#rufo x reader

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headlines for over a month in the US and increasingly around the world. The lady in question, one Claudine Gay, was President of Harvard, one of the most renowned educational institutions in the world, until earlier this week when she resigned over plagiarism allegations.

Why does or should anyone care about this? Well, Gay’s decision to step down is the culmination of long-running efforts to address the cancer at the heart of Western societies: the idea that the way to fix injustices of the past is to commit injustices today.

Following her resignation, Gay’s defenders were quick to emphasise the racial dimension of this story. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, tweeted that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism”.

And while his claims of this being a racist campaign are absurd, it is true that Gay was not targeted solely for seemingly adopting the personal motto: “I came, I saw, I copied”. She became a focus of major Harvard donor concerns and a media campaign led by Christopher Rufo – a man I would approvingly describe as the diversity industry’s greatest enemy – in the light of her mind-boggling testimony in Congress. Her statements, given alongside the Presidents of MIT and UPenn, revealed the core of the ideology the entire Western education system is based on in all its glory.

The oppressor vs. oppressed mindset which is - no matter how uncomfortable this may make some readers - cultural Marxism, says simply that white people and “over-performing” minorities like Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans should be discriminated against in hiring and student applications in favour of “underprivileged groups”. As a result, college campuses on which regular meltdowns have occurred for a decade over such “hate speech” as dressing in a Mexican costume for Halloween found themselves with nothing to say about pro-Hamas demonstrations and the harassment of Jewish students on their campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

But even that is not painting the full picture. Yes, Gay, a darling of the diversity industry, was targeted for her plagiarism following her complete failure of leadership in recent months. But she was also partially targeted because of the assumption, if not outright conclusion, that the reason she was appointed in the first place was, to put it mildly, not merit alone.

After all, Gay’s primary achievement is not stellar academic work, exemplary managerial skills or even charisma and force of personality. She was appointed President of Harvard following a distinguished career in fields like “improving diversity” and researching “race and identity”. To put it bluntly, many people believe that she is a diversity hire and the reason she pushed the DEI ideology that eventually led to her appalling testimony in Congress is that she is herself a beneficiary of it.

To be clear, she has not been forced out for being black. She has been forced out for being placed in a position for which she had neither the skills nor experience to succeed and then failing in it. This is the rotten legacy of affirmative action, which, as Thomas Sowell explained decades ago in 90 seconds and in many of his books since, hurts the very people it is attempting to help:

If allowing students to enter universities in which they are destined to fail for the sake of diversity harms them, then what might be said about hiring people for leadership roles in major institutions in which they are destined to fail? This harms not only them but also the people who work and study at those institutions.

To be clear, I have no evidence that Claudine Gay was hired ahead of better, more qualified candidates. But it is not hard to imagine that a position holding the prestige, reputation and nearly $1-million-a-year salary the role of Harvard President commands could have been filled by someone with more executive experience, academic achievements and other relevant expertise.

This is the other curse of the counterproductive attempts to artificially increase the presence of “underrepresented” groups in employment and education. Because everyone knows that some people are routinely given unfair preferential treatment, it becomes easier and easier for the rest of us to suspect specific individuals of being there for reasons other than merit.

So here is the truth: we must return to pursuing the goal of a colour-blind society immediately. There is no such thing as positive discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. And because it is wrong, it will create precisely the kind of resentment that Claudine Gay is now facing. She is seen as the standard-bearer of the DEI industry and is being treated as such by people who have had enough.

All of us must be treated on the content of our character. When we refuse to follow this principle, we hurt everyone: white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish. A healthy society relies on the equal treatment of all individuals. The fact that we have to say this out loud in 2024 is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.

DEI must be dismantled. This will take years, perhaps decades. But, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time, we have grounds for optimism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rachel Poser

Published: May 4, 2024

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Criticism of Kendi only grew in September, when he made the “painful decision” to lay off more than half the staff of the research center he runs at Boston University. The Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded during the 2020 protests to tackle “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” raised an enormous sum of $55 million, and the news of its downsizing led to a storm of questions. False rumors began circulating that Kendi had stolen funds, and the university announced it would investigate after former employees accused him of mismanagement and secrecy.

The controversy quickly ballooned into a national news story, fueled in large part by right-wing media, which was all too happy to speculate about “missing funds” and condemn Kendi — and the broader racial-justice movement — as a fraud. On Fox News, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo told the host John Roberts that the center’s “failure” was “poetic justice.” “This is a symbol of where we have come since 2020 and why that movement is really floundering today,” he said. In early October, a podcast affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank where Rufo works, jubilantly released an episode titled “The End of Ibram X. Kendi?”

In December, I met Kendi at the Center for Antiracist Research, which was by then mostly empty, though I caught signs of its former life: Space heaters sat idly under desks, and Post-it notes lingered around the edges of unplugged monitors. On the frame of one cleared-out cubicle, a sticker in the shape of Earth read “Be the change.” Kendi welcomed me into his office in a pink shirt and a periwinkle blazer with a handkerchief tucked neatly in its pocket. He was calm on the surface, but he seemed to me, as he often did during the conversations we’d had since the layoffs, to be holding himself taut, like a tensile substance under enormous strain. The furor over the center, he said, was a measure of how desperate many people were to damage his reputation: “If this had happened at another center, it would either not have been a story or a one-day story.”

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” his best-known book, Kendi challenges readers to evaluate themselves by their racial impact, by whether their actions advance or impede the cause of racial equality. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” he writes. “The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on?” This question evinces Kendi’s confidence that ideas and policies can be dependably sorted into one of two categories: racist or antiracist.

Kendi is a vegan, a tall man with a gentle, serious nature. “He’ll laugh at a joke — he’ll never crack one,” Kellie Carter Jackson, the chair of the Africana studies department at Wellesley and someone who has known Kendi for years, told me. He considers himself an “introvert and loner” who was chased down by the spotlight and is now caught in its glare. “I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi,” said Stefan Bradley, a longtime friend and professor of Black studies at Amherst. There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding — or the fact that his phone email signature is “Sent from Typoville aka my iPhone.” Though he is always soft-spoken, volume sometimes seems to be a gauge of how comfortable he feels. The first time I met him in person, he greeted me so quietly that I worried my recorder wouldn’t pick up his voice.

Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs, a controversy that he believed had fed into dangerous, racist stories about Black leaders, and about him in particular. In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division. Kendi told me he received regular threats; he allowed me to come to the center only on the condition that I not reveal its location. “When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,” he told me.

Boston University had recently released the results of its audit, which found “no issues” with how the center’s finances were handled. The center’s problem, Kendi told me, was more banal: Most of its money was in its endowment or restricted to specific uses, and after the high of 2020, donations had crashed. “At our current rate, we were going to run out in two years,” he said. “That was what ultimately led us to feel like we needed to make a major change.” The center’s new model would fund nine-month academic fellowships rather than a large full-time staff. Though inquiries into the center’s grant-management practices and workplace culture were continuing, Kendi was confident that they would absolve him, too. In the media, he’d dismissed the complaints about his leadership as “unfair,” “unfounded,” “vague,” “meanspirited” and an attempt to “settle old scores.”

In the fall, when I began talking to former employees and faculty — most of whom asked for anonymity because they remain at Boston University or signed severance agreements that included nondisparagement language — it was clear that many of them felt caught in a bind. They could already see that the story of the center’s dysfunction was being used to undermine the racial-justice movement, but they were frustrated to watch Kendi play down the problems and cast their concerns as spiteful or even racist. They felt that what they experienced at the center was now playing out in public: Kendi’s tendency to see their constructive feedback as hostile. “He doesn’t trust anybody,” one person told me. “He doesn’t let anyone in.”

To Kendi, attacks from those who claim to be allies, like attacks from political enemies, are to be expected. In his books, Kendi argues that history is not an arc bending toward justice but a war of “dueling” forces — racist and antiracist — that each escalate their response when the other advances. In the years since 2020, he believes, the country has entered a predictable period of retrenchment, when the force of racism is ascendant and the racial progress of the last several decades is under threat. To defend antiracism, to defend himself, he would simply have to fight harder.

Not so long ago, Kendi thought he saw a new world coming into being. “We are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution,” he wrote in September 2020 in an Atlantic cover story headlined, “Is This the Beginning of the End for American Racism?” Nearly 20 percent of Americans were saying that “race relations” was the most urgent problem facing the nation — more than at any point since 1968 — and many of them were turning to Kendi to figure out what to do about it. They were buying his memoir and manifesto, “How to Be an Antiracist,” much of which he wrote while undergoing chemotherapy. “This was perhaps the last thing he was going to write,” Chris Jackson, Kendi’s editor, told me. “There was no cynicism in the writing of it.” (Jackson was the editor of a 2021 book based on The 1619 Project, which originated in this magazine in 2019; Kendi contributed a chapter to that book.)

Kendi confesses in the introduction that he “used to be racist most of the time.” The year 1994, when he turned 12, marked three decades since the United States outlawed discrimination on the basis of race. Then why, Kendi wondered as an adolescent, were so many Black people out of work, impoverished or incarcerated? The problem, he concluded, must be Black people themselves. Not Black people like his parents, God-loving professionals who had saved enough to buy a home in Jamaica, Queens, and who never let their two sons forget the importance of education and hard work. But they were the exception. In high school, Kendi competed in an oratory contest in which he gave voice to many of the anti-Black stereotypes circulating in the ’90s — that Black youths were violent, unstudious, unmotivated. “They think it’s OK to be the most feared in our society,” he proclaimed. “They think it’s OK not to think!” Kendi also turned these ideas on himself, believing that he was a “subpar student” because of his race.

Kendi’s mind began to change when he arrived on the campus of Florida A&M, one of the largest historically Black universities in the country, in the fall of 2000 to study sports journalism. “I had never seen so many Black people together with positive motives,” he wrote at the time. Kendi was disengaged for most of high school, as concerned with his clothes as his grades. His friends at the university teased him for joining a modeling troupe and preening before parties, particularly because once he got to them he was too shy to talk to anyone. “He would come out, and you could smell the cologne from down the hall,” Grady Tripp, Kendi’s housemate, told me. But experimenting with his style, for Kendi, was part of trying on new ideas. For a while, he wore honey-colored contact lenses that turned his irises an off-putting shade of orange; he got rid of them once he decided they were a rejection of blackness, like Malcolm X’s straightening his hair with lye.

Over long hours spent reading alone in the library, Kendi found his way to some unlikely conclusions. In “How to Be an Antiracist,” he describes bursting into his housemate’s room to declare that he had “figured white people out.” “They are aliens,” he said. Kendi had gone searching for answers in conspiracy theories and Nation of Islam theology that cast whites as a “devil race” bred by an evil Black scientist to conquer the planet. “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” he wrote in a column for the student newspaper in 2003. They are “socialized to be aggressive” and have used “the AIDS virus and cloning” to dominate the world’s peoples. Recently, the column has circulated on right-wing social media as evidence of Kendi’s antiwhite extremism, which frustrates him because it’s in his own memoir as an example of just how lost he had become.

Kendi went on to earn a Ph.D. in African American studies from Temple University. The founder of his department was Molefi Kete Asante, an Afrocentrist who has called on the descendants of enslaved people to embrace traditional African dress, languages and religions. Kendi eventually changed his middle name to Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu; at their wedding, he and his wife, Sadiqa, adopted the last name Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru. Kendi has called Asante “profoundly antiracist,” but Kendi remained an idiosyncratic thinker who did not consider himself a part of just one scholarly tradition; he knew early on that he wanted to write for the public. In a 2019 interview, when asked about his intellectual lineage, Kendi named W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X.

Kendi became part of a cohort of Black writers, among them Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, through the sunset of the Obama presidency and the red dawn of the MAGA movement, argued that anti-Blackness remains a major force shaping American politics. They helped popularize the longstanding idea that racism in the United States is systemic — that the country’s laws and institutions perpetuate Black disadvantage despite a pledge of equal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended de jure white supremacy, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed it into law, acknowledged that it wouldn’t uproot a racial caste system grown over centuries.

“The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights,” he said, would be to achieve “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact.” Kendi and others wrote bracingly about the failure of that promise. Far from economic redress, Black Americans were met with continued discrimination in every realm of life, while being told the country was now “colorblind.” Kendi and others argued that remedying the impact of hundreds of years of subjugation would require policies that recognize, rather than ignore, that legacy, such as affirmative action and reparations.

Far too many Americans, Kendi felt, still thought of racism as conscious prejudice, so conversations got stuck in cul-de-sacs of denial, in which people protested that they were “not racist” because they harbored no anti-Black animus. To convey this, he landed on the binary that would become his most famous and perhaps most controversial idea. “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea” or a “race-neutral policy,” he wrote in “How to Be an Antiracist,” published in 2019. “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’”

Black activists have long used the word “antiracist” to describe active resistance to white supremacy, but “How to Be an Antiracist” catapulted the term into the American lexicon, in much the same way that Sheryl Sandberg turned “Lean In” into a mantra. After George Floyd’s death, the book sold out on Amazon, which was “unheard-of,” Kendi said. Media coverage of Kendi in those days made him sound nearly superhuman. In a GQ profile, for example, the novelist ZZ Packer describes Kendi as a “preternaturally wise” Buddha-like figure, “the antiracist guru of our time” with a “Jedi-like prowess for recognizing and neutralizing the racism pervading our society.”

During the summer of 2020, Kendi sometimes appeared onstage or onscreen alongside Robin DiAngelo, the educator whose book “White Fragility” was also a No. 1 best seller. Kendi and DiAngelo write less about the workings of systemic racism than the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in it. They share a belief in what Kendi calls “individual transformation for societal transformation.” When Kendi took over Selena Gomez’s Instagram, for example, he urged her 180 million followers to “1. Acknowledge your racism,” “2. Confess your racist ideas” and “3. Define racism and antiracism.” Then they would be ready for Steps 4 and 5, identifying and working to change racist policies.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette — which words to use, whether to say “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” Many allies felt that Kendi and DiAngelo were merely helping white people alleviate their guilt.

They also questioned Kendi’s willingness to turn his philosophy into a brand. Following the success of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he released a deck of “antiracist” conversation-starter cards, an “antiracist” journal with prompts for self-reflection and a children’s book, “Antiracist Baby.” Christine Platt, an author and advocate who worked with Kendi at American University, recently co-wrote a novel that features a Kendi-like figure — a “soft-spoken” author named Dr. Braxton Walsh Jr., whose book “Woke Yet?” becomes a viral phenomenon. “White folks post about it on social media all the time,” rants De’Andrea, one of the main characters. “Wake up and get your copy today! Only nineteen ninety-nine plus shipping and handling.”

Those who thought of him as a self-help guru, Kendi felt, simply hadn’t read his work. Like most scholars of race, Kendi believes that Blackness is a fiction born of colonial powers’ self-interest, not just ignorance or hate, meaning that combating racism today requires upending the economic and political structures that propagate it. But Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.”

