#like we weren’t even somewhere private. we were sitting on the back stoop

[bumblebeerror]

You know how sometimes when your brain is on idle mode it’ll just sometimes toss a memory at you and force you to deal with that

I was just viscerally reminded of the time my (transmasc) best friend’s (cis) boyfriend asked me, without any irony, which brands of soap could be used INSIDE my best friend’s mancave. [vagina.]

Putting aside the fact that he really just asked me to advise him about my best friend’s snatch -

Listen. Listen. [brings the mic real close]

THERE ARE NO SOAPS THAT ARE SAFE TO GO INSIDE YOUR GODDAMN COOTER.

They don’t exist. Summer’s Eve does not go inside, it goes on the hairy bits. Even douches shouldn’t technically go inside there, because they ruin that delicate microbiome. Don’t put soap in your vagina. It fuckin burns like hell to boot.

Just please do not do that. Do not follow the advice of a cis man about your secret garden, alright. Please.

[harlowsbby]

Bare wit me part 2

Love is so strange, one minute you’re head over hills for somebody and the next minute you’re crying your heart out and wondering what went wrong.

You getting cheated on wasn’t your fault but you couldn’t help but to blame yourself. Maybe you should’ve saw the signs sooner thinking back on times you’d leave Jack and Lilly alone flooded your mind, all those times they spent together they were sleeping with each other.

Maybe if you were a better girlfriend you wouldn’t have gotten cheated on, you weren’t so sure what it was or how to feel, your emotions were all in the wind you felt like you were going down and couldn’t get up.

“Y/N open the door please, you’ve been hiding in your room all day.” You’ve been staying with your friend Tae ever since you found out Jack was cheating on you, being alone would just take its tole on your mentally so staying with Tae was your best option.

“Let me be Tae please I don’t wanna see anybody ever again, I’m literally the joke of Atlanta right now.” Tae sighed and took out the spare key he had in his pocket before opening the door.

“How did you get in?”

“A spare key duh and I need you to get up and shower I’m not letting you lay around and feel depressed and sorry for yourself he isn’t worth it.”

Tae despised Lilly and Jack for what they did to you especially Lilly, you’ve all been best friends since elementary school he never thought Lilly would stoop so slow and sleep with someone’s man.

“I just hate the way I spent so much time and effort into a relationship that was failing Tae, this shit hurts so much. I was kept a secret for months and months and just to find out the reason why we couldn’t tell the world about us is because he was cheating on me with my so called best friend.”

“I understand your frustration and anger boo but sitting in this dark room all day and eating up all of my ice cream might I add, isn’t healthy.” Tae rubbed soothing circles on your back and you smiled.

“You’re right Tae thank you.”

“You’re welcome Y/N but seriously get up the charity event is tonight and you’re coming.” You groaned and tossed a pillow at Tae but smiled and got up and started the shower for you.

Every year around this holidays Atlanta always put together a charity event for those indeed, a lot of famous celebrities and influencers were invited and helped host the event and they even had musical guest, sadly this years music guest was Jack.

“Do I have to go? How about we both just stay in bed all day and watch movies.” You smiled nicely and even gave him your signature pout but Tae wasn’t falling for it.

“Nope you’re getting up and getting dressed and going, now get up you honestly smell like ten cans of bounce that ass.”

With the help of Tae you finally managed to get up and shower it felt good but the entire time all you thought about was Jack.

That night

“You slept with Lilly? Are you kidding me right now Jack.” You we’re a crying mess, you were sure people around were recording and ready to share them to all the known blogs but that was the last thing on your mind.

“Baby it was a mistake.”

“A mistake?!” Lilly stepped forward.

“You weren’t calling me a mistake just a few days ago, I wasn’t a mistake when you were fucking me after Y/N left to work.” Several gasp were heard from across the room.

“Really Jack? This whole time I was out here being faithful to you and doing nothing but loving and caring for you and towards you and you were out here cheating.”

“Please baby let’s talk about this somewhere more private.” He whispered and went to take your hand but you pulled your hand back and shook your head at him, tears stung your eyes.

“I hate you Jack I really and honestly hate you.”

“You don’t mean that Y/N.” Jack’s lip quivered and tried his best to mask his emotions but he couldn’t.

“I mean every word Jack. I hate you Jack and I hope you both rote in hell together.”

“Y/N are you done in there?! You’ve been showering for the past hour and it don’t take that long to wash some hair and your body.” Tae yelled from the other side of the door, you laughed and rolled your eyes. Turning off the water you grabbed the towel and dried yourself off before stepping out of the shower and opening the connected door.

“Yes Tae?”

“Uhh come on you have to get dressed and I need to do your hair” Tae was one of the best hairstylists in Atlanta, celebrities traveled to get their hair done by Tae and lucky for you he did your hair at no cost.

After you got dressed, Tae did your hair you smiled in approval at how well it looked. After Tae got ready the two of you got into the car he had ordered.

“Are you nervous?” You we’re nervous not because of the charity event but to see Jack again you knew he was currently in Atlanta and you were surprised you haven’t ran into him before tonight’s event.

“I’m nervous but as long as you’re there by my side everything should be okay.”

“Yeah so about that..”

“What are you talking about Tae?” Tae smiled at you sheepishly smile.

“I won’t be with you tonight like I will during certain times but I’ll be busy getting everything ready for the auction Y/N.”

“You promised you’d be with me all night Tae? Now I don’t wanna go I don’t wanna risk getting caught alone with Jack.”

“Just stay around where everyone else will be or sit at the table with Tuson and Ari.”

“Fine I’ll do that.” You pouted and sat back in your seat, you weren’t exactly thrilled that Tae wasn’t going to be with you for the night but as long as you stayed with Ari and Tuson you’d be good.

Once Tae and You arrived, cameras were immediately being shoved in your face.

“Y/N are all the rumors true? Did Jack Harlow cheat on you with your best friend.”

“Y/N over here?! Are you Jack Harlow’s mystery girl?!”

“Y/N, Y/N?!”

“Fuck I wish they’d leave us alone where the hell is security.”

“We’re almost inside Tae don’t even worry about them let’s just go.” When the two of you finally made it inside you sighed in relief. You went from actually being a nobody to finally being a somebody but not in a good way.

“Well I’ll see you around Y/N just stay with Ari and Tuson and you’ll be okay.”

“Don’t take long Tae please, I don’t want to run into Jack without you by my side.” Tae gave you a reassuring smile and gave your hand a quick squeeze.

“I promise Y/N whenever I have the free time I’ll be back out here with you okay?”

“Okay Tae.” He gave you a side hug before going off to the back rooms to get everything together for the auctions.

You felt as if everyone was looking at you and laughing at you, and maybe it was just your mind playing tricks on you but you felt like you were the center of attention. Walking past people you could’ve swore they said your name or something about Jack.

Ari had texted you and said her and Tuson would be at the table in a few minutes they were just getting you all some drinks.

“Y/N is that you?” Looking up you you smiled seeing Druski.

“Druski?! Long time no see how have things been.” Druski smiled and pulled you in for a hug.

“Things have been good shorty I can’t complain you know could’ve been records has been out here blowing up, rumor is could’ve been is the hottest recording label out right now.” Druski stated, the two of you immediately bursted out laughing.

“I’m just fucking with you Y/N, but how you been shorty? I kinda heard about Jack and You.” Of course Druski did, it seemed like the whole city of Atlanta knew about Jack and You.

“I’m doing better now Druski, I’m still hurt obviously but I’ll be okay and I’ll get over it.”

Druski hated that Jack cheated on you as well he stopped talking to Jack for a few days because honestly Druski never thought Jack was one of those type of guys but clearly Jack proved him wrong.

“Well as long as you’re growing and moving on that’s all that matters.”

“You’re right Dru, when is Jack supposed to be performing anyways?”

“Uhh” Druski checked his phone seeing it was now ten at night.

“He should be coming on in a few minutes actually.” As if on que here came the Dj announcing Jack.

“Atlanta!! I need you all to stand the fuck up right now and show some love to Jack Harlow!!” Everyone in the room started screaming like crazy and started recording Jack.

You sucked in your breath seeing how good he looked, he was wearing a regular pair of levi jeans and a striped blue and white shirt with a pair of new balance jeans. It was something basic but Jack always pulled off the most basic looks.

“What’s up Atlanta? Y’all ready to party.” The crowd screamed and Jack immediately started singing Dua Lipa, after awhile of singing and talking to the crowed he decided to slow things down a bit.

“This song right here it’s dedicated to someone really special she isn’t in my life anymore but if you’re in this room right now I hope you know I miss you so much.”

“Is he singing a song about you?” Ari’s voice came from behind you. Looking up at Druski he just shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t know he was doing this honestly Y/N.” Druski told you.

“Why would he sing a song about Y/N when he’s with Lilly?” Tuson asked which received him a slap to the head by Ari.

“Tuson shut up.”

You watched how Jack sat down on the stool that was given to him, he looked around the crowd before his eyes locked with yours.

“This is for you.” He spoke into the mic, the entire time Jack sang he never took his eyes off of you.

“I know you sick of being my little secret, I know you sick of being my favorite, I know you hate the fact that I’m famous.” He sang and stood up, he started making his way towards the direction you were in.

“I told my therapist about you, she always takes your side, ain’t nobody I love more I just need more time.” He started singing with more passion, he wanted you to know that he heard you and that he knew he made a mistake but wanted you two to give what you once had another chance.

“Hate the fact that you gotta wait, but you gon wait, cause you confident that we soulmates.” You smiled sadly thinking back at those late nights after some of his shows you’d lay on his chest and draw random shapes on his chest with your fingers and tell him that the two of you were soulmates and would be together forever.

“Y/N are you okay?” Druski asked, you didn’t even notice you had tears streaming down your face till you rubbed your cheeks and noticed your makeup was smearing.

“Uh I’m okay Druski I’ll be right back okay? I just need to freshen up.” You quickly hurried out of the room.

“Where did she go?” Jack asked Druski backstage.

“She went to the bathroom but I don’t think she’s taking you back Jack I mean what you did was fucked up, sleeping with her best friend? And then you brought Lilly here.”

“I don’t have the time for a lecture right now Druski, I have to get Y/N back.”

“Damn you Tae, I don’t even know why I came tonight, damn you Tae I should’ve stayed home and finished eating my ice cream.” You complained to yourself before leaning against on the of walls.

What were you doing honestly you knew you should’ve stayed home, you should’ve known Jack was going to pull some stuff of stunt like that.

“Y/N?” You never thought you’d hear that voice again turning around slowly you were now face to face with Jack.

“What do you want? Haven’t you caused me enough pain. Don’t you have some new girlfriend to entertain.” You spat at him.

“Look Lilly and me aren’t a thing all of that is fake we never got together. I wanted to see if you’d take me back Y/N.”

“Take you back? After all of the damaged you caused I don’t think so Jack.” You went to step away from him but he pushed you back into the corner gently, he raised both his hands and leaned them against the wall behind you, great now you were stuck.

“Give me one good reason why you won’t take me back Y/N.”

"I don't want a tainted love Jack, haven't you had enough?" Jack fucked up and you weren’t understanding what he didn’t get by that.

"Please Jack, please let me go you messed up things between us not me, you made that choice to sleep with Lilly." You cried out all you wanted was to go home you didn’t want to be here anymore.

You huffed and tried your best to avoid eye contact with him but he wasn't letting up.

"We aren't working out Jack it's over between us, please move l'm pretty sure your little girlfriend Lilly is waiting for you."

What you didn't know was that Lilly was hiding behind the corner listening to Jack and You, she peaked around the corner and glared seeing how dangerously close Jack was to you.

"Please Y/N I promise l've changed I realized I make a mistake sleeping with Lilly was the dumbest thing I’ve ever did.”

You weren’t even sure if you could trust him anymore what if he was lying to you again.

"I miss waking up to you in the morning, I miss hearing the sound of your soft snores in my ear whenever you'd lay on my chest." He smiled weakly as did you. If it was one thing Jack was good at it was changing the topic he loved saying things to make you feel better or make it seem like what he did wasn't as bad.

"I'm sorry Jack but I don't see us getting back together I can't get back together with a cheater, I trusted you, I trusted you with my heart and you broke it, Lilly and You."

While Jack and You were talking you didn’t notice that Lilly had snuck in she was on her way to use the bathroom but stopped when she heard people talking once she realized it was Jack and You she stayed hidden around the corner.

Lilly frowned she never meant to sleep with Jack the two of them were both drunk and one thing led to another and they kept an ongoing relationship for about five months. Lilly was in love with Jack and she wasn't about to let you take him away this time, not again.

"Can we start over Y/N? I promise baby please I promise I won't make those same mistakes again, Ineed you Y/N." You bit your lip nervously as you looked into Jack's eyes you weren't sure what to do or how to feel or what to even say.

We're you seriously about to take him back, after all of the things he put you through, you didn't feel like being his secret again and having to act like the two of you weren't a couple, but you'd be lying if you said you didn't miss him.

“There’s a reason why I can’t take you back Jack.” You gulped were you really about to tell him something that would most likely ruin his friendship with someone close to him.

“I can’t take you back because.”

“Because what baby? What’s the reason.”

“I can’t take you back because I slept with Urban while we were together.”

taglist 💗

@moody4world @mortirolo @minkookie95

@hoodharlow @heavyhitterheaux @nattinatalia

@jackmans-poison @jackharloww

@jacksmoviestar @harlowthot

@awhoere4more

[thelittleredheadedmusician]

Halloween prompt: Alfred is getting increasingly annoyed at whoever is eating the halloween candy. No one will confess. (Bruce is sitting in a corner somewhere with a bag of... [insert Batfamily appropriate candy here])

Three Musketeers

Rating: G 1,844 words Gen AO3

Bristol was technically in Gotham City limits. Though the gilted mansions and private woods with pastures and stables seemed like a whole other world in comparison. The residents liked to think so too, especially because – despite Gotham’s robust public transportation system – it was almost impossible to reach the rich suburb from the city proper. It was because they lived in this separate world that Bristol’s wealthy residents often fought to receive special treatment or even secede from the city all together.

Except when it came to Halloween.

The residents of Bristol were more than happy to hold their trick-or-treat night during the same time as the rest of Gotham. Mostly, because it discouraged the city’s poorer residents from coming out to ask for literal handouts from them. The time it would take to sit in train stations and bus stops to get there ate up a large chunk of trick-or-treat’s two-hour window. And the walk from the last stop and between the houses took up the rest.

Despite all this, many made the trek out to Wayne Manor and its residents always made it well worth the work.

It was known that the Manor didn’t simply give out full-sized candy bars, no, they gave a whole bag of king’s sized bars. And from the entrance way to the ballroom off to the side were decked out and fitted to be a haunted house with games and entertainment and even more snacks. There was no reason to go anywhere else when you went to Wayne Manor.

Except, this year the seemingly endless supply of candy was mysteriously missing in the week leading up to the big night. Which was ironic considering the Manor was populated by detectives.

Alfred was suspicious. And annoyed. But mostly suspicious. He had raised the world’s greatest detective and then helped raise the current world’s greatest detective. In addition to the other seven vigilantes he’d actively cared for over the years. And countless others who hadn’t lived under his roof. Which meant that he was extremely hard to pull something over on. Extremely.

Yet, his stockpile of trick-or-treat candy was gone. Completely. And his list of suspects was long and skilled.

First, was Barbara because he loved the young woman dearly but she was a bit of a chocolate fiend. Also, if he could rule her out then he could enlist her assistance. It was easy enough to make her coffee just the way she liked and message her to come to the kitchen when she was working in the Cave one evening. She was happy enough to come up, thinking it was just for a chat but knowing something was up when Alfred passed her the mug.

They studied each other from across the long wooden table that took up the far side of the kitchen. Alfred sipped his tea from the good china that after the last family debacle was his alone to use. Barbara narrowed her eyes as her glasses slipped down her nose. They were playing a high stakes game of chicken and they both knew it.

Barbara broke first. “Is there something you wanted to talk about, Alfred?” she asked sweetly, setting her coffee down and pushing her glasses back up in the same movement.

“Now that you mention it, yes. I was wondering if you happened to know where my trick-or-treat supply is disappearing to?” Alfred’s lips turned up in kindness, but his eyes were hard and steady as he held her gaze.

An adult, a seasoned crimefighter, an honest to god superhero and yet Barbara wanted to wriggle in her chair, knot her fingers in the hem of her t-shirt, under that look. Pure willpower was the only thing that stopped her. Though it didn’t extend to her mouth. “No, I’ve been out of town most of the week.”

This was true, Alfred knew, but not necessarily an airtight alibi.

“Besides,” Barbara continued, “I have a Costco card. The Birds and I split it. If I wanted to eat a whole bag of candy, I’d just buy my own.”

Alfred nodded, lifting his tea to take another sip. He accepted that answer, she knew better than to lie to him. “In that case, might I enlist your skills to uncover the real culprit?”

This was what Alfred had truly wanted to ask, they both knew, and Barbara smiled in delight at the prospect. “I’d love to.”

The next suspect was Tim. He knew exactly how to cover his tracks and misdirect their attention. Tim was sly, smart, and still technically a teenaged boy so sugar was irresistible. Barbara set the trap, crashing the Batcomputer one afternoon when everyone else was out. This forced Tim up, out of the Cave and to Alfred lying in wait in the kitchen.

Tim had climbed up onto a kitchen chair to get at the stash of poptarts on the top shelf of the cabinet above the stove. Proving that he had means, motive, and a record.

“Master Timothy,” Alfred drawled as he stepped out of the shadows. Bruce had to learn the skill from somewhere.

Startling, Tim whirled around and nearly fell from the chair. Dropping the silver packet in the process. It landed on the tile with a crunch. “Look I need the brain power to get the computer back up,” he said hastily, glancing guiltily between Alfred and the fallen junk food.

“I am not here to reprimand you about the poptarts,” Alfred said and Tim immediately relaxed, shooting him a relieved little grin. “But I may have to reprimand you for sneaking something else,” Alfred continued, causing Tim’s face to fall.

“I swear, I only had the one Monster the other week. And I split it with Kon ‘cause we were trying to keep Bart from drinking it. Me and him on an energy drink bouncing round the Tower is way better than a speedster on an energy drink.” Tim’s eyes were wide and the blood that had drained from his face made the boy almost impossibly paler.

Alfred lifted an eyebrow at the confession. Not what he was looking for but good to know all the same. “And what of the candy for trick-or-treat?”

Tim’s brows drew together in confusion. “Uh, I don’t know? I suggested we get milkyways but if you got snickers again then I’m not going to complain.”

“So, you did not eat the supply?” Alfred confirmed, though the fact that Tim was already feeling guilty and hesitant to lie on top of the fact that he had no idea Alfred had purchased boxes of three musketeers cleared him of the crime.

“No?” Tim shook his head as he shrugged.

Satisfied, Alfred nodded. “Enjoy your poptarts, Master Timothy. I shall be moving them shortly.”

“It wasn’t Jason,” Barbara said over the phone. “I have a couple different angles of him being in Paraguay all last week.”

“I never suspected him to begin with,” Alfred admitted as he pushed the shopping cart, restocking for the big night tomorrow. “He never liked three musketeers. Dark chocolate kit-kats are a separate story.” He smiled at the memory of a young Jason carrying a huge box of the candy bars to drop in the cart during his first Halloween with them.

“Cass and Dick are out too,” she continued. “Cass laughed at me when I even suggested it and then confirmed Dick was telling the truth when I questioned him.”

Alfred hummed. Richard had been his next guess, though he was more likely to take them to hand out while on patrol or pass on to his friends’ children than to eat himself. “Master Damian is innocent as well. He scoffed at the implication he would, quote, ‘stoop so low as to steal candy from children.’ He also vouched for Master Duke and neither were anywhere near the spare pantry recently to begin with.”

“Security cameras confirm that.”

“That leaves Miss Stephanie,” Alfred frowned. Stephanie tended to decline any offers of assistance from the Manor’s residents that weren’t directly related to masked vigilantism. Though she recently had allowed Alfred to slip her gas money when she visited during daylight hours. The thought of her taking the Halloween candy just did not sit right with him. It was almost as impossible to imagine as Damian taking it. Cassandra was more likely to be playing a trick on them all, having hidden it for some soon to be revealed reason. “Are you positive Miss Cassandra is not the culprit?”

Barbara chuckled. “I mean, not really. But at the same time why would she? Though why would Steph either? I don’t think it was either of them but I can vouch for Steph. She hasn’t been anywhere near the Cave or the Manor since last month. What with school she’s been staying close.”

“Which leaves us back to the beginning,” Alfred sighed and got in line. “We could create a sting operation though I’d loathe to lose this supply as well. There’s nearly no candy left in the entire state.”

“That I believe. Alright, I’ve got the feed from the events kitchen running on one of my screens. I’ll keep an eye on it for the rest of the night, see if anyone stupid enough to try it again.”

“Thank you, Miss Barbara. I really appreciate your assistance in this matter,” Alfred told her before exchanging their goodbyes. He had plans for a little stakeout of his own.

Placing the boxes in the spare pantry, Alfred settled himself on a stool next to the industrial fridge in the dark. He typed out a careful message in the family’s groupchat informing them all that the missing candy had been replaced and politely asking that it not disappear again before the next night. They would all be getting ready to go out for the night so there is no doubt they would see it. And he would have plenty of time to wait for them to strike.

Hours later, the family was returning and Alfred was still lying in wait. A creak echoed in from the ballroom where decorations were mostly in place. The light padding of rubber soles on the marble tile came closer and closer. Alfred leant further back into the shadows as the door swung open. He held his breath, waiting as the guilty party walked into the kitchen proper, headed directly towards the pantry. Alfred slipped from his hiding spot, keeping low as he crept around the island to come up behind the culprit.

Alfred contained his gasp of shock and annoyance as he flipped on the light. Forcing the candy thief to whirl on him. “Master Bruce!” Alfred scolded. He hadn’t thought his first charge would do such a thing and hadn’t even considered him as a suspect.

Having the good sense to look ashamed and like a ten-year-old boy again, Bruce offered a wavering grin in apology. “You bought three musketeers,” he said as his only defense.

Alfred frowned as he crossed his arms. “And your penance will be handing them out tomorrow night.”

[roonil-wazlib-at-221b]

Inferno: Part 4

Pairing: Peter Parker x Reader

“Okay, challenge time!” Spider-man chirps into the camera, grinning brightly. “We’re bored and there’s no criminals out at the moment so we decided to show off a little bit.”

You don’t smile into the camera exactly, but kind of smirk as comments start to roll in from viewers of his livestream. Someone suggests a race.

“We could race?” you suggest, pointing to the far end of the roof you’re on. “There and back?” Though you know it’s fruitless—you and Peter are just about the same speed, though he might be a few seconds faster while you have more endurance—you figure it’s a fun enough challenge.

“You’re going down, Stark,” Spidey says. You can hear the smirk in his voice even though he doesn’t have his mask rolled up at all. You roll your eyes and prepare yourself, muscles tensed in anticipation. The wind whips around you and you spit hair out of your mouth as goosebumps appear on your arms. “On your mark, get set, go!”

You shoot forward as he does, breaths coming in short pumps as you sprint as fast as you can go the edge of the building. You stoop to touch the elevated side and spin. Unfortunately Spidey doesn’t feel the need to stoop and he gains a millisecond lead, laughing at your squawk of indignation.

“I win!” he crows through gasping breaths, delighted. You scowl at him, panting.

“Yeah, ‘cause you cheated.”

“I did not cheat. You didn’t specify the rules.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I didn’t think you were going to cheat!”

Spidey crosses his arms. “You can pick the next one if you want, all right?”

You near the phone and squint at the comments. Someone suggests kissing each other, but you ignore that one even if your cheeks burn; no matter who you hang out with, being a young celebrity means a rabid fanbase that both wants you to be in a relationship with someone and wants you to be available for a relationship with them. You’ve learned to ignore it at this point.

After spending so much time with Spider-man during the past three months, you have to admit that the shipping has become a little out of hand. Especially considering you’re pretty sure you have a humongous crush on the guy based on the butterflies in your stomach every time you hang out (but that might also just be nerves from the height, because he prefers to hang out on top of buildings rather than anywhere else).

Someone else suggests doing a backflip, which you don’t know how to do, but that’s sort of Spidey’s specialty.

“Do a backflip,” you decide, leaning back on your heels.

Spidey huffs. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing this with me?”

“We’re showing off, not competing,” you roll your eyes. “I’ll light myself up like a Christmas tree after you.” You need the warmth after all.

“Okay, here goes.” Spidey plants his feet and executes a clean backflip. You clap a few times. “Your turn, Inferno,” he teases.

You rub your hands together and shiver. Spidey watches you shake your limbs out, preparing to call the heat always under your skin to the surface.

But it’s not under your skin.

Your eyes widen and your heart immediately starts to pump. Adrenaline floods your system. You’d completely let your guard down. There’s no heat.

“Y/N?” Spidey asks. “You good?”

“I’m fine.” You avoid his gaze by staring at the ground and clench your fists. Seconds ago you were shivering, now you’re flooded with heat. It’s never been hard to call the heat back, but it’s also never left you completely before. Within seconds you’re glowing red-hot.

“It’s like standing next to a bonfire,” Spider-man admits to the camera. “Hey, maybe your superhero name should be Bonfire instead of Inferno.”

You relax slightly. Though your hair still waves in the wind, you don’t feel its chill at all. You still feel cold. “Yeah, because that sounds so much cooler.”

Spidey waves at the phone. “Well, that’s all for today because the sun’s setting. See you guys tomorrow!” His phone buzzes in his hand and you resist your curiosity as he taps out a quick message to someone.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” you ask curiously.

“Kind of,” he shrugs. Now that the camera’s turned off, he rolls up his mask to just above the tip of his nose. “But in an hour or so. So we still have time to hang out.” His lips curl up into a lopsided smile. You stop yourself from staring at them for too long. “What are you doing tonight?”

You scowl and turn away from him, shrugging your shoulders halfheartedly. “I think the whole team wants to have a movie night. I wanted to watch Wonder Woman but Wonder Boy is coming over tonight and he loves Star Wars so we’re watching his pick. Just like we have every movie night since I came back.” You sit down on the edge of the building, letting your feet swing a little bit.

“And Wonder Boy is...?” Spidey hesitantly sits next to you. His phone buzzes again. He looks at the screen and shoves it back into his pocket.

“My dad’s favorite intern.” You laugh bitterly. “Heir to Stark Industries at this point, I assume. Dad talks about him more than he talks about his fiancee.”

“Did you tell your dad you wanted to watch Wonder Woman?”

You shake your head. “Why even bother? I stopped trying after the second movie night.”

“Then maybe he thinks you don’t have a problem with it,” Spidey concludes. “I don’t know. I don’t see him that often, but whenever he checks in on me Tony seems kind of cool. He never mentions his intern to me.”

You snort. “You obviously don’t hang out with him that often, then. I don’t think he can go five minutes without mentioning Peter Parker.”

Sounding nervous although you don’t know why, Spidey asks, “And your only issue with this Peter Parker is that your dad—”

“Clearly prefers him over me?” you interrupt. “I mean, I guess. I haven’t really talked with the dude that much.”

Spidey hums.

“What about you, huh?” You side-eye him. “What’s bothering you today?”

Spidey smiles the smile that you know means trouble. Something flutters in your stomach. “My biggest problem today is that this suit is just a little bit too tight around my more, uh...” He clears his throat and gestures at his crotch. “Private areas.”

You laugh, surprised. “You mean compression isn’t a good thing for your, uh...”

