#“drowning in the sewer” is a reference to →

[floortile34]

i feel lost. scared. lonely

step out into the sun. into the endless pain. alone in an opaque void, or maybe i just can't see through it enough to notice i'm not alone. it burns. is rotting in the darkness worse? drowning in the sewer?

infinite mazes of light, nobody aroung. this isn't real. the real light burns, this doesn't. i see so clearly yet there still remains no-one. fields of empty space, knee height. marble floors with no temperature

mirages of others. of company

endless seconds ticking by. however many millions. running around searching for a way out, tiring myself endlessly, never collapsing

my flesh bleeds – oozes, almost – with sickly purples

(legs numb now. alternating between writing tags and main post segment whatever this is called)

dragging my forearms across the subtle rough texture of the tiling. they bleed. they fall apart so easily. so weak. so brittle. so rotten through

i need ..... . .......i don't know what i need

please, i need whatever that thing is

someone tell me what i need

someone tell me what to do. where to go. i'm so lost in here. i'm running out of battery. it's always ticking down, never reaches 0, i feel like it's a lie. shepherd's tone

my sanity's slowly falling deeper and deeper into the infinitesimal abyss, or maybe not and it just feels like that. i don't know anymore. i don't remember anymore. i don't remember what i am. my family's fading from me. i'll be alone soon. without them

my ideas are running out yet i must keep writing. this is my purpose in life for... however long it's taken now. 10 minutes? i didn't check when i started.

...... ..............

■■■■ ■■■■■■ shall claim me soon

[mikaylathenerd5]

🖤🩸 Summary: Thornhill is a city built on blood and secrets. Roman Reigns — killer, myth, untouchable — walks free after three years in prison. To keep him contained, the courts assign him a therapist: Dr. Jasira Cedeño. But what begins as mandated sessions spirals into obsession, power games, and a dangerous connection neither can control.

Some monsters are made. Others are worshipped. And in this city, no one leaves clean.

🖤👑 Pairing: Roman Reigns x Jasira Cedeño (black oc)

⚠️❗ Content Warning: Graphic violence (referenced), mature themes, psychological tension, mention of past murder, corruption, emotional manipulation, power dynamics, trauma references. Dark atmosphere. Proceed with care.

🩸👑 Story Inspirations: I wanted Beneath the Bloodline to feel like if Gotham and The Boys had a love child — dark city, corrupt elite, mythic power plays. Roman is a man they tried to cage, now walking free with the whole city watching. And Jasira? She was supposed to keep him in line... but some monsters aren’t meant to be tamed — and some hearts aren’t meant to stay untouched. Enjoy, loves. 🖤🩸

🎵🎧 Song Inspo: grandson & Jessie Reyez - Rain

📄✍🏽 A/N: Been working on this one forever lol. This story is inspired by the dark, corrupt worlds of Gotham and The Boys. Expect a slow-burn, dangerous romance, layered power plays, and two broken people drawn to each other when they shouldn’t be. Roman and Jasira’s story starts here — but what lies beneath is only the beginning.

✍🏽📝Word Count: ~ 10.1k (i got carried away...oops)

Main Masterlist ৹ Join My Taglist

The rain never touched this part of Thornhill.

While the lower districts drowned in sewer water and neon rot, the McMahon estate stood untouched—perched above the city like a cathedral to the corrupt.

Inside, the walls pulsed with history. Every polished surface whispered of power bought in blood.

And at the long, bone-colored table beneath a chandelier shaped like a crown of thorns, four names sat etched in legacy: McMahon. Guerrero. Rhodes. Orton.

“They’re actually releasing him.”

Shane McMahon’s voice cracked the silence, sharp as broken glass. He didn’t sit. Couldn’t. Instead, he paced behind his chair like a man trying to outrun his own mistake.

“After everything we did to bury him,” he said. “They’re letting that bastard walk out like it’s nothing.”

“You buried him,” Cody Rhodes replied coolly, fingertips tapping a silver pen against his notes. “The rest of us warned you what would happen if you pushed him too far.”

Shane stopped pacing. “I protected this city.”

Cody arched a brow. “No. You tried to muzzle a lion and then cried foul when he bit your throat.”

Shane’s mouth tightened. “He burned his family to ash,” he hissed. “He snapped.”

Randy Orton leaned back in his seat, lazy and lethal. “And you handed him the match.”

Eliza Guerrero didn’t look up from the file she was reading. Her voice was low. Precise. “What you call madness, I call consequence.”

“He killed his parents, Eliza.”

Randy’s grin was slow, almost amused. “And you killed his future. Guess vengeance runs in the family.”

Shane’s eyes flared. “He doesn’t deserve release. He should’ve rotted in that cell.”

“Maybe he did,” Cody muttered. “And maybe what walks out now isn’t what we locked up.”

Eliza finally closed the folder. A photograph slid across the table—Roman Mataio Reigns, eyes dead and unblinking, prison light casting shadows like bruises across his face.

“They’ve assigned him a court-mandated therapist,” she said. “Jasira Imani Cedeño.”

“Some bleeding-heart rookie?” Shane snorted. “That’s your solution?”

“No.”

Eliza’s tone was quiet, but every syllable struck clean.

“She’s sharp. Intuitive. Untethered. No ties to any family. No one to protect her but herself.”

“So she’s disposable,” Cody said.

Eliza didn’t blink. “She’s bait.”

Shane scoffed. “He’ll destroy her.”

“Let’s hope so,” she murmured.

That caught even Randy’s attention. His gaze cut sideways, assessing.

“You want her to provoke him.”

“I want to know what he remembers,” Eliza said. “And what he plans to do with it.”

Cody stood, a dark line drawing through his voice now. “You all act like this is a chessboard. It’s not. This is a blood feud. Roman Reigns didn’t just survive what we did—he transcended it.”

He glanced at the photograph again.

“You hear them outside?” he added, voice low. “The protests. They’re not just angry. They’re scared.”

Eliza’s eyes flicked toward the storm-lit windows. “Good. Fear means we still have control.”

Randy gave a low chuckle, devoid of humor. “Control?” He shook his head, slow and deliberate. “We couldn’t even kill a myth.”

“You don’t kill myths,” Cody said. “You feed them. Or you starve trying.”

A pause.

“You didn’t bury him. You resurrected him.”

Outside, thunder rolled over Thornhill like a war drum.

Eliza’s gaze drifted to the skyline, her voice a soft blade.

“We crowned him with ashes,” she said.

“And now,” Randy murmured, voice like a scar, “we wonder why he’s come back as fire.”

Eliza’s gaze drifted to the photo again. “No fire burns forever.” A pause. Then softer—deadlier: “But it can be smothered… if you’re patient enough.”

The protestors were louder than usual today.

Their screams climbed the sky like smoke—raw, splintered, relentless. Outside the wrought-iron gates of Ridgefall Correctional, chaos vibrated through the chain-link barriers, teeth bared in the form of cardboard signs, spit-flecked chants, and neon-drenched outrage. Someone had set a garbage bin on fire. Another threw a glass bottle at the line of riot guards. The shatter was barely audible over the sirens.

Inside, it was quiet.

Roman Mataio Reigns sat still on a steel bench, elbows resting on his knees, fingers loosely interlocked. His head tilted slightly, eyes fixed on the scuffed floor like it might offer answers he hadn’t already choked on.

They'd removed the jumpsuit two hours ago. In its place: a custom-tailored black suit, sent by someone he hadn’t spoken to in years. Maybe a peace offering. Maybe a dare. It fit perfectly. As if they still remembered his measurements. Black on black. Crisp collar. No tie. The kind of suit you wear to a funeral.

His own, maybe.

The overhead light buzzed. Fluorescent and flickering, like it couldn’t decide whether to illuminate him or let him disappear.

A slow breath moved through him. Just one. He didn’t even notice he was holding it.

He hadn’t dreamed about this day.

Didn’t allow himself to.

But once—just once—he had imagined the silence after the gates opened. What it might sound like when the world saw him again and didn’t know whether to kneel or run.

Ridgefall sat like a monument in the heart of Redrun Heights—Thornhill’s political and judicial district, where the marble steps of courthouses bled into luxury condos and surveillance drones flew lower than birds. Every building here looked clean on the outside and hollow at the core. The law didn’t live in Redrun Heights. It ruled. Brutally. Conveniently. From behind thick glass and legacy seals.

Roman had never forgotten that.

He’d been sentenced three blocks from here. Watched the same officials who’d shaken his hand at charity galas twist their faces into masks of outrage. They tried to erase him, not just as a man, but as a myth.

Ridgefall wasn’t just a prison.

It was a symbol.

A warning.

A reminder that even gods could be caged—until they couldn’t.

The guard entered too loudly, like he wanted his footsteps to matter.

Roman didn’t look up.

“Reigns,” the man said, voice tight beneath the false calm. “It’s time.” He hesitated. Then added, lower—like he couldn’t help himself: “Shouldn’t be.”

Roman rose slowly. No cuffs. No chains. No leash.

At the faint whisper of the guard’s last words, he finally glanced sideways—just once. A look that said more than any threat.

The man swallowed. Hard. “I’m just doing my job,” he muttered.

Roman said nothing.

He hadn’t worn shackles in seven months—not since the tribunal reversed the sentence. Said the evidence was insufficient. That he'd served more than enough time.

That the devil could go free.

The walk down the corridor felt the same as it had the first time. Same peeling walls. Same antiseptic stench. Same air, heavy with unsaid things. Only now, there was no guard barking instructions. Just silence. Just him. Just the building itself, holding its breath like it knew it had failed to contain the thing it feared.

He passed a wall where the paint curled like skin after a burn. He’d seen it a hundred times. Never touched it. Just watched it decay. Watched it become honest.

At the final door, the air changed. It always did at thresholds.

Roman stood still for a beat. Not because he was hesitant—but because he knew the moment he stepped through, something else would begin. Or end. It was hard to tell anymore. He wasn’t sure it mattered.

There had been a girl once, standing on the other side of a very different door. She’d had dirt on her knees and eyes too big for her face. She asked him if monsters could look like people.

He never answered her.

The memory passed before it could sharpen. He let it.

The guard hesitated behind him. Probably praying to a god less dangerous than the one in front of him.

Roman stepped forward.

The door opened.

Flashbulbs burst like gunfire. Sirens roared. Voices surged, broken and brutal.

Murderer.Let him burn.He’s a fucking god—look at him!

The crowd split down the center, barricades trembling under the weight of hatred and awe. Media vans. Protestors. Families of the dead. Tourists of violence. All of them here for one thing.

Him.

Roman didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. The noise washed over him like warm rain—loud, but no longer sharp.

It had been sharp once. Years ago. When the truth first cracked open, when they first whispered the name Reigns like it was both a curse and a crown. Back then, their screams had pierced him.

Now they just confirmed something.

He was still unforgettable.

He moved forward with quiet precision. No wasted movement. No rush. Like time would bend for him if it had to. Like the world would wait.

The press tried to get closer. One shouted his name. Another snapped a photo inches from his face.

Roman turned his head. Not much. Just enough.

The camera lens cracked.

The man stepped back in a hurry, eyes wide, hands shaking.

Roman kept walking.

Down the stone steps. Through the wind that smelled like rust, scorched brick, and distant smoke.

A mural covered the far wall across the courtyard—half-faded, cracked down the middle. Years ago, it was a Reigns family tribute. Now someone had painted over it in black spray paint.

GODS DON’T DIE. THEY WAIT.

His shadow hit the pavement before his boots did.

No entourage. No family.

Because there were none left.

The Reigns estate had burned three years ago. No one rebuilt it. All that remained was scorched earth. Charred iron. And the memory of a bloodline that used to rule Thornhill like gods—until Roman ripped the crown off and left nothing but ash.

Now he was the only one left.

And Thornhill?

Thornhill had no idea what it had just unleashed.

The building smelled like sterilized fear.

Not the kind that screamed or begged—but the quiet kind. The kind that wore lab coats and wrote reports and locked doors behind itself twice. The kind that lingered in elevator shafts and conference room corners like residue from a chemical spill.

Jasira Imani Cedeño sat in a glass-paneled waiting room inside the Thornhill Department of Psychological Oversight, watching raindrops streak across the window in slow, slanted lines. The whole office was too clean, too still—like someone had polished the place just to hide the bloodstains underneath.

This was Redrun Heights. Thornhill’s political and judicial core. All mirrored towers, sealed corridors, and the scent of rot disguised as protocol. The kind of place where secrets were measured in redacted lines and career promotions. She hated it.

Her work usually took place in Briar District—a few miles south but a world away. The Ashlight Center was housed in a renovated courthouse with vertical gardens, meditation wings, and skylights designed to simulate sunrise at any hour. The kind of place that sold “healing” like a luxury product. Briar District called itself Thornhill’s wellness corridor, a polished, moneyed sector where therapy was rebranded as optimization, and trauma was something you booked a sound bath or biometric journaling session for.

Here, in Redrun, therapy was just another tool to control monsters. Not like Briar, where wellness was branded in pastels and glossy pamphlets—more sedative than solution. Redrun didn't believe in healing. It believed in holding the leash tighter.

She had been called in with no warning. Just a clipped message sent to her encrypted inbox: Urgent reassignment. Report to Redrun Heights.

Urgent, she’d learned, never meant simple. It meant someone in power was too scared to say it aloud.

The door opened with a soft hiss.

“Dr. Cedeño?” a voice said. Crisp. Male. Neutral like it had been practiced by committee.

She stood, smoothing her dark blazer, and followed the assistant down a corridor lined with photos of past directors—white men with hollow smiles, heavy frames, and eyes that had never known what it was like to be broken for sport. Every step clicked too loudly against the tile.

The conference room at the end of the hall was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the kind of cold that came from too many ghosts in one place.

Inside sat two people: Director Eliza Raine Guerrero, all angular posture and diamond-hard eyes, and Dr. Julian Maddox, who wore his discomfort like an expensive watch—tight, polished, and ticking.

“Dr. Cedeño,” Eliza said without standing. “Please sit.”

Jasira took the chair opposite them, spine straight. Hands folded loosely in her lap.

They didn’t offer water. They didn’t pretend this was a discussion.

“We’ll be brief,” Maddox began. “The tribunal has approved the release of Inmate 742-A.”

Jasira blinked once.

Not out of shock—but recognition. The name echoed.

Roman Mataio Reigns.

She’d read the file when it first hit the system—three years ago, when his arrest shook the entire city like thunder in a sealed chamber. Everyone had. It was the kind of case you didn’t forget, even if you tried. One part tragedy, one part legend, and several parts classified.

She remembered the stillness in his mugshot. The lack of remorse. The refusal to perform.

It wasn’t narcissism. It was... something else. Something unstudied. And that made it harder to ignore.

“Effective immediately,” Eliza continued, “you’ve been assigned as his mandated therapeutic contact.”

Silence. Jasira didn’t flinch.

Then, measured: “You’re assigning me to a man with a known history of familial homicide, mass psychogenic influence, and systemic silence for over three years. And I’m to... what? Debrief him?”

“Stabilize him,” Eliza corrected. “Engage in rapport building. Monitor for relapse potential.”

“And if he never speaks?”

Maddox shifted uncomfortably. Like a man who wished he worked in accounting.

Eliza smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Then you take notes.”

Jasira held her gaze for a beat longer than protocol allowed. “You’re not assigning me to treat him. You’re assigning me to witness him.”

Her voice sharpened by a fraction. “And if what I witness is something you can’t contain?”

Eliza’s smile sharpened. “Then I trust your report will be... illuminating. For both of us.”

Maddox cleared his throat. “We expect professional neutrality, Dr. Cedeño,” he said, a little too quickly. “You are not to escalate or... engage unnecessarily.”

“Neutrality,” she echoed, voice cool. “You’re handing me a match and asking me not to feel the heat.”

Eliza tilted her head the slightest degree. “You’ve handled... volatile patients before. We’ve reviewed your files.” A faint, calculated pause. “But this one will see you coming.”

“And you expect me to walk in anyway,” Jasira said.

Eliza’s smile sharpened. “I expect you to hold your ground.” Another pause. “Unless that’s a problem.”

Maddox jumped in quickly. “Of course, this is a controlled setting, Dr. Cedeño. You will have support—observation teams in place. If at any point you feel—”

“Observed is not the same as protected,” Jasira said, cutting him off gently. “We all know that.”

A faint pulse started at the base of her throat. They wanted her to think this was about her record. It wasn’t. It was about survival.

Maddox added, almost too quickly, “And this assignment will reflect in your file, of course. Exceptional service here could... open doors.”

Jasira looked at him coldly. “I didn’t take this job to decorate my file.”

Eliza’s eyes glittered. Approval, maybe. Or curiosity. “Then I trust you’ll be... memorable.”

Jasira’s voice stayed steady. “I intend to be.”

A breath caught behind her ribs.

Just for a second—no more.

She was back in her mother’s living room, eight years old and trembling. A school report clutched in her small, ink-smudged hands. The teacher had written: She’s very sensitive. She cries too easily. Struggles with boundaries.