In The Atlantic, he warned against the country going down a path of symbolic change where “monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies,” like Medicare for All, need-based school funding and reparations. Changing policy was exactly what he aimed to do at Boston University. During the protests, in the summer of 2020, the university named Kendi the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities, a chair previously held by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and announced the creation of a center on campus to put his ideas into action. Donations came pouring in, led by an anonymous $25 million gift and a $10 million gift from the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which the provost said would give Kendi “the resources to launch the center like a rocket ship.”

Kendi started the center from his home in Boston, while Sadiqa, a pediatric E.R. doctor, came and went from the hospital in full protective gear. Kendi ran a research center as part of his old job at American University, but he felt unable to make a meaningful impact because the resources were modest and he was diagnosed with cancer just four months after its founding. Now, granted tens of millions of dollars to enact his most ambitious ideas, Kendi was determined to create an organization that could be a real engine of progress. “We’ve got to build an infrastructure to match what the right has created,” he later told a co-worker. “We’ve got to build something equally powerful.”

Kendi’s two centers were part of a wave of racial-justice spaces being founded at universities, like the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard or the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton, that pledged to work in partnership with activists and community groups to achieve social change. Kendi envisioned an organization that supported people of color in campaigning for policies that would concretely improve their lives.

To reflect that mission, he designed a structure with four “pillars” or offices: Research, Policy, Narrative and Advocacy. He recruited data scientists, policy analysts, organizers and educators and brought in faculty members working on race from across the university. They set up a model-legislation unit, which would draft sample bills and public-comment notes; an amicus-brief practice, which would target court cases in which race was being overlooked as an issue; and a grant process to fund research on racism by interdisciplinary teams elsewhere at the university, among other programs. Kendi also struck up a partnership with The Boston Globe to revive The Emancipator, a storied abolitionist newspaper. “It was a really exciting time,” he told me.

That summer, however, Kendi found himself on the defensive beyond Boston as Republican book-banning campaigns revved up. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced “How to Be an Antiracist” as “poisonous,” plucking out Kendi’s summary of the case for race-conscious policymaking, which sounded particularly maladroit when taken out of context: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Carlson read in mock disbelief. “In other words, his book against racism promotes racism.” This was around the same time that Rufo, the conservative activist, started to position Kendi as a leading proponent of critical race theory, a school of thought, Rufo told The New Yorker, that he discovered by hunting through the footnotes of “How to Be an Antiracist.”

Critical race theorists were a group of legal scholars in the 1970s and ’80s who documented ways that the American legal framework of racial equality was nevertheless producing unequal treatment. They elaborated the idea of systemic racism and the critique of “colorblindness” that inform much of the writing of Kendi’s cohort. Rufo wrote on Twitter that his goal was to change the meaning of the term “critical race theory” — to “turn it toxic” by putting “all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” In his attacks on Kendi, Rufo also amplified the left’s critique of Kendi’s corporate-friendliness, caricaturing Kendi as a grifter out to enrich himself by raking in speaking fees. The number of threatening messages Kendi received began to rise. “I don’t feel safe anywhere,” Kendi later told a colleague. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder.”

By the time the academic year began, in the fall of 2021, Kendi decided to take extraordinary measures. Before the center began in-person work that September, Kendi sent the staff an email about “security protocols,” instructing them to conceal the location of the center even from other Boston University faculty members and students. “It is critical to not share the address of the center with anyone or bring anyone to the center,” Kendi wrote. The email included a mock script to be used in the event of an inquiry about the center’s location, which ended abruptly with, “I gotta go.”

Though such precautions felt necessary to Kendi, they were met with incredulity and frustration by some employees who were starting to question his leadership. Problems emerged within the first six months, according to more than a dozen staff and faculty members I interviewed. Some told me they had gone to the center because they considered Kendi a visionary; others had reservations about or flat-out disagreements with his work but believed he had brought much-needed attention to issues they cared about. They would be able to find common ground, they thought. They were ready for some chaos as they tried to spin up a new organization remotely, but they quickly ran into difficulty as they tried to execute some of Kendi’s plans.

Kendi emphasizes in his books that policies alone are the cause of racial disparities today. In “Stamped From the Beginning,” his 2016 history of anti-Black ideas from the 15th century to the Obama presidency — which won the National Book Award and was recently made into a Netflix documentary that made the Oscar shortlist — Kendi writes that blaming Black people for their own oppression, by implying that Black people or Black culture are inferior or pathological, was one of the oldest cons in America. He had witnessed it again during the early days of the pandemic, when the numbers suggested that Black people were dying from Covid faster than every racial group save Native Americans. Some pundits speculated about the “soul food” diet or posited that Black communities weren’t taking the virus seriously, even though a Pew survey found that Black respondents were most likely to view the coronavirus as a major threat.

Kendi wanted the center to build “the nation’s largest online collection” of racial data to track disparities like this one and do analytical work to understand each policy responsible. In the case of Covid, for example, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to work in low-income essential jobs, to live in crowded conditions and to lack access to high-quality insurance or medical care. The center might research these conditions and propose targeted interventions, like changes to Medicaid coverage, or more transformative measures, like a universal basic income. One faculty member involved told me that she was “initially incredibly enthusiastic” about the idea. “It seemed like an opportunity to do rigorous, well-funded social-science research that would be aimed at real policy change on issues that I cared about,” she told me.

Like Kendi, his staff believed that historical oppression and ongoing discrimination explained why Black Americans fared comparatively poorly on so many measures of well-being, from education to wealth to longevity, and that centuries of injustice demanded a sweeping policy response to remedy. But understanding that past and present racism is the underlying cause of Black disadvantage is different from the work of assessing its role in any single policy, let alone figuring out how to change the policy to eliminate it. That takes careful analysis. “You have to have specificity,” the faculty member said, “or you can’t measure.”

Kendi pushed back at staff members who argued that the center should constrain its focus. There were plenty of academic centers and researchers that tracked data on racial disparities in one policy area or another, he said; he wanted to convene that pre-existing data, bringing it together in one place for easy access by the public. In a 2022 meeting, when the team tried to get a better sense of his vision, Kendi told them that he wanted a guy at a barbershop or a bar to be able to “pull up the numbers.” To many employees with data or policy backgrounds, what Kendi wanted didn’t seem feasible; at worst, they thought, it risked simply replicating others’ work or creating a mess of sloppily merged data, connected to too many policies for their small team to track rigorously. In the midst of the pandemic, the center struggled to hire a director of research who might have been able to mediate the dispute.

In November, a confidential complaint was filed with the university administration raising concerns about Kendi’s leadership. The anonymous employee told a university compliance officer that Kendi ran the center with “hypercontrol” and created an environment of “silence and secrecy” that was causing low morale and high turnover, claiming that “when Dr. Kendi is questioned, the narrative becomes that the employee must be the one with the ‘problem.’” The employee warned the university that the situation “is potentially going to blow up.”

One of Kendi’s refrains is that being antiracist demands self-criticism. “If I share an idea that people don’t understand, I’m to blame,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “I’m always to blame.” Kendi told me that his most productive conversations with critics of his ideas often happened in private, including one with a prominent Black thinker who inspired him to make a change in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “This person talked about how the goal should not just be equity,” Kendi said. “The goal should not be the same percentage of Black people being killed by police as white people. The goal should be no one being killed by police.” But some Black scholars, as the right-wing backlash strengthened, debated whether to make their criticisms in public. The philosopher Charles Mills, after listening to a graduate-student presentation about Kendi and DiAngelo at a conference in 2021, asked the presenter: “Are their views now sufficiently influential, or perhaps sufficiently harmful, that we should make them a part of the target?”

Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers “white identity” to be “inherently racist,” while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations, and that Black people as a group don’t have the structural means to enforce their prejudice; this notion is often phrased as a formula, that racism is “prejudice plus power.”

Kendi thinks of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description. His reigning metaphor is the sticker. Racist and antiracist are “peelable name tags,” Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool. But he has no intention of taking the moral sting out of “racist” completely. “I wouldn’t say that a person is not being condemned when they’re being called a racist,” he told Ezra Klein in a 2019 interview.

Rather than replacing one definition of racism with another, Kendi is really joining two senses into one. For much of the 20th century, the white mainstream considered racism a personal moral issue, while Black civil rights activists, among others, argued that it’s also structural and systemic. In his definition, Kendi aims to connect the individual to the system. A “racist,” he writes, is “one who is expressing an idea of racial hierarchy, or through actions or inaction is supporting a policy that leads to racial inequity or injustice.”

Kendi’s focus on outcomes is not new. For decades, civil rights activists have brought lawsuits based on the legal theory of “disparate impact,” which holds that unequal outcomes prove that certain practices (by, for example, an employer or a landlord) are racially discriminatory, without evidence of malicious intent. Kendi’s definition urges us to perform this sort of disparate-impact analysis all the time. In Politico in 2020, Kendi proposed the creation of a federal agency that would clear every new policy — local, state or federal — to ensure that it wouldn’t increase racial disparities. But as his team at the center knew well, policies can have complicated effects. Let’s say that a local environmental policy would improve the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories but would also lead to hundreds of lost jobs and worsen the area’s racial wealth gap. Should it be cleared? Is such a policy racist or antiracist?

The question is made even trickier by the fact that the racial impact of many policies might not become clear until years later. The legacy of desegregation, for example, shows that even a profoundly antiracist policy can be turned against itself in its implementation. This is what the term “systemic racism” captures that can be lost in Kendi’s translation of “racist policies.”

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi writes that “racist policy is the cause of racial disparities in this country and the world at large.” Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern, told me that Kendi’s focus on race didn’t fully capture the complexity of social life — the roles of class, culture, religion, community. “No one variable alone explains anything,” she said. But she thought there was value in simplifying. She understood Kendi not as an official making policy but as a thought leader making a “defensible, succinct provocation.” “We live in a country whose ideology is very individualistic, so the standard response to any failure is individual blame,” she said. “Those of us who do recognize the importance of policies, laws and so on have to always push so hard against that that we have to make statements like the one that Kendi is making.”

I came to think, after months of talking to Kendi, that this was the key to understanding him — to remember that he is trying to push so hard against that. To shove back the anti-Black stereotypes he documented in “Stamped From the Beginning,” the racist ideas that poisoned his own mind and sense of self-worth. His aim, at every turn, is to blame the policies that create unequal conditions and not the people enduring them. But Kendi is so consumed by combating the racist notion of Black inferiority that some of what he says in response is overstated, circular or uncareful, creating an easy target for his critics and discomfiting his allies. Conservatives were far from the only ones alarmed, for example, by his proposal for a constitutional amendment to appoint a panel of racism “experts” with the power to discipline public officials for “racist ideas.” (Kendi told me he modeled this proposal on European countries like Germany, where the bar for hate speech is much lower.)

Some of Kendi’s ideas are softer than they appear at first. Kendi told me that people who believe that his binary applies to “everything” are misreading him. Though he writes that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he says he never meant that sentence to apply to the whole universe of ideas, only to ideas about race. When I asked him whether the environmental policy above would be racist or antiracist based on his definition, he qualified that “policies can be like people, both racist and antiracist,” and went on: “By improving the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories, the policy is being antiracist. By exacerbating the area’s racial wealth gap, the policy is being racist.” Many of his critics might find this a more reasonable position, but it also leads to a question about how useful or powerful a dichotomy it is in the end.

Kendi wanted to remain open to criticism, but so much of what he encountered was racist mockery, lies, professional jealousy, misreadings and threats. “I have thought many times about exiting my vocation as a scholar who studies racism,” he wrote in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “After the experience of the last three years, it does not feel safe for me to be publicly self-reflective or self-critical. It feels dangerous for me to be vulnerable.” Though he commits to doing so anyway, the onslaught brought on by celebrity seemed to cause Kendi’s introversion to harden into distrust. “Fame can be defeating and depleting,” Stefan Bradley, Kendi’s friend, told me. “Every word he puts into the atmosphere will be chopped up a hundred different ways, and that takes a toll on somebody’s mental health.” Bradley continued: “I think that if he were a lesser spirit, he would have been destroyed.”

That Kendi felt under siege became clear to Yanique Redwood when she started her job at the Center for Antiracist Research. Redwood had met Kendi once, in 2017, and she remembered him as soft-spoken but burning with big, exciting ideas. In the fall of 2021, when she interviewed to be the center’s executive director, Kendi told her he felt as though he was failing. Fund-raising while also running the center was too much for one person, and he wanted Redwood, a Caribbean American health and racial-equity researcher who had spent nearly a decade running a small foundation, to take over internal operations. Redwood was prepared to find some disorder, but the state of the center’s finances was a mess unlike any she had ever seen. “Nothing was in place,” she said. “It was unbelievable that an institution like that, with so much spotlight on it, just did not have systems. I understood why I was being brought in.”

Before starting, she conducted a round of entry interviews with faculty and staff members, and by her 27th and last conversation, she was exhausted from absorbing their frustration. “There’s something really wrong here,” she told Kendi. Much of the staff was relieved when Redwood was hired. There had been widespread confusion as employees were asked to do “damage control” by performing jobs for which they weren’t hired, or even qualified. “Everyone was overwhelmed,” Redwood told me. “There were too many promises being made to funders. Products were being promised that could never be delivered.”

Redwood designed a process to help get researchers going on pilot projects tracking disparities relating to felony murder, the health and social safety net, reparations and student-debt forgiveness. She wanted to share some takeaways from her round of entry interviews with the staff, in a tactful and encouraging way, to start the work of repairing the center’s culture, but Kendi worried that whatever she wrote might leak. A reporter from a conservative media outlet was reaching out to former employees, asking about problems at the center. “This media storm was coming,” Redwood told me. “It was brewing.”

Employees said Kendi’s fear of leaks slowed the work and created confusion and unease. The first time Rachael DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, asked Kendi about the center’s finances to help her budget, in 2021, he reacted “bizarrely,” she told me. “Why do you need that information?” he asked. (Kendi denies that this conversation took place. DeCruz says that after asking repeatedly, she received the information about six months later.) The threat of outside scrutiny exacerbated what employees described as Kendi’s tendency to withhold information to avoid interpersonal conflict. “He doesn’t understand people, how to nurture them, how to make them want to do their best work,” Redwood told me. “It’s not his strength, not even a little bit.”

During her entry interviews, Redwood asked each employee what the organization’s values were, and many of them responded by saying something along the lines of “I’ve been wondering that myself.” She encouraged Kendi to hold a retreat to talk through the mission as a group. Kendi was hesitant because he found work retreats “uncomfortable” — “sitting in a room with a large group of people all day long is exhausting for me,” he told me — but he committed to holding one anyway and solicited staff comments on a document he wrote laying out his theory of social change and the center’s role in it. “I was happy to receive all this great feedback,” he wrote to Redwood. “I think the changes will make the document much stronger and clearer.”

