a nervous wreck, about to play his first game as captain of the foxes and Andrew says he can't make it.

Set after cannon when Andrew and the others have graduated

Neil breathed shakily. It was his first game back at palmetto state since the upper classmen had graduated.

Since andrew had graduated.

The roar of the crowd is deafened by the walls of the locker room and his own anxiety, his own thoughts berating him; Why is he so scared to play exy- the sport he loves, the sport he excells at when he survived the japanese mafia and his sadistic father? Why can't he just pull himself together to play without his boyfriend at his side?

"Hey kid- you good?" Coach Wymack stands before him, concerned furrow to his brow and hands on his hips. Neil notices he stays out of arm reach- that Neil is out of his reach. Neil never mentions it.

"I'm fine," he cringes as the words come out of his mouth. Despite everything he's been through with the team he still has that knee-jerk reply, to pretend he's fine.

Wymack frowns at him, "You'll do great, kid. We may not have the upperclassmen any more, but you were never great because of them, Neil. You're good because you're good."

Neil huffs a bit, an almost laugh, before replying.

"It's not entirely that. Andrew and I won't stand on court together for a year at least and-" maybe ever again.

"It's just-" Neil clenches his jaw. "It's stupid, but Andrew said he wouldn't be able to make it back today. He said his coach wanted them all to stay for the first month for team bonding or some shit."

Wymack raises an eyebrow. "S'not stupid, kid. It's okay to wish he could be here- it's your first game as captain and you wanted to show off the progress you made with the freshmen over the summer-"

Neil coughs.

"The very small amount of progress." He appeases. "It's still an achievement, I swear those kids will give me grey hair and I'll have to retire within the week."

Abby pokes her head through the door, "they want you ready in five, they're starting warm ups earlier tonight."

Wymack softens at her appearance as Neil nods, and she turns fully to face him.

"Need anything, Neil? No new injuries you forgot to mention?" She grins at him.

Neil shakes his head no, and she nods in return before turning to talk to the others.

"I think that means it's time for your pre-game pep talk, captain." Wymack says.

Neil shakes out his arms and turns to follow Abby.

As he rounds the corner he sees his team huddled in seperate groups- not unusual for the Foxes- but when they see their captain they all gather to huddle with him.

Although the freshmen are looking a little pale, he can see the hunger in their eyes.

"You'll do good." He sounds stilted, even to his own ears. "We should warm up now."

Some of the team roll their eyes while they begin to disperse towards the door, but he can see some of the freshmen frozen in confusion, shoulders a little laxer as they forget their nerves for a moment.

Wymack shakes his head amusedly as Neil passes him, clapping a hand on his shoulder and huffing out an only semi-sarcastic "nice one, kid."

Neil doesn't flinch. He hasn't been that jumpy in years.

He passes through the door and firmly ignores the stands. He needs to get into the zone, needs to focus.

The warm up laps and light stretches pass in a blur and he raises up on his tip toes and bends towards the floor to stretch his legs. A wolf whistle comes from the crowd.

"Damn Neil, if you weren't already take-ow."

Neil snaps his attention to the stands, finding Nicky rubbing the back of his head beside a scowling Aaron, whose hand makes a hasty retreat back into his pocket. Next to them stands-

"Andrew." Neil walks towards him, pulling himself onto the stand's railing to better see him.

Andrew stands from his seat in the front row, face is as stoick as always, but Neil can see the way his lips turn up at the corner, the slight glimmer to his eye that tells he's enjoying the surprise. Neil's surprise.

Andrew's here to surprise Neil.

Neil reaches up to clasp his shirt in one hand as Andrew moves to stand in front of him, fisting his own hands into Neil's sport shirt with what little give his has with his bulky exy armour beneath.

"I thought you couldn't come."

"Surprise." Andrew deadpans.

Neil laughs and smiles as he looks into Andrew's face.

"Yes or no." Andrew asks, glancing down at Neil's lips before staring into his eyes, searching as always for a hint of doubt- a reason to say no.

"Yes," Neil answers, "always."

Andrew gives him a look, before using his grip on Neil's shirt to tug him forward enough to connect their lips in a simple kiss.

Neil smiles at him, before turning to Nicky and Aaron. "Thanks for coming," he says, because he's learned that they don't have to come because they feel responsible for him, but they choose to come because they care. Because he's family.

Nicky smiles back and Aaron pretends he didn't hear Neil speak, but his ears turn a little red.

Andrew pushes him off the railing onto the side court below. "Go play, junkie," He calls down.

Neil just laughs, and with one last glance back at Andrew, he walks over to his team.

"Alright, let's do this."

The announcement speaker buzzes on. "Now in the home court we have the Palmetto Foxes! Leading the starting line is number 10, captain Neil Josten."

He runs into the court.

#all for the game #aftg #neil josten #andrew minyard #aaron minyard #nicky hemmick #coach wymack #david wymack #abby winfield #the foxhole court #aftg trilogy #aftg fic #andreil #andrew x neil #post canon #drabble

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thetistaboveall · 1 year

Text

The Coven Of Giants

In a weird sweep of dust flowing through the dank, miserable and busy suburbs of Hollow Coves overtake the neighborhood.

The neighborhood flows through sifting in to the air passing it come hitting hard by way of open windows.

It’s a holiday weekend for the men as their wives pack away for a weekly event of free times and fun.

The air so cool overflowing the room it filters to the top as the window shuts close quietly it tickles his skin.

The first man Tom plays with his senses as the nerves go into over drive sending his fiery vessels.

The synapses electrifyingly his mind fell in to a deep coma like state staying in a stasis as his body froze.

The air swirls above his head does his right and left cheeks sending it in to both of his nostrils.

His body cools blowing up his entirety of his body causing him to shake, shiver and total rock him.

His body breaks out in a feverish pitch in to a reverberating of his body he slips to the floor.

“You can hear the whispers in the wind for a strong call of his name.”

“Thomas! Thomas”

“What? What the fuck?”

“Who is there?”

“Ssssshhhhhhh”

“Nnnnnnnooooo! Ssssssttttttoooooppppp!”

“You can’t move”

“Can you?”

“Oh Relax”

Tom eyes pop open slowly stirring fully till he is awake rolling on to his eyes he pushes his body upward.

His eyes turn very dark black pacing a bit forward at a time he rips his closet door open.

Inside his walking closet he begins to undo his shirts, removing his pants and redresses himself.

He flows from the closet through the front door slamming it close he strolls next door to the house across the street.

His neighbor Alan tired as ever wiping his eyes with anger in his eyes he rages a bit making a fist.

He slam it in to the wall Alan grabs him by his shirt collar pulling him in to the building and slams his back to the wall.

“Who the hell are you to the knock on my door at eight in the morning?”

“Then why are you staring in my eyes.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck me indeed, you need to so bad w at to crave me.”

“Ravish me”

“No! Zip it! Stuff it”

“Overwhelming! Need to love me”

“Kiss me! Feel my lips on yours consuming you.”

“Yyyyeeeesssss! Mmmm Babe ! I am at your will possessed.”

“Good boi!”

“Sir Yes Sir”

“Kiss me again”

Tom sees his friend Andrew in the next door apartment next to his home with a bright bit of smile.

Andrew is about to be in for a shock rolling his eyes he shook his head and knowing it’s off.

Truth Andrew can’t believe that Tom tries to speak with him, Tom knows how odd and off he is.

“Andrew pal! Over here”

“What’s up Tom?”

“What’s up Andrew?”

“Pass me over”

“Give me a kiss”

“What the fuck?”

“Give me a strong kiss like a real man”

“Get the fuck off of me”

“What is that blowing in to my nose? Get off of me.”

“Sir my love Sir”

“He is prepped”

“Mmmmmm”

“Alan attends his best friends concert”

“Hey Guys!”

“Sing for me”

“My love”

“How about you guys dance for me?”

“Clap your hands for me”

“What’s that smell?”

“Me bro”

“Stay back”

“Smell me”

“Nnnnooooo”

“Shit Face”

“It’s so good”

“Sssoooo ggggoooodddd”

“Mmmmm…my love”

“Hey babe”

“Where is Master Lawrence?”

The end

#magic #Hypnosis #straight to gay #warlock #possession #alien #tom hardy #andrew garfield #grant gustin #alan ritchson

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otdiaftg · 6 months

Text

The King's Men - Chapter Fifteen

Day: Monday, March 11th / 12th* Time: 9:20 AM EST

Andrew claps his hand over Neil's mouth and keeps it there until going to his knees means he can't reach anymore. Andrew ghosts a kiss across Neil's hip before swallowing him whole. Neil catches at Andrew's hair, but his injuries and the plastic bags make it difficult for him to get a good grip. He scrabbles at the wall instead, but it is too slick to offer much leverage. Andrew pins him against the wall with a hand on his hip, which helps, but Neil still feels like he is falling. He does fall afterward, albeit in a controlled slide down the wall, gasping for breath and dizzy with burnt-out need. "Do you want—" he starts, voice ragged. Andrew kisses him to shut him up. Neil grimaces a little at the taste on Andrew's tongue but is happy to burn it away. Andrew braces himself with a forearm against the wall, keeping a few comfortable inches between their bodies. Neil lets him have that gap but crosses his aching arms behind Andrew's head to keep him close. Neil doesn't notice the absence of Andrew's other hand until Andrew's breath catches against his lips. It confuses him for a second, to the point that he is almost stupid enough to pull back and look down. It'd been weeks since kissing Andrew became a regular thing, but every night ended the same: with Andrew getting Neil off and then sending Neil on his way. He wouldn't even unzip his pants when Neil was still around. Neil doesn't know if this break in routine is grudging trust or determination to not let Neil out of sight again. Neil doesn't care right now so long as Andrew stays. Neil hums something into Andrew's mouth that could have been approval, could have been encouragement, and gets a faint growl in response. Andrew isn't amused by Neil's support, but he isn't annoyed enough to pull away, either. Neil holds tight until Andrew finally goes still. Andrew takes a couple seconds to catch his breath, then pushes at the wall until Neil obediently drops his arms and lets him go. Andrew rinses his hand in the spray before getting to his feet and helping hoist Neil up.

