#place so tiny i called it a cell and i fell in love with a girl who didn't like me back i had a bit of a mid-life crisis at age 17 was

[sanzusslutt]

She Belongs To Me

Pairing: Bully!Katsuki Bakugo x Y/N

Warnings: bakugo is an ass, baks bullies y/n, blood mentioned, no smut, they hate each other, angst, sa mention but didn’t happen, prob spelling and grammar mistakes just ignore them, sorry if I missed anything..

Authors Note: It’s 3 am and I can’t sleep if I don’t get this out of my system. Now it’s yours.

Thinking about bully Katsuki who made sure to make every day of your life a miserable hell. Throwing your food on the trash can, making fun of you with his friends, pushing you aside when he is walking the aisle you were walking, ripping your notebook, blowing up your stuff, everything he could think of just to make sure you would always remember him.

Unlike Izuku, you weren’t a childhood friend of his. You never were even close to what you could call a friend. You were just someone who could tolerate everything in your path and that’s what you did. Consuming every and last attack of his. You were just another victim. You hated his guts with every cell on your body and so did he.

He wanted to punch your face every time you walked in front of him. He craved to blow your face up when you answered a question correctly. He longed for that desperate look you gave him every time he stand above you, threatening that he would make your life hell. He yearned for every last drop of tear you shed for him every time he hurt you. He lusted after that sense of control when you were standing below him, afraid just by his presence. He ached for your teary eyes, begging him not to leave another scar on your body. He hated thinking about that look all the fucking time. He despised every time he thought of you on the ground, begging him. He loathed looking at you talk to other brainless guys who only want to use you for your mesmerising body. He was repelled by the damn thought of seeing you with someone.

But here you were, in an abandoned allay, close to the school, cornered by an idiot who thought he could have you his way. The stone wall felt cold as your back touched it in hopes you could get away. Your thighs trembled, the fear only getting bigger inside your stomach. The brown haired boy stepped closer, placing his hand on the wall next to your head, excluding any possibility of escape. His other hand found place on your waist, causing a nauseous feeling in your stomach as every thought of what he could do, hit you like a train. Tears started building on your eyes as you heard a voice you could recognise for miles away since it haunted you in your worst nightmares.

“The fuck are you doing, bastard?” Katsuki’s quiet voice hold a threatening tone but this time it wasn’t directed to you. The brown haired idiot’s head immediately flew to the side at the question but the only thing that fell from his lips when he saw Katsuki was just a huff.

“You thought you could have her only for yourself?” The idiot asked. The threatening look the blond boy gave to that dunce was clearer than the fucking sky. Your handsome blond bully walked slowly towards you two but his now, dark eyes were locked to the boy above you. His stroll seemed ignorant but his deadly eyes told a different story.

“Who the hell do you think you are? Huh?” Katsuki questioned. His tone now even more intimidating. His hand flew off his pocket, tiny explosions start to form as he stretched his fingers. The darkening in his red eyes grew and by the time he stood right before the brown haired fool, they became darker than his own heart.

“Ya think you can just do whatever the fuck you want with someone who belongs to me?” Bakugo laughed. Your heart skipped a beat hearing those words. Not from love or excitement but from pure shock.

“Belongs to you? I don’t think she likes you more than m-“ The idiot didn’t have the time to finish his sentence as a loud explosion from Katsuki landed right on his moron face, landing him on the hard ground and scaring you the fuck out.

The brown haired fool laid on the ground as those red eyes finally looked your way. They softened as they fell on your gaze and his body lost the stiffness it previously had. He looked up and down your figure and then turned his eyes to the end of the allay. His body soon followed as he made his way out of the deadlock.

“Thank.. you..” those were some words you never thought you would say to someone who hurt you. Especially Katsuki.

“Don’t expect me to run every time you’re in trouble.” His tone was familiarly harsh. Just when you had a feeling of hope that something in him would change, it vanished as fast as it came.

Those red eyes looked at you one last time before he made the turn that exited the unpopular allay. You were now alone, kneeling against the cold wall, with a semi-conscious body and your own stupid thoughts. Thoughts that always had that spark of hope for Katsuki..

Want me to make more bully Baku? I really like the idea to be honest..

[maddy-ferguson]

i hope you guys know that i'm not cool irl like i would say i'm a loser in the glee sense of the word

[denaliwrites]

Say You'll Remember Me (Denali's Version)

Alec Hardy x Bad Girl!Reader

Summary: If "whirlwind romance" were in the dictionary, next to its definition would be an image of you and Alec.

Soundtrack: Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift

Requests: Open!

Warnings: Criminal Activity.

1995

It wasn't like Alec, going and falling in love with one of the people he was sworn to put away.

Yet as you were escorted into the station, all crimson smiles, all confidence, all sauntering hips and deep black leather, he couldn't help the way his heart skipped a beat.

(Little did he know how dangerous that would be for him if this had happened, oh, eighteen years into the future.)

And when your eyes danced across the room just to finally land on him -- tiny, scrawny little Alec Hardy -- oh, he knew he was done for. Not that he minded much... or at all.

Doing your intake was the highest honor that had, in his twenty-six years of life, been bestowed upon him.

"What'd they get a lass like you for?" he asked as he took your fingerprints, his hands surprisingly gentle with your own.

"Defacement," you replied simply with a smirk.

"Of?"

"Churchill's grave."

"Oh," he said, too stunned to move or speak for a moment. It passed quickly, and he resumed his work as if nothing had happened. "One of those counter-culture types, then."

You laughed at that, and it was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard. He could listen to it forever.

"Something like that," you said once your laughs died down. "I'm not big on the punk scene, though."

"Really?" he asked, looking up at you before quickly looking back down. "You look like you'd fit right in with that lot."

"What can I say? They've got a good look."

He hummed in response, then the two of you fell into silence as he continued processing you.

Once he was done, he escorted you to a cell and guided you in by the waist. You said nothing, but the look you sent him and the smile on those bloodstained lips let him know that you knew -- and you liked it.

The gesture was so small, so insignificant, and yet he couldn't believe he'd done it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered about the power dynamics, and if he was abusing what little power he had in this situation. Then he decided that any power he had -- you granted him, and could easily take away if you wanted.

This suspicion was only confirmed upon your release. He was the one to open the cell -- he made sure of it -- and as you passed you winked at him and slipped him a piece of paper. Where you'd gotten it, or a pen, he had no idea, but when he looked at it at the privacy of his desk there definitely was a phone number written on it, as well as a kiss mark from your lipstick.

Oh, how devilish of you.

He called the number that night, and honestly half expected anyone else to answer. Maybe even no one.

Instead, your heavenly voice drifted down the line. "Took you long enough," you said lightly into his ear, and it took every ounce of control he had over his body to keep breathing.

"I had work," he protested, just as lightly.

"A poor excuse. Do you normally keep girls waiting like this?"

"Only the naughty ones."

Wow, he couldn't believe he'd just said that.

"So it's a punishment?" you said with a laugh.

The note of danger in that angelic sound sent a thrill down his spine. "If it is?"

"I'd like to see you try," you said, still laughing.

He wouldn't. He couldn't imagine it, frankly. Though he could imagine you punishing him, and he, much to his surprise, rather liked the idea.

The hell were you doing to him?

"Do you have a place to stay?" he asked.

"I have a phone number, don't I?"

Oh. Right. That you did.

"Would you like to stay at mine anyway?"

You hummed thoughtfully. "Stay with a random cop I only just met yesterday?" you asked teasingly. "What could possibly go wrong?"

"I promise I won't kill ye," he said quickly, fearfully.

"I know," you said. "You couldn't even if you wanted to."

He gave you his address, anyway, and then the conversation lulled and, rather suddenly, you hung up.

"That was rather rude," he mused.

You arrived just as he set his plate down on the table.

Answering the insistent knocking upon his door, he didn't expect to see you, yet there you stood. You were gorgeous as ever, with wild hair tumbling over your shoulders, no doubt whipped to a frenzy by a car's open windows, and lips as red as they were the moment he'd first laid eyes on you.

"Oh," he said, blinking. "You... came?"

"Well, you did invite me," you said, grinning.

"That I did," he said, and stepped aside so that you could enter. He closed the door behind you and followed you as you took a few exploratory steps deeper into the flat. "Have you eaten?" he asked as he passed you to return to the kitchen.

"No," you replied simply, looking around his kitchen curiously, as if you couldn't believe he actually lived here.

"Well, help yourself." He motioned to the pot on the stove as he sat down.

You must've noticed he wasn't eating -- he noticed the look of realization, the way you hurried to fill a plate and sit down beside him.

Your eyes met, and he smiled at the hint of a blush on your cheeks.

"I hope you don't expect me to say grace," you said to break the silence that had built around the two of you.

"Oh, goodness no," he replied.

"So you're waiting for me."

"Of course." You were the one in charge here, after all. Well, to him you were, at least.

You took a bite and he followed suit, and the two of you ate in amicable silence.

The rest of the night Alec spent discovering all the ways he could make you tick.

1996

Alec had never had a roommate before, let alone one who found themselves in jail as frequently as you did.

He had had girlfriends before, but you were the first one he hesitated to introduce to his parents -- it wasn't that he didn't love you, it was that he wasn't sure his poor mum would survive meeting you. She was a bit traditional, and you were anything but.

Unfortunately, the universe didn't agree with him.

You were home alone, recovering from a hangover when his mother dropped in unannounced -- and about had a heart attack at the sight of you, with all your leather and spikes, and what a "traditional" woman might say was a scandalous amount of makeup.

"Who are you, then?" Mrs. Hardy asked, because you couldn't possibly be Alec's girlfriend.

You were sensible not to immediately correct that assumption, instead simply offering your name before wandering to the kitchen and popping some painkillers.

"And what are you doing here?" she pressed.

"Oh, I live here."

"Does my boy need help with the rent?" she asked, mostly herself -- at least, you were pretty sure she wasn't asking you. "Enough that he'd seek help from..."

"Hmm?" you prompted in amusement, leaning your hip against the counter.

"Well, someone of your profession. Of course."

"What profession would that be?"

"You know," she said conspiratorily.

"Ma'am," you said with a biting laugh, "I work at the pub down the street."

She looked like she wanted to say, no, that's not right, you couldn't possibly be anything but a prostitute. She must've thought better of it, though.

Alec, blessedly, chose that moment to walk in the door.

You could see on his face, the moment he saw his mother, that he almost considered walking right back out.

Instead, he said "Mum!" and pulled the woman into an embrace. "I see ye've met my girlfriend."

You watched as several decidedly not great emotions passed over her features, before she settled on disbelief. "But... darlin', she's..."

You and Alec both stared at her as she struggled to find a delicate way to say it.

"Isn't she a little... bold, for you?" she asked. You had to admit, that was better than you expected.

"That's why I like her," Alec answered, pulling you into a side hug and kissing your cheek. You giggled and instinctively pulled him into a proper kiss, which he happily returned.

"Well... if ye say so..."

1997

The goal had never been to tame you or cage you, and the longer your relationship lasted the more he saw how ill-fitted to domesticity you were.

He didn't want to admit it, of course. He would've been happy to spend the rest of his life with you.

But he loved you, and he could see just how miserable you were living in the same little flat, going to the same boring job every day, talking to the same boring people and having the same boring sex with the same boring partner, day after day, for years.

You'd always been a troublemaker, it was one of the things he'd first learned about you, and it was one of the first things he'd fallen in love with.

For a while, at the start of the relationship, you'd put in effort not to get into trouble. For him, mostly, but he suspected you also had a genuine desire to turn a new leaf.

But you got bored. And when you were bored, you lashed out.

It was at a point now where Alec thought you probably spent more time in a cell than in his bed.

It broke his heart, that you couldn't be happy with him. But it broke his heart more that he'd unwittingly tried to break you, when he should've released you back into the wild. Hell, he never should've captured you at all.

"I want you out," he said one night.

"... out?" you asked, stunned. Confused. Lost. Hurt.

"I can't do this anymore," he said with a sigh. "The constant stints in jail, the drugs, the drinkin'. It's too much. So you need to leave."

"But..."

"No. You need to leave. That's the end of it. You have a week to sort out another place to stay, but then ye've gotta go. Even if it means ye gotta live on the streets."

It killed him inside that he could see a tiny glimmer of relief in your eyes.

And when he got home from work the next day, you were gone.

2004

Honestly, Alec hadn't expected to run into you again. Ever.

Yet as he walked Daisy through the park, there you were, circling the playground like a lion stalking its prey. There was only one child playing there, screaming gleefully as he sped down the slide. You hovered for a moment, watching vigilantly, before continuing your path around the jungle gym.

You looked... stressed. But happy.

Daisy tore her hand out of his and ran for the boy, no doubt eager to make a friend.

He watched as you realized there was an incoming missile in the form of a little girl, your eyes on his daughter as she neared. You eased the moment you realized it was just a kid coming at your... son? Yet you kept an eye on her, easily adopting the role of guardian for her even though she was a strange child who had, by all accounts, appeared out of nowhere.

He slowly made his way over, his eyes never leaving you. He saw, in rapid succession, your expression change from casual, to realization, to deer in the headlights, to flighty panic.

Yet you were stuck -- whoever this child was, you couldn't leave without him, and he was playing with Daisy in a section it'd be near impossible for you to reach before Alec reached you.

And reach you he did.

He said your name, the first time in years, and you closed your eyes at the sound of it. No doubt willing him to vanish.

"Hey."

It was the best he could've hoped for, honestly.

"You look well," he said, before his attention shifted to the kids. "Is he...?"

"God, no," you said with a nervous laugh. "Please. Me, with a kid? That'd be a disaster. No, he's, er... my friend's kid. I'm babysitting for the day while she's visiting her mum."

"Never really took ye to be a kid person."

"There's a lot about me you never really got the chance to learn."

"That's fair," he replied, watching the kids run around the swingset in a game of tag.

"Why did you do it?" you asked after a few moments of silence. "The real why, not the one you gave me that day."

He didn't want to answer that.

"The reason I gave you that day was the real reason."

"Don't -- don't you fucking dare," you hissed, turning to him. "Why lie?"

Because he knew if he'd told you the truth, you never would've gone. Never would've saved yourself.

"I didn't. I'm not. I was so tired of it all."

"And now?"

"And now I'm married with a kid."

He saw a brief flash of hurt in your eyes -- it was a life you never could've given him. Not for any lack of ability, but you both knew that if you'd somehow miraculously allowed yourself to carry to term, you probably would've walked out eventually. The domestic life just wasn't for you. It would've driven you crazy.

He could see that, just in the brief time he'd been watching you with your friend's kid. You were watchful -- perfectly diligent, perfectly protective... but he could see you itching to do just about anything else instead.

"How have you been?" he asked, pulling himself as well as you out of the thoughts circling in your heads.

"Good," you replied simply, at first. After a moment of thought, you added, "I took up a job in a school. Pays better than the pub."

"His age?"

"Yeah. I see him, sometimes."

"D'ye ken Daisy?"

"Your daughter?"

He nodded.

"I think she's familiar, but I'm sure if she actually were a student at my school I would've run into you sooner."

"Nah, my wife does all the school stuff. Tess, her name is."

"It rings a bell, actually."

"Eh? Small world."

The conversation drifted a bit from there, hitting on a few topics before you plucked up your now exhausted six-year-old charge and carried him home for naptime.

2008

Whoever you thought you might run into at an underground rave, Alec Hardy absolutely did not make the list.

Yet, he was unmistakable.

"Hey babe," you shouted into his ear with a grin, your body moving closer to him in time with the pounding beat of the music playing overhead. "I was wondering where you'd gone!"

"What are you on about? I don't know ye--"

Realization dawned in his eyes, and your grin widened. The last thing he saw before you pulled him into a kiss was a flash of danger in your eyes.

"What the hell?" he all but shouted into your lips.

"Play along, dumbass," you said instead of answering.

He seemed to get the hint, though. He was stiff at first as his hands circled your hips, but the two of you quickly fell back into whatever chemistry you'd had thirteen years ago and he loosened up.

You continued to dance, body grinding against his.

He was still, simply holding you, and when you looked up you saw nothing but adoration in his eyes.

"What?" you asked with a confused smile.

"I wish I'd gotten to see this side of you," he said. "This is how you should've been."

"Coked out?"

"Free."

Several emotions flitted over your face, eventually landing on heartfelt appreciation. "So that's why you broke up with me."

"Yes," was all he said. It was all you needed.

"Why didn't you just say that?"

"Ye would've given up yer freedom 'cause you would've thought that's what I wanted ye to do."

He was right.

"Thank you, Alec," you said quietly, and if not for the tender kiss he placed on your forehead, you would've thought your words lost to the blaring music.

You had to admit, he played the role of "boyfriend" well.

Too well.

It was rather funny, you thought, that he was confused for a patron and arrested along with you.

"I'm never gonna live this down," he moaned into his knees.

"Shut up," you told him with a laugh. "You'll be fine. Officer!" you called, waving your non-cuffed hand to get one of the arresting officers' attention. "Officer, can I get leave from these cuffs to run to the restroom?"

"Can't you hold it?" a gruff voice asked.

"Well, I could try, but then you'll be responsible for all the blood I leave behind."

You had to bite back laughter at the disgusted face the cop made. "Fine, but he stays with you," he said, motioning to Alec.

Alec, to his benefit, didn't protest.

You happily bounced up from the floor, dragging Alec along with you, and made your way to the restroom.

Inside was empty and quiet.

"Oh, this is gonna be a problem," you said thoughtfully.

"If there's anything I can do to help, I'll do it," Alec said, and you were struck by how genuine he was. After all this time, he still loved you -- enough to help you change your tampon, even.

"Oh, that was a lie," you reassured him. "I'm not on my period."

"Then... what are we doing in here?" he asked, looking around like the answer might be written somewhere.

"Busting out, duh."

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me -- I can't get arrested twice!"

"Yeah, that's why we won't be caught."

He dropped his face into his free hand, and you laughed. Quietly.

"C'mon, Hardy. Help me. You said you would."

"Yeah, when I thought ye needed help takin' care of yer period. I did not agree to help ye evade arrest!"

"Isn't it your career on the line, here?" you asked casually, as you eyed the bathroom window.

You heard a grunt behind you. "Ye always were tricky, weren't ye?"

"Like a fox, babe," you agreed.

He moved to stand beside you, looking at the window thoughtfully. "It should have a hatch release," he said, even though neither of you had found one.

"Could it be... subtle?" you asked. "Like a... tiny button?"

"To open a window?"

"I was hoping we wouldn't need to smash it."

"Sorry, but no such luck."

"Fuck. Okay."

You pulled him close to you, hands working quickly to undo the buttons of his shirt.

"I hardly think now's the time for sex," he gasped. "They'll come lookin' for us any moment."

"Yeah, it also won't help us break the window. You know what will, though? A fist, wrapped up in your shirt."

He really was such a dumbass, sometimes.

Once you got to the sleeve of his cuffed arm, together the two of you made quick work of making the necessary tears to get the shirt off completely.

Alec started wrapping the remains of his shirt around his balled fist, but your hands on his stilled him.

"Let me," you said.

"Now's not the time to be a hero," he replied.

"Please."

"Why?"

"If I get injured, I'm the one who broke the glass. I'm the one who gets in trouble. Your career won't be on the line."

"I'll still have let ye do it."

"Please, there's no 'letting' me do anything."

With that, he let you unravel the shirt from his hand and helped you wind it around yours. Then he double-checked it, and triple-checked it.

"When you're ready," he said after his last inspection.

Without hesitation, you punched a hole in the glass, then started knocking the remains out of the sill.

"Have ye done this before?" he asked, impressed and concerned all at once.

"I will let you believe what you want to believe. Now, c'mon!"

The two of you crawled out of the freshly broken window and ran off into the night, laughing and hand-in-hand.

You were lucky that the shop clerk didn't ask questions or call the police as you and Alec, still cuffed together, stepped up to the counter with a small haul.

Alec, ever the responsible one between you two, held a bottle of water, some painkillers, a sports drink, a protein bar, and your favorite candy.

You, ever the partier, held a bottle of beer and an energy drink.

You paid with the banknotes stashed in your bra and carried your haul out into the night.

The two of you walked a ways before finding a park. You dragged Alec over to the swings with a giggle and happily sat in one. He sighed and rolled his eyes, but sat in the swing next to you anyway.

"You're a right menace, y'ken that?" he groaned.

"It's one of my most charming features," you argued, smirking as you popped your beer open and took a sip.

"Why'd ye kiss me?" he asked, staring out over the park.

You shrugged. "The only way you'd ever end up at a rave is if you were undercover or it was some kind of sting operation -- which meant there were dangerous criminals around, and -- I'm sorry, but you do not blend in."

"So you gave me a cover."

"It was that or get stabbed. I'd like to think kissing me isn't as bad as the alternative."

"It was rather unexpected," he said, but you could see him fighting back a smile.

"Speaking of unexpected, when were you gonna tell me you have a key to these cuffs?"

"Oh, never," he said with a laugh.

"Alec Hardy," you said with a dramatic gasp. "Are you arresting me?"

"I could do," he teased, yanking his arm, with enough strength to send you reeling. Instead, though, you were able to catch yourself and swung to face him instead.

When your swing came close enough to his, his legs caught yours and kept you in place while his lips crashed into your own in a bit of a rough -- but sweet -- kiss.

"Alec Hardy," you said again, breathlessly.

He whispered your name into your lips, and you realized it had never sounded as lovely as it did coming from him.

"I love you," you whispered back, and he pulled away to stare longingly, lovingly into your eyes.

"It's not just the coke or booze talkin'?"

"Does it matter if it is? Even if I were completely sober... what could we do? Date again? Get married? You know I'd rather die than settle down."

He did. It was the whole reason he'd let you go.

"What we can do," he started, pulling you into a gentle kiss, "is get ye somewhere safe and comfortable to sober up."

"Your place?" you questioned with a grin.

"Exactly," he responded, and you felt his own smile against your lips. "And then, once yer sober, we can... talk."

With that, the two of you (reluctantly) parted, and Alec led you away into the glimmering city.

No real talking was had for the week you spent at Alec's flat. Sure, words were exchanged, like "What should we have for dinner?" or "What time should I expect you home?" But for the most part, the two of you didn't talk so much as... moan each other's names in a near-constant state of ecstasy.

And boy, did you get great use out of those cuffs.

2013

Of course you'd heard about the Sandbrook case -- even when you and Alec weren't talking, the two of you still kept tabs on each other.

He'd sent you an email when your aunt died. You'd sent him a text when his mum was diagnosed with cancer (luckily, she was fine now, and you'd sent him a text when she'd gone into remission, too).

All that to say that you knew. About the case, sure, but more importantly, about how devastated he was over it. A text wouldn't do. Hell, even a call wouldn't do.

Last you'd heard, he'd relocated to some coastal town called Broadchurch.

So you followed him there.

You hadn't been expecting a murder investigation when you pulled into town, but it was the only thing anyone was talking about, nor were you expecting to organically run into Alec mere minutes after arriving, yet in he walked as you were grabbing a coffee.

"What're you doin' 'ere?" he asked, completely baffled.

The woman beside him looked... well, equally confused. Maybe more? You and Alec just had a habit of running into each other. For her, this was new.

"I heard about Sandbrook," you said simply.

He sighed dramatically, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I don't have time for ye right now."

Ouch.

"Just -- go get set up in the hotel. I'm stayin' there, I'll... I'll see ye." With that, he waved you away. Dismissed you like a dog.

Hmph.

You did get yourself set up in the hotel, of course, but you took your sweet time getting there. There was plenty to do in the town, though the constant mistrustful stares set you a bit on edge.

It was about six when you finally went and got yourself a room, and about ten when you heard a gentle rapping at your door.

"I'm sorry about earlier," was the first thing Alec said as you swung the door open.

You looked him over, now that you had the chance -- he looked haunted, haggard. Sleepless...

"Oh, Alec," you sighed, drawing him into an embrace. He melted into you, holding you tight. "I'm sorry. I should've been there."

"Nothin' ye could've done."

You knew that, of course, and you knew your presence alone wouldn't have chased away that haunted look in his eyes, just as it wasn't doing now, but... you wished it could. You wished it were that easy.

He parted from you with a shaky breath, his eyes rimmed with unshed tears.

And then he yanked you into a desperate kiss.

You didn't protest, and in fact returned it. Neither of you parted as he pushed you back into the room and toed your door shut, nor as the back of your knees hit the bed and you nearly collapsed.

He caught you, held you impossibly close, fingered the hem of your shirt in a silent bid for consent.

You nodded, eagerly, and he made quick work of your clothes -- and you.

You weren't surprised how often Alec came to see you during the Latimer case (okay, maybe you were, a little).

You knew he was just using you for stress relief, but you didn't mind (much). You figured it was penance for being unable to help him during the Sandbrook case. You figured things would go back to normal once this new case was over.

Then the fucker went and had a heart attack or something.

So things returned to normal a bit quicker than you expected.

At least he apologized.

Things were a bit awkward at first once sex was taken off the table. Like the two of you didn't know how to do anything but fuck like rabbits. Eventually, though, you found a groove that worked.

Every night that he came "home," you had dinner, watched a movie, and talked about the bits of your lives you'd missed.

You told him where you'd gone after the breakup. He told you about meeting Tess and having Daisy. You told him about your trip to Tanzania. He told you about becoming Detective Inspector.

"Your life has been much more exciting than mine," he said one night as the two of you lay curled up together in bed.

"Maybe," you said with a shrug. "But you actually did something with yours."

"Naaaah," he growled, making you giggle. "Everyone's different... this is the path I was always gonna be on, and that's the path ye were always gonna be on."

"I guess we're lucky our paths keep crossing from time to time."

"I hope they do far into the future," Alec said with a yawn.

You giggled again. "Go to sleep, dumbass. You have a murder to solve."

"God, don't remind me."

2014

You could feel that Alec was at peace, for once.

Sure, Joe Miller had walked. But Alec knew he'd gotten the right man. And he'd solved the Sandbrook case -- finally gave that family justice and closure. Finally erased that blemish from his conscience.

The two of you celebrated in the only way you really knew how, by making love.

Leaving Broadchurch had always been the plan, for you. You'd stayed, because Alec had needed you to, but you never intended to stay anywhere permanently.

So why did it hurt so much when Alec told you he was leaving?

And why did it hurt so much when you watched his train rattle away?

2017

Alec kept the house in Broadchurch -- mostly for you. He knew you weren't a creature of habit, of settling down and growing roots, but he offered it as a sort of base of operations, with no strings attached. You'd taken the offer, simply because it felt like if you didn't, you'd never hear from him again.

Not that he contacted you anyway.

Until one day, when he'd called you to tell you he was moving back to Broadchurch and would need his house back. You were welcome to stay, he assured you, but he also made it seem like maybe you shouldn't. He was bringing his daughter with him, and she seemed to be in a difficult period of her life.

You wondered if Alec remembered how the two of you had met. Apparently not, given he thought his daughter being a troublemaker would bother you.

So you'd stayed, and they'd moved back in.

Things were tense at first, especially given his first big case upon his return, but eventually it all evened out. You even got on surprisingly well with Daisy, all things considered.

2018

You hadn't meant to stay. It had just sort of... happened. And you hadn't meant to fall back into a relationship with Alec. That had just sort of happened, too.

Yet... you were happy.

For the first time in your life, staying... wasn't so bad. You even thought you could rather do more of it. Maybe not a lot. But... some.

2019

You admired the glittering ring on your finger as reflected lights danced on the ceiling and walls of your tiny little home in Broadchurch.

Alec held you in his arms, and you had your legs draped over his lap. Some old black and white film played on the TV. It was dark and rainy. The night couldn't have been more perfect, even if he hadn't proposed to you on top of it all.

Eventually the two of you moved to your bed, and Alec held you impossibly close, his arms tight but tender around you.

"All I ask," he sighed sleepily, "is that if ye leave, ye always come home to me."

And come home to him you did.

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

Breaking Ajax out of prison. *waves* Hi Wifi! Sending this brainrot in. Enjoy the vacation!

***

You are Wriothsley's well-traveled sister. You've been away from Fontaine for a while, growing your business in Liyue and Inazuma. You walked with a purpose, towards your brother's office in Meropide. Except, you know he wasn't there. He had taken the day off and you were one step closer to being a criminal. You were disgusted at the verdict of the justice machine installed at the Opera Epiclese. You received a letter from one of his agents and your friend, Violet, as you so casually called the Electro Cicin Mage. You rushed back home when you found out that Childe was behind bars.

How dare the nation of justice snatch away the only person who convinced you to live? You met Ajax during a dark period of your life. You had challenged the Oceanid in Liyue, with no intention of fighting back. It was a bit poetic how you wanted to lose your life to water, after leaving the nation of hydro. Ajax watched the battle unfurl from the edge of the mountain, only to notice that you weren't moving at all. You fell to your knees, eyes shut and waiting for the rushing tide that never came. When you opened your eyes, blue eyes peered at you with concern and curiosity. Electro buzzed in the air, only to dissipate with a flick of his hand, as he switched off his Delusion.

Now, it was your turn to save him. You only hoped that your brother's stories were accurate. Your brother has been trying ro recruit you for years, saying that your skill would be very useful in bringing in criminals. Little did he know that you would use the skill that he praised you for, not to bring in criminals but to break out one. Hall after hall, you walked, using the vapor in the air to conceal yourself. Ajax is a Harbinger. They would have kept him in the cells with more security. You just needed a distraction. Thankfully, Violet and her fellow agents, are there to cause a ruckus. You've reached the deepest part of the prison. Your eyes searched for dark, ginger hair - passing by a couple of cells before hearing a muffled groan. You followed the sound, dropping your cover and came face to face with eyes as blue as the depths of Fontaine. Ajax stares at you with alarm and parted lips. Placing your index finger on your lips, you requested his silence. You shut your eyes, concentrating as you became one with the water. Your body separated into tiny bubbles that passed through the small opening of the cell. Your flesh coalesced back into one piece. Ajax' arms found your waist, face pressed against your neck. He had gone too long without you. Your scent brought him comfort.

"Jax," you whispered. "Priorities." You pushed something cold into his hand.

"Oh. My vision," he smiled softly.

"Archons, please do not leave your vision behind. I almost had a heart attack when I saw that it was dull." You bit your lip, turning away. "I thought you.."

Lips pressed against your nape softly before settling on the back of your head. "Sorry. Never again."

A sigh escaped your mouth. You could never stay mad at him. Not when he had to endure being imprisoned. You eyed the inside of the cell.

"But love, now that you're here. What's the plan? When are you visiting again?"

You turn to Ajax with a winning smile, one that you often saw on his face instead of yours.

"I'm not visiting. We're getting out."

You explained how Fatui agents were ready to serve as distractions in different parts of the city. There were mekas prepared to go berserk and run loose. Fontaine is organized, they will subdue the threats quickly. You just needed enough time to get Ajax out.

"How are we getting out? My blades are sharp and ready. Or I could transform." He paused. "I just...i actually just didn't want to transform because of your brother. Didn't want to leave a bad impression."

Your hands found his cheek, stroking softly. He leaned into your hand.

"You've held out long enough. This time, I'm the one saving you. We're leaving without a trace."

His eyes widened slightly.

"I have been practicing a lot. I can do it now for extended periods of time. I can maintain the unseen form for more than one person."

Ajax titled his head to the left, giving your hand on his cheek a soft peck.

"Whatever happens, I'm proud of you. Thank you."

Before you could respond, there was a series of explosions. Shouting followed, then footsteps as guards ran towards the entrance of Meropide.

"Hold my hand. Don't let go."

Ajax stepped closer to you, slotting you against his body as he hugged you right.

"Well, that's also a way of holding me."

Ajax chucked, as he placed his chin on top of your head. Your locked your arms around him. Shut your eyes and both of your bodies dissolved into bubbles. This time, you needed something more advanced than bubbles, you needed to be vapor. Unnoticed and unseen. As vapor, you passed through the high security cells now devoid of guards. You passed through the halls. The strain of the concentration wore you down. But Ajax kept you going. Finally, you passed through the reception and the entrance. You were at the edge of Opera Epiclese but you kept the form for a little while longer. Your forms plunged into the water, now zooming towards Elynas. You online relinquished your hold and control once you've reached the shore. Your forms coalesced back into human bodies.

Ajax' arms were still around you when you fell to the ground in exhaustion. Your breaths came hard and your mind burned in pain. Worry etched over Ajax' face. He needed to take care of you now.

You opened your eyes after a deep sleep. A single crystalline eye peered at you. Happy chirps followed as Legacy nuzzled you.

"Legacy?"

Understanding the question in your voice, Legacy gingerly took a note from the desk and pushed it into your hand.

Childe's wrote: Legacy's face is not recognizable.

You were in an old house that seemed to have been abandoned. The bedsheets seemed cleaned enough. The floors look like they have been mopped recently. In the corner of the room, you spotted a mop with it's handle broken. Legacy must have tried to clean up. You smiled at the thought.

Breaking Ajax out of prison took more effort than you thought. But pushing yourself to the limit proved that you could do it. Your skill was useful after all. Legacy nudged your hand, asking for pets. You scratched behind his horn, earning a rumbling purr. You nuzzled into his side, while petting him. Although on the run and officially a criminal, you felt safest with Ajax and Legacy. You would break the law over and over again if it means keeping them safe.

MACCHIATOOOOO I MISSED YOUUU ;v;;;; AND THIS IS SUCH A MEAL I AM EATING THIS UP

you have to rest for a couple more days after you wake up- pushing yourself so much completely sapped your energy. Legacy does his best to care for you, fetching fruit and flowers from outside while you're confined to bed (the flowers are to cheer you up, because he knows you love them so) and nudging your shoulder with his head to get you to lay down. he desperately wants to make sure that you don't exhaust yourself more, and he WILL lay on top of you to make sure you don't move- carefully, of course! his head nestles in the soft skin of your stomach, brilliant sapphire eye looking at you stubbornly as he lets out a light huff, having found you trying and failing to stand for the third time that day. and once you begin to recover, he helps you walk, gently holding your hands with his claws or even carrying you in his arms to go sit outside for some fresh air, the cool ocean breeze washing over you

there haven't been too many mekas looking for you and Ajax- if you were being honest, you suspect Wriothesley being your brother had something to do with it- and the few that did come after you were swiftly dealt with by a protective Foul Legacy, eagerly bumping his forehead against yours afterwards for pets. he hasn't seen you in so long, after all, always shut away in Ajax's mind even when they were both thrown into prison. he tried to tell the Harbinger that he could help, he could get them out of there, but Ajax always refused! Foul Legacy was so lonely; it was like drowning in a cold, starless sea, bringing back memories he'd rather forget. so he clings to you now, craving the sensation of your gentle hands running through his hair, soft and fragile after being surrounded by the cold metal of the prison. sometimes he finds his thoughts drifting back to icy water and chains and bars and the crushing pressure of the sea, and he curls around you with a whimper, wanting to be held until he drifts off to sleep, comforted by your presence

when you're asleep and he knows no one else is around, Ajax takes over for a few minutes, pulling you close to his chest and murmuring that he missed you so, so much, speaking for both him and Foul Legacy

[a-little-unsteddie]

Give Love a Chance || Original Post

the other day @ladykailitha posted something that just sparked so much joy, i decided i absolutely had to expand upon and write a full story abt it. idk how fast i’ll work on this, as my main focus currently is on the big bang fic, but i wanted to post a prologue/teaser of sorts. (side note: i am definitely stealing piratefishmama’s layout, shhh)

enjoy! -rowan

Steve wasn’t sure how he had gotten here, to be honest. Well, he did, but he didn’t know it would actually get this far. He would like to place the blame on either Dustin or Robin—or both, both was good, too. The point was, Steve was completely faultless in it.

When Steve got home earlier, after a long day at work, he had checked the mail, as he usually does. He saw a letter addressed to him, which, to be fair, makes sense, seeing as it was in his mailbox, but it was the sender that had surprised him. It had been several weeks—at least—since Robin and Dustin had cornered him and forced him to fill out an application to be a bachelor on Give Love a Chance, and he had honestly forgotten about it. He had only agreed to submit an application to the show because he had been so sure that he wasn’t going to make the cut. Who would want to watch a dumb reality love gameshow with Steve as the bachelor? A middle school guidance counselor with a five year old daughter?

Steve had still held that opinion even as he opened the envelope and pulled out the contents. The confidence in his thoughts only waned when he began to read the letter, his eyes had slowly widened and his mouth fell open. He reached for his cell, instinctually calling Robin as he reread the contents of the letter.

“Y’ello?”

“Did you seriously just answer with—nevermind. Robin tell me why the fuck I’m staring at a letter telling me I was chosen to be on Give Love a Chance?” He asked, pacing the length of his kitchen.

“Oh my God!” Robin shouted from his phone, causing Steve to wince and adjust his hearing aid. “Why do you sound upset? This is what you agreed to! This is why we sent in the application in the first place! This is great news!”

“Robin, you and I both know that I only agreed because I thought nothing would come of it.” Steve said flatly, checking the time on the stove. He still had twenty or so minutes before he needed to leave to grab Matilda from preschool. “I’m going to tell them I changed my mind.”

“Absolutely not! I’ll never forgive you. Dustin will never forgive you.”

“What? Am I supposed to just do the show?”

“Yes!” Robin said enthusiastically. Steve let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“What am I going to do with Mattie, huh? I can’t just take her with me, she has school!”

“Dustin already told you that he and Will would take her in!”

“‘Take her in’? Rob, she isn’t a stray cat. She’s a whole tiny human.” Steve said with heavy exasperation. “He may have said that, but that doesn’t mean he will say the same thing now! There’s a difference between us joking about me getting accepted and the reality of taking care of a four year old!” Steve walked to the kitchen sink, filled himself a glass of tap water and set it to the side.

“So, we ask them again! I’m sure they’ll agree! You know they’ve been wanting to adopt! You can think of this as practice for them!”

Steve stared blankly out of the window above his kitchen sink, then groaned loudly and tipped his head back to glare at the ceiling.

“I don’t think I can leave her for the month—or more—it’ll take to film.” Steve admitted with a frown. He could immediately feel Robin’s shift in demeanor with the soft sigh she let out.

“Oh, dingus. You’ll be okay. We can video call her everyday while we're gone.” Robin said softly, trying to soothe him. “I think you should give it a go. You deserve to give love a chance.”

Steve let out a loud groan, which dissolved into a soft laugh. “You did not just say that.”

“I did.”

“That was so bad.”

“I know. But it’s true!”

“You’ll be with me?”

“Every step of the way.”

“..Fine.”

—x—

Dear Steve Harrington,

Congratulations! You have been selected as one of the bachelors to move forward into the next stage—interviewing and filming! We believe you are a perfect fit, and cannot wait to have you at our Los Angeles studio!

If you are still interested, please contact us via email to receive more details about what comes next.

Thank you,

Murray Bauman, Host of ‘Give Love a Chance’

[hitechlatte]

Alrightie! Thanks for waiting FINALLY GOT POLLS WORKING!

This poll will run for a week and you can pick which fic I write first! Each of these fics will take me 4-6 weeks to write depending on their length so I’ll keep you posted!

More details about each of the fics here:

Rise!Mikey X GN!Reader:

You had been Mikey's friend for years. His best friend in fact.

He had two drawers in your dresser and his own bean bag chair at your place.

Every minor update in your life, good, bad or ugly, he was the first person you'd text.

And who else did he call at 3am to rant about his family or vigilante escapades?

But now... you’d be gone for a 2 year service with the Peace Corps. 

Of course he’d miss his best friend, but you’d be back eventually and you promised to call everyday.

So then why couldn’t he shake the aching feeling in his stomach?

Why did everything suddenly feel... different?

Rated T or M, Friends to Lovers, Fluff, Two Idiots Sharing A Brain Cell

Rise!Raph X Irma

(This is Irma from the TMNT universe, just recreated with my own spin for ROTTMNT)

Irma’s internship with the NYPD was more than she could have ever asked for.

A job in her field, a possible switch to the FBI already in the works, and assisting her boyfriend on the occasional mission? 

She really had it made.

However, her romantic escapade with the red turtle was no secret around the office. So of course, her squadmates kept begging to hear the story of how the two of them got together.

So one lunch she finally caved and regaled the tale of how she fell in love with one of the infamous NYC turtles.

Rated T or M, Strangers to Lovers, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks/Telling Stories, Crime Fighting Adventures

Rise!Future Donnie X GN!Reader

This was really happening, Donatello Hamato had actually proposed. 

After everything the two of you had been through with the Purple Dragons, your memory loss, Baxter Stockboy and now your insane work schedules, this was a welcomed surprise.

And now with the wedding only days away, everyone had come to stay in the lair. Including, the renown Casey Jones.

However, you were surprised when this cool headed vigilante from the future stood in front of you, stammering uncontrollably.

“Y/N… I think- I- it’s um... time I showed you these… I’m sorry I didn’t before, it’s just- it's never easy to…”

You could see he was holding back tears as he placed the tiny USB in your hand.

“You have the right to read these… To know what happened.”

Rated M, Strangers to Lovers, Angst, Major Character Death, Heartbreak, Grief, Flashbacks/Telling Stories

Rise!Leo X Usagi

Raph had his police work, Donnie had his tech and Mikey was on course to be the next big chef.

But besides protecting the city, Leo had nothing.

So when Usagi suggested that Leo should try out for this year's Battle Nexus Tournament, the blue turtle swore he finally found his calling.

However, the elation quickly faded when rejection after rejection flooded his inbox, each justification for denial stupider than the last. 

A fighter with his skill should have teams begging him to join. But the only group even willing to include him on their roster was practically a pyramid scheme!

Leo was started to wonder if a mutant could ever make it in the Yokai world.

Rated M, Friends to Lovers, Angst, Mutant/Yokai Racism, Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment, Discrimination and Emotional Abuse

Thanks again for your love and interest! Can't wait to see what you all pick!

[suratan-zir]

Remember I shifted the responsibility to you? Y'all got me into trouble.

this is yet another post about rats, I'm sorry

About a week ago, I was feeling exceptionally anxious and overall unwell, so I did what I typically do to make things even worse. I looked through the rat ads online and found what I was looking for. In a city next to my town, a classic case of a rat in a tiny prison cell. Most likely bought for a child who got bored of it, either because it's not as cute anymore, its claws are too sharp, it smells bad or whatever the reason is. I've rescued quite a few of such unfortunate rats in the past. My most beloved rat of all times, Bambook, the little guy on my user icon, once was rescued from these conditions:

(yes, I keep the old screenshots because I'm sentimental like that)

So when I saw this post, my brain went like "this will be Bambook number two, same age, same conditions, even at the same price! I'll save him, love him and finally, after over a year of grieving, will let Bambook go"

(mind you, this rat is only 4-5 months old, very skinny and weighs 300 grams. Adult males can weight from 600 to 700 grams on average. Yet in this cage he looks big because of how small it is)

I went to that city, two teenage girls, who were looking kinda scared for some reason, handed me this tiny boy. I was asked to bring "a box or something" because "the cage is sold separately". I brought a carrier that was probably bigger than the torture devise they call a "cage".

I could barely talk to them, they started almost running away immediately after handing me the rat. Initially I didn't think much of it, I'm sort of used to people being scared of me. I'm told that I have a weird gloomy, unfriendly look on my face. But they probably wanted to get rid of him before I notice...

On the way home the rat was sweet and gentle, licking my hands and enjoying being petted. But when we got home…oh boy. I always knew that male rats can exhibit hormonal aggression, especially at the age of 6-8 months. But in the years of keeping rats, I never ever encountered such aggression towards humans. Guess I was just lucky.

At first he's cute and cuddly, calm even, then something switches inside his brain and in an instant he goes into killing mode. He attacks not only hands, he bites even knees and thighs, basically every body part he can reach. Then he calms down and demands pets again. He not only bites, but thinks I'm his bitch. After what he did to my hands and knees, they might be pregnant… The girls mentioned that he lived with another rat before they moved him to that cage. I assume it was a female and he mated with her, which made him even more hormonal.

So, everyone, meet Skritch. He went to horny jail and they stole his balls.

Also, the photo where he's stoned is the best photo I have of him, because he won't stop moving.

Skritch is smart, sweet and very friendly whenever he's not attacking me.

He was neutered only yesterday, so it is too early to judge the changes in his behavior. But he no longer bites my hand in the cage, even when we wrestle, which is a huge improvement. But unfortunately, he still didn't pass the couch test. (couch is the place where he gets most aggressive, probably because of the smells of other rats)

He attacked me only once today, the result you can see on the video, it's not nearly as bad as his bites were before. And after that, as always, he acted all innocent and affectionate and fell asleep by my side.

I already love him so much, even if he's a menace. But I am so not looking forward to introducing him to my other boys. Something tells me it's not gonna be easy.

[tsintotwo]

[59 Hours, Part 3. (Part 2 here). Jake (Sweetbitter) x You. 18+ ONLY, there’s stuff about drugs in here. a. Please keep in mind I made most of the drug stuff up, and b. Don’t do drugs!! (Drama. Disturbing + tender things. I loved writing this so much, IDK why.)]

Hour 17

Someone’s burying you alive. And they’re laughing a mad laugh. No, now they’re grunting, like an animal in pain. It’s so dark, and so, so cold-

You awake in a deep haze of confused panic. No, you’re not in a pit in the ground, you’re here- but where is here? And why is it colder than death?

It takes a long minute for everything to come back to you- New York, the blizzard, Jake’s apartment. But you still don’t understand why it’s so dark and cold. And then another loud grunt makes your heart thud. Someone is making sounds, it wasn’t just a dream.

Slowly, you realize what’s going on- a power cut. There’s no light anywhere, and the heating stopped- who knows when. By now, the apartment is a refrigerator. You fell asleep on your couch, and your phone can’t be too far away. You feel for it in the dark and find it tucked under your thigh. Your movements are slow, your hands feel frozen, your face is numb, your legs seem to weigh 200 pounds each. Somehow, you switch on the flashlight app, the harsh glare making you cringe. Standing up is an effort. But moving is bringing a tiny bit of feeling back in your body.

The first thing you do is to find more clothes. You put on layers, socks, your coat. By now, you’re sure the periodic grunting sounds like Jake. Is he having a nightmare too? Where is he?

He’s lying on the floor in the next room, and what he’s having is a hundred times worse than a nightmare. You’ve seen it only once before, and it looks different on different people, but you’re pretty sure. He’s having a bad trip.

He’s on his side, curled up tight and shaking violently. He’s still not wearing a shirt, but when you tentatively put your hand on his shoulder, his skin is burning. Your touch must be icy to him, but it doesn’t seem like he feels it. He’s groaning and grunting into the crook of his elbow, breathing hard, his eyes twitching, his lashes and face wet with tears.

You had knelt on the floor beside him, now you set your phone down and let your knees give way. What are you supposed to do now?  

It doesn’t occur to you that you could not do anything for Jake, because very, very clearly, he is in pain. In a dark place, being tortured. It’s visible on his face, audible in his thick animal whimpers. He was a complete asshole to you earlier, but right now that’s irrelevant- you want to help him. You’d want to help anyone going through this. Also, lying here like this, he’ll freeze to death.

You pick up your phone again. No bars. What the hell is going on, the apocalypse? Suddenly your stomach clenches in fear. What if a riot has broken out in the city, and you don’t even know? What if something like The Purge happens? People entering other people’s homes, raping and killing…

You shake your head. You can still hear the wind- the blizzard- or this installment of the blizzard- is going on in full-force. People couldn’t ‘riot’ in this weather, and this is also the reason fot the power cut, and the bad cell reception. There must be people out trying to fix things, and you’re sure they’ll do it soon. You just need to wait it out.

Taking a deep breath, you call, ‘Jake.’

No response. Okay, it wasn’t going to be that easy. Think. For your job, you often go to ‘bad’ neighborhoods where drug abuse is prevalent. At work, they try to prepare you for things you might see. Maybe not so much acid, but still, didn’t you attend a seminar once, where someone talked about how they helped someone else going through a bad trip?...

Lowering your head, you keep calling Jake’s name, making it sound as soothing as possible. You run your hand on his back and shoulder. More than knowledge, instinct tells you that he needs to be pulled out of the pit he’s being buried in, he needs to feel that he’s not alone, not lost.

You’re almost surprised when it seems to work. His shaking subsides a little, and he moves his head, trying to look up at you. His eyes are half-open, hazy and far away. They’re glistening with tears.

Moving closer, you pull up his upper body on your lap, cradling his head on the crook of your elbow. This was instinct too, or, more than that, this was sympathy. You are very aware that there’s nothing romantic about drug abuse or terrifying hallucinations. You just see a person in pain, and you want to make it go away, make them feel safe- it’s as simple as that.

You wipe Jake’s eyes and face with your hand. Then you hold his hand, and you talk to him in a soothing murmur. You don’t even know what you’re saying. ‘It’s fine, you’ll be all right, look at this, no electricity, can you believe it? My hands are freezing, and my feet, ugh, you are completely freezing, we have to do something about this soon, you’ll move, right, ‘cause I for sure can’t carry you anywhere-‘

You don’t know if you’re getting through to him. But you can’t give up trying.

Hour 18

You don’t know how long you keep this up- your hand is hurting from holding him and you’re out of breath talking in the cold. Your tongue is getting heavy, your teeth chatter. Jake’s breathing has evened out, his face seems more rested, but he’s starting to shiver, you think from the cold this time.

It’s a real struggle pulling him to a sitting position, then to a standing position, then supporting- almost half-carrying- him to bed. But the threadbare carpet was doing nothing to suppress the chill wafting up from the floor, you couldn’t have been there all night.

Pushing him down to the bed, you adjust the pillow under his head and cover him with the sheet that’s there. You hunt around for a better blanket. You find one in a drawer- thankfully, the small apartment doesn’t accommodate many pieces of furniture, so it wasn’t that hard. It’s thick, and big, and yeah, there’s just one. You cover Jake with it.

It seems so strange to be hungry right now, but suddenly you feel that you are. You have a few granola bars in your backpack. You munch one. Drink some water. Make a trip to the restroom. Take off your jacket and the top layer. Then you get into bed beside Jake under the blanket. Even in all your clothes, you weren’t going to survive the night without any covering.

Waking up in panic, discovering the power outage, seeing Jake like that, then trying to solve the situation- you were on an adrenaline high. You’re coming down now, and the deep surrealness of it all seems to close around you. So much has happened in the last 16 hours, none of it you could’ve ever imagined. You’ve turned off the phone flashlight to save battery- who knows when power will be back- and it’s completely dark. And does Jake even have any neighbors? In your town, families would be coming together right now. But here, you didn’t hear any sounds in the hallway, or from other apartments. Everyone is so isolated, dealing with their own demons in the dark. You feel like a ghost in a ghost town suddenly, as if none of this is real, not even you.

But then Jake moves beside you. You thought he fell asleep, or finally passed out, but now he’s fitful, tossing, muttering words you don’t understand. He reaches out blindly, and finds you next to him in the narrow bed. He turns on his side, pulling you in, and in the next second, he’s burying his head in the crook of your neck, his face cold against your skin, the metal chain around his neck sending a shock of chill down your shoulder. He’s shivering again, uttering tiny cries, and as if on their own, your arms go around him. He’s still very cold, it makes you shiver too. ‘Shhhhhh’, you say in the dark, running your finger through his hair, ‘Shhhh.’

Earlier, after your fight- or whatever it was- you curled up in a ball on the couch, and you didn’t cry for long- crying for a dude was something you’d had enough of already- but you thought about it all for a long time before falling asleep. And you had to acknowledge to yourself that you’d been sending Jake major mixed signals. You knew the type of guy he was the minute you walked in here, and you still expected too much from him. Or you didn’t, really, you just couldn’t stop yourself from wanting him until you’d pulled the plug at the worst time. But you still know that you have the right to take that decision anytime- it’s called consent- and he was a complete jerk for acting like he did and belittling you for it. You don’t forgive him for that. But right now, he’s at his most vulnerable, and you can’t hate him.

Against your body, Jake is still restless. You’re exhausted, and choked with a strange unmooring sensation all on a sudden- this pitch dark, cold, quiet except the cries of a stranger falling apart in your arms- but he doesn’t feel like a stranger, he’s another lost soul, just like you. You need to not let your mind scatter, not become hyper, you need to be the calm one. So you do the first thing you can think of- you start to sing.

It's a lullaby your mother sang to you when things were good, and there was sunshine, and you had a dad, and you didn’t know what ‘depression’ meant. It’s good memories, nice dreams, peace. You sing to calm yourself down, but Jake calms too, slowly quieting, sighing deeply against your neck. Maybe it's the shared warmth of bodies, maybe it's Jake's arms pulling you against himself more snugly, maybe it's the soft song in the dark- but after years, you feel a trace of that old peace again. You don’t know when your singing trails off and the world melts into sleep.

Hour 24

The next time you open your eyes, it’s daylight. Dim daylight, the world outside the window still grayed out, wind still rattling the panes, though it seems more muted. But it’s morning.

You look beside you. Jake is not here. But it’s still very snug under the blanket. Too snug. Then you realize- the heating is on. Power came back.

You sit up and reach for your phone. There’s cell signal back- though still only two bars. You have a worried text from your mother and one from your sister. You wonder if your mom made your sister write hers (‘but you’re writing one anyway’-). You don’t get along very well, you and your sister. Or rather, she doesn’t like you very much. You guess you can’t blame her. Growing up, you were more like a strict parent to her rather than a fun big sister, and she never did see you as anything else. You only texted her instead of your mom last night because she at least checked her phone. Your brother is too young now, but you think once he starts having a life of his own he’ll hate you too-

A sound breaks you out of your depressing thoughts. It’s Jake- walking in, coffee mug in hand. The ocean-blue of his eyes looks clear, his hair glistens as if he’s run his wet hands through it. Strangely, it feels weird to see him back in his t-shirt. You were getting used to the shirtless thing, hah.

He sits on the couch, and says, ‘What the fuck happened last night?’

You reply, ‘Power outage.’

He frowns. Clearly, he knows that’s not the only thing that happened, but you don’t know how much he remembers, or how he remembers it, and you don’t want to say anything that he might not be comfortable with. Anyway, you don’t even know how to explain last night. The memory of it already seems smoky like a dream.

He’s not saying anything else, so you get out of bed, and get freshened up. You open his fridge and raise your voice, ‘Is it okay if I make some eggs?’ The options are not great in here.

‘Whatever.’, is his response, so you make some, and declare, ‘I made enough for two.’

You don’t wait for him. He is constantly smoking or taking sips of some drink, (or worse, you think), so you understand him never being that hungry. But you need to eat.

He joins you though, shoveling eggs in his mouth like he has some kind of personal vendetta against them. You both finish in silence. Then you go put your phone on charge while browsing the internet. It’s still painfully slow, but it’s working. You need it to work. You need to know what’s going on in the outside world. Then you need to leave here.

‘What happened last night?’, Jake has followed you back, and asking this again. This time there’s a touch of dread and thunder in it. Things must be coming back. As you look up, his unhappy scowl makes you sigh. Just- you don’t have the energy to think about being diplomatic with him anymore. You say, ‘I guess you made use of the last of your stash. Then you had a bad trip.’

He’s silent, small lines on his forehead. From the way his eyes move and micro-expressions flicker on his face, you know he must be remembering a lot now. No happy thoughts there, that’s for sure. You look at your phone again. According to the reports, the blizzard is mostly over, just the tail end of it passing through and expected to be gone by this afternoon. But the city is under six feet of snow, and there are at least four major crashes and roadblocks between here and the airport anyway. Even if flights resumed tonight, you don’t see how you would get there by that time.

‘Were you singing?’, Jake had been pacing, now he suddenly stops, coming to stand in front of your couch.

‘Yeah’, you say without looking up, ‘You seemed to like it.’

Silence. You look at him, and he looks like he can’t process this, so you say, ‘Jake, it’s okay. You had some bad time, you don’t need to linger on it. Or do, I guess, it’s your choice, but it’s okay now.’ You feel the need to let him know that you won’t be imposing on him much longer, so you tell him that. ‘I’m looking for a motel or something in walking distance. The storm is supposed to be over by afternoon. Then I’ll get out.’

‘You weren’t even wearing snow boots.’

You sigh. That’s true. ‘I guess I’ll just have to deal with wet socks, then.’

‘I was on the floor’, he can’t seem to let go of last night.

‘Yeah.’

‘You pulled me to bed?’

‘Yeah. And you only have one blanket, apparently, so that’s why I got in there with you, otherwise I much more prefer this couch, trust me.’

But he’s not listening anymore. ‘I was there', he says again, as if to himself, ‘I was-‘, he stops. His jaw clenches, then he turns his face. And walks away.

You understand what’s going on here, you think. Jake has certainly had bad trips before, there’s no way he hasn’t. But maybe he’s never had one alone, or no, worse- one in front of a stranger. All your trauma bared to someone you don’t even know- and then to have them take control when you’re completely helpless- he’s embarrassed. You sigh. That train of thought only leads to a wreck, and whatever your dynamic is with Jake, you’d rather stop it.

He's sitting at his small table, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. You take the chair opposite him, and say, ‘I got my period during a book report.’

‘What?’, he looks up, utter confusion on his face. No disgust though, so props to him.

‘My first period. Didn’t even know what it was. Mom hadn’t briefed me, and I got it early, so we hadn’t gotten to that class at school. I thought the aches in my abdomen were just from bad food or something.’

He’s listening, not sure where this is going.

‘Then I get in front of the class for a book report presentation, and I loved that book, so I was eager, really getting into it, and then there’s just blood coming down my thigh, dripping. I didn’t even realize at first, but the kids started pointing right away, and I looked down, panicked so hard, didn’t know what to do- did I cut myself? What? In my panic, I ignore it, I try to concentrate on my report, and by now everyone is laughing, and I’m getting louder, and it hurts so bad too, and Mr. Oswald, he was, like, 25, he didn’t know what to do- eventually I ran out crying. Leaving a trail of period blood on the floor.’

Jake is staring at you, ‘The point?’

‘The point is, I just told you the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. And you have to admit it’s pretty fucking embarrassing. Now we’re even.’

‘Because you told me about something that happened when you were thirteen.’

‘Ten, actually. But no. Because everyone called me Bloody Mary after that. That nickname stuck through middle school. Wasn't fun. And yet, I had friends. I had people who saw me at my most helpless moment and still decided that didn’t matter, that didn’t define me. And these were kids.’ You pause, then say, ‘I’m not a kid. I know shit happens. I don’t judge people for it. And they shouldn’t judge themselves either.’

You don’t know why you’re going this far to convince Jake that you don't judge him or he doesn’t need to be embarrassed. You guess it’s more about you than about him. You can’t have him, or anyone, thinking of you in a way that’s not accurate to who you are. Maybe it’s a flaw you have.

Jake is quiet now, taking in your words. Then he sighs, and says, ‘I owe you an apology.’

‘You do.’

He nods, ‘I was a dick to you last evening. I’m… sorry.’ Not used to saying this word much, you think. ‘I’m so used to seeing whores, I forgot that doesn’t have to be the norm. You do you, whatever.’

‘You don’t-‘, you shake your head, ‘You don’t need to put down all the other women-‘

‘Who’s putting them down?’, Jake blinks innocently, ‘I love whores!’

You cock your head, ‘Is that why you are one?’

He laughs then, a genuine, out-loud laugh with a guttaral sound- you haven’t seen this before. You kind of love it. And you forgive him- his apology was genuine.

You were going to ask something about his wifi when he says, ‘You’re not really thinking about leaving in the afternoon, are you?’

You frown, ‘Of course I am.’

‘Unreasonable. There’s no way you can walk anywhere in this snow.’

‘I can try.’

‘So that you can slip and land in a hospital?’

That’s actually a real possibility, and you don’t know what to say. ‘Maybe an Uber-‘

‘What’s the hurry? You gotta work?’

‘No, they know about NYC and told me to take as much time as I need, actually-‘

‘So?’

‘I don’t want to bother you anymore, okay?’

'Please keep trying to bother me. Your efforts are very amusing.’ He’s joking, but also kind of not, and then he does something unexpected. Your hand was on the table. He slips his under it. Holding your hand, he leans in.

‘Stay.’, he says, voice low.

He’s not joking now. In fact, this is is probably the most serious he’s been since you came here. And on his face, you see it. Singing is not the only thing he remembers of you from last night.

A few seconds of silence. Then you say, ‘Okay.’

Maybe you’ll regret it. But maybe you found your own drug. Maybe it is Jake.

[Update: Part 4 here]

[douglass-fir]

"There was only one bed" but it’s Jinkook accidentally locked in an IKEA tiny-house model.

They only meant to nap for a moment. Just “rest” their eyes for a bit during a hectic day of shopping. But when they awaken in a quiet IKEA, locked in a tiny-home model, Jungkook leaps into action.

Cell service sucks in the metal-roofed warehouse. But Jungkook manages to find a brief window of service—not to call the police, but to search YouTube for survival tips.

“Hyung—it says we have to shelter-in-place,” Jungkook yells as he strips the pillows off the couch to build a “fort” in the living room.

With little cell signal and zero work responsibilities beating down his door, Seokjin declares this the “best day of his life” and promptly plops face-first on Jungkook's pile of cushions for a nap.

Meanwhile, Jungkook works out their "survival game plan". During this time, Jungkook builds a proper pillow fort (around a sleeping Seokjin), and collected all the sample food in the kitchen into one "emergency rations corner".

He grabs a string of fairy lights from the wall and re-routes it to cast a calming glow in their pillowy safe-house.

Jungkook reads that warmth is a "key to survival", so he takes the most important step of crawling into the pillow fort, wiggling up to Seokjin's chest and wrapping his arms around him to keep him warm from the chilly warehouse air.

Seokjin cracks an eye open to the sight of fairy lights under a canopy of blankets, Jungkook's warmth around him.

"You take such good care of hyung, Jungkook-ah," he whispers with a fond smile. He kisses the top of a sleeping Jungkook's head, and pulls him closer before falling back asleep.

But Jungkook heard every word, and feels chest fill with warmth, so proud that he was able to properly care for his hyung.😌

That was truly all he ever wanted.

******

Jungkook wakes a few hours later nestled in Seokjin’s arms, tucked away in their little pillow fort when he realizes…he needs a bathroom.

Like now.

So he tiptoes around Seokjin, snoring in their pillow fort, and stacks chairs and tables until he can scale the wall and quietly unlock the door to the tiny house from the outside.

Seokjin startles awake later to the sound of Jungkook plopping down beside him.

“Hyung, look!”

Seokjin wipes the sleep from his eyes to see Jungkook holding a massive bag of gummies, and Seokjin instantly knows he fell in love with the right man.

“Jungkook-ah, we’re free?” he asks with a sleepy mouth full of candy.

“Yeah…" Jungkook says with a sad smile. "I guess we are. I mean…the warehouse is still locked. But we have the whole place to ourselves!"

“You know what this means, don’t you, Jungkook-ah?”

“We call the police to unlock the doors?”

“Shopping cart race!” Seokjin says as he stands, dusts his hands off, and takes off running.

Jungkook and Seokjin spend the next hour racing flatbed carts down the aisles, assigning the winner based on the best 2 out of 3.

Then 3 out of 5.

Then 6 out of 10.

Next, they raid the candy wall and Seokjin’s heart melts at the way Jungkook stuffs his bunny cheeks, making an angry face when something tastes too good for words.

Then it’s off to the furniture aisles to conduct “important research”—jumping on each bed, and rating it on a scale of 1-10 for its ability to handle “acrobatics and sex stuff.”

Seokjin eventually bounces to the floor and stretches. “Be right back, Jungkook-ah. Hyung’s gotta use the restroom.”

He heads to the back of the warehouse, does his business, and is running back toward Jungkook’s voice—when he stops in his tracks.

It’s a door. An employee exit door.

He gently pushes on the handle.

It’s unlocked from the inside.

Seokjin quietly peeks his head out, a cool breeze hitting his face as he hears Jungkook’s laugh echoing in the distance.

“Oh my god, hyung, you gotta try this bed! I almost did a flip!” Seokjin hears faintly.

Jungkook sounds like a kid again. Vibrating with simple joy, without a care in the world.

Seokjin’s heart clenches and he purses his lips. He knows what he has to do.

“Be right there, bun,” he shouts as he lets the door close behind him, running back toward Jungkook.

He never mentions the door. 💕

twitter | ao3

[creat0r-cat]

Yancy x reader - Behind the Pen

(Y/n) had come to expect letters arriving in her cell every other day. It was a constant thing now. Her family wrote to her occasionally, but the majority of notes she received were from someone she didn't recognize. 

And how could she recognize a letter from someone who never signed it? 

As cliche as it sounded, her apparent admirer was constantly complimenting her through his penmanship. The only reason she knew he was a male was because he had said before in a past letter, "A man like me doesn't deserve an angel like you." 

That comment had made her blush so much that the other female prisoners worried she was running a fever. 

(Y/n) held a new note in her hand, admiring just how simple it was. A small piece of paper with the front held together by a red heart sticker, like you would find on a first grader's valentine. Inside was some messy yet intelligible handwriting that looked like an attempt at fancy calligraphy.

"(Y/n), 

A dove like you should be away and free from us ravens and crows. But of course, this jailbird fell in love with you and can only dream of making you his own. After what I've done with my life, how could I deserve to even be close to you, much less your lover? Nevertheless, like Romeo, I will continue to love you, my Juliet, even if it kills me." 

(Y/n) blushed and walked out of her cell and made it to the yard where a majority of people were gathered. Like usual, they were either playing basketball, lifting weights, or taking a small nap in the sunlight. It was a gorgeous day outside and sleep sounded very appealing, but (Y/n) had something to do first.

"Hey guys!" She greeted her fellow female prisoners, the letter clutched in her hand. Tiny, one of the tougher girls, smiled at her mischievously. "Ohhh~ you got another letter? What does it say this time?" 

Some of the other girls crowded around her to hear the reply as it was read out. They were all romantics in some kind of way and a secret admirer story unfolding right in front of them was certainly exciting. 

"Well, he told me that I didn't belong in a place like this, and he even called me his Juliet." Some of the ladies let out an "awww" and Tiny wrapped her arm around (Y/n)'s shoulders. "Man, he really seems to have a thing for you, huh? Who do you think it is?" 

"I don't know. I keep hoping I can pick up signs or some kind of hint when I interact with the boys, but I'm not picking up on anything. I guess I'm just really boggled that I even have a.." 

She trailed off as she looked toward a group of 8 boys playing basketball over in the prison court. There, being patted on the back after an amazing 2-point shot, was Yancy. (Y/n) blushed, seeing how his slightly damp shirt clung to his toned body, his skin slightly shining from sweat as he panted and smiled at his teammates. 

Time just seemed to move in slow motion when she looked at him. He was beyond attractive. He was so handsome, he could kill ladies with just a look. Heh, maybe that's another reason why he was in prison. 

"(Y/nnn)? Hello?" Tiny waved a hand in front of her face, seeing that her friend had zoned out. "Huh? Oh sorry. Were you asking me something?" Some of the other girls gave each other knowing looks and (Y/n) looked at them in confusion. "Am I missing something?" 

"You have it rough for him, huh?" Asked Tiny and (Y/n)'s face erupted into a bright red blush. "Huh? Why would you say that? He's my friend, granted that he's a very attractive friend, but still!" 

"Girl, admit it. You have a big ol' crush on Yancy." (Y/n) knew she was caught and she looked down in embarrassment. "I.. gosh I know I do but I feel kinda bad about it because I have no idea who's writing me these notes. I kinda hope it's him, but if it's not I'm gonna feel terrible if I don't like this guy back and reject him."

"Reject who?" 

(Y/n) stiffened, recognizing the voice that came up behind her. "Oh, hey Yancy," said Tiny with a smirk, "we were just talking about (Y/n)'s secret admirer." (Y/n) turned around to see the scruffy faced man she had grown to love. He smiled while his tattooed hand rubbed the back of his neck. 

"A secret admirer eh? You don't usually see dat in prison. Yous gots any idea who it could be?" (Y/n) shook her head. "I don't recognize the handwriting and I haven't really got any other clues, so no not really. Do you know anything?"

Yancy shrugged. "We males don't really talk about all dat romance and lovey dovey stuff, but I'll keep an eye out for ya." 

"T-thanks." Was all (Y/n) could say while shyly looking up at his grinning face. He really was so kind. A criminal with a heart of gold. Yancy nodded at the girls behind (Y/n) and turned to leave, joining the other boys back on the court. 

Turning back, (Y/n) saw the girls smirking and looking at her expectantly. “What? Is there something on my face?” Tiny shook her head and laughed softly. “No, it’s just that some of us already know who your admirer is.” (Y/n) was shocked. “What?? Who is it?? Tell me!” Giggling, the girls began to move away, shaking their heads. “Sorry, we can’t say anything. Good luck figuring it out though.” 

“Tiny! Guys! Come on, I thought we were friends!” Laughed the (h/c) female as she chased after them. 

From across the yard, Yancy watched their interaction and he bit his lip nervously. He knew that Tiny and the other girls wouldn’t tell (Y/n) about his secret crush on her, but still, he swore that they loved to tease him with their knowing looks. “Oi, Yancy pay attention!” Said Sparkles McGee, tossing him the basketball. “Sorry. Was just thinking ‘bout stuff, y’know.” 

Bam Bam smirked at him. “Oh, thinking about (Y/n) again are we?” Yancy looked over at him quickly, “What? No! ‘Course not. What makes youse say dat? I think of other things.” 

“Riiiiight, because staring at her and losing touch with reality means you’re thinking about other things.” Laughed McGee and Yancy pouted a little. “Shut up, it isn’t like dat.” 

“We all know about those love notes you’ve been sending her. I’m surprised she doesn’t know it’s you sending them yet.” 

“Well, she doesn’t need t’know either.” Snapped the handsome prisoner, glaring at his friends and tossing the basketball to the net only to miss. “I doubt she feels the same anyway.” 

“Are you kidding?” said Bam Bam, looking at Yancy with evident shock and confusion. “Have you seen the way she looks at you? I swear you’re just as oblivious as she is!” This was news to the man in question and he looked over to where his crush sat with her friends. She relaxed under a tree, her (h/c) hair slightly messy from the light breeze that flowed through the yard. She laughed, her melodious voice sounding like a symphony to Yancy. 

(Y/n) suddenly looked over at him when Tiny pointed him out. She smiled at him, waving, and as he blushed, he waved back. His heart beat so fast and he resisted the urge to run away to his cell. He had a reputation to uphold as the Prison Tough Guy. Turning away, he saw the guys smirking at him and he shook his head, the basketball being passed to him again. “Shut up youse guys.”

-time skip-

As (Y/n) sat in her cell a few nights later, unable to sleep. She was thinking about her admirer. Who could it possibly be? Gosh, she hoped it was Yancy. No, she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Any girl would die to have him as their lover, even if he was a murderer, but Yancy sees all the prisoners as family, so he probably only sees her as a sisterly figure. Her secret admirer was probably someone else. 

That same night, Yancy slaved over pieces of paper in his cell. He struggled to come up with the right words to write down, having to start over every time he made a mistake. “You’re my own personal angel.. Ugh no. ‘ve used somethin’ like dat already. Uhh.. You’re so beautiful… naw. Gosh I’ve used up everythin’.” His eyelids were drooping, exhaustion washing over his body. Yancy wanted to give (Y/n) another letter, but he was too tired to write. “Oh well. Maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow..” He thought as he drifted off to sleep surrounded by his crumpled papers.

-timeskip-

“Have you guys seen Yancy?” Asked (Y/n) the next morning. He hadn’t shown up for breakfast which was very unlike him. Both girls and boys alike shook their heads, but then one voice piped up. “I passed by his cell on the way to breakfast,” said Sparkles McGee, “He was fast asleep. I think he was writing a new song or something last night and zonked out in the middle of it.” 

“Why don’t you go wake him up, (Y/n).” Suggested Tiny and (Y/n) nodded. “Sure. I’ll be back.” She stood up and made her way down the hall to Yancy’s cell. Sure enough, when she entered, the soft sound of Yancy’s light snoring. 

(Y/n)’s heart melted at the adorable sight before her. Yancy was curled up in his bed, cuddling both his pillow and his prison bed blanket. Around him were a bunch of crumpled up pieces of paper. (Y/n) frowned, wondering what exactly he had been writing so late at night. Sure she could just assume that they were just tossed lyrics to a new song, like McGee said, but curiosity was a powerful force and she couldn’t help but look. 

She opened the nearest piece of wrinkled paper and her eyes widened. It was a note for her, but most of the writing was scribbled out. (Y/n) could only make out a few words and sentences here and there as she continued looking through the discarded notes. Lots of the phrases were familiar. The handwriting was sloppy but legible, writing out similar sentences to previous letters she had received. (Y/n) could barely contain her tears of joy as she looked at the sleeping man before her. 

Yancy was her secret admirer all along.

Placing the gathered papers to the side, (Y/n) crept over to his side and she smiled, reaching over and gently caressing the right side of his face. Yancy leaned into her touch in his sleep, letting out a small purr of pleasure. The poor man was touch starved after all his years in prison and now he finally had the chance to receive the comfort and love that he was craving. 

Slowly, Yancy’s eyes began to open and he looked up into (Y/n)’s shining eyes. “(Y-Y/n)? What’re you…” his voice trailed off as her hand trailed up his chiseled jaw into his black hair. He began to fully wake up and he realized what was happening as well as the state of his cell, or more accurately the state which his cell was supposed to be in. 

He sat bolt upright, accidentally hitting his head on the top bunk and almost squashing (Y/n)’s hand, and looked around to find that all the papers that were previously strewn around on the floor were nowhere to be found. “Looking for these?” Came (Y/n)’s teasing voice as she held up a stack of small wrinkled papers. 

Yancy paled noticeably and his hands began to shake. “(Y-Y/n), p-please, I can explain!” He stood up from his bed, fear written all over his face. “Yancy-” 

“No, please listen. I know I’ve been lyin’ to ya about not knowing who was writin’ youse those letters, but I was afraid that youse wouldn’t like me back ‘n I just wanted youse to kinda fall in love with me indirectly before I asked youse to be mine, y’know?”

“Yancy, I-”

“I understand if youse don’t like me back, but-”

“YANCY!!!” He stopped speaking and looked at (Y/n) as she looked at him with an amused smile. “You don’t need to explain yourself. Heck, you had me mostly convinced it was someone else writing these letters.”

“I.. I did?”

“Yes!” Laughed (Y/n), “You did! Honestly, I would’ve felt awful if I had to reject my admirer because they weren’t the person I fell in love with. The letters were flattering, but it would’ve been so much easier just to tell me that you liked me after spending time getting to know me.” Yancy blushed and looked away before she used her hand to gently bring his gaze back to her. 

“And I like you too, Yancy, in a romantic way. I have for a really long time.” 

Yancy blushed so hard and he rubbed his neck shyly. She smiled, taking his free hand and squeezing it. “Alright, well let’s go to breakfast. The others are going to get suspicious if I never come back after going to get you.” 

“Heh, I guess so, since they already knew about my little crush on youse.” 

Even though they both knew they should leave, neither of them really wanted to. It was a nice change of pace to just have time for the two of them. (Y/n) looked up at Yancy and leaned up, kissing him gently. 

The kiss only lasted a second, but it brought one of the best feelings either of them had ever felt. “I… you..” stumbled Yancy, struggling to say coherent words as he touched his lips in awe. He looked back at (Y/n) with a hopeful expression. 

“C-could we do that again?” 

(Y/n) laughed and nodded, “Of course.” This time, Yancy was the one to take the lead, leaning down and gently holding the sides of her face in his large hands. His lips met hers in a passionate hunger which took (Y/n) off guard. It was a sloppy kiss, clearly inexperienced but euphoric to experience for the both of them. 

“Y-Yancy, we’re gonna get caught. I was sent to find you and bring you to breakfast. Everyone’s gonna get suspicious if I never come back.” Yancy kissed (Y/n) again with a small possessive growl. “I don’t care if we get caught. I gotta start showin’ the others around here dat your mine, sweetheart. You’re so dang beautiful. Wouldn't be surprised if one of them started a fight with me over youse.” 

Something about him calling her ‘sweetheart’ and getting really protective really got her knees weak and face red. “E-even so. What would the warden say?” That last part is what finally got Yancy to stop. “Fine, I’ll stop..” His arms wrapped around (Y/n)’s frame in a warm hug which was happily reciprocated. 

“I love youse, (Y/n).”

“I love you too, Yancy.”

Back in the cafeteria, some of the others were starting to wonder when (Y/n) was going to come back, hopefully with their leader in tow. “Do you think something happened?” Asked Hank, looking over at McGee who was smirking. “Something romantic, maybe.”

Tiny groaned and shook her head in amusement. “I swear the two of them are so dang oblivious they better get together soon because I don’t think I can take the tension and stupidity anymore.” There was a hefty laugh that filled the room but it was soon replaced with cheers as Yancy and (Y/n) walked in from the hallway, holding hands and blushing madly. 

From his office, the warden laughed softly, looking at the new couple in one of the security monitors. “It’s about dang time.” he murmured, taking a long sip of his lukewarm coffee.

[bellafarallones2]

the winnebago speaks

My wheels settled easily into the dust and gravel of Eastwoods Campground & RV Park. There was snow on the ground, and the lowest bough of the tree above me almost brushed my roof. I liked how quiet it was.

You rarely stayed in one place long, before Kepler. We traveled together from Oregon to Florida and back, and so when we stopped in Kepler I was expecting to leave the next day, or maybe the day after.

My Indrid: you have not taken me to a mechanic in fifty years, the fifty years we have been together, no. The saffron magic of Silvain has flowed through your hands and into me, no need for oil changes or wheel rotations. My tire traction is always impeccable. The faux-leather of my steering wheel is stained with the sweat of your hands. I am not like a human, whose cells regenerate; I wear the evidence of every touch forever.

That day you sketched frantically, huddled over my tiny table with a mug of hot eggnog at your elbow. And when you’d drawn the ruins of Leo’s General Store you hurried out the door to the payphone on the other side of the campground.

You looked so cold as you talked on the phone, shoulders huddled, the wind pressing into you.

Whenever you are away I call out to you. I say, here I am, here are my four space heaters humming, here is my metal door to keep the heat in, here my little booth and formica table, here my microwave and hot-plate, here my refrigerator, here my ragged carpet, here our bed. Here we are.

Sure enough, when you were done on the phone you hurried back inside me, folded your knees to your chest as you sat on the sofa with your sketchbook, pen-tapping nervously. 

That was the first time you drew Duck Newton, standing authoritatively in the light of the Pizza Hut sign, though I did not recognize him then. And after you’d drawn him, when your visions had shown you whatever you were looking for, all the tension in your muscles ran out at once, the pencil dropped from your hand, and your head drooped backwards.

“I can’t believe they managed it,” you murmured, wonder in your voice.

–

The next morning three humans arrived. This was unusual. You rarely entertained guests, but these three you opened the door for an instant before they knocked. A gray-haired man in a loud tie, a young woman with dyed-red hair and scorch marks on her jean vest, and a man in a park ranger uniform who you couldn’t quite take your eyes off of. 

You spoke their words as they did - I love when you show off. You offered them mugs of eggnog. You tore down dramatically the drawings you’d hung on my wall, and announced that the funicular was going to crash. 

The three humans - the Pine Guard - left again, and you paced. My corridor, such as it is, is long enough for you to take five steps before turning around, and you took those five steps back and forth for almost an hour. 

Then, after the disaster was averted, you fell into a restless, twitching sleep. 

I am the cocoon you curl up in, your pale limbs soft like the flesh of an insect newly eclosed.

Sometimes on moonless nights you climbed up onto my roof and took your glasses off, spread your wings over the weather-worn metal. I keep the secret of your true form faithfully, just like I keep all your secrets, the things you murmur when you are alone in bed, and the many futures not-to-be. 

[lady-maria-the-wolf225]

a short Mikey kitten story part 2

Mikey didn't want to say goodbye to cookie. she has been one of the best things that has ever happened to him in his whole life. he sobbed quietly as he pets her soft fluffy fur as she purrs happily. all of a sudden, his cell phone rang, and hears your voice. you notice by the sound of his shrilled sad voice coming from the other end of the phone call. "Mikey. sweetheart. what happened? did your brothers fight with you again?" Mikey sniffled out his words trying his best to speak as tears fell down to his cheeks. "I-I fo-found th-this kitten at an ally-w-way all alone, and I de-ci-ded to take h-her h-ome hop-ing m-my bros would be o-okay in h-having me ke-keep her, b-but they s-said N-No." you felt sorry for your terrapin boyfriend. you start to ask him questions what kind of cat she is, and so on. "does she have a name?" Mikey responded but still feeling upset. "her n-name is Cookie. she's a M-Maine coon." you try to comfort him and you decided to come by and check on him and look at the kitten yourself. that afternoon, you and April and Casey came to the lair. you walked up to Mikey and hugged him. "It's okay. I'm right here Hun." he hugged back and he shows you the kitten in his room. April and Casey followed. you and April meet cookie for the first time, and you instantly fell in love with the small kitten. you picked her up and examined for any broken bones or illnesses. luckily there was nothing. Mikey noticed how motherly you treated the young kitten which made him smile a bit. after you and April had a talk about what to do with the kitten, you decided to make a decision. Mikey and his brothers sat down along with you and April and Casey. April spoke to the boys "okay. the three of us spoke on what to do with cookie, and (Y/N) has decided to make a final decision." Mikey was afraid what he would hear. would cookie be sent to a shelter? back to the streets? he wasn't sure until you finally spoke. "I've decided that Cookie should live with me." Mikey slowly looked up and spoke. "But....I found her. she needs me." Casey sighs and speaks to Mikey for his brothers. "Look Mikey. we understand that you love this cat. but she needs to be in a better environment. the sewers is not a good place for a cat like cookie." You gently rub Mikey's shell and spoke gently to him. "she'll be happier. besides you'll get to see her as much as you'd like." April nodded. "Yeah. exactly. she will always be there waiting for you. it's going to be okay Mikey. at least she'll be in a better home." Mikey looks at his brothers as they gave him the look of them agreeing with this kind of decision. Mikey sheds a few tears and finally agrees to give cookie to you. he hugs and kisses cookie talking to her one last time as tears fell, and puts her in the cat carrier that you brought with you. you kiss him goodbye, and he watches you and cookie head out of the lair after hearing one last tiny meow from her. Leo walks up to Mikey and pats his shell. "you did the right thing little bro. *sighs* I know it's hard to let go of something close to you. you'll see her when you get the chance." Mikey nods and sighs. a few weeks have passed, and Mikey is now at high spirits. he went to visit how you and cookie were doing. as he got there, he hugs and kisses you happy to see you. you take him to a second room you have in your apartment, and it's now a kitty playground. it had a cat tree, automatic feeder and water fountain, proper cat toys, and a big kitty bed. Cookie meows at Mikey happy to see him. he notices a collar with a tag around her neck. and thanks to Donnie, he gave her a GPS microchip in case she runs away and gets lost. you and Mikey were having a great time being with cookie playing with her and messing around. he is glad a girlfriend like you decided to keep cookie and the fact you are now one big happy family. THE END @raisin-shell @kawaiibunga @shikobahkin @raphsweapondealer @turtle-babe83 @cowabunga-doll @raphslovemuffin80 @angelcatlowyn @nittleboo @nikitaboeve @foreignbrunette @mysticboombox @dai-su-kiss @cowabunga-doll @roxosupreme

[caltropspress]

A Catechism for billy woods’ Church

Everyone here takes a great interest in church matters. 

—Donald Barthelme, “A City of Churches” (1973)

The poison is bad for ya, stupid. You're equal measure to dirt, dust, grime, and puss, you're just a rapping infection... You're pure roach.

—Kool Keith, freestyle, In Control with Marley Marl on WBLS, 107.5 (1989)

[S]he went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue, with an undertone of sultry sulphur color, because of the smoke that dimmed the air…. She looked away over the trees, which were dingy and brownish, over the acres of shining wavy grass to the hills. They were hazy and indistinct…. Sometimes a tiny fragment of charred grass fell on her skin, and left a greasy black smudge. 

—Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (1950)

Along its eastern edge the sky’s aflame. He skulks back to his mud, his ferns and stones…is it unease he feels, without a name, or merely autumn gnawing at his bones?

—Alan Moore, Issue 27 of The Saga of the Swamp Thing, “By Demons Driven!” (1984)

1.  SYMPTOMS ARE PROLONGED AND PAINFUL

Something malodorous emitting from the Oval Office: Nixon and Reagan jacked up on the thought of paraquat. Whitey hit Mexican marijuana fields and then doubled back, raining herbicidal death on the crops that would be harvested and shipped north in the ’70s and ’80s. Stoners who thought they were stone free were instead coughing up a lung and asking where it’s from (the DEA, son—ain’t nothing nice). “Are you experienced?” became Are you experiencing side effects? “Paraquat” is about knowns and unknowns, about the acquisition of knowledge. woods deduces that the “spot on 116 must’ve had the cops in they pocket” when he peeps them selling “hydro jars [for] fifteen a pop” with a “line out the door.”[1] Not to knock that, but he’s got his own hustle thanks to a relationship hookup: “Stacy said her sister’s boyfriend had the new hot shit, / Gave me the plug like a stock tip.” He acquires the inside scoop, the insider trade, at the risk of the SEC on his back. The windfall made him a believer, he “found religion.” I’m a prophet, he declares (and its homophonics predict a propitious future: I’mma profit). Business is booming—blowing up like the World Trade. woods is feeling haughty now [from haut, “high”], “looking at the city like jihadis in the cockpit.” The knowledge got him knowsdiving. We all love to see the white man shook, so he Mohamed Atta mean-mugs with the force of T La Rock, Nas, and the Wu at his back. It’s yours, the gods seem to tell him. “It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine,” woods mos definitely repeats as mantra. Stares down that skyline like a metal-faced terrorist eager to claim responsibility. His impact will blow trees back and crack statues.

2.  

As woods is T.O.N.Y., it only makes sense “in D.C. they called [him] New York.” Trafficking across the Verrazano so frequently that the metonym stuck despite his place of origin. Start in on that Malachi Z, though, and woods won’t suffer it; he “can’t respect it.” He’s dismissive of false idols and can’t commit to blind faith. Even if Zev Love X abides, woods echoes Brian Ennals on “Death of a Constable” who proudly affirms “and I do eat swine.” woods protests with a plate of chicharrones for breakfast while these Nuwaubians puff on Newports. Dr. York recites the Hypocritic Oath in a supermax cell. The cult leader’s not “deep in the Tombs on a humble.” No Papillon exit-plan for him. No squinting at the sun like woods says on “Headband.” On “Cellz” off BORN LIKE THIS, we learned “DOOM [was] from the realm of El Kuluwm, smelly gel fume.” Emphasis on that emanating smell—a brutal stench. woods gives it the Gas Face and the stink eye all at once—travels N.Y. to D.C. but gives a wide berth to G.A. (maybe a detour through Stankonia, though). billy woods don’t rock the white robes or take the road to Tama-Re. Oh, that shit, Dambudzo Marchera writes in The House of Hunger. There’s a lunatic fringe to every way of life. 

3.  THE ROACH IS NEVER DEAD

We was raised on it, right? Might should’ve said we were razed on it, by it—that’s an actual fact. Demoed the bodily temples. The Pentecostal church crumble. Oh, oh, the leaf and the damage done. Amerikkka the hell razah. What other choice did they have? They “scraped and fought,” and sometimes the “quick lick turn to a kidnap”; sometimes they wait until you’re in the car to tell you that it’s stolen. There but for the grace of God, it seemed “everybody else got caught.” Keep poison control on speed-dial for when the War on Drugs goes nuclear, for when “whitey hit Hiroshima.” Acid rain is a “light drizzle on the tarmac.” Everything soot-covered as the “black rain baptize[s].” Beaked plague doctors roam the village. The cannabis plants become bubonic chronic. On “All Jokes Aside,” woods raps that “the place smelled like Raid,” like you’re huffing the can until convulsions. What aren’t we inhaling? What are these in[hell]ants? I CAN’T BREATHE chants on carbon-coated streets beneath smoggy skies. For another bad touch example, take El-P, who warned of “sucking on lead paint popsicles.” Or Phan Thi Kim Phuc running scared, naked with napalm burns in Vietnam. Or the 55-gallon drums of chemical waste floating down the Love Canal. Fucks with your head. “The acids of gut-rot had eaten into the base metal of my brains,” Marechera writes. That’s the psychological pollution Cage spoke of on “Agent Orange,” so you better get stuck with a Thorazine solution. Rifle through the drawer for the roach clip because the roach is never dead. Raid can be damned. We’ve heard the expression before—on “Manteca,” on “ECOMOG.” A post-apocalypse eclogue: the roaches still scurrying after the fallout. Viktor Vaughn’s “Never Dead” left spinning on the turntable. The subject keeps smoking; the landscape still smoking. Apropos that it was Subroc’s sobriquet. The roach, you see, is reincarnation. 

Always in anticipation of the worst, staring to the “black skies […] waiting on the thunderclap.” In the tenement, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Guess how much black mold your tenement hold. The inevitability of it all. Hard to turn the page; harder still to start the “second chapter.” Waiting on that sky-suck: “it’s the Rapture, / Anno Domini—it’s no before, only after.” After death, though—a second life. Establish a year zero. In The Progress of This Storm, Andreas Malm sees it differently: “[T]here is nothing but the present. Past and future alike have dissolved into a perpetual now, leaving us imprisoned in a moment without links backwards or forwards.”

woods chronicled the losses on Terror Management. “dead birds” consolidated the ecological L’s into a verse:

Bread cast on water come back poisoned. Film line the pot you boil water in. Spoiled meat dipped in bleach. Old oil drums the snake coiled in. Once the goyim go in—it's microwave with the foil in. Particulate matter stain the skin right where it meet the respirator mask rim. The original sin. Nowadays he start every book at the end.

Time is running out, and it’s been in effect. Go get a late pass. We’ve been living the Anthropocene obscene, and it’s only worsening.

4.

In Fresh Kill, Shu Lea Cheang’s ecosatire film from 1994, obnoxious bons vivants dine on lipsticked fish with glowing fluorescent green pollutants contained within at a restaurant called Naga Saki. Whitey hit Hiroshima and doubled back for this queasy spoon.[2] What was fresh for ’88 wasn’t necessarily fresh at all. Certainly not fresh for ’98, or 2008, you scum-suckers. Naga Saki was serving a crudité of fresh fruit for rotting vegetables. “Isn’t that something? Seventeen thousand tons a day,” Mimi Mayakovsky says from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry as she watches a garbage barge crawl along the Hudson, headed for the Fresh Kill landfill. She doesn’t know the half. Later, a newscaster reports from a tilted TV screen sitting atop an old stove: “...investigated the possible radioactive leak of an American hydrogen bomb that disappeared off the coast of Okinawa 24 years ago…” Cut to footage of the blossoming mushroom cloud over the sea. “The Pentagon confirms that the bomb has dissolved harmlessly on the ocean floor…”

The radioactive waste insidiously infects the supply chain—it starts showing up everywhere. Shareen and Claire’s daughter plays with her toys, and a green fluorescent orb suddenly glows in her palm. They bring her to the doctor—he’s incredulous: Green hands? Green head? Turning green? Give her plenty of liquids. “‘Kill’ is Dutch for stream,” Mimi says on her public access program as the steady stream of waste becomes more apparent. The fish glow; the cats glow. Comparably, the same green as the TV screen on Redman’s Muddy Waters album cover. Jiannbin, a hacktivist when he’s not slicing sushi at Naga Saki, sits with a seemingly endless perforated ream of dot matrix copy paper. He reads from a “Globex” corporate report he’s gained access to through his late-night hacking efforts: “High levels of Technetium-99 and Iodine-129 found in fish: extremely radioactive materials.”

On the Church album cover, a brick structure towers over us courtesy of Alexander Richter’s low-angle photograph. Oxidized truss structures criss-cross at its foundation. Fire escapes are distant, rising to a vanishing point. The balcony seats are empty—nobody’s out. They shelter in place while barely visible skinny limbs of winter trees strain up from the foreground, aching for attention. These are buildings in Washington Heights, “the home of church,” Richter tells me. This massive geometric construction blots out the sun. And if you look carefully, you’ll see several fluorescent green lens flares within the intersections of the trusses—indicating that even in this brick-and-steel church, orbs of the sickness are beginning to appear. 

5.

Sure, cataclysmic acts of gods and men for days. But those macro fractures don’t nag like the micro ones. You’ve got to control what you can—maintaining the mint condition of your sneakers, for instance. That’s where “Artichoke” starts: “I used to use a toothbrush to keep my kicks white—it mattered that much.” Buggin’ Out knows the struggle. You might’ve paid a hundred bucks (American dollars!), so you’re not just gonna let some sweaty white man in a Celtics shirt bump you off the block. Larry Bird befouling the pristine whiteness of your sneakers?[3] Man, you might as well throw them shits out. Them shits is broke. The situation might even turn violent. You might give that man a hundred headaches. Phife Dawg sure as hell would. “I sport New Balance sneakers to avoid a narrow path,” he raps on “Buggin’ Out.” “Mess around with this, you catch a size eight up your ass.” On “Whayback,” Tame One spoke similar of a bellicose past: “Back when steppin’ on kicks in ’86 got your ass kicked.” woods acknowledges there’s “certain things you can only learn from a fistfight.” Marechera recalls a knuckledusted fist hurtling itself at [his] teeth. Any spat could turn torrential. Marechera knows “you raise your fist at somebody and at once you are a potential killer—there is nothing manly in that. This business about ‘being a real man’ is what is driving all of us crazy.” Brothers on some ill shit, kill shit, Brewin says. Is Buggin’ Out that man? Nah, he’s just the struggling Black man trying to keep his dick hard in a cruel and harsh world.

Not a melee does every petty argument make. Just because Mookie and Vito argue over who the best pitcher in the game is (Dwight Gooden or Roger Clemens?), doesn’t mean you’ll be run out of town in a pair of Jordans. Or, worse, strangled to death for them as Michael Eugene Thomas was in 1989 (just three months before Do the Right Thing premiered in theaters). Not every quarrel over stats and standings is as heavy as Rodman sitting with the gun in his lap in the Palace parking lot. Or Spencer Haywood ordering the hit on Paul Westhead. Though sometimes relationship woes do justify the sportaphors (I mean, the blunts was like Shaq’s fingers!). Even if you loved that girl, you knew it “wouldn’t work like Harden on the Rockets.” Other times, you might be “feeling like Harden on the Thunder”—unappreciated, unloved, destined to go out like Iverson, “chucking brick after brick.” Harden ended up in Philly; “she loves me not is where [woods] landed.” (He might want to make like ELUCID on Valley of Grace and take his talents to South Africa.)

Step into a world that is bigger than you. Instead of a War on Poverty, they got a War on Drugs—and a War on Terror—so the police can bother you. You’ve gotta “move like the Black codes,” like the meadow is patterned and plotted with landmines and bear traps. “Every move [is] measured.” Avoid getting jumped by Jim Crow. Keep a “folded paper in [your] coat”—paper proving you’re gainfully employed, not some corner boy. Evade those vagrancy laws. Don’t you know bad boys move in silence and violence? “Keep [your] own counsel,” but the only Green Book you know is High Times, so you hug those papers tight to the chest; better yet—sew them into your Army jacket lining.

Pay mind to the Armageddon rap. Extinction Level Events unfolding. In about four seconds the teacher will begin to speak, but KRS is absent and woods is getting paid per diem to sub. “Open your book to Revelations,” he instructs. Learn about the “white phosphorus burning through the night”—a lesson learned before, on “Snake Oil,” which was meant to help you “see the light, white phosphorus bright.” But such incendiary enlightenment has the whiff of toxicity. The bad news pollutes your mind and you wake up to “a world made of plastic,” BPAs present in every household item (fake plastic trees, even—laced with roach repellent). Flipping pages fanatically, learning of a second death, a bubbling lake of fire, and how Death giddies up on his pale horse. “Hell followed with him” (Revelations 6:8, KJV), of course. woods watches from the fire escape: “Hellfire out the sky.” Trade out your reading material for some lighter fare, but motherfuck Billboard and the editor—’cause here comes the Predator drone. Don’t fear the MQ-9 Reaper. That “drone fly like metal kite,” which is appropriate if we check in with Clint Smith, who writes that the drone “looks as if it might be a toy.”

6.  THE LOUD GROWS LOUDER

woods feels like ELUCID’s apprentice. ELUCID—the sorcerer, the spelller wordsmith and dispelller of myth, wearer of fuchsia and green, seer who unilaterally decided Shit Don’t Rhyme No More—passes an amulet of van van oil to woods so he, too, can practice many practices, get flexi with the Old Magic. Follow that Bessie Hall protocol. woods’ is familiar. Self-confessed: his great-grandmother “was a witch”—neighbors “came for poultice when they was sick. / They came when the baby was late or too early to save, but the mother lived.” Like Lauryn, she’ll hex you with some witch’s brew if you’re doo-doo. woods is no witch doctor—just a Funk Doctor. On “Haarlem,” he dressed in sauvage drag and bragged of being the “King of all Blacks” who “eat[s] human hearts.” On “Fever Grass,” he’s taking a headcount of those that are left: survivors who “ain’t got no heart.” Some mark-ass bitches.

No talisman is trick-proof, though. Cold creeps through the cracks—drafty windows and the door doesn’t seal. We’re in the “house of hunger” again—trapped, but this isn’t a trap house. Someplace wearisome and precarious, crowded and genealogical. A family affair—what’s fair? Auntie’s “bent back from the juggling” of two jobs; your mom “mumbling about [her] deadbeat husband”; your cuz trying to “get that baker’s dozen.” 

In an episode of Steel Tipped Dove’s occasional podcast A Palace from Ruin[4], woods ponders what life was like for his ancestors in colonial Jamaica. [Press play on Muddy Waters and let the intro’s nature sounds design the vision.] They lived remotely on a “mountaintop in the middle of nowhere.” woods emphasizes just how secluded they were (“deep in the bush”; “not even a town”). He describes it as a “place that sometimes feels like it stands outside of time,” which makes it even more inaccessible to him. The second verse of “Fever Grass” evokes a fever dream of what that world would look like if woods could travel back. A hale grandfather builds “God a house in the jungle”—a church!—a humble but heroic one as every brick is stacked purposefully after he “mixed cement out of pain and sweat.” Once construction was complete, “fear of the pit” had the preacher in the pulpit “hurl[ing] threats,” much like Reverend Branham’s fire and brimstone sermons sampled throughout the album. Women have it the worst, simmering in heat and sin with “bowed heads,” showing deference, sweating through “Sunday [from] sunup till sunset,” envying the “hummingbirds [that] sip from long-neck flowers” outside the church window. Their “sway” is sexy, but the churchwomen are restive, hiding the supple movement of their “hips under thin shift under church dress.” 

If not from the sanctimonious, then the church seems at least a shelter from the encroaching wild—despite woods noting on “Pollo Rico” that there’s “no church in the wild.” He flows the Holy Ghost and implores the congregation to get the hell up out their seats. Preach! But the preachers in the church and the inhabitants of the house can’t withstand the insistent wilderness. Nature finds a way. 

woods paints an agrarian scene, one in which villagers tirelessly try to manage the wild that surrounds them. “Sugarcane [is] stripped with machete” as men navigate the “tangled fever grass.” “Green mangoes [are] peeled with teeth,” the fruit subjugated to the famished humans. Animals are hunted, skinned, and pelts are stretched to satisfy Man’s desires—“tambourine[s] jangle” and “goatskin drums” beat a triumphant rhythm. They repose beneath the “breadfruit heavy in the trees” and admire the “stands of bamboo where roots men crop they weed.” The picture is one of Man’s victories over Nature, a modest mirrored reflection of the gardens of Versailles. 

In Doris Lessing’s debut novel The Grass is Singing, Mary married Dick Turner out of desperation. They take up residence in a dilapidated house surrounded by the “miles of dull tawny veld” of Southern Rhodesia. As farmers, they perpetually fail to cultivate the land. Instead of dominating Nature, the uncooperative crops sink them deeper into debt. If only their mealie patches were as yielding as their oft-abused native laborers. Dick and Mary’s relationship strains, and Mary’s depression eventually leads to a psychotic break. As reality slips, Nature seizes upon the Turner home: “[T]he trees were pressing in round the house, watching, waiting for the night.” Mary’s paranoia and persistent fears of failure and unfulfillment lead her to personify Nature’s threat. She comes to understand “this house would be destroyed. It would be killed by the bush, which had always hated it, had always stood around it silently, waiting for the moment when it could advance and cover it, for ever, so that nothing remained.” Her mind is “filled with green, wet branches, thick wet grass, and thrusting bushes,” as she herself is invaded in the same manner as the house—they’ll be overwhelmed as one. Mary can see her own demise, though she’s apparently incapable of seeing her antagonized servants are the wilderness that surrounds her. It’s easier to imagine the end of her dwelling-place by unremitting vegetation:

...creepers would trail over the veranda and pull down the tins of plants, so that they crashed into pullulating masses of wet growth…. A branch would nudge through the broken windowpanes and, slowly, slowly, the shoulders of trees would press against the brick, until at last it leaned and crumbled and fell, a hopeless ruin.

7.

Likewise, disaster has struck on “Fever Grass”: someone or something “cut the power,” so you’ve got to learn to “thrive in the dark”—make do, [terror] manage. Time crawls and “every day is a tally mark,” but on the plus that affords you the opportunity to decide whether you’re a killer or a coward. Gotta find a way to stay “lit like wet blunts” when the blood rain starts to fall. Even as the droplets “tattoo” the “tin roof,”[5] you gotta ignite the pilot light on that “cold stove.” Play your position or get the fuck out the kitchen. For woods, the gastronome, the cold stove is a devastating setback. Havoc and Prodigy felt the temperature rising, but Marechera felt it plummet: “And I was cold; I have never been so cold in my life. The ice of it singed my very thoughts.”

Find warmth where you can. Keep lines of communication open. Those hummingbirds in the second verse network with the hum of the microwave in the first.[6] Vibrations of tail feathers communicate with the machine code in the control panel. A frequency all its own—call it Hummingbird style: 70 times in one second.

8.

The “house of hunger” that opens its rickety, rust-hinged doors on “Fever Grass”—with its “cold stove” and “madness in the cupboards” (Old Mom Dukes Hubbard knows too well that they’re bare)—clearly invokes Dambudzo Marechera. On Armand Hammer’s “Dettol,” woods hears the “rattling chains [of] Marley’s ghost” (notably, he ascribes the disturbance to “something [he] smoked”). Dickens himself calls the hullabaloo a “clanking noise.” While Scrooge recoils at the racket of Marley’s ghost, woods leans in close to listen to Marechera’s. “The chain [Marley] drew was clasped about his middle,” Dickens writes (and we figure he must “dance like [he’s] in leg-and-waist chains,” as woods says on “No Days Off”). Marley’s chain was “long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made…of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” Marechera’s ghost, meanwhile, drags around rich resources and raw materials for woods to seize on: Armand Hammer’s “Black Sunlight” refracts Marechera’s Black Sunlight; the gatefold of History Will Absolve Me bears an eerily relatable quote from Marechera’s Mindblast as epigraph (“My father’s mysterious death when I was eleven taught me—like nothing would ever have done—that everything, including people, is unreal”); “Cuito Cuanavale” features woods getting all autobiographical and axiomatic: “I rep my era: bridge the gap between Marechera and Sweatshirt. woods turns Slick Rick the way he wears Marechera’s chains. As Marley’s ghost haunts Ebenezer’s lumber-room, we find Marechera’s spirit haunting the margins of woods’ rhyme-pad pages. Marley and Marechera: these mar- prefixed ectoplasmic visitors don’t disfigure or despoil their hosts; they awaken them—marshaling their [literary] worlds together.[7]

9.  IT’S THE MONSTERS THAT I CONJURE, IT’S THE MARIJUANA

In his songs, woods incessantly answers the questions posed by a nameless, faceless interlocutor. The question, more often than not, is: What is it? As in, “Grand Wizard, God, what is it?” (if we walk down Memory Lane). Or spasmodically like Nore on “Superthug”: What, what, what, what, what? woods answers that aphasia with anaphora—the contraction it’s predominates. On “Fever Grass,” the effect sets a scene:

It's madness in the cupboards, It's no table manners at your cousin's, It's humming microwave ovens, It's auntie bent back from the juggling.

The tekneek is also suitable for meditating on problematic world affairs and your own, as he does on “red dust”:

It's not the heat, it's the dust, It's not the money, it's the rush, It's not the weed, that's a crutch. It's not greed, that's not enough.

And on “Remorseless,” the effect is tonal, conveying tension and release:

It's now or never. It's a freedom in admitting it's not gonna get better... It's fucking over. It's all payment pending.

It’s a mode of expression Marechera practiced as well (though he axed the contraction): “It was a prison. It was the womb. It was blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass-matted lowlands of my life. It was a Whites Only sign on a lavatory. It was my teeth on edge—the bitter acid of it! It was the effigy swinging gently to and fro in the night of my mind.”

If it’s not this, it’s that. Black Sheep knew the score (Engine, engine, number 9…). “Inexorable—you can’t stop what’s coming.” Survivor’s remorseful Puff all up in the ad-libs with the won’t stop. A slow train coming, and you’re Perils of Pauline track-shackled. You better be coming in from the cold like Bob and the Wailers, or else Everything Remains Raw like Busta’s ill-omened The Coming. Raw lips; raw hands; raw sewage; raw meat. R-A-W: Big Daddy Kane spelled it out. “The meaning of raw is ‘Ready And Willing’ to do whatever is clever, / Take a loss—never.” No, you can’t stop what’s coming, but woods appears to say we’ve got to at least be prepared for what’s coming, which means knowing what it is.

10.

As a rapper and as a man, woods must settle with—in Marechera’s words—“this cruel externality.” The world’s harshness is ardent—burning through ozone, exposing us. Counter this overexposure with the interior world of writing. Marechera scavenged rubbish dumps for reading material. Eco-racism, check it, quite literally enabled his writing—each notebook a sacrifice zone; hypothesize this: pollution h[e]aven.

“I came up in the cesspool,” woods raps on “Fuchsia & Green.” He came UP in the cesspool; he was RAISED on paraquat—the trajectory is ascension. But he dwells in the rotten core firstly. Rite of passage with the plague rats. Marechera did it: “I was writing an article about shantytown and while inspecting the pit-latrines there I fell into the filthy hole…. It was in a way a necessary baptism.” Stagnant water special. James Joyce was christened just the same. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is bullied by a schoolmate, Wells, who “had shouldered him into the square ditch…. It was a mean thing to do…. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.” He falls ill as a result and spends days bedridden watching the firelight on the wall of the infirmary. These cesspools, pit-latrines, and square-ditches are transformative. Got to cope by getting positively septic. On “Artichoke,” woods “flush[es] his system with sativas.” Later, on “Classical Music,” he tells us he “flushed everything” (but the haze). Plumb crazy maneuvers to discard the waste. These sludgy skinny dips—these fully and foully freak versions of Thomas Eakins’ Swimming Hole—are swampwater sessions. 

11.  A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

The swamp is a gothic territory, haunted by the past. Catch a whiff of what Marechera calls the “foul breath of our history.” Stale, moldering. In “No Haid Pawn,” a piece of postbellum fiction penned by Thomas Nelson Page in 1887, the author affects a Black dialect to tell us just what the woods are: “hit’s de evil-speritest place in dis wull.” Well then. Page’s story is of a white man daring to explore the putrid pathways others have only gossiped about. He ventures into the swamp, coming upon a ramshackle haunted house once inhabited by a slavemaster who cut off the head of one of his slaves and hung it in a window. To set an example, naturally. The swamp-dwelling carries what Lessing might call an “air of bleak poverty.” Mary Turner would strive to clean it up, polishing every surface “as if she were scrubbing skin off a black face.”

Messiah Musik’s beat for “Swampwater” is disorienting. He, too, braves the overgrowth. We can hear the same ringing harmonics as RZA’s “Ice Cream” production—a residue of Earl Klugh, only warped and morphed by humic and fulvic acids. But Messiah doesn’t help us get “all up in [the] guts” of women with these swamp blues rhythms, not unless we’re talking about intestinal parasites. French vanilla, butter pecan, chocolate deluxe? Negative on that. But Messiah makes your nodding neck stiffen from the listeria outbreak on your waffle cone. Watch for the sudden spillage to the sidewalk and all the kids cry.

12.

In the swamp neck-deep…

—“The Foreigner,” from History Will Absolve Me

In 1992, Showbiz & A.G. released Runaway Slave. “I’m aware of all evil and devilishment,” A.G. raps on the title track, “because I’m living in a rat-like wilderness.” Often, the swamp is an escape route. In keeping with their ongoing argument that most slaves were content on the plantation, proslavery novelists portrayed swamp runaways as aberrations. This was a gross miscalculation. Some are still running. Your ass was running too, fast as you could, punching yourself in the chest. On “Schism,” woods finds himself “waist deep in the swamp when [he] heard the hounds.” He felt the pressure, the pangs of fear, he “felt it in [his] bowels.” It’s the feeling itself, not the hounds, that’s so much trouble to escape.

In an 1856 issue of Harper’s, David Hunter Strother published a purported travelogue of the Dismal Swamp. He’s drawn there by a novel desire:

I had long nurtured a wish to see one of those sable outlaws who dwell in the fastnesses of the Swamp; who, from impatience of servitude, or to escape the consequences of crime, have fled from society, and taken up their abode among the wild beasts of the wilderness.

Strother happens upon the cautious and watchful “Osman,” one such “sable outlaw” with a weapon in hand, fringed with reeds and willows. Strother’s account is bullshit, a fiction, but remains full of possibility. When Moses the houseboy is discovered after exacting revenge on Mary Turner in The Grass is Singing, he’s described as “a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum, and dressed in a singlet and shorts, which were damp and muddy.”

In the 1880 novel The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable seized on that same prospect. Cable broached the topic of racial injustice in his work, magnifying that which proslavery authors worked so hard to diminish: “But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirely impossible to man—‘if one may call a negro a man.’ Runaway slaves were not so rare in them as one [...] might wish.”

On “Swampwater,” woods fears the “penitentiary blues” he’d have to wear after one quick lick gone grievous, but he sings a penitentiary blues, too. John and Alan Lomax both recorded work-songs at prisons, including Parchman Farm, the infamous plantation-cum-prison of the Mississippi Delta. In 1940, Bukka White recorded “Parchman Farm Blues,” articulating the dream he had while inside: “I sure wanna go home, / I hope someday I will overcome.”

13.

It was blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass-matted lowlands of my life.

—Marechera (1978)

The swamp provides invisibility. Easier for Maroons to plan insurrection when caked in mud from green beanie to Timbs like Redman on the Muddy Waters cover. woods reaches for the ghillie suit, not the shiny suit. Needs something covered in sage-colored twigs and twine. He rather lurk than floss. Camouflage comes from the French camouflet (“to puff smoke in someone’s face”).[8] Smoke and mirrors stunts. On “Fever Grass,” woods speaks of the “bamboo where roots men crop they weed.” woods himself disappears in a thicket of bamboo in upstate New York on the cover of 2015’s Today, I Wrote Nothing. A. Richter brings to vision the “grass high as bamboo” that woods mentions on “Dark Woods.”[9] In the “Pollo Rico” music video, Joseph Mault places woods in lush green bamboo, too. No better cover than the backwoods. Blow that smoke in the opp’s face. A blunt brand becomes a record label’s namesake but also speaks to the shadowy wilds in which woods and his cadre navigate. Dre recreated the Zig-Zag rolling papers label for The Chronic album cover—like Backwoodz, another détournement that obscures the original context. 

14.  THE NUKEFACE PAPERS

Adapt and empower: that’s the necessary potion. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Harriet Beecher Stowe palms the vial of acacia powder: “the near proximity of the swamp has always been a considerable check on the otherwise absolute power of the overseer.” The swamps are “regions of hopeless disorder,” Stowe writes. The description fits much of Messiah Musik’s work on the album: the impulse is to withdraw from the frenzy, but the reward is to embrace the chaos. Emerge stronger like ELUCID on “Ghoulie,” with “mud under the nails [and] smell of swamp moss and dead things.”

Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing resembles Strother’s Osman. From his run between 1983 and 1987, Moore’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing tells the origin story of how Alec Holland, a doctor, developed a “bio-restorative formula, which was intended to promote crop growth.” Holland’s experiment is sabotaged, and an explosion sends him and “his chemical soup” into the surrounding swamp—“teeming with microorganisms.” Holland is reborn as Swamp Thing. Moore asks us to “imagine that cloudy, confused intelligence, possibly with only the vaguest notion of self, trying to make sense of its new environment.”[10] 

The transformation is consummated through self-acceptance. Swamp Thing’s understanding of his own existence comes together rhizomatically. Somewhere quiet…somewhere green and timeless…I drift…the cellular landscape stretching beneath me…am I at peace?...Am I…happy? Even if woods was systematically polluted and poisoned by paraquat,[11] he still “scraped and fought” and won out in the end—he enters Another Green World (Issue 23’s title). Brian Eno’s “In Dark Trees” plays on a ghettoblaster—a Promax Super Jumbo boombox, serial number: 2014.270.2.1a, to be precise—the crusty and corrosive terminals of the D, motherfucker, D! batteries still functional. You don’t want Nunn of that. Not everyone was so lucky; so many others got caught. 

Nukeface—a laid-off mineworker, a deranged drifter—became a nuclear waste addict. Perfect storms are rarely predicted, and so no one would’ve guessed the Lombard Mine explosion of ’68 would lead to a lease of land, to overflow pits being used for radioactive dumping. The man who would be christened “Nukeface” by the local street kids guzzled that waste out of beer cans with an insatiable thirst, stooping pit-side to fill a sixpack. He slurped the slag. Nukeface was the whitey who doubled back. He didn’t die—he mutated into a brain-damaged and demented tramp—and grew frustrated and embittered when the coal company sealed the mine. His supply dwindling, he fled into the damp green cosmos, crossing paths with Swamp Thing. Nukeface’s poison touch irradiated, and he seared toxic handprints into Swamp Thing’s acrid chest—a stop-and-frisk like when Giuliani was mayor, like when Bloomberg was mayor. Swamp Thing bowed his head and prayed, Let there be grass. 

“How sickly seem all growing things,” Georg Trakl writes in his poem “Heiterer Frühling,” but seems is not absolute. On “Artichoke,” woods (whose name itself is so few pencil markings short of weeds) ambiguously repeats, The weeds overgrown, the weeds overgrown. Weeds are an invasive species to some, medicine to others. Weed is the town where Lennie nearly got himself lynched—the best laid plans of mice and men end up in an irrigation ditch, caught in a ravel of morning glory, waiting out the mob.

But Swamp Thing is a “moss-encrusted echo of a man,” and this is meant by Moore in a good way. He’s adorned with fibers and filaments. He settles for nothing less than the piffy with the red hairs—those cornus alba sibirica stems shooting every which way. Alec Holland has become a “ghost dressed in weeds.” Marechera might describe himself less favorably (“I was, I knew, a dead tree, dry of branch and decayed in the roots”), but he shouldn’t be so deprecating. Turn up the volume on your Artifacts tape; listen to Tame One talk of “smok[ing] the blunt that’s like a tree trunk.” Say to yourself, Just like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved. To survive, it’s imperative to become one with the weeds—to become weed-wedded.

15.  MEDITATION IVXX

What’s that shit that they be smoking? Pass it over here. Inquiring minds want to know. The weed helps you release yo delf. Even if you don’t have that mythical Methtical strain, you’ve got options. Tical was originally called The Burning Book, and the smoke Method Man exhales from his hellified flow on the album cover doesn’t cloud our judgment, but sharpens it. Somewhere woods was in a hall plush with piff, studying the image—that scroll caught in the wind with blackletter Gothic script (like a gutted and unspooling blunt leaf), trying to decode its esoteric message. On “Biscuits,” Meth was “smokin’ on a Spike Lee joint,” while woods knew a plug with the “bomb like the Spike Lee joint.”[12] Life in marvelous times, woods adlibs at the beginning of “Schism,” and a hearty laugh to follow. On the Mos Def song of that name from 2009’s The Ecstatic, we learn “their green grass is green; our green grass is brown.” woods’ grass is singing. When the words hit us, it’s like Fat Ray says, like the first time catching a contact. You streak through the dry grass of your fears, Marechera writes—in full sovereignty of your soul. Stoned is the way of the walk, but woods pursues something loftier for the blunted. In the past, he has “scoured the Heights,” but found “no piff.”[13] He’s been fickle: “That’s okay, but that’s not the haze.”[14] This ain’t something you can just Whatever, man. This is looking for the perfect leaf. Looking for weed so strong “your limbic system not a friend.”[15] Unclasp the jewel case of Super Chron Flight Brothers’ Emergency Powers CD: unfold the liner notes to view the two-page spread of bud—a verdure set to murder the “Dirtweed” of the album’s DOOM-produced single. The expectation is super chron[ic]. You want a room “thick with smoke,”[16] a chamber. You fiend to “get stupid high.”[17] Trying to chill out, like, Everything’s okay—Quinton’s on the way. 

“Check the motion while I be puffin’ the potent,” Redman raps on “Case Closed.” The motion is meditative: empty the lungs, cycle the air. Enter another green world, and another one—an anodyne and analeptic. Add kef to the tip of your spliff, feel like you can relax, “like you could disappear, like [you] wasn’t surrounded by the past.”[18] Weed as an escape from the past, but woods simultaneously dredges up his past—in that way, it’s a manual of exorcism. Questions come up, but woods “ain’t even answer—[he] just let the weed burn.”[19] He’s Frederick Douglass with the dutch, finding freedom and peace. 

16.  TOOK THE HAZE TO CHURCH

The immortal question: If you find a bag of weed on the floor, motherfucker, what the fuck you gon’ do? Miracles happen, and that bag of weed is a miraculum—an object of wonder. Pick it up, pick it up. Hold the church to the sky (HIGHER UP, cries ELUCID, HIGHER). Elevate the practice to the sublime. woods goes full anti-Iverson: You don’t smoke how I do—I be practicing.[20] For woods, he embraces the religious ritual—as you know, he wakes up and smokes weed. This rendition of his Fajr prayer brings him closer to illumination. Marechera concurs: “He took dagga; he believed that there is a part of man which is permanently stoned and that this was beautiful.”

billy woods steals the title of “Christ of Marijuana” from John Sinclair. For him, weed is faith. Qui fume prie: smoking is praying. He paces the nave of the Gothic church of his own making; walks the aisles to the transept; peers through stained glass to make the flying buttresses through the heavenly light. Still, in his treatise On Architecture, Leon Battista Alberti writes of a church so plain that it  induces contemplation. Alberti wants the windows high, so high that one could only see the sky and not be distracted by the external world. On “Falling Out the Sky,” woods buys in and “genuflected when [he] heard the weed price.”

In John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness, a green substance swirls within a glass tabernacle in the cellar of St. Godard’s Church (maybe this is the “ceremony in the church basement” woods mentions on “Artichoke”). The sticky icky green spills over and into the mouths of skeptical physics researchers—a Satanic slime eager to spew its evil essence. You will not be saved by your god Plutonium, the spirit behind the computer screen types. Again, the green is the same green as Richter’s lens flare. 

In Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein writes: “Smoking grass is usually a communal [act]; it draws the initiates into a circle of preference, including them and excluding others.” The weed draws a crowd; woods tracks the gatherings. Standing room only, he sits “slumped in the last pew” on “Scaffolds” and notes “the pulpit [is] packed.” On “Dettol”: “Packed house, pew to vestibule.” The homily is action-packed. People get ready—ready to die.

Usually everyone in the village—from the lords and ladies down to the peasants—joined the professional stonemasons [everyone must get stoned, if you will] in doing their part to construct an edifice to the glory of God and to the representation of the Church on earth. Churches were not merely places to go on Sunday or decorations for a town; they represented a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms—from heavy stone to heaven. The monk Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, in 1144 wrote:

I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world.

Suger knew of the swamps, the Planet of Slums [rest easy, Mike Davis]. So do we. We’ve normalized our sorry plots to the point we greet each other with “my slime.” Suger had ambitions to fill his church with light. He wanted for it to be one thing: s[ub]lime.

17.  IT’S SIMPLE MATHEMATICS 

Bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka! The artist formerly known as the Mighty Mos: “This is business—no faces, just lines and statistics.” “Swampwater” delineates the murky business of the drug deal like a part-part-whole word problem (“copped the whole package”). woods republishes an unexpurgated edition of The Art of the Deal, proving just how artless it is. The math is weird; “Mayans never counted to here.” On “Rehearse with Ornette,” woods played Itzamna and counted bars on fingers like he was doing sums. “Vindaloo” taught us if someone fuck up the count, you pocket the difference and bounce. Take that Diddy Dirty Money where it’ll take you: fecal matter and pathogens dispersing in the air when you make it rain. “Immediately switched my math,” woods raps, staying flexible on “Alternate Side Parking.”  He does not need the 99 problems. Doesn’t need the 88 keys on the piano. He keeps things pragmatic as the metric system. How he put it on “Stranger in the Village”: “Everything for sale except the scale.” woods as Anubis, weighing your heart against Truth. Meanwhile, petty pushers nickel-and-dime you—bunch of luniz with five on it but treating it like a mil. The church architects know beauty has to come correct—correct application of Pythagoras’ rules of proportion, which is a system of musical harmony. Import those arcades of Corinthian columns with semicircular arches into your DAW. The stonemason used numbers to reflect the divine order. “Think I’ll roll another number for the road,” Neil Young sings hoarsely, a throat ravaged by time and the drags of doobies. On “All Jokes Aside,” woods listens to math rock and is no doubt harangued by angular melodies and time signatures that slice ligatures. King Crimson out the guillotine type tortures. To decompress, he’ll roll a fat number.

18. 

Dead church.

—ELUCID, “Smile Lines”

When the math’s right, you end up with something magnificent, like Chartres. In 1973’s F for Fake, Orson Welles delivers a passional monologue on the church. He celebrates its anonymity, seeing as how it’s “without a signature.” Many hands make light work, though, and Chartres was the effort of all for one and One for All—or maybe one for none. Welles is correct: no single name is attributed to its creation. Zero: a cypher. A circle of MCs; a circle of passers and puffers. Welles rebuffs scientists who tell us our universe is one “which is disposable” by pointing to the “one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest” which is Chartres. 

But Orson Welles was fakin’ jax, too. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he blasphemed weed. “All it does is give you extremely bad breath,” he said, adding, “it’s a terribly overrated drug.” And he only told half the story of Chartres.

“Nice church you got here,” woods says on “VX,” “be a shame if something were to happen.” In June 1194, a fire devastated Chartres. The basilica was sparking like the wiring in a Black church. Burn, Chartres, Burn—I smell a riot goin’ on. An anonymous account of the event (everything associated with Chartres is nameless, faceless) describes how “certain persons” rescued Mary’s tunic (the Virgin, not Magdalene) by moving it into the lower crypt. They stayed “shut up there, not daring to go back out because of the fire now raging.” They were protected from “the rain of burning timbers falling from above.”

Out of despair, the people, clerics, and nobility of Chartres built a new church. How high? [the exalted Red and Meth sing with the angels]. Well, high enough for the planets and the stars and the moons to collapse. Inhale deeply—until those lungs collapse. The church strain places the apse in your unfortunate collapse, lifts you back up, and constructs the Most Beautifullest Thing in this World, beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face.

19.  UP IN SMOKE

Smoke clouds vision and disappears memories, but woods uses smoke to reclaim them, to shape them. Watch the chimney for the signal, for that Pope smoke from the Vatican conclave—that fumata nera. Can you smell it? It’s got that pungent skunk stink of a blunt. Joyce knew the smell.

After hearing about two boys stealing altar wine from the sacristy, young Stephen Dedalus’ thoughts wander to that “strange and holy place” and the activities he’d seen carried out there. Of particular note is a “boy that held the censer [and] had swung it gently to and fro near the door with the silvery cap lifted by the middle chain to keep the coals lighting. That was called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour smell.”

Stephen often imagined himself as a “silentmannered priest,” and he would mimic his priest’s movements: “he had shaken the thurible only slightly.” Nimble movements like sealing the blunt leaves with saliva. Ultimately, Stephen knows the vocation isn’t for him: “He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders….He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.” Sounds familiar.

20. 

On “Magdalene,” woods “wish[es] [he] still smoked cigarettes.” Deeper into his journey, his descent, he “[buys] a pack, [and] grimace[s] at the taste.” He needed a break to keep from breaking. Richard Klein explains that the cigarette break

allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary existence, a space and a time of heightened attention that gives rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself. 

[NB: Klein’s get lifted diction: heightened, rise]

“For Kant,” Klein continues, “the sublime, as distinct from the merely beautiful, affords a negative pleasure because it is accompanied, as its defining condition, by a moment of pain.” The yellowed teeth; the morning cough; the barcode lines around the mouth. Cigarettes, like pot-leaves coated in paraquat, “are poison…they are not exactly beautiful, they are exactly sublime.” They are a way to cope, if only for the duration of the act. And so woods will “get up and roll a ’wood [and] feed the cancer in [his] chest” like he describes on “Dirge,” and he’ll feel damn good about it, too.

21.

The fire long dead—this just smoke and ashes.

—“Artichoke”

What burns never returns, Don Caballero’s Damon Che might philosophize, but I’m funkdoobious. Wouldn’t U B? Okonkwo’s rap name was Roaring Flame—he was a “flaming fire,” Achebe writes. ’Kwo sounds like he’s strutting and sashaying at the ball like Venus Xtravaganza. (Lot of rappers worry about gender-bending…) And, yeah, Paris is burning. Looking into the log fire, he’s got the nerve to call his son Nwoye “degenerate and effeminate.” How could he have begotten a woman for a son? The smoldering log sighs in concert with him. “Living fire,” Okonkwo concludes, “begets cold, impotent ash.” Better up the dosage of the blue pill or get hyper off the ginseng root. But sometimes you’ve got to johnny blaze the village to pacify the spirit of the clan. The egwugwu burn Mr. Smith’s church to the dirt. Feel its warmth, something Nwoye doesn’t get from his father’s embrace.

Is that the fire in which you burn? “Forever smokin’ the mic,” J-Treds raps, and the “lyric contact got [him] open. / Naturally higher—no need to pass the Dutchie.” Ashtrays overflow on “Schism,” indicating woods has been burning the midnight oil. Burns through pages like Royal Dutch Shell does the fields of Ogoniland. Writing in his book of rhymes until the words pass the margins. Ken Saro-Wiwa—he sacrifices himself for this shit. Ashtrays overflowing and evahflowing with church embers. The ash of Chartres. The scorch stains on your saucepan. The stinking stains of history. Trotsky and Reagan battle it out in the cypher, each flipping each other’s script, damning each other to the ash heap of history while woods writes songs about Pompeii. The volcanic ash of Vesuvius reaches from Petrograd to Port Royal. woods raps with a pyroclastic flow. 

Living off borrowed time, watching the doomsday clock tick faster. Midnight in a grossly imperfect world. Waiting on the end of history, leafing through Fukuyama’s miscalculations while a thousand Fukushimas penetrate thyroid glands. “That’s what it is about swamps…too damp,” Nukeface remarks. “Nothin’ burns for long.”

22.

On “Nigerian Email,” woods promised to “break up trees on your fourth-generation imitation Premier beats.” Ya playin’ yaself if you emulate. Messiah Musik isn’t dwycking around—his beats are mellifluous dissonance. “A splinter of melody piercing the ear with brittle notes,” if Marechera had a listen. The swampwater soaks in and turns the music skronk. His loud grows louder, like the jittery strings on the first half of “Schism.” Abrasive and raucous, as loud as Loud Records, as loud as Steve Rifkind riffling record contracts in triplicate, as loud as a Mystic Stylez-era Three 6 Mafia collabo with Megadeth. All of Church’s tracks sing with a crossed signal. Doris Lessing might say it’s “that insistent screaming” you here and believe to be “the noise of the sun, whirling on its hot core, the sound of the harsh brazen light, the sound of gathering heat.” Beats that make woods want to fling inkwells and lumps of sadza. Messianic as his namesake on tracks like “Frankie,” where he composes a delicate mess to clear the moneylenders from the temple. We bask in the after-clarity and quietude. He’ll take a dime-a-dozen Goodwill copy of The Messiah and suck it through the sewer grates. What he creates is what Marechera mentions: “A cloud of flies from the nearby public toilet…humming Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’” Messiah Musik uses oblique strategies, I imagine, to achieve sounds unthought. He shows up where King Tubby met the Upsetter and nods to the noises made by the people from the grass roots. He communicates to woods through aether talk—not stems. No stress, no seeds, no sticks, for that matter either. Songs of antimatter. Guitars channeling a Wimshurst high-voltage generator. 

23.

On the legs of the piano, carved in the manner of African sculpture, are mask-like figures resembling totems. The carvings are rendered with a grace and power of invention that lifts them out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art.

—August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, “The Setting” (1987)

On Terror Management’s “Dog Days,” woods teased he might “play you some Neil Young on the piano.” Messiah Musik was his companion there, too, and it wasn’t a piano but the wheezing keys of a Hammond B2 organ we heard. On “Classical Music,” the piano does play, gently, but the drums turn the beat into a nerve-shredder—the rhythm got us sweating like the Nervous Records logo. The juxtaposition evokes something Evil [Dee], something like the “crone play[ing] keys of elephant bone” on “The Big Nothing” (an even earlier Messiah Musik collaboration). The simple fact is this: woods can’t play classical—his voice is too hardcore, “like Kool G Rap music made for concert piano,” as Bigg Jus once said. woods would maybe be more comfortable doing a boogie-woogie. Music made to get bills paid. Boogie, before it got reduplicated, referred to a rent party, and you know, you know, you know, you know the rent is too damn high. (That that Bill Withers!)

woods was a poor piano student, frustrating his tutor with the “wiry gray[s]”—she’s stressed. “Always late for lessons,” he confesses without citing CPT as an excuse. He lacked passion; he failed to put in the work: “She could tell I was guessing.” [We talkin’ about practice?] These old habits die hard, become “lifelong trait[s].” He’s “still guessing today”—still. Unfamiliar with the ebonies and ivories, “could never really find [his] place.” It’s not that he didn’t feel bad about it—how couldn’t he? She laid the guilt trip on him. “Disappointment etched every line in her face” as she listened to him fumble through the score; and, when he did fuck up, she cut to the quick. “Piano hands, she used to say, What a waste.” The criticism keeps stinging; he stays laid up in the cut (like Havoc living his hell on earth: Watch these rap niggas fuck you up). Tough to tell if it’s her or woods that’s “still disappointed today.” 

She tried to school him: Amadeus’s 28th instead of church. She got dramatic (“drew the heavy shades”) and demonstrated God’s grandeur (of which the world is charged, writes Gerard Manley Hopkins) through the instrument. No cathedral necessary. He was attentive, “watched her play” as “light poured the Lord’s grace” and “rich chords” filled the place. Her performance rings of religious epiphany even if he doesn’t “quite [find] his way,” or find his faith, or find Jesus. Game recognizes game. woods has certainly kept searching (three “always” and three “find/found’s” form the trinity for our proof-texts in this exegesis).

If there was spirit to be found, it was the spirit of the hustle. Boy Willie, the watermelon-selling brother in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, wants to pawn the family piano against his sister’s wishes. Berniece argues, “Money can’t buy what that piano cost. You can’t sell your soul for money.” But Boy Willie doesn’t fetishize the hulking heirloom: “I’m talking about trading that piece of wood for some land.” He pays no mind to the supposed magick of the piano. billy woods plays Boy Willie, you see—disillusioned, hell-bent on any inheritance he can hardscrabble together.

Doaker, the siblings’ uncle, explains that Berniece believes the piano “got blood on it”—and it does. “I don’t play that piano cause I don’t want to wake them spirits,” Berniece explains. Doaker eventually elaborates on the history of the piano, how Sutter the slaver traded a mother and child for it, severing the family over an object. The slavemaster’s wife was given the piano as an anniversary gift but missed her prized domestic slaves. Sutter forced the patriarch of that splintered family to flex his carpentry skills (“a worker of wood”) and carve their faces onto the piano. Years later, while Sutter was celebrating at a Fourth of July picnic, Boy Charles (Berneice and Boy Willie’s father) liberated that piano. Consequently, he was hunted down and burnt up in a boxcar. 

At the end of the second act, Sutter’s ghost rears its honky head in an attempt of reclamation, but Boy Willie fends it off in “a life-and-death struggle fraught with perils and faultless terror.” Her brother needs help, so Berniece finally plays the piano, and what she plays is “both a commandment and a plea. With each repetition it gains in strength. It is intended as an exorcism.” The song she plays is “a rustle of wind blowing across two continents,” and it keeps Sutter’s ghost at bay. Boy Willie realizes generational wealth is its own curse. What we already know: Anything you want on this cursed earth probably better off getting it yourself.

Berniece plays the “old urge to song” and the song is “found piece by piece,” meanwhile woods “played the piece till it fell to pieces”—into micro-fragments, Saafir would say. Chasing ghosts, chasing ghosts, woods chants. (What ghosts? Sutter’s ghost? The ghost of the Yellow Dog?) woods’ “arpeggios break,” doin’ damage with the fracturing [JVC] Force of a Black Flag nervous breakdown or the “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” of Robert Johnson. The verse itself breaks down into a mosaic of memories (from piano lessons, to religion, to culinary, to drugs). Broken down completely, woods needs to build up. He “sifted seeds”; he “made niggas believe when [he] grated cheese”; he was “proud to be accepted.” In the end, “the police rush the gates,” and the splendor of the ocean floor becomes an unseemly flushed toilet (though he “couldn’t bring [himself] to flush the haze”).  The simultaneous storylines of his life follow this indirect pattern. Lessing writes: “He arrived at the truth circuitously: circuitously it would have to be explained.”

24.

On “Frankie,” the titular character is as her name implies: direct. Despite her bohemian trappings, she doesn’t tantalize woods—she vibes with him. She gives it to him straight, no chaser. We’re blessed, too—a rare linear and localized narrative. The setting is Morningside Heights, “back when the building was nice”—in other words, “Frankie” is an idyll. The halcyon days. The song isn’t on the mourning-side; rather, it helps us reach the heights of a vaulted church ceiling. The elevator may “grind and hiccup,” but, nonetheless, it allows us to get lifted. Keith Murray is our elevator operator, and we’re moving on up in the world. Me and you, your mama, and your cousin, too—woods brings us all along. 

What appears platonic at the initial pass might be more amorous than anticipated. “Frankie” is a spiritual ascent. The “old biddies out front with The Watchtower ask if [woods] know[s] Christ,” but he walks with purpose past the extended arms with the JW rag. He walks determinedly, faithfully, not ashamed to bow his head and “pray [the elevator] don’t get stuck.” He moves in spirit, inspired—it’s not the breath of God which gives him life, but the expectation of a climax. “Black pussy is the world’s first religion,” ELUCID says, so when Frankie “buzzed” woods up, it was unquestionably a love buzz, a tingling sensation.

Frankie’s “whole floor smell[s] like nag champa”—a fragrance that rescues him from the rank city streets. A frankincense aroma to the strain. Frankie is neither hag nor nag. She comes correct with mysticism—eastern medicines to cure his western illnesses. A sacred space: leave the “shoes at the door.” Her “roommate was Shanta” (Shanta? Shanta from the Rāmāyana?). They’ve got “rugs like 1970’s Cairo,” but the furnishings are less emblems of Edward Said’s “exotic sensuousness” and more an exposition of exxxotica. The filth of second-hand finds. “Half the stuff in here they found on the street,” woods says. “I helped carry that TV—stupid big.” At the beginning of Fresh Kill, Shareen Lightfoot carries a TV through a homeless encampment—all tarp shelters and crap-filled shopping carts—and loads the set onto a wall of other binned boob tubes. Near the end of the film, Shareen admonishes her partner Claire as they carry a pink piece of furniture down the block: “Claire, be careful. This is a Joséphine Empress chaise lounge, okay?”

Every spot in the apartment his eyes settle on is an aphrodisiac—dope and dopamine. For weed, woods “had to burn it raw” (a prelude to the fires still to come), and the cannabis got his receptors hot and bothered. His relationship with Frankie is, without question, an intoxicating one. 

She spins “Dick Gregory on vinyl”; my money’s on the 1970 Frankenstein album, pun intended. “They say more bad things about the drug users than they do about the pushers,” Gregory remarks. “They don’t say nothing about the cat in the silk suit and the alligator shoes that’s pushing that stuff.” Shanta’s role is selector. An hour later, sounds from Jamaica, or Nigeria (can I recommend Side A of Fela’s 1973 Afrodisiac?). Frankie moves to the music, skanking, before Shanta settles on Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo.” Now woods is burning candles—and sage—and all his other plans got canceled.

They “roll Js on [an] Amharic Bible that [Frankie] found on 113th.” woods can’t let this opportunity pass him by. Why? Because Frankie is the dopest Ethiopian. Redman’s somewhere out in Jerz nodding approvingly as the couple Smoke Buddah. (Shanta has dipped by this point.) woods inhales deeply and slumps against the trunk of the Bodhi Tree. I got a slight problem: I smoke weed too much. But there’s no problem here. 

Frankie gives new meaning to old flame. Her corner apartment is infused with light: “the sun run riot.” Rays of light beam through the “French doors”—you can get lost in the floating motes. The “hardwood [is] shining,” and Frankie herself is illuminated, “looking like she might just burst into fire.” Maybe woods’ love sickness is lethal and he’s dead already, and Frankie’s a ryde-or-die bitch practicing suttee. Maybe this is her spontaneous human combustion, sunstruck. No stench of accelerant, and her demise has a Calvinist bent. Perhaps punishment for her untold sins, the corruption of her spirit. Doctors once theorized an individual too intoxicated was liable to become flammable. Frankie was too lit. Shit, it happened to drunken sailor Miguel Saveda in Melville’s 1849 novel Redburn. He was relegated to a bunk in the forecastle, and when they checked on him later, he had “two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, [that] darted out between the lips; and in a moment, [his] cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames…while covered all over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly crackled in the silence, the uncovered parts of the body burned before [the crew].”

Or maybe they burnt all those herbs and their persons to purify. The summer months burn by. woods and Frankie sit at the open windows and listen to the “broken jazz float in.” Messiah Musik liberates the plinks of piano, and his horn sample blares funereally. He’s Henry Caul in the final scene of Coppola’s The Conversation, blowing his sax in his tore-up from the floor-up apartment, exasperated, having not found the bug. For woods, Frankie’s big windows have gotten tinier—what do you expect? He followed the White Rabbit and drank from the “drink me” bottle, did he not? Frankie with the Cheshire cat grin. Her fire melts the Italian ices, those “Marinos left out till slightly unfrozen.” That’s how he wanted them anyway. Patient, just “waiting for that moment.”  

25.  

Nirvana turns to drama on “Cossack Wedding.” woods is a “disaster tourist wandering” Chernobyl.[21] He’s touring the ravages of a calamitous relationship, one which has left an “alienation zone…30 kilometers wide.” He wends through scabrous wildlife, and we follow his extended metaphor wherever the umbrella leads, even if we’re guided to the ruins of a reactor explosion.

woods is not a disaster tourist so much a disaster capitalist, of sorts—I mean in the way he mines the past for the profit of his spirit (and ours when we hear it expressed in song form). But dude is radioactive ill—bilious woods with the broken heart. His core melts. “Never again would I suffer wholeheartedly for any woman,” Marechera writes. How could he if his heart is dissected, atriums to the right and left? woods looks like he’s seen a ghost and is turning over Ghostface lines in his head. His heart is cold like Russia after the breakup, breakdown. “For those cold wars you need endurance,” but woods just don’t have it in him. A partnership that once warmed the cockles of his heart now cancers the conjugal visit. Contaminants stain the sheets of the connubial bed. Throw the Magnum to his head and squeeze until the bed’s completely red. He feels isotopically iced out. Feast on mercury fish (unavoidable). Hot wire his heart. Put an end to all this cold chillin’.

She dresses down to a demure “black bra strap,” but the sex is a mess. “Never nothing lurid” save for the “dead fish [and] wild boars swollen with tumors.” “Radiation flow out [his] phone jack like a Keurig,” because the best part of waking up is caesium in your cup. The love doesn’t last; the communication breaks down. Only “snippets of dialogue” detected. He might crack a smile but ain’t a damn thing funny. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—to hold her, to swim in her “aqueous humor,” growing more splenetic by the second. 

The chorus offers clarity: “I’m a sucker; I fall for it every time.” Every time—so this is a pattern of behavior. The past is not without incident. Chernobyl had partial meltdowns in ’82 and ’84 prior to the big blowup of ’86. woods is sympathetic when he self-deprecates: I’m a sucker. Sucker M.C.’s: move back, catch a heart attack.

The bubbler pools boil over, ooze corium: woods and the missus consider whether to give it another go. He reminisces on what was—the books he’d loaned her. DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was a miss (the title itself befitting of his synopsis on what they had between them).[22] As for the Solzhenitsyn? “She skipped to the end.” The novel in question is the 500-page Cancer Ward, no doubt. In it, Kostoglotov scans a health department certificate—“On it was written: ‘Tumor cordis; casus inoperabilis’ [cancer of the heart].” The whole library love affair sums up to say less. Yet Lessing says more of Mary Turner:

It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavor. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word…. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers.[23]

That isotope chill prevails. woods feels “the cold creeping in [his] bones.” Creeping, because he’s creeped-out. Gone from creeper to crept-upon. Feels it “in [his] bones” like a neoplasm—deep in the marrow. Bones thugged in disharmony. She’s Creepin on ah Come Up. Like a force of nature, her “wind whip around [his] home,” spookily. “She came when I’m sleeping,” he says, vulnerable as can be. A succubus looking for a sucker. Postpartum possibly, what with her “breasts leaking [and] pussy unkempt.” The description is adjectivally nauseating, in Marechera’s words.

Wasn’t only her uglies going bump in the night. Ethereal beauty emerged: “Around her the light bent.” She was aureoled—something saintly and subtle; not like the raging immolation of Frankie. Not the excessive sunlight of Frankie’s loft either—this light is ambient, “like an opium den,” with the requisite narcotic effect. An air of mystery: “[He] couldn’t quite see her face.” She was dressed in all black like The Omen [can’t spell women without it—am I right, fellas?]. Her fashion sense is dour like the weed she got “from her friend.” She moves with the night, wears its cloak. He pulls on the “piff with a fragile stem,” and we consider the fragility of his mindstate. You gots to chill, he tells himself. “I mind my business,” he raps. Strictly business. It’s a lesson hard-learned. Stay the fuck up out my biznass. “A very bad business,” the people say of Mary Turner’s death at the hands of her houseboy. “Nobody beats the Biz,” woods sings. The M-A-R-K-I-E might make the ladies scream and shout and be bound to wreck her body, but this ain’t no party, woods ain’t no king of discoing. “Real mens mind their own business,” Daniel Dumile definitively said. woods always with that palm-to-the-camera pose—behind that, he’s still Mugabe in a DOOM mask.

He needs a double portion of protection—some [will-]power beyond prophylaxis. Strives to keep the “wolves behind the fences.” This means setting “snares in the snow.” This means he’s “dug trenches,” “mined roads,” and “interrogated peasants,” but his precautions are futile: the “wolves [are] at home in bed.” We’re reminded of reliable hiding places. You’ve got to peel back the glossed lips and “peep the teeth like a dentist.” You guessed it: toothy: long and glistening. I think it’d be in your best interest to dead the Little Red Riding Hood worries and, instead, polish your Red Army Faction tactics. Might need a Heckler & Koch MP5, because her passions and ploys make her Meinhof more formidable than your Baader. There’s no keeping her down or out: “In the morning [his] pillow smell[s] of pine cones.”

26.  SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN-EYED BANDIT

My betrothed fled to the forest, hid in the pines Still set a place for her, unlatched the door so she could come inside.

The encounter in the forest carries a chivalric quality, though chivalry is dead of a malignancy. We had the lady by the throat—carcinoma hugging her thyroid—yet still she pursues her lover. woods’ “Cossack Wedding” runs parallel to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While sheltered in a lord’s castle, the lord’s lady seeks to seduce the young knight. With the lord busy leading a hunt “through a lime-leaf border” [cue Nate Dogg: smoke weed everyday],  the lady sneaks into Gawain’s room. She finds him “slumbering in his sheets, / dozing as the daylight dapple[s] the walls.” Gawain, woozy, hears “the sigh of a door swinging slowly aside.” He lapsed by not locking the door (much like woods who “unlatched” it). He lifts his head and discovers the lady “looking her loveliest…craftily closing the door.” He feigns sleep, but the lady “cast[s] up the curtain” of his bed “and crept inside” [...yeah, just keep it on the down-low]. He fake-awakes, and she tells him, You’re tricked and trapped! She proposes a truce, threatening to “bind [him] in [his] bed” if he doesn’t agree to it. Gawain, recognizing the situation, refers to himself as a “prisoner” and asks her permission to dress, stalling. She denies the request and says she’ll “tuck in [his] covers corner to corner, / then playfully parlay with the man [she] [has] pinned.” The lady isn’t “hid in the pines” like woods’ stalker; she’s got him pinned. The lady tells Gawain, “do with me what you will. / I’ll come just as you call.” woods’ refrain of “...so she could come inside” hits different in those castle walls and bloody chambers. Ahooga! 

27.  SHE’S DRIVING ME OUT OF MY MIND: THAT GIRL IS POISON

Angels in white ask why she’s weeping: And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

—John 20:13, KJV

“She said, Come get me and I’m yours,” woods testifies on “Magdalene,” but the communication has gotten so poor that the line actually “went dead.” Unlike Mary Magdalene, woods’ Magdalene won’t even approach the sepulcher. She wasn’t present for his crucifixion. She rather play the coy mistress. Come get me…. She offers herself as a possession on some Craigslist killer shit: CURB ALERT. Casual encounters have been SESTA-ed out of existence. This ain’t the glory days of “Ca$h 4 Gold” when woods could ask, Do I know you from Craigslist? Those erotic services have been Ctrl+Alt+Deleted. Not a “spray tan and glitter” situation either. On “Schism,” woods stumbles into “a strip club everywhere [he’s] touring,” but Magdalene isn’t a dancer “bent at the waist, left cheek on the mirror.” What’s sacred, what’s suitable? ELUCID queries. What’s profane, Magdalene? The wayward woman. You could imagine a time when she twerked—put her thing down, flipped it, and reversed it—as orgasmic as Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, but now she’s in distress with seven devils swelling in her silicone chest.

woods wants to keep her talking—he puts “bread on her phone” like some Eucharistic handout—but a bad penny finds its own way to hell, and Magdalene shuffles about as da baddest bitch since Trina. Brother on the phone tells woods, “She don’t wanna be saved—get it through your fucking head.” He can’t, though—he’s thick. Can’t accept he’s a savior denied, his overtures met with threats—he’s stubborner than that. woods is in hot pursuit, and his verse on “Magdalene” is a road novel. 

This isn’t woods’ first foray into the genre. “Magdalene” calls back to “Sleep” from Today, I Wrote Nothing, but his latest car journey is far lonelier and grim—more big sleep than sleep. He’s driving unaccompanied, approaching the interchange of the road to Parnassus and the road to perdition. McCarthy’s “cities of the plain hum in the distance,” brimstone and fire falling fast as the AM radio static of a Reverend Branham sermon intensifies. At turns, as disquieting as a joyride in Christine from Mandeville to Sligoville. On “Swampwater,” the car ride was a commute with “really no time for fear.” Only had to compete with the “dying sun glare through thin atmosphere, [the] windshield smeared, [and] AC blasting old air.” Progress was on pause: “standstill traffic.” On “Pollo Rico,” woods recollects how his “heart used to sing crossing the old Goethals.” And on “All Jokes Aside,” he’s counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike like Paul Simon, gone looking for Amerika.

With “Magdalene,” woods’ actions are deliberate, not whimsical. He “slept all day so [he] could drive the next.” Early to rise, it was “still dark when [he] left.” The drive is immediately desolate—not gridlock’d, but “streets empty.” He hankers not for nicotine, but for the ritual that comes with smoking a pack. He tries not to fixate on the “check engine light lit.” The day ends as quickly as it begins. woods clicks on the high-beams, and those “brights plowed the night.” He’s alone in his eternity at the wheel, as Kerouac says. Like in Lynch’s Lost Highway, the dashed yellow lines of the asphalt-black road are swallowed up by speed. 

There’s nothing too sexual about woods’ check engine light—nothing on par with ELUCID’s pleading Suck my dick and tell me I’m beautiful, anyway. woods is a forsaken man, and only so much lust can be summoned from his vehicle—the good vibrations of the rumble strips along the shoulder, okay, the quivering chassis—but his whip isn’t anywhere near as erotic as Robert Johnson’s ride on “Terraplane Blues.” Like woods, Johnson “feel[s] so lonesome” on the 1936 recording, but his “moan” is libidinous. He longs for his lady, eager to “hoist [her] hood” and “check [her] oil.” Where woods ignores the check engine light, Johnson pulls out his dipstick with the quickness. He wants to charge his lover’s batteries, give her generator a spark, and tangle with her wires. He holds out hope that her “spark plug will give [him] fire.”

woods can spot the cell towers on the horizon—the signal reliable enough for a “split-lip selfie” to come through. Not the first time—and likely not the last time—Magdalene has been hit, vows of gentleness notwithstanding. The man Magdalene is shacked up with readies “his great hand swinging yet again to smash,” like Marechera writes—prepared to “beat her until she [is] just a red stain.” Words chosen more carefully when the threat of violence in the air. 

The “broken white lines” on the highway double as the lines on mirrored glass—vices and indulgences in which woods and Magdalene once partook. Blowing through states? More like, “Blowing through my mind,” if you were to ask Melle Mel. woods has got vision dreams of passion—a feeling of euphoria tempered by his previous Cocaine Blues. I took a shot of cocaine, and I shot my woman down: it might be worth the bid in Folsom. Less problems. No matter, woods is “riding clean”; no “trees mash[ing] in the grinder” like on “Sleep.” He’s been “eighteen months clean” of the stuff, but that doesn’t stop the dreams that form as his eyes grow heavy, hypnotized by the lines. He can “taste the acetate” in the dream—something visceral. Similarly piercing when he can’t “get hard,” but at least he gets to “[watch] her masturbate” like some woman with tattooed hands. Magdalene doesn’t bite her bottom lip, but “blood trickle[s] out one nostril.” Jerked awake. 

Forty winks at a “rest area in [the] Carolinas” to regroup. He eats some Chick-fil-A, “washed [his] face” in the “gas station sink”—those baptismal waters. Probably no soap in the dispenser. A “funny feeling” creeps in when another text goes unanswered. He feels a “familiar weight,” and succumbs to the temptation of a pack of cigarettes. Count ’em: familiar three over [“weight”; “rage”; “place”]. You can call them Graymalkin, Paddock, and Harpier. That’s right—he’s driving a “car full of ghosts” in the “HOV lane.” Not only Magdalene’s ghost, but Stacy’s, Frankie’s, and who knows who else’s. His car holds four in the back; two if they’re fat. This savior business is nasty, no question. Pac was doing 85, trying to outrun his enemies, but to paraphrase woods on “Fuchsia & Green,” he and his phantom girlfriends ride to the bloody end like the Ceauşescus.

woods “coast[s] right off the interstate.” His final call goes “straight to voicemail.” No music; no Capone-N-Noreaga’s “Driver’s Seat”; just his own voice to serenade him. The “road narrows” as his options do. State troopers will ping his phone, “GPS [his] fate,”—they’ll discover his putrid “human remains when [they] dredge those lakes.” The same as how he dredged up those past relationships—interest piqued at the autopsy table. “Doubt and questions” remain, “rattl[ing] like wedding cans on the getaway car.” Some real Bonnie and Self Jupiter mythos. The holy matrimony, the monogamous union, the vindication: he gets none of it.

28.  THE BLUES REMEMBERS EVERYTHING

…looking for a body… 

—ELUCID, “God’s Feet” (2021)

The blues remembers how the pillow smells of pine cones. The blues remembers the accidents and where the bodies are buried beneath silt and hydrilla, slicked with algae. The blues insists on its ever-presence—an evergreen tradition. This is how Kurt Cobain, an anguished and bedraggled white man, can channel Lead Belly in 1993 from a 1944 recording. The tormented speaker of “In the Pines” (or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” as it appears on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York, sans question mark—’cause you already know the answer) begs his girl (my girl, my girl…) not to lie to him. His suspicion (in the pines, in the pines) is somewhere “the sun don’t ever shine.” [The doubled-phrasing is in keeping with the theme of duplicity.] The dark woods are Jacob-and-Wilhelm level Grimm, but the forlorn lover follows anyway. He’s “going where the cold wind blows,” blows so hard that he’ll “shiver the whole night through.” Or, as Cobain sings it—thrrrrrroooooughhhaghhh—as if retched from the depths of his Flagyl-filled acid-scathed gut. On “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” Hank Williams’ woman was “long gone,” leaving him “lonesome blue,” and his only solution was to “find [himself] a river, one that’s cold as ice.” Cobain’s pilled and drab olive-green cardigan can’t even begin to keep him warm.

Everything is so unformed, so wild, and so lonely! I never saw anything so lonesome as these woods are. Here you can ride miles and miles, hours and hours, and hear nothing but the swaying of the pine-trees, just as you hear it now.

—Nina Gordon in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856) 

The sun don’t ever shine in the pines; this ain’t Frankie’s corner apartment. Come night, the pines are dingy and frigid. There’s Soviet partisans in the pines, and woods’ betrothed from “Cossack Wedding,” too. Doris Lessing describes Mary Turner as “a woman whose life had been so unhappy because of economic pressure that she had literally pined to death.” To pine is to be in the pines. 

Nirvana as descendent or derivative of the blues (a Situationist dérive more truly, maybe)? Well, reader, don’t you know that things go in cycles? Excursions are more easily achieved in motor vehicles—cover more ground that way. Don’t simply defer to Inspectah Deck and his evocations; Cobain, at times, was a wild rockstar who smashed guitars, but for most of his life he was a mordant personality inhabiting a Pacific Northwest region as putrefactive as a bacteria-packed Petri dish. Junk-sick, love-sick, and living homeless under bridges, he too remembers and represents what the country forgot. The drop-D riff on “Heart-Shaped Box” forms the basis of 3 Melancholy Gypsies’ “Sunsprayed” (oh, so Frankie wasn’t sunstruck—she was sunsprayed!), and woods interpolated “Come As You Are” on “Robespierre.” Memoria, Barrie McLain sings. 

29.             

The old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century.

—Marechera (1978)

The muck and mire of memory is heavy—we’re swimming in murky waters with naive hopes of recovering bodies. Bodies pulled from the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. Bodies pulled from the greenhouse above the garage. Which way is up? The point-of-view switches from first- to third-person in the closing stanza of “In the Pines”; the brokenhearted man tells the conclusion of his story from the hereafter—of how he was “her husband,” and a “hard-working man,” and how “his head was found in a driving wheel, but his body never was found.” No human remains when you canvass the area. The driving wheel puts the scene of the accident at a train crossing, but it corresponds to the steering wheel just as well. If your mem’ry serves you well, as Dylan and the Band sang in a gin-soaked chorus, this wheel’s on fire: “...rolling down the road, / Best notify my next-of-kin, / This wheel shall explode!”

In The Grass is Singing, Lessing describes how Mary Turner notices her husband Dick in a way she never had before on the drive home from the market:

As he gripped the steering wheel, his lean hands, burned coffee-color by the sun, shook perpetually, although almost imperceptibly. It seemed to her a sign of weakness, that trembling; the mouth was too tight-set. He was leaning forward, gripping the wheel, gazing down the narrow winding bush track as if trying to foresee his own future.

Childless Dick Turner appears poised for an accident, an accident that keeps repeating through time. In James Agee’s A Death in the Family, posthumously published in 1957, a father dies on the road returning from visiting his own ailing father. A cotter pin that holds the steering mechanism together works itself loose. The grisly details of his demise are described to his wife while her children sleep upstairs:

[H]e must have hit a loose rock with one of the front wheels…. They think it must have wrenched the wheel right out of his hands and thrown him forward very hard so that he struck his chin, just one sharp blow against the steering wheel. And that must have killed him on the spot…. That auto threw him out on the ground as it careened down into that sort of flat, wide ditch.

On “bigfakelaugh,” woods waits interminably for his father to come home as the day turned to evening: “Tree limbs skim the water, the dark deepen, / The car swerve, rainy season.” woods relates his father’s final words on Camouflage’s “Dirge”: “There’s a noise in my head, / Last thing my father said, / On the side of the road, then he was dead.” Was the noise that of a fly buzzing, startled out of the swampwater?

In The House of Hunger, the protagonist watches a film: “Of the pictures shown there were many traffic snarl-ups and ghastly road accidents.” One of the accidents was of an “old black man, rags tucked in, cycling into town.” On “Dirge,” woods sees the same man, but younger: “I remember his bike twisted, / Wheels still stuck in that truck hood, / So, yeah, I don’t sleep that good.”

Much in the manner that the son in the Agee novel is told of his father’s death, Marechera writes: “Mother woke me up to tell me that father had been struck down by a speeding car at the roundabout; I went to the mortuary to see him, and they had sewn back his head to the trunk and his eyes were open. I tried to close them but they would not shut, and later we buried him with his eyes still staring upward.” Lead Belly said the man’s head was “found in a driving wheel,” and these decapitations are not so different.

These father-bodies stack up. (You can’t bury that many bodies; they burned ’em in piles.) The emotional weight: immense. We’re the children carrying the concept-heavy Dead Father with cables in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father (1975)—it bears repeating: The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open…. Dead, but still with us. Still with us, but dead. Child is father to the man, hopelessly dragging the corpse farther than it seems willing go.

30.  IT WAS WRITTEN

...hundreds of thousands of people devote their entire lives…to acquiring skill in twisting every phrase in all possible ways and finding a rhyme for every word. And these people, often very kind, intelligent, capable of every sort of useful labour, grow wild in these exceptional, stupefying occupations and become dull to all serious phenomena of life, one-sided and self-complacent specialists…

—Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1897)

Many of Tolstoy’s adherents—of which there were many—had never seen his face. They depended on the realistic rendering completed by Nikolai Ge in 1884. In Ge’s painting, the writer is black-bloused and hunched over his desk. He sits with furrowed brow in deep thought, the straggles of his hoary fern-moss beard hanging low. Pen in hand, his papers are piled and strewn before him. He’s searching for words, like, “How can I put this when this itself is amorphous?”

In the self-portrait woods paints on “Schism,” the “ashtrays overflow.” He’s got the whole world in his hands, and the whole of human history is in his ashtray (there’s that ash heap again). But “the shit [woods] wrote,” it speaks to the tangible action of writing. Not saying he’s going to drag a stylus across a cuneiform tablet, but what he writes, you “can’t do it on a phone”—to do so would minimize the practice and the work itself. In The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner receives a note from a messenger—a request from her husband. She has to “stifle a scream” when she sees the native holding it: “He held it as illiterate natives always handle printed paper: as if it is something that might explode in their faces.” woods subverts this image of the subaltern. The paper won’t “explode” in his face; rather, what he writes on the paper—those incendiary lyrics—will blow up in the pallid faces of his oppressors. Zulu Tolstoy toying with the colonizers. No surprise here: we always assumed he was in the booth at Steel Tipped Dove’s reading off parchments. 

There were days, woods admits, where he wrote nothing. On “Lost Blocks,” he tossed “rhyme books in a rubbish tin,” but now “they gon’ live on.” How could he dare be so arrogant? Like Paris, the devil made him do it. He tells us so on “Fuchsia & Green”: “The devil move my pencil.” Faustian bargain: Robert Johnson negotiating the cotton fields of Dockery Plantation to arrive at the crossroads; woods navigating the necropolitan streets of rubble to arrive at the Cross-Bronx Expressway. But you can’t blame the devil like ELUCID said on Save Yourself; you’ve got to save yourself. woods is mostly on the humble, but, as he said on “FNU LNU,” he lets “the pen gloat.”[24]

31.

My thoughts chalked themselves on the black page of a dreamless sleep.

— Marechera (1978)

Rappers are a logocentric lot—viewing what they do on the mic (speak, spit, et al.) as closer to the truth. Each is a god of the spoken word (In the beginning was the Word…), world-builders, speaking everything-is-everything into summary 16s—each an O.C.: Word…Life. Freestyling, especially, appears to reinforce this idea, as improvised thoughts manifest as speech. Writing, historically, is seen as subordinate to speech—secondary, a hype-man at most, a freestyle transcription. That’s why Socrates didn’t write shit down. Neither did Stringer Bell (Nigga, is you takin’ notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?) or Paulie Walnuts (I don’t write nothin’ down). Writing solicits danger—the risk of being too removed from the original thought (and that thought is the truth, Ruth). In Of Grammatology, Derrida undoes this notion of speech as king, as prime mover [of crowds]. He instead argues that language results from the interplay between speech and writing. Writing composes A Book of Human Language (as Aceyalone made known, establishing the guidelines in ’98).

billy woods reminds us, frequently, that what he delivers to us through his voice [presence] comes off the page [absence]. We know he stares at the page, blunted. We never see the well-worn and thumbed-through rhyme book, but he draws our attention to it: The shit I wrote…. Others aren’t so quick to; they uphold the primacy of speech (“I think about what I’m gonna say, but it’s never pen to paper,” Jay-Z has repeatedly claimed). To write, for many, is to endanger or deaden. woods, meanwhile, welcomes the risk (...’cause I’m HAZARDOUS, Godfather Don declares). If the words die on the page, woods simply resurrects them on the mic, on the stage—the resuscitation as heavy and as heaving as a Biz Markie beatbox. Still, nothing is ever simple. We could argue woods never writes either—after all, “they said the greats ain’t write shit, they just poured out they anguish.” 

32.  They gon’ be here when all y’all are gone.

woods no longer has fears that he may cease to be. Unlike John Keats who expired at 25 (like Tupac, like Scott La Rock), tuberculo-sick, a hacking cough into a blood-spattered cloth, woods takes stock of his life and rap career. Keats wrote “When I Have Fears” in 1818, but the sonnet wasn’t published until 30 years after the poet was placed in cemetery clay. He knew it was coming—some Don Killuminati-type premonitions. Even left instructions for his epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. The Young English Poet clearly had a “tombstone head and a graveyard mind,” to quote Bo Diddley on “Who Do You Love?” (For who do? read “hoodoo”—and so well, it’s a spell, hell…) “Just 22,” Diddley sang, “and I don’t mind dyin’.” Keats knew his life and lyrics were fleeting—that’s why his name was “writ in Water.” Another sonneteer washed. Another man done gone. Keats stands “on the shore / Of the wide world” alone, and he “think[s] / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” Like woods smoking and thinking until those “ashtrays overflow.” Catch wreck and then shipwreck. “[L]ove and fame” dissolve into “nothingness” and “sink.” “Spanish galleon—I was sunken in place,” woods raps on “Classical Music.” But he gains a Mariel boatlift on “Fuchsia & Green”: “I’m a vessel.” AKAI SOLO previously spoke to the fact: “Even though the vessels differ, we’re all still sailing.” woods’ flow is blood-flow—arterial spray. Suffer and survive the aqua seafoam shame.

Keats and woods, stubbornly, make the decision to write—acts of preservation: etched in stone or grooved into vinyl. For all the afters possible: posterity, posthumous, post no bills over these epitaphs. On “Robespierre,” woods promised: “You niggas gonna remember me even if it’s burning in effigy.” But on “Schism,” the picture is rosier. “My poems need a home,” woods raps—taking up residence in our consciousness, likely—and it’s there that they’ll “live on.” In fact, “they gon’ be here when all y’all is gone.” They’ll exist beyond us—we’re transitory; his poems are not. His lyrics won’t deign to settle for a file “on a phone.” “Maybe a little limerick,” he concedes, but even five Edward Lear-like nonsense lines harness substantial power. On Armand Hammer’s “War Stories,” a Messiah Musik-produced track from Shrines with Tom Waitsesque conundrum percussion, we learn a limerick is all it takes to “get the plantation lit.” woods is focused on the Payback. Time is Running Out Fast, and payback is a thing you gotta see (all hail James Brown). “It wasn’t all at once,” woods admits, “but trust me: everyone paid.” We knew his agenda coming in; knew he was close to completion. On “Indian Summer”: “I swore vengeance in the seventh grade— / Not on one man, the whole human race. / …I’m almost done—every debt gets paid.” God be praised. God bless the dead, but we not talking about John Keats. We’re talking about william woods. 

In the moment, it might feel like “ya mans was doing too much,” but he MUST NOT SLEEP; MUST KEEP SCRIBBLING. Can’t stop before his “pen has gleaned [his] teeming brain.” Killah Keats can’t be laid to rest “before high-pilèd books” are written. Like Keats, woods wants to behold “Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” on the “night’s starred face.” He wants to “trace / Their shadows” into your record collection, if not the Heinemann African Writers Series. He wants us all to be able to say, Ya mans did every damn thing. 

33.  EXEUNT

Soft you. A word or two before you go.

—Othello (5.2.397)

I’ve said too much—that’s my bad, but “Pollo Rico” and “All Jokes Aside” are a dyad of resignation, a surrendering. A removal of the signum. Scratch the name from the account book (“bad memories, sad endings”). Don’t leave one damn identifying mark. I think of Chartres again—without a signature, Welles said. “Everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash,” yet, the church remains. As “Pollo Rico” begins, we know we’ve arrived at our destination—a point of no return as pointless as each before it, so clearly there’s “no point going back and forth over who did what.” For his part, woods steps back and widens his view: “My character arc: Rolling Loud to Shakespeare in the Park.” Lord Scotch to Lord Chamberlain’s Men. woods stands tall, at the edge, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea and Fog—above the crowds, above the clouds where the sounds are original, like Guru, like a guru. He looks, listens, and observes as a “man apart, drink[ing] alone [in a] packed bar.”

What are you waiting for? A dream deferred, a future unfixed, or maybe just awaiting the end. You can’t stop what’s coming (as woods said on “Fever Grass,” but also Uncle Ellis in No Country for Old Men). It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity. You’ve got to be ready, like Marechera: “I was at that moment prepared for the knife-thrust.” woods is primed to “get stabbed [and] stagger off in the dark.” Is this a dagger which I see before me?  Lance Un Rivera shanked in the club by Jigga Man; Hamlet having the potent poison [of paraquat] quite o’er-crow his spirit. Or maybe he stabs himself like Othello. Whatever the case, he’s the star of the show, and then instantly he’s someone else, an “understudy” just “waiting in the wings.”

I’m always waiting on the thunderclap, woods raps on “Paraquat.” In T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the thunder speaks (section V. of the poem is titled “What the Thunder Said”), and the message is bleak: “He who was living is now dead, / We who were living are now dying.” In The Grass is Singing (its title culled from The Waste Land), Mary Turner is menaced by thunder as Moses, the houseboy, braces to cut her down with his weapon—likely a scythe, what with its “long curving shape.” She screams, but the cry is “stopped by a black wedge of hand inserted between her jaws.” Mary describes Moses as one with Nature (“the bush avenged itself”). Moses is only the medium, not a vengeful victim who had suffered her whip across his face and wore its scar. She sees him as inseparable from the trees, which “advanced in a rush, like beasts, [and] the thunder was the noise of their coming.” After the murder, Moses “look[s] down at the piece of metal he held, which he had picked up in the bush, and had spent the day polishing and sharpening. The blood trickled off it…” Some real stab your brain with your nose bone revenge.

34.

She saw on his face that queer grin of his, that was more a baring of the teeth than a smile: self-critical, assessing, defeated. She hated to see it.

—Lessing

As embittered as you might be, you’ve got to adjust your expectations. woods’ uncle teaches the truth to the youth. He says, Hey, youth—here’s the truth: “When the revolution was over, they gave ’em half what they promised, / Let’s be honest, / And the ones who bust they guns went home to tin cups of tea, that same plate of porridge.” Even revolutionaries—those guerillas in the mist—resort to Oliver Twist begging: Please, sir, I want some more. But the diminishing returns mean gruel’s all you get in the end. The uncle tells him, “They can’t bury that many bodies, [so] they burned ’em in piles.” No other choice—it’s a public health issue. Can’t leave bodies exposed to be picked apart by scavenging dogs like Polyneices. It won’t be cinematic, his uncle essentially says. woods can barely see his face through the dark: “I could see his teeth—it wasn’t a smile.”

35.

The chorus of “Pollo Rico” reveals woods is keeping vigil. We who were living are now dying. He slips another dollar into the “hospital vending machine” with the despondency of a man who just signed the DNR. It’s New Year’s Eve, which is just another way of saying it’s the end of something. Even if he sneaks in the Clicquot, it’s still all suffering. A last meal of pollo rico and yuca fries. A tray table on castors becomes a table of plenty. 

Here comes the sun-king: “Louis XIV in a vape”—something regal, exalted; something Reggie noble. That’s the sufferer’s divine right. “You hit it twice,” and the two hits speak to the two levels of familiarity operating here: woods’ familiarity with the D2 button on the vending machine grid, and our familiarity with the experience in general. We’ve all been in that same waiting room, flattening crinkled dollar bills against our thighs, making meals of those same salty and sugary snacks—a danse macabre we all do. The images of the vending machine and the Cheetos is something so banal compared to what woods hopes for: “Nothing but love in paradise.” Of course, that love doesn’t arrive until the very end, once reality sets in. Prior to that, it’s only offhand hoes (bringing to mind those jihadis in the cockpit, aiming for 72 virgins). 

In Richard Klein’s words, the Louis XIV vape “is itself a volume, a book or scroll that unfolds…”—[the unfolding blunt scroll of Tical’s cover again, still whipping in the wind]—“...its multiple, heterogenous, disparate associations around the central, governing line of a generally murderous intrigue.” The vape, then, is both the breath of life (first hit) and the last breath of death (second hit). 

In woods’ hands, the Louis XIV vape is a thyrsus, the wand of Dionysus, which Baudelaire took to be the symbol of all poetic language. In 1869’s Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire calls it “a sacerdotal emblem” in the hands of killah priests, “celebrating the divinity of whom they are the interpreters.” The thyrsus, physically, is “a baton, a purp staff, a hop-pole, a vine-prop; dry, straight, and hard.” The thyrsus is twined with “stems and flowers” in “capricious meanderings.” The vape—like the blunt or the joint—is woods summoning us to church through his words.

36.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914)

On “All Jokes Aside,” woods is the sick one now, “surprised” and indignant about the co-pay for his meds. “No cocaine” to numb the pain (though it is a “snow day”). Sips of soda for his upset stomach—which is Lee Perry-level upset—and plays math rock and Roc Marciano softly on the stereo—you know the selections. Don Caballero’s sophomore album from ’95, my guess, what with its twelve-framed smoke-stack emission cover art and flare-stack back cover. The only acceptable Roc Marci on a snow day is “Snow,” so let’s go and finesse the flow. Brick as heck out there, in here, as “the cold wind writhes about purposelessly as if there was nothing but air in the gleaming casket of creation,” Marechera says. So feel blessed for the creature comforts and let yourself get weepy and introspective.

“Once they broke open the safe,” woods raps, but we know they is just as well him. “The eyes take a moment to adjust so you can see what’s inside,” and woods takes an inventory: a meaningful “newspaper dated March 15, 88’; a “few CD-Rs” (early demos); “Megagraphitti on VHS” (Vordul always haunting his headspace); “a guap of haze, just in case.” The Mr. Serv-On CD reminds woods, and us, that lives are long. Picture billy woods riding a gold-plated No Limit tank, not a T-55. Like a rush of blood to the head, woods assesses the damage of his personal history. “The sarcophagus crack the purest,” he said on “Cossack Wedding,” but the pharaoh’s corpse is at the whim of so many changing hands, all its component parts purloined, perused, and exploited. 

Really, though, “All Jokes Aside is another love[-sick] song, like so many on Church—chronicles of a cleft communion. We hear the moans of Desdemona. And woods finds himself on the road again—Magdalene still back at the half-empty apartment, checking that tomb. This car episode is an exodus, or an escape. Like on “speak gently,” woods chooses to “E-ZPass past the cowards.” But once the traffic clears, woods takes his “sweet time, the scenic route,” as he did on “Western Education is Forbidden.” He misses and longs for that “burnt sugar sweet between those thighs,” but he has to settle for schlocky and saccharine love songs. Speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike singing “Sweet Caroline.” Emotions overflowing, tears in his eyes, he wails, Good times never seem so till it’s goodbye. woods is “sorry for the hurt [he’s] caused,” and his guilty pleasure road mix soundtracks his own guilt.

All told, woods “enjoyed the ride” of the relationship, but “she’s gone”—and he repeats it so many times that we know she ain’t coming back. Pac poured out a little liquor, and woods put the church in the sky. His new life will be lived “after the locust storm.”

37.

We finna smoke like it ain’t no tomorrow.

—Scarface, on Devin the Dude’s “Sticky Green” (1998)

...if there was a swarm of locusts, then he took it for granted, with a kind of angry but determined fatalism, that they would make straight for his most promising patch of mealies.

—Lessing

woods asks for the angels to blow the horns fast—he’s been read’ to go. Those horn blasts mean the dead is coming home. This is the day of the locusts. This is post-fallout, so rise up out of your shelters. woods joins Marechera in accepting that “there was almost nothing left but locust-like raspings of wings in his mind.” In Things Fall Apart, the inevitable was irrefutable: “...at last the locusts did descend. They settled on every tree and on every blade of grass.” Achebe’s locusts manifest a colonial settlement; for woods’, the locusts are more like a divorce settlement. The locusts, which appear from “the smoke of a great furnace,” fall “upon the earth: and unto them was given power” (Revelations 9:2-3, KJV). The blighting insects are like the boll weevils Lead Belly sang of—they’re “lookin’ for a home,” just as we all are.

38.

When the face gets revealed, game gets real. On “Pollo Rico,” woods “showed [his] face.” On “All Jokes Aside,” he flips through a “couple of pictures where [he] didn’t cover [his] face.” These are details paid to a face that has systematically been effaced. Catch a body, head for Houston. Shave the beard. Four names; two aliases. And all of ’em is mud. “I been around since long,” woods says, “I got a couple names.” He’s had to be both mask and man. In his Marechera-mode, he must create for himself “a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh [him] within its crude mythology.” He’s had to “plot the coup, while [he] cop[s] the plea,” and the assonantal connection of those dactyls [plot the coup | cop the plea] in reverse order goes to show how fast he can flip it: mask on, mask off. He’s looking to the next move while settling another. And we’re carried along, swiftly and smoothly, on the short-o of plot and cop.

A fact of life…we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced—but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

—Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973)

woods is the opposite of Lessing’s Dick Turner, a man who “did not put these feelings into words; he had lost the habit of word-spinning, living the life he did.” woods is the word-spinner, tireless. And when he feels, fair creature of an hour, that he shall never look upon thee more (the crowd, not Keats’ object of affection), he puts pen to pad again. The debt he feels toward the audience is the same debt he feels toward himself. “I was contrite until I had the crown,” he discloses. Those hard-c’s, r’s, and n’s, after all, sound as serious as contrition—give me that old time missionary Christianity ’cause it’s good enough for me? woods, we know, is remorseless. He’s done all he can. “I was right all along!” is what he tells the crowd. He’s “waving on the runway walking backwards,” blowing kisses at his opps. Or, more likely, he’s “squatting on stage” as Mo Niklz lowers the channel fader on the mixer. On “Paraquat,” woods said it’s “easy to take, hard to give back,” and that sentiment circles around again on “All Jokes Aside” when he’s “hoping [he] never took more than [he] gave.” He hasn’t. 

Footnotes:

[1]  According to Reggie Noble, there’s a Million and 1 Buddah Spots, but in an interview titled “The Redman Boom Buying Guide” with On the Go magazine in 1995, he confirms “116 is the Spizot.” 

[2]  Whitey always doubles back. On “Myth” from Terror Management, woods noted the eternal recurrence: “Whitey stole the soul—came back ’round like we old friends.”

[3]  Larry Bird’s Celtic teammate Robert Parish was busted for 5 ounces of weed and got six months probation. As per Ricky Powell’s burned-out reporting for Grand Royal: “I just do it for relaxation,” the Chief said.

[4]  A Palace from Ruins, August 17, 2020 episode with Armand Hammer.

[5]  Lessing’s Mary Turner heard the percussive sound, too: “...at night the rain would drum down on the roof, on and on, endlessly…”

[6]  Just as his auntie’s “bent back” is inverted by his cousin who sits in the “back bent”—woods’ words and imagery are in constant communication. 

[7]  “Marley’s ghost” may as well reference Bob Marley, too. Reggae’s opaque presence is less fog and more smoke: that sacramental ganja encircling the visitor. “The world will confuse ya and you’re worried and don’t have no time to think, and herb is that thing that’ll give you a little time for yourself so you can live,” Marley says.

[8]  The cassette shell case for Church is tinted radioactive green—that same Fresh Kill fluorescence to it. The interior of the J-card is military camo—not the pixelated version of the Iraq War, but the Vietnam-era green and black blotches. The kind you’d see in Platoon, Dafoe shotgunning Sheen through his Remington.

[9]  Marechera writes: “Richter would not be Richter without the staining of those baptismal scars.” Late in Fresh Kill, after their sushi is outed as toxic, Naga Saki rebrands as Mumbo Gumbo. The waitress serves up “Swamp Potion” drinks and the owner sings “Kingston Town”: Sad to say, I’m on my way… 

[10]  In Southern Change, Issue 41 of Moore’s Swamp Thing saga, is an issue about a soap opera being filmed on a Louisiana plantation. Swamp Thing comes upon a cemetery site and asks, What is it…that attracts them…to this dismal place? Louisiana locals are hired to play slaves, and method-acting soon becomes possession-acting.

[11] Toxins run through woods’ discography. Armand Hammer’s “Dettol” is an antiseptic and “VX” is a nerve agent. Our whole world’s like Mr. Gower’s apothecary, delivering poison to the masses. woods and ELUCID slap us upside the head and make our ears bleed.

[12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]  “ECOMOG”; “checkpoints”; “Houthi”; “toothy”; “Western Education is Forbidden”; “That Was Then”; “Falling Out the Sky”; “Black Sunlight”; “The Fuhrman Tapes”]

[21]  “Cossack Wedding” is a disaster tour, whereas Aethiopes took us along on a cannibal tour. Scared to death and scared to look, we’re shook—but woods will have it no other way. He forces us to stare, and we can’t help ourselves. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes how “fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.”

[22]  How interesting that a David Foster Wallace book is offered up—the pale king of dick-lit. Perhaps Wallace’s stalking and walloping of Mary Karr should give woods’ partner pause.

[23]  Later in the novel, Mary returns to reading, but on her own terms: “Her wonder deepened. She had not seen books for so long she would find it difficult to read. She looked at the titles: Rhodes and His Influence: Rhodes and the Spirit of Africa: Rhodes and His Mission. ‘Rhodes,’ she said vaguely, aloud. She knew nothing about him, except what she had been taught at school, which wasn’t much. She knew he had conquered a continent. ‘Conquered a continent,’ she said aloud, proud that she had remembered the phrase after so long. ‘Rhodes sat on an inverted bucket by a hole in the ground, dreaming of his home in England, and of the unconquered hinterland.’ She began to laugh; it seemed to her extraordinarily funny.”

[24]  woods’ doesn’t feel the need to brag; he allows his personified pen to engage in the gloating. He doesn’t punch—his lines do. Derrida explains that “one must think of writing as a game within language.” Today’s claims that an MC’s “pen game” is strong makes an apt metaphor. Socrates, in The Phaedrus, says “the play is played out; and the rhetoric enough.” 

Images:

The Teacher's Guide to the Nuwuabian's Language frontispiece (detail) | “Zev Love X and Subroc at the compound.” Image appeared on the back of Operation Doomsday album cover (1999) | Fresh Kill, dir. Shu Lea Cheang, 1994 (screenshot) | Redman, Muddy Waters album cover (1996) | Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, 1989 (screenshot) | Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, First UK edition, 1950 (detail) | “Marley's Ghost,” Charles Dickens, illustration by John Leech, 1843 edition (detail) | Wood engraving published Harper's New Monthly Magazine (September 1856) | billy woods, “Pollo Rico” music video, dir. Joseph Mault, 2022 (screenshot) | billy woods, Today, I Wrote Nothing CD cover, photography by Alexander Richter (2015) | The Saga of Swamp Thing, “Another Green World,” Alan Moore, Issue 23 (April 1984) | Brian Eno, Another Green World, 1975, back cover (detail) | Berkeley Barb, 1968 (detail) | Cannabis sativa, From Franz Eugen Köhler's Medizinal-Pflantzen (1887) | “Hangin’ Wit’ Da Clan,” High Times (1996) | Prince of Darkness, dir. John Carpenter, 1987 (screenshot) | Berkeley Barb, Issue 508, May 1975 (detail) | Romare Bearden, The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) (1983) | Suttee. Gouache painting by an unknown Indian artist (ca. 1880) | The Chernobyl nuclear power plant sits crippled two to three days after the explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine in April, 1986. In front of the chimney is the destroyed 4th reactor. (AP) | Black Market Research, East Village Other (1968) | Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch, 1997 (screenshot) | Picture of Kurt Cobain’s home taken April 8, 1994, the day he was found dead there. Mike Urban. Copyright MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection | Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1884) | Pope Sylvester II and the Devil in an illustration (c. 1460) | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (1818) | Black Market Research, East Village Other, 1968 (detail)| The Teacher's Guide to the Nuwuabian's Language frontispiece (detail)

[zerolawrence]

Have you met ZERO LAWRENCE yet? They’re the THIRTY-ONE year old BARTENDER that lives around SWINDELBROOK ST. APARTMENTS. I think they’ve lived in Seattle for ELEVEN MONTHS. From what I’ve heard, they’re ASSERTIVE, but once you’ve known them long enough you’ll find they can also be FICKLE. When I think of them, I usually think of THOROUGHFARE by ETHEL CAIN. 

name: zero lawrence.

gender: cis male.

sexual orientation: bisexual.

age: thirty-one.

birthday: december 14th.

zodiac: sagittarius.

birthplace: rye, east sussex.

neighborhood: swindlebrook street.

time in seattle: eleven months.

occupation: bartender.

HISTORY.

with a name like zero, it was hard for strangers not to have low expectations of him growing up. though the same could never be said about his parents — despite the fact they only named him zero due to being told that was their chances of having children on several different occasions by medical professionals.

even with their ironic and unusual choice of name for him, zero's parents only ever showered their little boy with love and affection, encouraging and supporting his every endeavour. zero was always taught he could do anything he set his mind to, a mindset he still carries around with him to this day.

zero's childhood was spent running up and down cobbled streets, begging his father to bury him up to his head on the beach of camber sands during summer holidays and staring outside his bedroom window wondering what lay beyond his small town's tiny borders

as much as zero loved his parents and his small town growing up, by the age of seventeen he knew small town life would never be enough for him. he wanted to travel, meet new people, experience the kind of love his father had for his mother and go on an adventure. when he was twenty one, he finally left his parents and east sussex behind with only one destination in mind — america. zero had spent his childhood obsessed with american sitcoms, falling in love with cities like the big apple, the windy city and the emerald city.

he purchased a one way ticket to new york with the money he had saved from his job at his local pub from the age of nineteen, leaving behind everyone and the life he knew. zero had left home with enough savings to last him several months before he would need to start looking for work. when his funds finally did start running low, he picked up a job in a diner where he would eventually meet the first great love of his life — or so he thought.

zero fell for this person fast and he fell hard, before he knew it they were making plans to drive across the country and exploring every nook and cranny together and for nine months that's what they did; driving across the country, sleeping in the back of their pick-up truck when they couldn't afford a motel, eating at every 24 hour diner they could find. it was the exact reason zero had wanted to leave home for in the first place. everything was perfect between them — or so he thought.

one morning zero awoke to learn they had disappeared and so was every dollar he had to his name. when he tried calling their cell phone, the only voice on the other end was one to inform the caller that this number was no longer in service. what he thought had been a whirlwind romance for him, had been a long-con for them. the only thing they had left him was their old pick-up truck, which zero immediately hopped in and headed further out west to texas — only for his truck to breakdown in albuquerque. with no money to take it to a repair shop, he decided on making alburquerque a pit stop so he could find a job and save up enough money to buy a another car and hit the road again.

it was between the ages twenty four to thirty that zero spent bussing tables in dallas, bartending at dive bars in nashville, working on a ranch in wyoming, spending some time in montana to see the rocky mountains and yellowstone national park and working blue-collar jobs in oregon. zero doesn't stay anywhere for too long, he's always searching for his next adventure, chasing that next high and his latest has lead him to seattle, washington. where he's spent the eleven months bartending at a strip club named the doghouse. out of all the jobs he's worked over the years, bartending is his favourite despite the unusual work hours. it allows him to meet people from all other the country, sometimes even the world and learn a piece of their story.

PERSONALITY.

+ assertive, captivating, dexterous, maverick and resilient. - airy, fickle, reticent, soft headed and opinionated.

TIDBITS.

his favourite song to workout to is confident by demi lovato.

this is one of his genuine messages from grindr, he still hasn't emotionally recovered.

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

ROMANTIC flirtationship / situationship / tinder matches / unrequited love / will they/won't they? / ex boyfriend/girlfriend / one night stand.

PLATONIC building neighbours / drinking buddies / work buddies / ride or dies / bromances / patrons / people he's met on his travels across america / the doghouse family.

ANTAGONISTIC noisy neighbours / drunks from the bar / exes / frenemies / rivals / the first great love of his life ( this would need to be plotted / discussed further but their name/gender/etc is utp ).

CURRENT CONNECTIONS.

cousins by blood / sunshine and grump duo by fate @howlettbaz

doghouse bros / casual friends with benefits @budddywells

swindlebrook neighbours / @mikaylatilly @howlettbaz @budddywells @thaddtilly @murphyaltman

the doghouse family / @budddywells @mikaylatilly @murphyaltman

nashville drinking buddy / @henryxmonroe

hiking buddies / dad joke victim @rafacarreno

doghouse patron / trades shots for secrets about her life.. or at least tries to @estestrauss

[short-hot-stories]

Dressed to Thrill

By Fugman. Listen to the ► Podcast at Connected.

I have always thought that a woman dressed in nothing but a man’s dress shirt was extremely sexy.  I have always had fantasized about coming home, and seeing my wife in just one of my dress shirts, but I never told anyone of it because I thought that they would think it as silly.  So I kept the thought to myself and just resigned myself to the fact that it would never happen.   On Valentine’s Day, I arrived home and I could not locate my wife, I went to the kitchen, bathroom, living room and even the bedroom calling out to my wife, no answer. 

I went into my office to drop off some work things and then I was going to call her cell phone from my office.  When I opened the door, my wife was sitting on the top of my desk wearing only my good dress shirt unbuttoned all the way down and my tie.  She looked absolutely stunning, her long brown hair flowed over her shoulders and hung down just right making her look so sexy.  The only words she spoke were “Happy Valentine’s Day, I love you!”  I could barely speak but I manage to muster an “I love you” back.  Carey looked incredible, I just couldn’t get over the fact that I had never told her about this but she just happened to fulfill my fantasy without even knowing about it.  “How did you know that this was my fantasy?”  I asked her.   Carey told me, “I didn’t know, but I had an idea that you would find this sexy.”

 I smiled and said “I find it incredibly sexy, I think you are incredibly sexy, I want you so bad right now.”

 “Are you sure you are not mad at me for wearing your clothes, I know it is the last clean shirt that you have until we do laundry?”  “How could I be mad at you, when you look so sexy?  Besides I can still wear it tomorrow, I will just never look as good as you do in it.”

 She motioned me to come over, I couldn’t wait to get closer to her, I had to kiss her, touch her, hold her, and make love to her.   We shared a very passionate kiss together, she looked up at me with those gorgeous eyes and I was lost in the moment, I couldn’t think about anything but holding her and kissing her.   Our passion was getting more and more intense, her hands started to unbutton my dress shirt.  When she finished unbuttoning my shirt she told me that she wanted to see if I looked as sexy as she did with my shirt unbuttoned.  I had to laugh, “I don’t think anybody could look as sexy as you do right now.”

 “Right answer,” she said as she smiled and removed her tie.  Her shirt fell open a little more and I could see that she was not wearing anything underneath.  She reached out to me once again, and drew me close and kissed me once again very passionately.  I couldn’t resist placing my hands inside of her shirt and slowly caressing her.  I felt her tense under my gentle touch and her breathing started to get more shallow.  My hands started to travel from her stomach to her side, up closer to her breasts and then finally to her nipples. 

 I could tell that she was enjoying my hands traveling around her body.  The passion in her kiss intensified and her hands started to work on the belt buckle on my pants.  I slid my hand down her stomach and let it rest on her upper thigh, I slowly moved my hands higher, closer to that spot that she wants me to go.  When I was only an inch away from that spot, I could feel the heat from her, I could tell that she couldn’t wait for me to continue.  The feel of her soft inner thighs, the warmth between her legs, it was all begging me to continue.  She broke away from my kiss and I felt her hands unzip and pull down my pants, dropping my underwear at the same time.  She grazed against my hardness but moved away, “when you touch me, I will touch you.”

 I slid my hand closer and closer to her, every inch that my hands traveled, her hands moved just as far.  When I could feel the tiny hairs above I slid my hands lower and felt the warmth and the moisture from her most intimate of places.  When my hand slid between her thighs, I felt her hands grab a hold of my erection and start sliding up and down on it.  She looked at me and smiled and said, “the more you do, the more I do.”

 My fingers dove inside of her , my thumb tracing the outline of her lower lips, as my fingers continued entering her.  Her grip tightened on my hardness as she continued to slid her hand up and down.  I could feel her breath get deeper and deeper as my fingers explored her inside, whenever my pace intensified, hers did as well.  I could feel her getting wetter, getting more excited as I continued to play deep inside of her, I knew she was getting closer and closer to her orgasm.  Her hands slid up and down faster and faster, I was getting harder and harder, I could barely breathe, the smells, the feelings, the excitement.  I don’t know what made me think of it, but I had stopped and removed her shirt, “I don’t want to get anything on it, I do have to wear it tomorrow.”

 She laughed and slid my shirt off of her shoulders and exposed herself completely to me.   At that point, I cleared my desk and laid her down on the cold wooden top.  I moved her legs up so that her feet were also touching the top of the desk, she was now open to me.  I kissed my way down her legs moving closer and closer, I could see my wife was getting more and more out of breath.  I could smell her excitement, I could taste her wetness, I reached out with my tongue and she screamed out in orgasm.  I gave her almost a whole second to recover before I started to flick my tongue up and down sliding between her lips. 

My tongue slid up and down, taking my time when I reach the top of her lips, where that little piece of skin is, I concentrated on that for a few moments before I moved back down and poked my tongue inside of her.  Her breathing continued to intensify, I knew she was getting close to having another climax.  I took my mouth away from her, pulled her down the desk until her legs were dangling off the desk, I slowly moved towards her, and playfully touched her lips with my erection.  I didn’t slid inside of her, just moved myself up and down until I was coated in her juices.  She begged me to slid inside of her, “I need you baby, please enter me; Now” I couldn’t disobey her, I slowly entered into her as far as I could go, it seemed to take forever until I was buried deep within her.  Once I was all of the way inside of her, I slid out a little ways and then right back in, I would slid out a little more and then right back in. 

 Each time, I would come out a little further before driving back inside of her.  Every thrust in was moving quicker and quicker, every time I slid myself out, was slower and slower.  I kept up this slow but agonizing pace until I was almost pulling out of her all of the way before I would drive back inside of her with a gasp from her and a grunt from me.   I continued to drive her crazy, she was getting closer and closer, her sharp breathing made her breasts rise and fall, her nipples like little ice caps on top of the fleshy mountains.  Her hair was all over her face, her hands gripping the side of the desk.  I continued to drive myself deep within her until I knew that she was almost ready for another climax, and then I did the unthinkable to her, I stopped moving inside of her. 

I slid down her legs and planted my tongue deep inside of her.  Carey gasped and I moved back up her legs and slid my erection back into her.  I moved in and out of her in slow sharp thrusts.  I knew she was getting close again and I stopped, moved my way down her body and slid my tongue inside of her one more time.  I licked her furiously for a moment and then slid back up her body and back inside of her, this time she grabbed a hold of my hips and forced me to finish her off.  I knew that she was almost there, so I continued and quickened the pace.  I could feel her muscles gripping me inside encouraging me to finish inside of her. 

 She screamed again and I felt the strongest muscles inside of her that I have ever felt before.  She was milking me, waiting for me to explode inside of her, I couldn’t hold back any longer as I gave one last thrust inside of her.  We were both breathing heavy, we were both sweaty, but we hugged each other and shared another passionate kiss.  “I love you Carey, Happy Valentine’s Day.”

By Fugman for Tumblr.

[0bliveon]

✧. ┊ ( until i write a proper bio for this baby, have this )

* dossier . name. oblivion ( she doesn’t like being called this, just because the cult was full of edgelords doesn’t mean she has to humor them ). nicknames. liv, this is what she will introduce herself as. race. wood elf. class & specialization. mystic ( she garners most of her power from shar, but after escaping she starts to pull her power from nature to fuel her magic ), druid ( circle of the moon ). age. 35. gender & pronouns. cis female / she, her. orientation. pansexual ( no preference ), polyamorous. height. 5’3”. hair. brunette, slightly wavy, mostly straight, falls past her shoulders. eyes. hazel, gold in the sunlight. alignment. chaotic good. faceclaim. victoria pedretti.

* important information.

✦ her mother is a sharran, and liv was born into the cult. into the same clergy that shadowheart was apart of. her mother fell in love with a selunite, and that is how liv was conceived. the clergy found out about this affair after it became impossible to hide the pregnancy. her mother was presented with two options, she kills the selunite and raises the child as a devout worshipper of shar, or she and her child both die. she chose the former.

✦ her father, the selunite who was killed by her mother, was a druid. he had a familiar, an immortal fey creature that always appeared in the shape of a rat, who claimed its name to be nazuunath ( liv calls him nazuu later ). this fey creature promised her father before he died that he would look after his child and try to protect her from shar, and so nazuu did.

✦ liv always had an affinity for magic, especially when it came from nature, and the ability to speak to animals has always been present since she was tiny. she loved nature, animals, and all living creatures, which is something her mother and the cult had a very hard time conditioning out of her. she was punished often for her use of the word love so freely, for sharrans aren’t meant to love — they strive to defeat all gods so that all existence might cease, all life stifled out.

✦ nazuu came to her often throughout the years, and she would find secret places to speak with him, often amused by how peculiar he was for a rat, how whimsical his way of speaking was. she told him secrets, and he kept them safe.

✦ and like mother like daughter, liv eventually meets a selunite outside of the clergy during a mission. she almost kills him, as a gut instinct, but he had a dog with him. and the dog begged liv to spare his master. they end up meeting in secret every chance they can get, and he helps kickstart her deprogramming process, swaying her further and further away from shar’s influence. and just like her mother, she was caught. the dog was killed in front of both of them. they captured him. her mind was erased, and not for the first time. and with no memory of her selunite lover, she was ordered to kill him, treating him as though he was nothing to her the entire time, because he wasn’t anymore. just another selunite, and she’s gotten pretty used to killing them at this point, for shar.

✦ at some point between them being caught and her mind being erased, nazuu comes to her again while she’s locked in a cell. she tells him they are going to erase her memories again, and she doesn’t want to forget. so nazuu tells her, ‘ speak onto me the things you never wish to part with, and i will protect them. ’

✦ liv spent years trying to figure out a way to escape from the cult, and every time she felt like she was getting closer, her mind would yet again be erased. and every time, nazuu would come to remind her. it seemed like a never ending cycle. until one day, liv’s fractured, worn mind had been freshly reminded of her never ending horror, and the mother superior needed a select group to retrieve an artefact, a mission that she was selected to be apart of. maybe this could be her chance. to slip away from a smaller group, no longer surrounded by an entire clergy.

✦ she abandons shadowheart to die at the hands of githyankis fighting for the artefact, but is swiftly stopped in her frantic attempt at fleeing by the nautiloid. she also leaves shadowheart to die in the pod aboard the nautiloid, because she doesn’t trust her. she doesn’t trust that she won’t be the reason she ends up right back into the cult’s clutches.

✦ the grove is where she realizes she wants to pursue druidic magic, and it already comes quite naturally to her. her favorite wild shape ends up being an owlbear, because big and strong.

✦ she is proficient in animal handling, survival, perception, insight, and medicine.

✦ nazuu can be summoned from anywhere she is, something she doesn’t realize until after the crash when she feels most alone, and wishes out loud that nazuu was there. from that point on, he is apart of the party as liv’s summon companion. he is always on her person, usually sitting perched upon her shoulder, chit - chatting with her.

✦ as a companion character, liv can be found at the grove, where she would have quickly changed out of her sharran armor, trying to do everything she could to distance herself from the cult. if you find her with shadowheart in your party, conflict will rise immediately, and liv will become hostile and threatening to your group. if she’s recruited without shadowheart in the party, conflict ensues at camp.

✦ she is romanceable. much like halsin, liv is a character that sees people as animals, wild and free, with love to give that shouldn’t be tied down to any one individual. she is more than okay with her lovers having lovers, and is not a jealous person in the slightest.

✦ though liv is happy to be free from the cult, she is plagued with constant fear and paranoia, especially with shadowheart being around. plus, they can’t seem to escape shar at every corner of their journey. and the entire tadpole situation keeps drawing her back, closer and closer to the very place she escaped.