On a spring day in 2022, the staff met at a conference center a half-hour’s drive from campus. The day’s agenda, though couched in the gentle jargon of nonprofits, contained hints of the mood: The organizers on staff had scheduled time for an acknowledgment of the center’s growing pains, for a “healing justice moment” and for a period of “wicked questions” when concerns or challenges could be raised. At the start of the day, Naima Wong, an outside facilitator, encouraged the staff not to hold back. “We’re here to really get into this,” she said.

Late in the afternoon, when it was time to wrap up, the group assembled at tables arranged in a circle. Saida Grundy, a sociologist, was seated across from Kendi. She had never been on board with Kendi’s understanding of racism, subscribing instead to the “power plus prejudice” view. Grundy had forwarded Kendi’s email about security to colleagues with the note “The paranoia is INSANE.” “Ibram is so lily-livered he probably jumps when the biscuit tin pops,” she told me. Grundy was the one who, back in November, had made the anonymous complaint, in which some charges carried a hint of paranoia of her own, like the idea that Kendi “despises academia” and had “gotten satisfaction out of pulling academics out of their own research.” She had accused the center of being an exploitative workplace and, after having conflict with her supervisor, had already mostly stepped back from her role. Grundy had told the compliance office that the center might explode, and now she was ready to blow it up herself.

Her voice raised, Grundy laid out an indictment of the document Kendi wrote. “This is a mile wide and an inch deep,” she said. She argued that the center needed to be more specific about its goals; “fighting racism” was such a broad mission that it felt cynically strategic, allowing the center to take in money for all sorts of projects. “If there is a grant for antiracism on Jupiter, great,” she said. “We do extraterrestrial antiracism.” Grundy, unlike most of the staff, thought the center should become a resource for university faculty members and students; her parents were Black student activists in the 1970s, and she believed that real change starts where you are. “If you lined up 99 Black students at B.U.,” she said, “99 will tell you the center’s made no difference to their experience.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent. Several people were crying. Dawna Johnson, the center’s financial director at the time, called it an “explosion.” “People didn’t know what to say after that,” she said. “It just left you so unhappy and uptight.” Kendi, his face inscrutable behind a Covid mask, said nothing, and the facilitator wrapped up the session. “Scholars who study the experience of Black leaders find that the No.1 racist challenge Black leaders face is contested authority, even from other Black leaders and staff,” he wrote to me later. I asked him what he remembered from that day. “It’s almost like trying to remember a day in which you were really happy, but then something horrible happened at the end,” he told me. “It’s hard to remember anything else other than that horrible thing.”

Grundy had admittedly come in hot, many staff members agreed, but it didn’t seem to matter how they couched their concerns. Employees continued to push to make sure that the center’s research projects were both rigorous and responsive to community needs, but the issues they raised in response to Kendi’s “theory of change” document never seemed to get fully resolved. “He’s communicating one thing,” one person said. “Behind the curtain, he’s behaving a very different kind of way.” Redwood and several others said that if someone was too persistent about a concern, Kendi would slow or stop his communication with that person. “If someone disagrees or someone is being vocal, you can’t just get rid of them,” she wanted to tell him. “Like, this is how you breed distrust.”

Redwood ultimately decided that Kendi wasn’t interested in building consensus around a shared mission. “Only he had the ideas,” she said. “We were there to execute on his ideas.” Redwood resigned in October 2022.

In a memo to The Times, Kendi disputed many of the staff’s recollections of his leadership. “This is not me, and anyone close to me, who has worked with me for a long time, knows that I’m open to constructive criticism as a writer and a thinker and a leader,” he wrote. Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote.

Even before Redwood’s departure, Kendi told me, he realized the center was in financial trouble. He was far from the only nonprofit leader caught short as funding for racial-justice work collapsed after 2020. Funders that doused organizations with cash in the wake of George Floyd’s murder proved unwilling or unable to sustain their commitment, and layoffs were taking place across the sector, even at large nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The center had gone from raising $40 million in 2020 to a fraction of that — $420,000 — the next year.

In June 2023, after he went on parental leave, Kendi approached university leaders with the idea of switching to a fellowship model, which could adjust its number of awards to fluctuations in fund-raising. He told the staff only that he would be announcing some major changes when he returned from leave. Dawna Johnson, who succeeded Redwood as executive director, was left to manage a staff frustrated by being kept in the dark. “I think the staff thought I knew more than I actually did, as far as what the future of the center was,” she told me. “He’s like, Just don’t spend money, essentially, which is kind of difficult in an organization that needs to move forward.” (Kendi denies that he said anything like this to Johnson, who remains in her role today.)

Kendi spent the next three months taking care of his newborn daughter, Imara, and his wife, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer while pregnant. In his absence, at another staff retreat, four employees stood up and spoke in turn about the problems at the center. Much of the staff had just learned that the center agreed to partner with the D.E.I. arm of the consulting company Deloitte, which does work for the police and prisons, on designing an antiracism training for corporate workplaces. “Why wasn’t this shared with the broader staff sooner, as a potential high-risk partnership that could impact the relationships we are forging with movement leaders?” one person said. “Why are we contemplating this partnership that arguably goes against our values?”

Kendi, who identifies as a police and prison abolitionist, suggested that donations from corporations could be seen as a “form of reparations,” and he stressed to me that the Deloitte agreement “allowed us to control the products from design to delivery.” He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.” He thought they were being hypocritical in objecting to the Deloitte partnership because they “do not object to personally having profiles on social media corporations that platform copaganda, or buying goods from retailers employing incarcerated labor in their supply chains, or using technology from corporations providing carceral states with technologies of surveillance.”

When I asked the employees about this, one of them called Kendi’s comments about hypocrisy a “deflection tactic.” She stressed that the staff was not making a demand but asking for an open dialogue — or at least a clearly articulated rationale — about decisions that affected them. His response fit a clear pattern, they thought, of believing that employees were trying to undermine him when they really just cared about the work. “I understand he’s coming from a place of trauma,” another told me. “He’s criticized unfairly and through a racist lens constantly. I do understand it. But then to distort that into an inability to receive feedback that’s going to ensure the success and usefulness of the center — that’s where it becomes a problem.”

In September, Kendi fired 19 of the center’s 36 employees in a series of Zoom meetings. Many told me they could understand the layoffs given the financial climate, but to change the model from an ambitious organization that had pledged to drive social change to one that handed out academic fellowships felt like a betrayal of the mission. The abruptness of the decision forced the staff to scramble to find other homes for projects, including a research program supporting Boston-area organizers on a campaign to challenge family policing in schools, for which they were in the midst of sensitive interviews with affected parents and caregivers. Breaking promises they’d made to grass-roots partners was what bothered her team most, said DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, because equitable and sustained relationships between communities and advocates build a strong network — a movement aligned on its goals. Pulling out damaged those relationships.

Though some staff members told me they appreciated Kendi — “My life forever, forever changed because I worked for someone who pushed me to envision what’s possible,” one said — many others had become darkly cynical about him. The most vocal among them was Grundy, who took to Twitter calling Kendi a “grifter” and fueling the rumor that he might have stolen funds. Redwood tried to have empathy. She imagined what it must be like to be constantly attacked — to have your intelligence insulted, your motives questioned. “I wonder if some of the secrecy and paranoid behavior came about as a result of that,” she told me. “I have no idea, and I had to just eventually stop trying to figure it out and just move on, because I couldn’t understand how the person I met when he was at American, when I sat down with him for lunch, the person who appeared to be so humble, so committed — and I still think he is committed — could be the person that I worked for. It is not something that I have ever been able to understand.”

Several people stressed to me that Kendi’s weaknesses as a leader were not as important as the larger forces that surrounded his leadership — the opportunism of white-led institutions, the boom and bust of trend-chasing nonprofit funding, the commodification of Black thought and activism. I asked Boston University to comment on a complaint I heard from the staff, that its administration had failed to provide adequate oversight. “Boston University provided significant financial and administrative support to Dr. Kendi and the center. Dr. Kendi did not always accept the support,” a spokesperson wrote. “In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight.”

The spokesperson also said that the decision to end the center’s projects was Kendi’s choice. “Several different models were discussed with Dr. Kendi, including bringing many of the projects to completion over the next two years and lessening the impact on staff,” he wrote. “However, Dr. Kendi’s preference was to terminate the ongoing projects and ask the funders to repurpose the funds for his new endeavor.” (In a written response, Kendi accused the interim university administration of trying to undermine the center’s work. “The center has faced more oversight and scrutiny than every other center at B.U. from the Office of Research and this interim B.U. administration,” he wrote. “I’m disappointed that this interim B.U. administration is giving The Times a version of events that doesn’t reconcile with the facts.”)

The last time I saw Kendi in person was in January, when he came to New York to promote his newest book, a young readers’ adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” based on her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage from Africa. That night, Kendi was doing an event at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were salt-streaked after a light snowstorm and white string lights glowed on a tree outside. One of the three personal-security officers he brought with him — bearded Black men in black peacoats and dress pants, fitted with earpieces — was checking bags at the door.

Kendi was standing by a wall of books in a teal blazer, his pocket square in place. For a while, he said, he stopped doing many public events because of his security concerns, but he realized it had contributed to his feeling alienated and embattled. “Not doing live book signings prevented me from engaging with the people who were reading and appreciating my work,” he told me later. Going on tour again had “helped tremendously,” he said. But he didn’t want to be away from home long while Sadiqa was in treatment. “It’s incredibly difficult to witness someone you care about deeply facing so much pain and loss,” he said. “I’d much rather just be the one facing that pain.”

Boston University had cleared him and the center of grant mismanagement, but he was still waiting for Korn Ferry, the management consulting firm hired by the administration, to finish its culture inquiry, and he continued to attribute any dysfunction at the center to the hardships of the pandemic and employees who repeatedly contested his leadership. He was coordinating with the university on the center’s next phase, he said, but the work that felt most meaningful to him at the moment was “getting back to my roots as a writer.” He was at work on his next big project, a contemporary political history.

Kendi has spun out 13 books since “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, 10 of which are adaptations of his or others’ work for children. Since becoming a father, he told me, it has become even more important to him to reach young readers — particularly Black kids like him who may have internalized racist ideas about themselves. Earlier that day, Kendi spoke to 250 kids at a middle school elsewhere in Brooklyn, taking questions from a panel of seventh and eighth graders. “Barracoon” was the latest in a series of books he was adapting by Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance ethnographer he has called the “greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era.” “I wanted it to read like a grandparent sharing their difficult life story with care and love to their grandchild,” Kendi wrote on Instagram.

During the talk, Kendi told the audience that there are some Black people who, from the way they maneuver in the world, you can tell are spiritual maroons. “This is the person who truly is living and navigating from the standpoint of a freedom,” he said. “They’re unafraid or not worried at all about the white gaze. They’re operating and navigating the world based on their own destiny, based on what they want.” Hurston, who traveled throughout the South, Jamaica and Haiti collecting folklore from the descendants of slaves, was one of those people, Kendi said.

Listening to him, I wondered how often he felt like one of them, too. I got the impression that Kendi spent a lot of time in his head, in that defensive pose, anticipating or parrying attacks from his critics. When I asked him later where he and Sadiqa had gone on vacation over the New Year holiday, he declined even to name the country for fear that “bad-faith people” would try to figure out where they had stayed and how much their hotel room cost. I told him it seemed as though he devoted a lot of thought to how something he said or did could be used against him by the least generous person on the internet. “I certainly don’t want to provide fodder for it,” he told me.

Kendi is right that there’s a mess of misinformation about what he believes. He has become a cipher for the unfinished national conversation about the post-George Floyd moment — the outrage and wild hope of the protests, the reactionary anger, the disillusionment. In tying together racism’s two senses — the personal and the systemic — Kendi has helped many more Americans understand that they are responsible not only for the ideas in their heads but also for the impact they have on the world. But this gap between intention and action, so core to his thinking, is where all the hard work takes place, DeCruz told me. That’s where organizing and movement-building happens, where you practice the kind of world you want to live in. “Having a shared language is important,” she said, but “it’s just the first step.”

[spooky-raccoon]

Road Trip (Part 10)

Rufo X Female Reader

Part 10 to Road Trip

Back to Reader’s Perspective

Tag List: @booklover2929​ @the-clown-crypt​ @chii2blog​

         I woke up that morning with the memories of the night before playing over in my mind.  The way Rufo eyed me as he approached the bed.  How he took the remote from me and changed it to a music station, one that was playing oldies.  He had grabbed my hand and we danced a little to the music.  No words between the two of us and I felt we didn’t need them.  Even when he had me pinned down to the bed there were no words but the sounds that filled the room.  I had to blink hard and shake my head before sitting up.  I could feel my cheeks heated with the blush that was sure to be bright on them.  That’s when I realized Rufo wasn’t lying beside me.

        I got up from the bed and made my way to the bathroom thinking maybe he was just getting ready for a shower.  Though when I saw the bathroom was empty my heart started to sink.  I went back to the main room and that’s when I saw the note on the desk.  I took it in hand and sat down on the bed to read it.

        “(Y/N),

        I hate to leave like this but it’s what’s best. Go on and enjoy yourself and the rest of your vacation.  Thanks for letting me tag along for as long as you would let me.  Thanks for the memories and good times doll.  

        And just remember, gray skies are gonna clear up.

        Rufo the Clown”

        I sat there for I don’t remember how long until the knock on the door from room service startled me, telling me it was about time for me to get going.  Even packing up and leaving in my car felt like a blur.  He had left some time in the night when I was deep in sleep. Probably knew I would have asked him to stay and tell him that things would be alright.  All I could do was sigh to myself and try to think of what next was on my agenda before the clown had joined.  Before I found myself attached in some way.

        I decided to go to the circus that we had planned to go to together.  I’m sure he wouldn’t be there and it would help get my mind off of things by having some fun.  I managed to find decent parking and bought my wrist band so I could freely enjoy everything the circus had to offer.

         The rides were the typical rides you would find at a travelling circus and I admit I rode the Tilt A Whirl and Scrambler more times than I could count.  I even managed to go on the Ferris Wheel alone even though I could feel my heartbeat pounding hard in my chest when I was at the very top all alone.  The view was worth it though as I looked out the tree lines and hills in the far-off distance.  I even managed to get a good couple of pictures before the descent back down.

        I made it to the big top show just in time to get a good seat close to the front amongst the sea of people.  The show was splendid, and I joined in on the clapping and cheering of the crowd after each act.  I didn’t even notice the gaze of the tall brown-haired man who looked ever so plain in the crowd. Heck, I didn’t even notice as he was getting closer behind me when the large group of folk were guided out of the tent so they could once again enjoy the festivities outside.  Though when he grabbed me that’s when he finally got my attention.

        “Evening cupcake.  I hope you enjoyed the show because we have some place we need to go.” His grip got painfully tight as he shoved me into his body as he made his way through the crowd.  I don’t even think my feet touched the ground much.

        “Let go of me!”  I shouted and even though I was loud enough for several people to hear me, none of them looked at me.  “Let me fucking go!”  I screamed again and tried to jerk away.  It always most worked but his grip was too tight and ready.

       “Now, now, don’t want to ruin everyone else’s day. That would be rude cupcake. Though, there is one person I need to see you like this.”  As I squirmed I saw him scanning around and then he grinned.  I didn’t really like that smile of his.  

        “I said let me go!”  I kept trying to jerk my body away again despite the pain in my arms from his hold.  It almost felt like I was about to break my own bones to get out of his grip and I damn well would if that’s what I needed to happen.

       Though when I looked up to see if anyone was looking I noticed one person.  Rufo looking as human as ever.  He was looking right at me and at Crowley.  That’s when I saw the eyes in his skull sink and his skin start to tear away.

        “(Y/N)!  Crowley! Let her go!  She’s got nothing to do with us!”  I could hear the change in his voice from how it normally sounded to a dry growl as if his vocal cords were becoming taut.

        “And now we make our exit.”  There had been a sea of people between us and I managed to get an arm free as I reached out to Rufo.  

        It didn’t matter though as the people cleared away for Crowley and seemed to move in front of Rufo which didn’t end too well as they were shoved away or worse.  Tears welled up in my eyes as Rufo got further and further away and eventually my arm drooped down.  Crowley didn’t speak as he got me into a car, tying up my hands though still made sure I was comfortable in the back seat of my car.  All I could feel was my heart aching the further we drove away.

        My eyes stayed looking out the window and watching how the road twist and turned.  I didn’t have a clue where were going and I doubt Crowley would give me an answer. Though I didn’t need to wait long as he pulled off to a dirt road which my car didn’t like too much with all the bumps, but it made due as we approached a small wooden cabin tucked away in the trees.  

       “Almost done (Y/N).  Don’t you worry.”  Crowley finally spoke just before getting out of the car.  He came around and got me out so we could trudge our way into the little cabin.  

       It looked as if he had been staying here for about a day.  There were some kerosene lanterns lit and the furniture that was there seemed to have always been there with an almost decaying appearance.  Laying out on a starting to rot tabletop was a brief case and inside was a various things like chalk, crystals, and vials filled with questionable liquid.  He had me seated on one of the sturdier chairs.

       “Now, sit there and be good for me cupcake.” He tied my ankles to the chair, and finally he fashioned a rope around my torso to keep my arms pinned to my sides.

        “Why are you doing this to me Crowley?”  My eyes followed him as he went back to the table and he grabbed a piece of chalk from it.

        “It’s not necessarily a you thing.  It’s a more of him thing.”  He jutted his head toward the door that we came in as he turned. “Him and I have been fighting each other for quite some time.”  He moved to the center and got to work drawing a large circle and various symbols. “You see cupcake, I’m very old. Much older than you can probably imagine.  I’m under certain rules and obligation to get rid of evil things.  Especially when they get under my skin and make me itch.”  His eyes stared into mine and that damned smile of his was back.  “And he’s like the damn chicken pox.”

        I didn’t say anything more as I watched him finish up.  He wiped his hands on a rag which he tossed onto the table along with his supplies. He paced around the room for a bit, peaking out the window now and again.

        “What makes you think he’s going to know where I am? That’s he’s going to come for me?” My leg was bouncing, well what it could with my legs tied to the chair.  “I’m not much of a prize.”

        “You say that but that’s not what I see.”  He turned his attention to me.  “He doesn’t put up with many people and put up is a strong phrase.  Most of the humans he comes in contact with end up dead.”  He strolled over to me and leaned over so he could get in my face.  “And you two seem to have gotten rather close.” As he said that his eyes flicked over me and there was that smile that sent chills through my body.  “So that makes you pretty special, cupcake.”

       “We just had a lot in common.  That’s all.”  I tried to look away, but I could still feel his eyes staring into me.  If I could fidget more in my seat, I would have.  “At least I’d like to think we did.”

       “Well, you have some time to think about all those things in common cupcake.  It’s gonna take some time for him to find us since there were some dead-end roads on the way here that he’s gonna have to figure out for himself.  So kick back, relax.  Take a load off.”  Crowley had a jokester smile as he stood back up and grabbed a chair for himself at the table.  

       So I sat there, staring at the door.  Thoughts flooded my mind as I imagined Rufo trying to find me.  If he was. From the window I could see some clouds over the trees roll by and all I could think of was the storms these past few days.  How Rufo took it upon himself to comfort me, to distract me what ways he could.  The way he looked at me with those icy blue eyes. How he held me tight to his side as we watched rerun after rerun of Cops in some hotel in the middle of nowhere.  The way he looked at me during our few moments of passion followed by his lingering touches throughout the day.  Hell, how he even murdered someone to keep me safe.  It had honestly been one of the most enjoyable times in my life in so long.

       It was that moment when I decided that I would do anything for Rufo.  

[the-clown-crypt]

hhhhhh I need some more reader x clown smut can someone please tag me in something pls hhh

just horny for clowns is all what can I say?

[rotten-hearts-sharp-teeth]

I watched Malignant again and it reignited my need to write Gabriel May x reader. 👀 All these ideas, I swear! The plan so far:

Finish the last two chapters of Alone Wolf

Write next chapter of Slumber Party

Start Road Kill (a long shot slasher x final girl)

One shot Kill Zone Captive (Agent Orange x reader)

One shot unnamed Malignant reader x

Rewrite and post the entirety of Empty (previously written Rufo x reader long shot)

Links to my AO3 and WattPad below

[exprimis]

The March 2021 edition of Imprimis contains an essay adapted from a lecture by Christopher F. Rufo, director of a public policy think tank called "Battlefront", a film director at the Documentary Foundation, and a contributing editor of City Journal.

His essay describes Critical Race Theory thusly:

Based in Marxism: "Abandoning Marx's economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, [Western Marxist scholars] substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories." This project which lost out to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, which sought freedom and equality under the law.

"Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism."

The source of euphemisms such as "equity", "social justice", "diversity and inclusion" and "culturally responsive teaching".

The essay emphasizes the distinction between equality (good, rejected by CRTists) and equity ("little more than reformulated Marxism"), the latter of which is a stalking horse for the end of capitalism. It mentions some particularly out-there ideas for Constitutional reform proposed by Ibram X. Kendi and suggests that they are representative of the entire CRT movement, seeking to abolish capitalism. In one wonderful flourish of rhetoric, the author writes, "In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end."

But CRT as described is a very abstract set of scholarly ideas. How is it operationalized, according to the author? The quotes in this section are his.

Telling people they've committed "microiniquities" and have been "socialized into oppressor roles"

Collective racial guilt, "virtually all white people contribute to racism"

Preaching antiracism.

Reeducation camps in the guise of sensitivity training, including writing letters of apology to fictitious people.

Training first-graders to rank themselves according to "power and privilege"

Playing oppression Olympics with an "oppression matrix"

The sort of rhetorical motte-and-bailey games where disagreeing with the bailey is admitting racial guilt, which we've all seen here on Tumblr

Why does the author think CRT is spreading?

People are afraid to talk about politics, because of cancel culture.

The motte-and-bailey guilt-admissions.

A failure to separate the premise of CRT (America's history includes racism and slavery and other injustices, which is true) from the conclusion (that the founding principles of the United States, its Constitution, and the American way of life should be overthrown)

A tendency to attack CRT within the field of academic combat, where it is developed, rather than in public, where it is deployed. This is bad because academics are great at academic combat, and because the ivory tower has been captured by CRT-ists. "They fail to force defenders of this revolutionary ideology to defend the practical consequences of their ideas in the realm of politics."

How does the author propose to fight CRT?

Publicly question CRT-spreaders about what suggested courses of action their ideology implies: Should schoolkids or soldiers be taught fill-in-the-blank?

Censorship, in the sense that governments and government employees should be banned from saying certain things

Lawsuits protecting people from being compelled to say certain things

Lawsuits protecting people from being told certain discriminatory things

General grassroots movement against racially-divisive rhetoric.

Encourage people to aim for excellence, to achieve their potential, no matter their background.

"...[I]n addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America - a stroy that is honest about injustices in American hsitroy, but that places them in the context of our nation's high ideals and the progress we have made towards realizing them.

-------

Let's return to that last bullet point. "the central dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated" is not identified in this article.

For all that he explains that the conclusions drawn from Critical Race Theory are horrible, this article doesn't examine how those conclusions were drawn, or say why the premises of the reasoning are incorrect. He expects the reader to take that on faith.

[arcticdementor]

The outdated definition of a liberal is that of a person who is tolerant of others, their thoughts, and their way of life. This traditional definition has been discarded in favour of an increasingly narrow one largely due to Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” in which the intolerant cannot be tolerated as an ‘open society’ will eventually be seized by the intolerant. Therefore, Enlightened Despotism is the ‘proper’ way to govern a society.

It is human nature to challenge despotism and authoritarianism, especially as they fall into intellectual, spiritual, economic and personal corruption. So how are those who challenge such a system to be dealt with? Simply label them as ‘intolerant’, which makes them a de facto outlaw in society.

Christopher Rufo is one of these modern outlaws. Initally a documentary maker, his life recently has taken him down another, much more difficult route: challenging the intellectual basis of today’s American elites, that being Critical Race Theory. He has been credited with singlehandedly putting opposition to this trend on the political map by way of influencing President Trump to issue an Executive Order halting its instruction inside of federal agencies. With Biden’s reversal of Trump’s Executive Order, Rufo is now expanding the front far and wide, and winning key battles along the way.

…

All Italians are mafia so your family is definitely connected to at least one of the NYC Five Families, if not the Outfit in Chicago.  You grew up watching Goodfellas and then eventually moved on to The Sopranos.  You and your wop friends picked up the lingo, started talking like mafiosos, and came across as fucking idiots to everyone around you.  You tried to extort a guy down the block who had a pretty strong betting book but he told his mom and his mom told your mom and your dad got out his belt and told you that you're not allowed to be hardcore.  When was your first hit and why wasn't it Rod Dreher?

There is some truth to this. Like most authentic Italian-Americans, I have distant relatives in both countries who operate “family businesses.” Most of it is harmless: off-the-books car parts, bookmaking, loan collection. We had a relative in Philly who made a living hustling mobsters in golf—he would let them win just enough to keep them hooked, then empty their pockets every so often. The business had its ups and downs. Once, he was sitting with the family on a Sunday, watching the news, when his face suddenly went white. A local mob boss had been arrested. Turns out that our relative had made his living the previous few years hustling that mob boss on the golf course. “Goddammit, now I need to find a job!” he said when the news broke. Most of the time, I don’t ask questions.

…

It’s astonishing to me that as recently as the 1960s, interracial marriage was seen, correctly, as a moral cause and a sign of racial progress. Now, for some factions on the Left, interracial marriages, and mixed-race families in general, are seen as a form of oppression, domination, and false consciousness. They see interracial marriages as an expression of “white supremacy” or, for the minority spouse, as an “assimilation into whiteness.” Some lefties famously blasted Amy Coney Barrett as a “white colonizer” for adopting a Haitian orphan. We’ve gone from Loving v Virginia to Ibram X. Kendi in a single generation. And now we’re beginning to see the revival of informal social prohibitions against interracial marriage and actual racial segregation in schools, universities, and public institutions. I recently obtained photos from King County Library, which held a racially-segregated diversity training program, even hanging up signs outside the separated rooms labelled “People of Colour” and “People Who Are White.” It’s like water fountains in 1955, but in the service of 21st-century woke ideology. The new racial politics of the Left is almost parodically regressive.

…

Others have laid out different strategies in fighting CRT.  Some have suggested confronting Corporate HR Trainers either overtly or subtly so that fellow employees would 'see through' its illogic and inherent awfulness.  Why are these approaches either useless or even counterproductive?

You can’t persuade zealots with logic, facts, and clever argumentation; they only understand the language of power. That’s why the campaign to prove that you’re “the real liberal” or “more antiracist than the antiracists” is doomed to failure. Like it or not, Critical Race Theory is the driving force of the modern intellectual Left; they’re not going back to the philosophy of FDR, LBJ, or MLK. And they scrupulously follow the old dictum of “no enemies to the left”—they will dispatch the centrist liberals with even more vitriol and brutality than they dispatch the conservatives. This is also the core dilemma of the IDW crowd: many of them cannot imagine aligning with political conservatives; they operate under the delusion that they can “recapture the centre” and convince the planet of the virtue of Enlightenment values. That’s not how politics works. We live in a polarized political system—one winner, one loser. You’ll remember that the Girondins went to the guillotine. If, metaphorically speaking, the centrist liberals want to avoid the same fate, they will have to make an alliance with Trump-loving, truck-driving, gun-toting Middle Americans. That’s reality. We’ll see if they heed it.

…

Ibram X. Kendi is a human fortune cookie. His intellectual output is an endless buffet of word salad and phony wisdom: “Denial is the heartbeat of racism”; “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist”; “Whiteness is literally posing an existential threat to humanity.” In my investigative reporting, I’ve noticed something quite interesting: the core demographic of Kendi readers is liberal, white, middle-aged women who work in public institutions. On one hand, this is a surprise: Kendi embraces a radical vision of Black Power-style revolution. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense: Kendi’s politics provides a vicarious thrill, but is completely in line with conventional wisdom. It’s revolution without risk; it’s liberation without leaving the house. That’s really the best way to understand what he’s doing. He’s not a revolutionary; he’s a self-help guru for white liberals and a reputation-laundering mechanism for multinational corporations. He is an apostle of anti-whiteness, but a mouthpiece for elite white opinion. He preaches anti-capitalism, but accepts Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.

…

The dirty secret about Critical Race Theory and, to a certain extent, the New York Times, is that they are both extensions of the state. Critical Race Theory was incubated in public and publicly-subsidized universities and then operationalized in public agencies and public school systems. In reality, Critical Race Theory has very little organic support—it’s an artificial ideology that has the illusion of support because it has commandeered the public bureaucracy and prestige media. But you’ll notice that the Critical Race Theorists are regularly ratioed on Twitter, juice their book sales with institutional purchases, and collect corporate handouts to do their work. The New York Times is similarly situated. It’s the mouthpiece of the permanent state no matter who is in office. Its purpose is to manufacture the narrative and enforce ideological discipline. But here, too, the New York Times is less powerful than it appears. Its authority rests on its historical reputation and prestige, which is rapidly being squandered with each bogus story, newsroom tantrum, and Taylor Lorenz article. I’ll admit: I was momentarily frightened when the Times was putting together a piece attacking my work on Critical Race Theory. But it turned out to be a great coup for me: the Times made a sloppy accusation, so I quickly owned them on Twitter and generated 100 times more social media engagement in my rebuttal than they did in their attack. To top it off, conservatives consider it a badge of honour to get that first NYT hit piece, so I enjoyed a round of attaboys, high-fives, and small donations from my tribe.