Her mother didn’t yell. That would’ve been easier.

She just sat there—long legs crossed, mouth flat, voice low and surgical.

“Do you know what happens to little girls who cry all the time?”

Jasira had shaken her head, her cheeks burning.

“Nobody takes them seriously. That’s what. You think the world’s going to coddle you?”

She hadn’t. But the tears still came. Quiet ones. Ashamed ones.

Her mother sighed. Stood. Walked over with a tissue—not to soothe her, but to erase the evidence.

“You want to be strong? Then stop making a mess.”

Her voice hadn’t been angry—it had been worse. Disappointed in that deep, bone-level way that said strength was a requirement, not a choice, and Jasira was already failing the test.

The memory dissolved as quickly as it came, like the aftertaste of something bitter you learned to swallow.

There it was—the real reason they chose her. Not because she was the best. But because she knew how to sit in silence.

She’d done it before.

She blinked it away.

Focus.

“I’ll need full access to his records. Surveillance footage. Tribunal transcripts. Every sealed document,” she said, tone professional. Controlled.

“Done,” Eliza replied. “You’ll meet with him within forty-eight hours.”

Jasira stood, but paused at the doorway.

“Why me?”

Maddox avoided her gaze.

Eliza didn’t.

“Because you’re not afraid to look into fire, Dr. Cedeño. And because if it consumes you...” Her voice dropped a shade colder. “...you’ll burn quietly.”

Jasira met her gaze one last time. And in her voice—barely a thread of steel: “Then I suggest you hope I burn slow.”

Eliza’s eyes glittered. “We’ll be watching.”

Jasira’s voice was quiet steel. “Then I’ll make sure you don’t blink.”

Outside, the rain had stopped.

Jasira exited the building with slow, careful steps, as if her body already knew it had crossed a threshold.

She didn’t drive straight back to Briar. Not yet. Not until the pulse in her wrists slowed. Not until the cold had earned its way out of her skin.

She needed to walk. Needed to feel the cold air on her skin. Let the sharpness of it thread through the tension in her shoulders.

It wasn’t until she reached her car, twenty minutes later, that she even looked at the folder tucked beneath her coat.

She didn’t open it.

Not yet.

Not in a parking lot where the city watched with camera lenses and streetlight eyes.

She drove back to The Ashlight Center, weaving through the city’s veins—where protest graffiti still clung to alley walls like a whisper no one could scrub clean, and broken glass glittered beneath courthouse steps. The rain had rinsed the streets, but not the memory of who had walked free.

She navigated past Thornhill’s cracked boulevards and immaculate façades. The building greeted her like it always did—glass doors that whispered open, warm recessed lighting, soft instrumental music humming like a nervous system trying to regulate. But today, it felt performative. As if the building, too, was trying too hard not to flinch.

The front desk was empty. The lobby was still.

She passed the therapy rooms, her heels quiet against the polished floors, until she reached her private office.

On the TV above the elevator bank, a newscaster’s voice bled through static:

“—public response has been mixed, with some claiming Reigns was framed, others—”

She didn’t stop to listen.

But the static followed her down the hall.

Once inside, she locked the door.

No music. No sound. Just the subtle hum of the security panel behind her and the faint scent of sandalwood from the oil diffuser she’d forgotten to shut off days ago.

On the edge of her bookshelf sat a small, smooth stone. Silver lettering carved into the surface. Her eyes flicked to the window beside her desk—her own reflection, ghostlike against the rain-streaked glass, watching her. Like a witness. Or a warning.

breathe

A gift from her first long-term patient.

She didn’t touch it.

She dropped her coat onto the chair, sat down behind her desk, and stared at the sealed folder for a long, heavy breath. Her fingers twitched once. That old, useless instinct to brace. As if pain could be predicted just by scent or weight.

The cardboard felt too thick. Too crisp. Like it hadn’t been touched by anyone willing to admit what was inside.

She adjusted the pen on her desk. Then again. Three times. Until it was perfectly aligned with the corner.

A ritual, not a correction.

Across the room, a digital news ticker blinked silently on the office wall. A local feed.

The headline scrolled once.

Paused.

Then again.

ROMAN REIGNS WALKS FREE — WILL THORNHILL EVER HEAL?

Her eyes caught on the word heal.

As if Thornhill was a patient.

As if Roman Reigns hadn’t become the surgeon.

She reached forward. Slowly. Like someone reaching for a match they knew might burn them.

For a split second, her hand hovered. A pulse quickened behind her sternum. He had seen her. That was what rattled her most. She had walked into that room prepared to observe. But he had observed her first.

Unsnapped the folder.

And with it, opened the cage. Behind her, in the dark reflection of the window, her outline doubled—one Jasira frozen, the other tilting forward like a mirror no longer synced to its source.

Inside: transcripts, surveillance stills, sealed statements. Inked diagrams of blood patterns. One solitary psychological assessment—outdated, inconclusive, stained with a coffee ring like it had been handled more like gossip than gospel.

Jasira read the first page.

Her stomach tightened.

Not out of fear.

Out of recognition.

The kind of recognition that lives in your bones before it reaches your mind. That unspoken sense of, I know this kind of silence.

She kept reading.

And somewhere deep in her gut, something shifted.

Not crumbled. Not cracked.

Shifted.

Like a door unlocking without her ever turning the handle. Somewhere inside her, the silence shifted—and smiled.

The interview room was colder than the rest of Ridgefall.

Not clinically cold. Existentially. The kind of cold that suggested no one ever truly left here—they just stopped being seen.

It was small. No windows. One surveillance orb in the upper corner, blinking red. Everything in Ridgefall was designed to break you quietly. This room wasn’t for conversation. It was for dissection—slow, surgical, state-sanctioned. A table, bolted to the floor. Two chairs. The metal was cold to the touch, leeching heat from anything that dared to rest on it. A low hum pulsed through the floor—subtle, rhythmic, like the heartbeat of the institution itself. It smelled faintly of bleach and rust. Like they’d tried to scrub out whatever came before, but the ghosts still clung to the walls. A faint buzzing came from the fluorescent light overhead, the only sound in a space so silent it made the skin hum.

And him.

She caught a glimpse of him first—not directly, but in the warped reflection of the stainless panel on the door. His shape was intact, but his eyes? Blurred into shadow. Like the room refused to reflect him honestly.

Roman Mataio Reigns sat like someone who had decided long ago that stillness was the only way to stay undefeated. His posture was relaxed, but not casual. Grounded. Composed. Every line of his body held in quiet command. The kind of man who didn’t need to announce power because the air around him did it for him. Like the gravity in the room belonged to him and had never stopped.

He didn’t look up when Jasira entered. Didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

For a moment, it felt like she had walked into a cathedral. Not a place of worship, but of reckoning.

She stepped forward. Each heel-click sounded louder than it should have. The walls absorbed nothing. It felt like even the air was listening.

She took her seat without a word.

The silence between them wasn’t awkward.

It was deliberate.

Measured.

Like two creatures circling something sacred and dangerous. Like myths trying to decide whether to coexist or destroy each other.

The stillness stretched. Her pulse betrayed her, quickening once. She pressed her thumb hard to her index finger. A pressure point. A ritual.

She opened the folder on the table, though she’d already memorized the contents. For the briefest second, she wasn’t in Ridgefall. She was ten. Knees pressed together. Eyes dry because tears were punishable. Don’t cry, echoed, even now. She blinked hard. Came back to him. Her left thumb pressed hard against the edge of her index finger. A grounding trick. One she hadn’t needed in years. She let the paper whisper. It gave her hands something to do.

Still, he said nothing.

His hands were folded. His eyes lowered.

But she felt it.

He was watching her. Not with his eyes. With something primal. Something colder. Like intuition sharpened into instinct, honed in silence and blood.

She cleared her throat.

"Mr. Reigns," she began, voice even. "My name is Dr. Jasira Cedeño. I’ll be overseeing your mandated sessions."

No reaction.

She expected that. Had prepared for it.

She leaned forward slightly, resting her forearms on the table.

"I want to be clear," she said. "This is not about rehabilitation. Not in the traditional sense. I'm not here to fix you. I'm here to observe you. To understand you."

His gaze finally lifted.

Not fast.

Like a storm waking up.

His eyes met hers. And the room changed temperature. The fluorescent buzz quieted in her ears. Her breath stalled.

There was no threat in them. But there was no peace, either. Just depth. Like looking into water so dark you couldn’t see the bottom. And knowing something lived there.

Above them, the fluorescent light buzzed louder—then flickered once. The surveillance orb blinked red. Watching. Always watching. But never blinking. And knowing something lurked beneath the surface, waiting.

"Then watch," he said.

His voice was low. Calm. Unhurried.

But it cracked something open in her. A sense she hadn't felt since reading his file.

Recognition.

She told herself it was projection. Classic transference. That the pull in her gut had nothing to do with the man and everything to do with the silence between them.

But her body was not convinced. Her instincts whispered: Not prey. Not predator. Mirror.

Not just of him—of herself.

She studied him just as carefully. The stillness of a man who had mastered restraint not out of fear, but out of design. His presence was heavy without movement. Like a temple to sorrow, every part of him carved from the weight of what he survived.

"You’ve got good posture," he said suddenly. "But your hands give you away."

He shifted, just enough for the metal leg of the chair to scrape against the concrete. The sound was small. But in a room like this, it might as well have been a siren. A declaration: I decide when the silence breaks. The way his jaw remained still even when he spoke. The stillness of a man who had mastered restraint not out of fear, but out of design.

He tilted his head, studying her. Not her body. Not her tone. It was her stillness that interested him. The way she withheld herself—not with fear, but precision.

"You’re not afraid of me," he said.

A statement, not a question.

Jasira met his gaze without flinching.

"Should I be?"

His lips curved. Not a smile. A knowing. A flicker of something almost like admiration.

"That depends," he said softly. "Do you break easy?"

Jasira met his gaze. Her voice was steady. "Not for anyone in this room."

His eyes sharpened—just slightly. Not a threat. A flicker of interest. Like a hunter finding the prey could bite back.

He didn’t answer.

She didn’t press.

She closed the folder.

The silence pressed in again, thicker now. Her pulse rose. She almost reached for her pen—almost—but stilled her hand at the last second.

Do not break first.

And they sat there.

Not speaking.

Not moving.

Just watching each other.

Like two myths told in the same breath.

And in the silence, something ancient passed between them. Not approval. Not trust. Just a mutual acknowledgment:

You see me.

And worse— You carry something I buried in myself.

From above, the surveillance orb blinked red. Watching two monsters in hibernation. Logging every breath. Waiting to see which one would wake first—and what they’d do once unleashed.

Roman shifted. Just a breath. Just enough to remind her—he hadn't even started speaking yet.

Beneath her folded hands, her pulse drummed harder than it should. She hadn’t broken. But it had been closer than she liked.

The Ashlight Center was pristine. A temple of curated calm tucked into the gleaming spine of Briar District. The scent of eucalyptus lingered, mingling with faint notes of sterilized citrus and something colder—an undercurrent of ambition too clean to be honest. The air was taut, smoothed into obedience like a starched white sheet stretched over something cold and hidden. The windows blurred the outside world, muting Thornhill’s pulse without fully silencing it. You were meant to forget the city's bones while still sensing them breathing beneath the surface.

Wellness here was not kindness; it was choreography. A perfectly balanced meal plated on poisoned porcelain. Nothing was soft by accident. Every fern was trimmed, every lo-fi jazz note precisely leveled, every pause in speech timed for maximum illusion. Serenity was an illusion built brick by brick—polished, practiced, and deeply unnatural.

Jasira walked the halls like a ghost in her own skin.

White coats passed her by with hollow smiles and brisk nods, fluent in the language of institutional politeness. Their eyes never lingered. Their pace never faltered. Her heels clicked against the marble floor with mechanical precision, but her mind moved differently. Slower. Hazy. Every breath in this place felt too crisp, too clean—a detox she hadn’t earned. Not after Ridgefall. Not after him.

Her fingertips still tingled. Like some part of her had stayed behind—or worse, been marked by it. She kept flexing her fingers as if she could shake off the residue of his stare. As if she could scrub out whatever he'd seen in her. The hallway narrowed, her vision tunneling.

When she reached her office, she keyed in her code on the third try. Her pulse thudded in her throat, dull and dissonant.

The door clicked open, releasing her into silence. The lighting was warmer here. Intentionally soft. Everything in this room had been chosen to soothe: muted green walls, a single orchid in bloom, shelves lined with books and carefully positioned degrees. A wax diffuser pulsed lavender into the air. The hum of the air vent was a lullaby for the broken. But none of it settled her.

Not after him.

She set Roman's file on the desk like it might bite. Its edges felt too sharp. Like it had grown teeth in her hand—jagged, accusatory. The kind of bite you earn when a place like Ridgefall brands you from the inside out.

Then sat.

Then stared.

The corners of the room seemed too sharp. Her chair too stiff. The hum of the diffuser too loud. She could still feel the metallic chill of Ridgefall on her skin. Bleach in her nose. A phantom buzz in her ears. The walls felt too close. Her skin too thin.

Minutes passed. Or maybe seconds. The clock didn’t help. She was still hearing his voice.

Then watch.

Her own voice, clinical and rehearsed, echoed in her ears. It felt distant, hollow—like listening to someone else through a fogged glass. The detachment stung. She blinked, almost startled by the coldness in her tone, as if professionalism had hijacked her humanity without asking permission. I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to observe you.

She felt like a fraud.

She swallowed the tremor in her throat and reached for the small recorder tucked in her drawer. Her fingers hesitated. The metal felt colder than it should have.

A low beep. Then red light.

Audio Log 001 — Start

"Patient: Roman Mataio Reigns. Session one. Date: September 17. Time: 3:36 p.m."

Her voice was clinical. She leaned into the professionalism like it was armor. But even armor has its chinks. Her tone cracked near the edges, barely.

"Initial presentation: nonverbal for the majority of the session. Composed. Still. Gaze was direct upon engagement. No observable signs of overt aggression. But..."

She paused. Fingers tightened slightly around the recorder. The silence in the room seemed to lean in.

"But the silence wasn’t empty. It was strategic. Weighted. Like a second language meant to disarm."

Her eyes flicked to the file on her desk. She didn’t dare open it.

"He didn’t feel dangerous. He felt... inevitable."

[glitch]

The audio stuttered.

She froze. The glitch wasn’t mechanical. It felt... deliberate. As if the silence between them had bled into the recording.

A second of silence.

Then she spoke again, slower.

"There was no fear. I expected fear. Instead... I felt like I had walked into something alive. And it was looking back."

A flicker passed through her—unbidden, raw—his voice again: Then watch. She heard it now not as a command, but as a promise. Or a dare.

She closed her eyes briefly, remembering the pressure in the room. A tightness bloomed in her chest, like invisible fingers pressing against her sternum. Her breath grew shallow, halting.

Her jaw clenched. Hard enough to ache. But the tremor still reached her fingers, traitorous and slight. She pressed them flat against the desk, forcing stillness she didn’t feel.

She almost saw herself in the void of his stare—fractured, refracted, like a funhouse version of the woman she thought she was.

"He is not what the reports prepared me for."

A pause.

"There is…" She stopped. The words had almost slipped out. She tightened her grip on the recorder. Professional. Clinical.

"There is… a presence to him. Difficult to quantify. Difficult to… resist." A sharp breath. Strike that. Her voice steadied. "Difficult to define."

"Stillness isn’t absence. With him, it's warning. Containment. A kind of restraint that suggests something larger underneath. Something old. Something watchful."

A beat of silence. Then softer: "And I am not sure... that I am the one watching anymore."

Audio Log 001 — End.

The click echoed louder than it should have. And beneath the fading hum of the recorder, one thought surfaced—unbidden, unwanted:

He saw me first.

She set the recorder down and stared at her reflection in the black mirror of her computer screen.

Her own eyes didn’t look familiar.

And that—that scared her more than anything Roman had said.

She brushed her fingers across her temple, grounding herself. Her reflection blinked back with eyes that didn’t blink in Ridgefall. What had he seen in her? What had she?

Her skin felt too tight, her blouse a cage, her office manicured to the point of mockery. She reached over and switched off the diffuser, snuffing out the lavender haze like a lie exposed under a harsh light. The air felt heavier without it—but more honest.

Her gaze flicked back to the file on her desk.

She reached for it—then froze. Not yet. Not when her hands might tremble.

Outside, beyond the tinted windows, Thornhill pulsed beneath the surface like a beast sedated. But not slain. The city, like Roman, knew how to hold its breath. It had perfected the art of the slow bleed. It wore civility like a mask. All clean lines and gilded lies.

And in that mask, Jasira now saw Ridgefall’s reflection—cold tile floors, steel air, the stench of bleach that clung to your skin long after you'd left. The city and the prison shared a language of silence, of menace painted over with respectability. One punished you with chains. The other with expectations.

And somewhere beneath it all, in the belly of Ridgefall Correctional, a man who spoke only once had changed everything.

Jasira leaned back in her chair.

And exhaled.

But the breath didn’t feel like hers. It scraped its way up, brittle and foreign.

It felt like she’d borrowed it from someone braver. Someone who hadn’t been seen by him. Someone who hadn’t looked back.

Someone who still believed that silence meant peace.

But peace had teeth now. And they were already sinking in.

The room was colder after she left.

Not by degrees.

By presence.

Roman sat where he was, hands folded on the table. The metal chilled beneath his skin, but he did not move.

Not yet.

Let the guards wait. Let the mirror watch.

He could feel it—the hum behind the glass. Surveillance. Always hungry.

But his gaze stayed steady.

On the door.

On the absence she’d left behind.

Her.

She hadn’t flinched. Not once. Not when he looked at her. Not when he spoke.

Then watch.

The words had slipped out, but not by accident. He had chosen them. A test. A permission. A warning.

And still—her eyes had held.

Too polished. Too trained. But underneath? There was fracture. He knew it. Had seen it in her pulse, in the tension at her throat. In the breath she didn’t take fast enough.

Control. Not comfort. Lavender. Steel.

And her body—he saw it, too. The way her shoulders had squared when she entered. Braced. The way they had not softened when she left. But her hands—her hands had trembled.

A small thing. But Roman had never needed more.

The faintest hitch in her breath when he spoke. Not fear. Not yet. Something older. Something she’d been taught not to show.

Roman leaned back slowly, spine uncoiling. He caught his reflection in the two-way glass.

Or part of it.

A warped shadow. Lines where there should have been definition. A man-shaped echo.

I do not look at myself.

Not yet.

Not until the day came when the mirror would show the truth—not the shape the world had carved from him.

His gaze shifted back to the door.

They were taking too long.

Let them.

He closed his eyes.

For a moment—one moment only—a flicker came. Malia’s voice—laughter splintered by screams. The thud of a belt against wood. His mother’s silence sharper than the leather.

His own roar echoing against the walls. Then blood. Then stillness.

His fists clenched.

No.

Not now.

The hum in the room pulsed louder, as if it could taste the crack in his control. Roman exhaled through his nose, slow and steady.

He opened his eyes.

Silence reclaimed the space.

But not emptiness.

Her voice remained.

Not the words—her tone. The cadence beneath the professionalism. The pulse of someone who had stared at monsters and built armor from the pieces.

And the tremor beneath it.

Roman smiled.

Barely.

A shift of muscle, not mirth.

Intriguing.

But not enough.

Not yet.

The lock clicked.

Two guards entered, stiff-backed and wary. As if he might unmake them with a glance.

Roman rose.

Towered.

He said nothing.

And as they led him out, his thoughts didn’t turn to Ridgefall. Or the guards. Or the mirror.

They circled one place only:

Her voice.

Her eyes.

Her hands.

The way her shoulders had squared against him—and the way they would not hold.

He did not believe in fate.

But the shape of her voice now haunted the empty corridors of his mind.

And her fracture— he had felt it.

Next time, Roman thought, gaze hooded, pulse slow. I will speak first. I will watch her break.

Not by force.

Not by violence.

By hunger.

By truth.

And when she looked at him again— she would not be able to look away.

Jasira didn’t go home that night.

She lingered in her office long after the sun had bled out behind the towers of Briar. The Ashlight Center emptied one by one, glass doors whispering shut, bodies disappearing like afterimages. But she stayed. She sat in stillness until her body began to ache from the posture, until silence started to hum like static in her bones.

She didn’t turn on any lights. Just sat with the darkness and let it settle in her bones, let it peel back the layers she'd kept stitched together all day. Outside, the city whispered against the glass, lights flickering like fireflies caught in a jar. Inside, time slowed.

Eventually, her phone buzzed. Not just a message this time.

It rang.

Mami — Incoming Call

She debated letting it go to voicemail, but the guilt was automatic. So she answered.

“Jasira,” her mother said immediately, not even waiting for a greeting. “I was starting to think you were ignoring me.”

“I’m just… tired, Mami,” she murmured, rubbing her eyes.

She hadn't meant for it to sound so fragile. She could hear it—her voice cracking like ice. The soft tremor that had no business making itself known.

“Tired from what? Sitting in that place, wasting yourself on people who won’t change? You let it eat at you. And for what? I warned you about this.”

Jasira closed her eyes. Her mother’s voice wasn’t angry, not exactly. Just sharp with concern. Sharp like a knife meant to protect you by drawing blood.

“It’s important work.”

“I’m not afraid of it,” Jasira said too quickly—before she could stop herself.

Silence on the other end. Then:

“Important doesn’t mean safe. And it damn sure doesn’t mean smart.”

Jasira’s chest tightened. She didn’t respond.

“I raised you to be smart. Not soft. Not reckless. But you—” a sharp exhale. “You never learn. You feel too much, and it makes you weak.”

Silence stretched between them. Jasira let it. Her mother, sensing she wouldn’t win, shifted tactics—her voice cooler now, not warmer.

“Did you eat?” she asked again, quieter but still clipped.

Jasira swallowed back the emotion rising in her throat.

“I’m not a child anymore, Mami.”

“Then act like it. Stop letting your heart write checks your head can’t cash. You feel too much, Jasira. It’s dangerous. For you. For everyone around you.”

“Yeah,” Jasira lied. “I did.”

“Okay. Try to get some rest, mija.”

“I will.”

She ended the call, then set the phone face-down and pressed her fingers to her temple, as if she could massage the tension from her skull.

The conversation echoed louder than it should have. Her mother’s voice always did. Every syllable a command wrapped in concern, every pause a test she was supposed to pass.

Jasira had grown up walking a tightrope. Emotions weren’t encouraged—they were corrected. Sadness was self-indulgent. Anger was dangerous. Fear? Weakness. Her tears had always been too loud, too inconvenient.

The only softness she’d ever been allowed was with her older brother, Elias. He was five years older, with a voice like velvet and a grin that made rules feel negotiable. Elias was the one who taught her how to hold in tears just long enough to find privacy. The one who left sticky notes in her notebooks that said feel it anyway. He didn’t push her to be perfect. He pushed her to be real.

When the house got too quiet, Elias would knock once and slip inside her room. They’d whisper about made-up stories or curse out the world in the safety of a blanket fort. He had dreams, too—talked about being a teacher, someone who helped kids like them learn to speak without fear.

But Thornhill had other plans. One summer night, just weeks before he planned to apply for a mentorship program, Elias got stopped by police outside a convenience store. The clerk had called in a report of someone agitated and suspicious. Elias had only been waiting for a cab.

They said he fit the description. They said he resisted.

He didn’t come home.

At the funeral, Jasira didn’t cry. Not because she didn’t want to, but because her mother told her not to. Be strong, she had whispered, fingers stiff around Jasira’s wrist. Don’t let them see you fall apart. So she didn’t.

Instead, she sat in the front pew, hands folded like steel, the grief roaring inside her with nowhere to go.

After that, Jasira had learned how to disappear her feelings before anyone else could erase them first. Her mother poured all her control into her now, as if shaping her into something perfect could keep another child from slipping through the cracks.

But even Elias had known—stillness wasn’t absence. It was survival.

And tonight? Roman hadn’t needed to raise his voice. Neither had Mami. Neither had they. And still—she bent.

She still carried one of Elias’s sticky notes in her wallet—creased at the corners, ink faded. Feel it anyway. It was the only permission she had left. A tremor worked its way down her jaw, an echo of the restraint she’d held all day.

The silence in the office was different now. Not the eerie stillness of Ridgefall, but not peace either. It was an in-between quiet. A waiting room kind of hush. The kind that comes before bad news. The kind that lets your thoughts grow fangs.

Jasira rose, moving to the small mirror mounted beside the bookshelf. It was meant to be decorative. A circle framed in warm brass. Gentle. Harmless.

But her reflection didn’t look harmless. It didn’t even look like her.

She studied her face in the dimness. Hair slightly frizzed from stress. Eyes rimmed with exhaustion. There was a tautness to her expression that hadn't been there before Ridgefall. A tightness around her mouth. A question in her brow.

Who are you becoming?

The thought came unbidden.

And then another: What did he see when he looked at you?

The file still sat on her desk. Unopened.

She had read the summary. She had heard the headlines. But she hadn’t opened the full contents. Not yet. Not after being in the same room with him. The man whose myth had survived courtrooms, bloodstained rumors, and prison bars.

Roman Mataio Reigns.

She didn’t want to see what others had written about him.

Because some part of her already knew—what they wrote wasn’t the truth.

The truth was what he didn’t say. The way he watched. The restraint. The stillness. That slow, deliberate blink. That silence that didn’t feel like emptiness.

It felt like judgment. Like recognition. Like being seen too deeply by someone who hadn't said a word, and somehow said everything.

She reached out, pressing her fingers against the glass. Her reflection blurred. For a moment, it looked like someone else. Someone harder. Someone hollow.

She turned away from the mirror.

And still felt its eyes on her.

Pull yourself together, her mother’s voice whispered, uninvited and sharp in her mind.

Or was it his?

No—it couldn’t be. But her chest tightened anyway.

She couldn’t shake what it had shown her. Not the reflection— The fracture.

Her shoulders had squared without her noticing. The way his had.

She crossed the room in slow, measured steps. Reached for the file on her desk. Her fingers hovered above it—then retreated.

Not yet.

Her breath caught, shallow. Hands trembling now, she folded them into her lap, gripping tight.

Some fractures weren’t ready to be examined in daylight.

She would open it. She had to.

Just… not tonight.

Not while part of her still wanted to.

She didn’t sleep.

By the time the first thin light bruised the Briar skyline, she was already dressed—sharp, immaculate, untouchable. The mirror offered no reassurance. She ignored it.

Ashlight’s halls buzzed faintly this morning, though no one said why. The whispers traveled differently now. Lower. Tighter. As if the walls themselves had caught word of Roman Reigns walking free.

By the time she reached the executive floor, the mask was in place. Cool. Professional. Unbothered.

Her badge buzzed her into the conference room.

They were waiting.

Three supervisors from Ashlight’s upper echelon sat along one side of the table. And at the head—a lean, silver-haired man in a McMahon family suit. Shane McMahon, head of the public oversight board.

He did not stand when Jasira entered. Simply gestured for her to sit.

She did.

Her heart did not race. It had learned better.

“Ms. Cedeño,” McMahon began, folding his hands. “Your first mandated session with Mr. Reigns was… eventful.”

A flicker of curiosity. Or warning. It was hard to tell with men like him.

Jasira inclined her head. “It proceeded as per the mandate.”

McMahon smiled thinly. “Our sources suggest he spoke.”

Silence stretched.

“Yes,” Jasira said at last. “One sentence.”

McMahon leaned forward, fingers steepled. “He’s already manipulating the narrative. You will not allow him to manipulate you.” A thin smile. “You’re bright, Dr. Cedeño. Don’t mistake that for control.”

Another pause. One of the supervisors leaned forward, voice flat and clinical. “This is about containment. You’ll provide results. Or we’ll assign someone less… compromised.” A flick of the fingers. “Someone less curious.”

Control. Not healing. Always the same game.

“I am aware,” Jasira replied evenly.

McMahon’s gaze sharpened. “Good. Because you are now to oversee his next mandated session—here.”

She stilled. Just slightly.

“In Ashlight?” she asked, already knowing.

“Yes. The next session will occur in our observation wing. Under review.” He leaned back. “We expect your full cooperation.”

“Of course.”

But the lie tasted bitter. Her role had shifted the moment she’d locked eyes with him. And they all knew it. And if they could see it already—so could he.

The meeting ended with perfunctory nods. No handshake. No warmth.

As she exited, a familiar voice caught her.

“Jasira.”

She turned. Eliza Guerrero stood near the frosted glass wall, arms crossed, expression cool as ever.

“Eliza.”

Eliza’s gaze flicked down, then back up—sharp, assessing. “You’ve begun with Reigns.” A pause. “I trust the assignment was... illuminating.”

“I was assigned.”

Eliza smiled faintly. No warmth. Only edge. “Assigned, yes. Chosen—because you were never built to look away.” A beat. “Be careful.” A pause. “They’ll burn you before they let him tarnish their name.”

A faint pause. Then Eliza’s gaze sharpened—not cold, but precise. Like a blade honed too many times.

“Play their game if you must,” Eliza added quietly. “But remember—he’s not the only one watching you now.”

For a moment, their gazes held.

Then Eliza walked away.

Jasira stood alone in the corridor for a long moment.

When she returned to her office, the file still waited.

No more waiting.

She opened it.

And the first page stopped her cold:

ROMAN MATAIO REIGNS Primary Diagnosis: Dissociative Identity Disruption / Violent Trauma Response Conditioning / Incomplete Rehabilitation Profile.

And beneath it— "Subject exhibits advanced capacity for compartmentalization. Moral architecture fragmented. Presenting with increased resistance to standard therapeutic intervention."

Her breath slowed.

She turned the page.

Let the mirror watch.

The words blurred.

Jasira closed the file for a moment, pulse hammering. Fingers trembled against the edges of the paper.

"They’ll burn you before they let him tarnish their name."

Eliza’s warning echoed sharp in her skull.

But it was not fear that rooted her in place.

She could still hear the measured weight of his silence. Still feel the phantom pull of his gaze across her skin.

It was something older. Something colder.

A voice worth breaking for again.

And for the first time since she left Ridgefall, Jasira wondered— oh God, what if he already had.

The city pulsed beneath him.

Roman stood in the glass-framed corner of the McMahon safehouse. Forty-three floors above Thornhill’s rotted heart, its gleam looked clean. From this height, even filth had order.

But he knew better.

The glass did not hold him. Neither did the marble beneath his feet or the guards stationed outside the door. Freedom was a skin they had draped across him—thin, fragile, already fraying.

He did not pace. Did not sit.

Stillness remained his armor.

Across the room, the surveillance camera in the corner blinked its red eye. Let them watch. It would bring her closer.

They would not see what they needed to.

Not yet.

A soft knock. The door opened.

Michael Faulkner, McMahon liaison, entered—a slender man dressed in corporate camouflage. He smelled faintly of mint and sweat.

Roman turned his head, slow as the city’s tide.

“Mr. Reigns,” Faulkner began, voice carefully measured. “Per your release terms, your next mandated session has been scheduled.”

Silence.

“It will take place… offsite.” A swallow. “At the Ashlight Center. This Thursday.”

He held out a paper.

Roman did not reach for it.

Faulkner’s hand trembled faintly.

At last, Roman moved. Stepped forward, gaze steady. Took the page with deliberate slowness.

Eyes flicked across the words. The date. The seal. Ashlight. Her ground, not theirs. He would make it his.

The pulse beneath his skin thrummed once.

Still, he spoke no word. No question. No consent.

Faulkner cleared his throat. “You’ll be escorted. Standard observation. Public interest is… high.”

Roman’s mouth curved—barely.

Not for the man. Not for the page.

For her.

Jasira.

He heard her voice again—threaded through the city’s hum.

Lavender. Steel. The breath she had not dared to take fast enough. The fracture behind her gaze.

She did not flinch.

She sees.

Roman folded the paper once. Slid it into his pocket.

Faulkner lingered. “You… understand, Mr. Reigns?”

A beat.

Then Roman smiled. Not warmth. Not threat. Hunger. The kind that made men like Faulkner pray the room had more exits than it did.

“I understand.”

Faulkner paled, retreating with a stiff nod.

Roman returned to the window.

The city beneath him shifted—mirrors beneath grime, shadows beneath light. A place that wore civility like a mask.

As she did.

As I do.

The hum of the glass seemed to echo her voice. The weight of her gaze. The pulse he had not forgotten.

Soon.

He would see her again.

And this time—

he would not speak only once.

He would peel back the mask she wore.

And perhaps—if she dared—

Together they would see what waited beneath his. And if she didn’t look away—he would show her everything.

Jasira’s reflection watched her from the glass of the Ashlight Center’s entrance. Pull yourself together, her mother’s voice whispered in her head.

She stepped inside.

The air felt thinner today—too bright, too staged. Every line of the building gleamed under artificial light, a city of false stars. The Ashlight Center was designed for serenity. But beneath it? A theater. A cage.

She knew that better than most.

By the time she reached her office, her mask was flawless. Hair pinned smooth, suit uncreased, voice rehearsed. But beneath her ribs, something coiled tight.

She unlocked the drawer.

Feel it anyway. The sticky note Elias had left her years ago. Worn, frayed, the ink nearly vanished. A defiant whisper from a brother who had refused to let her harden into ice.

She touched it once.

Then tucked it away.

Not today.

The clock marked 9:07 a.m.

Three hours until the session. Three hours until he would walk into Ashlight under their eyes—and hers.

The pen in her hand hovered over the page, tip poised but unmoving.

What mattered was how he would walk in. Not chained. Not guarded. Not controlled.

They thought they had built this room to contain him. To observe him.

But she knew better.

She had felt it already—in that first meeting. He would be the one watching.

And what terrified her most was how much of herself still wanted to watch him back.

Roman Mataio Reigns.

Her mind betrayed her. The cadence of his voice when he’d finally spoken: Then watch.

It’s the file. It’s the profile. It’s the case, she told herself.

She had. And she had not stopped.

Why me? Why did he choose to break silence then?

The thought curled through her veins like smoke.

A sharp knock. Her supervisor entered—a woman in an impeccable gray suit, mouth drawn tight.

“The room is prepared,” she said without preamble. “Live observation will be engaged.”

Jasira nodded.

“You are aware this is not treatment. You are there to manage optics. Contain.” “Contain. Comply. Do not deviate. You are not here to be seen.”

Another clipped nod.

Contain who? Him—or me?

“You will begin in fifteen minutes. Final prep is yours.”

When the door closed, Jasira exhaled—once. Slow. Shallow.

She gathered her file, steadied her hands, and moved.

The observation wing loomed ahead—glass walls, polished steel. Cameras in every corner. They had even reupholstered the chairs. Appearance mattered.

She stood alone in the room.

Set the file on the table.

Adjusted her seat.

Checked the one-way mirror.

Her pulse would not slow.

She reached to adjust the collar of her blouse—and her fingers trembled.

A shallow breath.

A slow one after.

You are not a child, her mother’s voice hissed again.

Jasira straightened.

The camera light blinked on.

A breath. Another.

The door behind the glass clicked. The latch turning.

He was coming.

I am not afraid.She lied to herself again.

And beneath the mask, her pulse would not still.

The door opened.

Jasira kept her gaze fixed on the file in front of her, though every muscle in her body screamed otherwise.

Footsteps. Measured. Unhurried.

She looked up.

Roman Mataio Reigns crossed the threshold like a man entering no one’s domain but his own. No guards flanked him. No chains bound him. His presence alone weighed more than steel.

He wore the same stillness she remembered. But sharper now. Leaner. A blade honed in the dark.

Their gazes met.

It’s the file. The profile. The case.

The lie rang hollow. A pulse of heat low in her throat—unbidden. Unwanted.

Roman held her eyes a moment too long before taking his seat.

He didn’t lean back. Didn’t sprawl. Sat with perfect posture, spine a column of iron.

Control. Hunger.

Jasira inhaled slowly, fingers tightening once around her pen.

“Good morning, Mr. Reigns,” she began, voice steady but thinner than she liked. “As per mandate, today’s session is under live observation.”

No flicker. No acknowledgment.

She continued. “In your last session, you chose to break silence.” A beat. “Would you like to elaborate?”

A smile touched Roman’s mouth. Not warmth. Not mockery.

Hunger.

I watch what matters.

The words weren’t spoken aloud—but they echoed in her mind, in the hum of the surveillance cameras, in the too-still air.

Finally, his voice—lower than memory, rougher, deliberate.

“I watch.”

A pulse leapt in her throat. And something in her whispered: I watch, too.

“And what matters?” she asked, the question more breath than command.

Roman leaned forward—barely perceptible. The kind of movement a predator made before the strike.

“You watch too.” A faint smile. Voice low. “You lean toward me without knowing.”

The words coiled between them.

Jasira’s mask strained. Her professional veneer cracked beneath the weight of that gaze.

He’s baiting you.You are not a child.

But her breath betrayed her—a sharp hitch before she forced it smooth.

Above, unseen eyes watched. Cameras blinked. The system leaned closer.

Roman watched her instead.

Both of them leaned—neither fully aware—mirrored posture, mirrored hunger.

The air between them shimmered.

Fracture. Stillness. Hunger. Breath.

Jasira forced herself upright, voice measured. “We are here to discuss your progress. Not mine.”

Roman’s smile deepened, eyes narrowing.

“Progress.” His voice held a near-amused lilt. “Is that what this is?” A glance to the mirror. “Progress for them. Not for you. Not for me.”

Jasira steadied her breath. “You are not here to observe me.”

Roman tilted his head. “No. But you observe me. Closely.”

Too closely.

Her fingers twitched once against the file.

Roman’s gaze sharpened.

Jasira forced a brittle smile. “It’s my job.”

“You are not afraid of me.”

Jasira’s pulse thudded. “Fear is not a therapeutic objective.”

“But it is present.”

The words were a scalpel—clean, precise.

Her hands stilled on the paper. Don’t react.

Roman leaned in a fraction more.

“What do you want from these sessions?” Jasira asked—last vestige of professional tone.

Roman’s eyes gleamed.

“To see.”

She swallowed. “To see what?”

Another pause. Smile widening.

“How well you lie.”

Her fingers trembled against the file. The paper rustled faintly—an accidental confession.

The words sliced through her—clean, scalpel-sharp. She felt them in her pulse, in the brittle edge of her breath.

He sees it.

Not the mask, not the file. Her.

A flicker of Elias’s voice surfaced unbidden—feel it anyway.

Her fingers pressed harder against the paper, whitening at the knuckles.

I am not a child. I do not flinch.

But the tremor in her chest already had.

She told herself she was unaffected.

She told herself this was control.

And beneath that lie— I already have.

The surveillance feed cut. Deliberate.

In the darkened observation room, Shane McMahon leaned back.

“Let it play.” His voice was silk.

He rose when the session ended. Unhurried.

No glance toward the mirrored glass. Only to her.

She held his gaze until the last second. She tried to.And in that last breath, she wondered if she had ever been the one watching at all.

He stepped through the door.

And next time— she will speak first.

And when she did— He would listen.

Not because he had to. Because something inside him—old as blood, patient as ash—had already decided: She is worth hearing.

And if the city burned to silence, he would make sure her voice was the last one left.

Because already, her silence was louder than any scream. And when she broke that silence—he would make certain she never wanted to stop.

A/N: Thank you so much for reading, loves. This theme is new to me, but I couldn’t pass up the idea — it’s been living rent-free in my head for months. I’m so excited (and a little nervous, not gonna lie) to finally bring this story to life. We’re diving deep into power, grief, obsession, and that kind of dark, dangerous pull that neither of them will be able to escape.

If you enjoyed it, please don’t be shy — reblogs, comments, and your thoughts always make my day. And if you want to stay locked in with Roman and Jasira (and all my future works), feel free to join my main taglist — I’d love to have you. 🖤🩸

taglist 🖤✨: @star017 @sheaabuttaababyy @tribalqueen20 @trippinsorrows @mamis-girly

@pittieprincess22 @zoeroxiie @beccalynns-world @keyera-jackson @li-da-savage

@sharmelasworld @jaded-human @lov3rla03 @justazzi @fearlesschimera

@skyesthebomb @chrissyxcxox @reginawhorge01 @purplementalitybluebird @jeyusosqueen

@brianochka @diamondlifeee @perksofbeingbeautifulyetsobroken @cyberdejos2 @transparentphantomface

@sayyestoheav3nn @kianaleani @sxvual @vebner37 @sexyblacksimper

@dopematicdiamondz @behavior619 @annfg8 @ayeeeitsmiracle

@ariiaellbtheedonn

@romanreignsluver1 @ashykneee @fame-ass-ers @baybehkay @queenofklonnie22

@blackchickinthedesert @thekittysmeow @rollinssection @keenagurl @faialii

@sassginaswanmills

[thesightstoshowyou]

Spill It

Pennywise (IT) x F Reader (NSFW)

(A/N: This is a commission for the fabulous @erensslut . Thank you so much! For the full tale of this poor Reader’s misery, please refer to my Masterlist)

Summary: Halloween night finds you at the mercy of the Clown once again. This time, though, you called him there yourself.

Warnings: Dubcon, supernatural elements, throat fucking, breath play (using gross sewer water), blood, degradation, threats, semi-public sex

The candy wrapper crinkles between your fingers. Chocolate melts on your tongue. Plastic flutters to teeter atop the small mountain accumulating on the side table. Your fingers root shamelessly around into the candy bowl poised in your lap. In your pocket, your phone buzzes.

I’m coming to kidnap you if you don’t show up

You force out a sigh through your nose. Your coworker again. Ever since you moved back to Derry, she’s been hounding you to socialize. Dodging her annual Halloween party appears to be her last straw. Buttons click under your thumbs with your response.

I’m not feeling well

The response is immediate:

LIAR. I’m on my way.

Between your chocolate-covered teeth, you groan and let your head fall back against the headrest. Slowly, despairingly, your eyes close. You want to go, if you’re being honest with yourself. You haven’t really left the house save for work and groceries, haven’t engaged in any kind of leisure activity since you came home all those months ago.

Your excuses are becoming less and less believable, but nothing could ever compare to the truth. You’re scared—terrified, really, of accidentally turning the Clown on innocent bystanders. IT follows you wherever you go anymore. It’s only a matter of time before he sinks those horrible teeth into someone close to you. He’s an inevitability.

The doorbell’s chime echos through the empty house.

Laboriously, you stand and haul the dwindling bowl of candy with you to the front door. Hinges squeal as it swings inward. You open your mouth to greet the trick ‘r treaters, but the words freeze on your tongue when you find the front step empty.

Again, you groan, this time adding a weary eye roll. “Very funny,” you sarcastically call out to the darkness and the ding-dong-ditchers undoubtedly hiding just out of sight. The wind is your answer. A chilly gust rattles the leaves in the trees and swishes through dead grass.

He’s not there, and then he is.

Your heart stutters in your chest before clawing its way into your throat. At the end of the walk stands the all too familiar shape of Pennywise the Clown, half hidden in shadow. The porch light illuminates the other half of his painted face, nearly torn in two by his heinous leer.

You slam the door shut.

Your phone is in your hand and the message is typed out before you can draw a shuddering breath.

I’m on my way

***

The first drink had gone down slow. It burned and sat bitter on your tongue until you’d forced it away with a second drink. The third was much, much easier to stomach.

Now, you’re grateful for the buzz. It dulls your anxious thoughts, erases the self-consciousness, quiets the ever present fear that hangs around your head like a noxious cloud. Instead, you focus on the drone of conversation around you and allow yourself to sway slowly to the music.

Fabric brushes against your thighs with your movement. You sigh and glance down at yourself. It’s ironic, really, that your coworker’s only spare costume had been “sexy clown.”

The universe is laughing at you. You’re sure of it now.

Red cup empty, you head to the kitchen for a refill. Perhaps this drink will erase the sensible voice in your brain muttering at you to “slow down.” The glug-glug of the bottle clutched on your hand helps to drown it out.

What isn’t drowned out, though, is the giggling. It’s the same chortle that has burrowed its way into your brain to haunt your nightmares, both sleeping and waking. Instantly, you whirl around and smack the countertop to keep your spinning vision from sending you straight to the floor.

The kitchen is empty, quiet but for your haggard gasping and the gentle hum of conversation and music from the next room. Carefully, you take a step toward the sink, eyes wide and searching. The loose faucet drips.

Giddy chuckling again, but it’s echoing and distant, as though it’s bubbling up out of….

The drain.

Cautiously, you lean over the sink. Tilting your head to the side, you catch lilting whispers, mutterings you can’t quite make out. Then, a single word slinks up out of the pipe like a snake to wriggle into your ear and set all your hair on end:

“Float.”

You straighten, lips set in a grim line. He followed you here, as you feared he would. Maybe he doesn’t even have to follow anymore? Perhaps he’s attached himself to your very soul like a parasite intent on destroying your mind with every pass of jagged teeth.

For a moment, you sit in your body, firmly rooted by the fear. You feel the pounding of your heart, hear the rushing of blood in your ears. Your skin prickles down the length of your spine.

The terror It inspires is still very visceral, very real and tangible, but now…. Now, you notice something else too. Just underneath the dread, below the surface like the hidden body of an iceberg, is a curious warmth, a clenching in your belly. You recognize it, focus on the sensation as it joins the fear surging through your bloodstream:

Excitement.

Perhaps it’s the alcohol, or the adrenaline, or insanity, or a combination of all three that makes you turn on your heel and plunge headfirst into reckless abandon. Whatever it is, it sees you weaving through the crowd, steps full of purpose as you make your way down the hall to the bathroom. Shoes squeak on tile as you slip inside and quietly lock the door behind you.

Voices and music now muffled behind the door, your heavy breathing fills the space instead, nervous and sharp as you suck down steadying mouthfuls. Tentatively, you approach the bathtub. Bare knees meet cool floor as you kneel and grip the porcelain edge.

“Penny?” Your voice trembles on its way out.

The silence stretches, punctuated by steady dripping from the sink. Your face heats up when you begin to realize how absolutely ridiculous you must look right now. And what are you doing, have you lost your god damned mind—

Overhead, the lights flicker. The drain gurgles. Then water, black like sludge, fountains up out of the drain to splatter the walls and pool in the tub. A gasp tears from your throat and you jump to your feet, staggering back against the sink. Brackish fluid fills the tub, the level rising and rising until it spills over the lip and spreads across white tile.

You expect him to emerge from the inky pool, wild orange hair soaked in black, painted face running to stain his costume. What you don’t expect is the clawed hand that claps over your mouth, its twin coming to rest around your throat. Your blood-curdling scream is muffled by torn, white gloves. You’re able to twist your head just enough so your wild eyes can watch the Clown emerge from the mirror, the entirety of its lanky frame slinking and contorting through glass until it hovers just behind you.

“Lucky day, lucky day, the pet calls for Pennywise! It must need something, hmm? Tell him what it is, won’t you? Spill. It.”

Your socks grow wet as disgusting, frigid water fills your shoes, but the sensation is only a blip on the radar compared to those menacing claws tickling your cheek. Now that he’s here, you can’t seem to wrangle your frenzied thoughts enough to form a coherent sentence.

The palm slips from your mouth and Pennywise tips his head like he’s waiting for you to speak. Swallowing thickly, you attempt a, “I…I’m….” Your galloping heart is going to choke you at this rate.

“Cold feet? Cat got your tongue? Open up, toy, let’s see for ourselves!” He doesn’t wait for you to obey, instead jams his fingers past your teeth to pry your lips apart. You hiss and whimper when talons slice your bottom lip, iron quickly coating your tongue. Pennywise shuffles to your front and comically peers inside your mouth.

Your jaw twinges and you cry out when he adds a second set of fingers like he’s trying to wrench your entire face open. He huffs at that, rolls his jaundiced eyes and growls out a, “Pathetic thing. That’s as far as it goes? Pennywise can do better. Watch.”

The snapping of bone makes your stomach drop and your muscles tense. The Clown spreads his great maw open, wider and wider until he could swallow your entire head whole, until his carrion breath billows across your face, until you can look all the way down that toothy, pulsating throat to the warm glow within. Hastily, you clamp your eyes shut to keep them from focusing too hard on the light. He warned you what would happen if you looked too long. ‘Float up, up, up and away, you will, forever and ever and ever!’

Something wet and fleshy brushes your cheek and you flinch. Your recognize the slithering appendage as Penny’s slick, gore-flavored tongue a millisecond before it plunges into your mouth and down your throat. A gag sounds around the intrusion and a horrible shiver ripples up your spine when the tongue pulls back a little, only to snake further down your throat a moment later.

Pennywise looses his wild, manic laugh. It’s weird and echoey as it bounces around inside his cavernous throat. Your jaw aches with how wide it’s spread. You choke on his tongue, oxygen furiously trying to enter and exit through your half-blocked airway, your nails digging grooves into your palms.

It is only when your knees begin to wobble and the vision behind your eyelids grows splotchy that the length of tongue vacates your throat and claws release your face. You double over, hacking and gasping and trembling as joints pop and crack overhead. Quivering fingers find your sore jaw muscles and rub the ache from them while your teary gaze glances up to make sure it’s safe to look.

“No cat to be found, no, but Pennywise did find something else…” the Clown announces ominously. He grips your shoulder and shoves. You’re forced to your knees, murky water splashing up to wet the hem of your skirt. You yelp as your hands fly out to catch yourself on the slippery edge of the bath.

Heat at your back heralds Penny’s hand around your neck and his lips on your ear. “I tasted your need, slut. It fills you all the way up to your throat. Going to overflow any second.” He laughs, vicious and sharp, so loud it hurts your bones, and adds, “Any second! Unless….”

Claws slip under your skirt—“Even dresses as a little clown, how flattering, all for Pennywise!”—and grasp a handful of underwear. They’re torn off your hips, another pair shredded and lost. You realize how odd it is to be lamenting over panties rather than screaming in terror.

But you know what comes next, after all.

“The pet thinks she knows, hmm? Thinks, thinks, but her tiny, little brain couldn’t fathom the depths, could never reach the bottom.” Your blood runs cold at his words and the way he slides his hand around to clutch the back of your neck.

There’s no time for a breath. You don’t even fully understand what’s about to happen until you’re underwater. Shocked by the cold, it takes you a moment to snap your mouth shut. It’s too late though; stinking, nauseating water already filled your mouth the second you were plunged under. Along the lip of the tub, your fingers scrabble as you thrash and push back against the Clown holding you beneath the surface.

Time and time again he shows you your strength is nothing compared to his. You are a toy, a doll he can bend and break however he sees fit. You should know better by now.

And you called him here, didn’t you?

Warm flesh presses to your slit. Your lungs burn, terror spikes. You attempt one last, fruitless struggle.

The Clown’s insane laughter is muted under the water, but you hear it all the same as he surges forward and buries the entirety of that thick, squirming length in your poor cunt. Bubbles fizz around your head as you soundlessly scream in pain and flounder and drown yourself.

Your wet shriek finally breaks the surface when you’re tugged up out of the water. Hurriedly, you gulp down a mouthful of blessed air, only for it to be punched up and out of you with the Clown’s brutal thrust. Laughter, more earsplitting cackling is the last thing you hear before you’re submerged again.

It continues this way for what feels like hours. You’re held underwater and punished with cock until your chest feels like it’s about to burst. Then you’re yanked from the depths so you can splutter and moan and beg, only to be forced back under yet again.

You wanted this, you wanted this you wanted this….

You wanted this. And you are, indeed, about to cum.

This time when you surface, gasping and sobbing, Pennywise wraps an arm around your chest and bends you into a near-painful arch. Freezing water rains from your soaked hair to wet the rest of the costume that hasn’t been already drenched.

In this position, you feel every, single, throbbing inch of that wriggling cock battering your drooling cunt. You’re so thankful to not be underwater anymore and so close to careening off the edge of climax, you thoughtlessly stammer out a breathless, “T-Thank you.”

More gleeful giggling bounces off the walls. Then, sharp teeth set against your cheek as he snarls, “Cum, pathetic girl, polite treat, my treat, my toy, or back under you’ll go! All the way this time, all the way down!”

Furiously, you shake your head, but there’s no need. You implode the very next second, heat blossoming in your belly, walls clamping down on the girth seated inside you. The Clown’s answering rumble is felt in your chest rather than heard, so low your ears can’t perceive the sound. Warmth paints your insides, overflows, and splatters your thighs. It’s so sweet-smelling you can almost taste it.

BANG BANG BANG

“Hey asshole, there’s a fuckin’ line out here!”

Your eyes snap open. You kneel, shivering and freezing in murky water as more still spills from the overfilled tub. The walls are covered in muck, and you’re drenched from head to toe, make-up streaking down your face, your once-colorful costume stained black and brown.

Most notable is the absence of heat at your back. Frantically, you look behind you, then around the entire space to find you are completely alone. There’s no sight of the Clown, only the mess he left behind.

“Fuck,” you whisper under your breath. Blearily, you glance to your right and find a window.

At least you’re on the first floor.

[her-satanic-wiles]

October 24th

Sex Toys, Cumulus x Reader

Masterlist

Words: 1k.

Warnings: Sex toys; sapphic; thigh riding; multiple orgasms; nipple play; thigh spanking; ngl, I struggled with this one. I wanted it to be better than it was but the Aurora fic kinda meant that nothing else would live up to it lmao;

Taglist: @sodoswitchimage @enchantedbunny @bitchywitchygardener @thew0man @sodomiser @the-did-i-ask @copias-sewer-rat @gehrmansbignaturals @deetz-ghuleh @onlyhereforghost @zombiesnips-blog

🔞 MDNI 🔞

Amidst the tranquil stillness of a moonlit night, a sense of anticipation hung in the air, as if the world itself held its breath in eager anticipation of what was to come. You were wrapped up in Cumulus’ arms, soft bodies pressed together and connected at your lips, where your tongues danced together. Both of you were completely void of clothing, and thighs pressed up against each other’s most sensitive places, hips moving and seeking as much pleasure as possible. The sound of your gasps and moans were the only noises that could be heard in the stillness of the room. Just two people desperately trying to reach an end by any means necessary.

As your clit continued to rub against Cumulus’ thigh, you allowed your hands and lips to wander over her body, pinching and playing with her nipples as your tongue laved over her neck. Her own hand had moved down to your thigh and pulled on it, tugging you ever closer to her centre in order for her to get as much pleasure from your body as she possibly could. The longer she rubbed against you, the wetter your thigh became, but you felt like you could drown in that feeling - knowing that it was you providing her with everything she needed to cum.

She came first - her face and body contorting with the feeling of the powerful orgasm washing over her. Her hips moved faster in a desperate effort to add to the intensity and her fingernails dug into your skin purely because she didn’t know what else to do. You soon followed her, your own body reacting in a similar manner and rubbing against her thigh needily prolonging the orgasm you were experiencing, her sweet, melodic voice whispering sweet nothings in your ear with breathless words as she was coming down from her own high. Her body, despite her orgasm being strong enough to make her eyes close in exhaustion, continued to move against you, silently begging for a second release.

“Can I get it?” She asked you, voice barely above a whisper.

“Please.” You answered, knowing exactly what she was referring to.

If you both spent the rest of the night humping against each other like animals, you’d never stop and work yourselves into oversensitivity. Thus, she pulled away from you temporarily, reaching into the bedside drawer and pulling out the only item you both favourited and frequently used: your wand vibrator. As soon as it was plugged into the wall, she moved back to her original position, placing your thigh back over the top of her and returning to that lazy, sideways missionary position you’d both been in before. The vibrator was placed between the pair of you, adjusting it so it sat between both of your clits before she turned it on.

Even at its lowest intensity it was incredibly powerful, both of your mouths falling open in pleasure at the low rumble now vibrating through your entire body. You both rubbed against it, the pressure from her movements pushing the vibrator harder against your clit and vice versa. “Oh fuck.” You moaned loudly, the pleasure proving too much for gentle whispers. Your body needed to expel that energy somehow, and your voice was the only way it could.

“Oh, just like that.” Cumulus’ voice was just as strained as yours, oozing with unbridled bliss.

Your body pushed you upwards, the need to move your hips faster too great for the position you were in. You sat up on your knees, still with your clit connected to the vibrator and began to rub against it, your hips moving at a much faster pace, which, in turn, kept the vibrator bouncing off Cumulus and made her noises increase in volume.

“Fucking just like that!” She exclaimed, hand coming to pull at your thigh once again for purchase.

Cumulus always loved it when you rode her. She got to lie back against the pillows and watch you take what you needed, see your body move as it bounced against her own. She loved watching your hands roam over your breasts, pinching and pulling your nipples for extra stimulation. You were truly a sight to behold when you were on top.

You, on the other hand, got to watch her body as it moved with the force of your thrusts, the way her breasts jiggled with each movement of your hips. The way her bottom lip would tuck up between her teeth and her eyebrows would furrow. The way her blown-out pupils would roam over your body, focussing on your pleasure points and screaming each time the vibrator slipped over a particularly sensitive spot on her clit.

The hand that was clutching onto your thigh slapped against the flesh, gently at first, but knowing that you liked it to hurt a little bit she slapped a little harder each time, rubbing at the redness between each it.

“Faster, baby, please.” You begged as you bent over her body and placed a desperate kiss to her lips.

She obliged, kicking the vibrator up a notch. Her eyes widened at the increase of intensity, and her back arched. You could tell by the way her body had begun to spasm that she was about to cum again And if you were being honest, you were close as well.

It took maybe two or three more thrusts against the vibrator before you were doubling over, head resting between the valley of Cumulus’ breasts as you came for a second time that night, mouth open in a silent scream as your hole clenched tightly around nothing. Cumulus came at the same time as you, her fingernails digging into your shoulders and her eyes squeezed tightly shut, mind wiped completely blank as all she could think about was how good you’d made her feel.

She practically threw the vibrator away from you both from the oversensitivity, and once again you found yourself wrapped up in her arms as you both lay there in bed, breathless and dozing off into a peaceful sleep.

Previous Day ⛧ Next Day

[porcelainseashore]

The Other Son - WoD HalloZine "Haunting"

Commissioned art by @medeaft

Author's Note: It’s been such a joy to take part in @vampemoqueen’s WoD HalloZine—my very first zine! Thank you so much for this experience and putting it all together. Here’s a short story of Kai, my beloved Ventrue, and the shadows of the past that haunt them.

Content Warnings: Brief references to drugs, self harm, maybe suicide (if you squint?), nihilism, and murder of a child.

“Jesus!” they cursed as their feet plunged into the silty drainage and mud squelched underfoot.

It had only been a little over half an hour since Kai entered this godforsaken place, burrowing their way underground like vermin. Beyond the manhole covers overhead, cars zoomed by and train tracks rumbled. They were still close to the surface, close enough to hear the city breathe.

However, down here, filth and grime carved out names for themselves on the grooved walls. At first, they gagged at the stench, finding it unbearable, but as their senses adjusted, one smell blended into another, like a sickness they could no longer distinguish. 

Under normal circumstances, they would never be caught dead wandering around the sewers downtown. But since when were things normal? Like all fledglings turned neonates, they had been obeying tall and elusive orders every night since their Embrace. Except, they weren’t like the others—they were groomed to succeed and never to fail.

There was another splash as the ground sucked them in, causing them to sink knee-deep.

“For Christ’s sake!” they yelled again in frustration.

All at once, they heard the scolding voice of Liezel, their mother, resounding in their head just like it was yesterday, “Kai! How many times must I tell you? Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!” 

They mouthed the words as it came. Liezel’s arms were akimbo, her brows furrowed as spittle flew across the room. She had rapped their knuckles harshly with the wooden handle of a feather duster for good measure.

Kai could feel the sting of pain upon their hand, as clear as day, but sharper still was the humiliation, the hurt pride. Their younger stepbrother, Alfie, had giggled to himself in the corner. They clenched their fists. People said they took after their mother’s temper, and more often than not, they found themself agreeing.

At this point, their tailored pants and leather shoes were soaked through and ruined. Even dry cleaning wouldn’t be able to salvage them in their miserable state. Grimacing, they brushed beads of waste water off their waistcoat—it was Sisyphean, almost—as new drops replaced old, blooming in piss-drunk patches across silk weaves. 

Why had their sire, Elena, sent them here again? Oh yes, “The sewer rats,” she said. “They’re hiding something from us. Find out what it is.”

They flipped their damp bangs away from their face in annoyance. Nearly two decades as a Kindred and they were still an errand runner—to Elena, to Lady Josephine, and in turn, to Baron Judge, the overarching Camarilla… Stringing them along with faint promises of power, like seductive wisps of smoke unfurling from their tongues, slithering into their ear and making a home in the hollow cavity of their skull.

Well, there were no sewer rats here. Through the dimmed shadows of light, all they could hear was the sound of sewage flushing through the system, pipes hissing and shaking, and molded moisture leaking from the arched ceilings. As they took a right, a group of vagrants huddling over a naked fire in an oil drum eyed them suspiciously. One crawled out from his tattered cardboard bed and shambled over to them.

“You got any er—”

Fentanyl. Meth. Heroin. He probably thought he could score some. The mole people—the homeless, the addicts, the outcast. They lived underground, in the flood tunnels, because there was nowhere else to go. Sometimes the water would reach so high that a bunch of them would drown. Not being quick enough made them easy pickings for the Nosferatu, but still bad blood all around.

Kai scrunched their face in disgust before relaxing their expression. Maybe they would have some use for this pitiful thing in front of them. With a practiced smile, they simpered, “I do… but first, tell me, how well do you know this place?”

The man coughed and shivered, grinning with swollen gums and putrid teeth. “Like the back of my hand.”

A guide. The gatekeeper of the sewer entrance had talked at length about its subterranean depths. Perhaps this man would know more. Raising an eyebrow, Kai focused their gaze, making sure their eyes met. A thin ring around their irises glowed—subtle, enticing, yet demanding. “Take me to its belly.”

He blinked slowly, once, twice, and then nodded. “This way,” he beckoned, turning around and trudging off through the labyrinth like a good soldier.

And so, Kai carried on, past winding corridors and forgotten lairs, crushing soiled glass and used needles beneath their heels. At the sides, strange altars decorated with melted wax candles and rotting pomegranates honored secret gods. The tunnels got darker and colder, so much so that they had to rely on their phone light to brighten up the path, but the guide didn’t seem bothered. In fact, he became livelier the deeper they went, as if he were drawing energy from some unknown source.

“Albert and Persephone would have a field day with this,” Kai grumbled under their breath, mocking the two absent members of their coterie behind their backs. Sarcasm dripped from their lips, cloying and condescending. 

They recognized that same unease they felt whenever Albert conducted one of his ceremonies, or the time they witnessed Persephone casting eerily-shaped shadows from her bare hands. The taint of Oblivion clutched at their unbeating heart and made their skin crawl.

Distant screams and moans from an alley interrupted their thoughts and a gnarly hand tugged at their arm. “Not there,” the guide warned before taking off again along another passageway.

The metallic stairs they descended afterward screeched on its hinges, clanking against the wall. Kai wondered how far down they went. It felt like they had been walking for miles. At some point, their phone light flickered and went out, and they stood in total darkness on the suspended staircase swaying in the chilled air.

It was so silent you could hear a pin drop, which was weird, precisely because they heard nothing. No creaking, no footsteps, not even the sound of one’s breathing.

Where had their guide disappeared to? Was this some kind of twisted prank they had fallen for? But it couldn’t be, that mortal should’ve succumbed easily; they saw him submit, enslaved by their will, he couldn’t—

“Kai! Help me, please!” a shrill cry pierced their left ear, shocking them to the core as they stumbled blindly forward, tumbling down the flight of stairs.

When they finally hit the rock-hard ground, something wet and sticky trickled down the side of their face as a dull, throbbing ache blossomed from the crown of their head. “Shit,” they muttered, tasting tangy iron on their lips, like licking a battery.

Dazed, they tried to pick themself up, only to slip on the waxy surface, falling into the muck on all fours. Shame and embarrassment rushed in twofold, rising like waves of heat towards their chest. That prickly feeling at the back of their throat returned, threatening to come apart. This couldn’t be happening—not to them, they didn’t deserve this.

“What do you think you deserve?” the same voice whispered in their ear. Cold, unnatural, and unfeeling, but uncomfortably familiar.

“I deserve a lot more than you!” Kai had screamed, back when they were kids playing on the cliffs along the coast. Resentment reared its ugly head as they glared down at their stepbrother. His chubby hands grasped the cliff’s ledge while he dangled in mid-air, squirming beneath Kai’s feet.

“I deserve all of this!”

They could crush him right now, that stupid weakling who’d never worked a day in his life, who’d everything handed to him on a silver platter, just because he was the favorite. 

No one would know. 

Crush him.

Do it.

The whispers grew louder as they buried their head in their hands and growled.

“Kai! Help me, please!”

They took one more look at their stepbrother’s soft brown eyes and the ocean of tears that had welled up in them, before setting their foot down on his tiny fingers, treading on them like ants. Alfie lost his grip and Kai had watched quietly as his body was reduced to a simple ragdoll in the tempestuous wind. His limbs tossed about wildly as the howling gust drowned out the boy’s cries. Jagged bedrock by the cliffside framed its subject like a moving watercolor painting. If they squinted, they could pretend it was a bird diving to catch its prey.

They waited, patiently and then some more, until the red sea foam turned pale, and all that was left was a memory of what once was. One less mouth to feed, one less child to fawn over, one less rival to tussle with. Time didn’t bring any remorse. Perhaps they had been a monster even before they were reborn.

From afar, an unearthly roar and mechanical whir shredded through the stillness, jolting them back into the present. Was this what the Nosferatu were hiding? Kai had heard stories of otherworldly entities that existed on this plane, undecipherable, unseen to the naked eye. There were more than just Kindred around, and they were beginning to realize that they weren’t on the top of the food chain.

Bolting forward, they couldn’t care less if they looked more animal than human as the sludge clung to their feet. It felt like a mass of hands creeping up their legs, dragging them down into the dirt where they belonged. They should’ve been put down for what they did. But they felt nothing. Years and months of nothing. At the funeral, they pressed a shard of glass into their palm, squeezing it within the pocket of their trousers, so that they would cry. Liezel couldn’t look at them for weeks.

Maybe this was the day of reckoning, their last chance to repent, but was there really something to feel guilty for? They had merely taken what was rightfully theirs from the beginning—before their mother remarried another man they were forced to call father, before they were told to sacrifice whatever they had for the sake of the other son.

They had reached the end, knowing this to be so as loose stone and rubble gave way, crumbling into the void pit below. It was pitch black, a long drop into a vortex of emptiness. For every second they stopped to pause, the darkness enshrouded them further, heavy and suffocating as it seeped in through their orifices.

And they were back on the cliff, at the scene of the accident. Although, instead of Alfie, it was Kai who was standing at its edge, waiting to be pushed.

“How does it feel to be in my shoes? How does it feel not to exist?” The tone was derisive, contemptuous.

Did Alfie expect them to accept their fate? To beg for forgiveness and mercy? They convulsed with laughter, the sound ricocheting off the walls. Their body was hollowed out, empty, a vacuum where nothing could be replaced.

There was only one thing left to do. Fear and weakness had no place in the Clan of Kings.

“Don’t you know?” they remarked, eyes black as coal. “I always win.”

And then, they jumped.

Dividers by @diableriedoll

[sycamorality]

rw mod region list

because i! got tired of scrolling through the workshop and trying to reference the modwiki constantly. this currently will not list the rooms they are found in. maybe it will later these are all listed from most recent to oldest release on the workshop.... for the most part. i cant promise all regions will be listed but im doing my best

missing regions can be found here in reblog

regions with pearls

- necropolis (1)

- gray urban (1)

- floating isles (2)

- the foundry (2)

- necropolis (1)

- gray urban (1)

- floating isles (2)

- the foundry (2)

- global hyper-transit system (2)

- underpass (1, also has 5 custom broadcasts)

- forgotten boiler (3)

- mistywoods (1)

- drainage system+ (1)

- howling rift (1)

- eventide (3)

- preservatory (1, features 3 custom broadcasts as well)

- scrapped peaks (2) (there's also a silly My Creature.png in the files)

- secluded pass (2, features 2 custom broadcasts as well)

- drowned pantheon (2)

- unparalleled innocence (1) (creator notes the iterator part is broken bc of iteratorkit sucking)

- drought regions (6, with 2 unused with no dialogue in files)

- unofficial leditor month gallery (1)

- underbelly (3)

- shrouded assembly regions (5)

- probationary district 4b (1)

- sun-scorched forest (1)

- forsaken station (5)

- forsaken factory (3)

- sunlit power plant (1)

- archaic facility (2)

- arid barrens (1, features 1 custom broadcast as well)

- gilded sanctuary (1)

- the grinder (1)

- forbidden tropics (wip) (4)

- chasing wind/luminous cove (1)

- citadel (1)

- corroded passage (2, features 4 custom broadcasts as well)

- bioengineering center (1)

- outer outskirts (2)

- rainforest (1)

- no significant harassment [hunter expansion] (2)

- overgrown facility (1)

- radiosphere (1)

- sky tower (3) (sound design can be headache inducing)

- moss fields (1)

- aqueducts (3)

- side house (2)

- deserted wastelands (4) (current biggest region released. can be laggy)

- ventilation ducts (1) (currently broken as fuck to my knowledge. not playable on new patch)

- badlands (2)

- sacred garden (1)

- moonlit acres (2)

- sizzling sewers (1)

- stormy coast (4)

- neuron forest (1)

- the mast (2)

- far shore (2)

- hanging gardens (1)

- hallowed grotto (5, features 18 custom broadcasts as well)

- undersea (2)

- lush mire (3)

- drainage system+ (1)

- howling rift (1)

- scorched district (1)

- washroom (2)

- old new horizon's regions (1) (theyre annoying to go through. be warned)

[frnkiebby]

I found this drowned greasy ass sewer rat (I have never seen such a T H E R E picture of Frank with his dreads b4 and it’s wild I needed this as a reference for a drawing like forever ago where tf was it???)

(Also send help my dog keeps hitting my face with her face and she refuses to stop it’s hurting my feelings)

this fuckin greased up sewer rat jfc those godforsaken dreads

i wish i was the one to chop those fucker off.

also pls i will need that drawing in my inbox asap thanks~🎃

[lea-andres]

Okay, so, if I could mod, which I can't for multitude of reasons (mainly "my computer is dying" and "I has the dumb"... Also "I cannot art") I would make a horror mod SO FAST-

"Lea SDV is supposed to be cosy, not scary" first of all *points at all the yandere mods*, second of all SCARY IS COSY TO ME-

*coughs* Anyway-

So, the framework would be as follows: On a random night in Fall (ideally a rainy night but idk if that's doable), your spouse would have a nightmare. You would then become the hero of said nightmare and solve whatever horror scenario is happening. With it being just a nightmare it wouldn't permanently alter your game so I COULD KILL WHOEVER AND DESTROY WHATEVER I WANT YAY!

It would work like a festival I suppose? No time actually passes? IDK if that makes sense but it does to me.

You would probably get hearts from this assuming you're not at 14 Hearts with them already even though you technically didn't actually do anything lmao. ✌️

Okay, so, each bachelor and bachelorette nightmare would go something like this maybe (AND REMEMBER: THESE ARE NIGHTMARES THEY ARE HAVING! CANON BEHAVIOR DO NOT APPLY):

-Harvey: OOPS HE INSPIRED THIS WHOLE IDEA LMAO. You know how he's got an... Alarming amount of dialogue regarding losing patient worries? Yeah... His nightmare would essentially be Frankenstein... Except Harvey's Victor. Which would just go SO POORLY... Let's all revel for a bit in how beautifully poorly that would go... 💕

-Maru: Maru makes the Blob, Blob destroys half the town. Pretty cut and dry, honestly. Just... Blob. 💕

-Penny: The children are being replaced during the night by doppelgangers. Wrong, unsettling doppelgangers. You and Penny investigate why, taking you into the sewers (IT WON'T BE KROBUS BEHIND IT, I PROMISE, I WOULDN'T DO THAT TO KROBIE 😭)

-Shane: SO, things are being destroyed in the night, sometimes animals turn up dead, town's getting freaked out, you're tasked with investigating because sorry you're the main character lmao. Turns out Shane's therapist is hypnotizing Shane and he's getting programmed to go do these things during the night YAY! Poor guy.

-Sebastian: Here, have this, we all know you want it! *tosses vampire Sebastian at you*. (I'm not particularly fond of Sebastian, in all honesty, but I'm sure vampire Sebastian would make his fans V Happy lmao. Yes, you'd get to let him drink from you, you freaks. /aff)

-Leah: ...Kel's a slasher now? (Sorry, I don't particularly care for Leah either, but hey. I assume you guys enjoyed punching Kel. You'll probably enjoy killing Kel in a brutal battle of self defense right?)

-Elliott: Ya'll seen Creepshow? (*Everyone starts groaning because I haven't shut up about Creepshow since the green rain*) Okay, there's a story where Leslie Neilsen (Naked Gun, Airplane, THAT Leslie Neilsen) drowns a couple in the ocean and their corpses break into his home to get revenge. It's that except Elliott didn't kill them. Because nightmare, you and Elliott are back in his cabin on the beach, bodies are coming out of the water, and quickly becoming yours and Willy's problem. (No Willy didn't kill them either. Probably.)

-Alex: He's on a gridball team, Coach is having him take some experimental drug so he plays gridball better, something something Werewolf. Let him and Dusty run around together lmao. Except oh no he accidentally spooks the town! :(

-Abigail: LOOK. It's me, I have to reference Evil Dead somewhere. Abigail seems like she'd be the most irresponsible if handed the Necronomicon, so she's getting the Necronomicon.

AND I HAVE NO IDEAS FOR EMILY, HALEY, AND SAM NOOOO. I FAILED THEM 😭 Pretend I have great thought out ideas for them, they deserve them.

[rookinthecrownest]

🖊+Val!

Omgosh hiiii <3 Ty for asking about Val!

Val isn't quite as fleshed out as some of my other OC's so I love any opportunity to try and delve into her a bit more.

I like to think of her as someone who has a very fucked up threshold for suffering and tends to downplay a lot of what she's been through.

Definitely the type to mention offhand, "Yeah, I've killed a few Darkspawn in my day" <- referring to the Siege of Weisshaupt.

"Haha yeah, I've gotten out of some tight scrapes" <- killed a Templar and shapeshifted into a rat so she could escape into a sewer through a toilet and nearly drowned in literal shit trying to escape the Antiva City Circle.

When she comes out of Solas' regret prison, she's frustratingly exhibiting that same tendency to downplay everything. She's more quiet than she usually is. I think this would drive Fenris crazy because he's already lost one important person to the Fade (in this worldstate Hawke romanced Fenris but was left behind in HLTA). I know Fenris is more reserved, but genuinely I do think Rook coming out of the Fade would be something he would want them to open up/talk about, not only for Rook's sake, but also because ... it's something he never got the opportunity to do for Hawke.

Hawke never came back from the Fade. He has no idea what Hawke's final moments were like - were they scared? calm? at peace? was it quick? did they suffer?

So when Val kind of shuts down and prefers to play it off like it was just another day trip to Val Royeaux (ugh, Orlais), this is understandably a big point of contention and would likely lead to an argument between them until she just breaks that wall and actually lets him in to the suffering she's been holding back for so long.

Val is easygoing but she doesn't have a ton of friends within the Crows, and while Viago knows her story, she doesn't bother him with it because he has his own grand plans and ambitions. Val shares bits and pieces with the Veilguard Crew but still keeps a lot to herself, even from Lucanis - who knows first hand what training/living under the Crows is like.

I think they need to have that argument though.

Fenris is hesitant to let someone in after what happened with Hawke, but the one person he does want to let in, builds their walls up even higher.

Ah, Im sorry, I've rambled enough about my emotionally constipated blorbos :')

[toomanyf4ndoms7]

New 52 Batgirl issue #7 Thoughts.

This one has Dinah in it. That’s a plus.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Overview:

We start off with a (sarcastic) lovely page of Barbara’s head being held under sewer water. It is a striking image that immediately makes you keep reading.

Batgirl gets out, obviously, but nearly being drowned and desperate for air, she’s in no condition to fight.

Grotesque (That’s his name) slips away and then we get a flashback to two hours ago.

And she’s visiting Dinah to ask for a spar. Because what else are two women to do in the middle of the night?

“Wait… this is too easy. Are you Batgirl? Did some cheerleader steal her costume?” (She doesn’t know what’s to come in future volumes.)

Barbara then has some introspection pointing out how she’s been off her game in the last few adventures.

She gets a few good hits in until Canary grabs her arm and ends the match. We get a brief Joker flashback which feels a bit out of place but I get the point of it.

This scene between Canary and Batgirl is effectively about stating: Barbara is Batgirl, physically, she’s back in the game, but she’s effectively re-learning on the fly.

In other news, Jimbo gets a visit from Barb. And we get a reference to James Junior.

Dinah uses some tough love to convince Barbara to get back out there, which I am a little bit iffy on the wording of. Yeah, I can buy some tough love, but I don’t think slapping your friend and pointing out how your mom is dead while hers is back in her life is the best thing to say.

Anyway, we get the lead up to how we got here, and Batgirl is ready to interrogate one of Grotesque’s goons. And as luck would have it?

It’s one of Joker’s old henchmen, one of the two who were with him on that fateful day.

Admittedly, a good Cliffhanger.

Another good issue, despite my minor complaints.

[phen397]

Sonic adventure 2 but told through notes I took while playing part 3

Time for the mines

A knuckles level

Gonna be tougher than he thought

Oh God it is a water temple

Water level unlocks and locks different areas

Drowned

All 3 get

Back to the city

Always alot of police around when u don't need them

Facts sonic

No signal from emeralds

Space only explanation

Knuckles in the sewers

The mines connect to the sewers?

Amy leave his head alone

Again Tails buddy I am sure it is important but can we get the audio guy to chill out here

Tails is tracking the president

Definitely not illegal at all

He has hacked the president's phone

Almost took knuckles' head off tails chill

Tails ain't waiting Amy he is gone

Route 101

Gotta get the president

Mario cart time

Drift king

Found you mister president

Reports say country is in crisis

What u want Egg boy

Full surrender or boom

Sonic heard that though the window

Now in the president's car

And cutting people off again

Good question Mr president

Hey wait

Signal from agent

They really raided the president's car, dissed Eggman, then jumped out a window and refused to elaborate

Pyramid time

Eggman went in there

Bat girl again

Time to kick some empireal butts

Lots of tails love for these last few levels

Hidden base

Avoid the quick sand

Blow up Egg blocks

Lots of animals omg

Is the colour of the animal it's rarity?

The animals shall be sacrificed to the child

Can I but him in the transporter thing?

I CAN

Okay he is in there now

Pyramid cave time

Half pipe time

Hourglass doors

Swing poles

Oh thing

Bounce bracelet

Bounce jump thing?

Doors that need a key

More half pipe

Done

Let's see if I can leave my Chao

I cannot

Wtf

Okay take the child out of the transporter

Headed to the center of the base

Eggman like machines

Gotta have a spare spaceship

Need key

I GOTTA GET IN THERE

Knuckles find key

Worlds greatest treasure hunter

Took me way too long to find the hammer gloves

Can now break metal boxes

Oh

I killed omachao

Didn't even think to try

Oh

Nvm

He back

Lots of digging through walls later

Key gotten

OK

Let's try to win a race

Mushroom race

My boy can run now

Wipes contest

Canyon

Wiped

Crab time

Easy work

Valley now

Jump off a cliff for the win

All level 1 races won

Got a sonic thing

What that noise

Bug ghost

King boom boo

Boss

Run around the circle to get behind him while he is busy attacking

Hit the little guy with the Hourglass to open skylights and fey boss

Dig up boss when he tries to hide

Smack da ghost

Rinse repeat

Knuckles looks like his only thought the whole time is"oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as he runs around

Boss done

Door open

What did you guys do?

Eggman here

Leave it to sonic

Eggman gonna kill us

Big golem man

I AM THE EGGMAN

Second boss in a row

Egg golem

Run around big boys ring climb his "back stairs"° hit big weak spot oh his head

Boss done

Nice try rocky

Cutscene

Pyramid opens

Space ship inside

Sonic run

TO SPACE

So this is the ark

Hit a rock

Knocked open the cargo bay and ditch the master emerald pieces

Don't touch that lever

*all scream*

What's up with that tyrannical knuckles

Place shut down after "incident" 50 years ago

Was advanced but now empty

Not much time

Impenetrable from outside attacks

Tails has a fake emerald

Anti emerald

Destroy power supply

Switch emerald out

Win

Amy got nothing to do and is gonna bitch

Running through ship with tails

Gole in hull claim me a few times

Bazooka

Big gum go brrrrrrrrrrrr

Like proto Chaos guys are here

Destroy generator for the win

More tubes for the child

The child for reference

Gonna hang put witht the kids till next time on this exiting adven- hold on one of the kids is drowning as I write this(not even kidding)what a little guy

[demonsteapot]

What type of music do you like / have you been jamming to recently? Any recommendations?

(my internet died halfway through this so i nearly had to rewrite it)

you caught me at a bad time i was schmooving to a sewerslvt playlist yesterday ;-;

okay to be serious for a moment. uh. i don't think i have super good or interesting (or normal) tastes in music? i can point you to some of the things i think are cool and good, and i can also point you to things that i listen to for mood.

ive also probably mentioned some of these before (probably all of them?) so sorry if there's repeats

(okay this ended up being longer than expected so cut vv)

good (mostly not depressing stuff?):

Bill Wurtz – weirdly dreamlike jazzy stuff (?) i recommend 'At the Corner Store' and then i recommend you listen to all his other stuff

Ujico*/Snail's House: ive probably ranted about this guy before; 'Cosmo Funk' is probably your entry level snails house song. sweet adorable future bass, my go to for free serotonin

Heaven Pierce Her – Ultrakill: Violence, the game's newest EP. generally melancholic but really sick especially in context. 'War Without Reason' is probably my new favourite track in the whole game? (you can tell i like amen breaks lol)

also ofc i have to mention john / TOOBOE!! shout out to @donutinsideofashark for introducing me to this guy. some recs: 'Tablet', 'Roman', and 'Appare kanpai' – stuff goes hard and makes me wish i knew jp so i could actually remember lyrics

mood (depressing and/or weirder stuff):

vivivivivi's Dead but Dreaming: concept album about a dead god, mostly chiptune instrumental stuff until the second-last track – personally I LOVE this album, but as someone said, it probably sucks unless you have autism (disclaimer: i'm not diagnosed autistic, this is a reference to the pinned comment). this particular album influences a lot of my works to be honest

two more vivivivivi beepbox albums, ones that are a little more lively: Sisyphus and Silly Little Songs from my Silly Little Head. probably not to the tastes of sane and normal people but i like the beeps and boops :)

sewerslvt: breakbeat stuff from a dark place. people seem to not like sewerslvt fans which is why i'm reluctant to talk about this one but whatever. idk what you'd call their genre (i've heard it described as ambient jungle, trance, something or other dnb, but most importantly NOT breakcore. call sewerslvt breakcore and you are signing up for a hell of a flamewar) listen if you like amen breaks and hate yourself (i hope not…) idk what to even recommend here… i stumbled across her first with Drowning In The Sewer years ago. i've been getting back into their stuff recently, which is probably not a good sign for my mental health… currently listening to 'was it weird that i listened to im god by clams casino's when i lost my virginity' which is a hell of a title

Heaven Pierce Her again – The Enigma of Heaven and Other Daily Delusions: weird album about religion and the internet. since this is hakita again there are amen breaks. good if ur fuckin WEIRD. i recommend most of HPH's work

i've also been listening to an ultrakill fan artist called Marzuku, who does – guess what – more amen break stuff. i don't know man, but 'At Ends' is pretty good

shit fuck of course the jvne section ends up being a whole paragraph just to say don't listen to their stuff.

THAT'S IT IT'S TIME TO WRAP THIS UP THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK. damn this got long. this is what happens when you ask me about my interests LMFAO

[poorchoicesarebettr]

LOOK MY WAY SPOILERS

Some ranting from me for he new music video, spoilers under the cut!!

First of all, the visuals were fucking beautiful and eye pleasing. I specifically like these shots/scenes:

The lineart part was stunning and I'm still rewatching again and again as I'm typing

Next, I just liked a small detail of a locked book

The symbolism, I am sobbing. When stolas says "let me hold you" he is holding a full moon, the nights they meet. When mentioning you it's it reference to a full moon when they get to meet and im crying.

Also any shot were Stolas was crying I'm sobbing.

And final point: TW for Sewer slide

I personally hate the fucking theory about Stolas dying, but the ending scene where he was "drowning", really hurts. And idk why but my first thought is that if Stolas is left without blitz, he might kill himself. He's not happy anymore, he has to take drugs that seem to come from Belphegor herself based on packaging (probaly means they're extra strong if a sin has to make them). I don't think he would because of Octavia but if angst writers and readers needs it there ya go.

[doorrobloxstuff]

RAMBLE TO US KING, TELL US ABOUT RUSH'S BACKSTORY

So, Rush’s backstory, abridged. [MAIN AU/MAIN AU VARIANTS ONLY]

DOES NOT APPLY TO TO POLY AU/INGENS RAPAX

Originally, I was gonna make a fic called gutter rat but I lost motivation. But I’ll leave the undeveloped version so I can slowly develop it later.

Doing/releasing this for fun! Yipee!

Born into the sewer to a single mother. Either the only survivor of its litter or it had no siblings to begin with.

Earliest memories are of it kneading into its mama’s fur and running water.

Rush might’ve actually learned a different language from her, but I’m not going to force ANYTHING NEW about Rush.

Yep, Rush is a mama’s boy.

They both lived underneath

She was big, soft. She had smoky fur like Rush’s. The smile. Though she was

Rush’s mother also was extremely sick and very, very hyper paranoid that something would happen to her only living offspring. So they never, really fully entered the hotel.

To be fair, a lifetime in the sewers will do that to you.

The two lived in the sewers beneath the hotel, Rush would occasionally emerge from the sewers and play with the other tiny entities under its mother’s surveillance.

Rush played with Ambush the most frequently.

Rushlet and Ambushling. :)

Rush would return and curl up next to its mother at night and eat little things of sewer algae and whack at tiny bits of algae.

It was a good life.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.

I don’t know how Rush’s mother died yet, since it’s notoriously difficult to kill an entity. But Rush found her cold. Fading away into flaking pieces. Her energy field collapsing and decomposing.

It curled up near her and just..cried. Because it was a child and it didn’t know what to do. Kneading cold skin and fur.

Rush tried to go to the hotel but got lost in the sewers.

And it spent YEARS in what it considered to be emotional and physical hell.

Also how it learned to swim. (Nearly drowned a few times in floodings. Traumatizing it more.)

Would get into nasty piss fights with other entities down there, would occasionally receive injuries from hitting sharp parts of walls.

Became a HUGE asshole to protect itself physically and emotionally and started going out of its way to attack or bully entities who were in its territory.

Eventually, it found the hotel again.

Decided to start living there.

Unfortunately, Rush was still a bully. Especially towards Figure (who, was a child of a single parent..and lived happily. Yipee! Projection!) But

Would tear up Figure’s books in front of it, steal books from its hands, knock shit over on the library, say rude shit.

Rush was a young adult by then just a reference for time passed.

Uhhh the bullying quickly ended when Figure told Rueben about the bullying and one night, Rush comes into the library and the little fucker gets knocked out by a angry tiny man in a cowboy hat.

Imagine the markiplier punching you meme. That’s Rueben. Pissed off country boy gave Rush the gatlinburg gas fire.

Once it was knocked out it dragged that lil shit out of the the library door and yelled “- AND IF I TRACK YA DOWN IN THE ACT OF BROWNEATIN ‘MAH KID AGAIN BY JAMES I’LL PUT A GODDAMNED BULLET HOLE IN YER HEAD!” Before tossing it out like a sack of potatoes.

Right in front of everyone too.

ANYWAYS.

Ambush still had a crush from when it was a child that never really went away.

“I mean, it’s not like it bullied me yet-“ *Depth stares in horror.*

Depth was scared/mad when it found out because Rush at the time was a walking red flag and definitely not the same entity they played with as a child.

Ambush went ahead, and somehow managed to befriend Rush.

Rush also, had a crush. Thought to be honest it had a lot of self loathing so. didn’t think it deserved nice things.

Eventually, Rush had a mental breakdown (still trying to figure out what triggered said event ^) and went back to the sewers, but Ambush followed.

Rush showed its metaphorical underbelly to Ambush that night and expected to be killed but instead its pain was validated and it was comforted..??

..and then the two confessed to each other and then Ambush had a really important conversation with it.

Basically the TDLR is “If you want me, you need to treat other entities with the same love, dignity and respect I treat you with.”

And baby girl /gn just.

Folded.

All (almost all ) the hate for itself, the world and others melted out of its body. Leaving something soft behind that Ambush gently embraced.

Not to say all the mean parts left..but..

Yea its life changed in that sewer.

They also loudly made out down there.

When it came up it apologized to Figure and eventually everyone realized Rush kinda just. Unassed it’s hole.

Ambush really said “I could fix it” and then DID.

Well, I mean too be fair, It was mostly all Rush but if the two hadn’t revealed their most deepest, intimate secrets and traumas to each other I don’t think they would’ve gotten anywhere good.

Other stuff:

Yes. Ambush is aware of all of this.

If Rush ever saw the movie it would cry during the entirety of the Bambi movie.

“It’s okay pookie! The fawn grows up and falls in love!!” “RWAUUUGH HE LOST HIS MAMAAAA!!”

Rush HATES the cold. HATES. HATES. And if it feels too cold it’ll start to excessively groom itself, Ambush, and its children until it they feel warm again.

The leftover asshole parts still linger I just gotta figure out which parts of Rush’s psyche would lash out in an unjustified manner.

[waiting-on-a-dream]

My Milgram ocs as long palette names because making the twst version was fun

Based on this post from @.fivepointpalettes + later palettes. Let's go!!

Just Friends But We Kiss Sometimes - LITERALLY DAISUKE AND RYUTO I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO SAY

Let Me Be Your Unreliable Narrator, Baby! - Every prisoner lmao

Focus On Me (Ignore The Blood) - Suzume, Haku

I Touch You And My Hands Burn My Hands Burn My Hands Burn (What Have You Done) - Daisuke, Suzume

Well First Of All I Am Positive What You Did Is A Criminal Offense / And Second Of All Why Didn’t You Invite Me - Suzume (She seems like the kind of girl who would feel left out when it comes to activities like this)

What’s A Little Murder Between Friends - Rin (This is kind of mean but its funny 💀)

I’m Sorry I Chewed Through Your Walls But You Must Understand I’m Calcium Deficient / Please Be Mindful Of The Evil Yoghurt Demon In The Freezer - I don't know why but these reminded me of Ichiro

Being In Love And How It Sucks Sometimes - Daisuke, Suzume, Rin, Noa (Sad little meow meows)

Do You Remember When You Told Me That You Love Me When You Told Me That You Love Me When You Told Me That You - Suzume

I Loved You I Did So How Did We End Up Like This - Daisuke, Rin, Noa

This Will Hurt You More Than It’ll Hurt Me - And That’s Okay! - Akane, Daisuke, Haruto (They're vibing guys)

I Need You To Understand That I Really Do Want What’s Best For You - And That Simply Isn’t Me - Noa

I’m Always At Least A Little Bit Scared Hopeless And Frustrated - Akane, Yui, Noa, Mayumi (This is the opposite of girlboss)

Can You Help Me Find What’s Wrong With Me / An Unhealthy Relationship With One’s Own Identity - Ichiro, Daisuke, Suzume, Yui, Rin, Noa (They are not having fun)

Biting Into A Rubber Ball Like An Apple While Maintaining Full Eye Contact - Haruto (I think he would do this just to spite someone)

I’m Just A Normal Functioning Member Of The Human Race And There Is No Way Anyone Can Prove Otherwise - Kiyoshi, Mayumi

The Magical Princess’s Strawberry-Scented Battle Axe Of Infinite Bloodshed - Suzume

I Hate Citations Why Can’t You Just Trust Me - Suzume, Noa

Doctors Say You Need A Consistent Amount Of Sleep To Be Healthy So I Consistently Sleep For 4 Hours A Night / Too Cool To Sleep At A Reasonable Hour / I’m Sick But The Bags Under My Eyes Are Sicker / Who Needs Sleep When I Can Just Drop Dead For A Rest - Haruto (I can't- Giving him these palettes are so funny 💀💀💀)

Lonely Sewer Cryptid Looking For Love - Ichiro

The Privilege Of Being Born Somebody Else - Ichiro, Suzume, Yui, Kiyoshi (I don't like what this says about them)

Look At Her Go Biting Everyone Who Comes Near Her Like A Champ - Akane, Mayumi (One day they're gonna snap)

I Apologize If You Found Finding This Place Difficult But You Must Understand I Am Currently Evading Detection And Arrest For Crimes Undisclosed - Daisuke

And If You Thought It Was A Threat It Might Have Been - Daisuke, Suzume, Haku, Mayumi, Haruto

Putting On A Show To Seem Alive / When I Don’t Feel Alive - Daisuke

Time Has Stopped Passing A Long Time Ago - Everyone in Milgram should be getting cabin fever by now, right?

Once Again A Cold Rainy Winter Gives Way To A Cold Rainy Spring - Rin (Him and his seasons theme)

Here’s Cheers To The Man Who Stole My Heart Away - Suzume, Noa

The Sort Of Love You Only Feel When Drunk - Daisuke (Yes another 'On love' reference I can't stop)

It’s Past My Bedtime And I’m Thinking Of You - Rin

Oh Baby Don’t You Know Our Sort Is Locked Out Of Heaven - Haku, Mayumi (I REALLY don't like what this says about them)

You Have To Stop Making So Many Enemies - Haruto @ most of the prisoners (Its actually just the guilty prisoners lmao)

Keep All Body Parts On The Inside Of The Vehicle At All Times As Failure To Comply May Result In Having Them Unwillingly Removed - Haruto (This sounds like something he'd say)

Drowning In A Coffee Cup (What An Awful Way To Go) - Noa

My Overconfidence Is Astounding And It’s A Surprise I’ve Never Been Killed - Haruto (He's lucky my prisoners are all so chill)

I Understand Where You’re Coming From But Where Did You Get The Gun - Daisuke

Well That Was A Little Unnecessarily Brutal Don’t You Think? - Sender: Daisuke (He said he wasn't cut out for his work), Receiver: Akane, Suzume, Haku, Kiyoshi

Tender Words And Hellish Screams - The entirety of Milgram

You Smell Like Nonsense With A Hint Of Melancholy - Noa

I Live In A Room With No Windows / I Haven’t Left The House In Months - People are getting depression from being cooped up in Milgram for so long, right?

Forever Dizzy In This Lonely World - Ichiro, Akane, Suzume, Rin, Noa

Summer Lasts A Week At Best But My Dedication To Sweater Vests Is Eternal So Look Me In The Eye Little Teacup And Melt If It Bothers You So Much - Mayumi

You Can’t Just Ask A Guy Why He’s In Love - Daisuke

Can’t Let It Slip That There’s More To Me Than Little Old I - Kiyoshi

I Know I May Look Like A Real Person But I Am Actually Not A Real Person At All - Ichiro (I don't know what kind of mental illness he has but he sure has one or a few)

You Know How Sometimes An Unwanted Guest Comes Over And You Do All You Can To Make Them Leave While Remaining Polite / Fizzy Brained Children Are So Troublesome - Mayumi (They both apply to her so I'll put it like this even though the palettes have nothing in common)

You’re The First Descendant In A Line Of Workaholics Utterly Convinced Your Willingness To Sacrifice Your Own Health Determines Your Worth As A Human Being And Promptly Working Yourself To Death To Provide Unto Others What You Never Had A Chance To Understand You Deserved Yourself - Kiyoshi, Mayumi

I Am The Mirror In Which You Can See All The Evil In The World - Ahaha, everyone in Milgram

My Brain Operates On Frequencies You’ve Never Even Heard Of - Again, whatever Ichiro has going on /pos

Being Told I’m Allowed To Make My Final Class Project About Any Topic I Want Awakens A Demon Inside Me That Makes Me Subject My Classmates To Only The Finest Of My Obscure Interests - Noa

The Only Thing Greater Than My Ego Is My Impostor Syndrome - Daisuke, Haruto

The Cons Of Being My Friend Greatly Outweigh The Pros - Rin

You Are Who We Say You Are Because Public Opinion Beats Self Worth Every Time - Kiyoshi

Murder And Other Expressions Of Love - Daisuke, Suzume, Haku, Rin

You Locked Me In A Cage And Threw Away The Key And When You Found Someone Better I Was Left To Gnaw On The Bars For My Freedom - Suzume, Rin

What Do You MEAN There Was A Fire - Haruto (Poor warden-san)

A Little Weirdo Driven By Consumption - Ichiro

Your Love Has Brought Me To The Point Of No Returning - Suzume

Go To Sleep In The Morning And Wake Up At Noon Only To Go Back To Sleep Till Evening And Wake Up Full Of Regret And With A Headache - All that sleep deprivation finally caught up to Haruto

A Toast To Our Special Little Brand Of Sin - Milgram~!

The Man Of Wine And Cigarette Smoke / You And All Your Money That You’ve Stolen From The Poor / Thank You For Your Loss - Daisuke (His mafia side makes an appearance!)

Learn To Forgive Yourself - Noa (The only true innocent prisoner here /j)

I Don't Know What's In Your Head Why Are You Asking Me - Haruto (I can imagine the prisoners asking him what went down in their MVs and him going: does it look like I know?)

[caltropspress]

FEEDBACK LOOP #14: Voodoo Macbeth: Armand Hammer's "Windbreaker"

…Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face…

—Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (1623)

They use me wrong, so I sing this song to this day.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power” (1996)

1.

Once upon a time, woods “had a gun once.” “Windbreaker” is woods’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedie Macbeth. Stories retold and resold—twice the first time, like Saul Williams once said. Not until you’ve listened to Rakim on a rocky mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. And not until you’ve staged Shakespeare in a sludge-slicked 150th Street Harlem sewer have you heard hip-hop either. A young Orson Welles directed what became known as Voodoo Macbeth on behalf of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in 1936. Featuring a full African-American cast, the play took place in a quasi-Haitian setting complete with tropical-cum-skeletal stage design—palm fronds and bone altars. We live in Storyville where the population density reaches hypersensitive levels and the murder police can’t keep up with the homicides. (Meanwhile, the Second Witch busies herself with “Killing swine” [1.3.2] in Macbeth.) We’ve been here before, before. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” (1988) told us to bite our tongues, that this ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh, it’s just another case about the wrong path. He warned, in a playful and pajamaed manner: “Straight and narrow or your soul gets cast.”

2.

“Windbreaker” is a [re]mixture in the witches/bitches brew of Nas’s “I Gave You Power” (1996), too. The power, you could guess, is a wily one capable of possession. “Possession” in a legal sense—nine-tenths of the law and so forth; possession of a firearm [see: S. Carter, B. Sigel, Shyne, et al.]—but also the possession the gun holds over its owner. Those finding themselves possessed by the gun—a weapon which “made you buckwild,” in Nas’s terms—should brace for berserk behavior modifications. We can splice together epileptic seizures and Santería and call it spirit possession just the same. The possession is pervasive—everywhere. The ubiquity of guns in the collective imagination takes up serious real estate—we’re talkin’ eminent domain land grabs—and Nas’s psyche is no exception:

I was around a lot of guns then. Guns were in my sleep, in my car, in my home. Guns were on my person, guns were on my friends. That’s how much they were around. There was so much around me that I rapped about it. It’s crazy to think about that today, but it was my reality. It was in my head 24/7.

“Windbreaker” functions as an exorcism of that exact sentiment.

3.  RECKLESS WHAT

Blow wind! Come wrack!

—Shakespeare, Macbeth (5.5.58)

The wind forebodes. woods gets handed the gun “late night, right on the porch,” and it must be windbreaker weather. woods’ jacket rustles in the gusts. “I’ll give thee a wind” (1.3.12), the Second Witch says to the First, and the “wind” she refers to is what the witches bestow upon each other to exact revenge. woods, though, breaks their wind (true to the song’s title and his heroic epithet, likely). He’s not susceptible to their marshy shufflings, their murky hells. He “speak[s] things strange” (1.2.52-53), as Lennox says of the worthy Thane of Ross.

But the winds are everywhere (like guns)—they be blowin’ like Maceo Parker in a buhloone mindstate. They blow the horrid deed in every eye and “tears shall drown the wind” (1.7.24-25). Word to the RZA and Wendy Rene: after the laughter comes the tearz. But the winds swirl and cyclone and gyre skyward. woods, “like a naked newborn babe,” survives by “Striding the blast” (1.7.21-22) as a cherubim might, riding the breeze. He’s Kong learning to stop worrying and love da bomb. He straddles and hoots and hollers from the hydrogen missile. A hard acid reign’s a-gonna fall [RIP to Gajah].

Of Macbeth’s poor murderers, the second says: “I am one… / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world / Hath so incensed that I am reckless what / I do to spite the world” (3.1.121-124). Shakespeare knows the sway of poverty over moral decisions, like the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet whose “poverty, but not [his] will consents” to selling illegal, poisonous drugs to Romeo. woods gets beat back by the gale-force winds, but he bests those “buffets of the world.” Everything’s for sale except for the Beaufort scale.

4.  YO-HO-HO

The gun, in the case of “Windbreaker,” is equivalent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Spot. That is to say, the song isn’t so much a billy woods metanarrative as a twice-told tale of Billy Bones in Treasure Island (1883). Passed from pirate to pirate, the Black Spot is a black-sided death sentencing, a Last Judgment on a scrap of paper. Biblical bad luck. A Book of Revelation back-page pressed into a fist. Maritime connotations aside, the Black Spot signals that it’s marring time, so make yourself scarce or knuckle up.

woods claims to have only had the gun “for about a month,” and he was none too keen on keeping it. The gun, we assume, had traveled many travails and trials, tribulations too; that it had “been in the hands of mad thugs,” as Nas puts it. Mad meaning “many” but also “crazed” and “deranged.” Mad like diaries maintained by gravediggaz. Pick, sickle, and shovel-wielding men. The gun, the “brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution” (1.2.19-20) is bequeathed to woods as it was to so many others. Less a gift than a curse. “Sick of the blood,” Nas-as-gun raps, “Sick of wrath of the next man’s grudge.” This gun—like any gun, perhaps—is one that harbors a self-consciousness. Maybe it is the guns that kill people, personified with malevolence [male violence].

Unlike countless others, woods doesn’t choose to use the gun to cement his masculinity. As Macbeth tells his wife, woods is already man enough, and “who dares do more is none” (1.7.52)—a negation of that manhood. Overkill, let’s call it. Mac daddies and MAC-10s: Nas is like the phallocentric Asian, half-man, half-guns blazing. “The barrel’s my dick,” he explains, “Uncircumcised, pull my skin back and cock me.” Macbeth, meanwhile, questions his hallucinating senses, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (2.2.44-45). The blade is bloody, possibly with menses, yet he still grapples for control: “Come, let me clutch / thee” (2.2.45-46). In doing so, he’s giving mics menstrual cycles. “The game is so irresistible to touch,” LL Cool J once said of the mic phallus, “You should see me when fiendin’ for microphones that I can clutch.” 

In a letter to his wife, Macbeth writes that he “stood rapt in wonder” (1.5.6), explaining what he witnessed held him in thrall. On the porch, billy woods is likewise “rapt withal” (1.3.60). Banquo knows “instruments of darkness tell us truths” (1.3.136). But woods is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17) to use the gun; he doesn’t have “slaughterous thoughts” (5.5.16). And even if he does, his ignorance and mystification prevent him from reaching for the strap.

5.

A dagger of the mind, a false creation…

—Macbeth (2.2.50) 

The story told in “Windbreaker” raises questions of realities and false narratives, actual fears and imagined ones, authenticity and authorship—in short, the friction that exists between fiction and figment. woods mixes up the simulacra of hyperreality like the guy Quelle Chris knew on “PSA Drugfest 2003” that “mix[ed] up a spliff like witches with newt eye.” We’re pulled in by woods’ first-person point-of-view (“I had a gun once,” followed by a proliferation of Is) but put off by his reluctance to divulge the details. He bleep censors the name of who he “got it from.” By doing so, he protects the innocent, the guilty, and every gradation of conscience in between. The unidentified person who gives him the gun could be a peer, an elder, a mentor, a bad influence, or some combination thereof. Regardless, the nameless and faceless figure—a mysterious character, if we choose to lean into the fictitious realm—“showed [woods] how to load it” in the “same place [he] showed [woods] how to roll a blunt,” linking two illicit activities, both requiring punctilious attention to detail. Of gats and ganja; of heat and hemp. 

woods demonstrates the blurry border between fact and fiction in the scene details. The gun is handed off clandestinely under the cover of “late night,” yet the location (“right on the porch”) is indiscreet. This doubling (call it down-low and out-front) plays out anadiplotically when woods says, “[They] was speaking soft, / Soft pack of ’ports.” The sibilance of “speaking soft” suggests secrecy (if worse come to worse keep this on the hush, Lil’ Cease might say), but the point-blank alliteration of “pack of ’ports” sounds like when your guns go pow-pow (word to Big L). Furthermore, the soft pack of stoges—though its connotation implies silence—has a plastic wrapping that crinkles like a windbreaker, attracting unwanted attention.

6.

The gun given to woods is far from perfect, in fact, the weapon is “scratched and marred where the numbers was filed.” Like the bleep censors, the redaction of the serial number safeguards against snitching. But, as the pattern of the one-verse song shows, that which is criminal is liminal. Those defaced numbers, well, “you could still see ’em.” One thinks of Macbeth’s dagger cloaked in hemoglobin: “...on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood” (2.1.58). One remembers Nas’s encounter with “a wrecked-up TEC with numbers on his chest that say: / 5-2-O-9-3-8-5 and zero.” The TEC yearns to confess, “hoping one day police would place where he came from, / A name or some sort of person to claim him.” But with his “serial defaced,” the TEC shares the same fate as Lady Macbeth: beyond saving. Just as doctors can’t “raze out the written troubles of [Lady Macbeth’s] brain” (5.3.52), so too can’t you resurface a scratched-off serial number. 

To include bleeped names and scratched-off serial numbers is to engage in a sort of scriptorium subterfuge. Historically, we’ve seen this in novels, as John Barth explained in “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967): “Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.”

Uncertainty abounds. woods can’t even accurately identify the weapon he’s handed: “.38, .22—I’m not even sure.” It could just as well be Nas’s Desert Eagle, a “semi-auto with lead.” These redactions, this unknowingness, inevitably leads to confusion. One must forgo epistemic approaches and settle for feels. Nas’s aforementioned Desert Eagle, as an example, measures at “seven inches” and weighs “four pounds.”

7.

Emotional liftin’—please use the proper form: / Bend at the knee.

—“spongebob” (2019)

But little and heavy as a dead child. The game is the game, but the gravity of the situation increases with woods’ somber simile. That uzi, or .38, or .22— weighs a ton. But it’s the emotional weight that’s so exhausting. “Windbreaker” opens with a bevy of words with short-u sounds—words with heft, words that carry bend-at-the-knee weight: gun | once | month | blunt. A significant weight, like Biggie’s ubiquitous uh adlibs. woods throws haymakers, heaves shots. By all accounts, he’s acting “wild truculent” (as Breeze Brewin once said on “Weight” by the Indelible MC’s). woods holds the gun with “Macbeth hands,” a phrase he drops on Armand Hammer’s “Duppy.” Macbeth speaks of “dread exploits” (4.1.164), and woods works in dread[ed] talk (s/o to Velma Pollard), that Iyaric, a protest language and flexi lexicon, to ward off the weight of what violence he might have the capacity to engage in.

You show loyalty; they learn loyalty. But Macbeth disregards the value of his commander Banquo even after leading Duncan’s army alongside him. He keeps the plot to murder Banquo “from the common eye” for “sundry weighty reasons” (3.1.141-142), most of which are purely practical. The Thane of Cawdor doesn’t consider the guilty conscience he’ll have to carry. He doesn’t contemplate “that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart” (5.3.54-55). woods does.

On “Heavy Water” (emphasis on the heavy—we’re talking some brine pool shit), woods told us “the play-within-the-play was G. Dep as Macbeth,” and thus hands us a key. G. Dep, who confessed to killing an innocent man seventeen years after the fact, couldn’t function under the weight of what he’d done. “I didn’t feel free and clear,” he said from prison where he’s serving 15-to-life. “Everyday I was faced with this memory, with this heinous act, that didn’t really have to happen….I had to do what I had to do to get that burden off my chest.” That burden off his chest. “Burden” from the Old English byrðen, meaning “load, weight” but also “a child.” (But little and heavy as a dead child.)

G. Dep endeavored to lift the weight off his chest, but woods prefers to hide the weight in a chest. woods secretes the gun—and his shame at even accepting it—in various places, all of which prove porous. He “had it hid under bed”—those deadweight d’s burying any misdeed deeply—but he “couldn’t sleep” like some Princess and the Piece. He’s a sensitive soul, feeling it penetrate his back leaving him black and blue all over his body. Mattress upon mattress upon mattress, and he still felt its presence. No quitter, woods seeks other unseen spots—ahem, hiding places—like “in the shed, somewhere Moms couldn’t reach.” I was made to kill, Nas rapped, and “that’s why they keep [the gun] concealed.” Nas tried to squeeze “under car seats” and sneak into clubs. By verse three of “I Gave You Power,” he’s “still stuck in the shelf with all the things that an outlaw hides.” As we see, any attempts at avoidance are mostly ineffective.

8.  THE WEÏRD TURN PRO

woods is unsettled. Who can make sense of machine gun etiquette? The man feels damned. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he raps, noticing “both shoulders had demons.” Can’t brush ’em off. As Macbeth says, “Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.144). Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two. (5.1.37). But the spot is blown, and Lady Macbeth can’t do a damn thing about it. She can try to sound like Biz Markie as much as she wants (“...a one-two, a one-two…”); she can make like Special Ed and fetch the Cascade, but there’s no getting those red stains off her hands.

“I was scared,” woods tells us, “’cause [redacted] heard [redacted] was tryna rob me.” But even self-defense shuffles closer to self-destruction. “I was more scared,” he explains, “when I took the gun, to be honest.” He fears both the threat on his person and the weapon intended to ward off any such maneuvers. He feels stuck: “By then, too late to say I didn’t want it.” We can assume his “dome was aching” like the man in Nas’s song who reaches for the gun, finally. woods “walked home in the darkness,” in his frantic thoughts. Somewhere along his route he was detained by “three witches on the marshes.” 

Rewind back to the beginning of the song. “And I know it better than before,” Fielded sings, “they want me to notice—even out the score.” Fielded becomes all three Weïrd Sisters in one: she turns to they. For weïrd read “fateful.” Depending on which Shakespeare folio you’re flipping through, the word is also spelled weyward and weyard. They all come from the Scottish form of wyrd, though—the Old English word for fate. The Weïrd Sisters, or witches, are tied up in some real Hussein Fatal/Fatal Hussein business. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be ready when they come through that door, Fielded sings with “the syllable of dolor” (4.3.9), evoking the lurking evil, the looming dread, that woods experiences. Fielded—whose stage-name is near-synonymous with the marshes and heaths on which the witches appear—sings of seething vengeance (“even out the score”) and simmering nervousness (“I got somebody coming for me in the night”).

Fielded, in their role as the Weïrd Sisters, is warmer to woods than Macbeth’s encounter with the witches. Fielded warns him, it sounds like, not to cross them. In an evasive move, woods goes metaphorical. He feels like a “dinosaur in the tar pit.” He marks sharks as “all cartilage.” (The witches include “maw and gulf / Of the ravaged salt-sea shark” [4.1.24-25] in their cauldron ingredients, by the way.) Sharks for woods; scorpions for Shakes. “O, full of scorpions is my mind” (3.2.41), Macbeth moans. woods feels his “blood cold as the water is,” while Macbeth looks to the “multitudinous seas incarnadine” (2.2.80), meaning the ocean turns blood-red. The arrival of Banquo’s ghost at dinner is likened to the approach of “the rugged Russian bear, / The armed rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger (3.4.122-123). Bears, rhinos, sharks, scorpions, and tigers…oh my!

9.  SLUMB’RY AGITATION

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, / And yet I would not sleep…

—Banquo, Macbeth (2.1.8-9)

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12-13), the witches say in unison. woods hovers through the fog and filthy air thinking, Fuck a fair one—I get mine the fast way, like Biggie on the “Flava in Ya Ear” remix from ’94. On “Halloween Fell on a Weekend,” woods was talkin’ witchy: “Fair is foul, / Awkward smile.” Nas, for the record, noted how the intrusive gun thoughts were “making every ghetto foul.”

But what’s really foul and utterly unfair—a flagrant foul, a Flagrant 2—is the sleep troubles. “I slept with no dreams,” woods raps. But his dreamless sleep is more of an insomnia. “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!” Macbeth says, turning over in the sheets to speak to himself in the third-person, “‘Macbeth does murder sleep’” (2.2.47-48). woods looks a ghost now, a somnolent wanderer: “Asleep on my feet, / Awake when niggas sleep.” The repetition of sleep at the start of one clause and at the end of the next signals the circularity of the story being told. 

We can’t help but summon Nas’s “cousin of death.” And Macduff refers to “downy sleep” as “death’s counterfeit” (2.3.88). woods is restless, “tempest-tossed” (1.3.26), enduring the night where “wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep (2.1.62-63). “Headlights splashed the curtains,” woods raps, and instead of sheep he’s “counting every car passin’ in the street.” He may as well be midnight marauding like Lady Macbeth with a taper. When the Doctor notes that Lady Macbeth’s “eyes are open,” the Gentlewoman clarifies that “their sense are shut” (5.1.26-27). Nas, Queensbridge-bred, opens his penthouse lids to “see some cold nights and bloody days.” If only Lady Macbeth had been as alert as Nasir Jones or billy woods.

10.  BLACK MACBETH WILL SEEM AS PURE AS SNOW

The gun, which was described as “little and heavy as a dead child” (G. Dep’s debut was called Child of the Ghetto, as fate would have it), returns to haunt us at the end of “Windbreaker.” The baby image, in Shakespeare’s terms, becomes “doubly redoubled” (1.2.42). When the hurly-burly’s done, it’s the kids who suffer. A generational pain that folds back in on itself. An inheritance of the horrific. Look around: dead babies are everywhere.

Ross speaks of Macduff’s murdered household where he discovered “babes / Savagely slaughtered” (4.3.240-241). Nas delivers a choral ode about how he, as gun, “might have took your first child.” Slick Rick rapped of “a little boy who was misled.” That boy found himself in a woods-like dilemma, calculating the consequences: I’ll do years if I pull this trigger. If not a corporeal death, a death of the spirit. 

The Weïrd Sisters promise Banquo that he’ll father kings—bank on it, they say. And so Macbeth fears Banquo’s children will be the future kings of Scotland, usurping his throne. Macbeth decides: Banquo’s gotta go. Not only his brethren-in-arms, but Banquo’s son Fleance, too. Fleance “must embrace the fate / Of that dark hour” (3.1.156-157), Macbeth determines, all in order to assure his place on the throne. When Macbeth ambushes Banquo in Act 3, Scene 3, Banquo implores his son to “fly, fly, fly” (3.3.25)—he tells him to supa fly, to supa dupa fly. To be fresh, wild, and bold, too—like the Cold Crush would advise.

woods, as Banquo, is drawn into a terminal life, a posthumous life, when he is given the gun. That hand-off arranges his end. “Banquo when I think of my kids,” he raps. “Banquo when I kiss my son in his crib.” This is the Fleance farewell. But woods is unwilling to go the way of Banquo. He doesn’t only want to save his son—he wants to save himself. “Stunningly,” Nas says, “tears fall down the eyes of these so-called tough guys.” woods rebuffs the “heavy as a dead child” gun. The only weight he wishes to feel is his son asleep in his arms.

11.  THE WOOD[S] OF BIRNAM

It felt wrong knowing niggas is waiting in Hell for him.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power”

“Here’s a knocking indeed!” remarks the Porter in Act 3, Scene 1. He considers the vocation of “porter of hell gate” and mocks the incessant knocking: “Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ / th’ name of Beelzebub?” (3.1.1-4). Careful what you ask for and be wary of the knocks you answer to. woods can knock the hustle. He’s none-too-anxious to join the mobb of “murd’ring ministers” (1.5.55) we hear about in the Scottish play or Track 4 on It Was Written. Still woods, eventually, commits to composing a kind of murda muzik—equally bloodletting and bloodshedding in its emotional registers and range. “[T]he blood-boltered Banquo smiles” (4.1.138) knowing he’s secured futures for his kids. He rests easy. It’s presupposed that the gun gives power, but on “Windbreaker” we learn that the weapon deprives us of power, leaving us with nothing to pass on but the curse.

Images:

Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail) | Opening of the Federal Theater Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Winslow Homer, Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) | Andy Warhol, Gun, black, white, and red on pink (c. 1981-82) | Ravi Zupa, Mightier Than Guns sculpture series, disassembled typewriter, stapler, and scrap metal (c. 2016) | G. Dep, Child of the Ghetto album cover, 2001 (detail) | “Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters (Three Witches) on the blasted heath,” title page by John Gilbert for an edition of Shakespeare’s works (1858–60) | Canada Lee as Banquo in the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail)