luciadorta
In 1986, Virginia "Gina" Toledo Alvarez is a fiercely ambitious Cuban-American medical student building a life in New York when a friend's journalism project brings her into Michael Jackson's orbit. Their connection begins quietly-with a note, then a letter, then carefully timed phone calls across hospitals, studios, hotel rooms, and continents. What grows between them is intimate, complicated, and increasingly impossible to contain within the word friend.
But loving Michael means living beside a public world that believes it owns him, while loving Gina means accepting that her career, family, and independence cannot become extensions of his fame. As Michael's artistic life expands and Gina fights to become a surgeon, they must navigate distance, grief, ambition, race, family, privacy, unequal power, and the danger of mistaking protection for control.
**Disclaimer** Still Here, Always is: An alternate-universe, real-person Fanfiction featuring Michael Jackson and an original female character. This story is fictional and is not presented as biography.