
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/482.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      Multi
  Fandom:
      Love_and_Rockets_(Comic)
  Relationship:
      Maggie_/_Rand_Race, Maggie_/_Hopey
  Character:
      Maggie_Chascarrillo, Rand_Race, Hopey_Glass
  Additional Tags:
      Character_of_Color, latina_character
  Stats:
      Published: 2005-03-19 Words: 2484
****** Five Things That Never Happened to Maggie Chascarrillo ******
by jadelennox
Summary
     She's Dorothy Gale, returned to Kansas, if Kansas were Hoppers and
     Toto a bassist in a terrible punk band. You were there, and you, and
     you, she thinks, hysterically.
Notes
     Spoilers: Won't make much sense without the "Wigwam Bam" storyline
     (collected in Locas).
     The warnings are for off-screen child molestation.
     Language disclaimer: I know basically no Spanish, so I'm using
     exclusively English slang where the Hoppers crowd would intersperse
     Spanish, even if they use Spanish in canon. Please forgive my
     language limitations.
     Thanks to the_Love_and_Rockets_chronology.
     © 2005 Jade Lennox under a Creative_Commons_License.
1968: Ball Of Confusion
Surrounded by her mud pies, Margarita Luisa Chascarrillo -- known as Perla to
her friends -- realizes she has forgotten underwear again. She knows because
the drying mud has started to itch, and when she scratches at it, there is no
underwear. Maybe she was wearing underwear this morning. She can't remember.
Perla is bored of her mud pies, and her bottom is scratchy. But even from over
here, she can hear the yelling coming from her house. Her papa is home for the
weekend, and she thinks that he probably shouldn't see her when she's been
making mud pies. Maybe Isabel will know what to do. She carefully wipes first
one hand, then the other clean on the front of her dress. Then she scoops up a
mud pie to bring to Isabel. That will be a nice present.
Isabel is in fifth grade now, and is very grand. Even though she has friends
and secrets, though, she still has time for Perla. In fact, Isabel and Perla
have their own secrets. Isabel made paper dolls for Perla from cut out pictures
of fashion magazines. She tells her which girls in school are mean, and which
boys are cute. She has promised to teach her things, secret things:When you're
a little older, Perlita, I'll teach you how to smoke,she said, and let Perla
play with the bright red carton and its picture of the funny lions. Not at
Isabel's house, but down at the ballfield, because the smoking and the funny
lions are secrets. Isabel's belly is a secret, too. Lately she has been letting
Perla touch her belly, which is fun.Soon there will be another little girl, and
you will be her friend like I am your friend,Isabel says. Sometimes she seems
frightened, but Perla and Isabel are both excited about there being another
little girl. They play with paper dolls, and play family. Fashion magazines
don't have many pictures they can use for papa dolls, but that's okay, because
Perla and Isabel don't want to play with papa dolls in their families anyway.
Papa dolls just yell.
Scratchy from drying mud, Perla wanders into Isabel's yard. She thinks she
hears Isabel's voice inside, but she must be wrong. When she peeps into the
kitchen where the voice is, she sees Isabel's older sister Chabela's friend.
She doesn't like him: he is loud, and he yells at her when he sees her catching
frogs or just playing in Isabel's yard. Now he looks funny, because he isn't
wearing any clothes. Chabela's friend has hair on his back! His hairy back
makes Perla laugh out loud.
Chabela's friend turns around at the sound and Perla sees Chabela behind him.
Only it isn't Chabela, it's Isabel. She opens her mouth to yell, but Perla's
not worried. Isabel is always yelling; Perla knows they are still friends and
later will run to the ballfield and catch frogs.
Perla runs to Isabel and throws her arms around her. She has forgotten about
the mudpie.
Isabel's naked chest is smeared with mud now. She glares at Perla, who has
fallen on to her behind and is thinking about crying. Isabel's eyebrows draw
together and she glares and starts to yell. But Chabela's friend starts yelling
even louder, and Isabel transfers her glare to him. Perla doesn't understand
the things he's saying, but they make Isabel wrap her arms around Perla and
hold her tight, like she does sometimes when Papa is home.
"Perlita," sing-songs Isabel, and holds Perla to her muddy belly. Perla traces
a picture of a little girl in the mud there, and is happy.
1977: Seventh Dream of a Teenage Heaven
Perla can't stand her mother anyway, so she has no objection to her mother
foisting her off on aunt Vicki like pile of old clothes. This way she can keep
working at Sal's, and doesn't have that little brat Esther following her around
all day, wanting to play. Maybe Mama didn't want her to be a bad influence on
the kids, but she didn't want to spend time with them anyhow.
Besides, this way she gets to spend more time with Letty.
Aunt Vicki won't let little Margarita stay there if she doesn't learn to
wrestle, so it's running laps around the block every day after school for our
Mag. She works with weights, and practices headlocks on Vicki. In theory,
anyway. In practice, Vicki's training method involves Perla getting thrown to
the floor a lot. She gets very used to the sight of little birds fluttering
over her head as she lies on the mat after a spectacular flight over Vicki's
head.
Perla wants to quit, but Vicki is frightening when she yells. There will be no
non-wrestlers living in Vicki Glori's house. Perla suspects that she's being
trained up to defend the family honor against Rena Titañon, but she knows she
is destined to disappoint; all she is good at is fixing cars. Once, Aunt Vicki
tries to stop Perla from working at Sal's -- she says it's unfeminine, but
probably just resents the time wasted that could be spent wrestling -- so Perla
runs away and hides for two days in Letty's basement. Lou saysone day you will
be a prosolar mechanic, eh, Maggie?and oh, she doesn't even dare to dream that
far ahead. But one day she will wash out as a wrestler and when the day comes
she needs to be ready to grab her mechanic career by the horns, and she will
not let even Aunt Vicki stop her from training.
When Vicki finds her at Letty's house, Perla is prepared to out-scream her aunt
to keep her time at Sal's. But Vicki arrives shaken and conciliatory. The
weekend Perla ran away is one of the rare weekends Quina Chascarrillo bothers
to call her sister. Vicki has let slip that Margarita has run away, and would
you believe that Quina has maternal instincts? She rips Vicki a new one, and
the chastised auntie is prepared to let Perla work at Sal's just to get her
home before Quina comes rampaging from Dairytown, breathing fire and grabbing
airplanes out of the sky like Godzilla.
When Letty dies, Perla stops working at Sal's.
She'd stop wrestling after the accident, too, but Vicki won't let her. To Vicki
Glori, there is only one grief: that Rena Titañon does not publically
acknowledge her champion. Well, two griefs, if you count her fury at all the
queers in wrestling. Too apathetic even to run away, Perla works out as she is
required. One day Vicki decrees she is ready to compete. Dressed in yellow and
black tights and a little cape like a deranged superhero, Perla -- Margarita
Bumblebee (designing personas is not Vicki's strength) -- is thoroughly beaten
in the ring. After a year of ignominious defeats, Vicki at last throws up her
hands in disgust. Perla will never beat a wrestler half her size, let alone
Rena Titañon. The wrestling practice is over at last.
Perla finds work waitressing at Bumpers. She thinks about stripping, but
decides her butt is too big.
1983: If There's a Heaven Above
It's been hot and dull since the return from Zhato. Once you've been involved
with revolutions and dinosaurs, normal mechanic work -- even prosolar mechanic
work -- is a letdown. They fix a couple of rockets, and deactivate Demoña's old
two-person robot she isn't using any more, but mostly it's just cars and
engines. And as glamorous as it is to be Rand Race's assistant, plenty of
Maggie's job consists of handing him the right screwdriver. She did more actual
mechanic work back at Sal's, fixing cars for Lou. Even Rand Race is bored, so
it's no wonder that Maggie, sick of bringing him water and passing him the lug
wrench, shares the boredom.
"This bites, Margie," he tells her, after they've rebuilt one too many sports
cars one scalding August day.
When Yax Haxley comes running in with word of a job in Troubania, they all leap
at it. Anything to get out of Hoppers in August, y'know? Daffy and Hopey and
Izzy and the gang are sorry to see her go again so soon, she thinks, because
after Hopey yells at her for wasting her life on the motherfucker when she
should be a fucking master mechanic by now, they all drop some acid behind Del
Chimney's old place and drive around Hoppers terrorizing the baby punk kids.
In Troubania, mending the rocket, Maggie is reminded that being Rand Race's
assistant is the same wherever she is. He's still calling her Margie. She's
still bringing him water and passing him the lug wrench. It's cooler, and she's
getting drunk on vodka instead of beer, but otherwise just the same. Her
mechanic skills are atrophying.
Until one day she passes Rand Race a lug wrench, and he opens a compartment
deep inside the rocket, and a mechanized wolf-thing bursts from the
compartment, grabs him by the arm, and drags him deep into the Troubanian
woods. While Duke, Yax, and the locals run around shouting and firing guns
randomly into the forest, Maggie coolly examines the compartment from which the
mechanized beastie originated. There's another creature in there, a deactivated
one which looks damaged. Serene, Maggie opens up the robot to find its control
processors. It's the work of two minutes to rewire it to take her to its mate;
she climbs aboard with only Rand Race's lug wrench for a weapon, and off she
goes. It's quite a ride: Maggie leans back, laughing, as she holds on to the
leaping creature with one hand and swipes away tree branches with the wrench.
Rand Race is wrestling fruitlessly with his captor in a clearing when they
arrive. Maggie's reprogrammed robot pet savages its former comrade, and the
disheveled Rand Race is flustered when he is freed from the monster's clutches.
Maggie's hand appears in his field of vision, and his eyes sparkle as she helps
him to his feet.
"Impressive," he says, as they smile down at the clashing wolfbots.
A chorus of cheers greets Rand Race and Maggie as they emerge from the
clearing, the victorious and ferociously loyal robot at Maggie's heels.
"Rand! Rand!" cry the locals.
Maggie smiles. She doesn't mind letting Rand Race take the credit; she knows
what she's done. But Rand silences the acclaim with one outthrust and muscular
arm.
"Not me," he says, grinning at Maggie. "The heroine of the hour is --" he
raises her arm above her head and turns her to face the crowd, "Maggie! Maggie
Chascarrillo, master prosolar mechanic!"
1987: All In My Mind
*slap*
*slap*
*slap*
The cracking sounds of hand to flesh ricochets through Maggie's skull. Each
smack consumes her senses, drowning out the all-encompassing misery which has
been eating at her for years. Sometime after the masochistic parade of This Is
Your Life ends, she opened her eyes, cheek still stinging -- and stares up into
Hopey's smirking face.
She's naked, lying in bed with Hopey, who's blowing sloppy smoke rings into her
face.
This isn't Texas.
This isn't 1995.
The ridiculously complex dream Maggie has just awoken from is already muddling,
blurring at the edges, vanishing into incomprehensibility. Details bob to the
surface: posing for naked pictures; Speedy dying; dating girl wrestlers.
Whoring herself.
Hopey leaving her alone for years and years.
It all spills out of her in a rush. She's Dorothy Gale, returned to Kansas, if
Kansas were Hoppers and Toto a bassist in a terrible punk band. You were there,
and you, and you, she thinks, hysterically.
But Hopey just smiles. "Tell me something, Mag: why do you think I would leave
you behind to go on tour an' then stay away from you for so long?"
Maggie relaxes as the dregs of the dream swish away. Nightmares didn't need to
make sense. Hopey stubs out her cigarette then climbs on to Maggie, all bony
elbows and tiny sharp hips. Sometimes when Hopey kisses her Maggie gets tense
and miserable, but this time she melts into it, lets Hopey's laughing and oh-
so-skilled tongue lap up the last misery of a nightmare that had seemed to take
years. Hopey skins out of her black T-shirt and tugs down Maggie's blanket to
suck on her nipple. But Maggie, usually content to be the passive recipient of
Hopey's eager ministrations, wants more tonight. Not much of the dream is left,
but she remembers passivity. Waiting for Hopey, wondering if she were alive.
So she rolls over, pushing Hopey down in a tangle of skinniness, and shucking
off Hopey's jeans as if she's a laughing ear of corn. When Maggie brings her
face down between Hopey's thighs, Hopey hollers in pleasure, and sticks both
legs up in the air at crazy angles.
"Dunno what's got into you, Maggot, but I'm not complaining," says Hopey, and
she reaches down to grab handfuls of Maggie's none-too-skinny flesh. Then she's
whooping and yodelling her pleasure, and Maggie realises she likes this. Not
just likes being the active one, not just making Hopey happy, but the taste,
the smell, the texture of Hopey's flesh tightening and convulsing under her
tongue.
Tomorrow morning, Maggie realizes, she will get in the bus and go on tour with
La Llorona. Maybe she'll be a groupie, though given what their bus looks like,
she'll probably be the mechanic necessary to get them out of L.A., let alone on
a nationwide tour. She'll be there if they succeed, and if they fail and break
up she will be there to be yelled at and to offer marvelous consolation sex.
She'll be there to see Ohio for the first time, and if the band plays Niagara
Falls. She'll be there if they meet artsy poseurs in New York City; laconic,
wolfish musicians in Baltimore; prostitutes in Texas. There will be screaming
fights and probably broken furniture. She's looking forward to it.
1997: So Alive
No matter how she twists and inhales, Maggie will not be able to pull on this
pair of jeans. She sighs, and finds worn old shorts to wear to Hopey's. Her ass
is never going to stop growing, she knows this. One day it will grow so large
that Cheetah Torpeda will have to fight it to determine who gets ultimate
control of Southern California.
She picks up a six pack on the drive down, and enough lo mein for two. Hopey
loves the lo mein, and they share it while listening to one of Terry Downe's
folk tapes. Hopey mocks the album for being crazy sweet for a bitchy, bitter
old dyke like Terry, but Maggie sees Terry's newest tape lying by Hopey's
stereo.
Afterward, they lounge on the front porch, finishing the beer, and start on
another six pack Hopey has in her fridge.
It's a beautiful evening in Los Angeles.
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!