“My dangly bits?” he supplies, prompting another shocked laugh out of you.

“Well, it might be uncomfortable with girls’ chests, but that’s the best way for us to keep everything together,” you explain. “I’ll take it’s not the same for you?”

“I think for me it’s a little too sensitive for that,” Spidey grins, nudging your shoulder with his. “But I appreciate your concern.”

Your cheeks flaming red, you change the subject. “That bully still messing with you? You know, I could beat him up for you if you wanted.”

Spidey shakes his head. He sounds sad when he replies, even though his mouth is smiling. “Nah, it’s fine, though. If he stopped picking on me, he’d move on to another target. At least I know that I can take the hints, you know?”

Your chest feels a little warm at that sentiment and you lean your head on his shoulder. “You’re the best, Spidey. If only my dad would take you home instead of Parker.”

“I bet he’s not that bad,” Spidey reasons. “I assume getting to know him is out of the picture.”

You huff at that and sit up. “You’re absolutely right. First off, it would be proving my dad right. He said I can’t make friends without his help, but I’ve got you, haven’t I? Completely without his help.”

Spidey clears his throat.

“Plus, if I did decide to hang out with Parker and Dad, I’d have to deal with their inside jokes all the time as well as Dad constantly praising Parker more than me.”

Spidey shifts uncomfortably and you elbow him. “I’m serious!” you insist. “I walked into the lab when I didn’t know Parker was there and it was insane. He stared at my dad for five seconds, Dad nodded and tossed him a wrench and it was apparently exactly what he wanted. Then later, Dad literally said something like ‘two nine four cat computer’ or some other gibberish and Parker replied ‘Turn it the other way’. It’s absolutely ridiculous. They act more like family than I ever have with Dad.”

“I know it’s been a tough transition,” Spidey starts and you snort, taking your head off his shoulder and looking away. He thinks he makes a great therapist, but he really doesn’t and you’re not really in the mood.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” You perk up. “How’s your Lego friend?”

“Lego fri—oh, you mean Ne—yeah, I know who you’re talking about,” Spidey stutters. “We’ve been busy lately with finals and everything coming up but his parents are going to get him the Millenium Falcon set for his birthday and we’re going to spend the whole day making that together. So that’s really exciting.”

You smile at how excited he sounds.

“Yeah?” he suddenly asks.

You frown. “I didn’t—”

He holds up a finger to shush you and mouths, “Karen.” That is, you know, the name of his AI. He jumps to his feet. “There’s an ATM robbery in progress five blocks away!”

You also jump up. “You want help or something?”

“It’s fine,” Spidey assures you. “You’re not in your suit anyway.” Without warning, he reaches around your waist and jerks you off your feet. You stiffen. If you weren’t such good friends with him you would tug away, but three months does build up some trust.

Still, your heart is pounding by the time your feet touch solid ground.

“Have fun hanging out with your dad and Parker!” he calls, jogging backwards as he adjusts the mask over his face completely. “Maybe he’s cooler when you get to know him!”

You roll your eyes and wave goodbye to him. You’re about to call an Uber when someone calls your name and you look up.

“Y/N Stark, right?” what looks to be the leader of a group of boys asks. You nod. “Can we get a picture?”

“Sure.”

You take the picture and decide against calling an Uber at this time, instead opting for jogging home. Of course, your ‘jog’ could be classified as a light sprint, so you arrive at the compound in only 45 minutes.

“How was hanging out with Spider-man?” your father asks.

You shrug. “Fine.”

“You two are pretty close, huh?”

“We’re friends,” you simply reply.

And nothing more. If there’s one thing you know about Spider-man, it’s that he’s very down to earth. He would never want all the fame that’s associated with dating a Stark. He hardly likes the fame he gets as Spider-man; why else would he keep his identity a secret? Besides, you couldn’t really date someone whose name or face you don’t know, even if they are funny and goofy and sweet.

“I finished upgrading your suit,” Tony adds. “It’s in the lab. I’m having Peter look it over just in case I missed something.”

Oh, so apparently Tony respects Peter so much that he has him look over his own work. You scowl and your palms start to heat up. “I don’t need Parker to sabotage my suit. Thanks, Dad.” You stomp towards the lab.

“Come on, Y/N,” Tony calls with exasperation at your back. “Just give him a chance!”

Sure enough, stupid Parker sits with his back to the door, curls wild. He really needs to get a haircut. He’s staring at a hologram of your suit.

He hardly stirs when you enter the lab, save for examining the right sleeve of the suit where a small flame is embroidered. Somehow, his dismissal of you makes you even more annoyed, so you march over to him and turn off his hologram without a word.

“What the hell, Y/N?” he spits.

“I don’t need you to sabotage my suit, Parker,” you hiss back. “I can look over my dad’s coding perfectly well, thank you.”

Parker rolls his eyes. “Yeah, like messing with your suit is one of my priorities. It would be my greatest pleasure in life to see a criminal stab you because I loosen the weft just enough.”

“Well, considering it wouldn’t hurt me, I doubt you’d be too bothered,” you snipe back.

“It would still hurt you,” Parker points out. “It just wouldn’t kill you. As much as you dislike me, that doesn’t mean I want to cause you harm. Besides, your dad would kill me.”

You snort.

“What, you think he wouldn’t be bothered if his daughter got hurt because of me?” Parker frowns.

You roll your eyes and throw yourself into a nearby chair, pulling up a hologram for a suit upgrade for Spider-man you’ve been considering. Parker chokes. “What’s that?”

“None of your business,” you respond automatically, using your left hand to view the different web combinations you could implement. With your right hand, you unlock your phone and text Spider-man.

@Y/N_Stark: hey, you get home okay? the robbers beat you up too bad?

Your screen shows that he hasn’t read your text yet, so you leave your phone unlocked and on the table, waiting for his response. You highlight his crotch and type an equation to enlarge the area. It’s tricky because it still requires support.

Your phone buzzes on the table and you practically lunge to read his response, which is a little humiliating, but oh well.

@The-Official-Spiderman: yeah, im all good. they were no match for me and my bulging muscles. they didn’t even put up a fight. the second they saw me they gave up

You roll your eyes.

@Y/N_Stark: yes, you’re totally an intimidating figure dressed up like an arachnid and climbing the walls

@The-Official-Spiderman: hey, you love it. its part of my charm

@Y/N_Stark: and you’ve got so much of that don’t you

You glance over your shoulder to make sure Parker isn’t spying on you adjusting Spider-man’s suit. To your relief, he seems engrossed in his phone as he taps away. Thank god for technology. It’s two teenagers that like to ignore each other’s best friend.

@The-Official-Spiderman: uh, yeah, my hordes of female fans would agree with you there

@Y/N_Stark: oh my bad, forgot you were such a big celebrity.

@The-Official-Spiderman: youre damn right it was your bad

@The-Official-Spiderman: hows it going with Parker and your dad?

@Y/N_Stark: oh, you know, the usual, my dad’s letting parker sabotage my suit and trusts him to check his own work and won’t even give me projects to work on because i’m still ‘adjusting’

@The-Official-Spiderman: if you think Parker’s going to do such a bad job, why don’t you work on it with him?

He’s kind of got you there.

@Y/N_Stark: you really think I want to spend more time than is required with him?

@The-Official-Spiderman: i have to go work on hw. i’ll ttyl, ok? just try to talk to Parker, all right? you never know he may surprise you

You opt not to respond to his message and turn off your phone just as the lab’s door opens. “Y/N! Underoos!” your dad calls enthusiastically. You’ve never understood that nickname for Parker. When you asked about it, Peter turned red and stuttered. Your dad, similarly terrible at lying, looked away and muttered something under his breath.

“Oh, look at this,” Tony groans dramatically. “Two teenagers that could be talking to each other ignoring each other on their phones.”

Parker turns off his phone, grinning star-struck at your dad, and you roll your eyes. “Is it time for the movie?”

You roll your eyes and turn back to your work. Problem is, you have no idea just how much you should expand that part of his suit. You’ll have to ask Karen for his, um, measurements next time you get her hooked up. It’s not weird, right? Not if it’s just for suit purposes. Just for suit purposes.

“Almost,” Tony replies. “Episode V, right?”

“Actually,” Peter says slowly. You’re still pretending not to be paying attention, but you watch out of the corner of your eye as he taps his chin. “I know we’ve been watching the Star Wars series in order, but I think Sam’s getting a bit sick of watching it. Why don’t we change it up?”

“What should we watch, then?” Tony leans against the bench with his hip.

Peter shrugs. “Y/N, any idea?”

You also shrug. Sure, you’ve got an idea, but your dad obviously doesn’t want to hear your opinion, so why should you offer it?

“Come on, Y/N,” Tony wheedles. Maybe he’d only just noticed I’m in the room, you think darkly. “There’s gotta be at least one movie you’re dying to see.”

There are quite a few, actually. You have a list of every movie you heard about over the internet that you want to see. You probably could watch them, too, but you’ve never been a fan of watching movies alone.

Your dad’s phone dings. He looks at it and curses.

“What?” you ask, sitting up.

“Ross called a meeting,” Tony grumbles. “For all the Avengers.”

You stand.

“All the adult Avengers,” he corrects.

You sit.

“I’m really sorry, Y/N, but it looks like movie night is going to be postponed.” Tony presses a quick kiss to your forehead. “You can pick next time!” he calls as he strides out of the room, but you know he’s going to forget that promise before next movie night.

“At his office?” you hear your father say just before leaving. “Are you kidding me?”

You clench your jaw, disappointment making your eyes sting. Without taking it in, you sit stiffly and stare at the hologram of Spider-man’s suit. Your dad will never give it to him, you know that. He’ll never even look at the design.

Parker coughs behind you. You whirl, insults on the tip of your tongue, but you’re taken aback when he’s closer than you’d thought. His hands are behind his back and he scuffs his toe on the floor. Is it you, or does he look... shy?

“We could still have a movie night, if you’d like,” he offers.

Your knee-jerk reaction is a firm no. Before it leaves your mouth, however, you hesitate. You’re not sure why.

“Whatever movie you’d like,” he promises, running a hand through his hair. “And I won’t say anything to upset you.”

You frown. Your problem with Parker doesn’t have anything to do with him. It has everything to do with your father. He knows that, right? He’s got to after your very first interaction with him.

You bite your lip, studying his earnest face, his brown curls, his puppy dog eyes. He reminds you of someone. Maybe your father. They certainly act enough like family. Finally, you nod your assent.

The smile that spreads across his lips is blinding. It makes you happier than you feel a right to be.

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

You feel lighter today than you have in a while, and so cold you even bought a sweatshirt. Spider-man cracks another joke that makes you laugh, bending over. Your abs have started to hurt.

When you look up, he’s staring at you. You color. “What?”

“N-nothing,” he stutters, making a move as if he’s going to push hair out of his face but his mask covers all of that so he just looks like an idiot. “It’s just... you’ve gotten a lot happier than you first were when you were released from the Raft.”

Self-conscious now, you adjust your hoodie and look away.

“Shut up,” he says aloud.

“What?” You know he did not just tell you to shut up—after you didn’t say anything, no less.

“No, Karen,” he explains. “She keeps telling me to...” He shakes his head. “It’s stupid.”

Despite yourself, your heart rate picks up. “What?”

“It’s just...” Spider-man’s fingers twiddle together in his lap. “I’m not a very impulsive person. You know?”

You laugh. “You’re Spider-man. A radioactive spider bit you and you decided the best thing to do was become a vigilante. You throw yourself into danger every night without a second thought. I’d say you’re pretty impulsive. At least as Spider-man. I don’t know about your secret identity.” As always, you raise your eyebrows at him in silent question, curiosity burning like the fire under your skin. Though you don’t outright ask him what his secret identity is anymore, it’s no secret you’re curious about it.

Spidey’s lips twist into a bitter smile. “When you put it that way...”

You laugh softly and turn your gaze back to the skyline. You can still sense his eyes on you, though. When you turn to look at him, something in the air crackles. He’s staring at you wordlessly. You see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows hard.

“Y/N...”

“Yeah?” Your throat is suddenly extremely dry. Is he going to...

“Can I have your credit card?”

It feels like a kick to the gut.

“What?”

“I’m gonna go buy churros,” he explains. “I’ll pay you back. But I know that you carry your credit card and I can’t exactly carry mine in my suit, so...”

“Yeah,” you respond faintly, already digging in your pocket for the plastic. “Yeah, of course.”

“Thanks.” He smiles at you. “Hey, I bet I can do a triple flip before I land.”

“I’ll take a video so you can post it,” you suggest. “If you make it.”

“Oh, I’m gonna make it,” Spidey vows. He unlocks his phone and hands it to you, pulling his mask down in the process. “Just watch.”

You click record and point it in his face. “You’re not gonna make it.”

“Oh, I’m gonna.” Spidey jumps up and down like an athlete preparing for a race. “Here I go!” He takes a running start off the roof, sending a web to a nearby building. The web’s slack catches him just feet before he touches the ground—you gasp despite yourself—and slingshots him into the sky where he easily flips three times in the air and lands in a crouch.

You end the video and cheer. Spidey shouts and raises his arms in victory. “Did you see that?”

“That was awesome!” you shout down at him.

“Told you I could do it!” He waves. “I’ll be right back, all right?”

You wave back and click on the video to rewatch, your heart still racing after that scare. He may have advanced healing, but he’s not as indestructible as you and sometimes—like just then—you’re extremely aware of it.

His phone buzzes in your hand as someone texts him. You mean to swipe the notification up, not wanting to intrude on his privacy, but accidentally click on the text.

It’s from... your dad? You blink.

Mr. Stark: are you still with Y/N?

He won’t think it’s too much of an invasion of privacy if you only respond with a simple yes, right? It is only your dad, after all, and you’re not going to read any of the other texts.

Spidey’s so easygoing, you reason. He’ll be fine with it as long as I tell him right as he comes back.

You type out a quick yes and hit send.

You can’t stop your eyes from straying up slightly to the other texts Spider-man apparently shares with your father. Even though he says he doesn’t hear from him often, it looks like he’s been texting him... all day?

Your brows furrow as you read their conversation just from today.

Mr. Stark: Y/N’s been working on your suit for days. I noticed she had to expand the crotch... what’s that all about?

Me: ok so it is a little tight but it’s not a big deal and I didn’t think she was actually listening to me when i said that

Mr. Stark: you could have told me at any time, kid

Me: I didn’t want to bother you

Mr. Stark: you’re never a bother, Underoos

Me: I’m still on for Saturday, right?

Mr. Stark: Of course. Y/N said Wonder Woman, right?

Your hands are shaking, vision blurring as your eyes burn. Why is Tony calling Spider-man Underoos? Why is Spider-man coming over on Saturday to watch Wonder Woman if Saturday isn’t even scheduled to be a movie night?

Your stomach hurts.

You have to read more. You scroll up. Up past the constant texts where Spider-man texts your dad about where you are, how happy or sad you seem, if you got any injuries while fighting crime.

A drop of liquid splashes onto the screen. You scrub furiously at it and then at your eyes, continuing up. Up past the constant texts that aren’t even about you; about building suits together and movie nights and nicknames and gifts that Spider-man is so, so grateful for.

Up past the texts where Tony calls Spider-man Underoos, and kid, and Spiderling, and—

You stop when you see what you were looking for; (your thumb hurts. How long does it take to get churros?) proof that your father and Spider-man have been spying on you, making fun of you behind your back, invading your privacy, lying to you—the list goes on and on.

Mr. Stark: Hey, Parker, thanks again for agreeing to approach Y/N as Spider-man. It makes me so much less worried to know that she’s got a friend and someone to look out for her.

You don’t bother to read Spider-man’s response. No, Peter Parker’s response.

Much gentler than you thought possible, you turn the phone’s screen off and place it down on the ground, remembering just how many times Parker must have been laughing at you behind the mask. When you told him you can make friends without your father’s help. When you told him he’s your best friend. When you told him about your mother. When you told him what the Raft was like, something you hadn’t even told your father.

You’d spilled your entire life to him and he was just acting the whole time. Making fun of you the whole time.

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

It turns out that climbing up buildings with churros in each hand is difficult. Peter transfers both to one hand, but climbing with one hand is still hard. Eventually he rolls up his mask and places them delicately in his mouth, making sure his mouth is only touching the wrapper and not the actual delicacy.

Thankfully, he reaches the top of the building without dropping the churros or biting through them. He proudly displays them, looking around for you. “So climbing is a lot harder with no hands than you’d think—” He notices his phone, locked in the center of the roof, and stops abruptly. “Y/N?”

He sets the churros delicately on the ground and scoops up his phone, unlocking it automatically. When he sees what you were looking at on his phone, his stomach drops.

“Oh, shit.”

Inferno Taglist:

@paullrud @eridanuswave @loveissupernatural @moistpotatobear @oh-annaa

Peter Parker x Reader Taglist:

@iconicbabesss

Forever Taglist:

@lemirabitur @annymcervantes @queenmissfit @quiet-because-it-is-a-secret @iksey @thehyperactiveteen @luxmoonlight

[purplepersnicketywrites]

Kiribaku,,, 16?

#16: things you said with no space between us

hhhhhh OKAY YES

—

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Katsuki raged at Aizawa. “You can’t turn it off?”

“I can cancel out someone causing something with their quirks, but no, I can’t reverse this sort after it has happened,” Aizawa said, sighing.

Katsuki ground his teeth in frustration. Some bratty first year had kicked his leg after he’d snapped at them at lunch, and apparently activated their quirk on him. Where had the fucking respect for the third years gone?

That being said, Katsuki probably would have kicked a third-year too back when he was a gremlin. Kirishima, the bastard, smiled at their teacher. “That’s okay, Sensei! It can’t be helped.”

Aizawa rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Thankfully this afternoon is merely sparring, so you two will be able to make it up in your own time. Go back to the dorms for now and wait this out. If you’re still attached tomorrow morning then we’ll have to make arrangements for it. Try not to kill each other.”

Katsuki groaned, but he nodded and pulled Kirishima away along with him.

“You know, it’s not that bad, man,” Kirishima said, ever-optimistic as always with his bright fucking grin and sparkly fucking eyes. Fucker. Gorgeous, idiot, wonderful, stupid, light of Katsuki’s life, absolute dimwit fucker. He wasn’t even stupid anyway but Katsuki needed a way to balance out his sappy thoughts.

Kirishima had his right arm over Katsuki’s shoulder - which was fine, normally. Katsuki’s tolerance for it had, however, ground down after the first fifteen minutes after they’d realised that Kirishima couldn’t take his limb back. They’d been stuck like this, side-by-side with Katsuki under Kirishima’s arm for nearly three fucking hours. Why the fuck were quirks allowed to create these situations, huh?

“Oh yeah?” Katsuki snapped. “What could possibly make this worse?”

Kirishima rolled his eyes and then grinned. “You could be stuck to anyone else, of course.”

Katsuki’s treacherous cheeks flamed. Damn it, Kirishima. Sure, he was Katsuki’s favourite person bar literally no one, but that was an implicit thing. You couldn’t just bring that shit up casually. People might assume that Katsuki had a weak-spot where Kirishima was concerned. He did, but people weren’t supposed to know that.

“Fuck off,” Katsuki grumbled, the heat in his voice not even a simmer.

“Wish I could, buddy,” Kirishima said, tugging lightly at the arm that held him in place against Katsuki’s shoulders. “No can do.”

Katsuki had a sneaking suspicion that Kirishima was enjoying himself.

You weren’t supposed to enjoy yourself during an incident like this. You were supposed to be stressed. Especially when it involved you and your best friend with whom you’ve been seriously flirting recently. It was a recipe for pining and tension - not for, for jokes, or whatever Kirishima was trying to do.

“Hey, don’t look so down in the dumps!” Kirishima chirped as they walked through the common room. It was weird that it was so quiet, but then again everyone else was in lessons right now. “We can just go watch some movies and pretend I’m being super-smooth.”

“Ugh,” Katsuki said, trying to pretend like the idea didn’t really appeal to him. A lot. “Fine, but if you put on something stupid I’ll kick your ass.”

“Oh, you can try to kick my ass any time,” Kirishima grinned at him, sly. Masochistic moron’d probably like that, anyway.

Katsuki bared his teeth. “As soon as your arm is free, your ass is going the fuck down!”

“What, you don’t think you can take my ass like this?” Kirishima quirked an eyebrow. Katsuki’s step faltered for a stride.

“TMI, dudes!” Kaminari called out from one of the sofas. Holy fucking shit Katsuki had forgotten that Pikachu was down with a cold and barred from class. Why wasn’t he in his room? Augh.

“This is a private fucking conversation!” Katsuki roared, increasing his pace to get out of the room as quickly as possible before anyone commented on how red he must be.

Kaminari snickered somewhere behind them. Impudent little weasel. Worse still, Kirishima snickered. Right in Katsuki’s ear. It was giving him goosebumps and he hated it. The fucker wasn’t even blushing, what the fuck.

They reached their floor without further incident, which Kirishima obviously took as an invitation to start shit again.

“So,” he drawled, eyeing their doors. “Your place or mine?”

“I literally do not give a fuck,” Katsuki said.

“Literally-literally, or figurative-literally?” Kirishima asked. Katsuki just glowered at him. “Let’s hang in yours, I haven’t tidied my room for a few days.”

A few days was an understatement and Katsuki had been in there last night to chat with him anyway, but whatever. “Slob.”

“I prefer the term hot mess.”

Kirishima winked at him. Katsuki rolled his eyes and reached for the door.

“Slob,” he repeated, and the two of them side-stepped into the room.

Maneuvring onto the bed proved to be a bigger challenge than anticipated. Kirishima sat down and pulled Katsuki into an awkward, unwilling stoop. Kirishima’s legs swung up onto the bed, and he began to shuffle over to try to make space. Katsuki was still being dragged along by the back of his shoulders, so he had to fucking like, crawl onto the bed and move sideways with Kirishima until there was enough space for him to roll onto his back.

Katsuki took a moment to stare at the ceiling. “We forgot to grab the fucking laptop.”

Kirishima sat up halfway and looked over at Katsuki’s desk, where the laptop sat. “Oh. Whoops.”

“I don’t wanna get up again,” Katsuki said. “But I’m already fucking bored.”

“We could make out,” Kirishima suggested.

Katsuki thought about it.

“Sure.”

Katsuki watched Kirishima blink. “What?”

“I said sure, Kirishima,” Katsuki growled. “Why, you backin’ out?”

“What, no, dude!” Kirishima spluttered, finally blushing. “That wouldn’t be manly!”

He sat up the rest of the way, swinging a leg over Katsuki’s to sit in Katsuki’s lap. Huh. Alright. Katsuki had no complaints there. Thanks to the quirk holding Kirishima’s arm in place, they were pressed pretty tightly together. Katsuki wondered if Kirishima could feel his heart beating as clearly as Katsuki could feel Kirishima’s through their shirts.

Katsuki settled his hands on Kirishima’s hips. Right. Making out. That was what they were gonna do. Katsuki forced out a breath from his nose and stared at Kirishima. They had been skirting this platonic-romantic border for a while now and Katsuki had a feeling that this was gonna be the tipping point.

Either they’d find out that their particular chemistry didn’t actually lead to any sparks, and they’d probably just fucking laugh at each other and go back to being ‘bros’, or… Or.

Katsuki almost felt startled when a hand tangled into his hair. Kirishima leant towards him, eyes fluttering shut. Oh shit, this was it.

Katsuki hadn’t known what to expect, but Kirishima kissed exactly like Kirishima was. The kiss was hard and soft at the same time. It was deliberate, slow and deep, and yet the way Kirishima’s hand tightened in his hair spoke of desperation.

Fuuuuuck, if this was how Kirishima kissed, then Katsuki never wanted to kiss anyone else because he knew that he would always be disappointed. They parted to breathe for a few moments, but even a couple of seconds apart was too much for Katsuki and he surged back towards the redhead, pushing him down so his back hit the mattress.

There was the hint of a smile to Kirishima’s next kiss, and Katsuki neither knew nor cared who it belonged to. This was definitely the Or, no doubts about it, and Katsuki could feel the sparks racing across his skin, through all of his nerves, lighting him on fire from the inside out.

“Date me, Katsuki,” Kirishima said, in the space between their breath and their lips. “Be my boyfriend.”

There was only room for one word back.

“Yes.”

[redstarwriting]

Always

Clint Barton x Reader

Request: “Do you think you could write a Clint x Reader where they have a private relationship away from everything Clint does at SHEILD and the reader loves singing so they always go to open mics together. But one evening when she had a show Clint can't be there because he's on a mission. On the way home the reader gets kidnapped by HYDRA to try to get a ransom from SHEILD and they don't get it so they take what the reader loves most about herself: her voice. Anyway she gets rescued and Clint helps her learn ASL and always takes out his hearing aids because he wants her to understand that while he loved her voice he is more happy that she's safe and with him?”

Word Count: 3,083

Genre: Angst | Some Fluff

Warnings: Kidnapping, Loss of ability to speak, Emotional distress

A/N: Wow! My longest one to date! I hope I did this request justice, because it’s a very cool concept I think. I hope you all enjoy this one!

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“I can’t believe tonight is the start of my solo career,” you joke to yourself, checking your outfit in the mirror. You were about to go to the bar you and Clint frequented as it’s open mic night. Unknown to the rest of the Avengers, except Nat, Clint had a girlfriend. In fact, the two of you literally met at an open mic night, so it was crazy for you to be going without him now. Not necessarily unknown to the rest of the Avengers, Clint has an amazing voice. However, what they don’t know about his angelic voice, is that he sings with his girlfriend at open mic nights every week. When he disappears for the night, they just assume he’s somewhere in the vents, all snuggled and probably eavesdropping. Everyone gets unusually quiet on these nights. He is in fact at the bar you two frequent, O’Caroll’s, not trying to get gossip on all the Avengers. That’s what he does when everyone thinks he’s getting lunch or taking a nap. He tells you all of the gossip too, so you know more about the Avengers than some of the other Avengers know about each other. If you ever met them, you’d really have to be careful with what you’d say. You could ruin lives.

Sadly though, this Saturday night you’re going to the bar alone. Clint is out on a mission, trying to get information from HYDRA with the rest of the team. He keeps telling you how worried he is that they’re planning something big. You always have to assure him that he and the rest of his team will put a stop to it and that everything would be okay. In a way, you were the only thing that could make him feel like everything would end up okay. You love having that power, because although the man is happy-go-lucky literally all the time, he has secrets and doubts in his mind. You put him at ease, and he loves it. You’re one of the main reasons he was able to go into this mission with a clear head. The Avengers finally found where HYDRA was hiding, and they decided to go after them. Although it left you alone, you were proud of him. He was busy saving the world, one open mic night wouldn’t hurt much.

Since O’Caroll’s was one block from your apartment, you always walk there as opposed to getting a ride. Usually, you have your boyfriend with you and that’s all the protection you need, but this time you were alone. A good thing for you is that on your way there, a good amount of people were still walking around the streets since it was nine in the evening. Although you felt a tiny bit sketched out, you still didn’t feel like certain doom was awaiting you because you were walking alone. When you arrive at O’Caroll’s, you’re greeted by the bartender, Cait. “Clint’s not with you?” she asks, surprise literally written all over her face. “No, not tonight. He has some work stuff to deal with,” you give her a look, indicating that it was Secret Agent Barton work. Cait was a close friend to you two, so she knew about Clint’s job as Hawkeye, one of Earth’s mightiest defenders. She nods, understanding immediately before grinning at you and motioning towards the stage. “Well, I’m glad you could still come. Can’t wait to hear your voice tonight.” “Thanks, Cait. Now, give me my usual, please.”