Art used with permission by Dshr-Art. Thank you @dshr-art!

*Due to the Leap Year, I have opted to highlight the day rather than the date to keep the events in occurrence to the 2007 year. I will continue to mark both days accordingly.

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route22ny · 2 years

Photo

Life as a 21st-Century Trucker

Technology, corporate greed, and supply-chain chaos are transforming life behind the wheel of a big rig. I went on the road to find exactly how.

by Andrew Kay

1 When Jay LeRette preaches the Word, he transforms from a mild Midwesterner—one who loves country gospel, rides a horse he has trained to roll over and grin, and has, himself, a whinnying laugh—into a human incandescence. Sixty-four, 5' 5", and dressed like a cowboy, he increases in stature; his voice crescendos to cracking. “The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us, to beat the snot out of us,” he says, then uppercuts the air. “Amen, Chuck?” A man in the second row with a great, ZZ Top–like beard croaks amen. “The devil mopped the floor with me,” LeRette continues, and mimes a janitorial sweep. “But God—but God!—” he shrieks, pounding the lectern and leaping, “—had compassion on you and I.”

It’s a weeknight in December 2021, getting toward Christmas, and I’m sitting in the trailer of an 18-wheeler that’s been repurposed into LeRette’s chapel. It’s parked, permanently, at the Petro Travel Center, a truck stop off Interstate 39 in northern Illinois. All around it are acres of commercial trucks, stopped for the night and carrying every kind of cargo: cows, weed, pro-wrestling rings, grain, petroleum. One side of LeRette’s trailer reads “Transport for Christ"; beside it, a neon cross gleams in the dark. John 3:16 adorns the back end: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Next to the scripture are two godly hands cradling a truck.

All across Illinois there are tornado warnings. Menacing gales rip through the parking lot, making the trailer shift and groan; we are beyond the reach of any siren. Yet every minute, the door opens and a new trucker walks in. Each takes his place in one of about 20 chairs arranged in rows toward the middle of the chapel, which is pretty minimalist: framed Bible verses along wood-paneled walls, a lectern at the front, an office and bed in back.

The drivers—all men tonight—have come straight from the road, and their bodies suggest the slow entropy wrought by bad food and decades of sitting. All but one appear over 50. Some know each other: When LeRette kicked off the service by belting out hymns and strumming his guitar, a straggler entered, and several men called out, “Rip!” Rip hustled in and high-fived or hugged them.

LeRette hands out copies of the King James Bible and asks us to open to Luke 10:25. Chuck seems to be back in Exodus, and when LeRette repeats “the Gospel of Luke,” Chuck responds, “Oh, I thought you said Mötley Crüe.” They are irrepressibly funny like this, suddenly schoolboys.

LeRette asks John, a small, older man in a hoodie, to read the verse. “A certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, ‘Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’” He struggles to sound out “eternal,” but the men nod along, supportive, patient.

Then LeRette interprets: A skeptic is trying to trick Jesus into contradicting Judaic law, into uttering a heresy. “Now how many know he ain’t gonna do that? Jesus is the living word of God, amen? There ain’t no trapping our savior.” Chuck calls out, “They tried to trap him for three years,” and LeRette answers, “C’mon, that’s right!” The quickness with which he beckons these road-weary men into call-and-response is extraordinary. He stamps and claps, sidesteps and kicks till his lungs falter. “Jesus carries our load, amen?”

After the sermon, John says meekly, “I have a pain in my shoulder. Would you try healing it?” LeRette agrees and hurries past us to his office, returning with a vial of frankincense. He approaches John and daubs his forehead, then places a hand on his ailing shoulder and calls out: “Father, we pray against whatever it is that’s trying to come against John.” The other drivers rise, surrounding and placing their hands on John or kneeling before him where he sits, eyes closed with one hand lifted upward. He awakens under their touch, smiling serenely.

Each trucker gets a turn at the center of the group. Then they turn toward me.

“Andrew, may I anoint you?” LeRette asks. There’s no time to think, so I say,

“You may,” and straightaway he applies the oil to my forehead.

“Just flood through him, oh God, like liquid fire,” he intones.

Then he starts speaking in tongues, a tumble of manic syllables he lets fly while the long-haulers encircle and lay hands on me.

“Father, I commit Andrew to your care,” LeRette concludes.

I have come here on a strange sort of mission: I want to find out what’s gone awry in American trucking. For more than a decade, freight-haulers have been held up as the poster children of a supposedly inexorable fate: 2 to 3 million drivers out of a workforce of 3.5 million—one of the largest in the US—are slated to be sidelined by AI. Yet recent years have hardly borne out that doomy prophecy: The self-driving industry has been humbled by fatal crashes, scandals, a federal investigation, a pedestrian death, negligent homicide charges, and stillborn business promises. Meanwhile the pandemic has wreaked havoc on our supply chains and made us more dependent on truckers than ever—more beholden to an industry that, for all its hugeness, still can’t keep pace with our needs. It’s an industry that dwarfs all other forms of domestic freight transport: 72.2 percent of the total tonnage of goods shipped within the US is moved by truck (air transport moves less than one-tenth of 1 percent). Investors—inspired, doubtless, by the shipping delays and logistical breakdowns that threaten to upend the economy—have sought furiously to augment or outright replace that workforce, pouring money with redoubled fervor into automation since 2020. But they have found scant success: What we have, ironically, is a nationwide shortage of the very workers alleged to face obsolescence.

What’s behind that shortage? And how exactly is technology altering life inside the cab? I want to know why 90 percent of the people who enter this profession quit within the first year; why a red-pilled faction of its members—affronted by a vaccine mandate that was, one senses, only the last in a litany of grievances—formed the Freedom Convoy and People’s Convoy last winter and spring, blocking border crossings between the US and Canada. I hope to understand, too, how the relatively few truckers who stick around sustain themselves: the myths they live on and the shrines to which they come, parched, to be replenished and raised up.

Shadowing LeRette, a holy therapist whose vantage point on this world is at once intimate and panoramic, I hope to glimpse some answers. Then, because I need to see the road for myself—need to be in a truck—I’ve arranged to ride shotgun with a person named Jason Childs, a 41-year-old trucker and adventurer I’ve never met but with whom I’ve very sensibly agreed to share a cab on a two-day route to Boston.

The day after my anointing, LeRette and I head to the main building of the truck stop, where showers, slot machines, and a diner are. He’s decked out in a big parabola of a cowboy hat, a custom black Carhartt jacket that reads “Victory in Jesus,” Wrangler-ish denim, and dark-brown cowboy boots. He approaches the PA system to advertise tonight’s service, which begins at 7 pm, then we grab a booth at the Iron Skillet, where he runs through his personal history over lunch.

As a young man, LeRette was such a wayward punk that he lowers his voice recounting it all. He stole things (“I liked motorcycles”), fist-fought, and assaulted police; he drifted from detention hall to drug ward to psychiatric hospital. At last, he went to prison for theft. One night toward the end of his yearlong sentence, he sat alone in his cell, thumbing through a Bible and crying; he wanted to be delivered, wanted to climb clear of the devilry that had devoured his early life. In the darkness, he became aware of something—a preternatural light. Some being or intelligence that he instantly identified as the Holy Ghost had come to dwell with him. He stopped struggling, felt clean and clear-headed, drained of the defiant energy that had twisted him crosswise with the world. At 6 am, he showed up for breakfast looking serene. “What’s got into you, LeRette?” other inmates asked. “I found Jesus,” he said. They responded: “Brother, you need him!”

He started converting other prisoners, and upon release, began evangelizing in the prisons, jails, and detention centers he knew so well. He made a name for himself bringing the gospel to the most hostile of places, a perilous early ministry that he recalls with what sometimes seems like preacherly embellishment. In Chicago one night, he claims, someone held a gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. He raised his arms to the sky and cried, “Jesus!” only to discover that the chamber had been empty. Another time, LeRette says, leaning in, while he was witnessing to a crowd of bikers at a Hell’s Angels bar in Rockford, he saw they were getting blow jobs as he spoke. He lifted his eyes and went on preaching.

LeRette supported himself as a mechanic at a Del Monte Foods factory, where he met his wife, Karen. One day in 1991 he got a call from an investor who was planning to build a new truck stop in Rochelle. He wanted to install a chapel there and appoint LeRette as its preacher. LeRette was dubious. He thought his calling was to be a prison chaplain—and besides, the lot was little more than an expanse of corn at the time. But the investor convinced him that if they built on this blankness of prairie, the truckers would come.

The chapel was furnished by a nondenominational ministry—Transport for Christ, now TFC Global—founded in 1951 to serve an industry that was booming thanks to the highway system. The name, like so much about LeRette’s world—its mingled grotesquerie and humor, its wild manifestations of grace amid grimness—seems drawn from Flannery O’Connor. Today, the ministry’s sanctified semis are stationed across the country. The souls LeRette encounters—thousands of truckers come to him each year—include regulars who pass through weekly, plus others he sees once and never again. They provide LeRette’s income in the form of donations, slipped into a box at the chapel or sent by mail. Some truckers have been donating monthly since the chapel opened.

LeRette lives with his wife in a farmhouse half an hour south of Rochelle. “I could never be a truck driver,” he concedes. “Too much of a homeboy.” But some nights he crashes on a couch in the chapel office. Once, he was rocketed from sleep at 4 am by a pounding at the door. “Get up, preacher,” said a voice. “You’re going to meet your maker.” LeRette opened the door and saw an enormous man who’d come to the chapel the night before. “I hate everything about you,” the guy said. “Your voice, your looks.” He seemed poised to murder LeRette when another driver entered—a jacked ex-bouncer who perceived the emergency and rushed forth, demanding the intruder back off. The three talked of Jesus until sunup, when the first guy broke down, agreeing to be born again.

This, LeRette says, is common: A trucker will come at him with a rage that turns out to conceal a desperate desire for forgiveness and love. “I think if there’s one word to describe the trucking industry and the drivers, it would be lonely,” he tells me. They are on the road for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. If they have partners or children, they carry the guilt of missing date nights and soccer games. If they fight with their spouses, they relive the spat numberless times on the road, the work itself becoming a brute metaphor for the emotional freight they carry.

In this sense, LeRette has become the prison chaplain he felt called to be. If trucking was once a lifestyle of freedom, it is increasingly one of deranging captivity and surveillance. During the week I spent at the Petro stop, drivers fumed to me about the electronic logs they must now use—tablet-shaped devices mounted on their dashboards that monitor everything they do: all their driving time, their fueling up, their loading and unloading, their napping. This particular digital intrusion is the result of federal legislation. A law passed in 2012 dictates that truckers work a maximum 14-hour workday, spending no more than 11 hours behind the wheel with three hours of rest time. If they violate this law, they risk being yanked from the road and fined, and might mess up their carrier’s safety rating, which could deter customers, creditors, and insurers. Many drivers concede that the time restrictions arose in response to reckless behavior. “Back in the day they used to do lines of coke off the freakin’ dashboard,” one Illinois-based driver recalled. That, he explained, is how one got to New Jersey overnight. Still, the truckers I spoke to would rather decide for themselves when they’re tired.

The newer trucks are so computerized that they provide what might be termed “AI helicopter parenting”: a development supposedly meant to increase safety and fuel efficiency, but also, I’ll come to suspect, a compensation for fast-tracking newcomers through training and into driver’s seats before they’re ready. Each state-of-the-art Peterbilt in the Petro lot is equipped with at least 10 computers that govern everything from steering to braking, reducing many truckers to what are known in the industry as zombified “steering-wheel holders.” The AI alerts a dispatcher if anything aberrant happens—an abrupt stop, a missed turn—and if a driver changes lanes suddenly, the truck will defy him, jerking itself back. (The driver can override this function, but many truckers say it remains disruptive, even dangerous.)

Then there are the cameras. Ascending the cabin of one semi, I see a black gadget affixed to the windshield like an old-school GPS, its lens trained on the driver’s seat. Such cameras protect companies from liability in the event of an accident—they can prove that a driver wasn’t acting irresponsibly and thus isn’t at fault—but truckers deplore them. “Some drivers,” LeRette says, “tell me they’ve got cameras pointed back in the sleeper.”

On a thriving Reddit community called r/Truckers, which hosts more than 100,000 members, one popular post begins, “Hello, fellow piss jug enthusiasts,” and goes on to complain that its author’s employer has announced it will start implementing driver-facing cameras. Hundreds of users chime in to say that they’ve quit for this reason. “I’ll only accept a driver-facing camera,” one comments, “if the company owner gives me a 24/7 unrestricted stream into his house.”

LeRette pays the bill and I follow him to the door. We pass a towering driver at the buffet. LeRette stops, invites him to the evening service, and asks where he stands with Jesus. “I tried to read the Bible cover to cover last year,” the man says. “But I got this phone in my pocket—it got a demon in it. Takes me to sites I don’t wanna go.” He claps me on the shoulder and bursts out laughing, and LeRette hurries off.

I decide to stick around, turning back toward the duskily lit dining room. The clientele is a microcosm of the workforce to which it belongs: older, racially diverse, overwhelmingly male. Of the 3.5 million people who work as truck drivers in the US, 75 percent are over 40, roughly 40 percent are not white, and at most 10 percent are women.

An ambient antisocial quiet hangs in the air: The e-logs and Covid, I’ll learn, have strangled the camaraderie that once flourished at these places where truckers would hobnob heedless of mandated resting and driving intervals. Most drivers sit alone, scrolling on their phones or glancing at the Fox News that drones on the TVs. Vacant booths are marked with a libertarian poutiness: “Due to the IL governor’s orders, this booth is closed.”

At one table, though, three men sit together laughing. I blunder up, introducing myself, and they invite me to sit. Their names are Junius (“JuJu”) Silas, Eric Brown, and Nick Rains; they haul equipment for big touring acts. They’re the drivers of the WWE trucks parked beside the chapel: Throughout my visit, because of the trailers’ adjacent rear ends, André the Giant’s likeness sits beside John 3:16.

I ask them why the industry has a 90 percent attrition rate within the first year. All instantly respond: “No money.” They describe a predatory apprenticeship system that conspires against new drivers seeking to enter the profession. The industry is made up of thousands of mostly small-fleet owners—95 percent of them with 20 trucks or fewer—but dominated by about two dozen giant companies that serve as its gatekeepers. These megacarriers often house schools where some 400,000 new truckers receive commercial driver’s licenses annually. The companies entice people with promises of financial plenty, even as they ensnare them in “training contracts”—binding agreements that require them to drive for the company at below-market wages for a year in exchange for training or else be hit with an exorbitant fee for that training, to be paid off at high interest. Many drivers stick around for the full year to avoid those fees, enduring what amounts to debt peonage.

Silas, a slyly charismatic man with graying dreadlocks, tells me: “The average pay per mile for a fresh driver—your shoes still on? 26 cents.” Actually, he notes, you make half that, “because you’ve got a split seat”—meaning it’s common for companies to pair new drivers in a truck, where they take turns at the wheel and split their earnings. “It don’t make child support,” Silas says. “It don’t make electric bill,” Brown says. “You don’t have a girlfriend,” Silas adds.

To make matters worse, drivers who leave their training contracts early risk being blackballed by the carriers. This past summer and fall, the US Department of Justice oversaw a high-profile antitrust lawsuit in which several truckers sued nine megacarriers for colluding with one another not to hire them. In November, they reached a $2.1 million preliminary settlement.

Freight companies have been warning lately about a trucker shortage so dire that it’s causing supply-chain and delivery delays nationwide. But drivers like Rains see such warnings as disingenuous, given the way megacarriers treat new drivers: “Like cattle.” What’s more, the DOJ has said that the blackballing of drivers who break training contracts may be contributing to the shortage. According to the American Trucking Associations’ 2019 driver shortage report, there are now nearly three commercial driver’s license holders for every job that requires one in the US: strange stats to square with a shortage.

All day I ambush drivers who greet me with an annoyed suspicion that gives way to a thirst for talk so desperate that within minutes I couldn’t shut them up if I tried. I buy them coffee, soon finding myself at the center of small congregations of truckers who’ve shifted seats to join. They want me to understand that freight companies talk up the shortage because they’re angling for federal and state grant money to subsidize the cost of training new drivers. They say that taxpayers are unwittingly funding the turnover that enables this deception to continue—providing what Todd Spencer from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association calls “corporate welfare” to companies that can seem ripe for treatment by Upton Sinclair. Last year, Rains received a payout from the carrier CRST, where he got his commercial license, after it had reached a settlement with drivers who’d filed a multimillion-dollar class action against it for lying about “free” training, overcharging them for schooling, and failing to pay them minimum wage. The same company saw 150 to 200 sexual harassment claims filed by student drivers against their trainers in 2018 and 2019; one woman alleged her trainer raped her, only to be told by CRST that without video footage they could do nothing. They charged her $9,000 for her training and effectively fired her in retaliation. She sued the carrier and received a $5 million settlement in 2021.

LeRette’s sermon the night before (“The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us!”) starts to strike me as an allegory about a more worldly, if faceless, kind of fiend. “The trucker shortage is propaganda,” insists 62-year-old Jerry Adams, who hauls flour, records country music, and claims to have dated one of Dolly Parton’s sisters. (Adams says she once called the chapel mid-service and sang to the truckers on speaker.) For him, the politicians who keep rewarding the megacarriers bear ultimate responsibility. Many drivers agree, blaming their mistreatment not just on corporate avarice but also on Washington. In 1980, the Motor Carrier Act deregulated trucking, making it easier to get a commercial driver’s license but also making the job far less remunerative. “The worst thing they ever did was deregulate it,” says Dean Martin, who began driving in 1994. “What I made when I started … I make less now.”

Adding insult to injury, truckers are barred from overtime pay by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, even though most of them work at least 70 hours a week—especially when you figure in the obligatory rest periods imposed by Congress in 2012. (A bill called the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act, sponsored by several senior Democratic US senators, is making its way through Congress.) The average US trucker salary in 1980, adjusting for inflation, was $110,000; today the median is $48,310. This despite research by industry experts like Daniel Rodríguez showing that the probability of truck crashes indirectly correlates with pay and experience, plummeting among long-standing, well-compensated drivers.

According to the American Trucking Associations, though, the trucker shortage is quite real—the product of an aging workforce, the industry’s struggle to recruit women, and the ballooning of freight volumes thanks to our rapacity as consumers. All this, exacerbated by Covid, has created a tight labor market in which fleet owners—primarily small outfits with a handful of trucks—are fiercely competing for the same limited pool of drivers. They are doing so by increasing their pay rates (up by as much as 25 percent since 2019) and enticing truckers with five-figure signing bonuses. Jeremy Kirkpatrick, a spokesperson for the ATA, stressed to me that many truckers are now regularly moving from one signing bonus to the next in a game of musical chairs that leaves fleet owners frustrated. “This churn, or poaching, is what really inflates the turnover rate,” he said.

It’s possible to reconcile these rival accounts: Scummy treatment of apprentice drivers is leading to massive hemorrhaging at the entry level and thus to a shrunken labor force that innumerable fleet owners must strenuously fight over. It’s a landscape akin to academia, the world I came from, where a great share of grubby work is done by an insecure class of entry-level laborers—grad students, adjuncts—striving desperately to join a small, cosseted class—the tenured—who enjoy clout, protections, and a lifelong career trajectory.

While the pandemic’s supply chain woes raged, venture capitalists funneled more investments into autonomous-truck startups—$11 billion from 2019 through 2021—adding fresh precariousness to a trade already beset with uncertainty. These investments have coincided with a rush of optimism among engineers and lawmakers alike. In August, US House representatives, fired by a conviction that “this technology is moving so quickly,” formed a bipartisan “autonomous vehicle caucus” aimed at “establishing the right policy conditions to increase the use of AVs.” “It’s closer than you might think,” Dmitri Dolgov, the co-CEO of leading AV company Waymo, wrote of a self-driving future last month. “Freight volumes will increase, demonstrating how AVs could help untangle supply chains and backfill the immense shortage of truck drivers.”

And yet when one looks closely, this boldness is everywhere haunted by doubt—a rooster-strutting that never quite convinces. One leading autonomous-truck startup, TuSimple, executed its first entirely driverless truck run in Arizona while I was at the Petro stop. An 80-mile nocturnal drive from Tucson to Phoenix, it was hailed as a success—but tellingly, a lead vehicle drove five miles ahead of the truck, scouting for obstacles, while an escort, ready to intervene, trailed it closely, and law enforcement vehicles stalked it from half a mile behind. In 2020, TuSimple struck a deal with Navistar to engineer autonomous trucks; the companies secured about 7,000 orders, and the trucks were scheduled to enter production in 2024. Last December, though, they severed their partnership. A rival, Aurora Innovation, told me in March 2022 that it was aiming for the end of 2023; it has since pushed this date to the end of 2024 and even mulled the possibility of a sale to Apple or Microsoft. In fact, there is little consensus about not just when but whether self-driving trucks will actually come. Truckers tend to bristle at the suggestion that an unmanned digitized truck could perform their job; they point to the dexterity involved in backing into a tight space, even as engineers maintain that this is what autonomous trucks do best—a mere matter of physics and geometry. For their part, researchers like Maury Gittleman and Kristen Monaco at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics stress how truckers’ jobs include more than just driving; they’re tasked with loading and unloading, customer service, and addressing the manifold safety concerns that arise on the road—all duties that “are less susceptible to automation.” Even among engineers, there’s little agreement about the viability of autonomous trucks. Anthony Levandowski, the cofounder of Google’s self-driving vehicle division and now CEO of the autonomous-truck company Pronto, told me he thinks the technology has reached an impasse owing to the trucks’ inability to “understand the world”—to anticipate and react to sudden, spontaneous occurrences such as a driver cutting them off. So the timeline remains uncertain: “Is it five years or 50?” Levandowski asks without an answer. Meanwhile, companies like TuSimple (which refused to talk to me) depict themselves as motivated by a noble desire to devise a solution to the punishment and peril of trucking. The logic, apparently, is that they will relieve an immiserated workforce by rendering it obsolete.

Afternoon at the Skillet bleeds into evening. Every so often a robot voice issues through a loudspeaker: The shower is vacant, the next ticket number is up.

A portrait sharpens into focus of a job that entails both mortal danger and wilting tedium. On one hand, truckers navigate vehicles that weigh up to 80,000 pounds down an interstate system swarming with civilian drivers cutting trucks off and fooling around with phones—and they do so knowing it will take them three football fields to stop should the need arise. From an accident investigator on Reddit, I learn of a trucker who was cut off on a wet road by a driver going 80 mph. The car lost control and skidded sideways into the truck’s path. The trucker could only watch as the car’s driver looked up at him aghast while his wife covered her head, and he barreled straight into them, killing the man instantly and leaving his wife a quadriplegic. The trucker never recovered psychologically: “I just couldn’t get the truck to stop.”

On the other hand, US truckers spend great swaths of their lives waiting at warehouses for their trailers to be loaded and unloaded. Of the 11 hours they’re allotted each day for driving, they spend an average of four and a half idling in line. “They talk about a truck-driver shortage,” one driver tells me. “Yet there are drivers sitting in warehouses two miles from here with an appointment from six or seven hours ago,” he says bitterly. “If they can tell me when I can eat and when I can take a nap, how come they can’t tell these people loading and unloading these trucks that they have a set amount of time to do it?”

Such bitterness helped ignite the Freedom Convoy and People’s Convoy. Ostensibly a transnational uprising against pandemic restrictions—one bolstered by money from far-right groups—the convoys were also an outcry against the perceived collusion of Big Tech and the government against blue-collar workers. Some of the convoys’ participants have passed through LeRette’s chapel. “They’re not against vaccination,” he tells me. “They’re against the government taking complete control over them.” Which sounds like a generic right-wing rallying cry, but it holds special significance for truckers, who feel they’re regulated in all the wrong ways: forsaken where they need help, oppressively monitored where they yearn for liberty.

Ascending the chapel steps around 7:15, I open the door and find a seventysomething man seated across from LeRette, mid-narrative. Haggard, cadaverous in color, he has a raving giddiness about him and takes no notice of me. “I got home, walked into the kitchen, and there she was, waving a gun in my face,” he’s saying.

I piece together his story: He came home from a trucking route and found his girlfriend, Norma, demanding at gunpoint to be done with him. He turned and ran downstairs, intending to flee the house. “I got halfway down the steps,” he says, “and she shot a hole in the wall above my head.” When he finally crept back upstairs, “She was on her hands and knees crying.”

The man’s name is Don, and it’s clear he’s likely withholding details. She filed a restraining order; he pressed charges. They’re awaiting a court date.

One by one, truckers file in for the service, and, grasping that something is underway, stay hushed and sit, watching. “Are you a born-again Christian?” LeRette asks.

Don instantly grows defensive. He’s a lapsed Catholic. “I could pull quotes out of the Bible that would put down any preacher if you contradict what I say,” he dares LeRette. “Over half the Bible wasn’t inspired by God; it was influenced by man.”

They clash on this at length, and LeRette finally bursts. “You know what you’re doing, sir? Hey! You’re living an ungodly lifestyle. You’re fornicating with this woman. You come in here with a filthy mouth and you say, ‘Where’s God in my life?’ Man, you need to repent and say, ‘God, I’m in the wrong! Forgive me and fill me with your Holy Spirit!’” LeRette stares at him beseechingly.

Don stands his ground, battling tears: “Her and I stood on a hill and looked at each other as the sun rose! That’s the way we were married! We are married in the eyes of God.”

More argument. Then LeRette says: “Jesus wept. You know that, right?” Don nods. “All of a sudden I’m experiencing feelings, and I never did before.” Later, he adds: “I don’t want to be alone.”

LeRette, seizing the opportunity, jumps up, fetches a Bible, and thrusts it into Don’s hands. He implores him to read aloud a verse from Ezekiel. Don fishes trifocals out of his jacket. “‘A new heart also will I give you,’” he pronounces, “‘and a new spirit will I put within you.’”

“Do you want that?” asks LeRette, standing before him. “Do you want God to take away that stony heart of yours and set His spirit inside you?”

He wants Don to consent to being born again here, now, and implores him to “Yoke up with Jesus!” But Don won’t submit. He keeps dodging, refusing, changing the subject.

A driver from Louisiana named Tony, bass-voiced and built like a bullfrog, pipes in, telling of his own divorce, how he lived out of his pickup in a Walmart parking lot during the worst of it. “I had to concentrate on me,” he realized.

A group therapy session materializes: The other drivers, pivoting toward the secular vocabulary of Oprah and Dr. Phil, urge Don to prioritize self-care, while LeRette sits by, looking sidelined and a little glum.

At last LeRette intervenes. “Don, I have no greater desire in my heart tonight than to see you say, ‘Lord Jesus, I need you. I want to be born again. I want you to renew me.’”

“No.”

Instead, Don joins hands with the other drivers and leads them in prayer. “Lord, I’m asking that we can find a peaceful solution to this situation I’m in. That I can get a lot of help from the people that have listened to me. That we can get help for Norma and bring her back to the woman I fell in love with. Bring her back to the light.”

I stay late in the chapel, talking to the truckers. They recall driving during the earliest days of Covid—the apocalyptic emptiness of the roads. “Everything shut down but us,” says Tony. “It felt like we were in a movie. Five o’clock, rush hour in Atlanta, and I’m running 65. I got chill-bumps on my arms talking about it.” A suddenly homebound public relied on them more than ever, yet they themselves remained unprovided for; truck stops, restaurants—all were closed. “They locked it down, man. You’d be lucky if you got a honeybun.”

“Back when Covid started we were heroes,” one driver says. “Now it’s right back to pre-Covid; we’re just POSes.” Another calls out, “Boy, it sure was nice while it lasted!”

An intimacy takes shape in the trailer among drivers who, as early as 2 am, will be back on the road, scattered to their separate lives. It’s as if we’re drovers gathered around a campfire—a metaphor with a powerful gravitational pull here. LeRette doesn’t just dress like a cowboy. His office is laden with cowboy paraphernalia: a cowboy kneeling before a cross, a holster, a rodeo poster, photos of LeRette on horseback shooting at targets, and an ornamental cowboy boot beside the vial of frankincense, a juxtaposition that neatly captures LeRette and the faith he’s plying—call it Cowboy Pentecostalism. Cowboyism, it turns out, is an essential piece of the trucker mythos, for many drivers a life-giving faith unto itself. As Jane Stern showed in her 1975 book on the industry, Trucker: A Portrait of the Last American Cowboy, the conviction that they’re heirs to the cattle-drivers of the frontier, peripatetic dudes who answer to no one, is their central animating story.

This is a core reason why truckers find the cameras and computers so galling: More than any projected future of self-driving trucks, these technologies threaten not just their livelihoods but their innermost sense of self. To watch LeRette in action is to see a ritualized resistance to that threat—a refusal through sacrament, through touch, of what many see as a coordinated push by Silicon Valley, government, and their employers to wring trucking of its human element.

I spend my last day talking to more truckers, conversations that range from damning to poignant. There’s the African American woman, a long-hauler who declines to share her name, who tells me: “Companies are treating drivers like meat in the seat. It’s all about them. They’re not concerned about what the drivers need.” By which she means, especially, time off, but also pay. There’s Janet, perhaps 70 years old, who talks to me from high up in her truck while her three spaniels peer around her at me. She drove for decades with her husband; a year ago he died. “It’s tested my faith,” she admits, and clutches my hand.

That night I have a last dinner with LeRette, thanking him for everything. I tell him, feigning poise, that in the morning I’ll catch that ride to Boston with Jason Childs. I share what little I’ve heard about him: Though recently engaged, Childs has 11 kids by 10 different women scattered about the country. “Oh, mercy!” LeRette shrieks, and prays for me over his pilaf.

When I get back to my hotel room, I see that Childs has texted me. “Well they changed my trip,” he wrote. “Going to the Everglades.”

In the morning I make my way south, by Greyhound, to a lot outside Springfield where I’ve arranged to meet Childs. In time a truck pulls up; out of it hops a middle-aged man in a hoodie—medium height, bearded, with a lone earring and a faintly roguish air. He holds out a hand, smiling: “Welcome to central fuckin’ Illinois.”

We embark on the route—me, Childs, and his 11-year-old soon-to-be stepson J. D., who wants to be a trucker himself and, in his spare time, plays a trucking video game on Xbox whose object is to make sensational deliveries in brutal weather. I’m in the passenger seat, J. D.’s in the sleeper cabin, divided from the main cab by a curtain through which he peers happily. Childs’ truck is a flatbed with a removable tarp that protects our cargo: 38,000 pounds of cornmeal destined for a tortilla-chip factory in LaBelle, Florida. It’s the first of three deliveries that Childs—who works for an independent contractor with 50 trucks—will make, a journey of five days, 120 hours, for which he’ll get 31 percent of the total cut: $1,100 for the first drop, plus smaller sums for the next two.

The e-log ticking, we head down Route 24 toward Kentucky. It’s arresting, being up here: To be lifeguard-high in a 35-ton machine screaming down the highway at 80 mph, to see so plainly every driver’s phone-fiddling, their eating and knee-steering, is a sensation of godlike omniscience. But it is also terrifying.

There is a moment-to-moment proximity to death, not just your own but everyone else’s around you, that gives fresh clarity to all I witnessed at the chapel—the reconciling with God of people forced into a daily awareness of endings. “I’ll die in a truck,” Childs says casually, explaining that this is every trucker’s deepest fear. “A buddy of mine had a heart attack in a semi, right up here at that last exit. His heart exploded and he lost control of his truck, and he went right into a hotel.”

At one point we find ourselves on a county road, where a truck passes us on a double line. A moment of dread ensues: There’s oncoming traffic, and since it’s far too late for us to stop, we can only watch as the driver lays on the throttle, hurtling forward and, just in time, merging back over to avert disaster.

At times, Childs’ anxiety crests in moments of rage so over the top they teeter into black comedy. “I have panic attacks,” he says. “That’s why I drink.” Sure enough, when we cross into Kentucky, daylight wanes and we get stuck behind a semi doing 50 in the fast lane. Childs seethes—we’re on the clock—and when the driver finally changes lanes he speeds up alongside him, flips on the cab light and lowers my window. “Stupid-ass Ichabod Crane-looking motherfucker!” he yells. I glance over and see a gangly man at the wheel, his own window down, utterly bewildered. “This is why I love him!” J. D. cries.

Childs is a Byronic character, a bruised antihero whose story is harrowing enough to merit a trigger warning. “I was sexually molested by a lady,” he tells me once J. D. has fallen asleep. “She beat me with a taser. You can see my shoulders are all fried.” He peels down his hoodie, baring a cartography of scars. “I’ve never been genuinely loved.” Abandoned by his biological parents, he cycled through foster homes and psychiatric hospitals, quickly developing the sex addiction that has shaped his life. He’s had north of 300 partners, many encountered on the road—in whose arms, he tells me, blithely Freudian, he has found the semblance of maternal love. Nearly a dozen kids have come into the world, and with them mountains of child support that dwarf his earnings. Of late he has found stability with his fiancée, Stephanie. He smirks: “I’m retired.”

Jason Childs may be an unreformed Jay LeRette—the preacher minus the jail-cell epiphany, still adrift in a tumult of rages, unhelped by grace. And yet Childs, too, is ignited by faith—that same mythic cowboyism that forms the other half of LeRette’s creed. “We’re the guys that go in the saloon and play cards back in the Old West. And these,” he says, gesturing at his truck, “are our horses.” In keeping with that mythos, he insists on driving a manual transmission—“It gives me greater control, and it saves lives every day”—and has elected to work for a boss who doesn’t use driver-facing cameras. He despises the new generation of drivers who have everything done for them by computers, including the teenage truckers who, thanks to a controversial new federal apprenticeship program aimed at combating the shortage, may soon be eligible to do interstate hauling. All the same, he angrily, defensively waves away my suggestion that the job may be automated out of existence: “You’re never going to get rid of the real truck driver.”

As evening deepens, we advance into southern Tennessee, past mountain silhouettes that in darkness loom like cenotaphs. “Automation will be the death of the cowboy,” Childs suddenly says, a different authority in his voice. “All truck drivers fear it, because we know it’s going to take our jobs away. We’ve heard this for years … But it can’t be,” he insists.

“I know safety is key to this,” he concedes, and in his tone there’s a curious fatalism at odds with his earlier indignant dismissal of a driverless future. “The American truck driver—think about how many songs, stories. ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’ All the country songs. Legends were born out here.” He searches for the right word. “The folklore of a trucker—it’s the cowboy culture, the outlaw. The big, long beards and the big bellies. Disheveled. Stinky. Then there’s me,” he laughs, “who looks like I’m going to rob a bank.”

“Now the actual truck driver is going to go extinct. And it’s all about saving money. That’s all it’s about.”

We barrel through Georgia, crossing into Florida around 2 am, when the e-log mandates that we stop for 10 hours. An odd suspense follows: The 14-hour workday is running out, so we scan the highway for a truck stop with both vacant space and a restaurant, but the combination proves elusive. We settle for a travel station with available parking but only a convenience mart. Childs clambers into the sleeper cabin with J. D., and crashes.

I shut my eyes briefly, but by dawn I’m awake and get out to stretch. My lower back is throbbing, my right sacroiliac staging a violent coup that’s spreading down my leg. I think of Childs’ frenzied philandering through the years and find it impossible to imagine any amount of sensuality surviving this life. I feel the least attractive, and furthest from horny, I’ve ever been.

I hobble across the road onto what’s almost certainly someone’s property, entering a different world of palmettos, steroidal pinecones, and migrated cranes that swim the air. After Rochelle, this feels like my own stolen sabbath. I stoop and photograph. When I amble back to the truck, I pass Childs and J. D., who are headed to the mart to get breakfast. Childs nods slightly.

I crawl into the sleeper and draw the curtain, and after a time hear them return; Childs is on the phone with Stephanie. “He’s finally asleep, thank Christ. I saw him walking back to the lot from some random fucking field. Like, y’all know this is serial killer central, right?” He switches to what I can only describe as some kind of strangled Big Bird voice: “Deh, I’m gonna get myself killed by Jeffrey Dahmer!” J. D. squeals.

All that day we scud southward, the sky sunless and menacing. Florida is a hallucination of Confederate flags and Waffle Houses. “Worst state in the union,” Childs says. He’s chain-smoking now, five an hour; I watch him distance-parent on the phone half the day while operating the rig. “She’s testing you, Maddy, she’s testing you!” he shouts into the Bluetooth speaker at one point.

At nightfall we hit LaBelle. The tortilla-chip factory is desolate; there’s no sign they’re expecting us—no instructions, not a soul about, and, it turns out, no clear way to the loading dock in the back. Cars are parked carelessly about the building, their noses impinging on the path to the dock. There are no overhead lights, so Childs must slalom backward in the dark, maneuvering this mastodon with utmost delicacy around parked cars, some 100 yards in all: a double black diamond.

He scopes out the route, returns, and revs the truck. Then he guides it glacially backward, threading it past car after car and somehow nicking none—a kind of calligraphy—and nearly makes it when the truck’s antenna catches on a low overhang and snaps clean off. Childs stops, snarls profanities, then resumes and reaches the dock, emptying the tonnage of cornmeal in the night.

I stay with them just half a day longer. We pick up a load of steel piping in the morning and drive north toward Tampa, through Sunkist groves and into a gathering storm. Stop signs jerk spasmodically in the winds; lightning severs the sky. It starts to pour. I watch other trucks wade through pooled water in the road, feeling our own slosh and sway. “Tornado sky,” Childs mutters. My journey is ending as it began.

We drive on in silence, at noon reaching Plant City, near Tampa, and pulling up before the gate of the factory that ordered the piping. No one emerges. Childs calls the foreman, who says the crew won’t come out until it stops raining; they don’t feel like getting wet. “Why can’t the foreman just make them?” I ask, incredulous. “Because he’s a tender-footed sack of shit,” Childs spits.

Hours pass, and no one appears, a waiting that starts to seem existential, starts to stand in for the long-deferred deliverance of a workforce, a way of life. More trucks collect behind us, a convoy stretching to the street, and when I get out to survey them I see that their drivers too are on the phone and pissed, calling the foreman, presumably. But nothing moves—nothing except the winds that start rising, vengeful gusts that pummel and lash like a scourge out of scripture.

I look up at the sky and decide all at once that I need to get out. So I hustle back to the truck and page a ride to the Tampa airport, and when it comes I turn to Childs. “Gotta run, man. Thanks so much for having me.” But he’s taking frantic drags off a cigarette, distance-parenting again—a daughter keeps peeing her pants, the store is out of pull-ups—and in the speakerphone’s background a child is screaming. He hardly notices me; J. D. is asleep. I leave them like that, rushing toward my ride past a line of trucks that sit, in a rain half-diluvian now, aimed at the shut gate and poised, I imagine, to blow it apart.

#long reads #interstate trucking #automation #public safety #capitalist society

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hella1975 · 1 year

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hella idk what to send to you for aftg im either bored or annoyed and I don't wanna just say bad things about it 😭 like that's just rude and yall obviously like it I DONT WANNA BE SOME DEBBY DOWNER MDMWKEM

I looked at the anti aftg tag too to see if I could intermingle there and last I checked it was a mix of fans obsessed with the series and haters being just a tad harsh imo, so i couldn't even do that RIP. I'm so lonesome in what is maybe a whole group of people gaslighting me 😔👊

honestly ive said this before and i always have to tread a very fine line with it because this isn't me saying it's OKAY or like. promotable. but i do think to an extent that aftg's problematicness is actually an aspect of what draws people in a lot. like the characters and their reactions to things feel real for who they are, what they've been through and the environments they were raised in if that makes sense? and then you go in the anti-aftg tag and it's just again and again 'they said THIS thing and acted THIS way in response to THIS scenario and it was PROBLEMATIC' and like. yeah. outside of the internet bubble you're in people do actually do that. like that behaviour exists. it IS problematic, well done. you pointed at a wall and called it a wall. but like? in real life people - PARTICULARLY deprived, traumatised people that typically don't ever get therapy or community or someone telling them why something is bad - DO act this way. ive said half of my love for andrew is literally just because he took an awful backstory and let it make him a complete cunt and ive NEVER seen a character do it as shamelessly as him before. and yeah there's the argument for how it's never resolved in the book where nora ties it with a bow and points at the bad behaviour so the readers can go 'see, this is wrong' and we all clap, but idk it just for me feels that when people point at the aftg characters and go problematic! problematic! problematic! it's like they're missing the point a bit.

the point being? that we need to be putting WAY more heat on the author. i really dislike her and a lot of her writing choices and her insistance of using slurs that aren't hers to reclaim and just because it happened to make the characters feel just that bit more authentic i can still acknowledge that she CLEARLY wrote it without characterisation in mind and just added all that problematic shit anyway. like i never get why there's so little focus on nora's writing decisions and thousands of posts just fucking CRUCIFYING the characters themselves and 'let's explain in detail why this behaviour is Morally Reprehensible and they should be Locked Up Forever'. like if u want to focus on the characters so bad and pretend they're the sole reason why aftg is Problematic and Bad then why is it so hard to acknowledge that someone raised the way they were might have some misinformed, ignorant beliefs. idk lol

#but i do also think im prone to viewing these characters as TOO real and i understand there's a line to be drawn between media and reality #like at what point does 'life imitates art' become just a genuinely shit piece of media #and at the end of the day im fully aware which end of the spectrum aftg is on LMAO but this is my 2 cents #like ive met so many people that have said absolutely heinous things that the internet would eat them alive for #like homophobic sexist shit you name it they've said it and it IS problematic and uncomfortable to listen to #but i also know that while teenagers online that would call them problematic were busy claiming some new fucking buzz word to throw around #those people were actively just fucking trying to survive. like they weren't learning about why misogyny is bad #because they were fucking addicted to drugs or living through poverty or some shit like they had BIGGER PROBLEMS #like not everyone got the education or life experiences you got and while it's valid to assume someone saying horrible things #is horrible themselves there's also the times it's just genuinely a misinformed ignorant person #like they'll say 'problematic' things and i'll point out why it's bad and they'll literally go 'oh i never thought of that.' that's it!!!#like i have this childhood friend whose life has been an absolute circus start to finish like COMPLETE instability i wont even get into it #low and behold she had NO ONE educating her about things and one time i had to explain to her why having abortion rights was important #bc she just out of nowhere said she was against abortions. and i initially was outraged and disappointed that this came from her #but i didn't patronise her or shout i just explained my angle on why i think they're good and she was on side immediately #cause she always had bigger problems than researching ethics and no one to guide her so she just absorbed the first opinion she came across #and in a small town from a working class family that opinion is typically not the nice woke answer the internet demands #and with aftg particularly andrew bc he's the one who gets a lot of slack for being violent and generally unreasonable #you have someone who has literally not had someone treat him kindly a single time in his life and each new person is a genuine safety threa #like the average person just does not have to deal with that! ofc they have more time to decide their political and moral compass!#and that's so relevant to real life! popularity for the monarchy is highest amongst the working class! the people voted for brexit! trump!#the lower classes and marginalised simply do not have the resources that higher classes do #and someone fighting for survival is not going to be reading twitter threads on cancel culture in their spare time #so many issues in the world can be eased so much quicker by kindness and patient non-patronising education #than just. pointing and calling 'problematic' at anything remotely uncomfortable #idk where this came from its 2am i should go to bed and instead im ranting not even about aftg anmore this is completely it's own thing now #i feel like i worded this badly too im gonna wake up to anons in the morning accusing me of like. condoning spiking #also gloomy i am SO sorry you are the true victim of this i went ENTIRELY off piste on this one please ignore this 😭#ask

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vvatchword · 11 months

Text

The King Is Dead (Long Live the King)

Twenty giants in custom divers’ suits hunched against the wall, a number of them swaying in the throes of sedation. The armor had been scuffed and shot to hell; old blood and rust stains striped them in brown. It was horrible; he could smell them—the musk of unwashed bodies and blood.

“What the hell is this?” Sinclair asked, clipboard clapping to his thigh.

“Ryan Industries is currently examining all Fontaine Futuristics projects and determining their fungibility,” said the dark-suited woman. “This project was deemed undesirable for philosophical reasons.”

“Look, our terms are nowhere near complete,” Sinclair said. “The contract Fontaine signed owes me for canceling early.”

“And Ryan Industries shall abide by the agreement.”

“Ah, very good.” Sinclair relaxed a little. “So, ah. Where’s the documentation as to their, ah… conditions? Needs?”

“The documentation is still being overlooked and has not yet been released,” said the dark-suit.

Sinclair paused. “Excuse me?” He gestured at them with his reading glasses. “These are the prize fighters of Fontaine’s Plasmid Theater, are they not? I know for certain that bunch has medical necessities lying outside the pale. At least give me their medical regimens or I’m refusing this shipment outright. I don’t think I have the facilities to hold them, full stop.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “This was what Ryan requested…”

“One moment,” Sinclair said. “I’m calling someone. You, chief—” He pointed at Dr. Alexander, who had frozen against the door, where he had begun pushing his shoulder. “—you make sure this lot doesn’t go mad in my absence, all right?”

He ducked into the first office he saw. The placard on the door said something about shipments. Inside, a squirrelly man with round glasses jumped.

“Mr. Sinclair?” he squeaked.

“I require the use of your telephone,” Sinclair said, plopping onto the corner of his desk.

He lifted the receiver, knocked on the cradle a few times.

“Yeah, darlin’, Andrew Ryan, please,” he said. “Augustus Sinclair sending his regards.”

The squirrelly man turned red, batted about for pens and folders, and scuttled out of the office. Sinclair watched him go.

“I trust this is important.”

“Andrew,” said Sinclair. “This is Augustus speaking.”

“Yes.”

“Some of Fontaine’s projects are being sent back to me.” Sinclair cleared his throat. “Without records. I hope you understand why this is a problem.”

Silence.

“Now, look, I’m a reasonable man. If you intend to pay for early cancellation, well, be my guest. But part of that agreement is full data on the subjects’ medical needs, which I’m being told are…”

“Those records contain sensitive information. Our genetics department is going over them before they are released to you.”

“Andrew. I can’t take care of them if I don’t know what they need. What’s more, these are Fontaine’s Plasmid Theater boys.”

“Are they?”

For a moment, Sinclair was struck dumb. There was weight in that sentence. It curled out cold and clever.

“Andrew,” Sinclair said slowly. “Have I done something to irk you?”

“Have you seen the news, Sinclair?”

“Well, naturally.”

“I no longer know who I can trust,” he said.

Sinclair had started twirling his cigarette in circles, over and over and over. Several sentences banged up in his throat, but they all started with, “But Fontaine.”

“You worked with Fontaine almost exclusively over the past four years.”

“Well, sure, chief, but he was the…”

“And I want to know if you are, as the vernacular goes, ‘on the level.’”

“Andrew, please. I’ve done you nothing but good since we met, haven’t I? I’m a productive member of society, aren’t I? Why, right here in my possession I have a number of your ne’er-do-wells…”

“The Johnny Topside case comes to mind.”

“Andrew, Andrew. That boy is long gone. A flash in the pan. Besides…”

Sinclair cut himself off. He’d been about to say, “Why not have a little fun while you’re at it?” But not only did Ryan not know the meaning of “fun,” the familiar emptiness gaped below his breastbone.

That boy, long gone.

That boy, no doubt swaying to music only he could hear.

“Besides?” Ryan asked softly.

“Besides, you can’t fault a man for having needs,” Sinclair said matter-of-factly. “We all know about Ms. Jolene.”

Ryan’s silence was particularly cool.

“Take them for now,” he said at last. “I will not leave you helpless, Sinclair. But take them… as a sign of your trust in me. I will deliver the records in time.”

“I have a facility to run down here,” Sinclair said softly. “Just as you have a city to take care of up there. Your boys know how to take care of them. I don’t. Just hold on to them for now; it’ll save both you and me a lot of heartache.”

“I have decided, Sinclair.”

Sinclair let out a long breath.

“If they go wild,” he said, “I’m sending you the bill.”

“Very well.”

A click. The dial tone hummed.

For a moment, Sinclair closed his eyes, let the receiver hang numbly in his fingers. Then he dropped to his feet, hung up, straightened his tie and jacket, and marched back into Receiving.

Dr. Alexander stood in front of one of the diving suits, injecting something into the inside of its elbow. The others twitched or shifted foot to foot or rocked side to side, but this one stood completely still—so still that it might have died and was merely held upright by its shape.

“What are you doing there, doctor?” Sinclair asked softly.

Dr. Alexander swung ’round, clapping a hand to his heart. He laughed nervously.

“Delta’s our firebrand,” he said. “He started looking shifty, so I thought I’d give him a little extra sedation before you took him.”

Sinclair gazed up into the viewplate. It was featureless. No sign who might be underneath.

“How the hell do you tell?” he asked.

“Oh, he begins standing very still. That’s how you know he’s thinking.”

“Can you at least give me a hint as to how to take care of these things?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Alexander said. “Don’t underestimate them. They change.”

The dark-suited woman glared at him, but Dr. Alexander rattled on.

“This bunch has had more ADAM pumped into them than most,” he said. “They’ve started, ah, adapting.”

“Good lord.”

“And there at the end all we kept them for was fighting, so the minute they wake up, they’re violent. Keep them sedated at all costs. I cannot stress enough how dangerous they are.”

“Well, it looks like I have no choice but to take them,” Sinclair said. “But if they cause trouble, I’m sending Ryan the bill.”

“He said you might say that,” said the woman. She held out a pad of paper. Sinclair took it.

It was a pack of invoices.

“He trusts you won’t need them,” she said.

UPRISING: BLACK SCRAPBOOK HUB

#bioshock #bioshock 2 #augustus sinclair #subject delta #big daddy #gilbert alexander #andrew ryan #and some paper-pushing assholes #can be thought of as the answer to the other topclair thing I posted #enjoy this #or don't #fanfiction #writing #vvatchword #uprising #only man #you might be asking “but do they go wild?”#to which I reply #:)

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watchmenanon · 2 years

Text

APRIL 28, 2017

Super Naturals

The wonder that is Stranger Things is at once a sweet story of simpler times and a spooky spin in the supernatural. For Netflix, the script by the Duffer brothers was a definite yes, as were the young actors whose bonds bedazzle on and off the set.

TATIANA SIEGEL

On a hot March morning in Atlanta, Finn Wolfhard and Noah Schnapp are rehearsing a scene for season two of Stranger Things.

Outside Screen Gems Studios, the sky is relentlessly bright, with the thermometer inching toward 86 degrees. Inside, it’s as dark and cool and secret as a military bunker. Director Andrew Stanton offers some last minute guidance before the camera rolls.

Stanton, the two-time Oscar winner behind WALL-E and Finding Nemo, took an unconventional approach in preparing to direct episodes five and six. He rewatched season one with the volume off. It’s obvious that even the smallest gesture is crucial. He tells Schnapp to touch the back of his neck when he delivers the line about feeling a troubling sensation in the back of his head.

“I geek out over the little things,” he explains a few minutes later. “But the touch made it all the more creepy.”

Wolfhard and Schnapp are sitting on a bed in what viewers have come to recognize as the Byers’s home, the one with the mysterious blinking Christmas lights and the sinister wall that Winona Ryder attacked with an axe in episode four of season one.

A Jaws poster hangs above a bookcase. The pajama-clad Schnapp, playing Upside Down escapee Will Byers, hits his line: “It’s like a dream, and you can’t remember it unless you think about it really hard.” But he flubs the follow-up and slaps his hand angrily.

Wolfhard, playing series star Mike Wheeler, cut him off too late. “I’m waiting for my cue,” offers Wolfhard, wearing a buttoned-up polo shirt, corduroys, old-school Pumas and a hoodie. Stanton tells the 14-year-old: “It’s okay if you don’t cut him off.”

Schnapp later explains his momentary frustration. “I just get angry when I mess up. It’s a professional business. It’s no game,” he says, sounding more like a seasoned thesp than a 12-year-old who will head to French, math and English classes at the on-set school later that day.

Back on set, the boys repeat the scene, this time for the camera. The dialogue is flawless, but now there’s a boom in the shot. So Wolfhard and Schnapp do it again. Three more times without a mistake, each time from a different angle.

“They rehearsed that only two times, and they nailed it,” Stanton marvels. “That’s a really long scene. They are just that good.”

As they prepare to break, Wolfhard and Schnapp face one another and begin slapping and clapping hands in a fixed pattern, chanting, “Concentration… 64.…” Are they prepping for the next scene? Some sort of protective charm against a mysterious foe? Nah. They’re just kids blowing off steam. Something Mike and Will would do, too.

Call it Hollywood’s version of the Upside Down, the inexplicable, parallel universe of Stranger Things. After all, who would have wagered on five unknown kids, a long-neglected Ryder and then–32-year-old twin brothers with few prospects to launch one of the most talked-about series of 2016?

But within days of its July 15 debut, the ’80s-set Stranger Things — created by Ross and Matt Duffer and led by Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin and Schnapp — quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon, complete with a Barack Obama–hosted White House visit in October and even a shout-out from a congressman on the House floor in February.

The series notched surprise wins for best drama ensemble at the SAG Awards and top drama series at the PGA Awards (beating out heavyweight Game of Thrones for both honors). Netflix aired a season-two spot during this year’s Super Bowl that drew more than 14 million views on YouTube.

And according to Google, Stranger Things was the most-searched-for show of 2016 around the world (it streams in 190 countries).

Still, the path to success wasn’t so linear. In 2014, the Duffer brothers were struggling writer-directors with only the unreleased horror film Hidden to their credit (the pic eventually was released straight-to-DVD). As they remember it, Stranger Things was envisioned as a movie, an homage to “the two Stevens/Stephens with different spellings — Spielberg and King,” Matt Duffer says.

They were making the rounds, taking studio meetings, “and people would ask us our movie ideas,” Ross Duffer adds. “And they weren’t very interested in any movie ideas that we had.”

They owed Warner Bros. a script and asked if they could adapt Stephen King’s It, a Stranger Things–esque book that the studio was developing with Cary Fukunaga attached to direct. “We didn’t even get in the room,” Matt Duffer recalls. “They said no.”

Undeterred, they embarked on writing Stranger Things , pivoting mediums from film to TV. But it was a difficult recalibration, given their lifelong obsession with movies, from E.T. to Jaws to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Growing up, I associated television with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Like, I’m done with my homework and it’s something to pass the time,” Ross Duffer explains.

But after seeing the trailer for HBO’s True Detective — directed by Fukunaga — and finding it more enticing than 90 percent of the movies in theaters, Matt Duffer says it dawned on them that “this is actually the cooler place to be right now, given the current state of the industry.”

Coming of age in their native North Carolina in the mid-’90s, the Duffers didn’t have a basement like the Wheelers, nor any friends with telekinetic powers. But the goal was simple: to make a viewer feel the same as when he or she cracked open a big, fat King book.

“The first thing we wrote was the Dungeons & Dragons scene because it was so close to our experiences growing up,” Ross Duffer says. “We had a room over our garage, which was just not as cinematic. I wish our house looked like that. I wish a telepathic girl had dropped into our lives.”

They sent the pilot script around but found no takers until it landed on the right desk at Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment, where senior vice-president Dan Cohen read it and immediately alerted Levy. Without hesitation, Cohen and Levy signed on to executive-produce the series — then titled Montauk — alongside the Duffers.

“Talent is talent. It’s just waiting for someone to bet on it,” Levy says. “We wanted to bet.”

So, too, did Netflix, which ordered the supernatural drama in April 2015. Casting would be key, potentially the separation between cheesy and brilliant.

The idea to target Ryder — a two-time Oscar nominee who rose to It Girl status in the ’80s but whose career had cooled considerably in the new millennium — to play a single mother trying to track down her missing tween was an early stroke of genius from casting director Carmen Cuba.

The Duffers and Levy invited Ryder to tea at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont for a conversation that lasted several hours and ranged from secret government testing to missing children. “I remember Winona: ‘What is this new kind of television on your computer?’” Levy says with a laugh. “We left that tea slightly exhausted but quite certain this was our Joyce Byers.”

But finding the right kids proved to be far more exhaustive, with the Duffers and Levy seeing some 1,000 aspirants. The trick was finding kids who looked “regular” and not like slick child actors.

Gaten Matarazzo, a stage actor from New Jersey whose Broadway credits included Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Les Misérables, was the first cast, as Dustin Henderson, the perpetually picked-on boy with a lisp.

Next was Millie Bobby Brown, who landed the breakout role of Eleven, the buzz-cut waif with psychokinetic abilities. The British actress says she perfected an American accent by watching TV and just observing people. After sending a self-tape to Cuba, she was asked to provide another and another and still another. She wouldn’t allow herself to get her hopes up, though.

“I always get really close on something,” Brown says, then it’s, “‘Oh, we’re picking the other girl because….’” But the series of tapes led to a Skype call and then a trip to L.A., where she won over the Duffer brothers.

McLaughlin, another Broadway actor who played Young Simba in The Lion King, nabbed the role of Lucas Sinclair, the member of the gang most suspicious of Eleven’s arrival.

Then came Schnapp, whose screen time in season one is limited but who plays a significant role in season two. The angel-faced boy with an uncanny resemblance to Ryder (his screen mom) recalls coming to L.A. for a so-called chemistry test and being paired with McLaughlin.

Fortunately, the two suburban New Yorkers already had bonded at the hotel pool. But Schnapp returned home without the job and headed to upstate New York for sleepover camp, where he was allowed only three incoming phone calls.

One day, his mother called with the Duffer brothers on the line. “I’m like, ‘Who’s Will?’ ‘Cause I didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says. “And then I realized it was ‘cause I originally auditioned for Mike when I auditioned for the role. And I started freaking out. It brightened the rest of my summer.”

Wolfhard was last. The Vancouver native, who started acting at eight, was sick in bed when he did his self-tape, which was “super out of focus, my dad’s finger was in the frame, super unprofessional.” But the Duffers loved it and Skyped with Wolfhard, then flew him to L.A. twice over a two-week period. But two months passed with no word.

“Out of nowhere, I got a call from Matt saying that I got the part, and that was really, really cool,” Wolfhard says of landing the lead. Ironically, Wolfhard was available to tackle the series only because Fukunaga had just dropped out of King’s It.

Wolfhard already had landed the role of Richie Tozier in that film, which was now suddenly on hold. It eventually recovered with Andrés Muschietti in the director’s chair, and Wolfhard was able to fit the project in between seasons of Stranger Things. It will hit theaters in September, some seven weeks before the second-season debut of Stranger Things on Halloween night.

To prepare their Fab Five, the Duffers assigned a list of movies to watch, including E.T., The Goonies, Jaws and Poltergeist. But nothing could equip the young stars for the show’s rabid fandom.

“On my Instagram,” McLaughlin says, “[it’s] like, ‘Brazil loves you.’ People from all around the world… France, Mexico, Africa...”

Brown says she never tires of the fervor surrounding Eleven. “I don’t really want to call them my fans. They’re kind of like my friends,” says the 13-year-old. “And I can’t say no to a picture. Obviously, I would do the same thing to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. This 90-year-old came up and he was like, ‘I love you!’ It was really sweet.”

Perhaps most important was the vote of approval that came from Mr. King himself. The author tweeted several thumbs-ups in July, including: “STRANGER THINGS is pure fun. A+. Don’t miss it. Winona Ryder shines.”

Of course, an email exchange with the Duffer brothers ensued. “It took me four hours to write a five-sentence email,” Matt Duffer jokes. “I had to check the grammar with all my writers. I was very nervous about it.”

The kids also are enjoying the perks of being labeled TV sensations, including hanging with people they’ve long admired. Matarazzo singles out a meeting with Sarah Paulson. “She’s a wonderful person, and to hear compliments from her, it was, like, ‘wow,’” he says, sounding rather grown up for a 14-year-old.

For the 15-year-old McLaughlin, nothing compares to getting feedback from President Obama. “He’s like, ‘I like the bond the boys have on the show. They never gave up looking for their friend.’”

That dynamic the president noticed isn’t just a put-on for the cameras. Wolfhard and Matarazzo frequently hit the multiplex in tandem and caught Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens together. McLaughlin and Matarazzo compete against each other in video games. Retro ’80s games, naturally. “Pac-Man, yeah. I’m even wearing the Pac-Man shirt,” he says, pointing at his street clothes.

Brown, who describes herself as “a real girl’s girl in pink and pearls and rings and necklaces,” has managed to fit in with the boys by taking up whiffle ball. She and Schnapp have formed a close friendship. “Noah comes around almost every weekend for sleepovers,” she says. “We watch really scary movies on Netflix like The Babadook and Hush.”

Ultimately, they all are sharing in a secret that is being guarded more closely than a Project MKUltra experiment being carried out at the fictitious Hawkins Laboratory: what will happen in season two.

As evidence of the major secrecy involved this year, Building 5 — where a camera test is about to take place with a new character — is off-limits to press today. Day players and non-essential crew also are cleared. Only hair and makeup and a few key crewmembers remain. Keeping a lid on potential spoilers is serious business.

“My brother always asks me, ‘Gate, can you send me the script?’” Matarazzo says. “I’m like, ‘It’s a new season, and it’s a lot stricter than last year.’ He read them last year, but this year he’s not able to ‘cause we don’t want any, like, hacking interference.”

Hacking, indeed. The danger serves as a jarring reminder of today’s less-than-innocent times — and explains part of the appeal of Stranger Things: it harks back to an era not long ago but definitely out of reach, when people made eye contact, kids tore through neighborhoods on their bikes unsupervised and no one was enslaved by a beeping device.

Schnapp says his father schooled him on the mindset of the ’80s. “They were always outside. It’s all phones and computers now. You know, I kind of miss the ‘80s. Even though I wasn’t alive,” he says with a laugh, catching his own absurdity.

But viewers of Stranger Things — be they 12 or 90 — understand that universal feeling.

#st articles #noah schnapp #finn wolfhard #gaten matarazzo #millie bobby brown #caleb mclaughlin #byler #<target audience

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