…

How much do you shudder when you hear Capicolo pronounced "GABBAGOOL"?

The last time I heard that pronunciation, I shuddered so hard I threw out my back. It’s more than hate speech—it’s actual violence.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo: Reflection

Direct sequel to Naughty and the last one shot before Empty begins

Warnings: fluff, biting, shower sex

Rufo stood at the bathroom sink, brushing bits of flesh off his teeth while he studied his reflection in the mirror.

The blood on his face and arms had washed off without too much difficulty, his skin returned to it's usual pristine white. His face lost the corpse like quality as his mood improved; his cheeks filled back in and his light blue eyes were no longer sunken down in their sockets. Even the bullet holes in his slim chest were gone. He looked normal again. Well, normal for him.

Putting away his toothbrush, Rufo grabbed one of the blue curls framing his face and examined it. His hair had grown a lot longer than he kept it when he was alive. Of course, it hadn't been curly then. Or blue. He was considering cutting it when two arms wrapped around his waist and his girlfriend pressed herself against his back. The corner of his lips lifted in a crooked grin and he turned around in her arms to face her.

Her smile was warm, the bloody massacre of her coworkers all but forgiven. She (had a beautiful smile) was an unusual woman.

“What are you so happy about?”

“You made it back by Christmas, just like you said you would.”

Rufo lifted an eyebrow, the cut out triangle on his face distorted.

“I’m a man of my word and I gave you my word, didn’t I?”

“Yeah... you did.”

She bit her bottom lip as she ran her nails up his bare chest and linked her arms behind his neck, pulling him down for a kiss. Rufo bent to accommodate her. He (loved the way she kissed) pressed his scarred lips against hers, then pulled away.

“Get the shower ready for us.”

When Rufo returned (home) from a job, they showered together. It was a long standing routine that he looked forward to. It gave him a chance to (hold her) plan what he wanted to do to her body next and if he snuck in a little teasing, then even better.

She turned on the water and unzipped the red dress she had picked out just for him.

“You really did look beautiful in that dress doll.”

Rufo didn’t mind giving his lady a compliment when one was due. She looked back over her shoulder at him and kept her tone playful as the dress fell to the floor.

“Even though it made me look like a whore?”

“Especially because it made you look like a whore.”

He winked at her and she laughed as she stepped into the shower and closed the stall door. Rufo glanced at his strange appearance one last time before he pulled off his slacks and joined her. Steam billowed out as he stepped into the glass shower. The bathroom was one of the reasons she had picked the apartment in the first place and he had to admit, he was going to miss it when he relocated her. The bodies wouldn't be discovered until after the holidays, so he figured he might as well enjoy it while he could.

She was rinsing her hair and Rufo took the opportunity to look over her body; the curve of her back, the shape of her calves. He (loved her body) admired the red welts and dark bruises that covered her ass from his earlier punishment. Her skin bruised so nicely. She moved out of the way so Rufo could stand under the stream of hot water and he let the massaging jets run though his hair. Red water faded to pink as blood swirled down the drain. Her hand closed around his wrist and he let her pulling him out from under the water so she could wash his hair.

Rufo held her so she could stand on tip toe while she massage his scalp with her fingernails. Before her, he had never considered letting anyone else wash his hair. She worked her hands through the rest of his curls as he leaned further into her touch. He enjoyed the feel of her breasts pressed tight against his chest, the feel of her ass in his hands while he held her against his cock. Maybe he would keep his hair long after all.

She finished with his hair and grabbed the soap before she moved on to his body. She rubbed the tense muscles in his shoulders, then scrubbed the dried blood off his chest until he was squeaky clean and clown white. Lathering up her hands, she started to wash the v of his hips. Rufo smirked as he watched her.

She moved lower and took his cock in both of her hands, squeezing with slightly increased pressure while she stroked his shaft. It felt good and before long Rufo was hard again. He leaned his head back against the tile and thrust up into her hand while she gently squeeze his balls. His girl was good.

"Does that feel good Rufo?"

He moaned, then heard her giggle. His eyes snapped open and a sadistic smile spread across his lips as he looked into her eyes. So she wanted to play huh? He grabbed her wrists with one hand and turned her into the water so her back was held against his chest.

“Yeah, it does. But I'm clean enough. It's your turn now.”

Rufo pressed his cock against her ass and moved her wet hair from her shoulder.

“I have to make sure my dirty girl gets clean too, don’t I?”

His breath was hot against the back of her neck, her body arched into his when she felt his teeth graze her skin. He (loved her soft skin) enjoyed sinking his teeth into her flesh and had indulged himself back at the office. Soapy hands rubbed over the bites before moving lower to massage the muscles that held up her breasts, just like she had shown him. Her head fell back against his shoulder and she moaned his name. It took all of his willpower not to bend her over right then.

Rufo worked his way around her tits and rolled her nipples between his fingers. He (loved the noises she made) pulled until she yelped in pain, then continued to pinch and pull on her tits with one hand while the other one slid down her belly to rub between her legs. Running a finger up the length of her slit, he was amazed at how wet she already was. No matter how many times he used her, what hole he chose to abuse, the bites, the cuts, the bruises, she was always ready for (him) more.

“I... think I’m clean now Rufo.”

She was breathing hard, and he laughed as she tried to grind against his hand. He enjoyed the hell out of teasing her.

“Oh, you think so? I better make sure.”

Rufo pushed her back against the shower wall and she gasped as her bruised ass made contact with the glass. He dropped down to his knees in front of her and lifted her leg up high, fingers sinking into the flesh just behind her knee while he held her wide open. She stumbled, then grabbed onto his shoulders for balance. His face was right next to her cunt anyway, so he used his fingers to spread her labia for a better look.

“Rufo...”

Her voice was shaking but she knew better than to try and stop him. He pushed his middle finger all the way in to the knuckle then wriggled it around.

“Hmm.. I don't know. You seem pretty dirty to me princess.”

He smiled as he added a second finger, then pumped them in and out while he look over the faded bruises on her thighs. He'd have to fix those.

Leaning forward, Rufo pressed his lips against the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh, then sank his teeth into her skin until he tasted blood. Her pussy squeezed around his fingers and she screamed, but she didn't dare push him away. When Rufo pulled back, she had a perfect imprint of his teeth right next to her cunt that was already starting to bruise. He bit his way up her leg, leaving matching bruises every few inches while three of his fingers worked her pussy and his thumb rubbed her clit. She sobbed, and when Rufo looked up to see her crying his cock throbbed. But no, he wasn’t read to fuck her. Not just yet.

She flinched when he brought his mouth to her mound but instead of biting her, he flicked his tounge over her clit. Another lick made her throw her head back and moan (for him) like a slut. Rufo had spent a lot of time learning her body early in their relationship. Before her, his experiences with women had been… complicated at best. Now he could bring her to orgasm in almost no time if he wanted. She pulled his hair and rode out her pleasure on his face while he sucked her clit. It wasn't something he would normally have allowed, but it was Christmas Eve. He fingered her until finally, she grabbed his wrist and begged for him to stop. It was time.

Rufo got to his feet and lined up, then started to push in. Even though she was dripping wet, he had to force his way past her bruised muscles.

“Sore already?”

He groaned as he pushed the last few inches of his full length inside her and she cried out in pain.

“Yes but please, don't stop. It feels good.”

Her eyes were clenched shut, her pussy throbbed from her orgasm but still, she moaned and held on to him. He grinned and pulled almost all of the way back out before slowly pushing back in.

“Good. I’m not even close to finished with you doll.”

Rufo kept his grip on her leg and brought his other arm to rest against the shower wall just above her head. He pressed his forehead against his arm and closed his eyes while he slid in and out of her, enjoying the way her insides squeezed around him. His kept his pace agonizingly slow until she bucked her hips in an attempt to get him to go faster. He figured he might as well accommodate her, the hot water wasn't going to last forever.

Rufo effortlessly lifted her away from the glass, then let her drop back down onto his cock. His fingers dug into the bruised flesh of her ass and she yelped as he roughly bounced her up and down. Her arms tightened around his neck, her cries changed to loud moans and gasps. He (loved how loud she was) made her scream by bouncing her harder while he thrust up against her body. Rufo's arms were shaking, but it wasn’t from the strain of holding her. Her slick warmth slid up and down his cock and it didn't take long before he started to feel the familiar tightness in his balls. Her screams changed pitch as she struggled to hold on to him and he knew she was just as close as he was.

“You ready to cum?”

He growled in her ear, his breath uneven.

“Yes, I’m so close Rufo. Please... it’s right there!”

He shifted her body in his grip so she could roll her hips and grind her clit against his pelvis.

“That’s it baby. Cum with me.”

Rufo held her down on his cock while she screamed his name. Her body squeezed tight around him, throbbing, forcing him over the edge with her and he couldn't hold back a moan of his own.

After the last twitches of pleasure had passed between them, she moved and he felt cum start to run down his shaft. It was an odd sensation, one that filled him with something he couldn't quite describe. Possessive satisfaction maybe? Instead of putting her down, he held her closer (and smelled her shampoo) until he caught his breath.

Rufo sat her back on her feet, then rinse off before he stepped out of the shower. He wrapped a towel around his waist while she cleaned herself up and when she was finished, he stood waiting with her towel in his hands.

He (loved her) dried her hair and kissed her on the lips.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo: Naughty pt. 2

Warning: jealousy, blood, gore, cannibalism (?) eye trauma

The look on Rufo’s face made you want to run and hide. His body was actually shaking with rage.

One of the guys that worked two floors down stepped in front of Rufo, blocking his view of you. You couldn't hear what he was saying but you could tell from his posture that he was asking him to leave. He went to grab Rufo by the shoulder but the clown suddenly moved. Rufo swung his arm up in a wide arc and a spray of red followed the glint of the knife in his hand. Your coworker fell backwards, clutching at his throat, but even across the room you could see blood pumping through his fingers.

Jingle Bell Rock began to play as the screaming started.

Rufo stepped over the dying man and grabbed Helen from accounting by the hair. He plunged the knife in her face then let her limp body drop to the floor before he advanced on his next victim. The small crowd panicked in their rush to get away from the corpse like clown and you were knocked to the floor. Another scream was cut short as you crawled your way through the legs of the crowd. Someone kneed you in the cheek and another lady stepped on your hand with her heel before finally, you were able to stand.

An empty hallway was to your left, so you ran for it. You had no doubt that Rufo would find you eventually, but if you could hide somewhere, give him enough time to calm down a little, maybe you would stand a chance. Rounding the corner of the hallway, you ran into the second office on the right. You left the door open and dove under the desk where you tried to control your breathing. Closed doors seemed be more suspicious than open one so you hoped Rufo would check those first.

The screams faded as the crowd moved further away and it was almost quiet, until gunshots went off at the end of the hall. The noise was too loud, too sudden. It startled you and you jumped, hitting your head against the bottom of the desk. Who the hell brought a gun to a Christmas party?

Everything was dead silent for just a moment, then your boyfriend started to laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh. The screaming started again and you laid your head down on your knees. You had really messed up and Rufo was angry with you. That thought broke your heart.

You listened as someone ran into the room with you and slammed the door before turning the lock. Looking up from under the desk, you found a blood splattered Richard slumped against the wall.

“No! Nonononono, he can't find us in here together!”

Richard's panic stricken eyes snapped to your face and you realized your mistake.

“What the fuck is going on? You know that… that thing?!"

Rich was on the verge of hysterics and you didn't guess you could really blame him. Rufo was a hard pill to swallow.

"Was that your boyfriend in clown makeup?!”

The screams were getting closer so Rich shuffled some papers on the desk, then picked up a letter opener and held it out like a weapon.

“Thats just going to piss him off.”

Richard didn’t seem to hear you or maybe he just didn't care. The last scream cut off right outside the door before the knob rattled and you heard Rufo chuckle. Locks did absolutely nothing against him and within two seconds Rufo had the door open and was stepping into the room.

Richard's eyes went wide with terror as he reached down and pulled you out from under the desk by your hair. He spun you around to face Rufo then pressed the letter opener to you neck. You gasped as you got a good look at your boyfriend underneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs. Despite the small cluster of bloody bullet holes in the front of his shirt, he looked fleshier, more alive than he had before, but that wasn’t saying much. Gore covered his mouth and both arms all the way up to mid forearm. His sleeves were rolled back to his elbows and the untouched strip of titanium white skin between the blood and his shirt seemed obscene, yet mildly erotic. Your heart beat faster and your breath caught in your throat. Rufo always had that effect on you.

The smirk on his skeletal face disappeared as Rich shoved the letter opener harder against your skin.

“Don’t even fucking think about coming any closer!”

Richard was screaming, right in your ear.

“Ballsy move Dick. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Rufo raised his bloody hands to show they were empty and slowly stepped closer to the desk.

“But I wonder, could you do it Dick? Could you actually kill someone?”

“Rufo..”

Your voice was barely above a whisper. Taunting Rich wasn't very helpful and seemed like a good way for you to end up dead. It was kind of ironic though. The situation reminded you of the first time you had met your boyfriend, only this time you were someone else’s hostage.

“Relax doll. I can stop him before he hurts you, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of hot water just yet.”

Your face fell as you realized you were stuck between a rock and a hard place. You were the one Rufo was actually angry at.

“I’m not joking freak!”

Richard's hand shook and you felt the tip of the letter opener puncture your skin. Warm, wet blood trailed down the curve of your neck and Rufo's eyes followed it until it soaked into the top of your red dress. He turned his attention back to Richard and looked every bit the cold killer you knew he was. There was something demonic burning in his blue eyes when he smiled.

“You’re going to be my new best friend Dick. I’m going to take my time with you.”

Richard panicked and would have killed you, but Rufo moved too fast. His hand shot out and closed around Richard's wrist before he twisted hard enough to snap ligaments. Rich gave a small cry of pain before Rufo grabbed his throat and drove him down to his knees. Richard used his one good hand to try to break Rufo's grip, but you knew it was hopeless. Rufo was inhumanly strong.

You started backing away towards the door as Rufo turned the point of the letter opener and drove it through Richard's eye, just deep enough to destroy the organ. Fluid dribbled down his cheek and the scream that tore from Richard's throat made you feel a little sorry for him as you turned to run. You had almost made it to the door when the letter opener flew by your face and embedded itself in the wall by your head.

“Stop running.”

Rufo’s tone didn’t leave any room for argument.

“You’re just making it worse for yourself, princess.”

You watched Richard's eye goo drip from the letter opener then slowly turned to face Rufo. He flashed a bloody smile at you, then looked back down at Richard. Rufo peeled his good hand from his arm and held it up to his scarred mouth.

“You really shouldn’t touch things that don’t belong to you, Dick. Especially when they belong to me.”

"No! Please... no!"

Richard begged but Rufo wasn't a merciful man. The clown bit through three of his fingers, then swallowed them. Bile rose in your throat at the sound of bones crunching and you closed your eyes while Rufo continued to eat. After what felt like an eternity, Richard's screams dulled to quiet whimpers and you felt the unnatural heat from Rufos body as he stepped in front of you.

Opening your eyes brought you face to bloody face with the man you had been dating for almost a year. The corpse like appearance was almost gone and white skin was visible through the bullet holes in his shirt. Rufo stepped closer and pressed you back against the wall while he retrieved the letter opener, then pressed it against your cheek.

“Now, what am I going to do to you?”

[spooky-raccoon]

Road Trip (Part 7)

Rufo the Clown X Female Reader

Part 7 of Road Trip

Tag List: @trig-loves-clowning-around​ @rottenhearts-and-sharpteeth​ @booklover2929​ @the-clown-crypt​ @chii2blog​

         The next morning, I woke up to the sound of the shower running and decided to take the time to get dressed for the day.  I was slipping on my shoes when Rufo came out, dressed in his usual attire of slack pants and a button up.  Though as he was coming out I watched as the human looking skin grew over his body and his hair changing back to black.  I couldn’t lie, it was interesting to watch. He saw me watching him from the mirror he was in front of and turned to me with a smile.

          “Morning doll.  Hope ya slept well.  Figured we could take a break from driving right away and we can explore the town a little bit.  How does that sound?”  His brow raised as he strolled over to me so he could put on his own shoes.

         “Uh, yeah, that sounds good.  I did see a lot of antique stores when we were coming in. A lot of them looked pretty neat.” I nodded as I finished tying my laces.

        “We can hit up as many as you like.  Ladies choice.”  He seemed so pleasant, as if yesterday didn’t happen at all.  

        Once his shoes were on we decided to head out on foot into town.  It was a beautiful morning with only a few clouds in the sky.  I even brought my camera with me to take some pictures here and there when something caught my eye.  Every antique store we stepped into was a little treasure trove of assortments that I wished I had more room in my car for.  We found ourselves in a particular one that had two floors and Rufo had found something that he was telling me about.  There was such enthusiasm in his voice as he talked about memories on how he used to use it back in the day.  When his eyes landed on old circus memorabilia though that’s when he really lit up.  

        “Almost looks like my own.”  Rufo mused as he picked up a vintage throwing knife.  It was rusted in some spots but other than that it held up its age well.  “Just needs a good polish is all and all brand new.”  He had a fond smile before setting the knife back down, letting out a small sigh.  When he left to go look around the corner I picked up the knife and held it to my side so he wouldn’t see it.  Nothing wrong with getting him a little something as a little thank you, right? “Hey, (Y/N)!”  Rufo called from around the corner and I quickly made my way around.  In Rufo’s hand was a little clown.  “Look at this little fella.”

        Rufo held up the clown for me to take and I did with my free hand.  The small clown was in a bright red outfit with a small hat that topped his bright green hair.  The makeup on the porcelain face consisted of red lips with a red outline a little bit out, a green dot on his small nose and big blue eyes.  There was a little charm about the doll that I couldn’t help to smile at and Rufo looked very pleased with himself when he saw how I was smiling.

         “He’s adorable Rufo.  I think he’s pretty great.”  My eyes glanced up to Rufo and he took the clown from my hand.

        “Perfect.  I did say we would find you one.  Maybe find him a friend or two at some of the other shops.”  Rufo turned on his heel as he went to look around again.

         “Rufo, don’t think you’re paying for him.”  I did my best to keep up with him.  It was easier said than done when Rufo had such long legs.

          “Nonsense.  I’m a gentleman and a gentleman should get the little lady some gifts now and again. I’m going to get you this little fella and that’s that.  No arguing with me doll.”  He turned to give me a side eye, so I understood to drop the subject and I did but only after giving him an eyeroll.  I was getting him a gift so I could let it slide.

          We wondered through the shop and I managed to get away to pay for the knife and tuck it into my bag so he wouldn’t see it. After he paid for the small clown we left to explore the rest of the shops and he indeed did find me a couple more clowns.  There even had been one that was almost like him except the triangles were smaller and the dots at the end of the mouth were also triangles that pointed upward.  Along our walk around the small town we would see some posters for a circus that was coming up in two days close by in the next state.

         “I haven’t been to a circus in so long.”  I tried to think of the last time I had been to a genuine circus, but the memories were fuzzy of a younger age with a smaller me.

         “How about we change that then?  We’re ahead on your little schedule.  We’d have plenty of time to enjoy a circus.”  Rufo had the bag of clowns in one hand, his other in his pocket as he looked down at me.

         “Are you sure?  Don’t you need to get to your um, job?”  I raised my brow, looking back up at him to meet his gaze.  The way he was looking at me made my cheeks blush. He had such a gentle smile on his lips and there was a bit of a sparkle in his eyes.

         “Don’t worry about the job, doll.  I always get them done, one way or another.”  He chuckled, plucking two tabs off the poster that offered free entrance.  “This is a vacation after all, and you’re supposed to be having fun.  So, let’s have some fun.”  He tucked the stubs into his pocket the put his arm around my shoulder to lead us away to somewhere else.  “And a clown knows best about fun.”

         After that, we had some lunch then we checked out of the motel so we could take off down the road.  Things almost felt back to normal between the two of us as we eased back into idle conversation between singing along to the music.  After a while Rufo flipped off the music and let out a long sigh.  

        “(Y/N), it’s not usual I have someone I can open up to things about.  I usually end up killing anyone who tries to know too much about me.  Heck, even if they catch me in an off mood if they tap me on the shoulder just a little too hard.  Only one who really knows me well is the man I work for.  You’re probably the only willing living person who knows who I am.”  There was a bit of solemnness in his tone.

        “I still don’t know too much Rufo.  You don’t have to tell me either if you aren’t comfortable with it.  Yeah, I’m curious but I wouldn’t want to push you.”  I shrugged and Rufo chuckled with a slight shake to his head.

         “Oh doll, you couldn’t push anything out of me even if you tried or gave me some big old puppy dog eyes.”  His fingers ran though his hair as he let out a few more chuckles before having a more serious look on his face.  “No but I think it’d help to explain things just a little with me. Seeing as we’ll be around each other a bit longer and you agreed to stick around with me.”

       Rufo went on to tell me about the time before. How he was a boy named Cecil Phelps who grew on a farm with a little sister who looked up to him.  How he ran away to the circus so he could try to get to his dream life of being an escape artist.  He even would write to his family and send them money when he could. I could see an old pain in his eyes when he spoke about his sister, but he would quickly move on.  He told story after story about the circus and each of the members of his new strange little family.  For a while there he had even become a ring master to fill in now and again. Then he told me about Serenity Falls, how the townsfolk hated them all and that one night after some murders and a scuffle some of the towns people came to the circus late into the night to kill. And kill they did.  They burned the trailer with the clowns inside, Rufo being one of them.  Rufo then went into how he clawed himself out of Hell, wandering the town of Serenity Falls until Albert came into the picture.  Even Albert had tried to send him back a few times but Rufo kept coming back, so Albert decided to put the stubborn angry soul to use and eventually got him a new body to help further.  Rufo had been enjoying his new life to the fullest despite some bumps in the road of trying to help the souls of his friends but he was making due.

         “And now I’m here.  On another job on some other part of the country.  Been doing this for a long time.  Don’t plan on stopping any time soon.”  There was a stone look on his face, a stiffness in his jaw that had set about halfway through his story telling.  I had turned my body so I could look at him better as he spoke, and I found myself resting a hand on his arm which surprised him.  He looked at me with a raised brow before quickly looking back to the road.

         “Rufo, I’m so sorry for what happened to you.  What they did was horrible and I’m sure each and every single one of them will get what’s coming to them.  In some way or another.”  He could see that I was sincere and there was an odd look on his face. Something that he never had felt before perhaps of someone accepting and knowing of what had happened.  “Thank you for telling me.  It means a lot to me that you told me.”

        “I… Thank you, (Y/N).”  He only nodded and I slipped my hand away, facing the road again. There was a sense of ease on his face that settled in with the restlessness that had been there the start of the drive.

         It had been a few hours and now I could see he was getting tired.  The next time we had to fill up I suggest we switch off and he agreed, leaning the seat far back so he could stretch out his long legs.  He even fell asleep at one point.  I draped his jacket over him like a blanket so he would rest better.  We wouldn’t be driving much longer anyways as the sun was starting to set and I could see some storm clouds rolling in. It was nice to have a moment to myself to just sit and dwell on everything and how I felt. Even after finding out everything I still couldn’t ignore the way I felt for him.  The butterflies fluttered in my gut and I could feel how my heart pounded in my chest.  I hadn’t known him for more than just a couple of days but there was still the nagging feeling of something there.  Though I could push it down for now and ignore it as he slept next to me.  For now, at least.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo: Naughty pt. 1

Warnings: jealousy, blood, gore, cannibalism (?) knife play, spanking, rough smut, punishment sex

It was Christmas Eve and you were fighting with your boyfriend.

You hadn’t seen the jerk all month! He was halfway across the country for work and before he left, he had promised you that he would be back in time for your first Christmas together. Yet here it was, Christmas Eve, and he had just called to say he wouldn’t be back until late tomorrow night. Not much of a Christmas together at all! Your one year anniversary was right around the corner, did he plan on missing that too?Tempers flared and a yelling match ensued before you hung up on him. He tried to call you back twice but you ignored it. Let him spend the night angry. It served him right.

Your phone rang again, but this time it was your co-worker Holly. She had been pressuring you to go to the company Christmas party even though you told her that your boyfriend forbade it. Holly could be a little pushy sometimes, and when she heard the tears in your voice she became even more determined. How would he know? He was the one who left you alone on Christmas eve! She did have a point...

Thirty minutes later, you were dressed and ready for the party.

You ended up enjoying yourself more than you thought you would. There was a decent amount of food and drink and the conversations with your co workers helped take your mind off the argument. Even your boss Richard was being pleasant and brought you drinks throughout the night. Your boyfriend didn’t particularly care for your boss, and even though you reminded him constantly that 'Rich' was the modern hypocorism for 'Richard', he insisted on calling him 'Dick'. He was convinced the man had a thing for you, but you didn’t see it that way.

It was getting late when your happy mood was ruined by one song. Blue Christmas started to play over the speakers. The slow melodic tune made you think of your boyfriend and you realized just how much you missed him. Sure, he was a little rough around the edges and he could be a little crazy, but he made you feel like the most important woman in the world.

Holly spotted the look on your face and made her way over to you. She really was pushy.

“Don’t tell me you're thinking about that asshole boyfriend of yours. I don’t know WHAT you see in a guy like that.”

She scoffed and you smiled. You could tell her exactly what it was you saw in your boyfriend, what he did to you when you were alone, but she would probably die from embarassment. Not to mention a few other little details about him.

At that moment, Richard came up behind you and slipped his arm around your waist.

"May I have the next dance?”

You were just about to tell him no, that you had too much to drink and you were headed home since it was so late when Holly nudged you.

“She would love to!”

Holly winked and you glared at her while Richard pulled you to the dance floor. He took your hand and held you a little too tight for your liking as you swayed to Santa Baby. The dancing made your head spin, but when you put your hands on his chest he didn't let up. Instead, he leaned down to whisper in your ear while his hand inched lower.

"So tell me, have you been an awful good girl this year?"

He smiled and that was it. Boss or not you were about to give him a piece of your mind when you heard a commotion at the door. Apparently, so had Richard because he stopped swaying and you both turned to look at the man who had just walked in.

“Evenin' folks.”

You shivered as you recognized the cold, polite voice. There was only one person you knew who spoke like that. Richard misread your shiver and took the opportunity to pull your body even closer to his.

“Is… is that a clown?”

He laughed a little in disbelief and you couldn't blame him. You took in the shoulder length wild blue hair, the titanium white greasepaint that was not in fact paint, and the blue and red markings that were carved from his face. Jack wasn’t wrong. He was a clown. He was also your boyfriend, Rufo.

Rufo was smiling inside the red clown smile, but it looked strained. It was never a good sign when he wore his clown face in public.

“Don't mind me. I’m just here to fetch my stray….”

His steel blue eyes landed on you and he almost choked on the words. You had to admit, it looked bad. Richard's arms were wrapped around your waist and your body was pressed so tight against his there was no room for Jesus. You had shown up in a skimpy little red dress with a white jacket, but as the night wore on and you drank more, the jacket disappeared. It was the dress you had picked out for your Christmas date with Rufo, but in a moment of anger, you decided to wear it to the party. You regretted your decision as you watched his smile disappear. His lips turned down in an angry snarl and his face started to change. The skin across his cheek bones pulled tight while his cheeks sunk in. His lips dried then cracked as they pulling back from his too perfect teeth and his blue eyes sank into fleshless sockets until they were only pinpricks in the shadows of his face. You knew Rufo had a temper, but you had never seen him look like that before. He looked like a corpse. He looked... furious.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo the Clown: Red Silk (revised)

An Empty one-shot

Warnings: face fucking, spanking, restraints, biting, knifeplay, bloodplay, choking

Rufo sat on his girlfriend’s couch with his head leaned back and his eyes closed. His hand moved up and down, slowly stroking his cock while he thought about what he planned to do to her.

They hadn’t been dating long. It was only his third time visiting her as her lover, but Rufo was tired of holding back. He didn’t mind being a gentleman, treating her the way a lady should be treated, but he had darker urges when it came to sex. It wasn’t so different from his urge to kill. It was simply something he had acquired when he possessed Marco’s body which, by the way, came with it's own dark desires. He wanted to hurt her. To cut open her skin, rip into her flesh with his teeth and taste her blood. So far he had only bitten her, but it thrilled him and he wanted more. What better time to push her to her breaking point?

He listened to her footsteps as she crossed from the bathroom to the bedroom door. He could hear every move she made and if he had really tried, he could have listened to her heart beat. It was a pretty neat trick to have especially in his line of work. The bedroom door creaked and she tiptoed down the hallway, pausing when he finally came into view. Rufo rolled his head forward and opened his steel blue eyes, grinning as he looked over her body while his hand moved a little faster.

Wet hair hung loose. A heart pattern t-shirt with no bra. Red shorts that were so tight they left nothing to the imagination and her eyes were glued to his hand, watching as he stroked himself. He smiled wide enough to show teeth too perfect to be natural.

“Come over here.”

It wasn't a request and she rushed to obey. She learned quick, he had to give her that.

She stepped in front of him and he watched her struggle not to fidget with her hands. Sex with him still made her anxious. Good.

“Like what you see baby girl?”

She nodded, her eyes drifted down to his cock.

“Then get on your knees.”

She dropped to her knees and he grabbed her wet hair, forcing her face down to his crotch. The tip of her tounge hesitantly swiped the head of his cock before slipping back between her lips. Brat.

“That’s not going to work tonight doll.”

Rufo pulled her head back so he could look into her eyes and dipped his hand down the front of her shirt. He squeezed her breasts then painfully tweaked her nipples between his thumb and forefinger until they strained against the fabric of her t shirt.

“I think I’ve been too easy on you. In fact, I think I need to fuck some fear back into your body. What do you say?”

Her eyes went wide and her lips parted in a soft gasp. He liked that look on her face and shifted to sit on the edge of the couch.

“Lets try this again.”

When he pulled her head down the second time, she made sure to take his cock in her mouth. She swallowed him down to the back of her throat, almost gagging in the process. Rufo held her there and enjoyed the feel of her struggling before he finally let her up for air. Thick strings of saliva trailed from her open mouth and connected to the head of his cock. Her eyes were red with tears and she quickly sucked in a breath of air before he pushed her back down. His other hand slid down her back to her ass and he squeezed hard enough to make her moan.

“That’s it baby. Just like that.”

Her mouth felt good wrapped around him, her tounge worked him just as much as her lips. Rufo moaned and raised his hand over her ass before bringing it down in a harsh slap. Her body jumped and he knew it had to hurt. He tightened his grip to keep her in place and slapped her just as hard on the other cheek. She tried to cry out, but couldn’t manage anything but a muffled sob around his cock. Rufo slapped again, over and over, alternating sides until finally, she tried to pull away from him. He yanked her head up, grabbing her bottom jaw as he brought his face down to hers.

“Did that hurt?”

She nodded, her swollen bottom lip protruded in a pout and Rufo laughed in her face. He knew it would take more than a couple of slaps to the ass to really hurt her. Hell, he’d done more than that in their short time together. She was pushing his boundaries, so he figured he might as well push hers right back. Rufo stood and picked her up by the head as if she weighed nothing. Her legs kicked out into empty air while he carried her down the hallway to her bedroom.

“You better suck it up sweetheart. I’m just getting started.”

He cackled and threw her on the bed. A red silk scarf materialized between his hands as he climbed on top of her and used it to tie her wrists to the headboard. She held still for him and he grinned, happy with her sudden decision to obey. He’d never lost his temper with her, she wouldn’t still be alive if he had, but she knew just how dangerous he could be.

“Spread your legs.”

She lifted her knees, opening herself up just as he’d instructed. Rufo stripped off his clothing then climbed between her legs. A flick of the wrist, and a knife appeared in his hand. He watched her and ran his tongue over his teeth while he tested the sharp edge of the blade against the pad of his thumb. She struggled and pulled against the scarf, but she could try forever and never get out of those bonds. He had made sure of that.

“What are you going to do with that?”

The look on her face was driving him crazy. It was somewhere between fear and anticipation. He moved the tip of the knife to her hand and lightly scratched a trail down her arm, across her breast and abdomen, then finally came to rest at her mound. She was so close to tears, he could feel her body shaking underneath him.

“Why, I’m gonna use it to cut you up doll. You should try to hold still. Wouldn't want me to slip now would you?”

Her whimper made his cock throb and he pressed the flat of the blade against her slit. The thin material of her shorts was already damp and turned a slightly darker shade of red. Rufo smirked as his eyes flicked up to her face.

“Filthy girl. You’re not wearing any panties.”

Her cheeks flushed and he chuckled as he grabbed the crotch of her shorts. He pulled the material out away from her skin before slicing through it with one quick flick of his wrist. The blade almost nicked her skin causing her to flinch. Just the way he wanted. One look told him how wet she was, but instead of touching her he left her needy and exposed. Rufo ran the knife under her shirt and lifted, cutting it up the middle. The heart print pattern split in half and fell away, revealing nipples that quickly stiffened. He spared a moment to tease them before he grabbed her breast and squeezed. She moaned and arched her back, pushing her tits harder into his hand. No, she was enjoying it too much. He slapped her across the breast and she looked up at him with hurt in her eyes... so he did it again and again until her skin was puffy and red.

Once he was satisfied with the hand print, Rufo raised the knife to her hot skin and sliced the side of her breast just enough to bleed freely. Her jaw dropped open as he lowering his mouth to the cut. The sweet taste of her blood filled his mouth and he moaned while she screamed. He worked his way down her body; slicing and biting across her ribs, her stomach and finally her thighs. He watched her pussy as he sucked on the inside of her leg. She was even wetter now. Throbbing. His eyes followed the trail of blood and bruises covering her body until he could see her sweat soaked face. Her breathing was erratic, her lips swollen, her cheeks flushed and her eyes half lidded while she panted. She was at the limit of her pain tolerance and as much as he wanted to push her past it, he enjoyed having a girlfriend.

Rufo tossed the knife off the edge of the bed and pushed two fingers inside her cunt while he moved his mouth to suck on her clit. Her eyes snapped open. She screamed his name and tried to sit up, but the scarf held her down. Her pussy squeezed around his fingers, clenching as he pumped them in and out. She was wet enough so he added a third finger and curled them up to press against her g spot. She screamed when she came, but he didn't let up. He fingered her through her orgasm and didn't stop until she collapsed, limp on the bed.

Her insides were still twitching when he pushed his painfully hard cock deep inside her, filling her in one swift stroke. Rufo moaned and lifted her hips in his hands, bouncing her in his lap as he thrust in and out of her.

“You’ve got a great pussy baby. Always so wet and tight no matter what I do to you.”

No answer. He dropped her hips and changed the angle so he was leaning over her body. His hands rested on either side of her chest as he continued his steady rhythm. Her eyes were closed, her breathing deep. She was out of it and that just wasn't going to work for him. He ran his hand along the side of her face before slapping her. Hard. Her eyes snapped opened but it took another slap before she finally focused on him. His hand moved from her face and closed around her neck as he picked up his pace. Rufo squeezed tighter and pounded into her, fucking her harder and faster than he ever had before. Her mouth dropped open in a silent scream, the bed springs sqeaked to his rhythm and he watched her eyes roll in her head. Her face was starting to change from red to blue when he felt the familiar tightening in his groin. Rufo thrust a few more times before he came, spilling his load deep inside her. He lowered his forehead to rest against hers and one final spasm followed a groan of pleasure, then it was over.

Rufo released her throat and watched her color return as she sucked in deep, sobbing breaths. Honestly, he would be surprised if she was able to speak tomorrow morning. A dark ring was forming around her neck but he knew some tricks with makeup to help her hide it from public view. He didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about his girl... or else he’d have to punish them. He smiled. He knew he was starting to feel the slightest hint of affection for her and it made him feel almost human again. She was entertaining and accepted what he was, which was a feat in it's own. Not only that, but the sex was great. She’d proven she could take physical punishment and he was willing to bet with some work, he could push her even further.

Rufo untied her and held her close while he stroked her hair. He told her what a good girl she was and how well she did and he meant it. He was proud of her. His desire for blood and violence was temporarily sated and he finally felt content, laying there with her in his arms.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo Collection

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo the Clown: Audience pt. 1 (revised)

An Empty one-shot

Warnings: voyeurism, possessive behavior, blood, gore, rough explicit smut

Earl E. (not to be confused with Earl C, it said so right on his uniform) stood in the bedroom of apartment number 504. He was the maintenance man of the building but he wasn’t there for work. In fact, the owner of the apartments had no idea he was there and that was the way he intended to keep it.

He ran his grimy fingers over the lacy panties belonging to Miss 504 before selecting a particularly nice pair and lifting them to his face for a good sniff. The thought of little Miss 504 wearing those panties made his cock stiffen and a smile spread across his face. He’d been watching her since she moved into the apartment two months ago. She was a pretty thing. Quiet and standoffish, but she had an ass that had become a major point of Earl’s fantasies as of late.

Earl was pulled from his thoughts when he heard the lock on the front door click. He shoved the panties into the pocket of his overalls before he scrambled to hide his large frame in the walk in closet. The closet door was one of those old fashioned ones that had wooden slates running across it and at just the right angle, Earl had a clear view of the room without being seen. He had, after all, installed those closet doors for just such an occasion. Maybe with some luck he would get a show from Miss 504. Maybe if he was really lucky he'd be able to surprise her and get more than just a show.

His hopes were quickly crushed when Miss 504 stepped into the bedroom... with her boyfriend. He was usually away for work, whatever it was that he did, so his presence caught Earl off guard. Earl wasn’t a man that was easily intimidated, but this guy made him feel uneasy in a way he couldn’t explain. They walked into the bedroom and Earl could have sworn he saw the man turn his ice blue eyes towards the closet door. There was no way he could be seen from the outside, but the thought of coming face to face with that guy and seeing that creepy smile again sent shivers down his spine.

********************************

It had only taken a week of her living in the building for Earl to decide he really liked the look of Miss 504’s body. He found any excuse he could to work on her floor in the off chance he got a peek, and he was thrilled when the elevator he was working next to opened. There she was, trying to smooth her short skirt back into place with a deep blush on her cheeks. Her man was with her and it didn’t take a genius to figure out things had been hot and heavy in there a few moments ago. He probably had her stink all over his fingers, and was that blood on her lip? Nah, it must have been smeared lipstick. Earl let his eyes wander over her legs as the boyfriend grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of the elevator. They were probably in a rush to get back to their apartment and finish what they started. Earl turned around to check out her ass as she walked by but instead, came face to face with the dark haired man.

He had the coldest eyes Earl had ever seen. The almost white blue of them just didn’t seem possible. Earl was a big guy, and while the boyfriend matched him in height, Earl easily weighed double what he did. He would be damned if he was gonna let this guy intimidate him. Earl stood a little straighter and made his voice sound a little deeper.

“You got a problem mister?”

The man continued to stare at him and Earl found it difficult to keep eye contact with the skinny little twerp. A smile stretched across the man’s face. It started on one side of his lips, then continued to spread until his smile was all Earl could focus on. It seemed too large, his teeth too straight and Earl noticed he had some of her (blood) lipstick smeared on his teeth. He leaned forward and Earl flinched. For a moment there, he had thought the man was going to bite him. Instead, he spoke to him in a pleasant, friendly voice.

“If you keep looking at my girl like that I’ll rip your eyes out of your skull. Do we have an understanding..” his eyes flicked down to Earl’s nametag. “Early?”

Earl nodded and the stranger reached out to pat him on the shoulder. His skin was hot, even through Earl's coveralls and he caught a whiff of something long dead.

“Smart move Early, maybe you do have a brain buried in all that blubber.”

He laughed and disappeared down the hallway, pulling his red faced girlfriend behind him. Earl stood frozen in place and tried to remember how to breathe.

********************************

That was two months ago and since then Earl had convinced himself that he had heard him wrong. Nobody threatened a man his size, especially not in a tone as casual as if they had been discussing the weather. Still, it had taken a long time for Earl’s desires to burn out the memory of his fear. He had only recently started adding 504's panties to his collection.

Earl watched the man stare directly at the closet door and knew he hadn’t heard him wrong. The boyfriend reached behind him and pulled the bedroom door shut then clicked the lock in place. Miss 504 turned around.

“Rufo, what are you doing? Aren’t we going out to dinner?”

Rufo? What the hell kind of a name was that? Must have been a pet name. The man, Rufo, smiled as he stepped closer to the woman and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Dinner can wait babydoll. I have something more important to do.”

Rufo grabbed the back of her head and kissed her. It wasn't a quick peck either. Earl could hear the sounds of their lips working together from his spot in the closet. He watched with envy as Rufo’s hand slid down her back and squeezed that perfect ass, almost like he was taunting him. She broke the kiss and Earl could hear her try and catch her breath.

“But Rufo, we have tickets to..”

Whatever she was going to say ended in a gasp as Rufo grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.

“It's been a long time since I got to play with my girl.”

Rufo’s other hand traveled down her stomach and lifted her shirt up over her bra. He pinched the thin material covering her nipples.

“You know how I get when it's been a while. You wouldn’t be telling me no, now would you?”

Despite his predicament, Earl felt his cock start to harden while he watched them. He could just imagine how wet her pussy would be. His hand slipped into his pocket and he rubbed the soft material of her panties.

“I would never tell you no Rufo."

“That’s my girl.”

Rufo grabbed her bra and ripped it open, making her tits bounce before he roughly palmed them. Earl pulled the panties from his pocket and wiped at the sweat on his forehead. He watched that lucky bastard lower his mouth to her breasts while his other hand rubbed her shorts between her legs. Earl was considering pulling out his cock for a quick stroke when 504 yelped in pain. Rufo moved his mop of dark curly hair and Earl realized there was a bleeding bite mark right above her nipple. He expected her to push Rufo away or slap him but instead she moaned and rocked against his hand. Go figure. They were in to some freaky shit.

Rufo let go of her hair and grabbed her around the waist. He lifted her up and tossed her onto the bed where she landed with a bounce. Honestly, Earl was impressed. He didn’t see how a man that size could be strong enough to toss her that far, let alone make it seem so easy. Rufo walk across the room and Earl had to squint for a better look. There was something wrong with his face. The flesh seemed to run like a candle melting, or a balloon deflating, but that couldn’t be right. Earl was convinced there was something wrong with his eyes up until the point Rufo reached up and pulled off his face.

Earl slapped a hand over his mouth to keep from screaming as he watched Rufo's fingers dig into his own flesh. He pulled down and the whole thing came of in one piece before he tossed it to the side. Earl didn't see where it landed, but he heard it hit with a wet thwap. His stomach churned as he prepared to see a red mass of muscle where Rufo's face had been. What he wasn't expecting was skin as white as fresh snow. Earl adjusted his position and when he looked again he realized Rufo’s face wasn’t just white. Blue triangles sat above and below his eyes and a big red smile was painted across his mouth. He looked like a fucking clown.

Rufo leaned over 504 and grabbed her shorts. He yanked them off her body and Earl caught a quick glimpse of her panties. They matched the pair in his hand. Rufo wrapped a titanium white hand around her throat and squeezed. Earl heard her wheeze as Rufo pressed her into the bed and stared down at her. His eyes narrowed.

“You are my girl, aren’t you?”

She nodded and gasped for air. Rufo's expression didn't change as his other hand ran up her thigh and dipped into her panties. Earl couldn’t see from his angle, but he could hear exactly what he was doing to her. Rufo's face split into that damn cocky smirk that Earl hated so much. It was even worse with the clown makeup on.

“This pussy belongs to me, doesn’t it babydoll?"

To prove his point, Rufo squeezed tighter. 504 tried to answer him, but only a gargled, choking sound came out. Earl thought for sure this was it. Rufo was going to kill her. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her lips turned blue. Just when it seemed like she was about to lose conciousness, Rufo let her go. She choked and gasped for air while her hands ran over her heated face. Rufo pulled his fingers out of her and laughed.

“Naughty girl. You liked that, didn't you? Now, I want you to get on your hands and knees for me.”

504 rolled over and crawled to the middle of the bed. She was facing Earl’s hiding spot and she didn’t even know it.

“Like this Rufo?”

She pressed her tits against the bed and stuck her ass up in the air, shaking it for him while she smiled. Earl desperately wished the closet was on the other side of the room. He still felt pretty confident that neither of them knew he was there, until he noticed Rufo staring right at the door. There was no way. He felt his blood run cold and his erection wither away as Rufo winked then unzipped his slacks.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo the Clown: Audience pt. 2 (revised)

Warnings: voyeurism, possessive behavior, blood, gore, rough explicit smut

“Just like that. Keep facing the closet for me”

Was he fucking with him? Earl made it a point not to look at another mans junk but even he couldn’t help but stare when Rufo pulled his out. His dick was the same shade of white as his face and arms! Earl watched Rufo crawled on the bed behind Miss 504 like it was the most natural thing in the world and slap her on the ass. Rufo pulled her panties up between her cheeks and spanked her again. This time he hit her harder and she gave another little yelp of pain.

“You HAVE been waiting for me, haven't you?”

504 looked over her shoulder at him.

“Of course I have Rufo. Now please. I want you so bad.”

She pushed her ass back against him, her voice was thick with lust and Earl was surprised she wasn’t panting like a bitch in heat. Rufo chuckled. That stupid cocky grin was still planted on his face as he lined up and pulled her back on his cock.

“Careful what you wish for doll.”

Earl watched the expression on 504's face change. She bit her lip while Rufo pushed inside her and when he grabbed her by the hips and started thrusting, her mouth dropped open in a little o of pleasure. There had been a few nights where Earl had jacked off to the thought of her making that face for him.

“Rufo!”

Rufo reached down and grabbed a handful of her hair. He lifted her upper body off the bed until it was flush against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. He pulled and squeezed her tits while he kissed a trail down her neck to her shoulder.

“I love it when you say my name like that.”

Rufo stared down Earl’s hiding spot and sank his teeth into her shoulder. 504 grit her teeth, but when blood started to run past his red painted lips and drip down her breast, she screamed in pain. Rufo didn't stop thrusting as he bit down again and left another set of teeth marks on her body. This time it was his name she cried.

Earl shifted his position in the closet and cursed under his breath. It was barely audible to him, but he noticed the clowns body tense. Rufo pulled his bloody lips from her skin and frowned inside his clown smile. He bared his teeth in anger and slammed her face back down into the mattress, holding her down while he pounded into her.

“You know what I would do to you if I found out you were fucking around on me?!”

He moved his hand from her hip only long enough to slap her ass again before he resumed the harsh pace of his thrusts. 504 gripped the blankets so tight Earl could see her knuckles turn white.

“Only you Rufo… you’re the only one who gets to fuck me!”

That seemed to please the clown. His smirk returned and he changed the angle of his hip to move with her instead of against her. Soon she was moaning louder than Earl thought a quiet girl like her could. Rufo pulled her head up and gave Earl a good look at her face as she came. The manic clown behind her laughed and let her body drop to the bed. He grabbed his cock, now covered in her cream, and gave it a few hard jerks before thick streams of cum shot out and covered her back. Rufo groaned and leaned his head back to try and catch his breath while 504 rolled over and smiled up at him.

“Rufo, I'm going to have to shower again.”

Rufo looked down at her, a sadistic smile planted on his face as he tucked himself back into his slacks.

“Sorry Doll. You know I just can't resist performing in front of an audience.”

Earl barely had time to stand up straight as Rufo flew across the room and threw open the closet door. Earl came out swinging. He put every ounce of weight he had behind a punch meant to knock out the clown, but Rufo ducked at the last minute and grabbed him by the wrist. 504 screamed as Earl’s forward momentum was used against him and Rufo swung him against the wall. His considerable weight busted through the plaster, leaving an impressive hole. Earl felt the tendons in his wrist snap but the adrenaline coursing through his system did wonders for the pain. He tried to stand up and throw a punch with his one remaining arm, but Rufo was too fast for him. Earl didn’t know where the knife came from, he didn't even see it until he was pinned to the wall with the long blade wedged between the bones in his forearm. Earl opened his mouth to bellow his rage and hurt but slim fingers wrapped around his face with bruising force and cut off any noise he would have made. He tried to lunge forward in one last rush but he was held down with impossible strength. He should have been able to overpower the slim man, nobody was that strong, but Rufo held him still without even breaking a sweat.

Earl’s eyes went wide as he finally got a good look at the clown face. The pattern had been carved from his skin deep enough to stick a fingertip in. Earl could make out the twisted knots of scars hidden just underneath the colored patches of skin. Skin, not face paint.

Rufo stared at him with eyes that seemed to glow with insanity from deep in their sockets. When he spoke, his voice sounded like dry, dead leaves rustling in the wind. Heat radiated off his body and Earl gagged against the stench of death.

“Early Early Early. I thought we had an understanding.”

Rufo casually reached out and Earl thought he was going to brush his hair back from his sweaty forehead. Instead, he felt the hot finger of the clown push behind his eyeball and pop it out of the socket. Rufo gripped they eye and pulled until all of the connective tissue snapped and the organ came free. Earl screamed but the vice like grip on his mouth muffled the noise. Rufo glanced at the eye before he crushed it and tossed the gooey remains to the side.

“Now that the cats out of the bag so to speak, I'm going to ask you one more time. Have you been fucking our friend Earl here behind my back?”

Earl could see 504 with his one remaining watery eye. She had been watching the whole thing, one hand covered her mouth and the other arm held across her breasts like he hadn’t already seen everything she had and then some. He silently pleaded with her to do anything, say anything to save him. She moved her hand from her mouth and grabbed the little decorative pillow beside her. It was almost comical the way she threw the pillow at the clowns head. The look of surprise on the clowns face before he turned to glare at her was even better. Earl almost felt like laughing.

“Of course I haven’t! I didn’t even know he was in there! I wouldn’t have done that stuff with you if I knew. That creep saw... everything.”

Her face burned red with embarrassment and she looked away from both of them. So much for mercy.

“I believe you babydoll, but a man comes home from work and finds some rube in his closet he’s entitled to ask a few fucking questions.”

Rufo turned his attention back to Earl, the grip on his face tightened as he leaned closer.

“Your turn now Early. I’m going to let you go and you’re not going to scream. You’re going to explain to me just what you were doing in that closet and you better make it damn good.”

Rufo moved his hand and Earl stammered.

“I was...look pal. You don’t know what she's like when you’re gone. Parading her ass all around in those skimpy outfits. She’s been begging me for attention. If anyones to blame here, it's her.”

Earl ignored the look of indignation on her face as he wet his dry lips.

“Honest man. You gotta believe me.”

Rufo looked him up and down then reached into the pocket of his uniform and pulled out the sweat stained stolen panties. He waved them in front of Earl’s face.

“Final answer Early?”

Earl took a shaky breath and licked his lips again as hope died. In that moment he knew he wasn't going to make it out in one piece.

“Earl. It’s just Earl. They put the E on my uniform because Earl C is the groundskeeper.”

Rufo shrugged and reached into Earl’s mouth. His bloody fingers wrapped around his tounge and he pulled. The muscle stretched a lot further than Earl would have guessed before it tore free. Earl thrashed his head from side to side but couldn’t shake the clowns hold. Blood spurted out of his mouth and hit the clown in the face, but Rufo simply smiled and tossed the tongue down beside the remains of his eye.

“Unfortunately for you, Earl, I could hear your heavy breathing as soon as I walked through the front door. I wonder what you would have done to my girl if I hadn't shown up?”

Earl tried to scream when Rufo pulled the knife out of his arm, but only succeeded in choking on his own blood. Rufo grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him away from the wall.

“You're a bad man Earl, and bad men have to be punished. Oh, I almost forgot.”

Rufo chuckled and ripped Earl’s nametag from his uniform. He tossed it to the woman on the bed.

“Wouldn’t want to make identifying the body too easy for them. Pack your bags doll, I think it’s time we relocated.”

Rufo kept a tight grip on the back of Earl’s neck as he steered him towards the bedroom door. Earl only had a moment to wonder what was in store for him before Rufo changed course and flung him towards the large bay windows that covered the far wall of the bedroom. He let loose a gargled scream as his weight carried him through the windows and over the balcony in a crash of shattered glass. Earl fell five stories, head first, while the clown laughed. His last conscious effort was to put up his hands as the sidewalk rushed up to meet him.

[red-and-blue-sewer-circus-arc]

Rufo the Clown: Journey pt 8

Final Part

Warnings: blood, character torture, angst

Albert continued to silently stare at Rufo with a smirk on his face. "Our usual arrangement should be just fine Cecil. I'll say... a year of service should suffice?"

"A year!" Rufo was sitting on the edge of his seat as he lifted a hand to run through his curls. "How long is it going to take to awaken her abilities?"

Albert glanced at you and raised a shoulder. "One, maybe two days. But there is no guarantee she will survive the ordeal. It's going to be excruciatingly painful and require a lot of my time and effort. I need you to make it worth it to me Cecil. A year, or no deal."

Rufo leaned back in his chair, his long legs almost brushed Albert's desk as he stared up at the ceiling. His gaze shifted over to you and he sighed causing your heart to drop. He opened his mouth and you expected him to say no, but instead he agreed.

The next twenty four hours were the worst of your life. During the most painful moments of the ceremony, you thought death might have been a mercy.

First, Albert rubbed some strange silver powder all over your body. Then, he made you sit in a circle surrounded by writing you couldn't even begin to guess the origin of. Finally, he started chanting and when he started chanting it felt like the powder was trying to burn straight through your skin.

Rufo took a seat just outside the circle and watched as your body contorted in pain. His face remained completely unreadable past the clown makeup as you screamed loud enough to tear your vocal cords. After a few hours Rufo stood and left the room, shortly after that Albert said it was time for a break, he said if he kept going you would die for sure.

You drifted out of conciousness but when you woke up you were in a large, soft bed. A blanket was pulled over you and there was a glass of water on the nightstand to your right. Grabbing the water, you swallowed it so fast you started to cough. "Slow down before you drown yourself."

The sound of Rufo's voice next to you startled you and you almost dropped the glass. You hadn't realized he was laying in the bed next to you. After taking another sip of your water, you turned to him. "Why did you do that for me. I want to know.. just in case.." He kept his eyes closed as he cut you off. "Finish your water. Albert wants to get this over with as soon as possible." You nodded and quietly did as he asked.

More powder, more pain, hours and hours of pain. You couldn't say exactly when it started but eventually you felt the pain change. It started low in your belly, it felt like raw power and it felt.. good. The change was gradual but by the time Albert finished chanting and blew out the candles you were a sweaty, panting mess.

"Well." Albert stared down at you with amusement written across his face. "That was an unexpected show." Rufo joined him in looking down at you. "Does that happen every time?" Albert shook his head. "I've never seen a succubus awaken in person, I've only read about it and nobody has bothered to document the noises they make. The reason why is beyond me."

Albert turned his attention back to you as you finally focused on his face. "Sorry my dear, but there is no time to rest. You have survived and I need that spell written right away." He sounded almost apologetic as he turned and left the room leaving you alone with Rufo.

Rufo moved inside the circle and sat down beside you. "A succubus. Jesus. Do you have any idea what seeing you like that was like? Do you know what you look like even now? No, of course you dont." He was mumbling to himself but stopped as you placed your hand on his arm. "Rufo. What happens now?" He stared down at your hand, then slowly looked up to your face. "Now you're gonna bleed. A lot, but you'll live."

Albert called from down the hallway and Rufo stood, lifted you up in his arms. He carried you to Albert's study and you noticed a gold pan and silver knife sitting on the desk. Albert sat behind it, an old fashioned writing quill and an ancient piece of parchment lay in front of him. "Cecil, if you would please." He raised his hand and motioned at the chair in front of you. "Have a seat."

You expected Rufo to lay you in the chair but instead, he sat down and held you in his lap. Albert raised an eyebrow as Rufo gently pulled your arm over the pan. He picked up the knife and stabbed it into your wrist causing blood to spurt out and into the pan. "Mmn" You bit your lip from the pain and groaned as you buried your face in Rufo's neck, his body stiffened but he didn't push you away.

You were dizzy and on the verge of passing out again by the time Albert's quill stopped scratching on the parchment. "All done, and would you look at that, the bleeding has stopped." Rufo shifted you in his grasp and you felt him examine your arm. "Of course it did Albert. She doesn't have to worry about physical damage. Not anymore anyway. I slit that woman's throat, the one companion of the hunter, and she bounced back like it was nothing." Albert chuckled and you got the impression that you were being carried somewhere. "They are powerful creatures. Do you know what you got yourself into Cecil?" If Rufo answered him, you didn't hear it. "Have it your way. I want her cleaned up and once she is rested I have a job for you to attend to. Do with her what you will, she's your problem now."

It took a full day for you to recover your strength enough to leave which, normally you would have been out of commission after losing so much blood. Albert said his pleasant goodbyes and assured you that if you ever needed help he would be happy to assist, for a price of course. The police car you had arrived in was nowhere to be found so Rufo walked you down the driveway. He paused just outside the gate and turned to you.

"Well, you're free to go. Maybe I'll see you around." You stared at him in shock. "You're leaving me?" Rufo returned your stare with one of his own as skin started to grow over his clown appearance. "You're free. Go back to your old life, forget about me and forget about this. I'll bet the money will be even better now that your powers have awakened."

You turned away from him and looked up and down the street. "What about you Rufo? Where are you going?" He was quiet for a few moments and when you turned back to him a normal looking man stood before you. "I'm already on another job for Albert, I'm going to California"

"And if I wanted to go with you?"

Rufo scoffed and shook his head. "With me? Why the hell would you want to do that? You know what I do. It'll be dangerous."

"Rufo, I have no idea what I am or what I'm capable of doing. Before you, I had no idea any of this shit was possible. I.. want to learn and I want you to teach me."

Rufo studied you like he was staring into your soul before finally, he smiled. "Alright. Let's go."

Special shout out to @booksdragonsdolls and @pennytrash for being with me from the start of the Rufo fandom to me finally finishing this fic. It took 10 months but I finally finished this story. (Except for maybe a smut follow up)

@trig-loves-clowning-around @witchyclowngirl @allkundsofwrong @pinoflicious @clumforme @vladsgirl @fugiecakes @claddypenny @clown-purinsesu-shuga @grotesquegabby