The rest of the night was a blast. You mingled with all the other regulars and sang quite a few times. Nearly every time you would step off the stage to let someone else go, you were met with protests. All in all, your first solo performance night went very well. You couldn’t wait to tell Clint all about it when he got home from the mission. You knew he’d want to hear every detail, so you went easy on the alcohol this time. You also knew you’d be walking home alone tonight, as no one else who lived in your apartment complex came to open mic night. By two in the morning, you decided it was time to head home. You said goodbye to Cait and all of your adoring fans as you walked out into the breezy New York night. It seemed like a very calm night, and you were very at ease. Your feeling of ease quickly disappeared when you realized just how quiet and calm it was. It was unusual, some of the bars around here forced their patrons out at two in the morning, so why didn’t you see anyone coming out of any? You began walking faster, trying to get to your apartment building as soon as possible. You were about to get to your stoop, when you heard a hushed whisper from the dark alleyway you were right in front of say, “That’s her, get her!”

Before you could even start running, you felt someone grab your arms while another person shoved a rag in your face. You struggled to get out of the man’s grip and fought desperately to stay awake, but you knew the rag was doused in chloroform. And due to this, you began losing consciousness. The last thing you noticed was being shoved in a van and seeing a badge on one of your abductor’s clothes. A skull with six tentacles where the mouth should be. The last thought that went through your head was Clint, then everything went black.

While this was happening to you, the Avengers were on their way back from their mission. The information they got from the HYDRA agents at the base they just destroyed was very helpful to them. In fact, it would help them absolutely win against HYDRA completely. There was a map on the wall of the main control room in the base, and although there were no marks on it to the naked eye, there were marks on it you could only see under a black light. It was quite a textbook thing to do really. Everyone was impressed with how simple it was. Well, actually maybe not impressed. Maybe more suspicious, concerned, paranoid. Clint especially as he hadn’t heard from you for about an hour. He kept telling himself you were just performing, busy singing and that’s why you couldn’t respond. Or maybe you decided to turn in for the night early. He made excuse after excuse as to why you weren’t responding, but no matter what he told himself, he had a bad feeling. “Barton, what’s wrong?” He looks up to see Nat standing in front of him, her hushed tone heard only by him. He sighs, standing to become closer to her level. “I haven’t heard from (Y/N) since 1:30. I’m worried, Nat. I have a bad feeling about this,” he informs her, quietly and urgently. She frowns, you two are friends after all. “Well, isn’t she at home? Maybe she just fell asleep.”

“Maybe, but she could still be out. We go to a specific bar every Saturday, and she told me that even though I wouldn’t be there with her tonight, she was still going.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you two talking so hushed about?” Thor asks, oblivious to the tension and seriousness of the conversation. The rest of the team looks at them, and Clint thinks on his feet. “Nat was just telling me about this new SHIELD agent she thinks I’d get along with. Nothing else,” he lies effortlessly, and Nat plays along. “Oh, yeah? Who?” Tony asks, turning the pilot’s seat around, becoming involved in the conversation. Nat rolls her eyes, “If you think I’m going to tell you, you’re sadly mistaken. I’m trying to get her a husband, not a hook-up.” Everyone chuckles at the remark, and Tony shrugs. “Worth a shot.”

At this point, Clint’s phone buzzes. He quickly looks at it, hoping to see your name, however he sees a message from Fury. “Call Me.”

“I gotta take this, guys,” Clint says, walking to a corner of the jet where he can be a bit more private. Emphasis on a bit. He calls immediately, and Fury picks up on the other end. “What do you need?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, so I’ll just be blunt about it. (Y/N)’s been kidnapped. By HYDRA. And to get her back, they’re requesting we give them the Tesseract. I know you know we can’t do that, but we’re working on finding out just where exactly they’re holding her. I’m sorry for the bad news, Barton.”

The call ends, and Clint freezes. Horror and anger begin flowing through his veins, and he rigidly brings his phone from his ear. “Clint? What’s wrong?” Nat immediately notices the change in his demeanor, as do the rest of the Avengers. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even turn around. “Barton?” Steve walks over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Clint’s eyes dart to Cap’s hand, before looking at him in the face. He doesn’t say anything to him, but rather turns to Nat. “HYDRA has her.” Nat’s expression hardens, and Tony’s eyebrows furrow. “Has who?” Clint doesn’t say anything, rather he sits down, putting his head in his hands. “(Y/N),” Nat responds for him. “Not to be rude, but that doesn’t exactly clear up anything for us,” Bruce says, and Nat sighs. “It’s his girlfriend.”

From that moments forward, the rest of the team began searching to find you. Clint didn’t get any sleep, and he was the most distressed any of them had ever seen him, even Nat. It took two days to locate you, and the very moment your location was found, Clint was already on the quinjet, ready to go wherever you were. He was well aware of the risks of storming the place to find you, but quite frankly, he just didn’t care. He would do whatever it took to get you home safe, and it became very obvious to all of the HYDRA agents and the rest of the Avengers that this was the case very quickly. Arriving at the base was a wild ride, mainly due to the fact that as soon as the quinjet was over the base, Clint immediately skydived out of it. He showed absolutely no mercy to anyone who got in his way, and he showcased some of his swordsmanship abilities. Getting inside the base was easy with Clint going at the rate he was going. The Avengers fought their way to you, but when they found you, it didn’t look good.

Your arms and legs were chained to a chair, and you were looking down. You didn’t even look up when the door to the room you were located in was kicked in. Within the time it took for them to find you, you had been tortured and beaten almost every second of it. You figured the noise was just another method of mental torture they were putting you through, making you think you were being saved, only to rip your hopes apart by beating you again. You were sure you had some broken bones, and you couldn’t even imagine how many cuts and bruises were on your body at this point. You would have rather endured countless beatings than come to terms with what they did when they found out SHIELD wasn’t giving them the Tesseract. Tears start flowing from your eyes again as you think about it, and you’re only snapped out of it when you hear your name being called. You slowly lift your head, and your eyes are met with Clint’s. “(Y/N)!”

He runs over to you, grabbing your face in his hands. “(Y/N), baby, you’re alive! Thank god you’re alive,” he starts mumbling an excessive amount, getting you out of that chair and taking you into his arms. He picks you up, carrying you out to the quinjet while Tony, Nat, Thor, Bruce, and Steve handle the rest of the HYDRA agents. “You’re okay, now. It’s okay,” he says, holding you and wiping the silent tears escaping from your eyes. You only begin to cry harder, however you make no noise at all. Clint finds that odd, knowing that when someone begins sobbing there’s usually sound to it. “What did they do to you…?”

You bury your head in his chest, shaking and crying, but remaining silent the whole time. Clint holds you, stroking your hair and trying to soothe you. When the other Avengers got back to the quinjet, they were met with Clint holding you in his arms, his cheeks stained with tears. “Is she okay?” Nat asks, going over to you. You don’t move from the position you’re in, but Clint nods, telling her you were okay. Nat could see the distant look in his eyes, though, and she knew something was wrong. She didn’t want to pry, so she just nodded and walked away. The ride home was silent, even Tony wasn’t talking. The whole time, Clint just held you in his arms.

When you all arrived at Avengers Tower, Clint lead you to his room immediately. “You can take a shower if you want to. You were gone for a while and I doubt they let you practice personal hygiene, so,” he tells you, and you nod. He looks at you for a moment, he already believes he knows what happened, but he asks you again, “What did they do to you?” You look at him for a moment, opening your mouth to talk but quickly closing it when you remember what happened. You look around, tears already welling up in your eyes again when you see his desk. You walk over to it, grabbing a post-it note and a pen, scribbling down what happened through tears. You hand it to him, sitting on his bed and holding your head in your hands. “They took your voice…” he whispers, nodding while reading what you wrote and covering his mouth. His assumptions were correct, and he immediately feels awful for you.

He sits next to you, pulling you into him. He holds you as you cry even more, trying to comfort you when he gets an idea. He holds up his index finger to you signifying you to give him one second, when he suddenly reaches for his ears. You look at him with curiosity, only to see him take his hearing aids out. He sits them on the nightstand next to his bed, turning to you. He points at his ears, shrugging and writing on the post it you wrote on. “Watch my lips.” You look at him, and he signs something to you. You do as he says and watch his lips, and you quickly realize he’s signing “Hello” to you. He motions toward himself, visually telling you to do it back to him. You sign “Hello” back to him, and he smiles. He reaches for his hearing aids again, putting them in again. “I can teach you ASL, you know. I’m fluent in it and you’re smart enough to do it,” he says quietly, and you look up at him. “It would just be ultimately easier for you to communicate, you know?” He wipes a tear from your cheek and gives you a small smile. “You can get through this. I know you can. And I’ll be right here with you the entire time. Always. You’re not alone.” You slowly nod, and he kisses the top of your head. “We’ll start tomorrow, you need to get some sleep,” he tells you. You nod, changing into his clothes and laying down next to him. He pulls you into him, humming a song to you to lull you to sleep.

It was difficult adjusting to your new life, and even more difficult learning ASL. You and Clint would practice all the time, but it still took a significant amount of time for you to become fluent in it. After about a year, you were becoming decently proficient at it. You still had a lot to learn, but you could communicate and get your points across. Although getting used to your new way of communication was taking work, Clint was making it as easy as possible for you. He frequently would take out his hearing aids now to make you feel like you weren’t alone. You get to know all the other Avengers, and actually manage to talk to Nat in ASL as well. Although Nat hated seeing one of her best friend’s struggle, seeing Clint help you out by taking his hearing aids out and making you feel not alone was one of the cutest things she sees. She also loves when Tony will try to get Clint’s attention when his hearing aids are out. It’s turned into Clint just pretending his hearing aids are out at this point, so he doesn’t have to talk to him. Nat never told anyone, but she saw how you two would refer to the rest of the Avengers, since you both had personalized names for everyone. Most of them were positive. Unless Stark made either one of you mad. Then it wasn’t as positive.

Although you were becoming adjusted to all of this, it was still very difficult for you at times. At times Clint would find you crying, and when he asked what was wrong, you’d tell him you missed singing. It was your own personal fear that he loved you less because you two couldn’t go sing together anymore because it played such a large role in your relationship. Any time you would communicate this to him, he would assure you he loved you for you, not your voice. He has to make sure you know that although he does miss singing duets with you and hearing your lovely voice, he would rather have you safe with him. He loved you, not just your voice. You thought it was funny how it changed from you being able to constantly assure him and make him feel like everything was going to be okay to him doing that to you. Granted, you still did assure and help him, but you never would have been able to deal with this if he hadn’t been there. You knew you would be able to handle anything now, as long as Clint was with you. And he is always with you.

[inazumashiko-archived]

Everything

because all of this is only possible thanks to @idonthaveabackstory, it is a gift for his wonderful author, the lovely Kara.

Shiko had been several hours well into dull paperwork, drowsing trade agreements from the provinces she had to go over before the meeting at the end of the week, and just the usual onceover of the palace advisors on the things that needed revising, when the door to her office opened. She didn’t look up from the sheet of paper currently between her fingers, though, expecting Niko or any of the advisors to interrupt her if it was something urgent, or wait if it wasn’t.

Silence filled the room as she finished the reading. A hand moved on it’s own towards her cup, taking a sip only to find the coffee much too cold. She heated it up automatically, as her other hand marked just a few changes that needed to get done, and placed the paper on a neat pile to her side. When she looked up, her lips stretched into a smile over the brim of the now steaming porcelain. One like only her children managed to pull from her.

Everything on her desk was instantly pushed from her mind, as she took in the look of her youngest, Hikori. Hands neatly folded on his lap, the boy was perfectly sitting on one of the chairs across from hers; all the way on the backrest, his feet were on the air, their movement the only note of his impatience. Her chest warmed at her baby’s calm demeanour, so much like his father, like her brother even.

Her children knew they could come to the office whenever they needed of her, and were nothing if not polite with not abusing of it, or waiting for Shiko to finish her work before addressing their concerns, but there were varying levels for it of course. Had it been Raeden on the chair, well- there had been sparks flying around the room in the past.

Shiko made her way around the desk, kneeling in front of his chair, hands taking Hikori’s little ones in hers. He was always so cool, she took a hand to his chubby cheek, thumb caressing over the messy brow that was clearly from his dad’s side. “What are you doing here, baby?”

“We’re having a tea party, and I’m bait.” He announced, proudly, and so very innocently, Shiko laughed. Gold splattered, green eyes, tightened with his grin, when he joined her.

“Is that so?” She shook her head, standing and picking him up to fix at her hip. “I’m not sure you were meant to say that part, sweety, but I’m glad you did. Come, let’s go find that party.” Hikori leaned his head on her shoulder, a hand finding a lock of hair behind her neck, keeping it safely between his fingers.

It would seem his siblings thought he’d get the job done, get her out of the office to play, and they weren’t wrong, work was definitely forgotten for the day. Being the little one, he often got away with a lot more than the other two rascals, that had already found ways to try and exploit their prince and princess condition.

Shiko found Niko waiting out the door, and asked her to put the office in order, giving word not to be disturbed on what remained of the day, unless it was urgent.

It didn’t take long for Shiko to find the spot, if it wasn’t for the lovely blend scent of the tea, for the poorly hushed voices of her kids. Hikori squirmed in her grasp, and she let him down on the floor to run the rest of the way out to the little decked garden. A surprise it was then, good thing she needn’t feign happiness with anything that involved her babies. And yet, she found herself genuinely gasping, a soft, happy sound, when she got to the door.

“Mako.” Shiko’s heart flipped in her chest at the sight of her husband, which was silly, considering she’d seen him less than twelve hours ago. But he had that effect on her still, even after all these years, a wedding, three kids, and waking up to him every single day.

But for one, she thought he’d be out until dinner time, and then- how could she not lose her breath when he was like this; red all around him in the form of his stunning regalia, and their three kids, clinging to him with nothing but love and adoration in their eyes. She’d never tire of this sight.

“Fire Lord, so nice of you to join us.” He greeted her. The kids scrambling to their feet to hug at her middle, Shiko locked eyes with her husband; hers, warm with emotion, his, a dangerous mix of love and fire, and she had to shake her head to clear it from the thoughts that incited. Terrible, terrible man. She’d deal with him later.

“Hello, my darlings.” Shiko stooped to greet each of the kids, a shower of kisses and tickles, until they surrendered, before moving to brush a soft kiss on Mako’s lips, kneeling on the other side of the squat table.

Tea was a lovely and fun affair, as it usually was. Mako served it, the kids filled the air with stories and anecdotes, and their mouths with pastries, and Shiko watched everything unfold around her in a blissful state.

Raeden, already in her last year of primary school, sat cross legged to Shiko’s right, between Mako and her. She was the spark; fire, and lightning, free and confident, and so charming already. Her tutors said she’d get everything she wanted in life, now if she could only manage to sit still for the whole of a lesson… She talked about her training, the last letter she’d received from her uncles, and added a couple of well placed comments and eye rolls at her brother’s stories, so reminiscent of Azula, Shiko could hardly scold her for it.

To her left, Tatsuya sat properly on his knees, his back straight, and his words much more hand picked than his sister’s, albeit less elaborate, given the five years she had on him. He was the equanimity; focus and thought, poise and traditions, and had his father’s quality to enchant a room full of the most venomous ministers. He was excited about school, about learning more, and having homework, and he was actually excited about his royal lessons.

On her lap, Hikori made active use of his toddler’s half tongue, talking about all and everything, and trying out the words he heard that caught his attention. Every once in a while, he’d get stuck on one of them, repeating it until it lost all meaning, and got them all laughing at his excitement. He was calmness; balance and breathing, freshness and strength. He was their little earth baby, already showing signs of his element being that of his uncle, having little pebbles react to his tantrums.

Soon enough, the tea turned into dinner, and then it was time to go to bed. Mako dismissed the governess for the night, and they prepared the kids for bed themselves, Tatsuya’s room the place to take the party to next.

Raeden and Tatsuya tucked in the middle of the massive bed, little Hikori snuggled to Mako’s chest on one side, and Shiko started to read the story for the night on the other. It was one of spirits and adventures, and every so often Raeden made fire figures in the air to represent the characters. Hikori would squeal each time, Tatsuya scoff something along the lines of ‘show off’, and Shiko would catch Mako’s warm eyes over the cover of the book. Their family, her smile told him, this was their wonderful family.

Somewhere along the way, the day caught up with her, and she fell asleep. She was woken up by her husband’s rich voice, reading the end of the story to her two eldest, Hikori snoring softly between Mako’s arms.

A kiss on each forehead, Shiko stood, Mako doing the same, putting the book back into its place on the shelf. She stayed by the end of the bed, warm arms wrapping around her middle, she smiled and leaned back into Mako’s chest. He rested his chin on the top of her head.

“Can you believe we made them?” She often asked that question, especially when the three were together, and calm. Their faces relaxed, chests rising and falling slowly, a mess of hair, and little limbs all over the bed.

“It is pretty amazing.” Mako’s answer was soft, almost reverential, as if to say he really couldn’t. Soon they’d be too big for this, Raeden would be at least, and yet, it seemed only yesterday, when each had been put in her arms for the first time. It was ridiculous, the amount of love she could fit within herself for her babies.

With a soft kiss to her cheek, Mako laced their hands together, and led her out of the room, to their own, on the other end of the wing. Shiko leaned into his shoulder, her free hand toying with the golden trim at the hem of his robe.

“Wait, don’t-” She stopped his motions when they reached the suite, Mako’s fingers halting midwork of unfastening his robe. The way the right corner of his lips curled up told on her.

“Yes, my Lord?” He teased, a thumb brushing over her cheek, that burned all the way to the depths of her belly. And suddenly Shiko was not the Fire Lord anymore, but a much too shy princess again. Her eyes dropped to the floor, and her skin was aflame, blushed all over most likely than not. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Just- don’t take it off just yet.” Shiko liked to believe her voice sounded confident, even when it’d been but a whisper. He just rendered useless.

Her eyes took him in, the fine silks hugging his body perfectly, the darkened tangerine of his eyes, and the tiny lines at the sides of his eyes. Her fingers moved to trace them, and then up, to tangle in his hair, where some graying strands where slowly showing. He let her examine him, smiling with a confidence she had out to the public, but not in a private setting, not with him. Not when a single press of his hand on the small of her back had her gasping.

“Found anything you like, Shiko?” Mako asked, but didn’t let her answer, fingers closing around her chin, pulling her up for a kiss that left her breathless, and alight.

When she gathered her thoughts again, she was in bed with him, warm and contented between his arms, tracing lazy patterns on his abdomen.

“Everything, Mako.” She breathed softly to the skin of his chest, and slowly drifted to sleep.

[dibs-on-holland-blog]

Boys Are Mean To The Girls They Like pt. 5

Pairing: mob!Tom x reader

@chennyetomlinson @thefuriousquake @klausbaudelaireee @greenarrowhead @theflowerswillbloom @avahodge @meyrapp @bellagrayson-wayne @spiderboy-and-loki @stop-that-go-away @iaiabear  @peter-pan-hoe @hawaiiantozier @colourful-fandoms-ruined-my-blog @trash-can-beebo @peteryesparker @captainsherlockwinchester110283 @grey-raven @diesinspanishbcimhispanic @youlittlecvnt

Word count: 1.7k

That morning you had woken up earlier than usual, skimming your eyes to the clock that sat on your bedside table you seen that it was just after 6am, and groaning loudly you turned your back on the clock and closed your eyes again, cuddling into your duvet and trying to get back to sleep but immediately your head started filling up with random thoughts. The top one being “why’s my Dad ruining my life from afar?”.

You didn’t know where you father was at that particular point in time, he could be across the globe for all you knew or cared, but somehow he still managed to stop you doing what you wanted, like he always had. When other kids went out to play in the park, did you? Of course not, your Dad couldn’t let you out anywhere because “do you have any idea how many people could hurt you and use you against me?”. You didn’t even go to school like other children, you were homeschooled. Honestly it’s a wonder you were allowed out the house now without an entourage, because you knew how to handle yourself and always kept a gun in your bag or somewhere nearby. Did you have permit? Do you even need a permit when you’re forced into a mob? This is London, who would even give you permit? So many questions, so little answers. What wrong could Tom do to you anyway? It’s not like you two have been living in the same damn house all your life. What’s the worst he could do anyway? He can’t pump and dump then never speak to you again, because YOU LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE. It’s not like he could hurt you either, you liked to think you were pretty immune to pain, so that wasn’t an issue.

Laying there in your room in silence, the house sounded very much dead, not counting the odd creak of the wooden floors, as it happened in houses. It was odd, it seemed the world was dead too, not a single bird chirping outside, not a sound. It’s like they knew the house was deadly, it’s like they knew that everything that went on in the house always had some sort of dark purpose to it, and they kept away.

The weather was dead-like too, it was grey and gloomy, the clouds gathering above the house, you knew it was due to rain at some point in the day; it was one of the days where you just wanted to curl up in bed and watch movies all day. Might as well get the morning started, you thought as you slowly began to sit up in your bed and make your way to your bathroom, washing your face and brushing your teeth, not bothering to put makeup on, no one would see you anyway. You put on a grey hoodie over a pair of black lycra leggings and a pair of grey socks, putting your hair up in a ponytail, letting your hair fall nicely down your back and a few wispy strands sit around your face. Walking quietly to the kitchen, hearing your shuffling echo through the silent house you couldn’t help but wonder where the dog was. Probably in Tom’s room, though you couldn’t vouch for that. Because the day was so morbid, the morning was more of a ‘hot chocolate’ than ‘coffee’ kind of day, do you took out a mug out of the cupboard and poured some milk inside, then put it in the microwave for a minute and a half and stared out of the window, looking at the perfect lawn that stretched out for several hundred feet. You couldn’t help but picture what the lawn would look like if this were a normal home, there would be garden furniture outside, maybe even a hammock, perhaps some swings if children lived here, there would be laughter and guests and barbeques. Dogs running about, kids chasing each other, a typical Dad would be standing at the BBQ grill with dad shorts and a polo shirts while a kind-faced Mum would be sitting on a lawn chair, reading a magazine. The perfect scenario vanished from in front of your eyes as the microwave beeps three times, signalling the milk had finished heating; you snap out of your daydream and press the button to open the microwave door, and take out the lukewarm mug containing hot milk and put spoonfuls of chocolate powder in the milk and stir it. Sighing loudly you turn and go to walk out the kitchen when you see Tom standing in the doorway leaning against the frame, studying your every move.

“You’re up early” you commented as you squeezed past him and out of the kitchen, but he didn’t move an inch so that when you squeezed past him, your entire torso had to brush past his tensed arms. Such a dick move, you knew.

“Just like you then, pet” he said smirking at you off-handedly. It seemed like a smirk was just his constant face, some people had a resting bitch face, some people had a resting nice face, while he always had that stupid little smirk on his face.

“Not really the point though, is it?” you said not looking back at him and making your way up the stairs but his voice stooped you.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest and you couldn’t help but notice the way the veins on his toned arms stood out against his tanned skin.

“If you must” you said stopping halfway up the stairs and looking down at him, the cup getting warmer in your hands.

“Do you have a thing for me?” he asked, making you freeze in your tracks. Why was he asking? Wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t you have this conversation literally a day prior? What is he playing at, you thought.

“What?” you asked, in a disbelieving tone.

“Do you; have; a thing; for me?” he repeated, breaking the sentence down and saying it like he was talking to a toddler who didn’t understand what was being said to it.

“I don’t know what you mean” you dismissed, starting to slowly turn around to continue your journey up the stairs; these kinds of conversations never ended well with Tom, you knew there wasn’t a point in this discussion, since nothing would come of it anyway.

“You fully well know what I mean, don’t act daft” he said, his tone sounding miffed.

“It doesn’t matter, you very clearly highlighted that you’re not going to do anything because of my Dad so why is it relevant?” you told him, matching his tone and you knew it wouldn’t be long until this would develop into a fully-fledged argument if both of you kept this up. He started moving towards you, up the stairs, keeping eye contact with you the whole way up, and didn’t speak until he was on the stair before the one you were standing on, his eye level was just mere centimeters below yours, and you couldn’t help but notice how easily you could lean over and kiss him if you wanted to, but you couldn’t.

“Well, I’ve been thinking and he’s not here, is he? We could keep it a secret” he said suggestively, his hand on your upper arm, the warmth of his fingers spreading along your arm.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about” you said, shaking you arm lightly to shake his grip off but he wasn’t fazed, his grip stayed just as strong as it was before and his eyes were plastered on yours.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about” he said in a soft tone, raising his eyebrows delicately. You stayed silent for a few moments, unsure of what you should say to that, it’s not that you didn’t want to, of course, but you knew the consequences could be serious if anyone was to find out, you knew your father wasn’t a force to be messed with, so you just looked back at Tom and he smiled knowingly; he took the mug from your hands and set it on the stair you were stood on, and he then picked you up, one hand on the small of your back and the other under your butt to keep you steady, and he started walking up the stairs with you, and walked into his room, not bothering to shut the door behind him, no one else was in the house anyway. You hadn’t been in his room before, and you weren’t surprised to see the walls were dark, a dark shade of purple to be exact, and his walls were covered by paintings, framed certificates, elegance. He put you down lightly on the bed, kissing you while doing it, breaking the kiss, you moved so that you were lying along the bed and he moved with you, lying down your side and leaning over you, one arm keeping himself steady on the bed, other cupping your face as he kissed you, his hand progressively moving further and further until it was cupping your asscheek, and not your face. Your hands were on the back of his neck, your legs tangled together, breathing slowly and deeply as you tasted each other, taking your time, having all the time in the world.

“You should probably take these off” he said, growled almost, tugging needingly at your leggings and sliding his hand up your jumper. What needed to be done, was done, both of you pried items of clothing off one another until you were both in your birthday suits, and then slipped under his duvet covers, as close to each other as humanly possible, as things started getting more heated, kisses getting sloppier, his hand was just finding its way quizzically down your stomach and slowly into your ‘privates’ as you wrapped your legs diligently around his waist. The moment, beautiful, as you were about to give into your lust for one another was cut short when both of you stopped dead in your tracks after hearing a very clear and unhappy “What the fuck” coming from his bedroom door.

[siderealscribblings]

The Day Ladybug Met Chat Noir

@swan-shaped-cream-puffs​ @mlsecretsanta​

Dear Ladybug,

I didn’t know if this was the best way to reach you; I never got around to getting your number (though you can’t say I didn’t try). But I trust that our mutual friend and budding Albert Londres winner at the Ladyblog will do her best to make sure this gets to you. I expect you used the same kind of technological skullduggery to post on the Ladyblog as I did, so I’m sure this is going to wind its way through the sea of proxy accounts to find you sitting at work somewhere.

It’s been awhile, huh? I don’t know how things shook out on your end, but I’m guessing your Miraculous doesn’t exactly work anymore, does it? I thought we’d at least have a moment to say goodbye after Hawkmoth got hauled off, but my little cat friend was gone before I could find you again. I looked for you in the crowds (I don’t know if you did the same, but I’m flattered if you did) but you were gone before I could find you.

I’d say I hope you survived, but we both know you’re too clever to be killed by a man in a butterfly costume.

It took me a while to work up the nerve to write this; partly because I don’t know if you’re going to respond and partly because I’m sure you moved on with your life after lycee. I don’t know if you ever loved being Ladybug the same way that I loved being Chat Noir, but I always suspected that you have bigger and better things to do with your life. The loss of your Miraculous wouldn’t make you any less...well, miraculous.

I guess I just got to thinking of you; Christmas time makes me nostalgic like that. I wish you were here...I wish I could have just one more run with you on the rooftops. To have so many nights together end so suddenly feels, well, anticlimactic, don’t you think? Completely against the spirit of fairy tales; heroes save the day, bad guy goes to prison, happily ever after, right?

Well...at least I thought there would be an ever-after for us. Not just a hard, fast end to Ladybug and Chat Noir without so much as a goodbye between us.

I don’t know if you’re ever going to get this, but if you do...I’d like to hear from you. If only to know that you didn’t get flattened by Hawkmoth’s final temper tantrum (though let’s be real, that’s pretty unlikely, don’t you think?).

Yours, merrily,

Chat Noir.

P.S. Without you, she’d no longer be here.

Dear Chat Noir,

You were smart to put that line in at the end there, though I’m sure you already knew that any email I got from you would be opened with the greatest suspicion. I like to think some of my level headedness rubbed off on you, but maybe you were just play acting to get me to trust you~

I admit, I wish you had sent this letter sooner; it would have saved me a couple dozen sleepless nights wondering if you got out of that battle alive or not. Please, stop writing your indignant reply long enough to finish reading; I’m not saying you’re not competent. I’m just saying I worry...a lot. I tend to overanalyze things and imagine the absolute worst scenarios that could happen, so thank you for putting my anxiety at ease.

I don’t even know what to say.

How are you? Are you doing well? Did you graduate lycee like I did? Are you in school? How’s your family doing? Are you trying (and failing) to do parkour like I am?

(You can answer these in any order you want.)

I did look for you, you know. I must’ve spent the better part of that weekend looking around with my friends for any sign of you. I pretended to be looking for Ladybug, but we both know that she managed to pull herself out okay. I don’t know if I expected to find a bell crushed under some rubble that I couldn’t Lucky Charm away; I was waiting to hear any news from anyone. I kept the news station on in case someone found a broken baton or you decided to make a stunning appearance on national television. I guess I should have thought to go through the Ladyblog; we posted “official” notes on there enough.

I guess I just didn’t want to send something out there and have nothing come back. As long as I didn’t do that, you could still be alive. The worst thing I could honestly imagine is the nothing that might follow any attempt to reach out to you and the gnawing, nagging suspicion that you weren’t alive to answer my message.

I’m happy that you are. And I’m happy that we can still make some kind of ever-after together. With any luck, it’ll be a happy one.

Yours,

Ladybug

P.S. Without us they won’t make it.

Dear Ladybug,

I wasn’t expecting such a quick turnaround. Sorry for not writing sooner; I’ve had my hands full over here with some, shall we say, family complications (isn’t that how it always is around the holidays?)

I’m sorry to hear your uncostumed attempts at parkour aren’t as slick as you’d like them to be. If it makes you feel any better, I tripped coming out of the shower this morning and was surprised when I didn’t land on my feet like good cats should.

One more thing I took for granted, I guess.  

To answer your other questions, yes, I managed to graduate even with my less than stellar final exam marks. I don’t have to tell you how hard June was, but let’s just say I had my own score of complications to deal with on top of having to plan an assault on Hawkmoth’s base of operations.

I can’t exactly go into details, but let’s just say that I have my personal reasons for being disappointed with Mr. Agreste.

University has been a nice distraction (still in Paris, if you were wondering); helps that I actually have a reason to stay up late without appearing vampireish. Still, I only looked forward to late nights because it usually meant cocoa and pastries (you need to give me the name of the bakery you visited; grant me this small comfort in my darkest hour at least!!)

It’s been a busy week and my economics essay is staring menacingly at me (what I wouldn’t give for the ability to Cataclysm my homework away). I’ll write more when I can.

Yours,

Chat Noir

Dear Chat,

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier today. A friend of mine...lost his father recently, and we’re in the process of trying to get him through the holidays in one piece.

...if I can vent for a moment, I’m really losing patience with adults who act like selfish teenagers.

My friend’s father made a series of astonishingly stupid decisions with his life, and as a result, my friend is effectively an orphan now. Ostracized, shunned, and all but bankrupt as his father’s business is being liquidated to make restitution to the families of his victims.

It’s not fair that someone with so much power over the lives of others should have the power to act so selfishly; to ruin lives in pursuit of their own goals.

Even Hawkmoth was a father if you can believe that (though why anyone would stoop to marrying a cold, stuffy pretzel stick like Gabriel Agreste is beyond me; certainly wasn’t for looks or personality). I can’t even begin to fathom the pain that comes from having all of Paris know your family is responsible for so much suffering.

...did we do the right thing? Outing him and exposing him to Paris like that?

I mean, we got the police’s help to bring him in, and once he was out of a hiding place, he got desperate enough to challenge us himself but...the backlash and collateral damage was much greater than I could have expected. I like to think I’m a pretty thoughtful person...so to be responsible for his son’s suffering is just hard to deal with. I’m starting to think a private confrontation, like you suggested, would have been a cleaner choice.

...did we do the right thing?

Yours,

Ladybug.

Dear Ladybug,

It’s hard to say whether we made the right call or not. 

If we didn’t expose his father, Adrien might not be dealing with the wave of accusation on his father’s behalf. There’s no doubt we made his life a lot harder, at least in the short term.

But losing a parent is always hard.

It’s having someone you counted on to be supportive suddenly taken away from you, and struggling to find your footing after that. It’s confusing; just trying to live your life like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time.

And if it was me...well, accepting that my father could be capable of doing such terrible things wouldn’t have been easy but....I think in the end, even if Gabriel didn’t get arrested, Adrien would have still felt like he lost a parent. I can’t admit to knowing him all that well, but he seems like the kind of person who would have a hard time staying in touch with someone who he knows is a supervillian.

Sometimes the right thing isn’t the nice thing. But in the end, the happiness of one person isn’t worth the same as the safety of an entire city, is it? 

We were charged to protect this city, and to the end, that’s exactly what we did. 

Yours,

Chat Noir

Dear Chat Noir,

I know we did what was best for Paris in the end. I just wish it felt that way.

It’s hard to see the greater good beyond the suffering of someone who was unfairly stigmatized by your actions. If losing Ladybug has given me anything, it means never being forced to make choices that affect the lives of other people to such an extent. I don’t have to tell you how heavy responsibility is. 

And you talk about losing a parent like you know what it feels like and I realize now that I don’t think I’ve ever asked about your family. Or your home. Or anything else about you.

I’m sorry I never asked.

I don’t want you to think I wasn’t curious. I think I was just worried that learning a tidbit of info would open the floodgates. Keeping this to myself for so long hasn’t been easy, and these last couple of months has just proved that I relied on you more than I thought I had.

I can’t talk to anybody else about any of this stuff.

No one else knows what it’s like to have such incredible power given and taken away in such a short period of time. None of my other friends know what it’s like to miss the feeling of wind in your hair, or what Paris looks like from the top of buildings at night. As much as I love them...there’s a part of me they’ll never know or understand. I don’t even have a way to prove to any of them that I was Ladybug so what would even be the point of telling them?

It’s been isolating for me...as I’m sure it’s been for you.

Which is why—now with our friend in purple serving time—I wanted to ask if you have any plans for Christmas Eve?

It was freeing to feel cold bite into his cheeks as he made his way down the street, brightly wrapped parcel tucked under one arm as he made his way down familiar paths towards the trees lit with twinkling lights and laced with snow.

The first time Adrien had come to this place, he came on the rooftops, hopping and relishing the feeling of practically soaring over the streets of Paris. His legs felt almost plodding without the grace, power, and poise that Chat Noir gave him, but for the first time in months, he felt a familiar spring in his step. After so much had gone so wrong, there was a chance for normalcy again.

Meet me where we first started our first patrol and tell me what you said to me before I addressed Paris for the first time.

Ladybug’s words buzzed in his mind the closer and closer he got to the park, eyes scanning the passers by for any sign of familiarity he could latch on to. As much as he had always yearned to find out who it was under Ladybug’s mask, he was no less apprehensive about seeing each other properly for the first time. Despite knowing each other for so long, there was that nagging hesitation in the back of his mind; something telling him that this was too good to be true. He was reasonably sure the woman he had been talking to was his partner but-

“Ooph!”

Adrien’s brooding was interrupted as he bumped into someone, boxes flying as he caught the stranger under the arms to keep them from tumbling to the ground.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there miss…Marinette?”

Marinette brushed snow out of her hair, frantically bending over and plucking the small black and green parcel out of the gutter before straightening up with a slightly perplexed smile. “A-Adrien? Wh-What are you doing here?”

“Walking,” Adrien chuckled, brushing his coat off. “Or trying to; not doing a very good job, am I?”

“We could both use a little practice,” Marinette said, rocking back and forth as she clutched the small parcel to her chest. “I...thought you were going out of town.”

Adrien winced internally as he remembered the excuse he gave to get out of Chloe’s Christmas party. “The...airports were snowed in. Felt like getting out of the house because…well, you know.”

It felt cheap using his father to get out of a lie, but it worked as Marinette seemed to accept his answer with a knowing “oh” and nod of her head.

“Well...you want to walk together?” Marinette asked, rocking back and forth on her heels. “I-I mean if we’re walking in the same direction, that is. Otherwise that would be silly...I mean not as silly as, say, Christmas sweaters for dogs, or most Christmas movies, but still pretty silly and I realize that I’m babbling and I’m probably not gonna stop any time soon so please feel free to tell me to shut up anytime you feel like it.”

“That would be rude,” Adrien said, tucking his red and black package under his arm as Marinette scratched the back of her head. “C’mon. I have to meet a friend, but we can walk until then.”

“Funny...I was out to do the same,” Marinette said, falling into step beside him.

“Not a Christmas date?” Adrien said, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes.

“He wishes,” Marinette said, lips curling into a fond smile. “If he even shows up that is.”

“Can’t imagine anyone standing you up on Christmas,” Adrien said, biting his lip as the park came into view, scanning the few milling parkgoers as the clock inched closer to midnight.

“First time for everything, I suppose,” Marinette said, not showing any sign of leaving his side, even as he turned into the park. “Pretty this time of year, though.”

“You’re telling me,” Adrien said, tugging his scarf tighter around his neck. He should have bundled up like Marinette, sporting the handknit scarf, mittens, and beanie that left little of her freckled face exposed to the elements. “Prettier from up on high.”

“Hm?” Marinette cocked her head as they headed towards a quiet part of the park.

“I-I mean...used to come here with my parents when I was a baby,” Adrien said, trying not to sound morose as he reached out, fingertips skimming the blinking white lights. “Mom insisted, even if Dad wanted to do the “proper Christmas party” like our friends did. If you think Chloe’s parties are frou-frou now, you should have seen her mother’s.”

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Marinette said, before quickly adding. “In some cases.”

“You don’t have to treat me like I’m glass, you know,” Adrien said with a small smile. “I know who my father was...is...used to be.”

“...you heard from him today?”

“...he wasn’t talkative,” Adrien said with a small shrug. “Always next year, I guess.”

Marinette’s fingers flexed in her mittens, almost reaching out as they approached the small bench tucked away in the corner of the park. “Do you blame them?”

Adrien turned to look at Marinette as she suddenly looked intensely pensive, staring at him as though expecting some kind of judgement.

“Ladybug and Chat Noir, I mean,” Marinette continued, fidgeting with the package in her fingertips. “I mean...if it wasn’t for them, then-”

“Hawkmoth would still be free to do what he wanted ,” Adrien said with a sad smile.

“They could have stopped him in a less...public way, though,” Marinette muttered. “You don’t resent the fact that they put your father on blast for the whole world to see?”

Adrien sighed, breath fogging in front of him as he chose his words carefully. “It’s a hard thing, making choices that affect the lives of people you’ve never met. I’m sure Ladybug...a-and Chat Noir tried everything they could before going with the big reveal.”

“Besides, what good would being mad at them do?” Adrien said, trying to steer the conversation in a more pleasant direction as he glanced at his watch, unaware of the fact that Marinette was squinting at him like he was a blurred image she was trying to focus on. “Especially around Christmas. I tend to think of better times around this time of year; the holidays always make me-”

“Nostalgic?”

Adrien’s brow furrowed, stopping his half-hearted scan for Ladybug candidates and focusing on the young woman in front of him, taking in her furrowed brow, her suspicious expression, and the black and green package clutched to her chest.

The smallest snowflake can set off an avalanche, and as the park emptied of buzzed university students, the clock struck midnight, leaving Adrien and Marinette standing in the snow, staring at each other, waiting for the other to say something.

“Don’t you have a friend to meet?” Adrien asked, voice barely registering amidst the distant chimes of Notre Dame.

“I do,” Marinette breathed.

“Shouldn’t you be going?” Adrien asked, throat tightening a little as Marinette made no move to leave.

“...shouldn’t you?” Marinette said, clutching the parcel almost protectively to his chest.

Adrien shifted his weight, scared that he might tip over if he didn’t ground himself in the cold, snowy sidewalk. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

He held his breath for the eternity it seemed to get Marinette to answer, shaking her head with a small laugh. “...me too.”

Silence hung between them as the final bell chimed.

“Without you, she’d no longer be here,” Adrien said quietly, heartbeat hanging on her response.

Marinette’s eyes widened, blinking rapidly as though taking Adrien in for the first time.

“Without us…” Marinette said, lips breaking into a grin mirrored on her partner’s face. “They won’t make it.”

As two bewildered teenagers, stood smiling at each other like idiots, it seemed that Paris was, momentarily, still to commemorate the day that Ladybug met Chat Noir.

AN: Happy Holidays @swan-shaped-cream-puffs​! I was your secret santa!

[teshknowledgenotes]

JAYZ DECODED NOTES

WHY?

Jay-Z is someone I look up to as a rapper and businessman, I wanted to read this book to gain some insight on his thought process. I found it really cool how he made a deal with LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennesey.

There were some real talents in Marcy. DJs started setting up sound systems in the project courtyards and me and Jaz and other MCs from around the way would battle one another for hours. It wasn't like that first cipher I saw: the crowds were more serious now and the beat was kept by eight-foot-tall speakers with subwoofers that would rattle the windows of the apartments around us. I was good at battling and I practiced it like a sport. I'd spend free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary for battles. I could be ruthless, calm as fuck on the outside, but flooded with adrenaline, because the other rapper was coming for me, too. It wasn't a Marquess of Queensberry situation. I saw people get swung on when the rhymes cut too deep. But mostly, as dangerous as it felt it stayed lyrical. I look back now and it still amazes me how intense those moments were, back when there was nothing at stake but your rep, your desire to be the best poet on the block. I wasn't even in high school yet and I'd discovered by voice. But I still needed a story to tell.

Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling for me at least live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style the relentlessness the swagger the complex wordplay and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home

. No one hired a skywriter and announced crack's arrival. But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man to gunshots. Or your father walking out the door for good. It was an irreversible new reality. What had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever. Cocaine wasn't new and neither was selling it. There had always been older dudes who grew their pinkie fingernails out to sniff coke. There were always down-low dealers who partied with their customers as they supplied them. Melle Mel had a song called "White Lines (Don't Do It)" and of course Kurtis Blow called himself "Blow". but for the most part doing coke was something that happened at private parties, something you might've of heard about but had never really seen. Crackheads were different. They'd smoke in hallways, on playgrounds, on subway station staircases. They got no respect. They were former neighbors, "aunts" and "uncles" but once they start smoking, they were simply crackheads, the lowest on the food chain in the jungle, worse than prostitutes and almost as bad as snitches.

Most of these fiends were my parents' age or a little younger. They had no secrets. Skeletal and ashy, they were as jittery as rookie beat cops and their eyes were always spinning with schemes to get money for the next hit. Kids my age were serving them. And these new little kamikazes, who simply called themselves hustlers (like generations before us did), were everywhere stacking their ones. Fuck waiting for the city to pass out summer jobs. I wasn't even a teenager yet and suddenly everyone I knew had pocket money. And better. When Biggie rhymed about how things done changed he could've meant from one summer to the next. It wasn't a generational shift but a generational split. Look at our parents, they even fukn scared of us. With that line, Big captured the whole transformation in a few words, Authority was turned upside down. Guys my age fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling. So how could those same mothers sit them down about a truant report? Outside in Marcy's courtyard and across the country, teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shootouts had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who'd known us since we were toddlers forming Nieghborhood Watches against us. There was a seperation of style, too. Hip-hop was already moving fashion out of the disco clubs and popularizing rugged streetwear, but we'd take it even futher: baggy jeans and puffy coats to stash work and weapons, construction boots to survive cold winter nights working on the streets. As an MC I still loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming purely for the aesthetics of the rhyme itself -- the challenge of moving around couplets and triplets, stacking double entendres, speed rapping. If it hadn't been for hustling I could've been working on being the best MC, technically to ever touch a mic. Btu when I git the streets for real, it altered my ambition. I finally had a story to tell. And I felt obligated, above all, to be honest about that experience. That ambition defined my work from my first album on. Hip-hop had described poverty in the ghetto and painted pictures of violence and thug life, but I was interested in something a little different: the interior space of a young kid's head, his psychology. Thirteen year old kids don't wake up one day and say "Okay I just wanna sell drugs on my mother's stoop, hustle on my block till I'm so hot people want to come look for me and start shooing out my mom's living room windows" Trust me no one wants to wake up in the morning and wants to do that. To tell the story of the kid with the gun without telling the story of why he has it is to tell a kind of lie. To tell the story of the pain without telling the story of the rewards the money, the girls, the excitement is a different kind of evasion. To talk about killing people dead without talking about waking up in the middle of the night from a dream about the friend you watched die, or not getting to sleep in the first place because you're so paranoid from the work you're doing, is a lie so deep it's criminal. I wanted to tell stories and boast, to entertain and to dazzle with creative rhymes, but everything I said had to be rotted in the truth of that experience. I owed it to all the hustlers I met or grew up with who didn't have a voice to tell their own stories and to myself.

This is why the hustler's story through hip-hop has connected with a global audience. The deeper we get into those sidewalk cracks and into the mind of the young hustler trying to find his foturne there, the closer we get to the ultimate human story the story of struggle with is what defines us all. One of Big's genius lines wasn't even a rhyme it was in the ad lib to "Juicy" his first big hit:

  Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothin, to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin to make some money to feed my daughters and all the niggas in the struggle

I loved that he describe what a lot of hustlers were going through in the streets dissed and feared by teachers and parents and neighbors and cops, broke, working a corner to try to get some bread for basic shit as more than some glamorous alternative to having a real job. Our struggle wasn't organized or even coherent. There were no leaders of this "movement". There wasn't even a list of demands. Our struggle was truly a something out of nothing do or die situation. The fucked up thing was that it led some of us to sell drugs on our own blocks and get caught up in the material spoils of that life. It was definitely different, less easily defined, less pure and harer to celebrate that a simple call for revolution. But in their way, Biggie's words made an even more desperate case for some kind of change. Che was coming from the perspective "We deserve these rights, we are ready to lead" We were coming from the perspective, "We need some kind of opportunity, we are ready to die" The connections between the two kinds of struggles weren't necessarily clear to me yet, but they were on my mind. Being misunderstood is almost a badge of honor in rap. Growing up as a black kid from the projects, you can spend your whole life being misunderstood, followed around department stores, looked at funny, accused of crimes you didn't commit, accused of motivations you don't have, dehumanized until you realized one day it's not aobut you. It's about perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke's on them because th're really just fighting phantoms of their own creation.

  From the first time I rapped the line you like Dom, maybe this Cristal will change your life on my first album, hip hop has raised the profile of Cristal. No one denies that. But we were unpaid endorsers of the brand which we thought was okay, because it was a two-way street. We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it. But they didn't see it that way.

A journalist at The Economict asked Frederic Rouzaud the managing director of the company that makes Cristal: "Do you think your brand i hurt by its association with the "bling lifestyle?" This was Rouzaud's reply: "That's a good question but what can we do? We can't forbid people from buying it" He also said that he looked on the association between Cristal and hip-hop with "curiosity and serenity" The economist printed the quote under the heading Unwelcome Attention.

That was like a slap in the face. You can argue all you want about Rouzaud's statements and trry to justify them or whatever, but the tone is clear. When asked about an influential segment of his market, his response was essentially well we can't stop them from drinking it. That was it for me. I released a statement saying that I would never drink Cristal or promote it in any way or serve it at my clubs ever again. I felt like this was the bullshit I'd been dealing with forever, this kind of offhanded, patronizing disrespect for the culture of hip-hop.

When people all over started drinking Cristal at clubs when Cristal became a household name among young consumers it wasn't because of anything Cristal had done. It was because of what we'd done. If Cristal had understood this dynamic they never would've been so dismissive. The truth is we didn't need them to tolerate us with "curiosity and serenity". In fact we didn't need them at all.

There's a knee-jerk fear in America that someone especially someone young and black is coming to take your shit fuck up your brand destroy the quality of your life, tarnish the things you love. But in hip hop despite all the brand shout-outs the truth is, we don't want your shit. We came out of the generation of black people who fainlly got the point: No one's going to help us. So we went for self, for family, for block, for crew which sounds selfish, it's one of the criticisms hustlers and rappers both get, that we're hypercapitalists, concerned only with the bottom line and enriching ourselves. But it's just a rational response to the reality we faced. No one was going to help us. Not even our fathers stuck around. People who looked just like us were gunning for us. Weakness and dependence made you a mark, like a dope fiend. Success would only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss not a dependent. The competition wasn't about greed or not just about greed. It was about survival.

Back in the eighties and early nineties cities in this country were literally backgrounds. Kids were as well armed as paramilitary outfit in a small country. Teenagers had Uzis, German Glocks, and assault rifles and we had the accessories too like scopes and silencers. Guns were easier to get in the hood than public assistance. There were times when the voilence just seemed like background music like we'd all gone numb.

The deeper causes of the crack explision were in policies concoted by a government that was hostile to us, almost genocidally hostile when you think about how they aided or tolerated the unleashing of guns and drugs on poor communities, while at the same time cutting back on schools, housing, and assistance programs. And to top it all off they threw in the so called war on drugs, which was really a war on us. There were racist new laws put on the books, like the drug laws that penalized the possesion of crack cocaine with more severe sentences than the possession of powder. Three strike laws could put young guys in jail for twenty five years for non-violent crimes. The diseas of addiction was treated as a crime. The rate of incarceration went through the roof. Police abuses and corruption were rampant. Across the country, cops were invovled in the drug trade playing both sides. Young black men in New York in the eighties and nineties were gunned down by cops for the lightest suspected offenses, or died in custody under suspicious circumstances. And meanwhile we were killing ourselves by the thousands.

Almost twenty years after the fact, there are studies that say between 1989 and 1994 more black men were murdered in the streets of America than died in the entire Vietnam War. America did not want to talk about the human damage or the deeper causes of the carnage. But then here came rap, like the American nightmare come to life. The disturbing shit you thought you locked away for good, buried at the bottom of the ocean, suddenly materialized in your kid's bedroom, laughing it off, cursing loud, and grabbing its nuts, refusing to be ignored anymore. I'm America's worst nightmare, I'm young black and holding my nuts like shh-yeah. Hardcore rap wasn't political in an explicit way, bt its volume and urgency kept a story alive that a lot of people would have preferred to disappear. Our story. It scared a lot of people.

When the politicians can't censor you and the industry can't marginalize you call the cops. The statistics on the incarceration of black men, particulary of men of my generation are probably the most objective indication that young black men are seen in this country as a "problem" that can be made to literally disappear. No one in the entire world not in Russia or China or Iran is locked up like black men are locked up in this country.

  I had to deal with the cops when I was hustling and that made sense. I had to ddeal with the cops before that too, because even before I started running the streets, I was on their radar just because of who I was. But when I was done with the streets and done with my one major brush with law enforcement after I left the streets, I still wasn't done with five-oh.

I got followed by hip hop cops for seven years but I sill have to ask myself why. Rappers as a class are not engaged in anything criminal. They're musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren't task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don't have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others don't want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not a crime, at least not one that's on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people they'd love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can. I was never on that nationalistist tip as an MC, but MCs I looked up to, like Rakim, Kane, and Cube, whatever their politics were unambiguously black, with no concession to any other standard of appearance. They didn't hate themselves. They knew how to be strong and stylish but stay black in a way that wasn't self-conscious or contrived. Just by being true to who they were, they obliterated the ideal of the light skinned singer with the S-curl which for a lot of kids of my generation took the edge off the kind of color consciousness that's always lurking for black people in America. Even when hip-hop aired some of the ongoing colorism among black people like Biggie rapping that he was black and ugly as ever the point is that we were airing it out, not weeping it under the rug and letting it drive us crazy trying to pretend it idn't exist. Just one more way that hip-hop kept us sane.

For my pops it was just as important to take in places as people. He wanted me to know my own neighborhood inside out. When we'd go to visit my aunt and uncle and counsins my father would give me the responsibility of leading, even though I was the youngest. When I was walking with him, he always walked real fast (he said that way if someone's following you, they'll lose you) and he expected me to not only keep up with him but to remember the details of the things I was passing. I had to know which bodega sold luandry detergent and who only stocked candy and chips, which bodega was owned by Puerto Ricans and which one was run by Arabs, who taped pictuers of themselves holding Aks to the Plexiglas where they kept the loose candy.

He was teaching me to be confident and aware of my surroundings. There's no better survival skill you could teach a boy in the ghetto and he did it demonstratively, not by sitting me down and saying "Yo always look around at where you are", but by showing me. Without necessarily meaning to, he taught me how to be an artist.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you. The hip hop generation never gets credit for it, but those songs changed things in the hood. They were political comentary but they weren't based on theory or books. They were based on reality on close observation of the world we grew up in. The songs weren't moralistic but they created a stigma around certain kinds of behaviours just by describing them truthfully and with clarity. One of the thing we corrected was the absent-father karma our fathers' generation's created. We made it some real bitch shit to bounce on your kids. Big mixing rage with double entendre (pop duke left ma uke, the faggot took the back way), we as a generation made it shameful to not be there for your kids. The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden. As kids we didn't complain about being poor, we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money we were eager to show it.

I watched the coverage of Hurricane Katrina but it was painful. Helicopters swooping over rooftops with people begging to be rescued the helicopters would leave with a dramatic photo, but didn't bother to pick up the person on the roof. George Bush doing his flyby and declaring that the head of FEMA was doing a heckuva job. The news media would show a man running down the street, arms piled high with diapers or bottles of water, and call him a looter with no context for why he was doing what he was doing. I'm sure there were a few idiots stealing plasma Tvs, but even that has a context anger, trauma. It wasn't like they were stealing TVs so they could go home and watch the game. I mean, where were they going to plug them shits in? As the days dragged on and images got worse and worse old ladies in wheelchairs dying in fron of the Superdome I kept thinking to myself. This can't be happening in a wealthy country. Why isn't anyone doing anything?

To some degree charity is a racket in a capitalist system, a way of making our obligations to one another optional, and of keeping poor people feeling a sense of indebtedness to the rich, even if the rich spend every other day exploiting those same people. The highest level of giving is giving in a way that makes the receive self-sufficient.

Of course I do sometimes like to see where the money I give goes. When I went to Angola for the water project I was working on and got to see the new water pump and how it changed the lives of the people in that village, I wasn't happy because I felt like I'd done something so great. I was happy ot know that whatever money I'd given was actually being put to work and not just paying a seven figure salary for the head of the Red Cross.

[thetimeistwoam]

Night Call

Takes place after 4:42am. Murdoc and Noodle go for a drive resolving nothing as usual

Noodle shut her eyes, falling back against the front door and working her bottom lip between her teeth. Alright, she couldn't leave Murdoc’s jacket on the stoop. It was too much of a mirror of that immature behavior she was determined to let them all know she'd grown out of. She swung the door back open, picked up the leather jacket, was about to go back inside, but upon turning found herself face to face with Murdoc himself. "Let's go." Noodle blinked at the extended, pale green hand, following its leatherclad arm upwards to the glinting red eye of Murdoc, his hair swaying slightly in the wind. "Go where?" She asked warily, backing up a little; there hadn't been much space between them, she having turned almost directly into the doorframe. "On a drive. Somewhere. I don't know, just not back in there," He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, waggling the fingers of his other hand at her invitingly, "Put that back on," He didn't wait for her to do so, but rather took his jacket and tucked it around her shoulders as he'd done earlier; he now wore a similar leather one over his stripes. "And let's go," The hold Murdoc got around her closed fingers was forceful, he pretty much dragged Noodle to the car, though not like she couldn't have broken free if she so desired. Opening and shutting the door for and behind her, Murdoc rolled over the hood like the young-old man he was to get to the driver's side, and despite herself Noodle had to work her mouth very hard to keep from grinning. She'd gotten herself under control by the time Murdoc had thrown himself into the driver's seat. He started the engine, pausing to light a cigarette, then light hers, then pulled them out into the street. "Here," Murdoc held up the auxiliary cable; though new, the car wasn't exactly new. "Oh damn it, I left mine-," Noodle was patting at her pockets, which were actually Murdoc's pockets; typically her iPod was on her even when sleeping. "Get the spare in the glove box," Once again giving instruction only to follow it himself, Murdoc leaned over and banged open the glove box, retrieving an original 80GB iPod and dropping it into Noodle's hands. She smiled slightly as she plugged it in, looking through the endless lists of artists, many of which she recognized, many she did not. "Didn't know there was a spare." "I'm constantly losing the sodding thing. Only a matter of time until I lose this one too, but until then, we have music," Murdoc's lips curved into a grin as Noodle made her choice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY), the Sound filling the car, forcing them to roll down the windows and let in the icy air. He kicked the driving up a notch then, Noodle’s choice fitting perfectly with the dim streetlights and dark alleys just asking for it. By a normal driver's standards this was kicking it up by about a hundred notches; they sped through a tunnel so fast the echoing roar of the engine almost drowned out the music, the turn back out into the night nearly tipping the car. It being so late, or being so early to be more accurate, the streets were empty. Murdoc blazed trails though the entire city, over bridges, through fancy neighborhoods, finally reaching the outskirts and continuing into the countryside. They sped through the small forest overlooking the city out into the farmlands past, Noodle hanging as far out the window as she could to stare up at the sky where the stars were brightest. They went far, but with Murdoc driving it didn't seem too long of a drive, and finally they began to slow down, having come to a dead end on whatever country road they were on. Noodle plopped back into her seat, looking at Murdoc inquisitively. "You didn't bring me out to partake in one of your weird-ass Satanic rituals, did you?" Noodle asked, resulting in a scoff from Murdoc. "Noodle please," He shook his head, turning off the car and twirling the keys into his pocket, "I couldn't trust anyone but myself with something like that," He winked, leaving Noodle to sit on that in the time it took for him to open her door. She then realized that he'd opened her door. "I can get it, you know-," "Yeah whatever, different times, different habits," Murdoc was lighting another cigarette, already walking off towards the end of the road and the beginning of a field, where a low hanging chain was evidently supposed to double as some kind of barrier. A rusted red and white sign hung on it bearing the words: Private Property, NO TRESPASSING. Murdoc's evil grin stretched across his face; he kicked the sign with a Cuban heeled boot. "Mm, would you look at that," He was building up the suspense, but it was all sort of ruined by Noodle just walking over the chain in extreme nonchalance, shrugging at Murdoc's gaping, appalled look and continuing on through the field. He shut his mouth and ran a hand through his hair, somewhat angry that she hadn't waited on him to build up the moment. If you were gonna break a law, any law, no matter how small, you do it right. He had half a mind to run back to the car and burn rubber out of there, leaving her stranded, but didn't want to deal with whatever repercussions there'd be when she made it back to the house. Therefore, he followed after her. He would at least decide where they stopped. A ways into the field, a delipidated chainlink fence stood, guarding a sharp cut off of the hill into a gorge below. Far off below were the twinkling lights of the city, and above the twinkling lights of the stars. Multi-colored to silver. Artificial to natural. There was something extremely poignant there, though he couldn't think how to put it in lyricism yet. He'd have to come back later. Murdoc leaned against the chain, surprised it didn't just lean with him under his weight. He watched Noodle for a bit; she was off in the middle of the field, staring up at the stars with her hands in his pockets. Whether she was purposefully milling around out there to annoy him, he didn’t know, but it was a few minutes of stargazing, or whatever she was doing, before she finally came and joined him on the fence. "Got one for me?" She indicated his cigarette, and Murdoc gave her one, feeling some of those bad feelings he'd felt earlier on the stoop as he did so. Another small silence as they both smoked it away, dawn slowly growing brighter. It was still dark, though. Dark enough. "Smoking is bad, you know," He couldn't just not say anything about it; or, he could, but it made the bad chest feelings nag more insistently; even still, a statement like that coming from him sounded sarcastic any way you looked at it, maybe he’d even meant it to. Noodle laughed then, looking at him comically. "Just saying, love, doesn't seem to fit with the whole, 'perfect self' routine you have going on." Noodle laughed a bit more to herself, shaking her head and looking out at the city, gripping the fence with her free hand. She didn't want to reply to that. He'd never been the type to settle, however. "Neither does breaking down over pancakes, come to think of it. Or being up so late making pancakes, for that matter. Or the not sleeping for more than an hour a time deal, going out late, sneaking into 2D's room when he's not there to rifle through his pillboxes-," "So what are you trying to say?" Noodle spat, finally having been drawn out; they were both hotheads, a fact both of them were acutely aware of. "What I'm trying to say is look at you," Murdoc brushed Noodle's hair away from her profile, causing her to instinctivly flinch away and push back his hand. "How long has it been since you've slept more than four hours a night?" He asked, letting his hand drop; Noodle glared at him. "Suddenly concerned?" That sounded whiny; she glared herself into a unfocused fog. Murdoc laughed to himself, shaking his head and staring out through the links in the chain. "Not suddenly." Too caring? He inhaled deep, feeling his face get slightly warm. It was Noodle's turn to laugh now, and Murdoc threw her a glare when she did, anger nipping at his insides, like it always did. "I'm not your fucking dad, Noodle, never was-," "Oh believe me, I know," Noodle cut him off, deeply inhaling on her cigarette, using it to collect her thoughts a bit. They weren’t her parents. None of them. But it was times like these, times like staying up till 4:42am to make pancakes, that had her hating the lot of them. Because she knew, she just knew, that she would’ve done things differently. She would’ve done things, for one; outside of actual band activities, recording, touring, and the like, she didn’t have strong memories of them. When the four had been at home, they all did their own thing. She’d raised herself, basically, and was currently feeling that hatred any child would at what was supposed to be a father figure, but was really the exact opposite. For some reason that annoyance seemed to manifest itself most deeply in Murdoc. Why? Because he was the oldest? The most intelligent? ...Intelligent to an extent, anyway. She didn't even know, herself.   "You think the meditation and shit counteracts something like this?" Murdoc flicked her cigarette with his own, and she shrugged, drawn out of her thoughts. "A bit funny, I do think, that you take such pride in your spiritual health, and physical to an extent, yet still need a cigarette every now and then." "How could I not, being around-," "Three morons like us, right," Murdoc finished, shaking his head and puffing out some more smoke. "2D and Russel aren't morons," Noodle said, quitely yet still full of venom; he shut his eyes, alright, THAT one might've hurt just a little. He watched the embers of his cigarette, an orange glow in the dark, took another puff with a new gust of cold air blowing right through his jacket. "Don't see either of them here now," Murdoc finally said, grinning slightly to himself at being right in this no matter what she may try and say. There was nothing for Noodle to say, however. It was a true statement. She couldn't picture trespassing into a field and stopping for a smoke against a chain link fence overlooking the city with anyone but Murdoc, to be completely honest, and she hated that truth as much as she liked it. There was a silence, during which both of them finished their cigarettes then turned to lean against the fence. They were facing the sunrise; the whole sky was now a sort of dusky purple, the first rays of morning bleeding in orange. Noodle itched to light another cigarette, for without one there was the pressure to focus more attention on each other. Murdoc seemed perfectly comfortable, but she'd been exuding a vulnerability their entire time together that she wasn't at all fond of. Yet she didn't know what to do to get rid of it. It's not like it'd be proper to just suddenly start bragging about how she wasn't this searching, lost girl he seemed to think she was. Didn't he? She resisted laughing to herself; who WASN'T inferior to Murdoc? Still, she'd always thought they were sort of on the same level, hoped he felt that way too. She realized now she really wasn't sure what he thought of her. "Breakfast?" He suddenly broke the silence, causing Noodle to flinch slightly, she'd been so lost in thought. In typical fashion he was ending any potential breach into the gray area that was their conflicts and emotions. Noodle glared at him, even though he wasn't looking, before sighing and giving a shrug. Maybe it was the best way. Maybe it was the only way even; was there anyone even alive who’d ever had a heart to heart with Murdoc? She laughed slightly at the thought.  "Guess I'm a little hungry." "Since the pancakes didn't turn out?" There was laughter in his voice, and despite it all Noodle couldn't help but smile a bit as well. She gave him a shove in the shoulder, and there was some laughing and pushing about as they made their way back to the car. It got a bit awkward when Murdoc put his arm around her shoulder, a friendly enough gesture had the two of them actually been friends. He let go quickly, coughing a bit to avoid an awkward silence and not bothering to open her door this time. Noodle rested her arms against the open window frame as they reversed, enjoying the cold air against her hot face, focusing her attention on the steadily disappearing stars and growing daybreak. She felt a tap on her leg, turning to see Murdoc once again holding out the auxiliary cable, still attached to his spare iPod. She took it with a small smile.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #141: The Phantom Empire!

November, 1975

VERSUS THE SQUADRON SINISTER! THESE GUYS AGAIN! ‘Nuff said.

Or not ‘nuff said because this is a pretty okay cover. Its a pretty aggressively average example of two teams lined contentiously.

Although, it may have been a trend-setter in that regard because apparently this particular cover gets homaged and parodied a lot.

I mean, sure, some of the lining up is awkward. Iron Man is standing in a really bad punching pose. Golden Arrow is sorta crouched in the back between several legs. And Beast is jumping down from the void.

And tiny, grumpy Vision is glaring at his larger counterpart.

Last time: Wasp and Yellowjacket managed to get themselves hurt in separate ways. Wasp was cured through the healing power of actual medicine. Yellowjacket by having a robot swim inside his heart.

Also, a mysterious woman has been trying to contact the Beast by camping out on the Avengers Mansion stoop.

This time: Payoff to that particular plot hook.

But we start with Beast bouncing along the middle of a road, in flagrant disregard for traffic laws.

Oh, hi George Perez!

Anyway, Beast is just so thrilled that his new pals Wasp and Yellowjacket are getting better. So thrilled that he almost doesn’t notice some green jumpsuited weirdos sneaking up on him.

But he do notice and he do dodge and throw out some witticisms and knocks some heads. But one of the weirdos gets a lucky shot on him and a bunch of those green jumpsuits jump him.

Luckily, Beast is saved by Captain America, dynamically entering the fray with his silliest maneuver.

With Beast and Captain America back to back, the tide of battle turns and the green suits flee.

So that was a weird thing that happened for no apparent reason.

Nah. Seldom do jumpsuited people attack superheroes on the first page of things for no reason.

Cap has been tailing the sergeant of that crew. Back when Cap was Nomad, he saved Roxxon president Hugh Jones from Warlord Krang and the Serpent Squad. Then later, Jones dropped a hot tip in Cap and Falcon’s lap when they were trying to find the Red Skull. And then at the Skull’s hideout, some strange troops burst in and massacred his men.

Long story short, Cap is mighty suspicious of Roxxon right now. He was snooping around Roxxon when he saw the dude he was tracking grab some pals and go prowling for Beast.

But why? What’s the connection between Beast and Roxxon?

Beast confusedly states that he and Cap aren’t even contemporary Avengers, which baffles Cap because Cap hasn’t been keeping up with the news and missed new membership news.

Meanwhile, mysterious woman is still mysterious and still hanging around Avengers Mansion waiting for Beast. But Jarvis mentions that the Avengers are at Mercy General Hospital. So off mysterious woman goes, to the hospital!

So, meanwhile at the hospital: Wasp and Yellowjacket are still on the mend. Lying in hospital beds. Wasp has gotten a lot of flowers, which she is thrilled about.

Yellowjacket has also received a bouquet, which has threatened his fragile masculinity.

It was actually Vision who ordered the flowers, for Scarlet Witch. Since her honeymoon and also witchy upgrade, she’s just really into having flowers around.

Around now, Cap and Beast burst in to report cool superhero nonsense is going on. He’s going to need to borrow the Avengers to fight a private army.

So Vision, Thor, and Scarlet Witch join Beast and Cap and head out of the room. Thor privately exulting that maybe Cap is finally rejoining the team.

Cap, also possessing of fragile masculinity, advises Yellowjacket to ditch the bouquet of roses.

After they leave, Wasp expresses how glad she is that the two of them helped found the Avengers. And Yellowjacket just passes her the bouquet of flowers, lest anyone else insinuate things.

Which is when mysterious woman shows up. Which you may recognize as literally right after the Avengers left. She just missed them. Mysterious woman immediately turns around and heads back to the mansion.

Wasp vaguely recollects knowing her from somewhere... and Yellowjacket confirms that mysterious woman was present at the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards, back in Fantastic Four Annual #3. So, hey, that narrows it down if you want to investigate which character appeared in Amazing Adventures and also at the wedding. But I’d advise not putting down this review to go look up the answer. I’ll just tell you in a bit.

Meanwhile, on the streets home, because the Avengers like to walk now and again, they spot a Quinjet flying overhead. Which means Iron Man and Moondragon have returned, possibly with Hawkeye (except nope).

When the Avengers return to the mansion, Jarvis tries to advise them about the mysterious woman but the Case of the Missing Hawkeye is more pressing and the Avengers just brush right past the butler.

Iron Man expresses surprise that Vision and Scarlet Witch have returned from their honeymoon so soon, which apparently has become a sore point at this point.

Iron Man: “Well, hi, lovebirds! I didn’t expect to see you back so soon! That was a short honeymoon!”

Scarlet Witch: “We know, Iron Man.”

But pleasentries aside, Iron Man and Moondragon fill the other Avengers in re: the missing Hawkeye and the obvious and transparent trap that has been set up to lure them to their doom via the Doom time machine.

Except its not Doom luring them to their doom. It’s obviously Kang the Conqueror.

Even computer-brain Vision is getting tired of how monotonous Kang’s frequent attacks have gotten at this point. Which says something.

Anyway, Moondragon proposes that she and Thor be the ones to seek Kang. For reasons of them both being gods.

Whatever. This works out fine for Cap’s needs anyway. He has his own situation so they’ll have to split the team anyway and that’s as good a division as any. He’s only investigating the private army of a giant powerful and possibly evil oil company. As long as he has numerical backup, he should be fine.

And then mysterious woman bursts in, shoving right past Jarvis, and announces that Beast is hers at last!

And hey! Mystery of the mystery woman solved! It’s Patsy Baxter, nee Walker, and also Patsy Walker again these days!

You may recognize her from her eponymous comics, her role in Amazing Adventures, this series of Avengers issues, Netflix Jessica Jones, certain eras of the Defenders, and a more different and cool eponymous comic about her and all her cool friends doing cool stuff.

Patsy Walker rocks and I’ll brook no disagreement on these true facts.

Anyway, Beast takes Patsy into the next room so they can talk in private and also so she can yell at him in private.

Moondragon figures that this is probably going to take time and they already know what they’re doing and judging by the look on Thor’s face, he wants no part of this drama. So they’re off.

And yeah. It does take time. The apparently contentious and loud conversation goes on for ten minutes before Beast leads Patsy back into whatever vague room the other Avengers have been awkwardly waiting.

See, Patsy has a BIG announcement to make.

BEAST IS REALLY HANK MCCOY!

... This comes as a surprise to exactly zero people. Not even Scarlet Witch and Vision who weren’t even on the team when he joined and revealed his identity. Or possibly they just don’t care and/or don’t even know who Hank McCoy is.

Either way, blackmail attempt failed. Because, yes, Patsy was trying to blackmail Beast with knowledge of his secret identity.

And somewhere, Peter Parker just woke up in a cold sweat.

Still though, Beast did promise her a thing. And even though she has zero leverage, he decides its the done thing to bring her along on an Avengers mission as an observer!

Obviously!

Cap has an objection though. Bringing a woman into danger to observe superhero stuff might be dangerous.

Beast says nah, Patsy has grit.

ALSO, POINT OF ORDER, DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT DRAG A TEENAGER NAMED RICK JONES INTO DANGER WITH YOU? HOW IS YOUR GLASS HOUSE, CAP? HOW IS ITTTTTTTTTTTTT?

Cap reluctantly concedes the point.

Meanwhile, away from this specific brand of hypocrisy, Thor and Moondragon on a random rooftop.

Thor requests Moondragon stop mentioning how much of a god he is. Moondragon asks if he disliked being called a god in front of mortals. This will be a plot point, kinda.

Oh. And then Moondragon rings up Immortus with psychic powers, like a time-a-phone. Apparently its that easy.

I’m never really sure how Moondragon stacks up next to the mutant psychics. Jean Grey was never trained by trees but she turns into a sun-devouring firebird. Moondragon turns into a dragon, of the moon. But only the once.

Anyway. Immortus agrees to transport Thor and Moondragon through time so that they may avoid mechanical time machines, which Kang might be watching. Although, if he’s spying on the present so maybe he saw Thor and Moondragon sitting on the roof yelling at nothing.

I can’t be sure because when Immortus does lead them to where Kang is, Kang just declares that they’ve definitely fallen into his trap. The guy is so self-confident that he’d say that even if he was completely surprised by them.

The usual Kangfrontation things happen. Thor throws his hammer. Immortus yells at Kang for never learning himself a thing and causing shit in three out of four Giant Avengers issues.

But Kang will never learn himself a thing. He swears it. He also swears he’s going to destroy the Avengers for keeping the Celestial Madonna out of his hands. And then he blasts at Thor.

And Thor just absorbs the energy and blasts it back at Kang, who falls backwards in time. Into a time. Time is weird.

Thor swears that this time will be the end of Kang for realsies this time! Even though Immortus is kinda cool and killing Kang will kill Immortus and Immortus saved Iron Man’s life when Kang’s machinations killed him.

Meanwhile - whatever that means in the context of time traveling - the Avengers investigate Brand. Which has a sleek, modern looking brand. If you told me the Brand brand was for a 2000s company, I’d buy it.

Anyway.

The Avengers stop outside the Brand gates to chat. Iron Man tells Cap that Brand has always struck him as bad news. That and Cap’s smiling face are why he’s with him all the way!

“So am I!” chimes in Patsy Walker, just happy to be part of the moment.

Wanda does not chime in with moral support. Because she once again thought of her shortened honeymoon and Vision insisting that they return to check on the Avengers and how now they’re drawn into stuff. And she realizes that she does not really like these circumstances.

Inside, Roxxon President Hugh Jones and Colonel Buzz Baxter, chief of Roxxon security, are watching the Avengers just having their team bonding experience right outside the gate and laughing at Beast for thinking that security is still at 1973 levels instead of the far superior 1975 levels. What an idiot.

But Jones is surprised to see Buzz’s wife with the Avengers.

Colonel Buzz Baxter: “Good lord! It is! But whatever hare-brained scheme that twerp’s got cooking this time -- it won’t slow Colonel Buzz Baxter! Anyway, she’s my ex-wife!”

Okay so back to the Avengers, totally intruding on Brand Corporation’s grounds. Beast does a cool flip over the gate. But Vison has him beat, just slipping through the gate like some sort of vision. Plus, he opens the gate for the rest.

Beast finds it spooky. Vision is the hardest Avenger to figure out of all the ones he’s met. And being an X-Men and living the X-Men life, he knows from spooky.

But here’s also a spooky thing: no guards.

And then a portal or a teleport or something happens and out steps:

THE SQUADRON SUPREME!

Whizzer: “That’s ‘Supreme’ -- not ‘Sinister,’ Avengers! Just so you’ll know who creamed you!”

...

You lied to me, cover.

Why do I still open up my heart to be hurt by you??

Anyway, we have Lady Lark, the Whizzer, Dr. Spectrum, Golden Archer (can’t be Hawkeye now that Hawkeye is back to being Hawkeye), and Hyperion.

Aka: Black Canary, Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Superman by way of serial number filing off.

Cap spends a kooky triangular panel recapping the situation with the Squadron Whatever. The Squadron Sinister was created by the Grandmaster for his game with Kang and technically those people exist on Earth-616 and the sinister Nighthawk (aka Not-Batman) would end up joining the Defenders.

The Squadron Supreme were the heroic equivalents, from a parallel dimension. The Avengers ended up having an adventure involving them when a dimensional mishap occurred after another encounter with Arkon of Polemachus.

Oh and Golden Arrow was a disguise Hawkeye used to shake Cap out of his post-Secret Empire funk and the Squadron Golden Arrow stole the name because Hawkeye stole his name and there’d be confusion if there were two Hawkeyes (Kate Bishop says ‘nonsense’) even if Hawkeye isn’t currently contemporary. Anyway, that’s why Golden Archer is Golden Archer. Coincidentally, it also gave him the same initials as Green Arrow.

Meanwhile, Whizzer whizzes around and kicks Iron Man’s ass, who just can’t keep up. A later Flash expy that Iron Man fought during the Long March Of Nihilism that was the lead-up to Secret Wars dismantled his armor in the middle of the fight. Iron Man is bad versus speedsters. Maybe he should install an oil slick.

Beast ends up fighting Hyperion. Which. Which dang. That’s a mismatch.

Dr. Spectrum fights the Vision. And just uselessly blasts through him.

And just like clockwork, Scarlet Witch gets the Designated Girl Fight and fights Lady Lark. But Scarlet Witch has fought Lady Lark before so knows to keep her off-balance and uses her magickery to explode the sand beneath Lady Lark and knock her off her feet.

But then Patsy Walker decides she Wants to Be Part of the Moment and jumps in to join the fight. And I guess starts pulling Lady Lark’s hair?

Scarlet Witch tells Patsy Walker to step off but talking time is not magicing time and also Patsy is in the way.

Lady Lark uses her Lark Sceam or Whatever and knocks out Patsy and Wanda Witch.

And then everything goes to hell in short order.

Vision gets distracted by <BAD THING> happening to Wanda, leaving him vulnerable to Dr. Spectrum’s blasting.

Whizzer finishes off Iron Man. This probably would have happened one way or another even without Patsy’s interference. Speedsters are a real bad match-up for Tony.

Speaking of mismatches, Hyperion just grabs Beast and slams him into a wall.

And although Captain America is doing okay against archer guy, Lady Lark is free to use her sonic attack and knock him out.

And that is that. It only took four pages for the Avengers to go down like chumps.

But going down like chumps against lawyer friendly expies of the Justice League just makes a victory later all the sweeter. Hopefully.

Anyway, the Squadron Supreme reports in to Jones and Baxter. Jones is still confused why Baxter’s ex-wife is hanging out with the Avengers. Baxter says he always sensed she had some weird connection or perhaps pact with the Beast. BUT HEY, THEY CAN GET ALL THE ANSWERS THEY WANT WHEN THEY PUT THE AVENGERS PLUS PATSY INTO AN ESCAPE-PROOF CELL!

And also: then no one will be able to stop Roxxon’s final march to victory. So its going to be pretty rad overall.

But in the mean time, Immortus, Moondragon, and Thor land in the Old West of 1871. You can tell from the cactus. And also because Immortus says so.

EXCEPT WRONG. It’s 1873, interjects an off-screen voice with wiggly text bubbles. Master of Time, my ass.

So, yeah. Old West stuff next time. Also some more stuff at Brand.

Dammit, why’d they have to split the party! You’re terrible, Kang!

[youre-on-a-starship]

Word Count: 2,700

Author’s Note: This is my first entry for @trekken81‘s Songfic Challenge! (For your purposes darlin’, this is my sideblog, I’m following you under @mlleecrivaine). I really dig this song, it’s been a pleasure writing to it. Enjoy my loves! Fair warning, this is not a reader insert fic.

EDIT: I have made some edits to the lyrics as per the advice of a very helpful Anon. I wasn’t sure how to deal with the content of the lyrics specifically as they aren’t mine, and you helped me figure that out. I appreciate the heads up!

If I ever do something else like this, please let me know, I want to learn and grow as a person and sometimes I have to make mistakes to learn.

---

I'm tryna put you in the worst mood, ah

P1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah

Milli point two just to hurt you, ah

All red Lamb’ just to tease you, ah

None of these toys on lease too, ah

Made your whole year in a week too, yah

Main bitch out your league too, ah

Side bitch out of your league too, ah

“Jim, where the hell are you going?” Bones called after his friend as the younger man bounced to the front door of the apartment with a wave.

“I’ve got plans,” Jim flipped around with a broad smile. “I’ll leave her in your capable hands, Bones,” Jim gestured at the room as he opened the door.

“When are you coming back?” Bones followed his friend out the door into the hall.

“I should be back tomorrow sometime,” Jim said with a wink.

“Wouldn’t you rather bring her back here? I can go somewhere else, if you want,” Bones jerked a thumb over his shoulder as he chased Jim down the hall to the turbolift.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jim clapped his friend on the shoulder as they paused to wait for the lift. “Go out, find yourself a girl of your own. Hell, go find two. Have a party.”

The door to the turbolift swished open and Jim backed into the small compartment. Bones stayed on the landing, watching.

“Jim, I swear to God, don’t do anything stupid.”

“Where would you get that idea?” Jim grinned devilishly at the doctor as the door swished shut. “Champagne’s in the fridge!”

Jim leaned back against the cool wall of the lift, letting his bag fall from his shoulder, the strap catching on his wrist leaving the knapsack dangling in midair. The world passed by out the window as he flew closer and closer to the ground before suddenly the world disappeared altogether as the lift came to a stop on the parking level.

Crossing the garage he rounded the corner and stepped up to his new, shining bike. He ran his hand along the crisp leather of the seat before slinging his leg over the vehicle. It nearly killed him to find a bike with wheels these days; the wheelless versions were more highly sought after.

He emerged into the bright light of the morning and took off at twice the speed limit to the exit for the freeway. The wind tore through his hair, a delightful change from the stillness of the air on his ship.

The landing pad unfolded to his left, a series of shuttles parked next to each other ready to ferry anybody anywhere. He peeled off the freeway and sidled up to the front gate before powering the bike off and handing the keys to an attendant.

“Take care of this for me, it’s new,” he smiled at the kid and placed his hand on the registry panel.

“Captain Kirk,” the man on the other side of the terminal looked brightly up at Jim. “Your shuttle is at the end of this row, Gate 8,” he gestured down the row of shuttles. “Do you have any other luggage that you need us to take care of?”

“No, I think I can handle this, thanks,” Jim waved at the man and made his way between the shuttles to the end of the row. The muscles in his thighs still stretched sorely with each step. He consulted a map when he got back to the Enterprise and realized that he and Bones had run the better part of two kilometers before leaping off the cliff. Considering they weren’t planning on running the whole distance, it was a miracle they both made it.

Jim hopped up the steps of the shuttle and stowed his backpack over his seat. Buckling himself in, he tilted his head back against the seat and waited for the shuttle to take off.

Every day a ***** try to test me, ah

Every day a ***** try to end me, ah

Pull off in that Roadster SV, ah

Pockets overweight, gettin' hefty, ah

Coming for the king, that's a far cry, ah

I come alive in the fall time, I

No competition, I don't really listen

I’m in the blue Mulsanne bumping New Edition

His childhood home looked so small in the midst of the vast Iowan countryside. A tiny black car sat out front. The garage no longer stood next to the house. That meant that the last of George’s vehicles were gone.

Jim walked up the driveway with one hand in his pocket and one on the strap of his backpack. As he got closer he saw the curtains move in the living room window.

Taking a deep breath, Jim watched the front door burst open and Frank come barreling out onto the front stoop.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” Frank hollered, shaking with rage on the step.

Jim glanced back to the living room window and saw his mom’s eye appear through the crack in the curtains.

“I’m here to see my mom,” Jim called.

“You’re not welcome here, get the hell off my property,” Frank shouted, lowering himself down a stair.

“This is my mom’s property, too, last I checked,” Jim looked squarely at Frank, trying to keep his posture casual even though the bottom of his stomach tied itself in a knot, remembering the impact he received the last time he and Frank spoke.

“I call the goddamn shots around here,” Frank jumped down the last few stairs and hurtled towards Jim with his fists clenched, “and I said: ‘Get the hell of my property.’”

“I want to talk to my mother,” Jim reiterated, holding himself stiffly as Frank stuck his face inches from Jim’s. Jim could see the spit strings between Frank’s teeth as the man kept yelling.

“You think just because you’re a fancy Captain now you can just waltz right in here? This is trespassing, dumbass, I’m gonna have you arrested if you don’t get off my property right this goddamn second -”

“I’d like to see you try,” Jim made the mistake of saying.

Frank’s fist connected with his gut quicker than he could register it coming. Jim doubled over, lowering his hand from his pack and clutching at his stomach, trying to yank his hand from his pocket to defend himself from the next swing which landed straight on his temple. Jim fell to his knees, his backpack falling from his shoulder onto the dusty ground.

“Stop!” Jim heard his mother’s voice through the rushing of blood in his ears. He looked up through blurred eyes as his mother’s hands appeared around Frank’s body, pulling the large man back from Jim.

“Mom…” Jim croaked.

“Jim, get the hell out of here, for God’s sake!” Winona looked down at him with wide, scared eyes. “Go, just go.”

Jim opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. He put his palms on the driveway and pushed himself up, collecting his bag as Winona pushed Frank back into the house.

As the door shut, Jim turned his back and walked back down the driveway, slinging his bag over his shoulder and stuffing his hand back in his pocket.

Let a ***** Brad Pitt

Legend of the fall took the year like a bandit

Bought mama a crib and a brand new wagon

Now she hit the grocery shop looking lavish

Star Trek roof in that Wrath of Khan

Girls get loose when they hear this song

100 on the dash get me close to God

We don't pray for love, we just pray for cars

Jim looked down at the phone in his hand. Hell if he was leaving Iowa without letting his mom know why he came in the first place.

He flipped the phone open and selected her private line, the one he knew Frank didn’t know about. It went straight to voicemail, as he expected.

“Mom, it’s me,” he started after the tone. “Look, I know it was a bad idea to come by the house, but I wanted to see you. I didn’t see you at the ceremony, and I wanted to make sure you were alright.

“Anyway, um, I’ve got something for you,” Jim went on, “Dad wasn’t Captain long enough for you to know, but our salary’s pretty good. I’ve got an account open for you. I want you to have what’s in it. It’s not what you deserve, I don’t think even an Admiral could make that much, but it’s enough for you to… well. If you want to get out of there, you can.

“I’ve got a place in San Francisco now. I won’t be there often, but it’s nice. It’s a penthouse, can you imagine that?” he asked with a sad laugh. “If you want it, it’s yours. I have a car, too, and a bike.”

Jim touched his stomach gingerly, checking to keep tabs on the pain.

“I’m flying out of Riverside in three hours. If you want to meet up, call me. I’d love to see you before I go. I love you,” Jim pulled the phone away from his ear and ended the call. He tossed the device into the dust at his hip and curled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them and letting his head fall back against the brick.

His phone rang next to him and he hastily picked up, brushing dust from the device before putting it to his head.

“Hello?”

“Jim?” it was his mom’s quiet voice, thick with tears.

“Mom, Mom are you okay?” Jim let his knees fall to the ground, sitting up straight and away from the wall.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said. “Jim, why did you come back?”

“I wanted to give you -”

“That’s not a good reason, Jim,” Winona’s voice cracked on the other side. “You know how he feels about you, especially after you left.”

“I know it was a bad idea,” Jim said, looking down. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not really.”

“‘Not really’ or ‘No?’”

“Just don’t come back, Jim, please,” she pleaded.

“Mom…” Jim choked up, and he wiped roughly at his eyes. “Did you get my message?”

“I did,” she said. “I can’t just leave. You remember what he’s like.”

“I can have someone come to protect you. Frank’s… he’s just a goon, I can get someone from security, someone trained, to come take care of you, to keep an eye out for him -”

“Jim,” Winona said with a poor approximation of a laugh.

“Mom, please,” Jim pleaded, standing and starting to pace through the alley. “Come meet me.”

“I can’t leave now, Jim, he’s on a warpath,” Winona said softly. “He’s out back right now throwing things around, if he came back in and I was gone -”

“Then grab a few things and come,” Jim said, “I can take you back with me right now. I’ve got a place and everything -”

“I can’t, Jim, I can’t,” she breathed into the phone. “Look, maybe when he’s calmed down some. He’s been really good lately. Maybe when he’s calmed down, I can grab some things and I can come. But not now. Not when he’s so upset.”

“I don’t want him to hurt you again,” Jim whispered into the phone.

“I know, sweetie,” Winona breathed. “I promise you I want to leave. I do, really. I just want to do it quietly.”

Jim looked at the ground, stopping in his tracks. He listened to his mom breathe heavily on the other side of the phone.

“You know where to find the account. Just show them your ID and you’ll have full access to all of it. I put more in every time I get paid. It’s all yours. My place, too. I… I’m hoping that my crew can get this five-year mission they’re talking about. I might be off-planet for a really long time. It’s all yours. Everything I have,” Jim took a deep, rattling breath, “I made a will -”

“Stop,” Winona snapped. “Stop… I don’t want to hear about that.”

“You’re sure you won’t come to see me, anyway?” Jim looked up at the darkening sky. “I’m just down the road by the store.”

“I can’t, Jim,” Winona said. “I’ll let you know when I’m on my way.”

“I really hope it’s soon,” Jim whispered. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Jim. So much.”

The line went dead and Jim let his hand fall to his side.

House so empty, need a centerpiece

Twenty racks a table cut from ebony

Cut that ivory into skinny pieces

Then she clean it with her face man I love my baby

You talking money, need a hearing aid

You talking 'bout me, I don't see a shade

Switch up my style, I take any lane

I switch up my cup, I kill any pain

Look what you've done

I'm a motherfuckin' starboy

The San Francisco night oozed possibility. Jim knew his crew would be out having a good time on their first night back, first day of shore leave, and he knew he ought to be having a good one, too.

He took two more shots in quick succession, letting the warmth hit him hard and numb his limbs for a split second before the burn set in.

He growled at the sensation but it brought a small smile to his face.

As he opened his eyes, he looked across the bar at the woman watching him. She shot him a small smile and tipped her head to the side suggestively. Jim watched as her eyes shifted to the side for a moment and an identical woman slid into the chair next to her. They had a soft cascade of gills going down the sides of their necks, terminating at the plunging necks of their dresses.

Jim raised an eyebrow and slid out of his bar stool, sidling carefully around the bar, checking his pace with each step. He was wobbly, but he could manage. After the half bottle of rye he polished off, he needed something to cool him down.

“Ladies, this seat taken?” he gestured at the stool next to them.

“By all means, Captain,” the woman closest to him crooned.

“Oh please, call me Jim,” he grinned, feeling the anxiety in his stomach start to unwind. As long as he could keep himself occupied, his worries could wait another night.

“Jim,” the other woman said with a sultry pursing of her lips as she left her chair and nestled herself in next to him. “You look lonely over there.”

“You have no idea,” he drawled as he let a hand explore around her waist.

“We were wondering,” she exchanged a look with her counterpart, “Our sister’s having a party at our apartment and now we have nowhere to go.”

“I think I might be able to find you some alternate arrangements,” he grinned. “Now tell me, I feel like I’ve seen you before…”

The women giggled.

“First year navigation,” the seated woman said. “We formally met at Cranston’s Halloween party.”

“Right,” Jim said, bouncing a finger off the hip of the woman in his arm.

“We’d be very grateful for some help tonight,” the woman leaned down and murmured in Jim’s ear. “Those kinds of parties don’t really do it for us anymore.”

“I know the feeling,” Jim eased himself out of his chair and looped his arms over the ladies’ shoulders. “Please, right this way.”

--

When Jim flipped the lights on in his apartment he was shocked to find everything exactly where he’d left it, save for a folded slip of paper on the coffee table.

“We’re just going to go freshen up,” one of the women giggled. “Where’s your bathroom?”

“Just down from the kitchen,” he grinned, pointing.

As the women bounced off together down the hall, Jim picked up the note.

Please call me when you get back from wherever the hell it is you went. I’m worried about you. - Bones

Jim pressed his lips together and folded the note tightly. Padding to the kitchen, he opened the fridge and found the untouched champagne bottle in the door. He grabbed it and pulled three flutes from a cabinet overhead. Slowly, he stepped through the quiet apartment turning the lights on and settling in the bedroom.

Placing the note on the dresser under his phone, he dropped his knapsack in the closet and closed the door around it. He picked up the remote for the sound system and put something innocuous on before settling back onto the bed as the women emerged from the bathroom in matching pink lingerie, their long, fine tails swaying behind them.

[flauntpage]

Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds

"You're not going to make everybody happy," Kayvon Thibodeaux says. He is reflecting on the lessons he learned last year as a high school sophomore. "Everybody's not going to be happy with the decisions you make, but they don't have to live your life. They're not in your shoes."

This morning, Kayvon is not wearing any shoes. He's lounging barefoot in a black sweat suit and black skullcap in the living room of his father Angelo's house, one of four units in a building wreathed by iron fencing in South Los Angeles. Angelo is outside, tweaking the engine on Kayvon's 1995 Ford Mustang. Kayvon got the Mustang earlier this spring, along with his driver's license. It was teal then; in his first order of business as a car owner, Kayvon had it painted a fresh coat of black.

The car was something of a luxury at the time. Kayvon and his mother, Shawnta Loice, lived less than 15 minutes away from Dorsey High School, where Kayvon was a student and a member of the football team. Getting to and from school was rarely a problem—he could almost always bum a ride from one of his coaches.

Back then, before he transferred to one of Southern California's most prestigious private schools and upended his life, Kayvon spoke of high school almost reverentially. It was a time in his life that would anchor him to his community. Dorsey is predominantly black, and sits right in the middle of some of LA's most vibrant African American communities. Kayvon was a 4.0 student and a star athlete. He was in his element.

"I want to be that guy," he told me on a lazy spring afternoon while he was still at Dorsey. The sun was slipping behind the high school's labyrinth of buildings as he sat on a concrete stoop. A few minutes earlier, his mom had called to let him know his driver's license had just arrived in the mail.

"I want to be that story. I want to be that reason. Everybody has a story and my story is—we do have a lot of guys in the NFL, but we don't have a lot of guys that bring up the whole community. I feel like I owe something to my community." He wanted to rebuild the school, maybe even the entire neighborhood. "When I make it," he added, "it's going to be life-changing for everybody."

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon is arguably the top high-school football player in the country in the class of 2019. With two years still to go in his high-school career, there's already talk that the sprightly, six-foot-four-inch defensive end could be the best pass rusher to come out of the West Coast this millennium. The sport wasn't the reason he decided to transfer and leave his community behind, at least during school and football hours, but it was the tool that allowed him to make that choice.

"His gift is not football," says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey's defensive backs coach. "If he does it right and plays as long as his body allows him to, football is going to platform him to somewhere his mind can't even fathom."

Now the car is a necessity. After Angelo gets the Mustang purring and slams the hood shut, Kayvon will drive 45 miles northwest to Oaks Christian, a private school in Westlake Village where a year of tuition costs $30,900. Kayvon has been there since May on full scholarship. He is pulled between two worlds: days in Westlake Village, where the median family income is $112,000 and his new high school sits a few blocks away from a Four Seasons hotel; nights back home in South Los Angeles, where the median income is $32,000 and his parents live in neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs. "Two microcosms," he says. "That's exactly what it is."

Soon Kayvon will relocate out of South Los Angeles entirely. That's what happens when you're a star football player. You go away to college, then the NFL. He believes that the decision to leave now, a couple years ahead of schedule, will benefit his future, and ultimately his community's.

"Everything is a pit stop," he says. His voice is flat, his sentences truncated. Switching schools has made him wary, spread him thin.

Kayvon says that all of his plans are still in effect. But things have changed. Being at Oaks Christian, on its sprawling campus and among its upper-crust student body, means he is no longer of the place he so earnestly wants to elevate. At 16, he has chosen to become a man apart, if only for a little while. He has to go away to come back.

"What people don't understand is you can't be stagnant," he says. "You can't get comfortable, because a lot of people in the city get comfortable with just being in the city. That's what my mom and I weren't comfortable with. We can't just be in the city all our lives. We can't just be seeing the same thing all our lives. We want to see something different, experience something different.

"That's what I'm doing. Seeing the other side of things."

The story of the game has been told enough times by now that it's almost a tall tale. In some versions, Kayvon is six foot two inches; in others, he's already his full height. Some people have him taking out as many as seven opposing players. Kayvon remembers the game being stopped entirely.

What is known and agreed upon is that, in his eighth-grade year, Kayvon played in a Pop Warner All-Star game. Somewhere along the way, he got kicked out—not for doing anything illegal, or for showing off. Rather, it was safety issue. Normal middle schoolers were physically unable to withstand the amount of force he could already dish out.

"Everything was clean hits," says Jovon Hayes, Kayvon's defensive line coach at Dorsey. "It wasn't dirty. He wasn't getting up and flexing on them. He was just hitting them too hard. They weren't getting up."

Photo by Demian Becerra

It was always this way. Kayvon was born ten pounds, four ounces. By elementary school, he was already big enough that other parents would grouse at his friends' birthday parties about how, whenever they broke the piñata, Kayvon would outmuscle the other children to the candy that spilled out.

"He's the same age as these kids," Shawnta would tell them. "He's just quicker and bigger."

His size provided levity, too. Shawnta cackles at the memory of their trip to Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights when Kayvon was 13. He teased her relentlessly for being scared by the park's decorations. Then a life-size version of Chucky from the horror film Child's Play popped out, and park-goers were treated to the sight of a seemingly grown man sprinting in the other direction at full speed.

Yet for Kayvon, being big was often stultifying. He now recognizes his physique as a blessing, but it took time to gain that perspective. It was especially hard before he got to high school.

"Back then, it was a curse," he recalls. "I can never do what everybody else did. I can never just mix in. I always stood out, I was always looked at.… Something breaks, Who did it? It's me. I'm the first one people look at."

Words, he decided, would be his great equalizer.

"Everybody was seeing me, they all looked at me waiting to see what came out of my mouth so I had to make sure it was intelligent," he says. He read books—Mike Lupica, the venerable sportswriter, became a favorite author—and developed a penchant for debating anyone on nearly any topic, sometimes just to gauge different ways he could construct an argument. When he saw the Robert Downey Jr. movie The Judge as a high-school freshman, he decided he would become a lawyer.

Today he carries himself with an easy charisma and the sort of social grace that leads one of his former Pop Warner coaches, Dorsey assistant coach Jadili Damu Johnson, to label him "banquet smart."

"You can drop him in Spain, and Kayvon is going to know everybody in Spain," Johnson says.

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon says he only began watching college football in the past 18 months. He had never even seen a football game when Antonio Patterson, one of his teachers, cornered him in the fifth grade about signing up for Pop Warner.

"If [he] never approached me and told me to play football, I'd probably be somewhere reading a book," he says. "I don't know what I'd be doing."

He began on the offensive line, the proving ground for every overgrown player without an obvious home on the field. After two years of biding his time and learning the game, he yearned to do more. "I told my coach, like, 'I can run!" he says, before breaking into the sort of machine-gun cadence that middle schoolers use to badger adults into giving them what they want. "I can run, I can run, I can run."

"In three, four years he's going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse–like frame."

The coach relented and Kayvon scored a touchdown on his very first carry. Suddenly, he was a fullback and a middle linebacker. He developed an admiration for Ray Lewis, who became his first football hero and, for years, the only player he kept tabs on. By seventh grade, he'd sprouted into a defensive end. Today, he weighs 225 pounds, with a wisp of a mustache and a jawline that looks like it was etched out of limestone.

It's the sort of package that has made him a household name in high-school-recruiting circles ever since the summer after his freshman year, when 247Sports tabbed him as the top player in the class of 2019 in their very first rankings that August—a position that, 14 months later, he has yet to relinquish. All told, of the industry's four major ranking sites, none currently have him listed lower than fifth overall nationwide in his class.

Greg Biggins, an analyst for CBS Sports and Scout.com who has covered West Coast recruiting for more than 20 years, could name only a handful of other pass rushers with Kayvon's combination of physical ability and proven production—and perhaps none of them had put these assets together as early in their high-school careers.

"In three, four years he's going to have just the ideal defensive-end, long, athletic, coming-off-the-edge, Jevon Kearse–like frame," Biggins says. "The ability to be strong at the point [of attack], to be able to have the athleticism to run down plays from behind, the motor. He doesn't take plays off. He rises to the occasion when they play really good teams."

Hayes likes to tell a story from a playoff game during Kayvon's freshman year, when the opposing team concealed a trick play within what looked like a standard huddle formation coming out of a timeout. While Dorsey's coaching staff scrambled to signal their players, Kayvon snapped on his chinstrap and blazed across the field to snuff out what should have been a big gain.

"His skill set is unbelievable," Hayes says, "but the biggest thing is his mind."

This is evident when you watch Kayvon play in person. Yes, he's bigger, and stronger, and faster, but he's also smarter. He moves with a greater sense of purpose. All those academic gifts apply on the field, too.

Photo by Demian Becerra

Last November, in Dorsey's second-round playoff game against San Pedro High School, Kayvon delivered in expected ways: the pyrotechnic bursts around the left tackle's outside shoulder, the loping strides to chase down a ball carrier on the backside of a second-quarter run, the resolute intensity with which he snatched a ball out of the arms of a running back deep inside Dorsey territory.

There was something more, though, something ineffable.

He was hobbled during the San Pedro game, a byproduct of a play a few weeks earlier, when he eagerly scooped up a short kickoff and tried to reenact his past life as a running back by returning it. Instead, he sprained his knee, the sort of injury that could sideline a player for weeks. "The only time when I get hurt in football is when I try to do too much," he says.

"My childhood has been compact. That's part of being recruited. You can't be a kid."

But if Kayvon's body had lost a step, his mind seemed to compensate for it, and his ability to anticipate his opponent's next move shone through. That's the best explanation for what happened late in the third quarter, when, with Dorsey up 25-3 and San Pedro about to punt, Kayvon lined up on the outside, rocked back and forth like a six-foot-four mechanical metronome keeping time, and burst through to block the attempt. It also explains how he did the very same thing on a field-goal try one quarter later.

The postgame reaction to all of this was relatively muted, even after it was revealed that Kayvon had been playing with a knee injury. He had only managed half a sack—a pittance given that he took down the quarterback 16 times that season. But that's life as the most coveted football prospect in America. A forced fumble, a blocked kick, and a blocked punt, all on a bad knee, still amount to something of an off night.

By the time he graduates, Kayvon Thibodeaux will have spent three-fourths of high school as arguably the most scrutinized, most sought-after high-school prospect in the country. This means three years of beseeching by eager college coaches, three years of being side-eyed by other prospects jostling for similar attention, three years of fan bases across the country prodding him to attend their favorite school.

Already, it wears on him.

"My childhood has been compact," he says. "That's part of being recruited. You can't be a kid."

To the wider world, that process began last summer, when the University of Utah extended him his very first scholarship offer. Functionally, however, his recruitment kicked off years before that. Just as colleges scout high schools to restock their talent base, high schools across the country use Pop Warner teams to replenish theirs. In Los Angeles, the process has intensified this decade, with wealthier schools as far as 90 minutes away disembarking for the inner city to poach the best talent.

Which is how Kayvon had coaches approaching him on the sidelines of his games before he even hit puberty. By the time he was in eighth grade, Shawnta was taking meetings with schools from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley and everywhere in between, each dangling great promises for her only child. Of this experience, his father Angelo says, "It was amazing but it also made me want to hold him tighter. As a parent, it made me want to shield him even more."

Photo by Demian Becerra

Kayvon initially enrolled at Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a private-school powerhouse known for churning out alumni like recent USC All-Americans and NFL draftees Robert Woods, Marqise Lee, and Adoree' Jackson. In truth, it wasn't much of a decision. "I had all of my eggs in one basket," he admits now. His best friend, Justin (Antonio Patterson's son), was already there, and it didn't hurt that, for the previous two years, the bulk of Serra's coaching staff could be spotted at every one of his Pop Warner games.

Then, midway through his first semester in 2015, he left. According to Kayvon, playing time was a major factor: Serra's varsity team featured one of the best defensive ends in the country, leaving Kayvon to toil away on jayvee until a brief cameo at the end of the season. "I had about ten plays," he says, "and that was garbage time." Shawnta says the transfer was precipitated by their moving farther away from the school into a new apartment in South Los Angeles.

Whatever the reason, by mid-October, Kayvon found himself in an unlikely place. For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey, whose campus sits at the nexus of four distinct neighborhoods and is able to cull talent from each of them. The coaching staff almost exclusively comprises Dorsey alumni who played major college or professional ball, including Hayes, a multi-year starter at Arizona; Stafon Johnson, who played for USC and then the Tennessee Titans; and head coach Charles Mincey, who starred at Washington and played for four NFL teams over ten seasons.

In a different era, the idea of a player like Kayvon Thibodeaux starring at Dorsey the way, say, Keyshawn Johnson once had would have been the natural order of things, but the fever pitch of private-school recruiting has changed all that. As the Serras of the world rose in prominence, they did so at the expense of neighborhood schools that depend on the talent in their backyard to stay in their communities. Few programs were hit harder than Dorsey, which had sunk from perennial city champions to a combined 20-15 record from 2012 through 2014. College coaches, cognizant of the talent drain, stopped turning up as often. But also, Hayes says, "you get schools who don't always come to the inner city because of the stigma that kids don't have the grades [to qualify for college]."

For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players.

So when Kayvon Thibodeaux, the athletic and academic dynamo, decided to enroll at Dorsey, he was met with skepticism.

"'Dorsey? I went to Dorsey. You think you're going to Dorsey?'" he recalls being asked.

"Yeah, that's what I want to do," he'd reply.

His reasons were mostly pragmatic and entirely personal. It was close to home, for one thing, and he would not want for playing time on the varsity team. It also boasted a law magnet program, with its opportunities for him to conduct mock trials and serve on a jury in teen court cases.

Kayvon debuted on Dorsey's varsity squad that November during first-round playoff game against Carson Senior High. He promptly registered a sack. "That was throwing him in the fire," says Ivan Stevenson, the Dorsey defensive backs coach. "[We told him,] 'Go be athletic.'"

By mid-summer, the first crush of scholarship offers arrived. Then came the 247Sports ranking. In fewer than nine months, he had rocketed from an unknown jayvee player to the top recruit in his class.

Because of Kayvon, college coaches once again had a reason to show up at Dorsey. "A lot of kids benefit from his success," Hayes said, speaking to me before Kayvon transferred. "When a school comes up here, they'll look at him and go, 'Yeah, yeah, but who is the guy on the other side of him? Who is the D-tackle? Who's that safety right there running to the ball? They'll have a chance to come up here and see certain athletes that they probably didn't come up here for.… It opens up doors for everybody." He speaks from experience: while he was a student at Dorsey, Hayes became a highly touted prospect in part by blocking for Stafon Johnson, the Dons' star running back at the time.

Kayvon eagerly played his part. This spring, he took the unusual step of canceling any appearances at off-season showcase events, the very same camps that one year earlier had helped put him on the map. Why? He had nothing to prove, for one thing. It also effectively funneled every college and media outlet to Dorsey in pursuit of Kayvon, whereupon he used his clout to broker introductions for many of his teammates.

"You don't come to a place and [only] greet the man of the house," he joked during a conversation this spring. "You've got to get the whole family." I told him that showed a lot of confidence for a 16-year-old. "It is," he replied, "but closed mouths don't get fed. And if you don't have a mouth, you don't get fed. So, I'm giving them a mouth."

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Dorsey finished 11-3 last season. New players are transferring in from all over the city. Their junior and senior ranks have ballooned, and now the coaching staff estimates as many as eight players on campus could play in one of college football's elite Power Five conferences. Kayvon's success, says Hayes, "shows it can be done in the inner city."

Kayvon embraced all of it. Sitting there on the stoop at Dorsey this spring, a year and a half after he had left Serra, he felt he'd found what he was searching for the whole time: a place to belong.

"Dorsey is home. Dorsey's home for everybody," he says. "If you've got problems, if you've got anything, you come to Dorsey.… It's the way out. It's the back door. If you're in trouble, in this or that, you come to Dorsey. You'll always find somebody that will help you. You ain't got a ride home? You'll never have to walk. Somebody."

All of these things are bigger than Kayvon Thibodeaux. But, as the team's most recognizable face, the idea of him began to loom larger than any scholarship offer or quarterback sack. He was the player who abandoned the private-school machine to return to the inner city when all avenues pointed in the other direction. He was the student who reminded people that the neighborhood schools could educate their athletes on a level attractive even to universities like Stanford and Northwestern. He was proof that Dorsey could still incubate the very best talent on the West Coast. He was hope. He was validation.

And then, he was gone.

Photo by Demian Becerra

As his mother, Shawnta Loice, tells it, the move had long been in the works.

It was an accident that she and Kayvon wound up in their home near Dorsey, a duplex just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, in the shadow of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Part of the ceiling had caved in at their old apartment, and they had been relying on temporary accommodations in a guesthouse at the time she signed the duplex lease. Only after they moved in did she realize that it was located in the middle of gang territory.

Originally, the plan had been to move while keeping Kayvon enrolled at Dorsey, but Shawnta had long harbored worries that Kayvon wasn't being challenged enough academically. "It was too easy for him," she says. "He didn't have a lot of homework. He didn't have a lot of projects." Dorsey's coaching staff was well versed in her concerns. She had met with them before his sophomore season about the matter, and she routinely checked in to see when Kayvon could be placed into the most advanced classes on campus.

When she brought the issue up again ahead of Kayvon's junior year, Junie Rivero, Dorsey's special teams coach and a longtime friend of the family, was prepared. He laid out a plan to enroll Kayvon in a gauntlet of AP classes, possibly allowing him to graduate a semester early if he so chose. Besides, he told her, "he's got a 4.0. He's got over 30 scholarships. Not just football scholarships—top academic schools. What else could another school do for you that we couldn't?"

Shawnta didn't doubt Dorsey's intentions, but she worried about how rigorous the curriculum could truly be, as well as about the impact if it wasn't enough. "Sometimes I feel like [you] have to surround yourself around kids that have the same goals you have in life, that want to actually do something," she says. According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Unified School district, just 32 percent of Dorsey students complete all of their A-G courses—the statewide curriculum established by University of California-system faculty—with a C or better in each. Only 16 percent are enrolled in an AP class.

When reached for comment regarding Shawnta's concerns, Dorsey co-athletic director and football program coordinator Irvin Davis said, "I respect students' choice to go down the path that they think will be the most conducive for them. When Kayvon was here, he was an outstanding student in the classroom, he's a very nice young man and I wish him the best in everything he endeavors to do. All of the opportunities that a person could ever look for academically are here for them at Dorsey High School."

Demian Becerra

To Shawnta, getting Kayvon admitted to a top university was one thing. Making sure he was equipped to thrive there was another. "If I give it another year, then he's going to be a senior," she said. "I didn't want him to get to college and then not really be [prepared.]"

She concluded that her own past might offer the best pathway for her son's future. Shawnta grew up in South Los Angeles, too, before her family moved to white-bread Orange County for her high-school years. The change suited her. She found the classes to be more challenging and the environment more tranquil. She can't know for certain how much it ultimately improved her circumstances, but she notes that, years later, "a lot of my friends that way have done more than a lot of my friends this way that I've known from growing up."

She wanted to give Kayvon a new life, away from the inner city and its hardships. "There are bigger things than what you see right here that you can actually do with your life," she told him. So, she made a decision: After the school year, they would move to Woodland Hills, a middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley, the sort of place where Shawnta would no longer need to bar Kayvon from stepping outside once the sun set.

"You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city? Let's be honest. If football wasn't in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No."

Central to that new life would be a new school. To her, transferring Kayvon to Oaks Christian was a no-brainer, the type of opportunity kids from single-parent homes in the inner city simply don't receive: $60,000 worth of free tuition at one of the state's premier college preparatory schools. Already, she sees an uptick in his academic workload. The majority of his classmates come from stable home lives, where they are reared to view college as an expectation. Why wouldn't she want this for him?

For all his academic prowess, Kayvon is on full scholarship at Oaks Christian because of what he can do on the football field. He is no longer ensconced at Dorsey on a team of players with similar life experiences, coached by men who have known him since before he even reached puberty, who drove him home from school when he didn't have a ride and fed him when he asked for dinner. He is now a stranger on a campus that just lost a star wide receiver, linebacker and quarterback, the latter of whom publicly declared that Oaks Christian is "biased towards money." His former coaches worry that he'll be treated as a commodity instead of a teenager.

"You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city?" Stevenson says. "Let's be honest. If football wasn't in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No."

"We knew Kayvon when Kayvon was just Kayvon Thibodeaux, not Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation," adds Rivero. "The only thing Oaks Christian is getting is Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation.... I hope the coaches can look out for him and not just exploit him because he's the number one player."

More than that, they wonder about the damage the transfer could do to Kayvon's greater goals. Can he really build up a community that he's no longer a part of? And if he can't, will Oaks Christian ever truly embrace him as an outsider?

"I see a lot of schools, once you're no longer needed, I see a lot of players get thrown in the trash," says Jadili Damu Johnson, the Dorsey assistant who coached Kayvon since his Pop Warner days. He quickly corrects himself. They are not actively discarded so much as forgotten, slowly growing invisible once they can no longer capture a crowd's attention on Friday nights. "They're not given that phone call, 'Hey we've got stuff going on, you coming to the rally?'"

But, Johnson adds, all of their concerns intermingle with the ache of being left behind. No matter what happens, Kayvon Thibodeaux will never mean more to a place than the one he just left.

"He's great in every aspect," Johnson says. "We're just sad, because we wanted him to show the greatness from here forever."

For his part, Kayvon is mindful of the sacrifices he's made to get here. He says that he originally did not want to leave Dorsey and the camaraderie he built. Nor is he under any illusion that a depleted Oaks Christian makes for a better on-field situation than the program he helped breathe new life into. "If I was going for football, I would have stayed at Dorsey," he says. "I love everybody, of course. That's my team."

"But at the end of the day," he adds, "it wasn't tough for Kevin Durant to leave the Thunder… It's what's best."

Not everyone understood.

"Some people were mad," he says. "Some people were sad.… People look at me like I did something wrong." That, he says, forced him to learn a second lesson: "When you get emotions into it, that's when stuff doesn't go right."

Though he may no longer go to school in South Los Angeles, his loyalty to the neighborhood hasn't changed. He still wants to be a lawyer, and still wants give back to South Los Angeles. As inspiration for how he can help his community from the outside, he cites the example of Nipsey Hussle, a popular LA rapper from nearby Crenshaw whose numerous charitable ventures include helping fund the reopening, this summer, of World on Wheels, a legendary Mid-City roller rink that functioned as a safe space for young people throughout the area.

"He made it and he's still bringing money back to his community," Kayvon says. "I can help them once I set myself up.… [The plan] tweaked a little bit but the overall message didn't."

A few minutes after Kayvon and I speak, he's in the Mustang, motoring toward Interstate 110. The only thing on the day's docket is an off-season workout, one that might actually take less time to complete than the commute to and from his new reality. At that point, he hasn't spent much time on the Oaks Christian campus—just a few weeks last spring, as well as summer school—and he hasn't had "the full effect" yet.

But there are aspects that will always seem alien to him. The school parking lot is dotted with luxury cars—BMWs, Lexuses, Mercedes Benzes, and even a Maserati. "The engine sounds like an animal," he says. "Out there, it's spoon-fed.… We don't have the same problems." He recalls overhearing a conversation in the school hallway between two girls, with one being irate at how someone looked at her. "That's what you're mad about? Your whole day is messed up because of that?" he says in his father's house, which sits only a couple zip codes from Westlake Village but at times feels like an entirely different universe.

For better or worse, Oaks Christian is just the latest pit stop for Kayvon Thibodeaux, one that brings fresh challenges. He'll learn a new defense, and he'll add snaps on offense at tight end to his job description. As a rising junior, he'll have more contact with college coaches. He's preparing to parse their intentions.

"People constantly feeding you bad cars, like car salesmen," he says. "They're all selling you a dream, selling you what you think you've got and not really what it is." His criteria for a college boils down to whichever program can help facilitate those dreams, he says. "Wherever I can get business taken care of."

Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds

“You’re not going to make everybody happy,” Kayvon Thibodeaux says. He is reflecting on the lessons he learned last year as a high school sophomore. “Everybody’s not going to be happy with the decisions you make but they don’t have to live your life. They’re not in your shoes.”

This morning, Kayvon is not wearing any shoes. He’s lounging barefoot in a black sweatsuit and black skull cap in the living room of his father Angelo’s house, one of four units in a building wreathed by iron fencing in South Los Angeles. Angelo is outside, tweaking the engine on Kayvon’s 1995 Ford Mustang. Kayvon got the Mustang earlier this spring, along with his driver’s license. It was teal then; in his first order of business as a car owner, Kayvon had it painted a fresh coat of black.

Not all that long ago, the car was something of a luxury. Kayvon and his mother, Shawnta Loice, lived less than 15 minutes away from Dorsey High School. Getting to and from school was rarely a problem. He could almost always bum a ride from one of his coaches. Back then, before he transferred to one of Southern California’s most prestigious private schools, upending his life, Kayvon spoke of high school almost reverentially. It was the time in his life that would anchor him to his community. Dorsey is predominantly black, and sits right in the middle of some of L.A.’s most vibrant African American communities. Kayvon was a 4.0 student. He was in his element.

“I want to be that guy,” he had told me on a lazy spring afternoon while he was still at Dorsey. The sun was slipping behind the high school’s labyrinth of outdoor buildings and he sat on a concrete stoop. A few minutes earlier, his mom called to let him know his driver’s license had just arrived in the mail.

“I want to be that story. I want to be that reason. Everybody has a story and my story is—we do have a lot of guys in the NFL, but we don’t have a lot of guys that bring up the whole community. I feel like I owe something to my community.” He wanted to rebuild the school, maybe even the entire neighborhood. “When I make it,” he added, “it’s going to be life-changing for everybody.”

Demian Becerra

Kayvon is arguably the top high school football player in the country in the class of 2019. With two years still to go in his high school career, there’s already talk that the sprightly, six-foot-four-inch defensive end could be the best pass rusher to come out of the West Coast this millennium. The sport isn’t the reason he decided to transfer and leave his community behind—at least during school and football hours. But it was the tool that allowed him to.

“His gift is not football,” says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey’s defensive backs coach. “If he does it right and plays as long as his body allows him to, football is going to platform him to somewhere his mind can’t even fathom.”

Now the car is a necessity. After Angelo gets the Mustang purring and slams the hood shut, Kayvon will drive 45 miles northwest to Oaks Christian, a private school in Westlake Village where a year of tuition costs $30,900. Kayvon has been there since May on full scholarship. He is pulled between two worlds: Days in Westlake Village, where the median family income is $112,000 and his new high school sits a few blocks away from a Four Seasons hotel; nights back home in South Los Angeles, where the median income is $32,000 and his parents live in neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs. “Two microcosms,” he says. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Soon Kayvon will relocate out of South Los Angeles entirely. That’s what happens when you’re a star football player. You go away to college, then the NFL. He believes that the decision to leave now, a couple years ahead of schedule, will benefit his future, and ultimately his community’s.

“Everything is a pit stop,” he says. His voice is flat, his sentences truncated. Switching schools has made him wary. Spread him thin.

Kayvon says that all of his plans are still in effect. But things have changed. Being at Oaks Christian, on its sprawling campus and among its upper crust student body, means he is no longer of the place he so earnestly wants to elevate. At 16, he has chosen to become a man apart, if only for a little while. He has to go away to come back.

“What people don’t understand is you can’t be stagnant,” he says. “You can’t get comfortable, because a lot of people in the city get comfortable with just being in the city. That’s what my mom and I weren’t comfortable with. We can’t just be in the city all our lives. We can’t just be seeing the same thing all our lives. We want to see something different, experience something different.

“That’s what I’m doing. Seeing the other side of things.”

The story has been told enough times by now that it’s almost a tall tale. In some versions, Kayvon is six-foot-two-inches; in others, he’s already his full height. Some people have him taking out as many as seven opposing players. Kayvon remembers the game being stopped entirely.

What is known and agreed upon is that, in Kayvon’s eighth grade year, he played in a Pop Warner All-Star game. Somewhere along the way, he was kicked out—not for doing anything illegal, or for showing off. Rather, it was safety issue. Normal middle schoolers were physically unable to withstand the amount of force he could already dish out.

“Everything was clean hits,” says Jovon Hayes, Thibodeaux’s defensive line coach at Dorsey. “It wasn’t dirty. He wasn’t getting up and flexing on them. He was just hitting them too hard. They weren’t getting up.”

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It was always this way. Kayvon was born ten pounds, four ounces, and by elementary school, he was already big enough that parents at his friends’ birthday parties would grouse about how, whenever they broke the piñata, Kayvon would outmuscle the other children to the candy that spilled out.

“He’s the same age as these kids,” Shawnta would tell them. “He’s just quicker and bigger.”

His size provided levity, too. Shawnta cackles at the memory of their trip to Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights, when a then 13-year-old Kayvon teased her relentlessly for being scared by the park’s decorations. Then a life-sized version of Chucky from the horror film Child’s Play popped out, and park-goers were treated to the sight of a seemingly grown man sprinting the other direction at full speed.

Yet for Kayvon, being big was often stultifying. He now recognizes his physique as a blessing, but it took time to gain perspective. It was especially hard before he got to high school.

“Back then, it was a curse,” he recalls. “I can never do what everybody else did. I can never just mix in. I always stood out, I was always looked at… Something breaks, Who did it? It’s me. I’m the first one people look at.”

Words, he decided, would be his great equalizer.

“Everybody was seeing me, they all looked at me waiting to see what came out of my mouth so I had to make sure it was intelligent,” he says. He read books—Mike Lupica, the venerable sportswriter, became a favorite author—and developed a penchant for debating anyone on nearly any topic, sometimes just to gauge different ways he could construct an argument. When he saw the Robert Downey Jr. movie The Judge as a high school freshman, he decided he would become a lawyer.

Two years later, he carries himself with an easy charisma and the sort of social graces that lead one of his former Pop Warner coaches and a Dorsey assistant coach, Jadili Damu Johnson, to label Kayvon “banquet smart.”

“You can drop him in Spain, and Kayvon is going to know everybody in Spain,” Johnson says.

Demian Becerra

Kayvon says he only began watching college football in the last year-and-a-half. He had never even seen a football game when Antonio Patterson, one of his teachers, cornered Kayvon in the fifth grade about signing up for Pop Warner.

“If [he] never approached me and told me to play football, I’d probably be somewhere reading a book,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d be doing.”

He began on the offensive line, the proving ground for every overgrown player without an obvious home on the field. He bided his time and learned the game until, two years later, he yearned to do more. “I told my coach, like, ‘I can run!” he says, before breaking into the sort of machine gun cadence that middle schoolers use to badger adults into giving them what they want: “I can run, I can run, I can run.”

“In three, four years he’s going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse-like frame.”

The coach relented and on Kayvon’s very first carry, he scored a touchdown. Suddenly, he was a fullback and a middle linebacker. He developed an admiration for Ray Lewis, who became his first football hero and, for years, the only player he kept tabs on. By seventh grade, he’d sprouted into a defensive end. Today, he weighs 225 pounds, with a wisp of a mustache and a jawline that looks like it was etched out of limestone.

It’s the sort of package that made him a household name in high school recruiting circles ever since the summer of his freshman year, when 247Sports tabbed him as the top player in the class of 2019 in their very first rankings released last August. Nobody has knocked him off since. All told, of the industry’s four major ranking sites, none currently have him listed lower than fifth overall nationwide in his class.

Greg Biggins, an analyst for CBS Sports and Scout.com who’s covered West Coast recruiting for more than 20 years, could only name a handful of other pass rushers with Thibodeaux’s combination of physical ability and proven production––perhaps none of whom had put these assets together as early in their high school careers.

“In three, four years he’s going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse-like frame,” Biggins says. “The ability to be strong at the point [of attack], to be able to have the athleticism to run down plays from behind, the motor. He doesn’t take plays off. He rises to the occasion when they play really good teams.”

Hayes likes to tell the story of a play that happened in a playoff game during Kayvon’s freshman year, when the opposing team concealed a trick play within what looked like a standard huddle formation coming out of a timeout. While Dorsey’s coaching staff scrambled to signal their players, Kayvon snapped on his chinstrap and blazed across the field to snuff out what should have been a big gain.

“His skill set is unbelievable,” Hayes says, “but the biggest thing is his mind.”

This is evident when you watch Kayvon play in person. Yes, he’s bigger, and stronger, and faster, but he’s also smarter. He moves with a greater sense of purpose. All those academic gifts apply on the field too.

Demian Becerra

Last November, in Dorsey’s second-round playoff game against San Pedro High School, Kayvon delivered in expected ways: The pyrotechnic bursts around the left tackle’s outside shoulder, the loping strides to chase down a ball carrier on the backside of a second quarter run, the resolute intensity with which he snatched a ball out of the arms of a running back deep inside Dorsey territory.

There was something more, though, something ineffable.

He was hobbled during the San Pedro game, a byproduct of a play a few weeks earlier, when he eagerly scooped up a short kickoff and tried to re-enact his past life as a running back by returning it. Instead, he sprained his knee, the sort of injury that could sideline a player for weeks. “The only time when I get hurt in football is when I try to do too much,” he says.

“My childhood has been compact. That’s part of being recruited. You can’t be a kid.”

But as Kayvon’s body lost a step, his mind seemed to compensate, and his ability to diagnose an opponent’s next move shone through. That’s the best course of explanation for what happened late in the third quarter of the San Pedro game, when, with Dorsey up 25-3 and awaiting a punt, Kayvon lined up on the outside, rocked back and forth like a 6-foot-4 metronome keeping time, and burst through to block the attempt. It also explains how, one quarter later, he did the very same thing on a field goal try.

The postgame reaction to all of this was relatively muted, even after it was revealed that Kayvon was playing with a knee injury. He had only managed half a sack—a pittance given that he took down the quarterback 16 times last year. But that’s life as the most coveted football prospect in America. A forced a fumble, blocked a kick and blocked a punt, all on a bad knee, still amount to something of an off night.

By the time he graduates, Kayvon Thibodeaux will have spent three-fourths of high school as arguably the most scrutinized, most sought-after high school prospect in the country. This means three years of beseeching by eager college coaches, three years of being side-eyed by other prospects jostling for similar attention, three years of fan bases across the country prodding him to attend their favorite school.

Already, it wears on him.

“My childhood has been compact,” he says. “That’s part of being recruited. You can’t be a kid.”

To the wider world, that process began last summer, when the University of Utah extended him his very first scholarship offer. Functionally speaking, however, his recruitment kicked off years before that. Just as colleges scout high schools to restock their talent base, high schools across the country use Pop Warner teams to replenish theirs. In Los Angeles, the process has intensified this decade, with wealthier schools as far as 90 minutes away decamping for the inner city to poach the best talent.

Which is how, before he even hit puberty, Kayvon had coaches approaching him on the sidelines of his games. By eighth grade, Shawnta was taking meetings with schools from from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley to everywhere in between, each dangling great promises for her only child. Of this experience, his father Angelo says, “It was amazing but it also made me want to hold him tighter. As a parent, it made me want to shield him even more.”

Demian Becerra

Kayvon initially chose Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a private school powerhouse known for churning out recent USC All-Americans and NFL draftees Robert Woods, Marqise Lee and Adoree’ Jackson. In truth, it wasn’t much of a decision. “I had all of my eggs in one basket,” he admits now. His best friend, Justin (Antonio Patterson’s son) was already enrolled and it didn’t hurt that, for the last two years, the bulk of Serra’s coaching staff could be spotted at each one of his Pop Warner games.

Then, midway through his first semester in 2015, he left. According to Kayvon, playing time was a major factor: Serra’s varsity team featured one of the best defensive ends in the country, and Kayvon consequently toiled away on jayvee until a brief cameo at the end of the season. “I had about ten plays,” he says, “and that was garbage time.” Shawnta says the transfer was precipitated by moving further from the school into a new apartment in South Los Angeles.

Whatever the reason, by mid-October, Kayvon found himself in an unlikely place. For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey, whose campus sits at the epicenter of four distinct neighborhoods and is able to cull talent from each of them. The coaching staff is almost exclusively comprised of Dorsey alumni who played major college or professional ball, from Hayes, a multi-year starter at Arizona, to Stafon Johnson, who played for USC and then the Tennessee Titans, to head coach Charles Mincey, who starred at Washington and played ten NFL seasons for four teams.

In a different era, the idea of a player like Kayvon Thibodeaux starring at Dorsey the way, say, Keyshawn Johnson once had would have been the natural order of things. But the fever pitch of private school recruiting has changed all that. As the Serras of the world rose in prominence, they did so at the expense of the neighborhood schools that depend on the talent in their backyard to stay in their communities. Few programs were hit harder than Dorsey, which had sunk from perennial city champions to treading water at a combined 20-15 from 2012 through 2014. College coaches stopped turning up as often, cognizant of the talent drain. But also, Hayes says, “You get schools who don’t always come to the inner city because of the stigma that kids don’t have the grades [to qualify for college].”

For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey.

So when Kayvon Thibodeaux, the athletic and academic dynamo, decided to enroll at Dorsey, he was met with skepticism even from all angles.

“‘Dorsey? I went to Dorsey. You think you’re going to Dorsey?'” he recalls being asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I want to do,” he’d reply.

His reasons were mostly pragmatic, and entirely personal. It was close to home, for one thing, and he would not want for playing time on the varsity team. It also boasted a law magnet program, in which he would conduct mock trials and serve on a jury in teen court cases.

Kayvon debuted for Dorsey’s varsity squad during a November 2015 first-round playoff game against Carson Senior High. He promptly registered a sack. “That was throwing him in the fire,” says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey’s defensive backs coach. “[We told him] ‘Go be athletic.'”

By mid-summer, the first crush of scholarship offers arrived. Then came the 247Sports ranking. In under nine months, he rocketed from an unknown jayvee player to the top recruit in his class.

Because of Kayvon, college coaches once again had a reason to show up at Dorsey. “A lot of kids benefit from his success,” Hayes said, speaking to me before Kayvon transferred. “When a school comes up here, they’ll look at him and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, but who is the guy on the other side of him? Who is the D-tackle? Who’s that safety right there running to the ball? They’ll have a chance to come up here and see certain athletes that they probably didn’t come up here for… It opens up doors for everybody.” He speaks from experience: Once a player at Dorsey himself, Hayes became a highly-touted prospect in part by blocking for Stafon Johnson, the Dons’ star running back at the time.

Kayvon eagerly played his part. This spring, he took the unusual step of canceling any appearances at offseason showcase events, the very same camps that’d helped put him on the map one year earlier. He had nothing to prove, for one thing. But it also funneled every college and media outlet to find him at Dorsey, whereupon he used his clout to broker introductions for many of his teammates.

“You don’t come to a place and [only] greet the man of the house,” he joked during a conversation this spring. “You’ve got to get the whole family.” I tell him it’s a lot of confidence for a 16-year-old. “It is, but closed mouths don’t get fed. And if you don’t have a mouth, you don’t get fed. So, I’m giving them a mouth.”

Demian Becerra

Dorsey finished 11-3 last season. New players are transferring in from all over the city. Their junior and senior ranks have ballooned to a degree where the coaching staff estimates that there are as many as eight players on campus who could play in one of college football’s elite “power five” conferences. Kayvon’s success, says Hayes, “shows it can be done in the inner city.”

Kayvon embraced all of it. Sitting there on the stoop, a year and a half after he left Serra, he felt he’d found what he was searching for the whole time: A place to belong.

“Dorsey is home. Dorsey’s home for everybody,” he says. “If you’ve got problems, if you’ve got anything, you come to Dorsey… It’s the way out. It’s the back door. If you’re in trouble, in this or that, you come to Dorsey. You’ll always find somebody that will help you. You ain’t got a ride home? You’ll never have to walk. Somebody.“

All of these things are bigger than Kayvon Thibodeaux. But, as the team’s most recognizable face, the idea of him began to loom larger than any scholarship offer or quarterback sack. He was the player who abandoned the private school machine to return to the inner city when all avenues pointed in the other direction. He was the student who reminded people that the neighborhood schools could educate their athletes on a level attractive even to universities like Stanford and Northwestern. He was proof that Dorsey could still incubate the very best talent on the West coast. He was hope. He was validation.

And then, he was gone.

As his mother Shawnta Loice tells it, a move had long been in the works.

It was an accident that she and Kayvon wound up in their home near Dorsey, a duplex just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, in the shadow of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. She signed a lease when they were staying in a guest house, a temporary accommodation after part of the ceiling caved in at their old apartment. Only after they moved in did she realize that the duplex was in the middle of gang territory.

Originally, the plan had been to move and keep Kayvon enrolled at Dorsey. But Shawnta had long harbored worries that Kayvon wasn’t being challenged enough academically. “It was too easy for him,” she says. “He didn’t have a lot of homework. He didn’t have a lot of projects.” Dorsey’s coaching staff was well-versed in her concerns. She had met with them before his sophomore season to express as much, and she routinely checked in to see when Kayvon could be placed into the most advanced classes on campus.

This spring, she brought it up again ahead of Kayvon’s junior year. Junie Rivero, Dorsey’s special teams coach and a longtime friend of the family’s, was prepared. He laid out a plan to enroll Kayvon in a gauntlet of AP classes, possibly allowing him to graduate a semester early if he so chose. Besides, he told her, “He’s got a 4.0. He’s got over 30 scholarships. Not just football scholarships—top academic schools. What else could another school do for you that we couldn’t?”

Shawnta didn’t doubt Dorsey’s intentions. But she worried about how rigorous the curriculum could truly be, as well as about the impact if it wasn’t enough. According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Unified School district, just 32 percent of Dorsey students complete all of their A-G courses—the statewide curriculum established by University of California-system faculty—with a C or better in each. Only 16 percent are enrolled in an AP class. “Sometimes I feel like [you] have to surround yourself around kids that have the same goals you have in life, that want to actually do something,” she says.

When reached for comment regarding Shawnta’s concerns, Dorsey co-athletic director and football program coordinator Irvin Davis said the following: “I respect students’ choice to go down the path that they think will be the most conducive for them. When Kayvon was here, he was an outstanding student in the classroom, he’s a very nice young man and I wish him the best in everything he endeavors to do. All of the opportunities that a person could ever look for academically are here for them at Dorsey High School.”

Demian Becerra

To Shawnta, getting Kayvon admitted to a top university was one thing. Making sure he was equipped to thrive was another. “If I give it another year, then he’s going to be a senior,” she said. “I didn’t want him to get to college and then not really be [prepared.]”

She concluded that her own past might offer the best pathway for her son’s future. Shawnta grew up in South Los Angeles, too, before her family moved to white-bread Orange County for her high school years. The change suited her. She found the classes to be more challenging and the environment more tranquil. She couldn’t know for certain how much it ultimately improved her circumstances. But years later, she noted, “A lot of my friends that way have done more than a lot of my friends this way that I’ve known from growing up.”

She wanted to give Kayvon a new life, away from the inner city and its hardships. “There are bigger things than what you see right here that you can actually do with your life,” she told him. So, she made a decision: After the school year, they would move to Woodland Hills, a middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley, the sort of place where Shawnta would no longer need to bar Kayvon from stepping outside once the sun set.

“You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city? Let’s be honest. If football wasn’t in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No.”

Central to that new life would be a new school. To her, transferring Kayvon to Oaks Christian was a no-brainer, the type of opportunity kids from single-parent homes in the inner city simply don’t receive: $60,000 worth of free tuition at one of the state’s premier college preparatory schools. Already, she sees an uptick in his academic workload. The majority of his classmates come from stable home lives, where they are reared to view college as an expectation. Why wouldn’t she want this for him?

But for all his academic prowess, Kayvon Thibodeaux is on full scholarship at Oaks Christian because of what he can do on the football field. He is no longer ensconced at Dorsey on a team of players with similar life experiences, coached by men who have known him since before he even reached puberty, who drove him home from school when he didn’t have a ride and fed him when he asked for dinner. He is now a stranger on a campus that just lost a star wide receiver, linebacker and quarterback, the latter of whom publicly declared that Oaks Christian is “biased towards money.” His former coaches worry he’ll be treated as a commodity instead of a teenager.

“You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city?” Stevenson says. “Let’s be honest. If football wasn’t in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No.”

“We knew Kayvon when Kayvon was just Kayvon Thibodeaux, not Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation,” adds Rivero. “The only thing Oaks Christian is getting is Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation… I hope the coaches can look out for him and not just exploit him because he’s the number one player.”

More than that, they wonder about the damage the transfer could do to Kayvon’s greater goals. Can he really build up a community that he’s no longer a part of? And if he can’t, will Oaks Christian ever truly embrace him as an outsider?

“I see a lot of schools, once you’re no longer needed, I see a lot of players get thrown in the trash,” says Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant who’s coached Kayvon since his Pop Warner days. He quickly corrects himself. They are not actively discarded so much as forgotten, slowly growing invisible once they can no longer capture a crowd’s attention on Friday nights. “They’re not given that phone call, ‘Hey we’ve got stuff going on, you coming to the rally?'”

But, Johnson adds, all of their concerns intermingle with the ache of being left behind. No matter what happens, Kayvon Thibodeaux will never mean more to a place than the one he just left.

“He’s great in every aspect,” Johnson says. “We’re just sad, because we wanted him to show the greatness from here forever.”

For his part, Kayvon is mindful of the sacrifices he’s made to get here. He says that he originally did not want to leave Dorsey and the camaraderie he built. Nor is he under any illusion that a depleted Oaks Christian makes for a better on-field situation than the program he helped breathe new life into. “If I was going for football, I would have stayed at Dorsey,” he says. “I love everybody, of course. That’s my team.”

“But at the end of the day,” he adds, “it wasn’t tough for Kevin Durant to leave the Thunder… It’s what’s best.”

Not everyone understood.

“Some people were mad,” he says. “Some people were sad… People look at me like I did something wrong.” That, he says, forced him to learn a second lesson: “When you get emotions into it, that’s when stuff doesn’t go right.”

Though he may no longer go to school in South Los Angeles, his loyalty to the neighborhood hasn’t changed. He still wants to be a lawyer, and still wants give back to South Los Angeles. He cites the example of Nipsey Hussle––a popular L.A. rapper from nearby Crenshaw whose numerous charitable ventures include helping fund the reopening of World on Wheels, a legendary Mid-City roller rink that functioned as a safe space for young people throughout the area, earlier this summer––as inspiration for how he can help his community from the outside back in.

“He made it and he’s still bringing money back to his community,” he says. “I can help them once I set myself up… [the plan] tweaked a little bit but the overall message didn’t.”

A few minutes after Kayvon and I speak, he’s in the Mustang, motoring toward Interstate 110. The only thing on the day’s docket is an offseason workout, one that might actually be shorter than the commute to and from his new reality. At the time of our conversation, he hadn’t spent much time on the Oaks Christian campus—just a few weeks last spring, as well as summer school—and he felt hadn’t had “the full effect” yet.

But there are aspects that will always seem alien to him. The school parking lot is dotted with luxury cars—BMWs, Lexuses, Mercedes Benzes, and even a Maserati. “The engine sounds like an animal,” he says. “Out there, it’s spoon-fed,” he says. “We don’t have the same problems.” He recalls overhearing a conversation in the school hallway between two girls, with one being irate at how someone looked at her. “That’s what you’re mad about? Your whole day is messed up because of that?” he says in his father’s house, which sits only a couple zip codes from Westlake Village but at times feels like an entirely different universe.

For better or worse, Oaks Christian is just the latest pit stop for Kayvon Thibodeaux, one that brings fresh challenges along with it. He’ll learn a new defense, and he’ll add snaps on offense at tight end to his job description. As a rising junior, he’ll have more contact with college coaches. He’s preparing himself to parse their intentions.

“People constantly feeding you bad cars, like car salesmen,” he says. “They’re all selling you a dream, selling you what you think you’ve got and not really what it is.” His criteria for a college boils down to whichever program can help facilitate those dreams. “Wherever I can get business taken care of,” he says.

Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

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Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds

"You're not going to make everybody happy," Kayvon Thibodeaux says. He is reflecting on the lessons he learned last year as a high school sophomore. "Everybody's not going to be happy with the decisions you make but they don't have to live your life. They're not in your shoes."

This morning, Kayvon is not wearing any shoes. He's lounging barefoot in a black sweatsuit and black skull cap in the living room of his father Angelo's house, one of four units in a building wreathed by iron fencing in South Los Angeles. Angelo is outside, tweaking the engine on Kayvon's 1995 Ford Mustang. Kayvon got the Mustang earlier this spring, along with his driver's license. It was teal then; in his first order of business as a car owner, Kayvon had it painted a fresh coat of black.

Not all that long ago, the car was something of a luxury. Kayvon and his mother, Shawnta Loice, lived less than 15 minutes away from Dorsey High School. Getting to and from school was rarely a problem. He could almost always bum a ride from one of his coaches. Back then, before he transferred to one of Southern California's most prestigious private schools, upending his life, Kayvon spoke of high school almost reverentially. It was the time in his life that would anchor him to his community. Dorsey is predominantly black, and sits right in the middle of some of L.A.'s most vibrant African American communities. Kayvon was a 4.0 student. He was in his element.

"I want to be that guy," he had told me on a lazy spring afternoon while he was still at Dorsey. The sun was slipping behind the high school's labyrinth of outdoor buildings and he sat on a concrete stoop. A few minutes earlier, his mom called to let him know his driver's license had just arrived in the mail.

"I want to be that story. I want to be that reason. Everybody has a story and my story is—we do have a lot of guys in the NFL, but we don't have a lot of guys that bring up the whole community. I feel like I owe something to my community." He wanted to rebuild the school, maybe even the entire neighborhood. "When I make it," he added, "it's going to be life-changing for everybody."

Demian Becerra

Kayvon is arguably the top high school football player in the country in the class of 2019. With two years still to go in his high school career, there's already talk that the sprightly, six-foot-four-inch defensive end could be the best pass rusher to come out of the West Coast this millennium. The sport isn't the reason he decided to transfer and leave his community behind—at least during school and football hours. But it was the tool that allowed him to.

"His gift is not football," says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey's defensive backs coach. "If he does it right and plays as long as his body allows him to, football is going to platform him to somewhere his mind can't even fathom."

Now the car is a necessity. After Angelo gets the Mustang purring and slams the hood shut, Kayvon will drive 45 miles northwest to Oaks Christian, a private school in Westlake Village where a year of tuition costs $30,900. Kayvon has been there since May on full scholarship. He is pulled between two worlds: Days in Westlake Village, where the median family income is $112,000 and his new high school sits a few blocks away from a Four Seasons hotel; nights back home in South Los Angeles, where the median income is $32,000 and his parents live in neighborhoods controlled by rival gangs. "Two microcosms," he says. "That's exactly what it is."

Soon Kayvon will relocate out of South Los Angeles entirely. That's what happens when you're a star football player. You go away to college, then the NFL. He believes that the decision to leave now, a couple years ahead of schedule, will benefit his future, and ultimately his community's.

"Everything is a pit stop," he says. His voice is flat, his sentences truncated. Switching schools has made him wary. Spread him thin.

Kayvon says that all of his plans are still in effect. But things have changed. Being at Oaks Christian, on its sprawling campus and among its upper crust student body, means he is no longer of the place he so earnestly wants to elevate. At 16, he has chosen to become a man apart, if only for a little while. He has to go away to come back.

"What people don't understand is you can't be stagnant," he says. "You can't get comfortable, because a lot of people in the city get comfortable with just being in the city. That's what my mom and I weren't comfortable with. We can't just be in the city all our lives. We can't just be seeing the same thing all our lives. We want to see something different, experience something different.

"That's what I'm doing. Seeing the other side of things."

The story has been told enough times by now that it's almost a tall tale. In some versions, Kayvon is six-foot-two-inches; in others, he's already his full height. Some people have him taking out as many as seven opposing players. Kayvon remembers the game being stopped entirely.

What is known and agreed upon is that, in Kayvon's eighth grade year, he played in a Pop Warner All-Star game. Somewhere along the way, he was kicked out—not for doing anything illegal, or for showing off. Rather, it was safety issue. Normal middle schoolers were physically unable to withstand the amount of force he could already dish out.

"Everything was clean hits," says Jovon Hayes, Thibodeaux's defensive line coach at Dorsey. "It wasn't dirty. He wasn't getting up and flexing on them. He was just hitting them too hard. They weren't getting up."

Demian Becerra

It was always this way. Kayvon was born ten pounds, four ounces, and by elementary school, he was already big enough that parents at his friends' birthday parties would grouse about how, whenever they broke the piñata, Kayvon would outmuscle the other children to the candy that spilled out.

"He's the same age as these kids," Shawnta would tell them. "He's just quicker and bigger."

His size provided levity, too. Shawnta cackles at the memory of their trip to Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights, when a then 13-year-old Kayvon teased her relentlessly for being scared by the park's decorations. Then a life-sized version of Chucky from the horror film Child's Play popped out, and park-goers were treated to the sight of a seemingly grown man sprinting the other direction at full speed.

Yet for Kayvon, being big was often stultifying. He now recognizes his physique as a blessing, but it took time to gain perspective. It was especially hard before he got to high school.

"Back then, it was a curse," he recalls. "I can never do what everybody else did. I can never just mix in. I always stood out, I was always looked at… Something breaks, Who did it? It's me. I'm the first one people look at."

Words, he decided, would be his great equalizer.

"Everybody was seeing me, they all looked at me waiting to see what came out of my mouth so I had to make sure it was intelligent," he says. He read books—Mike Lupica, the venerable sportswriter, became a favorite author—and developed a penchant for debating anyone on nearly any topic, sometimes just to gauge different ways he could construct an argument. When he saw the Robert Downey Jr. movie The Judge as a high school freshman, he decided he would become a lawyer.

Two years later, he carries himself with an easy charisma and the sort of social graces that lead one of his former Pop Warner coaches and a Dorsey assistant coach, Jadili Damu Johnson, to label Kayvon "banquet smart."

"You can drop him in Spain, and Kayvon is going to know everybody in Spain," Johnson says.

Demian Becerra

Kayvon says he only began watching college football in the last year-and-a-half. He had never even seen a football game when Antonio Patterson, one of his teachers, cornered Kayvon in the fifth grade about signing up for Pop Warner.

"If [he] never approached me and told me to play football, I'd probably be somewhere reading a book," he says. "I don't know what I'd be doing."

He began on the offensive line, the proving ground for every overgrown player without an obvious home on the field. He bided his time and learned the game until, two years later, he yearned to do more. "I told my coach, like, 'I can run!" he says, before breaking into the sort of machine gun cadence that middle schoolers use to badger adults into giving them what they want: "I can run, I can run, I can run."

"In three, four years he's going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse-like frame."

The coach relented and on Kayvon's very first carry, he scored a touchdown. Suddenly, he was a fullback and a middle linebacker. He developed an admiration for Ray Lewis, who became his first football hero and, for years, the only player he kept tabs on. By seventh grade, he'd sprouted into a defensive end. Today, he weighs 225 pounds, with a wisp of a mustache and a jawline that looks like it was etched out of limestone.

It's the sort of package that made him a household name in high school recruiting circles ever since the summer of his freshman year, when 247Sports tabbed him as the top player in the class of 2019 in their very first rankings released last August. Nobody has knocked him off since. All told, of the industry's four major ranking sites, none currently have him listed lower than fifth overall nationwide in his class.

Greg Biggins, an analyst for CBS Sports and Scout.com who's covered West Coast recruiting for more than 20 years, could only name a handful of other pass rushers with Thibodeaux's combination of physical ability and proven production––perhaps none of whom had put these assets together as early in their high school careers.

"In three, four years he's going to have just the ideal defensive end, long, athletic, coming off the edge, Jevon Kearse-like frame," Biggins says. "The ability to be strong at the point [of attack], to be able to have the athleticism to run down plays from behind, the motor. He doesn't take plays off. He rises to the occasion when they play really good teams."

Hayes likes to tell the story of a play that happened in a playoff game during Kayvon's freshman year, when the opposing team concealed a trick play within what looked like a standard huddle formation coming out of a timeout. While Dorsey's coaching staff scrambled to signal their players, Kayvon snapped on his chinstrap and blazed across the field to snuff out what should have been a big gain.

"His skill set is unbelievable," Hayes says, "but the biggest thing is his mind."

This is evident when you watch Kayvon play in person. Yes, he's bigger, and stronger, and faster, but he's also smarter. He moves with a greater sense of purpose. All those academic gifts apply on the field too.

Demian Becerra

Last November, in Dorsey's second-round playoff game against San Pedro High School, Kayvon delivered in expected ways: The pyrotechnic bursts around the left tackle's outside shoulder, the loping strides to chase down a ball carrier on the backside of a second quarter run, the resolute intensity with which he snatched a ball out of the arms of a running back deep inside Dorsey territory.

There was something more, though, something ineffable.

He was hobbled during the San Pedro game, a byproduct of a play a few weeks earlier, when he eagerly scooped up a short kickoff and tried to re-enact his past life as a running back by returning it. Instead, he sprained his knee, the sort of injury that could sideline a player for weeks. "The only time when I get hurt in football is when I try to do too much," he says.

"My childhood has been compact. That's part of being recruited. You can't be a kid."

But as Kayvon's body lost a step, his mind seemed to compensate, and his ability to diagnose an opponent's next move shone through. That's the best course of explanation for what happened late in the third quarter of the San Pedro game, when, with Dorsey up 25-3 and awaiting a punt, Kayvon lined up on the outside, rocked back and forth like a 6-foot-4 metronome keeping time, and burst through to block the attempt. It also explains how, one quarter later, he did the very same thing on a field goal try.

The postgame reaction to all of this was relatively muted, even after it was revealed that Kayvon was playing with a knee injury. He had only managed half a sack—a pittance given that he took down the quarterback 16 times last year. But that's life as the most coveted football prospect in America. A forced a fumble, blocked a kick and blocked a punt, all on a bad knee, still amount to something of an off night.

By the time he graduates, Kayvon Thibodeaux will have spent three-fourths of high school as arguably the most scrutinized, most sought-after high school prospect in the country. This means three years of beseeching by eager college coaches, three years of being side-eyed by other prospects jostling for similar attention, three years of fan bases across the country prodding him to attend their favorite school.

Already, it wears on him.

"My childhood has been compact," he says. "That's part of being recruited. You can't be a kid."

To the wider world, that process began last summer, when the University of Utah extended him his very first scholarship offer. Functionally speaking, however, his recruitment kicked off years before that. Just as colleges scout high schools to restock their talent base, high schools across the country use Pop Warner teams to replenish theirs. In Los Angeles, the process has intensified this decade, with wealthier schools as far as 90 minutes away decamping for the inner city to poach the best talent.

Which is how, before he even hit puberty, Kayvon had coaches approaching him on the sidelines of his games. By eighth grade, Shawnta was taking meetings with schools from from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley to everywhere in between, each dangling great promises for her only child. Of this experience, his father Angelo says, "It was amazing but it also made me want to hold him tighter. As a parent, it made me want to shield him even more."

Demian Becerra

Kayvon initially chose Junipero Serra High School in Gardena, a private school powerhouse known for churning out recent USC All-Americans and NFL draftees Robert Woods, Marqise Lee and Adoree' Jackson. In truth, it wasn't much of a decision. "I had all of my eggs in one basket," he admits now. His best friend, Justin (Antonio Patterson's son) was already enrolled and it didn't hurt that, for the last two years, the bulk of Serra's coaching staff could be spotted at each one of his Pop Warner games.

Then, midway through his first semester in 2015, he left. According to Kayvon, playing time was a major factor: Serra's varsity team featured one of the best defensive ends in the country, and Kayvon consequently toiled away on jayvee until a brief cameo at the end of the season. "I had about ten plays," he says, "and that was garbage time." Shawnta says the transfer was precipitated by moving further from the school into a new apartment in South Los Angeles.

Whatever the reason, by mid-October, Kayvon found himself in an unlikely place. For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey, whose campus sits at the epicenter of four distinct neighborhoods and is able to cull talent from each of them. The coaching staff is almost exclusively comprised of Dorsey alumni who played major college or professional ball, from Hayes, a multi-year starter at Arizona, to Stafon Johnson, who played for USC and then the Tennessee Titans, to head coach Charles Mincey, who starred at Washington and played ten NFL seasons for four teams.

In a different era, the idea of a player like Kayvon Thibodeaux starring at Dorsey the way, say, Keyshawn Johnson once had would have been the natural order of things. But the fever pitch of private school recruiting has changed all that. As the Serras of the world rose in prominence, they did so at the expense of the neighborhood schools that depend on the talent in their backyard to stay in their communities. Few programs were hit harder than Dorsey, which had sunk from perennial city champions to treading water at a combined 20-15 from 2012 through 2014. College coaches stopped turning up as often, cognizant of the talent drain. But also, Hayes says, "You get schools who don't always come to the inner city because of the stigma that kids don't have the grades [to qualify for college]."

For decades, Dorsey High School had been the bellwether of public high school football in Los Angeles. Only two high schools in America have produced more NFL players than Dorsey.

So when Kayvon Thibodeaux, the athletic and academic dynamo, decided to enroll at Dorsey, he was met with skepticism even from all angles.

"'Dorsey? I went to Dorsey. You think you're going to Dorsey?'" he recalls being asked.

"Yeah, that's what I want to do," he'd reply.

His reasons were mostly pragmatic, and entirely personal. It was close to home, for one thing, and he would not want for playing time on the varsity team. It also boasted a law magnet program, in which he would conduct mock trials and serve on a jury in teen court cases.

Kayvon debuted for Dorsey's varsity squad during a November 2015 first-round playoff game against Carson Senior High. He promptly registered a sack. "That was throwing him in the fire," says Ivan Stevenson, Dorsey's defensive backs coach. "[We told him] 'Go be athletic.'"

By mid-summer, the first crush of scholarship offers arrived. Then came the 247Sports ranking. In under nine months, he rocketed from an unknown jayvee player to the top recruit in his class.

Because of Kayvon, college coaches once again had a reason to show up at Dorsey. "A lot of kids benefit from his success," Hayes said, speaking to me before Kayvon transferred. "When a school comes up here, they'll look at him and go, 'Yeah, yeah, but who is the guy on the other side of him? Who is the D-tackle? Who's that safety right there running to the ball? They'll have a chance to come up here and see certain athletes that they probably didn't come up here for… It opens up doors for everybody." He speaks from experience: Once a player at Dorsey himself, Hayes became a highly-touted prospect in part by blocking for Stafon Johnson, the Dons' star running back at the time.

Kayvon eagerly played his part. This spring, he took the unusual step of canceling any appearances at offseason showcase events, the very same camps that'd helped put him on the map one year earlier. He had nothing to prove, for one thing. But it also funneled every college and media outlet to find him at Dorsey, whereupon he used his clout to broker introductions for many of his teammates.

"You don't come to a place and [only] greet the man of the house," he joked during a conversation this spring. "You've got to get the whole family." I tell him it's a lot of confidence for a 16-year-old. "It is, but closed mouths don't get fed. And if you don't have a mouth, you don't get fed. So, I'm giving them a mouth."

Demian Becerra

Dorsey finished 11-3 last season. New players are transferring in from all over the city. Their junior and senior ranks have ballooned to a degree where the coaching staff estimates that there are as many as eight players on campus who could play in one of college football's elite "power five" conferences. Kayvon's success, says Hayes, "shows it can be done in the inner city."

Kayvon embraced all of it. Sitting there on the stoop, a year and a half after he left Serra, he felt he'd found what he was searching for the whole time: A place to belong.

"Dorsey is home. Dorsey's home for everybody," he says. "If you've got problems, if you've got anything, you come to Dorsey… It's the way out. It's the back door. If you're in trouble, in this or that, you come to Dorsey. You'll always find somebody that will help you. You ain't got a ride home? You'll never have to walk. Somebody."

All of these things are bigger than Kayvon Thibodeaux. But, as the team's most recognizable face, the idea of him began to loom larger than any scholarship offer or quarterback sack. He was the player who abandoned the private school machine to return to the inner city when all avenues pointed in the other direction. He was the student who reminded people that the neighborhood schools could educate their athletes on a level attractive even to universities like Stanford and Northwestern. He was proof that Dorsey could still incubate the very best talent on the West coast. He was hope. He was validation.

And then, he was gone.

As his mother Shawnta Loice tells it, a move had long been in the works.

It was an accident that she and Kayvon wound up in their home near Dorsey, a duplex just off Martin Luther King Boulevard, in the shadow of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. She signed a lease when they were staying in a guest house, a temporary accommodation after part of the ceiling caved in at their old apartment. Only after they moved in did she realize that the duplex was in the middle of gang territory.

Originally, the plan had been to move and keep Kayvon enrolled at Dorsey. But Shawnta had long harbored worries that Kayvon wasn't being challenged enough academically. "It was too easy for him," she says. "He didn't have a lot of homework. He didn't have a lot of projects." Dorsey's coaching staff was well-versed in her concerns. She had met with them before his sophomore season to express as much, and she routinely checked in to see when Kayvon could be placed into the most advanced classes on campus.

This spring, she brought it up again ahead of Kayvon's junior year. Junie Rivero, Dorsey's special teams coach and a longtime friend of the family's, was prepared. He laid out a plan to enroll Kayvon in a gauntlet of AP classes, possibly allowing him to graduate a semester early if he so chose. Besides, he told her, "He's got a 4.0. He's got over 30 scholarships. Not just football scholarships—top academic schools. What else could another school do for you that we couldn't?"

Shawnta didn't doubt Dorsey's intentions. But she worried about how rigorous the curriculum could truly be, as well as about the impact if it wasn't enough. According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Unified School district, just 32 percent of Dorsey students complete all of their A-G courses—the statewide curriculum established by University of California-system faculty—with a C or better in each. Only 16 percent are enrolled in an AP class. "Sometimes I feel like [you] have to surround yourself around kids that have the same goals you have in life, that want to actually do something," she says.

When reached for comment regarding Shawnta's concerns, Dorsey co-athletic director and football program coordinator Irvin Davis said the following: "I respect students' choice to go down the path that they think will be the most conducive for them. When Kayvon was here, he was an outstanding student in the classroom, he's a very nice young man and I wish him the best in everything he endeavors to do. All of the opportunities that a person could ever look for academically are here for them at Dorsey High School."

Demian Becerra

To Shawnta, getting Kayvon admitted to a top university was one thing. Making sure he was equipped to thrive was another. "If I give it another year, then he's going to be a senior," she said. "I didn't want him to get to college and then not really be [prepared.]"

She concluded that her own past might offer the best pathway for her son's future. Shawnta grew up in South Los Angeles, too, before her family moved to white-bread Orange County for her high school years. The change suited her. She found the classes to be more challenging and the environment more tranquil. She couldn't know for certain how much it ultimately improved her circumstances. But years later, she noted, "A lot of my friends that way have done more than a lot of my friends this way that I've known from growing up."

She wanted to give Kayvon a new life, away from the inner city and its hardships. "There are bigger things than what you see right here that you can actually do with your life," she told him. So, she made a decision: After the school year, they would move to Woodland Hills, a middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley, the sort of place where Shawnta would no longer need to bar Kayvon from stepping outside once the sun set.

"You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city? Let's be honest. If football wasn't in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No."

Central to that new life would be a new school. To her, transferring Kayvon to Oaks Christian was a no-brainer, the type of opportunity kids from single-parent homes in the inner city simply don't receive: $60,000 worth of free tuition at one of the state's premier college preparatory schools. Already, she sees an uptick in his academic workload. The majority of his classmates come from stable home lives, where they are reared to view college as an expectation. Why wouldn't she want this for him?

But for all his academic prowess, Kayvon Thibodeaux is on full scholarship at Oaks Christian because of what he can do on the football field. He is no longer ensconced at Dorsey on a team of players with similar life experiences, coached by men who have known him since before he even reached puberty, who drove him home from school when he didn't have a ride and fed him when he asked for dinner. He is now a stranger on a campus that just lost a star wide receiver, linebacker and quarterback, the latter of whom publicly declared that Oaks Christian is "biased towards money." His former coaches worry he'll be treated as a commodity instead of a teenager.

"You take football out of the picture, do these predominantly rich schools want these kids in the inner city?" Stevenson says. "Let's be honest. If football wasn't in the picture, would Oaks be interested in the kid? No."

"We knew Kayvon when Kayvon was just Kayvon Thibodeaux, not Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation," adds Rivero. "The only thing Oaks Christian is getting is Kayvon Thibodeaux, the number one recruit in the nation... I hope the coaches can look out for him and not just exploit him because he's the number one player."

More than that, they wonder about the damage the transfer could do to Kayvon's greater goals. Can he really build up a community that he's no longer a part of? And if he can't, will Oaks Christian ever truly embrace him as an outsider?

"I see a lot of schools, once you're no longer needed, I see a lot of players get thrown in the trash," says Jadili Damu Johnson, a Dorsey assistant who's coached Kayvon since his Pop Warner days. He quickly corrects himself. They are not actively discarded so much as forgotten, slowly growing invisible once they can no longer capture a crowd's attention on Friday nights. "They're not given that phone call, 'Hey we've got stuff going on, you coming to the rally?'"

But, Johnson adds, all of their concerns intermingle with the ache of being left behind. No matter what happens, Kayvon Thibodeaux will never mean more to a place than the one he just left.

"He's great in every aspect," Johnson says. "We're just sad, because we wanted him to show the greatness from here forever."

For his part, Kayvon is mindful of the sacrifices he's made to get here. He says that he originally did not want to leave Dorsey and the camaraderie he built. Nor is he under any illusion that a depleted Oaks Christian makes for a better on-field situation than the program he helped breathe new life into. "If I was going for football, I would have stayed at Dorsey," he says. "I love everybody, of course. That's my team."

"But at the end of the day," he adds, "it wasn't tough for Kevin Durant to leave the Thunder… It's what's best."

Not everyone understood.

"Some people were mad," he says. "Some people were sad… People look at me like I did something wrong." That, he says, forced him to learn a second lesson: "When you get emotions into it, that's when stuff doesn't go right."

Though he may no longer go to school in South Los Angeles, his loyalty to the neighborhood hasn't changed. He still wants to be a lawyer, and still wants give back to South Los Angeles. He cites the example of Nipsey Hussle––a popular L.A. rapper from nearby Crenshaw whose numerous charitable ventures include helping fund the reopening of World on Wheels, a legendary Mid-City roller rink that functioned as a safe space for young people throughout the area, earlier this summer––as inspiration for how he can help his community from the outside back in.

"He made it and he's still bringing money back to his community," he says. "I can help them once I set myself up… [the plan] tweaked a little bit but the overall message didn't."

A few minutes after Kayvon and I speak, he's in the Mustang, motoring toward Interstate 110. The only thing on the day's docket is an offseason workout, one that might actually be shorter than the commute to and from his new reality. At the time of our conversation, he hadn't spent much time on the Oaks Christian campus—just a few weeks last spring, as well as summer school—and he felt hadn't had "the full effect" yet.

But there are aspects that will always seem alien to him. The school parking lot is dotted with luxury cars—BMWs, Lexuses, Mercedes Benzes, and even a Maserati. "The engine sounds like an animal," he says. "Out there, it's spoon-fed," he says. "We don't have the same problems." He recalls overhearing a conversation in the school hallway between two girls, with one being irate at how someone looked at her. "That's what you're mad about? Your whole day is messed up because of that?" he says in his father's house, which sits only a couple zip codes from Westlake Village but at times feels like an entirely different universe.

For better or worse, Oaks Christian is just the latest pit stop for Kayvon Thibodeaux, one that brings fresh challenges along with it. He'll learn a new defense, and he'll add snaps on offense at tight end to his job description. As a rising junior, he'll have more contact with college coaches. He's preparing himself to parse their intentions.

"People constantly feeding you bad cars, like car salesmen," he says. "They're all selling you a dream, selling you what you think you've got and not really what it is." His criteria for a college boils down to whichever program can help facilitate those dreams. "Wherever I can get business taken care of," he says.

Kayvon Thibodeaux is Rushing Between Two Worlds published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv