#Rimbaud is cold. what's new

[unicornpopcorn14]

Was looking through a 'bsd official art' drive folder and found this

I'm sorry,,, no one talks about this official art??? Of Chuuya, Dazai and Rimbaud drinking boba??? At a normal location like a cafe??? And them being all chill???

I mean I have no idea what they're saying but Chuuya's expression can only translate to "I wanna beat this bitch up"

[kyouka-supremacy]

BSD Official Guidebook Tenkaroku - characters profiles

Profiles from the season 3 guidebook. I heavily relied on automatic translators for this, so if you notice any mistake, please feel free to bring it to my attention. I'll be posting the Japanese original text in reblogs not to make this post too long. Other guidebooks profiles: Shinkaroku; DEAD APPLE; Gongeroku.

Fifteen arc

Osamu Dazai Age: 15 years old Height: 155cm Weight: 51kg Impression when he met Chuuya for the first time: “I'll never feel positively about him again” Places he would like to visit if he went travelling: Famous suicide (by drowning) spots What are the qualities of a “king”?: The ones of people like Mori-san

Chuuya Nakahara Age: 15 years old Height: 150cm Weight: 53kg Impression when he met Dazai for the first time: “There's trash all around” Places he would like to visit if he went travelling: I want to go to a trip overseas with my friends What are the qualities of a “king”?: Being strong

Arthur Rimbaud Age: 27 years old Height: 185cm Weight: 68kg What he believes are his strengths and weaknesses: Strength: having a useful ability / Weaknesses: being sensitive to cold Favourite type: A woman who can warm him up Motto: Always put the mission above everything else Something he wants right now: His lost memories of the past

Canon

Osamu Dazai Something they've been into recently: Showing everyone the footage of Kunikida going insane because of Q's ability Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Since Ranpo-san is here, there can't be a “can't lose to anyone” What they want to overcome: Nothing at all

Atsushi Nakajima Something they've been into recently: Checking the bankbook page with his salary Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: He doesn't have any confidence in himself, so there's no such thing. What they want to overcome: I want to learn to have the common sense of and behave like a member of society.

Kyouka Izumi Something they've been into recently: Research on cooking for Atsushi Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Gratitude towards Atsushi and the Detective Agency What they want to overcome: I want to become less startled by thunders.

Doppo Kunikida Something they've been into recently: Education for the increased number of new employees Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Ability to plan, and passion to carry it out perfectly What they want to overcome: My own imperfections that sometimes prevent me from carrying out my plans

Junichirou Tanizaki Something they've been into recently: Visiting western pastries shops with Naomi Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: I'm embarrassed to say it, but supporting and protecting a certain woman. What they want to overcome: My indecisiveness

Kenji Miyazawa Something they've been into recently: Teaching farming to the members of destroyed gangs Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Love for nature What they want to overcome: I want to be able to use a computer

Ranpo Edogawa Something they've been into recently: Initiating Kyouka to the deliciousness of cheap candies Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: I can't lose to anyone in anything What they want to overcome: I am perfect like I am now

Yukichi Fukuzawa Something they've been into recently: Showing up at a Go club Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Excellence of subordinates What they want to overcome: The mistakes of the assassin from the past

Akiko Yosano Something they've been into recently: Collecting photos of dissected patients' internal organs Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Human body dismemberment skills What they want to overcome: If possible, I want to save patients who have no choice but to die.

Chuuya Nakahara Something they've been into recently: Enriching his wine cellar assortment at home Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Hatred towards Dazai What they want to overcome: When buying a big motorcycle, I want to stop checking whether my feet can touch the ground

Ryuunosuke Akutagawa Something they've been into recently: Searching for Dazai's house Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: I would rather have something that no one can beat. What they want to overcome: My nemesis, the man-tiger.

Ougai Mori Something they've been into recently: Coming up with new strategies to recruit Dazai Something at which they think they can't lose to anyone: Organization management techniques that request rationality and logic What they want to overcome: Buying too many clothes for Elise

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Age: Unknown Height: Unknown Weight: Unknown What he believes are his strengths and weaknesses: Strength: wishing for world happiness / Weakness: low blood pressure Favourite type: He loves all human beings equally Motto: Happiness in this world Something he wants right now: Someone to talk with who has the same brain as him

Katai Tayama Age: 23 years old Height: 175cm Weight: 53kg What he believes are his strengths and weaknesses: Strength: his life is not expensive (no expenses for transportation and socialization) / Weakness: if left to himself, he won't change his clothes Favourite type: A refined, dignified and gentle woman Motto: There are many dangers outside the house Something he wants right now: Faster communication networks

[chuubian]

Bulle fruit pancakes

Tags Arlecchino x fem reader, fluff, domestic life, anxiety, blood, death, soft Arlecchino, Arlecchino acts like an old man in this she’s my favorite gilf

Summary After a mission that nearly breaks you and Arlecchino apart, she decides she can’t let her job get in the way of your relationship. Living in the countryside after running away from the fatui can be scary. But Arlecchino finds a way to comfort and reassure you that you’re safe with her.

A/N: This is actually based off a conversation in stormbringer where verlaine tells rimbaud about his plan about running away and giving chuuya a normal life 😭😭 i wanted to cry during that and now i can’t stop thinking about it.

Images of Arlecchino, covered in blood and lifeless infront of you have haunted you since your relationship started. Her job is dangerous. Stepping out of line could lead to her being hunted down and killed. As her girlfriend, they wouldn’t hesitate to target you for revenge too. The fatui is not a philanthropic organization.

Her job requires her to constantly be away from home, sometimes you go weeks without hearing from her, wondering if she was killed— or, god forbid, captured and tortured. As a trained soldier, she would probably be able to handle it and escape, but it doesn't make it less frightening. There are still people stronger than her in this world— though it is very few.

On her last mission, Arlecchino is supposed to be sent to Inazuma for an undisclosed amount of time. Naturally, this revelation fills you with anxiety. How could they not know even a general timeframe? Was it this serious of an assignment. You begged her to please ask for a new assignment, but she brushes your worries aside. Telling you that you're overreacting and that if you can't handle it then there's nothing she can do to salvage the relationship, her cold red eyes staring into your soul, taking note of how you react.

You instantly go speechless, humbled by the threat. Sitting back down quietly, unwilling to lose her. Maybe it won't be so bad. She can still send letters. Arlecchino's gaze softens, leaning over you, kissing the top of your head gently. It was so sweet and intimate that you couldn't help but lean into her pleasant touch.

"I'll try to get back home as soon as possible. We can still write to each other."

Sighing softly, you look up at her. There was a flurry of emotions stirring up inside your chest. How were you supposed to be okay with this? You're brought back out of your thoughts by Arlecchino softly cupping your cheeks. Her nails, although sharp, feel soothing against your heated skin.

"It'll be fine. You worry too much."

Leaning away from her touch, you take a hold of her hands. You don't even want to look at her.

"How can you be sure? You don't even know how long you'll be gone."

Her eyes narrow, she pulls her hands our of your grip.

"I'm going whether you like it or not, it's my job. I expect you to reflect and come to your senses while I'm gone."

With that, she grabs her bags and leaves. Not even offering you so much as a goodbye. You sit in silence, feeling cold and abandoned. It's hard to even get up, your mind is filled with worries about what could possibly happen on this dangerous trip.

For the seven months Arlecchino is gone from home, she rarely writes. You can't really blame her, you don't respond to her letters either way. Nevertheless, you can't help feeling betrayed by her. She didn't stop to consider your feelings at all. It might be selfish, but you wish she cared more about you than her job.

When Arlecchino shows her disgraceful face around your shared house again, she's covered in blood. She doesn't wait for you to invite her in, taking the initiative to push past you, rushing into your bedroom and packing your clothes into a garbage bag. Stunned, you try to stop her.

"Arle! What are you doing?!"

She ignores you, seeming engrossed in her task. You try to pull her hands away, but instead of letting you, Arlecchino smacks your hand away. She looks back at you with a frenzied, irritated look on her face. It's clear you shouldn't mess with her, but you have barely talked to her in seven months, she can't force you to do anything. However, Arlecchino is nothing if not commanding and forceful. The look in her eyes chills you to the bone. Now you understand why she has such a high ranking in the fatui.

When she finishes packing your clothes, her cold hand wraps around your forearm- pulling you away from the bedroom, away from the house, and away from Snezhnaya. She doesn't speak until the harsh winter storms are far behind, in favor of the mild winters and humid summers of the Fontainian countryside.

"I'm leaving the fatui."

"What?"

She rolls her eyes, seemingly still aggravated.

"I'm leaving the fatui."

Your initial reaction is to doubt her new announcement. Even if she isn't lying- she betrayed you, she doesn't get to drag you away to Fontaine. But thinking it over for a few seconds, you realize something must've gone wrong. You take in her appearance, jacket turned brown. It makes you shiver, a sense of dread looming over you, the fright that comes with it sinks deep in your gut, making it hard to even move with the burden of your emotion weighing you down.

"Why? Did something happen?"

She moves to hold your hand instead, pulling you closer. The warmth radiating from her almost makes you forget about how stained her clothing and hand is.

“We’ll talk about it when we get to our destination, okay?”

You nod and follow her lead, unsure of what’s going on. Although the both of you aren’t speaking, it’s comfortable. The scenery of rainbow rose fields and exotic birds is a welcome change from the brutal blizzards that leave nothing but a white wasteland in Snezhnaya. As you both approach the cottage in the distance, you notice just how remote everything is. There's no people around at all, it doesn't seem like there's even any electricity. This is going to be a hellhole in the summer.

Arlecchino sets your bags down on the couch when you first enter, sighing softly. She starts taking off her soiled, blood covered jacket. Looking over her exposed arms, your mouth goes dry. It's been too long since you last saw her, and it was hard not to stare at her defined arms and strong back. She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, her skin was glistening. You reached out to grab hold of her arm, finding it hard to resist. The feeling of her soft skin and firm muscles is invigorating. It's just so right. You're interrupted in your thoughts by Arlecchino sitting down and pulling you onto her lap.

"What are you thinking about, my love?"

"You still haven't explained anything."

While talking to her you can't help but run yours hands over her arms and shoulders. The years of training in the fatui have sculpted her like a Greek god, you can hardly even pay attention to what she says. She tilts your chin up to look her in the eyes, sharp nails digging into your jaw.

"i meant exactly what i said, I'm leaving the Fatui."

Scowling, you shake her shoulders. Why does she always have to be so tight-lipped?

"Okayyy but why...? This is so sudden! And especially for a harbinger its hard to completely escape, what if they come looking for us? You came back covered in blood, I was worried all seven months! We barely even talked in that time, so what gives you the right to drag me away from home?!"

You felt like you're going crazy, How is this normal in any way? Arlecchino can never just talk to you like a normal person. She shushes you by putting a finger over your mouth. Pushing her hand away, you glare at her.

"Why cant you ever talk to me like a normal person? Am i not worthy of knowing your thoughts? Or what you're up to?! Seriously you're so fucking condescending and irritating, Arle!"

She smirks in response. Seriously!?

"You're angry at me but you still use a nickname?"

You can feel your face get warmer, embarrassed and angry with her. She knows you too well, she always has to rile you up in the way only she knows.

"If you don't explain I'm walking the whole way to Snezhnaya."

Her grip around your waist tightens. She wasnt going to let her prized possession leave her so easily.

"Fine fine, Ill explain."

You cross your arms, waiting for the explanation.

"Look... I didn't want my job to get between us. You're more important to me than the fatui is so It's not a big deal okay?"

"That's it? You couldn't have told me that before dragging me to Fontaine?"

Gently running her fingers over your sides, she presses a soft kiss to your cheek. The tensions leaves your body at the tender show of affection. All the anger and worry dissipates, leaving your mind feeling light. It's a welcome change from the grim thoughts running through your head for the past seven months. It's amazing how easily Arlecchino can manage to lower your defenses- she's your biggest weakness and she knows it.

"I'm sorry, but i had to get us away from there as soon as possible... They'll definitely look for us but its okay, I'm here. I'll protect us. I've taken all the precautions i can. You trust me right?"

You nod, leaning in and resting your head on Arlecchino's shoulder.

"But... you're not even the strongest harbinger, what if they find us?"

She soothingly rubs your back. It's comfortable moments like this that remind you of why you fell in love with her. She's usually so cold and brutal, but during intimate moments she turns sympathetic and unguarded.

"They won't, i made sure."

"You came back covered in blood, I was so worried."

Your eyes start watering. During that period of minimal contact, your heart was aching for your lover. Aching for someone you assumed didn't feel the same way. The lump in your throat grows bigger, making it hard to breathe or talk properly.

Arlecchino lets you cry into her neck all night. Holding you tightly and never letting go. She could never even conceive of a world where your relationship isn't her top priority. A sense of warmth washes over you, melting away the cold lonely feeling in your heart.

It's been months since you ran away with Arlecchino. Months since you've been away from civilization and big crowds- but surprisingly, you don't feel isolated.

The paranoia of being found by the fatui never goes away. Slowly creeping up on your mind, becoming more and more persistent until it pounces- causing severe panic attacks and barbaric nightmares. Images flash before your eyes. Portrayals of Arlecchino collapsed on the floor, slumped over, covered in her own blood, eyes flat and lifeless. Your cottage has been ransacked and destroyed by those barbarians. All your furniture and clothing were scattered across the ground, some of them charred until they were unrecognizable. You could feel the heat radiating off the fire burning your back.

You tried to scream for help, but for some reason your voice wasn't working, your throat was closing. Your mind felt fuzzy, it was hard to think or move- like your legs were made of lead. You didn't even get to say goodbye. She was taken too soon.

Suddenly you were shaken awake. Eyes fluttering open, your cheeks were wet with tears and you could feel your heart tightening in your chest. Arlecchino's worried face was hovering above you. Gasping for air, you search for comfort in your lovers arms. Relieved to see her again alive, wrapping your arms around her and squeezing tight, leaning into the warmth- the life- radiating off of her.

"What happened, my love?"

She tenderly caresses your hair, running her slender and sharp fingers through the strands. It sends tingles through your scalp and down you spine, quelling the dull ache through your body.

"Y-you died..."

Your voice was shaky and weak. It was clear to Arlecchino that the nightmare had affected you deep to your core. She gently kisses your forehead.

"I'm here, I'm not leaving any time soon."

She gently pulled you back bed, laying you down in her caring embrace. The soft golden light of the sunrise is shining through the window and into your eyes. It made Arlecchino's smooth skin glow. She looks so heavenly, even with her messy bedhead. How had you landed someone so gracious and bewitching? She cooed softly, her enchanting voice lulling you into a dreamlike daze. Even with the horrible nightmares that haunted you, mornings like this were your favorite part of being with Arlecchino. She never fails to make you feel secure again.

After a few minutes of laying in bed and holding each other tightly, Arlecchino decides to get up, attempting to pry your arms off her.

"Noooo don't leave me!"

Whining, you hug her closer, refusing to let go of the human heater that sleeps on the other side of the bed. Unfortunately, Arlecchino is much stronger than you so she manages to get your hands off her, instead deciding to pin your wrists to the bed, straddling your hips.

"We have to get up eventually, my love."

Pouting, you start complaining and trying to free your wrists.

"But does it have to be now?"

She chuckles lowly, leaning in so close that you can feel her breath fanning over your face.

"Yes, it does."

Your heart is beating so fast, her face is so close, you can feel the electricity in the air. The heat radiating from her skin was making your face burn. It was hard to look her in the eyes, if you made eye contact you would probably burst into flames. But despite you avoiding her gaze, you could feel her staring at your lips, looking down at you under her, with your hair splayed out, so disheveled but still so beautiful. The butterflies in your stomach seeming to want to escape, fluttering against the walls of your stomach, making your muscles quiver.

She squeezes your wrists tighter, leaning in even closer. You could cut the tension with a knife. It was like there was a magnet pulling your lips closer, like the universe is working to bring the both of you together. Slowly, she presses her lips to yours. She tastes like heaven. Your head goes fuzzy and your body feels like it's floating. It's too soon after that, that Arlecchino starts pulling away. Her lips are parted, panting softly. Her eyes are darkened, her pupils dilated.

Suddenly, she sits up- looking high and mighty, like an ice queen.

"We need to get up."

She drags herself out of bed, giving you a playful smack on the ass.

"Agh!! you're mean!"

Smacking her hand away, you attempt to drag her back to bed.

"Come back!"

"Nope."

She smirks taking a hold of your hands, kissing the knuckles. It made you forget your goal. Before you could get back on track she pulls you out of the comfortable cotton sheets, wrapping her arms around your waist.

"Arle!"

She ignores your cries and carries you over her shoulders. You squirm and kick, trying to get free.

"Put me down!"

She holds the back of your thighs tightly, laughing at your struggle. Once you both arrive in the kitchen she finally puts you down on the kitchen counter. She stands between your knees, with her hands on your thighs.

"I told you we had to get out of bed."

"Well maybe i didn't want to."

"But i want you to, the sun is already up"

You scowl, pushing her hands off you.

"It's only seven! we should be sleeping!"

She shrugs, not seeming to understand the problem.

"I like waking up early."

You run your fingers through her hair, pulling her closer.

"You're like an old man, seriously why do we need to be up so early?"

She wraps her arms around your waist, pulling your bodies closer.

"The sun is up, it's time to eat."

You sigh, giving up on trying to convince her to be normal. Getting up from the counter, you walk around the kitchen grabbing ingredients and tools to start cooking breakfast.

"You better stay out of the kitchen, your cooking is deadly."

Arlecchino doesn't even try to argue, she knows it wont do any good. Sitting down at the kitchen table, admiring the view, she rests her chin on her hand.

It seems like a dream, the birds chirping in the distance, the beautiful flowers in the garden, the sounds and smells of your cooking- it all feels surreal.

You cut up the bulle fruits, mix up the batter, making Arlecchino's favorite dish-Hearthfire's trail, adding spices (which are desperately needed). You cant let her live on without spices anymore, it is physically hurting you to see her eat bland food. How does she even do it? She's just torturing herself.

After a few minutes of cooking you finally finish, giving her a nice big serving of pancakes with bulle fruit jubilee, and her stupid beloved Hearthfire's trail. She looks at it confused.

"Did you do something to it? It looks different."

"No... i spent so long making it perfect for you and you're complaining?"

She decides against pressing you for more information, trying some. Quickly, her face turns red. She evidently isn't used to eating anything other than bland meat. Regardless, she doesn't spit it out, deciding to swallow it before complaining.

"Why did you do this to me??"

Her voice is hoarse, you cant help but burst out in laughter. You've never seen her so flustered.

" Hehehe... Arle! you can't go on eating unseasoned food forever! It's time to be an adult."

"Seasoning is useless! If your food needs spices to taste good then its just bad quality."

Shrugging you point to her food.

"I worked very hard on that, you have to finish it."

She grumbles softly, complaining but doing as you say anyways. She sips her tea between every bite, suffering due to your little scheme. After she's done, she digs into her pancakes, seeming much more delighted at the taste of cold ice cream and sweet fruit on her tongue. You giggle watching her, amused by how weak she is to something so simple.

"Arle... How did you manage to get the position as the fourth harbinger when you cant even eat cumin?"

"Our position isn't based off food preferences, it's based on strength."

She clearly isn't as amused as you, her eyes narrowed.

"Still..."

"I just have a taste for quality food."

"I would hardly consider what you eat to be 'quality'."

"Hey! I eat your cooking, so that means you think your own cooking is bad."

Oh she thinks she's so funny. Groaning, you sit up straight.

"My cooking is good!"

"You don't seem to think so."

Scowling, you ignore her. You eat your pancakes angrily.

"Do you like my cooking?"

"No."

Her face betrays her words, she's smirking- enjoying getting under your skin. You decide you need to get revenge.... by wiping putting the whipped cream and ice cream from your pancakes on her face.

"I hate you."

She only laughs in response, wiping the cream off with her pointy fingers and licking it off. Her long forked tongue dragging over the blackened skin. She doesn't even try to hide her intentions, staring you right in the eyes with that evil, sinful stare.

The rest of the morning is a blur. You can only remember the feeling of pure bliss and the warmth of being in her arms. All the worries about the fatui finding you are completely forgotten when you're with her. Arlecchino makes you into a happier, more secure person. There's no other place you'd rather be.

[wizardfrog69]

Hi hi! can i request for bsd men x reader who is a doctor and have the ability like machi from hxh?

Thank you for the request!

'•.¸♡ doctor ♡¸.•'

Doctor reader

Fluff

Masterlist

Enjoy!

Feat. Fukuzawa, Atsushi, Kunikida, Dazai, Katai, Mori, Ace, Rimbaud, Akutagawa, Hirotsu, Kajii, Oda, Ango, Fitzgerald, Nathaniel, Fyodor

Yukichi Fukuzawa:

He finds your ability very useful and will employ you if you already aren't an employee.

He will be as careful as always, not putting himself in harm's way, but if he does get a limb chopped off by accident he will come straight to you.

Your thread is useful for combat and traps, which is something he takes into consideration when planning out his schemes.

You and Yosano often work together.

If you don't want to leave your job, he will understand and not force you out of your work.

Atsushi Nakajima:

This man's limbs grow back like nothing happened, so your ability is useless/j

If he gets hurt during a mission, he would go straight to you to take care of him.

He's way too shy to admit it, but he really likes it when you take care of him as no one ever did, and he was forced to look after himself, it's nice to have a break from worrying about yourself.

Make him a ball of thread to play with (like a cat), and he'll be very happy and entertained for some time.

Doppo Kunikida:

He also thinks your ability is quite useful, and despite how much he does not want you involved in any missions, your threads can be useful.

If you do not work in the ada, Kunikida would often visit you after work, if you aren't busy.

He doesn't really want to visit you when he's injured so as not to worry you and cause you additional work.

If you do end up taking care of him, he will be very pleased and find comfort in your soothing touch.

Osamu Dazai:

He takes your ability to his advantage.

He may become a bit more careless (as if he isn't already) and put himself in harms way more, just to see your worried face and for you to care for him. At least that's what he claims.

He does always love it when you care for him, even if it's putting a plaster on a scratch on his face, which he obtained by "falling."

Katai tayama:

Since he never leaves his house, you can tend to him whenever you need to.

Katai doesn't get injured a lot, so you don't have to worry about him.

Ogai Mori:

Mori, being a doctor himself, obviously does not need any help regarding himself, but it would be useful to have another medic in the mafia.

Your ability can also be useful in combat, so Mori wastes no time trying to convince you to join the mafia. You probably don't have a choice since he's the leader, and it would be quite difficult to be with the leader of a mafia without being a part of it.

A new torture method is now being used in the mafia, cutting somebody's limbs off :)

Ace:

This little prick would put one of his collars around your neck, and you would be his personal doctor, tending to all of his wounds and stuff.

Don't worry, he won't exchange you for gems. You are just too valuable for that.

Arthur Rimbaud:

Maybe you could finally figure out why he's so cold all the time.

If you two are together, you probably work in the mafia, or the other place he's from.

He admires the work you do, human life (or any life really) is important, and you should receive the respect and loyalty it deserves.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa:

He could care less about your occupation unless it benefits him, and in this case, it does.

You would often help him with his wounds and coughing, reminding him to eat and drink, etc.

Your threads are quite useful to him, and he could strategize your ability into something.

Ryūrō Hirotsu:

What a silly old man.

You could be his personal nurse instead of sending him to a nursing home.

Motojiro Kajii:

Tbh, I'm surprised he isn't dead, ik he doesn't get hurt by his bombs but like still

He would always come home with some sort of scratches, which you will place a little lemon themed plaster on.

Also, you call him a mad scientist, and it was probably his idea.

Sakunosuke Oda:

Finally, someone norm- oh wait, he's a skeleton. Ig you'll have to help him not be dead.

You would always have plasters on you with an animal print or something on them, usually for the kids Oda takes care of, but it wouldn't hurt to help someone else out who needs one.

Oda loves what you do and wishes to help you when you come home tired from a long day at the hospital.

The kids Oda takes care of do get sick from time to time, so you will end up getting them to feel better.

Hey, maybe you could stich the kids back together after the little explosion? Pretty please????

Ango Sakaguchi:

He's too tired to realise his arms have fallen off.

He would get sick from the sleepless nights, and you'd demand him to stay home, but he would go to work anyway.

Ango respects your profession greatly and would never dream of getting in the way of your work.

He understands all too well how work can deprive you of everything, so he doesn't really ask you of anything.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald:

You are working in his team of Americans (ew)

/j I just don't think the food in America should be eaten.

Anyways.

You will be the doctor of the group, taking care of anyone who is ill.

He will find your ability useful and will certainly take it to his advantage, money is after all (one of) the most important things in this world and Fitzgerald will get it any means necessary, unless that means hurting you (or himself).

He cares about his family, so he doesn't wish for you to die :)

Nathaniel Hawthrone:

I'm surprised he isn't blaming the devil for everything tbh.

He can use this blood as thread so you can go away now. Your ability is not useful/j

Its great that you want to save people! (Or the children of God, I forgot how religious he is).

He can help by praying for you and your patients. that's it. God is the best doctor, after all.

He doesn't typically cut off his limbs whilst in battle, but if he does, he knows you will always be there to help him if he needs it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Your ability is useful to Fyodor and his gang of rats. You can stich limbs back on, and the nervous system will reattach itself like nothing happened, brilliant!

Fyodor claims he doesn't need a doctor or to be taken care of. In truth, he does, but he fails to admit it, fearing he may appear weak or dependent on other people. His feelings don't stop him from making you the doctor of a bunch of rats.

You may not be a vet, but it doesn't hurt to try!

༺♡༻ 𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊 𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧 ⋆ 𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧 𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊 ༺♡༻

I'm sorry I couldn't include everyone. It would have taken too long, and u would just be repeating myself, even though I'm already doing so here.

Happy pride month, everyone! So many people have come so far to allow us to be ourselves. It may still be difficult, but that is why we need to celebrate everyone!

I was recently binge watching some shows, so I added some more to the fandoms I write for if anyone is interested. To find the list, go to the masterlist -> the bottom of the post -> press 'Fandoms I write for, rules & regulations♡'

Have a wonderful day/night and enjoy pride month!

-love, Az

[caltropspress]

Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR

I speak what I see.

—Saul Williams, “Elohim (1972)” (1998)

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and systematic derangement of all the senses.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters of the Seer” (1871)

Every technological change begins with a spiritual revelation.

—Nathaniel Mackey (2016)

1.  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

The same motherfucker got us living in his hell. 

—Chuck D, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (1988)

I must forewarn you even now: what I intend to speak about, and in which I shall get myself entangled for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit. Two years ago, ELUCID promised that I Told Bessie could be significantly darker: “Trust me, it could be way more apocalyptic.” REVELATOR fulfills that promise. I Told Bessie introduced ELUCID as an anti-mystic mystic; on REVELATOR, we find him between the forge and the flame. He speaks from filthy tongue of god and griot, offering a <brand> of spiritual healing in the same <vein> as Dälek’s “Spiritual Healing” [for brand read “fire,” “cauterize,” “marked ownership”; for vein read “cold,” “spike,” “artery”]. At turns, his speech sounds of languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse. On ITB, ELUCID had just arrived in Heaven, trespassed its gates, yet stubbornly refused to sit down, to repose. On REVELATOR, he’s at Hell’s wrought-iron threshold, absolutely ruptured.

ELUCID emerges as a transgressive and dark magus speaking the omniversal language of Sun Ra. The first words spoken on REVELATOR, evidently ad-libbed, recall both Fritz Lang’s expressionistic Tower of Babel and Mister X’s psychitecture: “Metropolis…inverse overlord skyscape…” Another filmic nod would be to PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2017), where the climactic and classical rage of Daniel Plainview is unleashed as he screams: I am the Third Revelation! Plainview is, as his name intimates, an unbeliever, and he masterfully coerces preacher Eli Sunday into stating he’s a false prophet and that God is a superstition. 

See, the First Revelation was in the Old Testament (Show me your commaaaandments, as ELUCID drones on “Barbarians”); the Second Revelation was Jesus sermonizing that new shit; why mightn’t it be that the Holy Spirit was preparing another? ELUCID delivers the Third Revelation; he is the Seer, the Revelator—entering through a hatch [re: portal] of Houston horrorcore and disharmonic hard bop. REVELATOR is his unexpurgated rendition of K-Rino’s Stories from the Black Book (1993). The mutant blues of ITB have turned to hypnotik hip-noize—serrated, jaggy, shrapKnel-shattered, caltrop-piercéd. We witness, firsthand, the doom gospel he has previously preached about in practice, in praxis, in the demoniac rhythms and the patterns. Ganksta N-I-P’s “Reporter From Hell” (1993) amalgamated with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873).

2.  NOISOME THE EARTH IS

“Here in this hymn-deaf hell,” Rimbaud reports back, but in ELUCID’s hell all we hear are hymns—shrieks, semiwept, semisung. “A black wail is a killer,” Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Jo Stewart, and Yolanda Wisher write in “4 Telling” (2021), a posse-cut poem. Production of “a satanic symphony,” Rimbaud says. Sounding like EPMD in the pulpit, Rimbaud claims “[t]heology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below.” He describes moonlight when the clock strikes twelve, “the hour when the devil waits at the belfry.” Go get a late pass, in other words, as PE presses on “Countdown to Armageddon” (1988) and ELUCID reiterates on “MBTTS” (2016). “Watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned,” Rimbaud writes, appealing to the Devil, “...I will unveil every mystery.” 

ELUCID unveils histories of mysteries during his descent. On record, he shares what he sees. He sees Rimbaud in Hell. He sees Kanye and JPEGMafia in hell, Ye with BURZUM in Gothic script emblazoned across his chest. He sees Rubble Kings with SS skulls and sigs sewn onto Flyin’ Cut Sleeves denim. He sees Black Benjie’s assassin in Hell. He sees Richard Hell in hell holding White Noise Supremacists to account for how they treated Ivan Julian (“Mutants can learn to hate each other and have prejudices too,” the latter told Lester Bangs). He says peace to SKECH185 and sees him “playing devil’s advocate with Steve Albini’s Black friend.” Finally, he sees the cerberus in hell—the “monster cruel and uncouth,” according to Dante (c. 1321)—the 3-headed anti-crowd dog. He sees its three gullets, red eyes, and unctuous beard and black and belly large. He sees the wretched reprobates. He sees muzzles filth-begrimed. He sees hellhounds here, there, and everywhere.

3.  ROUND US BARK THE MAD AND HUNGRY DOGS

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—

—Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.49-50 (c. 1592-1594)

“Hands off,” ELUCID commands on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” the opening salvo on REVELATOR [salvo, a discharge of weaponry; yet also salivate: dog’s drool, secretion, spittle, spit the verse]. “It’s just happening,” he shouts—it’s happening to us; we are subjects of history, its malevolent thrum. “I can feel it ’fore you say it,” and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But allow me to litanize anyway.

In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron writes that the dog, the canis familiaris, is “an unwilling participant in the history of social injustice,” a casualty to a depraved Pavlovian conditioning. She cites an “association between canine aggression and black civil disobedience,” reflecting a “prism in which race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence.” She refers to these as cyno-racial (dog-black) representations.

Bloodhounds—aptly-named barking, beastly embodiments of biopower—were “imported from Cuba or Germany” during slavery and “trained to pursue escaping slaves in both the Caribbean and the American South,” Boisseron writes. Dogs were designed to “become ferocious only when in contact with blacks.” The Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) provides insight into this odious operation:

A negro is directed to go into the woods and secure himself upon a tree. When sufficient time has elapsed for doing this, the hound is put upon his track. The blacks are compelled to worry them until they make them their implacable enemies; and it is common to meet with dogs which will take no notice of whites, though entire strangers, but will suffer no blacks.

The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), meanwhile, offers a suspenseful, first-person account:

We had been wandering about through the cane brakes, bushes, and briers, for several days, when we heard the yelping of blood hounds, a great way off, but they seemed to come nearer and nearer to us. We thought after awhile that they must be on our track; we listened attentively at the approach. We knew it was no use for us to undertake to escape from them, and as they drew nigh, we heard the voice of a man hissing on the dogs.… The shrill yelling of the savage blood hounds as they drew nigh made the woods echo.

The training, of course, isn’t only about ghoulish intimidation; the hunt would often climax with violence. “When the slave runs away,” Boisseron explains, “the master needs to symbolically reassert his domination through a ritualized act of flesh cutting.” [FANG BITE!] Frederick Douglass spoke of such savagery: “Sometimes in hunting negroes…the slaves are torn to pieces.” Mutilation of runaway slaves, Boisseron claims, enacted “a rhetoric of edibility.” Derrida called it carno-phallogocentrism, linking the slavehunter’s virility and carnivorism, savoring “deeper shades of carnage,” as ELUCID says on “ZIGZAGZIG.” It has never relented. In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, the DOJ issued a report that detailed “puncture wounds” left in children by the Ferguson K-9 unit. The victims of these “bite incident[s]” were always Black. 

ELUCID also speaks of how victims “force-feed a war machine” on “ZIGZAGZIG”—regions and relics swallowed whole, irrevocably. In their plateau “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.” Somewhere on a desolate Yonkers street corner, DMX sleeps with a pack of strays, lying in wait.

4.

Police forces…have used dogs to break up rioting mobs…. The dogs’ snapping teeth, swift movements and indifference to the crowds’ menacing threats have made mob control a routine procedure for the forces which have the dogs.

—“A Progress Report of the Assembly Interim Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy on Using Dogs in Police Work, California” (1960)

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog… [T]hat black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.

—Malcolm X (1963)

In a contemptible case of cultural exchange, two German shepherds trained by a Nazi stormtrooper were used by police in Jackson, Mississippi to attack crowds in support of the Tougaloo Nine—Black students attempting to access books from a whites-only public library. That was in 1961. [TRUST NONE!] Two years later, Bull Connor utilized dogs to disperse protestors in Birmingham, notoriously documented by Charles Moore and Bill Hudson. Hudson’s photograph of fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden in the mongrel maw of law enforcement fills textbook pages to this day, while Moore’s photo would be aestheticized and reproduced in Andy Warhol’s Race Riots series in 1964. “Police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” a swinish Alabama sheriff said in ’63. Not much has changed. When people demonstrated outside the White House gates after the death of George Floyd, an orange fascist—who ELUCID begrudgingly won two long-standing bets on—threatened them with “vicious dogs.”

“Dogs were once perceived as dangerous due to rabies,” Boisseron writes, “but today the black man is the one responsible for making the big dog look ‘un-kind.’” A.G. rapped about the dogs with the rabies on 1992’s “Runaway Slave,” looking backward to understand his present, but by the ’90s, the ever-evil LAPD was calling Black people “dog biscuits.” An officer in a St. Louis suburb faced suspension after posting to Facebook that Ferguson protestors “should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” The aggression of the dogs, Boisseron points out, has “metonymically shifted from zoonotic to a racial context.” In essence, society shouldn’t fear the dogs—society should fear a Black planet populated by Black men. [FEAR ALL!]

The messaging has frequently been mixed—deliberately muddied (mutted, we might say) to defy understanding—racism skewing absurdist. In “A Dark Brown Dog” (1901), Stephen Crane used a “little dark-brown dog…an unimportant dog, with no value” with a “short rope…dragging from his neck” for allegorical purposes. [SHORT LEASH!] A child drags the dog “toward a grim unknown,” the child’s intolerant family. The dog is by its very nature powerless, “too much of a dog to try to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge.” Eventually, the drunk father beats the dog with a coffee pot and tosses him out of a fifth-floor window, falling dead in the alley below. Crane’s well-meaning story speaks to mystery writer Stanley Ellin’s comparison of the “solicitous white intellectual” and the “arrant racist,” the former of which “sentimentalized Black lives” and “patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel.” To retreat to such romanticizing, Ellin says, fulfills the “function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.”

As a child of the ’80s, ELUCID was exposed to the same surfeit of televised copaganda as the rest of us. McGruff the Crime Dog colonized our commercial breaks, asking us to join the feeding frenzy against drug dealers and burglars (Take a bite out of crime!). Meanwhile, Harlem World’s Herb McGruff provided counterprogramming and warned us of the real “Dangerzone.” “The idea of dogs attacking black people has become a haunting and unresolved image in the collective memory,” Boisseron writes, or, in ELUCID’s words: Eating everyone eventually. THE WORLD IS DOG!

5.

On SEERSHIP! (2020), a project ELUCID labeled a “work of spirit”—a work of glitch-hop and runt pulses and ill-bent illbient—we hear a blare of noise at roughly the one-minute mark. That calamitous blare is sublimated into the soundfury that sets off “THE WORLD IS DOG.” ELUCID’s bogeyman-down production, in collaboration with Jon Nellen’s urgent drumming and Luke Stewart’s grave-groove bass theories, provide for the sonics of a slave escape, equal parts panic and empowerment. “The dissonance is real,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” “—I be feeling woozy,” and that’s the vibration here. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1865), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes how the vengeful and unforgiving escaped slave Dred defends a runaway from a hellhound:

…a party of negro-hunters, with dogs and guns, had chased this man, who, on this day, had unfortunately ventured out of his concealment. He succeeded in outrunning all but one dog, which sprang up, and, fastening his fangs in his throat, laid him prostrate within a few paces of his retreat. Dred came up in time to kill the dog…

“THE WORLD IS DOG” is pulsing and gnashing, a sequence of switchbacks and untoggled kill switches, a hyper-aural freak-out, to borrow some phrases from ELUCID’s New York Times blurb for Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction.” We should’ve anticipated the arrival of “THE WORLD IS DOG,” should’ve been listening to the panting precursor curses. Be it the gold chain punk asphyxiation of Soul Glo opening for ELUCID at the ITB release show at Mercury Lounge in 2022; the absurd matter we heard from his Shapednoise feature in 2023, wherein he “backhoed the graves”; or his appearance on Kofi Flexxx’s “Show Me” a few months later (I show you what it look like…)—the signs were all there. When word got out that ELUCID was spinning Miles Davis’s “Rated X” (1974), we should’ve known it was over, cataclysmically. 

If “Rated X” is the model, then ELUCID has set out to attain “music’s most elusive grail,” as Gary Giddins calls it in Visions of Jazz (1998): “the promise…of an open-ended form that defies harmonic conventions and regulation eight- and twelve-bar phrases in favor of a flexible but contained form.” An anonymous internet blogger called “Rated X” a “demented church service where the organist has become possessed by an evil spirit and worshippers have fallen into a trance.” ELUCID puts the incendiary fuse in fusion—dark energy acceleration | emergent fervor, fire & brimstone | Tony Williams Lifetime-type EMERGENCIES [ecphoneme—bang—ecphoneme—bang…]. This is rap-fusion—uncontrived, channel alive. 

6.

“Fire for fire, wade in the water,” ELUCID raps on “YOTTABYTE,” singing the same sorrow song of a century-plus before. “Wade in the Water” (Roud 5439) was a spiritual that reminded the runaway slaves to use streams and rivers to throw the hellhounds off the scent. “If you hear the dogs,” Harriet Tubman said, “keep going.” If “THE WORLD IS DOG” begins in a dreaded delirium, it ends [DEVOLVE!] in radical resistance.

The faded amateur photograph that graces the cover of I Told Bessie shows a man fending off a German shepherd; or, feasibly, the man is elevating the dog—healing it, calming it, exorcizing its engrained demons. Admittedly, it’s a crazy mixed-up world, a doggy dogg [dog-eat-dog] world, and the dog can occupy valences of both killer and companion. Everyone is dehumanized in the slave hunt, in the crowd dispersal. The hunters and the cops are the actual beasts (“That’s the sound of da beast,” KRS howls; “the murderous, cowardly pack,” Claude McKay snaps); the hunted resort to instinct, fearing for their lives, amygdala swelling with signals.  

In Martin Delaney’s serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-1862), protagonist Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake, wields a “well-aimed weapon” and “slew each ferocious beast as it approached him, leaving them weltering in their own blood instead of feasting on his.” Delaney doesn’t only draw scenes of retributive slaughter; his characters also speak of how “da black folks charm de dogs.” Threats neutralized. Power harnessed. The Yorkshire Terrier on the cover of Swans’ The Seer (2012) bares Michael Gira’s chompers—he’s merged with the pup. Hip-hop auto-interpellated dog into dawg (s/o to Althusser).

7.

As we learn from “Amager,” ØKSE’s song featuring billy woods, dogs only violate at the behest of men. woods relates a narrative of detainment at Trondheim Airport. The purportedly “colorblind drug dog” exudes innocence (“flopped on the floor, head on his paws”), though its mere presence smacks of discipline and punishment. As the Norwegian customs agent “palm[s] [woods’] clean drawers,” woods sardonically reflects, “I been a nigga too long.” He “know[s] the dance” and “know[s] the damn song,” resentful of this choreography of incurable racism that has been all too common and recurring throughout his life. He understands what’s happening epistemologically (“I know they hoping… I know I’m clean…”), but he also knows “those clammy hands going from the crack of [his] ass to the weight of [his] balls” are suggestive of castration, and when you’re crossing borders, what, what, say what, say what, anything can happen. As they go through the rigamarole of “mak[ing] calls, x-ray[ing] the empty suitcase, / [And] going back through [his] pockets,” woods stews with “impotent rage,” the aforementioned emasculation working its spell. He doesn’t begrudge the animal laboring under the aegis of the Tolletaten, though: I pet the dog as I leave. Scathed but saved. He charmed de dog.

8.

After dealing with so many strays I had learned one thing: be patient.  

—E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX (2003) 

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the subjugation and subversion of the hellhound than DMX. In the lead up to the millennium, Dark Man X embodied the dog of vengeance; he exemplified the undoing of the dog’s quasi-innate hatred of Blackness. In ELUCID’s words, he emerged as a “whole new nigga” with “skin [untorn], eyes [ungouged], hair [unshorn].” DMX’s arrival in 1998 felt like centuries in the making. He waged a vendetta in the name of every runaway slave and Civil Rights demonstrator. He’d slept on the streets and shared the concrete with his dogs, strays like himself:

Stray dogs are normally scared of people; they’re scarred by whatever neglect or abuse put them out on the street. Or if they’re lost, they’re depressed because they can’t find their way home. But that morning I decided that no matter how long it took, I was going to get that dog to come over to me. I was going to convince him to trust me and make him mine…. I started looking all over for strays that I could catch and train for myself…

DMX charmed de dogs and the rest of us in the process. He stayed shitty, cruddy, trading the cartoonish bow-wows we’d become accustomed to (via Snoop) for fierce grrrs and arfs, elevating rap’s onomatopoeics. With “Get At Me Dog,” he turned a familiar B.T. Express funk sample feral. In the video, the most achromatic Hype Williams ever managed, X holds possession of the Tunnel crowd, on a stage but of the people. His only bling: a stainless steel choke chain that collars his neck. The black-and-white video disorients with strobe effect and negative exposure—pitch blacks suddenly transform into flashing whites. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen look on from the periphery of the crowd like, well, out-of-place bitches. The video captures the raw power of DMX, his stygian intensity, reminiscent of Tadayuki Naitoh’s 1971 photograph of Miles Davis. Like X, Davis harnesses his rancor and exhibits his self-possession.

The success of DMX’s subversion of the dog trope likely apexed with his Woodstock ’99 performance. Before a majority white crowd of hyperthermic slavehunter descendants, DMX rocked what Thomas Hobbs calls “blood-red dungarees.” X “growls viscerally” and “convulses” across the stage in a manner “akin to a Bad Brains gig in a sweaty punk basement.” DMX—like Dred and Blacus before him, like ELUCID to come—subdues the monstrous, cowardly pack, and has them eating Milkbones out of his hand by the end of the 45-minute set. 

9.

The first thing we feel on REVELATOR is a snarling, ravenous “fang bite” and the exhale of “dog breath.” We search for alternatives: the RZArector’s fangs on 6 Feet Deep (1994) maybe, a presence that Kodwo Eshun argues is akin to a head “filled with revelations that impeach the daylight.” We might think of the parallel universe of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (1928) where “dogs all have rubber teeth,” but REVELATOR doesn’t offer up that heavenscape—only a hellscape where teeth tear rabidly, rapidly. The “dog fangs [which dig] into black flesh,” Boisseron writes, are “deeply ingrained in popular culture.” We’d prefer the hip-hop context for “biting,” like when Rakim invokes “biting and borrowing” on “Follow the Leader,” where “brothers tried and others died to get the formula.” We’re on a “short leash” here, but Chuck D speaks of how he “cut the leash” on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and how prison bars “got [him] thinking like an animal,” and so I think we should act accordingly, tactfully, and lick our wounds.

ELUCID strafes us with 2-syllable units, iambs or IEDs, right from the start: 

Fang bite Dog breath Short leash Pit fight

We’ve not felt shelling like this since the opening words of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998): 

One-two One-two Come through Run through Gun who? Oh, you don’t know what the gun do?

We’re propelled and pummeled by a Dark Enlightenment acceleration; unquestionably, we’re on our heels. ELUCID activates a sequence of 3-syllable units—anapests—as we descend into Hell:

From this height At this speed Downhill Careening

Later, the 2- and 3-syllable units alternate: “Shit that binds, / Spit out, / Ribs came spared.” Such blunt syllabics occur elsewhere on the album as well. “YOTTABYTE,” for instance, introduces a more dactylic, grounded pattern: “Hard science, / Scum gutter.” These are billboard throw-ups in Mister X’s Radiant City. They’re terse skull snaps like when Michael Gira sings, “Space cunt, / Brainwash” on “The Apostate.”

“I’m not psychic, but I’m reading,” ELUCID clamor-raps. The rapper has repeatedly denied the spiritual and supernatural in favor of tangible work, learning, reading. He much rather attend a demo or browse a bookstore than show his face at a séance or a church service. “The more I thought, the less I prayed,” he raps on “BAD POLLEN.” In this regard, he’s a dialectical materialist, much to the dismay of so many nimrod New Age seekers. ELUCID is not your self-help savior. Appropriating occult symbology in song is not inscribing sigils on the navel of a newborn. More likely he’s standing in solidarity with the child laborers pulling opal from the ochre mines of Madagascar. “Black Jesus hated bill collectors—I do the same,” he raps on “IN THE SHADOW OF IF.” 

In The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem murder mystery, the titular conjure-man, one N’Gana Frimbo, is the closest forebear to ELUCID, a practitioner of the aesthetics of alchemy but one who knifes through the nonsense:

There are those that claim the power to read men’s lives in crystal spheres. That is utter nonsense. I claim the power to read men’s lives in their faces…. Every experience, every thought, leaves its mark. Past and present are written there clearly…. My crystal sphere, therefore, is your face.

“I receive it, then I weigh it,” ELUCID explains. He’s no Knownot but he also knows that he knows nothing, in a Socratic sense (one day it’ll all make sense, trust me [TRUST NONE, FEAR ALL]). He’s a member of a tribe on a quest, receptive of vibes and stuff, asking questions like: What? Can I kick it? Does it live or die? Who gon’ tell me why? Who goes there? Who dare disturb the hive? He remains unflappable, constant, “still inside,” channeling his “honey child” while killa bees are on the swarm angling for the fatal sting.

Our “small world” is razed; it “devolve[s]” as hell is raised—it’s not that tricky. The dog’s got “jaws that grind” and “teeth that tear”; Dante tells us Cerberus “displayed his tusks” and “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters” his enemies. “Where’s a pit, there’s a plague,” ELUCID says, demonstrating syntactically that life is parallelism to Hell but we must maintain. Boisseron discusses the “hysteria around pit bulls” rooted in an “overblown fear of rabies,” and we watched a “plague” of reckless media representation caricature Michael Vick as the very animals he electrocuted. “Pit bulls have been historically used in America as a weapon of stigmatization against blacks,” Boisseron explains, and so every Black man takes up residence in the Bad Newz Kennel when the public deems it convenient, whether they would ever dare to hold the jumper cables or not. If the stigma doesn’t catch up to you, the sickness will. ELUCID’s “pit” evokes morgue trucks reversing up to the trenches in the potter’s field. Careful where you step, or else risk experiencing “a quick trip to glory if you slip.” Pitfalls on every corner, beneath the buildings of every block. Like DMX said on “Get At Me Dog,” If you don’t know by now, then you slippin’.

“Be not afraid,” ELUCID advises, bending Biblical. It is I. It is I. It is I. If we can keep up, he’ll usher us out of the ravaged world. If not, “don’t know, don’t care—get out my way!” ELUCID’s “in the garden,” his own private Gethsemane, agonizing and “pouring for everyone whole came before [him]” and didn’t survive the onslaught. He pours out a little liquor, and like Pac who had his “back against the brick wall, trapped in a circle, / Boxing with them suckers till [his] knuckles turn[ed] purple,” ELUCID is intoxicated by his own dogged determination. Pac was simply rewriting McKay, who likewise found himself “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Glorious as it sounds, ELUCID’s exhausted—as we all are—by song’s end: voided. All he can put together are fragmented, clipped, incomplete idiomatic and figurative expressions: “razor walking”; “bridge to nowhere fast.” Still, he bites back. Like DMX, he’s “eating everyone eventually,” indiscriminately, re-establishing the order of “the world [that] is dog.” He, too, is dog. Sic ’em, and get sick wid’ it.

10.  TEKNOHELL

Today the plagues of Revelation are…the disastrous results of…the irrational use of technology.

—Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995)

“Police dogs were often framed as technology,” writes Tyler Wall, a scholar of racialized state violence. He cites a Baltimore K-9 officer who claimed “[t]he dog is the most potent, versatile weapon ever invented…. You can’t shoot around corners, but dogs can go anywhere you direct them—like guided missiles.” These comments anticipated the NYPD’s rollout of actual automated, data-gathering robot dogs, of course. But “CCTV” and “YOTTABYTE” escort us into an arena of Ballardian extreme metaphors and emergent technologies—a teknohell—where “Spot bots” prowl every city block.

“CCTV,” co-produced by ELUCID and August Fanon, screeches like a dial-up modem gone diabolical—a discordant din of panic chords. They’ve programmed drum patterns around the sound of the CCTV shorting out—the dread comes in sine waves: megahertz hurts | multiplexing and motion-detecting | low-frame rate. The cameras are everywhere we look, but ELUCID splits the veil and the surveillance. The mandala is a panopticon, a C-band satellite dish for bodies to rot upon. Impaled by feedhorns. Parabolically resting in peace. In “a moment of clarity,” ELUCID fucks the noise and begs, “Don’t be mad at me.” I ain’t mad at cha. Who could begrudge the corner boy who cracks the lens of a varifocal security camera with a rock in the courtyard of the low-rises (they call it “the Pit” on The Wire)?

The ill communications that ELUCID was channeling on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips continue to nauseate him. A year prior to that release, ELUCID told Gary Suarez that he was working to “dismantle what isn’t serving and then download and update with what does now.” For the man who “feel[s] a way about proving [his] identity to robots,” he can also acknowledge damage has already been done, which is evident in his diction. On SEERSHIP!, he despaired: “Every device I own knows my latitude.” On “NY Blanks,” he warned: “computers are listening.” In Jacques Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” (1983), he describes a Tetsuo-like man/machine [MAchiNe] who loses clarity between the sender and the receiver of electronic messaging:

And there is no certainty that man is the exchange [le central] of these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer. No longer is one very sure who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.

In this sense, REVELATOR is, at turns, an apocalyptic text. Much of ELUCID’s work has been. The cover of SEERSHIP! features a P1 phosphor font choice, as if it’s destined for a monochrome monitor. One might come to believe ELUCID writes in matrices of terminal green.

11.

In Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, N’Gana Frimbo is questioned by Dr. Archer:

“You actually are something of a seer, aren’t you?” “Not at all…. I filled in the gaps, that is all. I have done more with less. It is my livelihood.” “But—how? The accuracy of detail—”

“Even if it were as curious as you suggest, it should occasion no great wonder. It would be a simple matter of transforming energy, nothing more. So-called mental telepathy, even, is no mystery, so considered. Surely the human organism cannot create anything more than itself; but it has created the radio-broadcasting set and receiving set. Must there not be within the organism, then, some counterpart of these? I assure you, doctor, that this complex mechanism which we call the living body contains its broadcasting set and its receiving set, and signals sent out in the form of invisible, inaudible, radiant energy may be picked up and converted into sight and sound by a human receiving set properly tuned in.”

ELUCID showcases his broadcasting set and his receiving set, but his carries the outlaw spirit of an illegal cable box or the pirate radio signal from the short-lived Dread Broadcasting Corporation out of West London in the 1980s. ELUCID as DJ Lepke in limbo.

12.

The title “VOICE 2 SKULL” evokes a note to self, a Nextel push-to-talk, or a voice-to-text: ELUCID as fully automated, as a cybernetic MC. But the human essence—the flesh, blood, and bone—is still there: “I get up before everyone and lose my mind first— / For even just an hour, I work in sound and feeling—sometimes fury, / Asking the whys and hows when lies turn to vows.” That is, he grinds; his work ethic, the grating of gears. He starts his day, travels where he will, but always “free roaming” and “pinging stupid” as a “transcontinental satellite receiver freaking forth.” On “XOLO,” as tek, he “reach[es] inside—only to [his] elbow, / [And] pull[s] it back out like [he] was rewound.” Like a VHS tape, or Betamax. Functioning as some new plastic idea. We’re all wired and wasting away with “mirror[s] in pockets” as we busy ourselves “looking hard in the camera.” Not squinting to make sense, merely modeling a manufactured exterior. 

13.

Digital overlords don’t need free promo…

—ELUCID, ØKSE’s “Skopje”

The teknohell is ever-present on REVELATOR—you can’t escape its server rack bracket clutches. “Defrag the files,” ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” attempting to counter what Nathaniel Mackey calls a technology of decay. RFIDs, modems, CCTVs, pagers—all this tech isn’t anachronistic; it’s timeless—e-waste salvaged or scavenged—but ELUCID evolves, keeps it moving [...like a moving target], even if that means “bloody fingers on the keypad,” which we heard of on Valley of Grace. His own magnetic fields fuck up electronics; he lives in the “chaos hour shadow play” mentioned on “THE WORLD IS DOG.” “The situation’s unreal,” as Chuck D says on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,” Harold Pinter responds. Ultimately, ELUCID is “wholly unimpressed by your social media metrics,” at least according to “MBTTS.” He offers up “brick and mortar rhyme for distorted time” and “offline [is where] [his] core thrives.” He knows what’s what: these gadgets and gizmos are “soon to be rendered useless: and then what?,” as he inquired on Small Bills’ “Even Without You.” Merchandise is Brand New Second Hand as you sit in an ergonomic swivel chair before Roots Manuva’s radiation-emitting dusty microwave. ELUCID searches for a truth beyond the motherboard.

14.

I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there…the end of history…the death of God, the end of religions…the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West…the end of the end, the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end…. it is also the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language…

—Derrida

…so let me shut the fuck up.

—Editor’s note [me]

Tell me a lie, tell me a truth becomes ELUCID’s Max Headroom mantra for “CCTV,” minus the sputtering, the glitching. We like to think that the “truth [will] find you where you at—it’s fine, it’s fair,” he raps on “RFID,” but, more often than not, revealing the truth requires trying. Your responsibility, Toni Cade Bambara insists, is to “try to tell the truth,” and “[t]hat ain’t easy.” It’s tough to summon the strength when we “have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works.” The machinery of lies and disinformation come fine-tuned with a gleaming chrome finish. As for truth, we’re numb to its virtue; neutered by negative thoughts and clouded past experiences. But if we can pursue truth, prove it, and impress it upon our enemies, according to Bambara, “it releases the Spirit.”

The “cattle prod [will] shock you back some reality,” ELUCID raps. But truth can seem a hackneyed notion in the wrong hands. In Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Jesse, an abusive cop who takes sadistic pleasure in cattle prodding Civil Rights protestors, is charged with bringing the singing of jailed demonstrators to an end. He targets the “ringleader” of the group: “I put the prod to him and he jerked some more and he kind of screamed—but he didn’t have much voice left.” The protestor refuses to call for the others to stop singing, either out of defiance or debilitation from the beating he’s suffered, so Jesse’s frustration grows: “...the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come, only a kind of rattle and a moan.” Revisionist history can’t absolve the truth of that barbarity.

In one final [ex]plosive shout before “CCTV” transitions, ELUCID says, “Steal me your blues.” A call for reappropriation of what has already been plundered on a mass scale. The blues are never blameless. ELUCID collects blues and deranges ’em—traditional | twelve-bar | crowbarred | prison blues—deep cobalt with sapphiric crazing. REVELATOR most obviously invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s version of “John the Revelator” (1930), what with his scum gutter growl of Who’s that writin’? Jeff Place called Johnson a “guitar evangelist,” a man who was blinded by lye in his eyes at seven [the means of his marring and age should not go unnoticed], a reenactment, perhaps, of John the Revelator’s being dunked into the boiling oil cauldron—not nearly the “musky oils” ELUCID spoke of on “Obama Incense.” The teknohell is home to a Victor Talking Machine, no doubt, and the 78 RPM shellac record of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) spins centripetal. RJ’s bottleneck slide screams phoenix as he sings, I got to keep movin’. For protection from the dogs—zig, zag, zig.

August Fanon and ELUCID sacrifice the frenetic for a straightforward refrain to conclude “CCTV,” something to mesmerize with layered vocals, subliminal messages not so sub- that they’re unmanageable. Take freedom: ELUCID wants you to hear the message, the charge. “All power to oppressed people” isn’t just a slogan for him; for others, as we know, it undeniably is. He asks for a “red light on the virtue signal for the come-latelys”; or, as PremRock says on ShrapKnel’s “Human Form”: “Closeted moderates post black squares then act scared of actual progress.” On “NY Blanks,” ELUCID “refuse[d] to kneel and pray for hashtag another slain name, / On the dashcam frame of sight.” Technology pervades every moment of life and language—from sonogram to dashcam and the SMS notifications of each and all else in-between.

15.

Child Actor’s production on “YOTTABYTE” traps us inside the machine with hex bolts knocked loose and rattling around. Again, technology works its way into everything. “Stints and priors, / Sweat labor, / August sun,” ELUCID raps, seemingly on a chain gang—the teknohell is a maximum security prison: biometrics | video analytics | signal-jamming | duress alarms. Data storage facilities bursting at the seams. 

“Terabyte, gigabyte, niggas bite,” ELUCID spit on “Bitter Cassava,” adding with a whiff of cybersexuality, “I heard ass taste better in the summertime.” Do androids dream of having a romp with the provocatively named Deckard? Do Nexus-6 replicants have rape fantasies? “Came out the pussy and wrote a classic,” ELUCID says on “YOTTABYTE,” and I’m left wondering what Jodorowsky’s love machine from Holy Mountain (1973) might have to do with this. Cold and sterile tech-infused corporeality | conjugal visits with slinky cyborgs | proto-pornbots.

“SKP” presents as more sound poem than song—its patterns erratic, and therefore erotic—unpredictable with vocals pitched down and up arbitrarily. Andrew Broder provides a mellowed pulse backdrop, tunneling toward something visceral, and not the gear boxes and springs, the sensors and metal tubes, that make up a robot’s innards. ELUCID has previously proclaimed he was “a dyke in a past life,” a Sister Outsider standing alongside Audre Lorde: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos.” “SKP”—Some Kind of Power—draws inspiration from Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984), which reframes eroticism, removes it from the teknohell. 

I know you know the codes, ELUCID says. His lover has the key—they each possess a copy. And the key is crucial, at the crux of the relation; listen to what woods says on “INSTANT TRANSFER”: “It’s all skeleton keys on the keyring I keep, / Keys I never seen before for places I never even been, / Luxury cars—I key ’em and go to sleep.” Keys, keys, keys, as Angela Carter writes in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)—to china cabinets and safes and every other secret place. The narrator’s husband, though, forbids his young wife from using one key in particular. Not the key to his heart, as she presumes (“skeleton key to ya heart,” ELUCID echoes on “CCTV”), but “the key to [his] enfer.” He teases and tantalizes her and throws all the keys into her lap as “the cold metal chill[s] [her] thighs through [her] thin muslin frock.” Something’s not quite right; “we was down singing off-key: how?” ELUCID says on “XOLO.” The key might crack the code | stroking and fondling | heavy petting | as artificial intelligence records the taps and timbre of your keystrokes, stealing sensitive passwords—a sensate focus therapy for anonymous internet users. Probably best to keep the key under the mat.

“The erotic is a considered source of power and information within our lives,” Lorde writes. ELUCID answers: “Knowing is enough—deepest core informing all.” The erotic, Lorde notes, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” “From here forth,” ELUCID says, “you spit, you scream, you burn my tongue too raw—be soft.” Erotic, Lorde explains, is from the Greek eros, “born of Chaos, and personifying power and harmony.” Harm may precede harmony; pain prior to reaching “beyond the posture and the program.”

“Call me out my name,” ELUCID commands, “I’ll be the one you cum for.” Even if he brushes against the sophomoric at times (“Baby, please pop that pussy for breakfast” would be one such example from the archives), ELUCID’s sex raps swerve sophisticated. Lorde says the erotic is often “confused with its opposite, the pornographic,” which would demonstrate sensation without feeling. When ELUCID says “call me out my name” to his lover, he’s exploring “how acutely and fully [they] can feel in the doing.” Lorde explains, “[A]s we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…with the numbness.”

The technological bent to “SKP” climaxes with connectivity (¿Tu Tienes WiFi?)—a mutual dependance—“power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In 2020, ELUCID told Tim Fish about how a trip to South Africa inspired Valley of Grace (2017): “...my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law center, working towards protecting sex workers…. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out….” At the end of “SKP,” ELUCID declares “in a union made now, tomorrow anything…,” and we feel the phantom phrase “…is possible” in the absence that follows.

“There are many kinds of power,” Audre Lorde tells us, “used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” 2Pac, for instance, never achieved ELUCID’s level of erotic power in song. On “How Do U Want It?” (1996), Pac was forward with his proposal, seeking consent (“Tell me is it cool to fuck? / Did you think I come to talk? / Am I fool or what?”), but copped to his preference for pornographic perversions, the “positions on the floor” he invokes: “Ironic, ’cause I’m somewhat psychotic.” Lick before you bite, ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” his own nod to the erotic/psychotic dichotomy. But it’s more tempered than Pac’s imprudence. He seems to taunt Pac’s shortcomings on “YOTTABYTE”:

Wiggle with the lights on, Ripple off thrust, Ooh, it’s just us, Yes, I need it how I want it, Feel like Southern California with my belly full…

Not to say ELUCID’s erotic power is purely PG-13; it’s not. On “BAD POLLEN,” he “wake[s] up and thrust[s] inside [his] missus, / Two fistfuls of hair, [his] face buried.” Flashes of a possessive desire, an “I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy: So messed up—I want you here…in my room…I want you here. But even when ELUCID goes raunchy, it’s organic matter, raw materials—mud and bone and verdant muck—not nuts and bolts and a nexus of cables. His trysts always involve talking out the mud, crashing through the walls…, scorch, [and] stimuli response.

16.

I might work with the wires wet if we talking ’bout power…

—“INSTANT TRANSFER”

With SKECH185’s analog(ue) tape dispenser on loan (also note the Basinskian “disintegration tapes” mentioned on “IKEBANA”), ELUCID patches and splices the first bars of “INSTANT TRANSFER” in a terse trimeter:

Five side, keep the tape warm, Wrapped rays weighing way more, Racks raid how we wage war, Slack walk to a main course.

The alliterative and consonantal groupings (“wrapped rays”; “racks raid”; “weighing way”; “we wage war”; “slack walk”; “keep the tape”) and slant rhymes present an inconsistency that models a human touch—the warmth of the analog tape undermining digital media and the instantaneous [gratification and otherwise] operations of an ATM withdrawal, just as we see the plastic bank card repeatedly guided into the multi-function maw by a human hand in the “INSTANT TRANSFER” video.

Nostalgia is no retreat from the teknohell. Even on a memory song like “HUSHPUPPIES,” the hum of Integrated Tech Solutions interferes when ELUCID recalls the “static sizzle with the grease in stereo”—frying fish and the kitchen TV set in concert with one another. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels like a loose adaptation of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues” (1928), a fond recollection of fish as sustenance. Both ELUCID and Thomas begin with an urgency; Thomas “went up on the hill about twelve o’clock,” and ELUCID speaks in a tongue-twisted, nursery rhyme: “Must find fried fish—it’s Friday.”

REVELATOR has us fearing for the worst: fish fried in sulfuric waters, gilled vertebrates pulled from the River Styx—but it’s not that. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels down-home, a brief view of before, of Bessie-time, of salve and saviors and stove-top safe haven. “Put on your skillet,” Henry Thomas sings, “Mama gonna cook ’em with the shortenin’ bread.” “HUSHPUPPIES” works as a child-vision folk song, much like the “choking on a church mint” episode of “Guy R. Brewer.” ELUCID is an artist composing twenty-first century folk ditties, intent on inclusion in the Roud Index. I’m wary of the “sugar water, lemon sugar, water lemon” lyric sequence, though—the words transmit, mutate, like a gain-of-function in the kitchen sink. I feel he’s trapped speaking with “the language of the on-again/off-again future, and it is digital,” as Laurie Anderson once said.

17.  PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT A PAGER’S FOUL

In 1991, Q-Tip asked us if we knew the importance of a skypager. The responsibility fell to Phife Dawg to explain it in full:

The “S” in skypage really stands for sex, ………………………………………………….. At times I miss the pager so you don’t get vex, Having bad days like a voodoo hex, Conceptually, a pager is so complex that I be standing on the verge, ready to flex.

ELUCID portals us to that very ’90s dimension to pick up on Phife’s “-ex” rhyme scheme.

Skypage text, alphanumeric, Blind days—rain taste metallic, Dark roads lined with tall pine, Fire tongue in the annex.

Where Phife’s explication was elementary with its backronyming and monosyllabic rhymes, its simile and succinct storytelling, ELUCID’s post-millennial penchant for broken language and Holocene imagery elevates the archaic device of the skypager to the status of fetish item. One can see the huddled assemblage of survivors circled around the faint LCD glow on the annex floor, the acid rain falling through the collapsed roof.

18.

“14.4” drags us through the mass hysterics of Y2K mania with Saint Abdullah and The Lasso layering assorted ambient jazz touches to the Tron grid. ELUCID and SKECH185 fuck with the trellis modulation, raising a “Napster ’99” download speed from the titular 14.4kbps. They float over dial tones: “I dial in; you dial it down,” ELUCID says as he receives the signal from Armand Hammer’s “Landlines.” He’s charged with a “couple hundred-thousand watts,” so “do hold the line.” ELUCID and SKECH rap with “revolutionary millennial movements,” in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, “born in social catastrophe or in the fear of impending catastrophe.” Still, though, in the West African tradition, “time is cyclical and eternal; the religious tradition cannot then therefore readily provide for an apocalypse.” Fear all? Maybe it’s more fear none than we first thought.

I sometimes configure ELUCID as Aaron Dilloway (of Wolf Eyes, and—for our purposes here at present—their 2006 limited-release Dog Jaw) with a contact mic—full-contact stage presence | kilowatts killing | bringing the pain in a really real way. He wades in distortion, awash in both antiquated and active teknology (“*69—hit redial,” he remarks on “XOLO”). Hell is populated with tek—yottabytes of it like motes in sunlight, refracting his digipoetics. He announces proudly, “Afrika Islam loop in the key of my Lord,” which is a permanent—nearly park jamming—register for him to operate within. He dials in to Zulu Beats on WHBI 105.9 in New Jeruzalem and cracks codes for the afterfuture.

19.  THE HAINTS OF HAM RADIO

Never polemical, ELUCID makes aslant references to oppressive histories, dating back antediluvian. One second he’s “in ya sundown town holding [his] dick dolo,” and the next he’s bouncing to bear witness to an “illegal chokehold.” He time travels from crabgrass frontiers to a sidewalk slab on Staten Island. He may be “too old to comfortably rock logos,” but he’s in-the-ever-know [and the ever-now] of former lives—he embodies Gift of Gab running from Feds in his red Pro-Keds, and he hits the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue with the Lo Lifes. Nowadays, though, he’s Naomi Klein’s No Logo incarnate. In another nanosec, he’s a po-mo narcocorrido singer reading “the note like Chalino, except it’s off the SIM card.” He’s hopping through traversable wormholes of genealogical blues “from Ham to Cush to Nimrod.” Settle our assassin’s eyes on Ham, hm?

In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud “set out in search of the true kingdom of the children of Ham.” Wyatt Mason argues that part of Rimbaud’s legend can be attributed to the rumors of him as “the scoundrel who sold slaves in Africa.” Though it’s accurate that Rimbaud was free roaming, sub-Saharan, his vagabondage through the Horn of Africa might not have included slave-trading—that point is disputed by his biographers. In The Rebel (1951), Camus called Rimbaud a “bourgeois trader” of percussion rifles and Ethiopian coffee, but made no mention of slaves. In 1994, China Achebe stated that “[w]hen Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry” because poetry and slave trading “cannot be bedfellows.” When he wasn’t tagging up the Luxor Temple on a lark in Egypt or running guns across the border into Shewa land, Rimbaud’s travelogue was interlarded with diagnoses of typhoid, synovitis, and osteosarcoma—his right leg eventually lopped off. Perhaps we can ascribe his disease-ridden body to A Season in Hell’s most profane moments, such as when he writes, “I’m an animal, a nxggxr. But I can be saved. You’re all fake nxggxrs…”

The so-called “curse of Ham,” a blasphemy on Black people courtesy of Christian whites, has long contaminated the discourse—a shibboleth adorning the flowstones and helictites of the teknohell. “According to the scriptural defense of slavery,” Eugene D. Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), “...the enslavement of the blacks by the whites fulfilled the biblical curse of Ham.” But Genovese’s research indicates “the slaves did not view their predicament as punishment for the collective sin of black people. No amount of white propaganda could bring them to accept such an idea.” When ELUCID talks of “hammers hang[ing] on loop” on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” or “hammers out the Hummer” on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” I construe this cargo pants weaponry, this pakinamac in the back of the Ac’ (or Hummer), as a means of countering white propaganda, comparable to Treach’s chainsaw or Havoc’s scythe. Throughout REVELATOR, we find ELUCID going ham—hard as a motherfucker—but ELUCID’s too humble for any Tisci gilded throne. Instead, think of him as John Henry driving steel through the carpal tunnels of sinners and thieves. He sings a Scaramangan screed as he works, something gleaned from Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (1998): “Alphabetic hammer, magnetic grammar.”

ELUCID advances with “apocalyptic movement,” which Derrida defines as “the gesture of denuding or of affording sight,” a gesture which is sometimes “more guilty or more dangerous,” such as when Noah gets krunk in his tent and “Ham sees his father’s genitals.” ELUCID sees through the myths, the slander; instead, he exposes us to a soundtrack of staticky swells as he ascends out of the teknohell. I imagine the noise is a replication of what Joyce’s radio in Finnegans Wake (1939) sounds like. Here’s that signal recounted superlatively:

tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modem as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute…equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle shack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegotumy marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998) | [“MBTTS,” ahem], he writes that “Long-distance telecom systems intensifies sensations of imminent Revelation.” Oh, indeed.

20.  POST-INDUSTRIAL DOOM GOSPEL FOR THE GODLESS

On “Old Magic,” ELUCID announced himself as the “revelator, armed and dangerous,” so nothing he does on this album should come as a surprise. This lot of doom gospel spells shatters expectations, though. “I’ve been revelatin’” is what he told us on “Smile Lines,” and he’s yet to cease or even slow. The Book of the Seven Seals bulges, busting its binding and bending back its raised bands. REVELATOR, lyrics transcribed and beats notated in neumes, passes as ELUCID’s Book of Revelation.

I see it all, Michael Gira throat-sings. I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all… over the sunn oh godspeed charnelhouse chanting and gunmetal grind of SWANS’ “The Seer” (2012). ELUCID is all-seeing as well—omniscient shit. It wasn’t always this way. On “Blame the Devil” from Save Yourself, ELUCID admitted that “revelation had [him] spooked.” In his preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), George Bernard Shaw describes the Book as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon under the title of Revelation,” which only adds to the terror for an ’80s child who grew up with crushed crack vials underfoot.

On “Blame the Devil,” ELUCID saw the “seven eyes, seven crows” and “was lost.” “Now I’m found,” he would continue, “End of days—amazing time, / Everybody’s got a word—mine just happens to rhyme.” No longer cowering in church corners, surrounded by the congregants of what he has called a “death cult,” ELUCID’s Revelation remix has a liberation theology reverb. Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995) places the curious record in the context of revolutionary power:

Revelation arises in a time of persecution—and particularly amid situations of chaos, exclusion, and ongoing oppression…. Revelation transmits a spirituality of resistance and offers guidance for organizing an alternative world…. Revelation is wrath and punishment for the oppressors, but good news (gospel) for those excluded and oppressed by the empire of the beast…. Revelation teaches us to imagine the present and final eschatology with a sense of joy and hope…. The book of Revelation is helping to create a new historical and liberating language.

21.

In The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (1990), scriptural scholar Leonard L. Thompson points to the difficulties of understanding the “symbolic, metaphoric, even bizarre language of the seer.” John the Revelator confessed to being “in the spirit” when he composed the book, what Eugene D. Genovese might call “religious frenzy” in another context. Thompson receives the Book of Revelation as a nesting language, one in which “highly symbolic language” nests into “ever-larger contexts—ultimately into a cosmic vision that includes the whole social order, the totality of nature, and suprahuman divinities that invade but transcend both society and nature.” I think it wise to receive ELUCID’s lyrics in a similar manner. Lucien Goldmann might call it Towards a Sociology of the Rap Album. “The seer tends to develop his material concentrically into ever-widening rings,” Thompson contends. ELUCID reps such a structure in his verses, in his songs, even lending his own phraseology to the process, be it those “shimmer rims spinning loopy” on “VOICE 2 SKULL” or the “orbitings” we hear about on “IKEBANA.” ELUCID will “leave the meter running” only to “trigger doomsday.” He sips “Ethiopian coffee” and seconds later “space junk” floats by. We’re hipped to the particular and the panoramic. Scaramanga was similarly skilled. Samuel Diamond writes of how “Seven Eyes, Seven Horns” is “as much a meditation on symbology, semiotics, and brand identity as it is an erudite MC’s spin on a passage from the Book of Revelation.” Or, as Scaramanga Shallah himself says on the song, “What a script…” [as in, whew].

22.  MYSTIC STYLEZ

All a mystery…

—“THE WORLD IS DOG”

…nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.

—Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

To bring it back to that damnéd Derrida essay once again [back is the incredible], MC Deconstruction redefines “apocalypse” as revelation: “Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said…” This revelation “not only affords seeing but also affords hearing/understanding.”

We’ve prior seen ELUCID as mystagogue—a mystik journeyman, a Walkman invader—he whose function is to initiate us into the mystery. As Guru was above the clouds, the mystagogue positions himself, according to Derrida, “above the crowd [which] he manipulates through…a crypted language,” but, despite what some dum-dums [to borrow a term from diggity Das EFX] may argue, ELUCID is not beyond understanding. We must strive to understand misunderstanding; we must endeavor forevermore to miss understanding. Those who throw fits and fail to accept these norms—I have to presume—have not been listening to hip-hop very long or well. “Words mean things but don’t have to,” ELUCID declared with Derridean flair on “Split Tongue.” “[I]f anything has outlived its usefulness it is ‘coherent’ metaphor, one with explicit contours,” writes E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973). “It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.” “I’m okay with not understanding,” ELUCID said on Small Bills’ “Here Be Dragons,” “—I’m okay in the dark.” Dark Man X knows all directions.

Listening to ELUCID’s music, you enter a delirium, which Derrida refers to as a Verstimmung—“a social disorder and a derangement, an out-of-tune-ness…. The tone leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle takes you aside, speaks to you in private code, and whispers secrets to you.” On “IKEBANA,” ELUCID cops to “talking out [his] head, a fever set in.” Like Rimbaud in Obock, shivering, with his knee gauzed over, not a poetic thought to be found.

23.  SOUND & CEREMENT

Sound has a grammar to it—believe me—that will cause that thing that you call bending to open up in a way you won’t believe it.

—Ornette Coleman (2005)

…I just bend the rhyme…

—“Sir Benni Miles” (2021)

ELUCID, more than any other active MC, embodies a compositional approach that conflates poetics and musicality in a manner that doesn’t favor or diminish either—symbiotically rendered, synchronistically flexed: the orphic bend. In an epistolary novel by Nathaniel Mackey, Orphic Bend denotes a fictional album title of a fictional band. ELUCID asks on “RFID”: “Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” To forbid ELUCID these ludic junctures would be ludacris, a loss of not only file data but of finely wired rap filigree. ELUCID stays bent in both senses—his sentence inclinations, his word inebriations—bent like Miles Davis’s mouthpiece; dead bent like DOOM’s swilling death-drive to fund these experiments. These are “games I win at—mark me,” ELUCID gloats, but he also invites us to “share this reality.” If we’re willing, he’ll leave none of us behind; he won’t orphan us.

“We’re all eventually orphans,” Mackey has said. Elsewhere (namely, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol [1987]), he kindles, he forges, the meaning of orphan and Orphic, “an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death.’” Mackey continues:

Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort…. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan…. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language…. Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan.

ELUCID has previously instructed us on “the difference between loneliness and being lonely,” referencing like a hand reaching out—to Gwendolyn Brooks, who feels the “under buzz” of loneliness. But ELUCID’s bent is in the direction of populating his cathedral with the motherless children of his bastard style.

24.  INSIDE REPEATING NUMBERS

To stave off the dogs, the teknohell, and the unknown opps, ELUCID makes endless calculations but with an imprecise science. One can imagine the setting for such calculations resembling N’Gana Frimbo’s consultation room, what with “obliquely downcast light” and “lateral walls…adorned with innumerable strange and awful shapes.” Those strange and awful shapes—like glyphs carved onto dusty clay tablets—included “gruesome black masks with hollow orbits, some smooth and bald, some horned and bearded; small misshapen statuettes of near-human creatures, resembling embryos dried and blackened in the sun…forbidding designs.” The conjure-man’s mantelpiece showcases a “murderous-looking club, resting diagonally.” The club is actually “the lower half of a human femur, [with] one extremity bulging into wicked-looking condyles, the other…covered with a silver knob representing a human skull.” ELUCID holds the club like a stylus, dealing in tally marks and totalities until the skull smudges out an answer.

Numbers are concrete, seemingly. “Numbers don’t lie, but they damn sure don’t tell stories either,” ELUCID rapped on “NY Blanks,” skeptical of statistics. On “IKEBANA,” he starts with “3800 out the credits.” I ain’t count it, he admits, “but it’s sweat labor.” He narrows the narrative with estimates: “ten or something”; “on time, but off-key”; “almost, almost over…so close…almost over….” These are “complicated chemicals” that only work to deepen what Rimbaud called “numerical visions.” Do the math. On “YOTTABYTE,” it’s “dead money [and] thirteen guineas for a pickaninny piano.” On “BAD POLLEN,” he “brought a trunkful of tiny violins to the bloodletting.” ELUCID can “play one on each finger for every seven bodies.” These aren’t exact measurements or accurate costs. As he says on “INSTANT TRANSFER,” he’s “counting up in the dark” (in Frimbo’s consultation room, right?). Persevering and perseverating on “14.4”: “System error, / Less than zero, / Humanity pending.” Sounding like he needs to get his affairs in order.

The numbers game inevitably leads to money—nasty business like toxic assets and credit derivatives—and money is time; time, money. “Can’t clock the kills,” ELUCID says on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” echoing Master Ace in ’90 (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”) and Jay-Z in ’96 (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”)—earning miles while on the clock as a touring musician, tallying transatlantic and domestic flights. But is there ever a time when he’s not “waiting on money, thinking of murder,” as he raps on “BAD POLLEN”? Does the hustle, the bumrush, the killing ever cease? Or is it an interminable loop of episodes mimicking bell hooks’ oft-quoted (by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons) opening sentence from “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” (1995)? “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” hooks wrote. “I’m at the age they start to count my nights out,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” because death or revolution seems “a black power nap away” (“IKEBANA”). “Time wore us out,” according to ELUCID, speaking in the past tense as if the deal has already gone down, the jig is up, the end is here. The “24-hour drones” he mentions on “14.4” survey the damage. Too easy to get greedy and selfish at the end (“Give me a minute…give me five…”), shuffling off this mortal coil as “we wait—who knows the hours?”

25.

“IKEBANA,” despite the time-and-numbers crunch, sketches a scene of restorative habits, a survival guide for the godless. It falls short of He-is-risen optimism (Orpheus is the figurehead here, not Jesus), but we’re headed from hell to the heliosphere. ELUCID wishes the world “good morning” with “oatmeal” and “Ethiopian coffee.” He’s calculating to find peace. He feels that “everybody knew” but him—crying it out; they must know the secret to peace. Miscalculations leave him envious. Everyone laughing at his ignorance, at “all [his] comings and goings”—the state-of-the-art GPS tracking of the teknohell. RFIDs on the heels of his feet triggering field detectors.

The solution is a sometimes-turn inward: Being alive, I must look up. If the Ethiopian coffee doesn’t cut it, he’ll order an “everything bagel with the tofu scallion” or “vacuum the whip” (as he does on “VOICE 2 SKULL”). We’ve heard of his domestic resolve before. On woods’ “As the Crow Flies,” ELUCID was “cleaning up [his] kitchen, / Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, [and] sweeping corners.” By placing his “silverware in order,” he rebuilds the rubbled world. Peace is plucked from panic elsewhere, as on “YOTTABYTE” where he’s “squatting in a Barcelona hotel room playing Wu-Tang Forever,” observing the world rather than his phone, nourishing himself through sights rather than storing up the cache and cookies of his frequently visited sites.

After many calculations, the epiphany points toward what he details on “BAD POLLEN”: “I squeeze my children’s hand and walk harder against the wind,” the same wind that rustles the dead roadside bracken, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road (2006). ELUCID turns to his children, his family. woods, it should be stated, does the same, as noted on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”: “I walk ’em to school, then the park, / Hold they little hands when we cross the street.” A small step to cross the street is far simpler than crossing the Rubicon.

“IKEBANA” is another ELUCID and Jon Nellen production, and Gabriel’s muted horn is buried in the mix of the song’s bridge, a distant and dour reveille as ELUCID sings softly. As he bemoans everybody knowing what he doesn’t, Nellen’s percussion pulls us to where ELUCID wants to be: looking up. Being alive, he’s looking up out of hell. We hear his will to struggle, to survive, and to exist, but we also hear our will to “look up,” or research meaning, reflected—manufacturing it if we have to—as in, “You must learn” (life being nothing more than a boogie down production). Improve ourselves through awareness of others, of our loved ones especially, of our situation within all the scattered “scorching space junk, x’s and orbitings.” You must change your life, in Rilke’s words.

26.  MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

Kill your landlord, no doubt…

—“Roaches Don’t Fly” (2021)

“SLUM OF A DISREGARD” celebrates thirty years of skullduggery since The Coup’s “Kill My Landlord” (1993), but underhanded housing policies—what ELUCID calls “comforts of material conditions core-rotted”—are nothing new. Look at Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of the Landlord” (1940):

Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week?

Last week is “way last week” because any leak sooner than soon, quicker than quick, becomes an inundation, a deluge, and the subsequent damage, mold spores, and stench overwhelms. Hughes’ subject alludes to withholding rental payment until the landlord “fix[es] the house up new,” but the landlord threatens back with “eviction orders.” The threat is communicated through the tenant’s account, through a series of questions—a dialogue masquerading as a monologue for the first five stanzas of the poem. The landlord is absent, a ghostly presence only there to extract profit. When the tenant turns to intimidation (“If I land my fist on you…”), we suddenly hear the landlord’s voice summoning police and precipitating an ugly and familiar scene:

Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press…

For his threat of violence (which the landlord exaggerates as an attempt to “overturn the land”), the tenant receives a sentence of “90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.” But for his neglect and threat of dispossession, the slumlord suffers nothing.

“The house is built on deceit,” Boots Riley raps on “Kill My Landlord,” acquired through primitive accumulation and the successive decades of sniping and stealing, compressing a courseload of Proudhon property is theft readings into a solitary verse. ELUCID’s landlord—nay, slumlord—is on a “Tel Aviv holiday” when the crisis hits. While the landlord uses ELUCID’s monthly rental payments to feed IDF soldiers [...my taxes pay police brutality settlements, billy woods shouts back], ELUCID struggles to get him on the phone. When he does, he finds the slumlord’s “sincerity was threadbare” and “urgency been missing.” ELUCID “smile[s] like watermelon slice,” a simile which upends the slumlord’s own race-based neglect through subversion. ELUCID will grin and bear it (for the time being), but he won’t let it go without signaling to the slumlord—or himself at least—that he’s privy to the power dynamics which undergird the exchange. In doing so, ELUCID enacts a stratagem used by poets before him. “We sliced the watermelon into smiles,” Terrance Hayes writes for fourteen consecutive lines in one of his sonnets from American Sonnets from My Past and Future Assassins (2018). In Langston Hughes’ “125th Street,” the poet doesn’t allow racist stereotypes to overshadow Black joy:

Face like a slice of melon grin that wide.

Hayes, Hughes, and ELUCID invoke historical [mis]representations by combining the smiling, subservient Tom caricature with the conniving, watermelon-thieving Coon to deliver a knowing wink to the reader/listener. In a promo video for REVELATOR, images of James H. White’s Watermelon Contest (1896) flash across the screen—an Edison film under Brakhage-like production techniques.

The longer ELUCID stays on the line with his slumlord, the sharper the sting. Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?”—and ELUCID listens long-distance to the slumlord “turn the dagger slow” with every second that passes. This is an abrasive exchange—ELUCID’s complaints and his characterization of the slumlord’s speech effectively evoked through consonance: “Too late to make it right, / Tongue-tied talk, / Make noose quick.” The slumlord stumbles over his words, speaks offensively, and we’re reminded to “believe what people say they are and do.”

Like “Ballad of the Landlord,” the conversational lines within “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” are one-sided. We hear ELUCID, in father-mode, pressing: “If this happens all the time, what’s the plan?” The slumlord’s excuses are elided, for his words are meaningless drivel. “Both my boys have my eyes,” ELUCID coldly explains, “—don’t force my hand.” His hand, like the tenant’s fist in Hughes’ poem, communicates to us that stakes is high. “Don’t force my hand,” he pleads, but Darwish writes that “we are forced to return to the inhospitable myths / where we have no place.” On “Between the Lines” (2001), Slug rapped: “If I see you as a threat to my seedling or my sibling, / I’ll die to pull the plug on your machine.” This kind of escalation really isn’t escalation at all—it is meeting the violence of the slumlord, a violence aimed directly at the face of children. “Black mold, / Black lung, / Black child,” ELUCID chants, delineating the equation. He receives “no callback” and his fury rises. An international call culminating in a rat’s nest of cords and wires—a switchboard in a landfill.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” isn’t just a Jenny Holzer holdover, it’s ELUCID seeing and stating that which has become so tiresomely obvious. We would have to delude ourselves to see something other than what stands before us. “I am not a prophet claiming revelation, or that my abyss reaches heaven,” Darwish writes in “Mural” (2003), “By the full power of my language I am the stranger.” We’re no stranger to oppressive language, language that oppresses. On October 9, 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A year later, nearly to the day, ELUCID tells a truth to counter that lie: My landlord is a Zionist.

27.  FRESH AS FUCK ON STOLEN LAND

With his home in disrepair, ELUCID looks elsewhere to ease the tension of his rent-strife. “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” documents a search for refuge. He seeks to construct alternate realities and “alt timelines” where he’s making “[his] own breaking news” and “Lucy shit[s] diamonds” instead of habitating the sky with them, her kaleidoscope eyes gouged out. But you would need kaleidoscopic vision, of sorts, to manifest such a place. Though ELUCID has copped to “nam[ing] a thing or two into reality” on “SKP,” “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” postulates an added if—if he wasn’t “born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching,” maybe he’d be better off. But as he says on “Microdose,” the question—and the reality—is “who stopped recording?”

Fleeing the city, ELUCID heads upstate and beyond—somewhere coastal that he can walk “barefoot in the sand.” We discover him “stepping over dead fish in a bucket hat.” This is the downbeat of deep ecology. “Salt and sulfur,” he raps, and he “can’t tell where the wind blows.” Gusts die down and Hell reemerges (as if it ever left) | guts tighten. “I’m on that Black leisure for the increase,” he says, calling in a reservation at The Black Dog while reclined on his beachchair on Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell. ELUCID uses his ink well. But this all seems a reverie, an abstraction, as he challenges us to “pick a coordinate / [And] show [him] where localized perceived violence didn’t come with receipts, / White sheets.” Klan presence pervades any and all vacay getaways. You might not see the hoods and horses up north, but you will see “too many flags—one too many flags.” He’s not gonna front, “seeing all those flags outside the city make[s] [him] nervous.” These are ELUCID’s dead flag blues. They represent “physically violent reminders.” Natasha Tretheway writes that flags “inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psyche landscape of the American imagination.” Go back to “The Blackout” (1998) where Jadakiss warned that those “rednecks up in the mountains’ll try to slay you.” ELUCID ends up feeling like he’s “been cursed to concrete,” cordoned off by external forces, told to stay in the city, which makes him wonder how he’ll keep from going under. 

“The devil is a lie,” he exclaims, realizing “we are the ecology.” The mob made the devilry, manufactured it out of gurgling hate, and unfortunately “a moment to pause never goes on sale,” so peace can’t be purchased. ELUCID told us he was a “green book reader” on Armand Hammer’s “Stole,” navigating the netherworld of where no Black man, woman, or child is welcome. Time is warped; he angles through a simultaneity of oppressive timelines—“twenty years behind and ahead.” The “Black futures” he sought to build on “Stole” start to feel unattainable. Instead, he finds himself gripping “black steel in the hour of submission in search of a place to land… / …in search of a place where our blood don’t precede us.” Fact is, they built it on Indian graves. The land is composed of blood-soaked soil—runaway slaves torn to shreds, lynchings, and extrajudicial killings. On the original “Black Steel,” Chuck says, “Here is a land that never gave a damn.” ELUCID wants “purple rain” and “wild greens,” a lush and fertile vista where’ing the flowers grow and the price of avocados is free. “Search[ing] for a place to land”—forty acres won’t do. Can a reparations calculator really tell the cost of dispossession and plunder?

28.  WHO’S THE SUN SEEKING?

Xoloitzcuintli guides ELUCID into Hell, but ELUCID guides us out of Hell, penning a travelogue in miniature—traffic patterns and images of languid BK denizens. Virgil-level guidework, as Mos Def once said, “from the tree-lined blocks to the tenements,” so you don’t get vicked. On “No Grand Agenda,” ELUCID spoke of his “daydream on city buses, / Brooklyn pushing [his] button,” and on “XOLO,” we appear to receive the full panorama once the sound of sulfuric screeches and barking dogs in the distance fades:

Staring at the sun— a corner florist fell asleep with his mouth open on St Felix,  downhill on Dekalb, Green light succession, Stop-and-go, rubbernecking, Swerve, change directions,  Head in a smoke cloud…

He squints through the sunlight so that “he won’t burn” his retinas. Not to worry—he comes protected. REVELATOR’s cover image (photograph’d courtesy of A. Richter) shows ELUCID in shades. We can map the antecedents—be it Miles Davis’s shield sunglasses, Porsche 5620s with the frame screws (precursor to Kool Moe Dee’s steez); be it Sun Ra’s Courrèges Eskimo slit glasses that he rocked on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969; be it Afrika Bambaataa’s future-geometry set of shades. ELUCID’s might as well be a Makrolon face-shield, as he’s protected from the welder’s flash of Hell’s ultraviolet flames. On “CCTV,” he fends off the “sunshine and teargas,” the “flash bang” of dispersal orders, the anti-crowd dog’s growl and howl, the Brooklyn confetti of uprising. He does so just as the Irish travailed through the Troubles, as depicted with punkish punctuation in Ciaran Carson’s “Belfast Confetti” (1989)—with shrapnel (the titular “confetti”) in motion like movable type. ELUCID’s text goes explosive in the same ways as Carson’s: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.” ELUCID’s sunglasses allow him to “see now”—all the “details” with “color-cut clarity.”

Elevating out of Hell requires him to forge his own way, an avenue that becomes familiar: “I’m acclimated, black upon a path, / I made it outta clay.” Rakim crafted in the same Creator-cum-MC way on “Follow the Leader”: “Planets as small as balls of clay.” Get the fuck back, ELUCID orders, Stay the fuck down. Run for your life; duck down—his alarum’s a Rude Awakening. When ELUCID summons N.O.R.E.’s “theoretical niggas on the run eating,” the tempo starts to increase, steadily. Fire kindles and ELUCID says what we already feel: “The house is burning here…yeaaaah.” 

In William Melvin Kelly’s A Different Drummer (1962), Tucker Caliban is a slave descendant who, after serving the Willson family for generations, has had enough. He shoots dead his livestock, salts his land, and sets his house aflame in an act of defiance. The Lasso’s tempo-shift tracks with Kelly’s description of the inferno:

Orange flame climbed the white curtains in the center section of the house, moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it, burst through the roof with the sound of paper tearing, and lit the faces of the men, the sides of the wagons, and the faces of the Negroes…. Sparks curled up and then died, dissolving against dark blue sky…. [T]he rubble of the destroyed home looked like a huge city seen at night from a great distance.

Tucker’s family leaves the town of Sutton and the other Black residents soon follow, baffling the white residents who watch the procession of “suitcases or empty-hand[s]” headed for the state border. As a crowd watches Tucker blast bullets into his horse and cow, witnessing the “sticky blood r[u]n down” their fur,” as they watch him ax “the twisted tree” on the Willson Plantation, “on which his great-grandfather and grandfather had been slaves and then workers,” they think he’s gone mad. Enlightened Harry Leland refutes this, though. “It’s his land. He can do anything he wants to it,” he tells his young son.

29.  P.L.O. STYLE

You may burn my poems and books You may feed your dog on my flesh…

—Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun” (1968)

ELUCID dropped a zim zala bim on Armand Hammer’s “Solarium,” but—in recognition that magic can’t be the only survival method—he now promotes a zigzagzig. DJ Haram provides the sound design—a metallic gnashing, a chittering of rebar stakes, and a bass that throbs, muted and distorted, like eustachian tubes swollen from proximity explosions. On “Old Magic,” ELUCID offered a “double portion of protection,” but even charms and conjurings aren’t always enough. Under “war clouds” and a “cruel sky,” his “niggas survive like a moving target.” Zig. Zag. Zig. With the Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding of the last letter in the Supreme Alphabet—the zed, the end. Another bend of the body—an Orphic bend toward protest. The thousands upon thousands of Gazan orphans crying out to be heard.

For years, dead prez’s M-1 has argued that the struggle for Black liberation and the struggle for Palestinian liberation were “the same struggle.” “We have always been an international cadre,” he has said, “We have to see ourselves as a movement without borders.” Teknology allows deaths far and wide to be televised, rewound, reproduced on a “watch again” | replay | “share” exploitation loop. “I didn’t watch the video,” ELUCID says—and who can say which video? We wade through yottabytes of video footage like tonnes of debris. The video could be of grieving mothers in Khan Younis carrying the corpses of children, or it could be of Philando Castile bleeding out in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile 88. ELUCID willed himself to not watch the video—to not tune into the Black death | Palestinian death broadcast—because he already “remembered in [his] body,” in his bones in which the trauma sings, in the code genetically imprinted.

The specter of Palestine pervades REVELATOR. Listeners are more likely to scan ELUCID as “abstract rap” than “conscious rap” or “political rap,” but that’s only because ELUCID’s art is so innately revolutionary and activist, lacking the sharp edges and defined features of more contrived artists. The abstraction is that the unacclimated will perceive ELUCID as a mystic on the mic rather than a rebel. He can be both; he can defy categorization; he can perform more powerfully than any single genre tag or pigeonhole could signal.

The history of solidarity reaches back to the 1970s with communiqués shared between the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Method Man’s P.L.O. Style would never…). Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) dreamt of “having coffee with [his] wife in South Africa” and “having mint tea in Palestine.” Liberatory lucid dreaming. We collectively hope—and work—for better futures, for the dogs of Abu Ghraib and the hounds of the Great Dismal Swamp pace the same Hell. “I shall not compromise,” Samih al-Qasim writes, “And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist.” al-Qasim’s poems were discovered in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his death. “Enemy of the Sun” would even be misattributed to Jackson because he had transcribed the poem by hand.

ELUCID finds the energy, the caloric boost, in “locust and wild honey”—embracing this ascetic appetite of John the Baptist. He changes out his alpenflage cargo pants for a camel’s hair robe and leather belt about his waist (getting down with the animal pelts). He shelters in a “deeper shade of carnage,” turned from a whiter shade of pale, and “stare[s] into the fire,” scrying, divining answers from the glowing embers. On “14.4,” he said he “live[s] between two mirrors,” spitting catoptromancy raps wearing the “bulletproof Girbaud” from “YOTTABYTE,” backpocket containing a bulletproof wallet. Layers of protection. It’s the only way to “fix up sharp,” as he says on “IKEBANA” with dizzee rascality. Dressed to impress, he’s a “stiff-lip maroon.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), we learn that “in Surinam, as in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, warriors underwent complex rites and wore amulets intended to make them bulletproof…. [I]t was their gods and obeahs that spelled the ultimate difference between victory and defeat.” You already know ELUCID’s been spellling. And because the world always has been and continues to be dog, Cujo, Stephen King’s rabid St. Bernard, can be traced to Cudjoe, the Jamaican maroon leader. “A fearless rebel [who] boasted numerous bloody victories against the British,” Boisseron writes.

When ELUCID sees the “heads of state laughing” on “ZIGZAGZIG,” he knows they’re “liars” and that “hate has a logic.” They laugh “an idiot’s unbearable laughter,” to quote Rimbaud, still sweating through his Hell szn. But so are we all, grappling with the fact that “there’s no conscience, no authority.” ELUCID “live[s] to tell the story, / …to sing the song”—witness to atrocities, articulator of awfulness. When he can, he hammers out a warning. But he’s always on alert for imminent attacks which strike “without a warning.” Despite our teknological advances, we’re still a primitive society—our world still reduces to rubble, routinely. MPR500 precision-guided missiles fall from the sky and a Palestinian child stashes snacks in an abandoned IDF ammunition box. We search for survivors by hand—“Stony ground, metal poke out rubble, / Body twist angles akimbo, / Covered heads huddled”—hoping and praying for signs of life—head aching like rebar through skull, an inglorious Phineas Gage. 

On “Revelation Narrative” from Horse Latitude (2017), we hear the voice of a young child calling out: I want mama. How prescient. But the past tells the present, the future. 1948 | 1967 | 1987 | 2000 | 2008 | 2023 | & every increment in-between. ELUCID calls “from river to sea in lieu of peace, absence of truth.” He finds the gutless heads of state “guilty as charged.” They’re “monster[s] out the darkest abyss,” and—like dogs, like hellhounds—they exhibit a “gnashing of teeth.”

The death toll tolls for thee. John Donne felt the weight of every dun: “Each man’s death diminishes me, / For I am involved in mankind.” ELUCID makes the same pitch, even to those deaf to reason. His mathematics don’t need to be supreme; the most basic arithmetic tells a truth:

Who can still ignore the score? One more—to what end? Man-made horror beyond comprehension.

30.  I WOULDN’T TRUST IT IF THE POET DOUBT

After Revelation come a Genesis…

—Small Bills, “Falling Up” (2020)

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize langage.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

ELUCID pulverizes language. The lyrics on REVELATOR read like Bible page cut-ups, like Gysin and Burroughs put the scissors to ’em, like garbled Ghostface transcriptions. Narrative gets negated—not to confound, but to complicate communication. In doing so, ELUCID mirrors our shattered contemporary speech patterns, only it's art not the garbage glibness that the Geto Boys apprised us of in ’89—talkin’ loud but ain’t saying nothing. His Orphic bend and cadence flexing leave us levitating, lost in what Rimbaud calls a “hallucination of words.” More from Rimbaud:

I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and, based on an inner scansion, flattered myself with the belief I had invented a poetic language, that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate…. Worn-out poetical fashions played a healthy part in my alchemy of the word.

On “VOICE 2 SKULL,” ELUCID cops to “complicating noun combinations over drumbreaks.” He felt the existing “language insufficient—chess pieces to the checkerboard.” His new language includes words for the living and “words for the departed” (“ZIGZAGZIG”), as if a seraph touched a burning coal to his lips. His diction ushers in cosmic agonies. His voice is “the strange instrument of death,” loaned from the conjure-man Frimbo. Listening to REVELATOR, I see the colors, geometry, and nonlinear wanderings of Wadada Leo Smith’s scoring of improvisation, his Ankhrasmation language articulated into words.

31.

In 1965, Amiri Baraka ended his liner notes to The New Wave in Jazz on this hushed note: “New Black Music is this: find the self and kill it.” Nathaniel Mackey has interpreted Baraka’s statement in the following way:

...in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. It may be something innate, but you have to practice and find what it is, where it is, and how to get it out, and how to translate it through a horn or a piano or a bass—whatever—which you likely call “technology.” How do you technologize yourself? How do you utilize that technology to render something that may be unspeakable, or there before not spoken—and maybe unrenderable? How do you get out a version that at least approximates that self and, at the same time, registers your refusal to be satisfied that you have properly and authoritatively, or with some finality, articulated that self?... In some ways, you have to be prepared to lose that self, or even to be an instrument of losing it, which is to say, to be killing it.

By this measure, ELUCID has found out what his sound is. On REVELATOR, he’s getting it out, violently. He’s translating it through his trauma mic—that is his chosen teknology. He has killed the self, and—to speak in the terminology of today—he keeps killing it.

“This ELUCID for whoever’s asking,” he once said on Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” and he’s forever been “staring at the sun” (“XOLO”). Often overlooked is the irony (or anti-irony, depending) of the MC’s name. Elucidate—to “throw light upon,” to “render intelligible,” perspicuity for the patron saints of post-rap. These ideas are at odds: How can he complicate and clarify? Make the equation make sense [ELUCID = light = “sun”]. “[W]e know that every apocalyptic eschatology is promised in the name of light, of seeing and vision,” Derrida writes, “and of a light of light, of a light brighter than all the lights it makes possible.” John the Revelator’s apocalypse is “lit by the light of El, of Elohim,” he adds. [T]he glory of Elohim illuminates it [21:23]. It’s as if ELUCID is “applauded by sunrays,” as Saul Williams says on “Elohim (1972).” Gnaw on this while you head-nod:

 ...what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself…

ELUCID takes on the apocalyptic tone, and whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you.

Images:

A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello | A hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration shows an escaped slave trying to elude slave hunters and their dog. (North Wind Picture Archives/AP) | Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Unknown issue (detail) | Bill Hudson, “Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama,” The New York Times (May 4, 1963) | McGruff the Crime Dog PSA, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” 1984 (screenshot) | Robert Cohen, “Ferguson police officers during a protest in August 2014” (Associated Press) | DMX, “Get At Me Dog” music video, dir. Hype Williams, 1998 (screenshot) | Tadayuki Naitoh, “Miles Davis” (1971) | Jacob Riis, “The Trench in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York,” (ca. 1890) | Barry Williams / Getty Images, “Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officers look at a robotic device from Boston Dynamics” (2023) | The Wire theme song, dir. David Simon, 2002 (screenshot) | Dread Broadcasting Corporation flyer (ca. 1981-83) | Unknown photograph of computer desk (c. 1999) | Stephen King, Cujo, first edition cover, 1981 (detail) | Joan E. Biren, “Portrait of writer Audre Lorde at work at her desk, surrounded by papers, books, and posters” (1981) | Image of ham radio (Lehigh Special Collections) | Self-portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia (1883) | Scaramanga, Seven Eyes, Seven Horns, interior cover art, Sun Large Music (1998) | Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies, first edition, Covici-Friede Publishers (1932) | Illustration in Abel C. Thomas’s Gospel of Slavery, 1864 (detail) | Gordon Nye, “New York City Rent Strike” in the Yiddish newspaper Di Varhayt (1907) | Afrika Bambaataa (unknown) | Sun Ra, photograph for Rolling Stone (1969) | REVELATOR album cover, Alexander Richter (2024) | Richard Ansdell, “The Hunted Slaves” (1862) | “Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton outside an unnamed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” Unknown photographer (1980) | Wadada Leo Smith, “Kosmic Music” (2008) | A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

[oompaloompadidu]

CHUUYA X FEM!READER

CHAPTER 1

previous chapters:

prologue

Other chapters (will be updated when I post new ones):

Chapter 2

The setting sun's reflecting on the water of the park's lake, the ducks starting to get at their positions to sleep, the area getting quieter as people start leaving for the night. The cool winter wind makes your cheeks and nose flush a light red as you're sitting on a bench, a bag on your lap and a scarf well wrapped around your neck, waiting for your friend Chuuya. "Y/n-chan?" A voice next to your ear makes you jump a little and turn on yourself, just to see Chuuya, standing still behind you, smiling like an idiot after scaring you. "Chuuya!" You say in a complaining tone, even though you're not really annoyed or anything. "What is it? Did I scare you?" He asks, a soft yet slightly amused smirk playing on his lips as he looks at you. "Oh, shut up." You roll your eyes and grab your bag as Chuuya walks to your side, looking at you. He lets out a little scoff as runs a hand loosely on your fluffy scarf "is it this cold?". You blink, look at him and shrug "yes, it is." Huh. It doesn't surprise him at all that you've been so blunt. After all it's part of the reason why he likes you, you've always helped him keeping it real whenever he got too boosted. He mutters under his breath, shoving his hands in his pockets, "ugh,who are you, Rimbaud?..". only to hear your sarcastic reply "ah ah, very funny of you, Chuuya." He looks around. "Anyway. Where do we go?" When you don't answer he looks back at you, who's now searching something in your bag. "Y/n? What do you need?" You raise a hand in the air "wait", then finally look back at him and hand him a fluffy light blue hat with a pompom on the top of it "here, take it a moment.". He blink as he takes it from your hands, his eyes scanning its every feature "this isn't for me, right?" You close your bag and take back the hat, putting in on your head "no idiot, I'm cold." you say. He sigh softly "right, I almost forgot." He keeps quiet for a moment, then ask again "where do we go?". "Huuuh.... I don't know. I just wanted to see you." Fuck. He feels his head spinning for a moment. He knows you two are friends, it's not the first time you say things like this, then why does it always have such an effect on him? He runs a hand on his face, lowering his head to hide his slight blush with the 'em if his hat. "Ugh... okay. Whatever. We can stay here if you want. This park is... Is pretty." He curses under his breath, in a husky whisper. Even after so much time, he still acts like the kid you've met seven years ago whenever you say something nice. After a few moments of adjusting your hat to cover your cold (and quite red) ear, you cling onto his arm and wait. He looks at you and blinks a couple of times, perplexed, then wrap his arm around yours as well and start walking with you around the park.

BONUS +

"Damn, I look like an old man like this, walking arm to arm with you." He comments while you two keep walking around in the moonlight.

"Chuuya, we both look like old people in this moment." You reply nonchalant, your head resting on his shoulder while you walk, as you start being quite sleepy.

He looks at you with the side of his eyes "...yeah, I guess so. But if you're old, I have to say you've kept it quite good."

"eheh, you can say it. I look so young, don't I?" You chuckle, your voice a little muffled from the fact that you adjusted your scarf.

YAY! I love Chuuya so much! I could write forever about him! ❤️I hope you liked it!

taglist: @simbalioness

Tell me if you want to be tagged in the next chapter! ❤️

[midorishinji]

Clair de Lune

"One word from you will silence me forever, I hope you know that, but for that you need to say a word — your silence is distressing." "If one word would silence you forever, I hope fourteen are more than enough."

Sasuhina｜Oneshot｜Also published in Portuguese and on AO3

It was a lazy Thursday morning, in the middle of an unpromising autumn — or at least that's what Sasuke Uchiha thought. He tore one of the pages off the calendar without thinking much: today was September 22, 1988, the year in which the Iran-Iraq War came to an end, just over a month ago, after almost a decade of conflict; it had also been the year of the death of the Chinese president and the beginning of the USSR's economic restructuring, and the Gare de Lyon accident in Paris as well. It had been a troubling year to the world and, at the same time, a period of never-ending boredom for him, a mere high school student.

He left home for his first class of the day when it was early and the cold morning breeze dragged orange leaves away from the dry branches of the trees on his street. Next to him lived a fellow student and classmate, Hinata Hyuuga: the two hadn't really spoken to each other since they were children when they used to play together, and he rarely paid attention to her. Hinata had always been shy and reclusive, and this proved true even today when she walked every day protected from human contact by the headphones attached to her walkman. They didn't greet each other, as usual, they just followed the same path, in the same solitary and silent company as always.

Every second and fourth Thursdays of the month, the school newspaper was published, and Sasuke was an avid reader — not of the entire newspaper, but of a specific column, published by an author who hid behind a peculiar pseudonym, who wrote short stories. God forbid his swim teammates didn’t hear him say this, but he loved reading what that fantastic person, Charlotte Rimbaud, had to say!

Naruto, his best friend, knew this, and arrived at his locker with the most recent copy of the newspaper. — Your favorite author outdid herself this time, 'ttebayo ... I’ve read it, just out of curiosity, I mean, I wanted to see what it was all about since you like her so much, dattebayo …

— I like what she writes. — Sasuke corrected him, without taking his eyes off the math book he intended to pick up as he extended his hand towards the locker.

—Same thing, ‘ttebayo .

— I don't even know her.

That was the problem: Sasuke Uchiha, the boy who could have whoever he wanted in that damn school, couldn't have the only person he wanted because he didn't even know who she was. This bothered him, far beyond his wounded pride: it didn't matter if Charlotte Rimbaud didn't want him as a boyfriend, but perhaps as a friend or merely a fan, it would have been good enough for him. He needed to meet her and know what was going on inside the head of this extraordinary person.

— And you'll never know if you keep being a coward, dattebayo .

The bell rang before he could say anything else, and the two headed to the classroom. At the door, Sasuke bumped into his neighbor, who was carrying the journalism and literature club's attendance lists and other documents: perhaps that was a sign, he thought, before sitting down for Professor Kakashi's calculus class.

(...)

The end of the month always meant a lot of paperwork to fill out. Not that this bothered Hinata, she was already used to tedious tasks that allowed her to put on her headphones and let herself be carried away by menial tasks. At that moment, a new song served as a soundtrack to her duties: it was “Jane Says”, by Jane's Addiction; she had heard of them recently playing on the radio and she ran out looking for a cassette tape to record the song while in the first few seconds. It didn't matter that she had lost a couple of seconds of the track: the best things are discovered like that, by chance, and this loss was material proof of it.

The club room was already empty after four o’clock, except for her, who always stayed late to lock up the place and take care of the last details. It was during this moment of distraction that someone came in and suddenly took away her headphones, causing her to look up in annoyance. It was Sasuke Uchiha, from the swimming team. She knew they were neighbors, but frankly, she couldn't imagine why he was there. — Hey! — she said, taking the headphones back.

— Sorry, I’ve been trying to get your attention for a couple of minutes… — Sasuke said, very casually, as he observed the shelves full of books, carefully and meticulously organized — Anyway, I need a favor from you. I wanna know who Charlotte Rimbaud is.

—And why do you think I would know? — Hinata replied, without looking up from her papers.

— Because you are editor-in-chief of the newspaper and president of the journalism and literature club. Nothing is published without your approval. — what his tone of voice meant was: I'm not as stupid as you think.

— This means that I read what people submit for publication and I serve as a quality filter, that's all. Besides, has it ever occurred to you that anyone who is writing under a pseudonym is because they don't want to be recognized?

— Yes, but I need to know. I swear, I won't tell anyone, Hinata... I just need to know this.

She got up from her chair, taking the sheets of documents with her and giving a final tidy to a book that was slightly crooked on the shelf. — I can't help you, I'm sorry.

— A name, and I'll do everything else. She'll never know you told me. — the boy asked, blocking the path by placing himself in front of the door.

Hinata didn't give up, and turned the door handle anyway, forcing her way through. — I don't know if you've already considered the possibility, but not all the girls at this school are stupid enough to fall for your bullshit. — having said that, she put her headphones back on and, once they were both in the hallway, she locked the room and went to the principal’s office to deliver the documents. Meanwhile, Sasuke remained leaning against the wall, trying to come up with a plan to convince her to spill the beans.

(...)

— She didn't even want to hear what I had to say. She said she couldn't help me and that was that. And worse, she even said that not every girl in that school would fall for my bullshit! Can you believe it?

On the other end of the line was Naruto, who laughed at that crazy conversation. It was the first time he saw Sasuke Uchiha defeated to the point of not even being able to recognize it. —And is she wrong, dattebayo ? One time or another you were gonna fall off your high horse…

— I'm serious. I need to know who Charlotte is, and Hinata is my chance.

— One thing you already know, she's a woman, from what Hinata said... Why don't you try asking someone else at the club, 'ttebayo ?

— I've already tried: I spoke to Shino Aburame, and he said he didn't know anything. Sakura laughed right at me and said it's good that Hinata roasted me, so I can stop being an asshole. Kiba told me he didn't know anything either, but he looked so nervous that I suspect he’s lying…

— Then just go after Kiba and that's it, dattebayo .

— I tried, but he said that if I'm smart I'll get it, and that's it. After that, he hung up on me and he won’t answer my calls at all... And at school, he's avoiding me like crazy, I don’t know what else to do.

— Seems like nothing will come out of it then, dattebayo .

— My only option is Hinata. She has to give in at some point, right?

— I don't know, you know her better than me, 'ttebayo . Is she the type to crack under pressure?

Hell no, that's what Sasuke thought. They might not have been that close, but he knew that Hinata was as tough as nails, and when she got an idea in her head, there was no way to convince her otherwise: he remembered well when the school management tried to close the newspaper, and she just didn’t oppose it, she actually started the most successful publication right around that time and then managed to get a petition signed by the entire student body to convince the administration against closing down the newspaper. That's exactly how Charlotte Rimbaud's first story came about: out of spite. — Yeah, no, maybe that's not the best strategy... But I think you gave me an idea, so thanks anyway.

(...)

The following week, Kiba brought a stack of letters and left them on Hinata's desk, as she worked on the layout of the first page of the next edition very carefully. That broke her concentration, and she immediately questioned him. — What’s that?

— Letters from an admirer to Charlotte Rimbaud. He insists that they should be published in the newspaper for her to see. At first, I thought it was a prank, but we already have about fifteen stored in a drawer; it just seems like way too much work for a joke... By now, he should have given up if he wasn't serious. Wanna give it a read? — Kiba said, bringing the pile closer to her.

— No. As far as I'm concerned, you can throw it all away. — she replied, impassively.

— He said he won't stop sending until Charlotte answers him. He seems to be a pretty big fan.

She took the first one from the pile and opened the envelope.

“To Charlotte R.,

There's no one at this school who's a bigger fan of yours than me. I will continue sending letters until you answer, no matter how long it takes: you don't have to say your name if you don't want to, but I have so many questions and so much curiosity that knowing more about you would be enough. One word from you will silence me forever, I hope you know that, but for that you need to say a word — your silence is distressing.

Who are you, anyway? What do you like to do, to read? What kind of music do you listen to? What kind of TV programs do you watch? How do you manage to write your stories like that, so easily? What do you hide?”

— They're not signed, but the handwriting is the same, so they must be from the same person. — the Inuzuka said.

— You can throw it away. — Hinata replied, without hesitation. She felt her fists clench as she tried to control her reactions.

But Kiba had known her for way too long to see through that disguise. — Are you sure you don't want to read the others? They're not signed, like I said, but if I had to bet on a name, I think we both already know who it is, right?

— Sasuke’s an asshole, that's all. He just can't stand not having what he wants.

— And you're gonna let him send letters forever?

— He'll get tired soon and give up on this idea, and we'll be free of the problem.

— No, we will be pretending that the problem doesn’t exist, and that’s two completely different things. If I were you, I’d fix this.

With that said, he walked away from the table. They were the last two in the room, and soon, Kiba left her alone, while Hinata wrote down her response to a certain very persistent admirer on a piece of paper.

(...)

— She wrote back to me, can you believe it?

The excitement was noticeable in Sasuke's voice after he saw the small white envelope inside his locker. It wasn't signed or anything, but who else could it be? It had to be Charlotte! His insistence was certainly worth the price.

— And what did she say, dattebayo ? — Naruto asked, curious.

— I don't know, I haven't opened it yet… — the Uchiha unceremoniously tore open the envelope and then found the message that was there.

“If one word would silence you forever, I hope fourteen are more than enough.

Charlotte Rimbaud”

Naruto burst into infectious laughter, while his friend remained in disbelief. — Wow, what a woman… And she does have a sharp tongue, doesn’t she, ‘ttebayo ?

Sasuke, however, remained silent, still in shock. He had never imagined that his strategy would backfire…

Trying to cheer him up, his friend hugged him, patting the Uchiha on the back as they both walked to math class. — Give up on this while you're still on top, man. Actually, you’re not on top of it now, damn, dattebayo… !

— Your optimism impresses me. — the other boy grumbled. The classroom was still empty, as the bell hadn't rung, but little by little students began to arrive.

Naruto wasn't satisfied yet, of course, and needed to poke at the wound some more. — If you want, my mom has some Bonnie Tyler records to help you out, 'ttebayo , like “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, you know?

In the chair in front of Sasuke, sat the last person he wanted to see at that moment, Hinata Hyuuga, who arrived accompanied by Sakura Haruno, also part of the newspaper team. This certainly only worsened his mood, which became increasingly noticeable even to those who knew nothing about the situation. Like a good friend, Naruto added fuel to the fire: — Hey, girls, guess who just got dumped, dattebayo ?

If looks could kill, Naruto would be doomed by now...

— Do you have anything to do with this, Sakura? Talking shit about me to Charlotte would be very low of you... — the Uchiha said.

— You act like I need to talk shit about you to anyone, you worthless womanizer. — Haruno said, laughing, without having any real intention of offending him with the insults. The truth is that they both knew that he wasn't that bad, and that Sasuke Uchiha even had a smidge of ethics in dismissing suitors who didn't interest him and being straightforward in admitting that he didn't want anything serious. Not that that made him any less of a womanizer, of course.

— Maybe you should just give up. — Hinata said, very directly, as she put away her headphones and walkman in her backpack.

Sasuke sighed, regretfully. —That's what I'm gonna do. I promised her, didn't I? One word from you would silence me forever, as good old Mr. Darcy would say.

— I didn't know you liked Jane Austen.

— There's a lot you don't know about me, Hinata. Contrary to what Sakura thinks, I'm not a worthless piece of trash, no, at least not completely.

At least they both agreed on that. Part of ourselves is always hidden, like the dark side of the moon, and the face we show to the world is not always the face that represents us when we are alone. And sometimes we get this glimpse of who someone is when no one else is looking, which can be as surprising as swim team star Sasuke Uchiha reading “Pride and Prejudice” in his free time.

(...)

The remaining days of the month went away faster than they could imagine, and soon Halloween was knocking on the door, as was the promise of November. As promised, Sasuke didn't send any more letters to the newspaper's editorial office, and things seemed to be calmer, shrouded in the same haze of sameness as always. To his surprise, however, one rainy Tuesday morning an envelope appeared in his locker.

“If you still want to talk, Mr. Darcy, perhaps I will have some free time to read what you have to say. And, to answer your questions:

My favorite hobbies are reading and writing — my favorite book, as you may have already guessed, is “A Season in Hell”, by Arthur Rimbaud, a good last name for a pseudonym, don't you think? I like alternative music and my favorite artist is David Bowie. I don't watch much television, but I like watching new releases on MTV and watching movies, especially horror ones — my favorite is “Halloween”, even though I find the endless sequels detestable and just way too weak compared to the original. As for my writing process… I write the world as it is, beyond the appearances of normality, or as it should be; I like things that are interesting and out of the ordinary.

Charlotte R.”

To say that that letter had made him happy would be to underestimate his reaction: Sasuke Uchiha was ecstatic , and could barely control the stupid and stubborn smile on his face. It would be difficult to concentrate on training today, as he realized as he walked onto the school gymnasium. The place was almost empty, with few people watching the training sessions: winter was approaching and despite the pool being heated, it was still unbearably cold in the gym due to the lack of thermal insulation; it was probably the same feeling as getting inside a refrigerator, if he had to bet...

The coach, at the end, praised his performance and said that whatever had increased his motivation, it was good to keep close by — a thought that the Uchiha obviously agreed with.

Sitting down on one of the benches next to the bleachers, he saw a familiar figure, writing in a notebook. It was Hinata, and she didn't notice him until he was sitting next to her. — Writing much, huh?

This scared her and almost made her drop the notebook between the gaps in the seats. — Damn, Sasuke, what kind of idea, ugh…!

— Relax, I didn’t wanna scare you, I’ve just never seen you around here.

— Kiba is sick and someone needs to cover this fortnight's sports column, he's left to me, of course. — she explained, closing the notebook — What do you want?

— Nothing… But Charlotte answered me. I hope you don't mind if I send another letter to the editorial office, I don't know any other way of talking to her right now.

— It’s fine. — no questions, no complaints. This surprised him but in a positive way.

The one who actually had questions was Sasuke, who looked at the large mirror with an intricate, baroque-style frame, next door. — Is that yours?

— Yeah, a lady was throwing it out this morning, on my way here, and I brought it to take home later, Shino promised he would help me after he finished developing the pictures for the next edition. — she explained, tracing the arabesques on the frame with her fingertips. Thin, pale, and delicate fingers, like those of a pianist: Sasuke sometimes heard someone in the house next door playing, and now he was sure it was her.

Taking the mirror in his arms (which was quite heavy, he had to admit), he stood up and started down the steps. — Come on, I'll help you with this.

— I-it’s okay, Shino… — Hinata still tried to argue.

— Will take a long time, because developing photographs takes a long time. I know because my brother is a photographer, and I've seen him do it a million times.

The girl didn't answer, hiding her face inside the red scarf she wore, almost as red as her cheeks. Sasuke walked beside her, wondering how she had managed to carry that heavy thing to school, and where she could have stored it (probably in the club room, because it definitely wouldn't fit in the locker, it was too tall and large). What a determined mind, certainly…

Good thing the house was close by... Soon, they arrived at the Hyuuga family's yellow house, the one with sunflowers planted near the front window, from where it was possible to see the piano in the living room. — T-thank you... You don't have to be so nice to me, you know? I wouldn't ask for anything in return for letting you send the letters, you know...

— I know, and I know that I don't need to be nice to you or anyone else: I just wanna be. — Sasuke said, with a small smile of satisfaction. He was a person who didn't smile much — Are you sure you don't need help putting this up on the wall?

— No, my dad can help me with that, he should be getting home by now. Thank you, really, Sasuke.

It might not have seemed like much, but those simple words made a strong impression on Sasuke and, if he could describe it, he would have said that they melted his cold heart a little. There's a lot of beauty in being simple and to the point, and Hinata Hyuuga sure has a way with words, a certain firmness of character, he thought, as he walked into the house as well. It was a funny thought to have, accompanied also by a vague feeling of déjà vu .

(...)

Night fell and, for the first time in months, Sasuke heard the sound of the piano next door. First, someone playing a few stray notes, and then a familiar melody: "Clair de Lune", by Debussy. His mother, particularly, liked this piece: Mikoto, who was cooking dinner, stopped what she was doing for the next few minutes to listen to the music. Sasuke walked down the stairs and stood next to her, carefully savoring each of the notes, and the emotion behind them.

— Hinata plays so well. It's a shame she barely has time to play now... — his mother said, sighing deeply.

— I know. — Sasuke replied, in a tone of melancholy that he couldn't understand and, for the first time, there was a flash of pain in his heart, as if something was missing, and he couldn't understand exactly what it was.

He returned to his room after the song ended, still surrounded by a magical mist, which left him intoxicated. I wish I could’ve sat next to Hinata while she played, and recorded the song to listen to it countless times, or until the cassette tape fell apart from being used so much, just to be able to replicate the magic of that short moment a little bit more. He wrote, motivated by a hallucinated fervor, everything he wanted to say to Charlotte Rimbaud.

(...)

Half of October was gone in the blink of an eye, and the second fortnight would bring another publication of the newspaper, which Sasuke was very much looking forward to. Something had broken the ice between him and Hinata, which certainly surprised some and seemed expected by others, since they were now walking together, talking, to and from school, and he seemed to be hanging around the journalism and literature club more often than ever. The letters he exchanged with Charlotte became longer and longer, and he increasingly longed for answers.

It was a cold Friday afternoon when they were walking back home through an empty street. They knew that winter was approaching just from how the sky turned gray and dark so early, and the trees no longer had leaves on their branches.

— When are you gonna play again? — he asked, as they crossed the street towards the opposite sidewalk.

— Well, today, I guess? I don't know. Why? — the girl replied, while dodging a puddle of water, getting closer to Sasuke.

— If you’re gonna play "Clair de Lune" again, I want to record it. It's my favorite, and recently you've been playing it more often, I like it. My mom likes it when you play too, she always stops cooking to listen to you.

Hinata giggled shyly. — I can look for a cassette tape with the music already recorded by a professional pianist, I mean... It would be better than trying to use a recorder, I think the acoustics in my room aren't that good, and also, if I make a mistake...

— But it's different when you play. There's soul in every note, you know? Hard to explain.

She went silent for a moment, staring at the ground. — You know, it's funny you say that, because I think there's a little bit of me in that particular song. Not because I put my soul there, but because it has always been there , maybe even before I was born… Have you ever had the experience of recognizing something when you see it for the first time? Like déjà vu ... When I heard "Clair de Lune" for the first time, that's how I felt, as if I had already heard it somewhere, and suddenly the image of each note and my fingers playing the piano keys came into my head, even though it was long before I started playing, long before I understood anything about music. I just knew. My grandmother used to say that I was a peculiar child, an old soul, and maybe she was right about that, because I dreamed of the familiarity of old evening dresses and the glitz of the Belle Epoque , as if I had lived through it all and there was still a thread that tied me to the past, when I used to attend balls and waltz... — she paused and smiled — Or maybe I was just a very imaginative child and obsessed with a random historical period.

— My brother once told me that this reincarnation thing is probably true and that when we like people for no apparent reason it's because our souls have always attracted each other, gravitating around each other like planets around the sun. I found it very beautiful. I think he, like you, is also an old soul, and I am brand new, as modern as a color television. — Sasuke said, with a crooked smile — By the way, has anyone ever told you that you have a way with words? Right now, it’s like I felt a déjà vu too, as if I had already heard not those exact words, not those ideas, but this way, this soul behind it...

Pausing for a minute, suddenly Sasuke Uchiha felt terribly stupid, and realized the truth behind that almost comical situation: Kiba was right when he said that if he was smart he would get everything, and it seems that this thought had only occurred to him now. Arthur Rimbaud, who lived during the Belle Epoque, was an old soul just like the little Charlotte he finally met in person. — Charlotte... You're Charlotte, aren't you?

Giving up, the Hyuuga hid a little further inside the red scarf, as scarlet as she was. — Well... It looks like we've finally met, right, Mr. Darcy?

[silverbladexyz]

♤ Hey there, Silver! Hope you're doing well!! I'm always on a Stormbringer brainrot as well, especially with Rimbaud, I love that Frenchman waaaay to much-

Anyway! If you have the time, could you write Rimbaud reacting to a reader who get him a new winter coat and a scarf? I think he'd be really happy! I don't really mind on pronouns, whatever you're happy with!

Hope you're taking care of yourself, and putting yourself before writing!! ♤

Hiii Ember! I'm doing well, and I hope that you are too! And thank you so much for remembering about Rimbaud our underrated French spy!

The image does not belong to me. It belongs to it's original owner.

TW: None. Slight Stormbringer spoilers below!

A gift for you

It was winter, the season of cold and snow.

And it was just your luck that France had pretty heavy snow in winter this year. The snow was thick whenever it fell, it's white sheen ruthlessly covering everything it landed on. Footsteps quickly disappeared in the matter of seconds, leaving no trace behind. While one would think that this would be beneficial for spies, it was a meagre benefit compared to the largely increased risk of injuries and failure of the mission.

A lot more of your co-workers had started to wear thicker clothing which mostly consisted of long winter coats. Many accessories were worn as well, such as gloves, scarves, and ear-muffs, and the heaters in the buildings were always cranked up high. It stopped everyone from feeling cold.

Well, apart from one person.

"U-uh, Monsieur Rimbaud, are you sure that you'll be fine?"

"Brrr... it's alright, Y/N. The cold is only a small distraction; I'll be able to finish my mission without any disaster. Although I do wish it'll be warmer..." You looked at him in concern as he shivered violently. Even when he was dressed the warmest underneath the blazing hot heater, he still looked like he was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts in Antarctica.

"If only I had your ability... then I'd be able to make myself warm like a caterpillar in a futon..."

Ah, right. Your ability allowed you to manipulate anything that was to do with cloth. Which meant you could pull apart single pieces of fibres, or just control clothing on it's own. But not only did you have physical power over anything made from threads, you could also make the clothing become different temperatures, with no limit on how long it changed temperature for and how hot or cold it could get. You could even burn or freeze people with the clothing if you wanted. It was a formidable ability, one that had helped you immensely on your missions.

"But my ability could be dangerous if not handled properly. You know that." Rimbaud gave a miserable nod as he gave another shiver. Just looking at him made you feel guilty, because most of the time you just relied on your power to control how warm or cool your clothes were.

"Brrr... I have to head off now. I'll see you around." You blinked, then nodded, raising up a hand to say farewell. Lowering it down, you frowned as you recalled his shivering form. It was only just then did you realise how bad it had gotten. If he continued like this, his performance on missions would definitely be impacted; and that was something a spy wanted to avoid at all costs.

If only I had your ability...

Looks like you just found what gift you wanted to give him for Christmas.

~~~

December came quickly, and then the day approached where it was a public holiday for everyone. Well, only for normal civilians. For spies like you, it meant another day of highly-classified work.

You blew onto your fingers, your joints aching from working them a lot last night. The gift lay snugly in your coat, the product of so many months worth of blood, sweat and tears. Okay well, maybe not blood. In the place of blood was many sleepless nights alongside horrible coffee that kept you awake until 1AM.

Your eyelids were on the verge of shutting, but familiar black hair that appeared in the corner of your vision made you perk up immediately. Calling out his name, you jogged towards him, clutching the gift tightly against you. A wave of nervousness passed through you.

“Merry Christmas, Monsieur Rimbaud!” The Frenchman smiled a little, and opened his mouth to say something, only to sneeze again and shiver more violently than before. You hurriedly held out the package in your arms and he stared at it curiously.

“Here, I’ve got you a gift! I hope that you’ll like it!”

Rimbaud blinked as he accepted the gift from you with freezing hands. He stared at it, albeit a bit cluelessly, which made you feel a tinge of guilt for him. The spy probably hasn’t received a lot of Christmas presents before...

“Well, go on and open it! It was made specially for you!”

With shaking fingers, Rimbaud slowly took the ribbon off and opened the wrapping paper delicately.

The gift turned out to be a winter coat with a scarf alongside it.

“I know you’re always complaining about the cold, and that you have difficulty finding the right type of clothes to keep you warm. So I decided to make you your own winter coat and scarf. Don’t worry about whether or not they’ll help stop the cold. Because I’ve activated my ability on it indefinitely. You’ll never feel cold again with these on.”

Rimbaud slowly took them out with trembling hands. Yet they were not trembling from the cold.

“Thank you, Y/N.”

He put the coat on and wound the scarf around his neck. Your ability activated instantly, warming up the clothes, and in turn, warming up Rimbaud. The effect was instant; he stopped shivering, and his complexion even got a bit better.

You were about to say something when you saw him smiling the most genuine smile you had ever seen. It was tender and gentle, with warmth laced in it. If you had squinted and looked closer, you could’ve seen the faintest tint of pink on his cheeks. 

Smiling, you bid him farewell and left to continue with your day.

Gently grasping his scarf, Rimbaud smiled a bit. It was warm, yet lovely and soft.

Just like you.

Yes, I am soft for this French man >.< Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays everyone!

@pixyys @pianotross @chuuyas-beloved @fi-nn-losofia @nekokinax @xxelfmamaxx @yukitomybeloved @sariel626 @i-just-like-goats @ashthemadwriter @yuugen-benni @lakeside-paradise @irethepotato @voyagewiththesatan @scarletta-ruan @catzlivedforbsd @arisu-chan4646

[grymmnox]

weekly fic recs #28

uh. i think it’s 28? almost forgot ti was saturday,, whoops! my computer is struggling. so much. anyways, lets get into it. 

edit: I CANNOT BELIEVE IF ORGOT A LINK anyways its there now ok enjoy the fic

fandom(s): bungo stray dogs, the owl house (the finale aired,, i read some fics, ofc!)

ship(s): soukoku, shin soukoku, ranpoe, lumity, huntlow, and ofc some gen fics

Oneshots

Discovering My Inhumanity; UnfunnyClown - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 9.3k words | dazai & PM, dazai & mori, dazai & hirotsu, dazai & kouyou, chuuya & dazai, chuuya & dazai & rimbaud, dazai & Q, dazai & fyodor | READ TAGS

summary:

Some people go through their entire life without realising they have an ability. Osamu Dazai is not one of those people, no matter how much he wishes he was.

Five times Dazai learns something new about No Longer Human, one time he shares a discovery. (Au in which No Longer Human functions differently)

The Demon Prodigy; YunaYamiMouto - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 14.4k words | chuuya/dazai, chuuya & dazai, ADA & dazai, dazai & PM

summary:

The Demon Prodigy, basically a myth in the underworld, Port Mafia's most dangerous and precious asset, seemingly re-emerges after four years of silence. ADA is in hysterics. The Port Mafia is laughing their asses off. Dazai is Not Amused and Chuuya is less than Not Pleased with Soukoku's name being dragged through the mud. Shenanigans ensue.

To What End?; WaxWings (Greyality) - bungo stray dogs

mature | 2.7k words | chuuya/dazai, chuuya & dazai, dazai & mori, ADA & dazai | READ TAGS

summary:

"And you!" Yosano points an accusing finger in his direction, "Don't tell me you didn't know exactly what that sick fucking bastard had in mind. Don't tell me you didn't know that Mori wanted to--to--" Her voice falters, nausea and memories closing her throat all at once before she manages to spit out an acidic final accusation, "...you knew."

Ranpo refuses to meet her eyes.

"Of course I knew," He says, "But you know better than anyone that no matter our ability, there are some people that can't be saved."

"Dazai isn't some people."

----

Or I couldn't resist writing one of those fics where Dazai returns to the mafia to protect Yosano after the Hunting Dogs arc

Who Cares If It’s Gay, As Long As I’m With You; Mystic_Panda_4 - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 18.5k words | chuuya/dazai

summary:

Dazai and Chuuya have been engaged for just over five months now and Dazai is tired of waiting for a wedding. They've already told their coworkers, they've been fiancés for soooo long now, that really, they should just skip the wedding and go straight to the honeymoon right? And what better way to celebrate their honeymoon then by going on a road trip across the country they fell in love in. And of course, Dazai definetly has no surprises planned because what could possibly go wrong as Soukoku tackles America.

***

"Chuuya, look, there's a sign for Little Tokyo!" "No, absolutely not." "But wouldn't it be fun to see how accurate it is?" "Dazai, we are soaking wet and I personally am freezing, I am not making a detour in Little Tokyo so we can walk around wet and cold just to see how accurate it is." There was blissful silence in the car for a few moments, and then- "Chuuya, is it gay if we're in Japan but Japan is in America?" "Who cares if it's gay? As long as I'm with you, I'm sure you'll find some way to to turn it gay anyways." "Aww, Chuuya, I love you too."

all my own; halfbloom (diphylleias) - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 17.4k words | chuuya/dazai

summary:

“A day off?” Chuuya echoes, blinking slowly.

“Yes,” Mori repeats with a chuckle, but it sounds like an order this time. “A day off. Do with it as you please.” And right as Chuuya is opening his mouth to ask why, Mori perks up and says, “Ah, I instructed Dazai-kun to take the day off as well.” He smiles serenely. “So you two may spend it together, if you’d like.”

Chuuya’s eye twitches.

In between carnival games and ice cream stands, Chuuya learns a thing or two at seventeen about normalcy, cotton candy, and hand-holding.

Feet Over Harsh Ground; izanyas - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 8.1k words | dazai & kunikida & yosano, chuuya/dazai

summary:

When two foreigners ask the armed detective agency to collect something in the ruins of the military base near Suribachigai, Fukuzawa sends Yosano and Kunikida to investigate. Dazai, the agency’s newest recruit, asks to come along.

Alternately: Yosano accidentally makes a study out of Dazai, Kunikida is too tired for the both of them, and sometimes all it takes to open up is one too many drinks.

the wolves that guard their wounds; boopiejokes - the owl house

teen and up | 4.5k words | eda & luz, hunter & luz, eda & hunter, flapjack & hunter | READ TAGS

summary:

“Hooty, if someone’s here, why didn’t you—”

Luz’s eyes popped out of their sockets. “Oh…”

Hooty flicked his frightened eyes to her — and if something freaked Hooty out, then Luz was in the storm for something — then down at the boy on the ground who was painting the grass darker with his blood outside the door.

I Will Always Return; the_sentient_duck - the owl house

teen and up | 5k words | hunter & vee | READ TAGS

summary:

Once upon a time, Hunter met a basilisk, striking up a friendship that changed both of their lives for the better.

Frenemies; sakarrie - the owl house

general audiences | 3.2k words | hunter & luz

summary:

Hunter gets a mysterious message telling him to meet them at the night market. He really should have realized Luz would be behind this.

Or: Post-ASIAS, Luz doesn't like the idea of Hunter suddenly showing up at Hexside and almost kidnapping her friends.

Come Morning Light; Sokkas_First_Fangirl - the owl house

general audiences | 10.7k words | camila & hunter & luz & vee, camila & hunter, camila & luz, camila & vee, amity/luz, hunter & luz, luz & vee, camila & everyone, hunter/willow, gus & hunter | READ TAGS

summary:

Camila always dreamed of having a big family. She came from one, Manny came from one; they were in agreement that they wanted a whole bunch of kids.

Things didn’t work out that way. Manny got sick and that became the focus of Camila’s life. She tried to shield Luz as best she could, but Luz was growing up, growing wiser every day; she could see the dawning horror in her daughter’s eyes, the knowledge that Manny wasn’t getting better.

Manny died holding her hand and their dreams of a huge, loud family died with him.

Fate had other plans.

(Vee was hers in a heartbeat. Camila had a soft spot for Hunter, but she didn’t begin to think of him as hers until the end of the kids’ second month with her.)

*

Camila's always dreamed of a big family; she just didn't expect to become a mother of three in such an unconventional way.

Or, a study in Camila Noceda and her growing bond with Hunter.

Complete Fics

he’s got big sharp teeth (and big fat hips); bunterasu - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 3 chapters | 14.7k words | akutagawa/atsushi, chuuya/dazai, akutagawa & chuuya, poe/ranpo

summary:

Before Akutagawa could realize what he was saying, the words were tumbling out of his mouth and into the air between them: “Use Rashoumon.”

Akutagawa slapped his hand over his mouth so hard it stung. Atsushi’s mouth fell open, his ears going slightly pink as he processed what the raven-haired boy said.

“Excuse me?”

Akutagawa’s face was bright red under his hand. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Did you just suggest that I teethe on Rashoumon?”

“I said nothing of the sort, Weretiger!”

or, Akutagawa, Atsushi, and the universal teenage experience of teething.

Wrapped up in You; quinnlocke - bungo stray dogs

mature (altho i think it. could be rated explicit. sexual content) | 24 chapters | 100.9k words | chuuya/dazai | READ TAGS

summary:

Chuuya just wants to get through his day as a reptile expert, but there's a bandaged lunatic in his reptile house trying to get murdered by his snakes.

Saving the man's life is a courtesy, taking him home is just asking for trouble.

the blood on my hands is yours to keep; zyria - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 5 chapters | 13k words | chuuya/dazai, chuuya & dazai

summary:

Dazai and Chuuya have been in a secret relationship the entire time since Dazai defected from the Mafia. Everyone knows. Except Dazai, that is.

Or, an alternative retelling of the four year divorce where soukoku keeps in contact, because come on, four years is a bit too long to miss someone, even for these two idiots, probably.

"I'm betraying the mafia."

"Uh huh."

"We're enemies now."

"Sure."

Dazai sighs. Chuuya is always impossible, this is why he hates him so much.

"Why aren't you trying to kill me?"

"Why aren't you?"

Incomplete Fics

Dazai and Chuuya’s teenage camera roll; meezla - bungo stray dogs

general audiences | 14/20 chapters | 10.3k words | chuuya/dazai, chuuya & dazai, atsushi & dazai, dazai & kunikida, ADA & dazai

summary:

When Dazai's past at the Mafia is known by everyone at the agency and Dazai tells everyone that he still has his old phone, the agency can't help but go through it.

or

Dazai and Chuuya filmed a bunch of videos on Dazai's old phone when they were 15-18 and the agency watched all of them.

kerosene hearts; orphan_account - bungo stray dogs

teen and up | 7/? chapters | 16.9k words | chuuya/dazai, akutagawa/atsushi

summary:

Chuuya doesn’t have any gloves on which he always wears, and the skin beneath is clear, pure, unscarred from Corruption and that these hands are not his. It takes longer than it should have, the knowledge settling in like a black cloud over his figure on the unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room in what must be an equally unfamiliar apartment that this is not his body.

This is Dazai Osamu’s body, wrapped in bandages and taller than he is and lanky and not Chuuya’s at all. // the body swap that no one, especially chuuya, akutagawa, atsushi (and by some extension, dazai) asked for. //

grim’s notes: obviously this has been orphaned, so don’t expect any updates lmao. still a good fic nonetheless

i’ll die in his cold, cold arms; venusdahlia - bungo stray dogs

mature | 24/? chapters | 115k words | chuuya/dazai | READ TAGS

summary:

“Dazai-san, you’re staring.” Atsushi noticed, finding a spot over the railing next to Dazai. “Hm. I guess so.” He replied, not looking away from the rink. Just for a moment, the brunet’s eyes reflected the bright light from the overhead lights, a bright glow engulfing them. “It’s not that often I have the time to see you guys act so barbaric, it’s very entertaining.”

Atsushi gave the other a light shove. “Is that really what you’re here to see?”

Annoyed, Dazai moved his gaze with narrow eyes towards Atsushi. Before he could shoot back at him, a loud yell from the rink interrupted them. “THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT, YOU LOUSY PILE OF BANDAGES?!”

-

Where after losing a bet, Nakahara Chuuya, a skilled but short-tempered hockey player, is forced to train with Dazai Osamu , the most annoying figure skater he had the misfortune to meet.

carrier pigeon boy; Anonymous - the owl house

teen and up | 3/? chapters | 15k words | belos & hunter, eda & hunter, eda & owlbert, eda & king, lilith & hunter | READ TAGS

summary:

“It’s a shame you have these… things,” they spat, lifting a wing up once again but with a lot more force, stretching it high and picking at the plumage. Their hand plucked a feather, inspecting it- and he held still, breathless, a drop of blood welling from the spine. “The curse of wild magic never leaves.”

“Wild… wild magic?” he asked, quietly.

They nodded. “It destroyed this village, our family. They took you hostage- are you alright?”

"I’m your uncle, Hunter. Uncle Belos.”

Making a grimwalker goes wrong, somehow. Maybe he used too much palistrom wood, or somehow finally using his brother's heart instead of bone had more of an effect than he thought it would. Because this one has wings. This one, isn't quite as witch or human as it is animal and other; wings like the palisman of the witch that lead his brother astray. The very form of the palisman that lead him away.

But maybe it's a good thing. Even if this one is cursed by wild magic, and couldn't even take on a humanlike form- and could become less than an animal, take the form of a bird, it just meant he didn't need to feel guilty when he killed it.

[straycatboogie]

2023/02/27 English

BGM: Pizzicato Five - 陽の当たる大通り

Today I worked late. It was quite a fine day, and I couldn't read Yasuharu Konishi's "My Beatles" at the reading time at the morning. Probably it was too fine and my mood got so excited that I couldn't face the book steadily. I gave up reading more and started enjoying soul music as Stevie Wonder, and talked with my friends about the topic of "analog" and "digital" on a group on LINE as I wrote yesterday, and also finished the homework of the English conversation class. A friend said to us that we should use the things what we can use, so we don't need to decide what we can't use to do at the first rapidly. We need to have a soft attitude to use them with the tactic of eclecticism.

Referring to that "eclecticism", we often wander whether we have to choose between two opposite things. They can be any large topic of "conservativism or liberalism", or "The Beatles or Rolling Stones", "Rimbaud or Baudelaire", "Godard or Truffaut", etc. It becomes complicated because people even make some parties about this problem. I believe that we don't have to be so serious, but just try to enjoy "anything good is good". We can stand by Giants even though we are the fans of Hanshin Tigers. If we decided to deny the opposite thing because of "I stand by this", it would bring a narrow point of view... I thought this by the message of the LINE group. We have to keep the wisdom of finding the right decision between two things.  

Writing the essay for the English conversation class, I thought that I am living in the "change of the era". When I was just 20, "Windows 95" was started to be sold and the internet was started to be used actually. In other ways, I admit that I know the era which the division of countries were hot as Cold War. And I also have watched the division has been melted by the globalization by the internet. The internet is, I also guess, also melting the wall between the city and the countryside, not only the wall between countries. Now, we can catch various new cultural news even though we stay in Shiso city, a countryside town. Indeed, city life has its greatness. But this life in Shiso suits for me.

Now is the era that we can live freely not only in this real world but in the virtual internet world with using various digital devices. I want to think the "real world's beauty" first with the expression supported by the era of that digital age. This world is full of beautiful things, and they are provided in front of us with 3D, dynamic scenery. And also, "now, this moment" is just the thing we can enjoy "now" (yes, this is tautology). "Now, this moment" is always in front of us which never will come back as the real time scenery... it reminds me of Sartre's philosophy. It is important for me that I can enjoy this miracle of living "now, this moment" which never come back again. Now, I am living the now, the moment with Pizzicato Five's elegant tunes.

[kaypeace21]

"Rebel robin" easterggs

- Robin's friend is a horror movie fan whos fav movie is evil dead (jonathan has a poster of it in his room)

- Robin's parent's car is the " dodge dart" a ref to Dustin's demodog-dart

-robin and her friends make analogies to zombies (like Will- the zombie boy).

- robin faints. And her friend milton says "blink once for yes twice for no". A ref to what Joyce said to Will in s1.

- robin's other friend has a little sister named el-ie who pretends to be a squirrel. A ref to el killing a squirrel in s2. This is also reminiscent of a scene from the st prequel novel ' suspicious minds' where young-kali pretended to be a tiger (the Hawkins school mascot) & a rabbit (Jonathan's hunting story).

- robin reminds me alot of the byers: she is into photography and rock like jonathan and even worked at the movie theatre like jonathan did in the og pilot. They both like David bowie and cook for their families. She also is poor and wears hand-me down clothes from relatives (like Will). She also is into existential philosophers. Which is also similar to jonathan who had a poster of the poet rimbaud in his room.

- robin is almost run over by a car by a bully while riding her bike: similar to Mike, Dustin, and Lucas in s2

- robin says the best accessory for a girl is her middle finger. Cue max giving the middle finger to billy in s2 XD

- robin (before Will dissapears) sees the quarry and gets uncomfortable and thinks of metaphorical monsters

- similar to how billy had baseball references (along with Will). Robin wears a baseball shirt

- her fav flavor of pie is cherry (like alexi and cherry slurpies). She also gets pissed at a guy sipping a cherry flavored drink- similar to hopper in s3 with alexi

- she cuts her hair and she describes it as looking like a lion. El and Will owned lion plushies in s1.

- robin refs Chicago (kali lives there) and NYC (hopper used to live there), and California (where max and billy used to live).

-tammy's fav song is total eclipse of the heart: the song Robin and Steve sang in s3. Tammy would often sing the song in robin and Steve's class.

- they make references to the hellfire club: she describes a time where she dresses like a cross between a nerd and a rebel. And a mom yells at her appearance saying she looks "goddless' . And another of Robin's friend (kate) is told ' what demon is possessing you, kate?" (hinting at the satanic panic). Meanwhile someone describes Mike and his friends as "hellions' as another hint to this. We also see how alot of parents got paranoid and a bit crazy when Will and barb dissappeared- prob foreshadowing the chaos that will happen if more kids dissappear in s4. Along with the satanic panic

-Robin is visiting her friend Kate at her house. Kate wanted to listen to Madonna together. Max and el listened to Madonna at el's.

- Robin's friend (kate) says "I dumped his ass" in reference to her cheating bf. A little nod to the m*leven breakup

- robin (like Will) felt excluded during the summer cause her friends kate and dash (Kate's now ex bf) were always making out . Sound familiar- cough m*leven

- robin annoyed says " makeouts, breakups and declarations of love all in the span of a week". Wow if that ain't a diss to certain pairing we know in s3 XD

- kate (like mike) says to Robin dating the opposite sex is a part of growing up . Which scares Robin (and Will in s3).

- robin has a nightmare of running down the school hallway with short hair (like el in s2 via the upsidedown)

- robin contemplates shaving her head (like el)

- robin says she likes to sometimes dress androgynous . And found a cool suit. Which we saw in s4 bts pics I assume.

- robin watches a music video where there are duplicate indianna joneses (could be a ref to all the billy duplicates in s3?)

- robin says " I stare at the ceiling. The ceiling stares back. I'm stuck and don't know what to do" a ref to the s3 song with robin called "the ceiling is beautiful"

- a character named Sheena reminds me a bit of Will or el . She is very quiet, queercoded, and is often bullied. And she finds mean notes and other things in her locker- placed there by bullies. A bit like how Will found the zombieboy note in his locker. But sheena can be another name for Jane so ...maybe foreshadowing of el/jane being bullied in highscool?

- when robin hears a hom*phobic comment on tv- she describes the anxiety like a ' thundercloud in a big open sky' and a "chill". Which reminds me of the mf being associated with clouds, thunder, and lightning. And the mf liking it cold.

- robin constantly describes the monster or shadow in her life- whether it be her talking about conformity or the problems of consumerism while she is poor (themes of s3).

- robin before realizing she was gay/crushing on tammy just says " I don't get crushes' which reminds me a bit of Will saying " I'm not going to fall in love" (as the lyrics are " love thats new to you, you open up the door')

-robin on her bike hears something (demogorgan) and runs back to her house , locks the door, and calls her friend- and the phone gets electrocuted. The next day Will is said to be missing. (Another Will paralllel).

- i was right about robin being in theatre. So we most likely will see robin in theatre in s4 (she also auditioned with a friend in the book). So for s4 my guess is she may be in the drama club with dustin- cause in s1 he had a drama shirt

- one of her friends is named milton. Since the documentary 'paradise lost' was on the s4 movie list. Its prob a ref to John milton who wrote the fictional 'paradise lost'. The character Sheena may be a ref to the 80s film/movies *where sheena (jane) was psychic

-Robin's gal pal (kate) and Robin eat m&ms and candies together. Kate jokes m&ms and candy bars are 'foods of the gods'. El ate m&ms in s3. They joke how talking about plural gods (instead of 1) would get them in trouble. In case you are unaware- kali (is the name of a Hindu goddess) and el (is the name of a cannanite god) .

-Robin also mentions hopper's car smells like eggos.

- robin tries running away (like el in s2, max in her novel, and jonathan also wrongfully assumed Will ranaway in s1 too).

-robin tries to get a job at Joyce's, than Bob's, and later gets a job where jonathan used to work

-bob newby describes the byers family as his "home" . Similar to how El describes the Hawkins gang as "home".

- robin says she was friends with barb before nancy. Suspiciously right after she says this- barb grabs Robin's hallpass that says ' glitch in the time space continuim. " the teacher who wrote this called robin a "glitch". Which makes me wonder if my did theory is right- but ...that certain powers at be may also alter memories or things so people assume said people have always been around.Mentioning it cause it seemed suspicious.

-not an eastegg but robin can't believe how nice Bob is. And Bob says the byers filled a hole in his life 😭 . She also felt an instant connection with Will and saw alot of herself in him.And asked if Joyce ever thought of moving like everyone suggested . One of the reasons Robin didn't like steve was because Steve never mentioned how Jonathan took innapropriate photos of Nancy. So everyone at school just knew jonathan as the quiet kid who takes pictures. So to everyone it just seemed like- wow you're bullying the quiet kid who's brother is missing and take away the one thing still left in his life that makes him happy. Which is why everyone assumes jonathan beat up steve later. Interesting to know how general Hawkins (not in the loop) viewed things

- the book referenced alot of previously mentioned movies on the s4 list or from prior duffer interviews...along with a few NEW movies ,books, plays, singers, and songs that I have to analyze for another day ...

[millennialgrandma]

July Wrap Up

Let's just all collectively agree to ignore the fact that my July post is coming to you live from the sunset of August, ok? I could have had this done weeks ago when I took some time off work, but I DIDN'T. It isn't like I read a lot, or even wrote a lot, in July. But life happens and idk, man. I'm in this weird little funk right now.

Things I Wrote

I spent most of July decidedly Not Writing™. Until the last week of the month, naturally, when I spent a couple hours each night putting together my entry for our second "Write This In Your Style" collection. The Bloody At Your Door collection went live on Aug 1, but I'm still counting it as July writing. Especially because it is anyone's guess whether I'll manage to write at all in August (the muse has been a fickle and elusive little bitch).

Anyways, my angsty little open-ended contribution is titled the nature of breaking (dramione, E, 5k). I'm begging you to check out the rest of the collection if you haven't already. I'm astoundingly lucky to call these writers my friends.

Things I Read

Get ready, because I'm about to blow. your. mind. THAT'S RIGHT, FOLKS! I READ A TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED BOOK! And it is all @eggbagelsjr and @mightbewriting's fault. So what if the only book I read so far this year was a monsterfucking book? IT MADE ME HAPPY.

My fanfic track record for July is pretty abysmal. Outside of a multi-chap group read in the RoR discord server, I managed a handful of completed fics. I blazed through all of the available chapters for a deliciously depraved (new to me) WIP, and caught up on another. I have otherwise fallen behind on pretty much all of the WIPs I'm following.

Fiction:

Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nascosta (approx. 60k words)

Nonfiction:

Fanfiction:

Complete: (approx. 34.2k)

Best in Show by naughtybaguette (dramione, E, 6.6k)

The Nature of Seduction by @dreamsofdramione and @artofcrumbs (panville, E, 6k)

wanna lay my head where the cold wind blows by @one-equaltemper (dramionstoria, E, 7.8k)

Keep Swinging Your Bat My Way by @veelawings (dron, E, 1k)

Group Read: riddle me this by @megamegaturtle (dramione, GA, 8.1k)

Group Read: His Lucky Day by @monsterleadmehome (dramione, E, 5k)

WIPs: (approx. 217.9k)

Fervidity by @kittenshift-17 - Chapters 1 - 26 (dramione/sevmione/dramionbastan(?), E, 215.8k)

Where There's Smoke by @whimsymanaged - Chapter 4 (dramione, E, 2.1k)

Things I'm Currently Reading (Heading into August)

We continued our group read of @pacific-rimbaud's Love and Other Historical Accidents in July, flailing our way through Chapters 6-11. I'm still out here having the goddamn time of my life with this fic (the group finished it mid-August, but I missed the final chapter read and I'm still hanging on because I don't want it to end). I also hopped into another RoR group read for Chosen, by 5moreminutes. I only made it to the first read, so I'm just a couple of chapters in, but this fic is so wonderful and features Hannah Abbott as a side character and OH MY GOD I JUST WANT TO PUT HER IN MY POCKET AND KEEP HER FOREVER.

And since we're already ignoring the lateness of this post, let's also ignore that last month I said my July goal was to cross two fics off my TBR list, hmm? I do not wish to be perceived.

[popopretty]

Storm Bringer Spoilers (9)

I finally finished the translation of the last part in the epilogue where it is explained why Verlaine was still alive and how he became after that. Verlaine and Rimbaud’s relationship is just so sad :( 

Please feel free to re-translate. Just be aware that I don’t speak English or Japanese as my native language so I may make a few mistakes here and there. Also, some meanings might be lost in indirect translation. 

...

Going back in time.

The Demonic Beast Guivre appeared in the wood. Adam blew himself up. Chuuya opened the “gate” and defeated Guivre.

Four minutes and thirty seconds after that.

The place was the site of the collapsed highway overpass. Crushed foundation materials, concrete, wires, steel frames, cylindrical forms and such were scattered and piled up like dead bodies.

On the top of that place, Verlaine was in the progress of vanishing.

He couldn’t bend the tips of his fingers. His breathing was shallow. His vision was so dark and hazy that he couldn’t even see the stars. Verlaine is nothing more than a sealed string of codes. When the singularity lifeform that acted as his main body disappeared, his heart was slowly stopping due to the life-sustaining energy being depleted.

Verlaine’s thoughts were just as shallow and slow as his breath. Even on the verge of being engulfed into the hollow of death, his heart didn’t flinch one bit, nor did it seek for anything.

So this is death, Verlaine thought in his disrupted consciousness. It is not such a big deal as I thought. No groaning in pain, no crying of regrets, no distraught with fear either. It is flat and thoroughly empty. In the first place, my life is not a life that has anything to regret at this point. It is a life that should not have been born from the beginning. I didn’t live in a way as to regret anything either.

It’s just that, I caused troubles to so many people. The French government, my assassination targets, Port Mafia, brother. In the end, I didn’t get anything, even with all of that. That only is like a stain my life’s trail, that I regret a little.

Well, whatever. As you can see, I will die soon so forgive me.

His fingers grew colder and eventually he didn’t even feel the cold anymore.

His heartbeat weakened. And after a brief spasm...

It stopped.

His heart.

A few tens of seconds passed.

Verlaine realized that he was still breathing. At the edge of his field of vision, he saw something red. He turned his eyes to that. 

A crimson red cube was passing through his chest and surrounding his heart. That thing was making his heart move.

What the hell is this? Verlaine was confused. It was not because he did not know what the crimson cube was. He was confused because that was something he knew so well.

Why is it here?

“This is the first time I saw you in such a terrible state.”

How nostalgic was that voice.

Verlaine couldn’t believe his own ears. And when the person entered his sight, he started doubting his eyes too.

“No, no...”, Verlaine spoke in a whispering voice. “This can’t be happening. You can’t possibly appear here.”

“Exactly”, the person nodded. “However, showing up in the most unlikely places, at the most unlikely times, isn’t that what a spy is?”

That was Arthur Rimbaud.

A fuzzy outer jacket. A thick scarf around his neck. A pair of earmuffs made from rabbit hair on his head. Long, black hair and somewhat gloomy eyes.

He was the person who saved Verlaine from the lab, and his partner. And the person Verlaine betrayed.

The subspace created by the crimson cube was the sign of Rimbaud’s skill. All substances inside it can be manipulated at Rimbaud’s will.

“Paul, what have you learnt in the world of spies?” Rimbaud sounded surprised as he asked.

“That if you don’t throw away your feelings, you won’t be able to complete the missions, it taught me that much. But what are missions? And what are feelings? Is that to vent out all of my hatred towards human? Or is that to get a little brother? I rushed into this without knowing clearly which one was the mission, and this is the result. If I hadn’t told brother the way to stop Guivre, I would have been able to kill off all those hateful humans.”

“Ahh... I see, you are Rimbaud’s hallucination.” Verlaine said as if he was ridiculing himself. “You are the illusion that I see on the verge of death, the death reaper my guilts are showing me. Otherwise, there is no way Rimbaud who died one year ago would appear here.”

“I’m not a hallucination, neither a reaper. I am a ghost.” Rimbaud shook his head. “I have been waiting for you, in this country.”

Verlaine stared at the other silently, as if he was trying to understand what that existence over there actually was.

“No way, there can be no ghosts.” Verlaine finally shook his head. “Not because it’s unscientific. If you were a ghost and not an illusion, you would not be saving me like this. You would definitely curse me to death.”

“Why?”

“I betrayed you, and tried to kill you.” His cold voice echoed through the night.

Rimbaud didn’t say anything, he looked back at the collapsed Verlaine with calm eyes.

“What’s with those eyes? Be mad at me more, resent me more, punch me, kick me, strangle me, Rimbaud!”, Verlaine screamed, still lying on the ground. “I shot you from the back. That’s why that explosion happened. You were caught up in it and lost your memories, then died in this foreign country not even knowing who you were. If you are a ghost, then there is only one reason that you became one. That’s your grudge towards me, isn’t that right, Rimbaud!”

“It’s the opposite.”, Rimbaud shook his head. “I waited for you because... I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?” Verlaine frowned, not getting what he just heard.

“I wanted to help you. And I thought that I was helping.” Rimbaud leaned forward, holding his hand over Verlaine’s chest. “But what I actually gave you, was nothing more than the one-sided sympathy of a man who pretended that he understood. I can’t allow myself to just apologize. I have always been thinking about what I could give. And I finally got the answer on the verge of death. This is it.”

Under Rimbaud’s palm, the space cube grew bigger.

The thing that was at Verlaine’s chest earlier started to expand as if it wanted to shallow his whole body. Then it became huge enough to shallow both Verlaine and Rimbaud inside. That was the subspace created by Rimbaud’s skill. Inside it, Rimbaud is capable of doing anything. Except for bringing the dead back to life.

That exception seemed to be happening.

Verlaine noticed his own fingers twitching. They bent. It wasn’t an illusion. His eyes were also moving. His muddy vision gradually became clear.

“This is...”

Verlaine moved his arm. He twisted and raised his upper body up. He looked at his palm, at the back of his hand, squeezed it, then released it again. He felt his fingers being warmed up by the blood flowing in.

He tried to ask what was happening so he looked at Rimbaud who was there.

Rimbaud was not there.

He collapsed.

By Verlaine’s side.

“What is this?”, Verlaine asked in shock. “I see, you... you used your skill on yourself?”

“A method that I could use only once in life.” Rimbaud said with a faint smile on his face. “But it worked well.”

<The skill to turn humans into skills>

That was Arthur Rimbaud’s skill.

Transforming dead humans into a skilled lifeform, and using them freely inside the crimson subspace. The person who is turned will have the memories and physical capabilities of their past lives, they can even use skills. It is a skill worthy of a spy that is considered the most elite in Europe, the heresy of the heresies. 

Rimbaud used that skill on himself.

“It’s nothing to worry about. I am already dead.” Rimbaud said weakly. “What is left here is just information. But even if it is like that, I feel good. Because I could leave this to you.”

Rimbaud’s body started to glow in red. The way it glowed was familiar to Verlaine.

A redshift. (*TN: A term referring to an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy. In astronomy, it happened when an object is moving away from us. Good luck Googling.) 

“Wait!” Verlaine who realized what was going on, reached out to the collapsed Rimbaud.

“Wait, Rimbaud. Don’t disappear!”

“Because you didn’t like my birthday present.” Rimbaud laughed apologetically.

“Just take this as a birthday present instead. Happy Birthday. I am happy you were born into this life.”

After that, the subspace contracted sharply, sucked into Verlaine’s heart and disappeared.

All that remained was the debris, and Verlaine, and the cool breeze of the night.

Verlaine walked two, three steps with the stunned look on his face. He looked around then sat down on the debris.

“Ha...hahaha.” He looked down and let out a dry laugh.

“Hey Rimbaud, you waited one year for me just to do this? For something like this?”

Verlaine knew, what Rimbaud had done.

To save him, Rimbaud had turned himself into a self-contradictory typed singularity.

Rimbaud, who had turned himself into a skill, used that skill again on his own self who was born as a result of that. Then he continued to apply that skill on his new self that was born. And by repeating this progress, he created a self-contradictory typed singularity. Then he gave that singularity to Verlaine, in place of the Demonic Beast Guivre.

Verlaine tried to stand up but he didn’t have enough strength and dropped his knees on the debris. He was weak. Perhaps, the singularity that Rimbaud created did not have an infinity output like the unlimited energy that the usual self-contradictory typed singularity emits. He could no longer use his inexhaustible gravitational skill like he did before.

But Verlaine didn’t find it particularly regrettable. 

Because he was regretting the thing that he just lost that very moment more.

“Why, Rimbaud?” Verlaine looked up to the sky. “Why did you smile at the end? I betrayed you, and you died because of that, you know?”

He knew the answer. He just didn’t want to understand.

Rimbaud, the man who freed him from Faunus and gave him the freedom to live.

Rimbaud, the man who trained him and raised him into a spy, the person who got through all the dangerous missions with him.

Rimbaud, the man who shyly handed him his birthday present.

“Why did you smile?” Verlaine spoke with a trembling voice. “If you turn yourself into a skill, you are no longer human. You will be nothing more than a piece of surface information with a human’s memories and personalities. You knew that for sure. Still why did you wait for me? Why did you have to go that far for someone like me, when you didn’t even know if I would come or not?”

Verlaine finally came to his senses.

The reason why he let Chuuya know how to defeat the Demonic Beast Guivre at that time.

He hated humans. He thought that it would be okay if everyone died. Yet, he gave out the hint to destroy Guivre. That was because he didn’t think that everyone should die, equally. 

There was only one exception.

One person worthy of affirming human beings.

“Sorry, Rimbaud.” Verlaine whispered behind his clenched teeth. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to your friendship. I’m sorry I didn’t thank you when I received the birthday present. I am finally grieving the fact that you are not here anymore now...”

Verlaine said so with his trembling voice, as he sat still and looked up to the sky with his eyes closed.

He remained there for a long, long time, looking at the night sky.

...

--------------------------------------------------------------

...

Time pours on everything equally.

Verlaine didn’t die. After surviving with the life he got from Rimbaud, he was confined in Port Mafia’s underground shelter. That was what Verlaine wished for. There was already no place for Verlaine in the outside world. He had lost most of his gravitational skill and the only place he could escape the long and big hands of Europe was the hideout deep underground.

Also, he had no interests in the outside world. There wasn’t anyone he wanted to kill, nor anyone he wanted to meet. Apart from Rimbaud. 

And Rimbaud was no longer there.

At first, he just sat in the basement and spent all his time reading and writing poems. When he became bored with that, he started doing what Rimbaud used to do. Training the younger generation.

He hammered his assassination skills and knowledge into the Mafia’s elites in an underground training space. Gin, Izumi Kyouka, and many more.

Those mafias under his discipline all became top-class assassins in a short period of  time.

Verlaine didn’t reveal his feelings to anyone. He never told his apprentices nor the Boss the reason why he kept desiring that crippling life underground. 

When he was not training his apprentices, he just sat on his wicker chair, waiting for something. He never told anyone what he was waiting for. If he was asked persistently, he would just say “for the storm”. No-one knew what that storm was supposed to mean.

Six years later, Verlaine now has become an indispensable central figure in the Mafia, and risen to the position of one of Mafia’s five executives.

He is still sitting on his wicker chair, waiting for his storm even today.

...

[linklethehistorian]

Randou and the Sins of Season 3’s Fifteen Adaption (Part 50/???)

Bones’ Biggest Changes & Greatest Failures — The Tragedy of Arthur Rimbaud (29/?)

Ah, and speaking of that very visible struggle of Arthur’s, this is not the only scene within the original telling of Fifteen through which we can catch an extremely good glimpse of it in action; as a matter of fact, the one we were just talking about prior — in which Dazai confronts our helpless associate executive at the abandoned warehouse during the preparation for Chuuya’s would-be party — holds an even more clear exhibition of this trait, as Randou grapples with his inability to understand, keep up with, and satisfy his accuser’s demands.

When we look at the true version of this scene with this perspective in mind, the ebony-haired man’s simple statement of “Basis coming from you, I can’t imagine what it is” suddenly takes on a whole new level of importance, as we can at last appreciate it for what it truly was: an honest admission from Rimbaud that he could not even begin to fathom Osamu’s all-too-cynical, analytical, and cold thought processes — and indeed, how could he have? The ill-fated frenchman and the much younger mafioso-to-be were as different as night and day.

Try as he might, quite literally even to save his own life, Arthur — being the pure-hearted, kind, and selfless soul that he is — could never in a million years have hoped to truly comprehend the mind of such a person as the devilish prodigy in front of him, and he no doubt knew that mortifyingly well.

After all, while the only time we may have absolutely guaranteed to us through the book that they were well and mutually acquainted with each other was the past year following the old boss’ assassination — and truthfully, that alone should really be time enough to get to know one another fairly extensively, anyway — that does not necessarily mean that this is the whole extent of their history together, either; on the contrary, there is actually quite a bit of evidence to back up the notion that the bandaged teen and the raven-haired mafioso should very well have been introduced long, long before that, should one take a few moments to consider the timeline of events as we, at present, can best understand them.

Indeed, though it might at first seem that Dazai had only actively been involved and known in the Port Mafia after the arranged death of the predecessor, this is actually highly unlikely, for, if this were genuinely to be true, it would mean that the boy had absolutely no standing within the organization prior to that moment, and that lack of pre-existing credibility would have created a major flaw in the usurper’s plan — a mistake that I find it very hard to believe the ever-thoughtful-towards-the-optimal-solution Mori would have overlooked, to say nothing of the fact that it never truly caused any of the fatal problems it inescapably would have if it had actually come to pass. No, without question, it’s far more sensible to just conclude that Dazai was already a highly esteemed and trustworthy figure in the Mafia by proxy, and that he was chosen by Mori as an accomplice for this very reason.

And as for Randou, there can be no doubt that he also had been in the Mafia for quite some time before Mori had taken over, considering not only how clearly established it is within the novel that the Hyperspace wielder had already been cruelly toiling away at the front line under the old boss’ reign for a considerable period prior to the organization’s change of hands, but also the fact that Dazai even goes so far as to call him a veteran in the business during the events of Fifteen — a title that one would normally not be able to earn unless they had put in several years worth of work into a given trade. What’s more, when we take into account the knowledge that by the time in which the novel takes place, Rimbaud has now been stranded alone in Japan with a heavy case of amnesia for roughly eight years following the failure of his mission with Verlaine, the idea that he had been working within the infamous criminal enterprise for that entire span of time actually seems rather plausible.

I hardly find it outrageous, then, in light of just how little debate there can be that Rimbaud came to know exactly how dark, cynical, and complex the bandaged young man’s views of the world and people around him were, to say that when the moment came that he was saddled with such heavy charges, the knowledge of those views must have been especially hard on him, for many, many reasons.

Naturally, the most immediately evident of these, to the average person, might very easily be his inability to fathom Dazai’s basis for ultimately finding his testimony objectionable or otherwise suspicious despite his relative honesty — and understandably so, especially given that it was this very issue which caused him to make the remark which we were just now analyzing in the first place; however, noteworthy as that one example may be, if we are ever to truly grasp Arthur’s plight in this moment to its full extent and genuinely come to understand him properly as an individual, it is utterly imperative that we realize that the consequences of his innocence run much, much deeper than this alone — as do his causes for concern.

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[thepointoftheneedle]

BUGHEAD APPRECIATION WEEK: day three - favourite trope

I am a very simple creature so my favourite trope is the coffee shop AU.  I’ve written the little thing below the cut to celebrate it and as a thank you to the kind folks who have mentioned one of my stories this week. It honestly means such a lot! 

Betty tied the apron and stood attentively behind her shift manager, Kevin, as he showed her the idiosyncrasies and foibles of the huge Fracino espresso machine.  She was pleased to have got the job and wanted to present herself as an uncomplicatedly good hire.  The coffee shop was a five minute walk from her apartment and she liked the ambiance.  She’d been a regular since she began her research degree, stopping in often on her way to class in the morning.  It would give her a break from the solitude and intensity of her thesis and it would force her to interact with people, she needed the human contact.   After her initiation into the sacred rites of the machine Kevin gave her a laminated recipe card, took a seat on the other side of the counter and called out orders to her as she practiced. 

“Tall latte, three shots,” presented no problem and she even managed the leaf design in the foam with a reasonable degree of skill.  Kevin had clearly given his own order as a first trial because he took the drink from her hand and sipped it as he continued to put her through her paces.

“Medium cap, extra wet, rice,” was next, followed by “Flat white with legs.”  She turned out the orders competently although the difference between them was negligible. He tested her listening skills and her ability not to laugh at an order with the "Grande, bone dry, five-shot ristretto, extra-whip, two-raw-sugars cappuccino” and the "Trenti iced coffee, 12 pumps vanilla, 12 pumps hazelnut, 12 pumps caramel, 5 pumps skinny mocha, a splash of soy, ice, double-blended.” When he asked what she would suggest to up sell that customer she suggested a shot of insulin, which made the only client in the place bark out a laugh.  Kevin raised an eyebrow and she pointed at the millionaire shortcake instead and he nodded his approval.

“Ok, now for the real caffeine heads you need to get the serious drinks just right every time.” He had her draw a straight doppio, a ristretto, a lungo, a red eye and a black eye and lined them up along the counter.  As she served the last Kevin looked over his shoulder at the lone customer.  “You want any of these before they go down the drain, Hemingway?”

The guy looked up from his laptop and nodded, shuffling over and gathering up all of them in two journeys and returning them to his booth like a squirrel gathering acorns to tide him through winter.  “Thanks Kevin,” he muttered as he secured the last of his spoils.

“Don’t thank me, Betty here made them. I only worry that all that caffeine will stop your heart. An ambulance outside will do nothing for our reputation,” Kevin replied.

“I have a high tolerance.  For caffeine if nothing else.  And thanks Betty.  Nice to meet you.” He looked at her as he spoke and she was surprised by his eyes.  They were a striking blue green, not the brown she would have expected with his dark hair.  His eyelashes were unexpectedly long too, sweeping almost up to his brow line.  Now that he wasn’t hunched over the keyboard she saw that he was handsome in a poetic, sensitive, romantic kind of way.  He looked out of his time somehow, more suited to doublet and hose and rhyming couplets or drinking absinthe with Rimbaud.  But here he was, drinking free, cold coffee in Greenwich Village.  

“He’s a fixture and fitting, aren’t you Jones?”

“You’re my Café de Flore Kevin.  I’ll dedicate the book to your hospitality,” he smiled.  Betty liked the smile.

Over the next few weeks she exchanged a nod of greeting with Jones almost every day.  He was generally in his booth when she arrived at four and left around seven, gathering up his laptop and a tall Americano to go, as if he hadn’t already risked his sanity with the amount of caffeine he’d consumed.  “That’s quite a coffee habit,” she observed as he ordered another cup of drip coffee one afternoon.  

“I’m a machine for turning coffee into prose, got to fuel the engine,” he quipped with a smirk. It was clearly a line he used a lot.

The next day as he collected his to-go brew she asked him if it stopped him from sleeping and he explained that he worked nights.  “This’ll keep me going til four tomorrow morning.  It’s good to be able to hate your job with the required degree of enthusiasm.” He was funny in a dry, self deprecating way that she enjoyed.

She started to try to sneak him extras with his coffee, offering cookies and chocolate stirrers. He turned them down.  “I just like coffee with my coffee.”

“If you drink anymore you’ll start twitching.”

“No, I know my limit.  I stop when I start being able to see noises and hear smells.”

She began to tease him about the consistency of his ordering.  “Hey Jones, give me a challenge.  Order something milky with complicated syrups and whipped cream.”

“Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love,” he replied.  “That’s not mine by the way.  It’s a proverb from Turkey or somewhere.”

“But you don’t use sugar.”

“No, I replace the love with bitterness,” he laughed, returning to his seat with his usual drip coffee.

The next day she suggested a cortado.  “Come on Jones, let a little light into that darkness.”  He grinned and accepted a macchiato.  “Today a dab of foamed milk, tomorrow a vanilla latte with whipped cream.  You’ll find you can live without pure intravenous caffeine.”

“I can live without it but all the folks who remain unharmed because I am well caffeinated really don’t want me to skimp.  Anyway if you wean me off caffeine you’ll slash the profit margin of this place,” he smiled. “Not that I’m here solely for the coffee.”

She began to look forward to the jokes, to his familiar presence, to looking over at his long fingers dancing over the keys as he typed.  There were moments when she found herself imagining them moving over her skin that way, flushing and tightening her ponytail in confusion as if he’d be able to read her thoughts.

One afternoon she found him slumped in the booth, his head against the seat back, snoring softly.  She let him sleep until ten to seven before holding his Americano under his nose.  He blinked his magnificent eyes as he awakened and then shook his head to disperse the sleep.  She’d like to see that a lot more often, preferably from the adjacent pillow. “Thanks Betty, not enough coffee today and Jones without coffee is like… something without something…sorry, too sleepy for bon mots.”

 Betty learned that he was doing his MFA at the New School, supporting himself by working nights as a porter at Bellevue.  “Takes too long to travel all the way back to Yonkers between class and work so I hide out here and write.  Besides I live with a singer/songwriter so it gets sort of noisy at home.” Betty hid her disappointment.  Of course he had a girlfriend.  

“A musician.  Would I know her work?” she asked, twisting the knife masochistically.

“Him.  No, I doubt it.” He paused and then looked at her a little shyly through his untidy, dark curls.   “He’s playing downtown at the weekend and I’ve got a night off. You should come.” Betty reproached herself for her heteronormativity and smiled weakly.  She really didn’t want to see Jones and his boyfriend together.

“Oh I’ve got … stuff this weekend.  But thanks though.  I’m sure he’ll be great.”  

Jones flushed and looked at his feet. “I’m sorry if that was inappropriate.  You don’t come to work to get hit on.  Sorry,”

“Oh, no I didn’t think you were asking me on a date.  To your boyfriend’s gig?  That’d be weird.  Oh unless…Oh, I mean, weird was rude.  It’s totally your business but I’m not…like, I’m pretty strait-laced I guess.  But you do you…or whoever.  Sorry.”  Jones was actually laughing now.

“Archie’s my roommate not my boyfriend.  I wasn’t inviting you to a threesome.  I was asking you on a date.  If you’re busy or you’d rather I got lost just say so.”

The gig was the most fun she’d had since she moved to the city.  When he leaned in for a kiss her heart thumped like she’d just drunk ten shots of espresso. After the encore she put her hand on Jughead’s arm and looked into his eyes.  “Would you like to come to my place… for coffee?”

[straycat-writes]

fuubutsushi // 風物詩 (oda sakunosuke)

fuubutsushi // 風物詩 (japanese, n.) - the feelings, scents, or images that evoke memories or anticipation of a particular season.

requested by: anonymous

It was spring the first time he saw her, the mild early April air carrying with it the scent of freshly bloomed flowers. She was curled up with a book in a quiet corner of the quaint little café he used to frequent, completely lost as the words on the pages painted a picture in front of her.

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and Oda must have stood there for a full five minute, wondering whether or not he should approach her and strike up a conversation. With mellow sunlight streaming in through the window beside her and a steaming cup of coffee on the table, she seemed almost too serene, too…picturesque for him to disturb her.

But humans have an innate instinct, a tendency to notice when they’re being looked at. She looked up from her book, slowly taking in her surroundings before her eyes finally landed on him. Oda would have liked to look away, should have looked away but he couldn’t bring himself to. When he blinked slowly, she gave him a dazzling smile, and that was all the encouragement he needed.

He approached her, a charming smile gracing his handsome face, “Is this spot taken, ma’am?”

“Not at all.” She smiled, gesturing in front of her, “You’re very welcome to stay.”

He sat down, looking at the blue and gold cover of the book still glued to her hand. On France and Poetry. He raised a curious eyebrow, “Baudelaire?”

“Among others.” She nodded, rather wistfully, “Baudelaire was insanely talented, but it’s a shame he has become so synonymous with French poetry that people barely pay any attention to others.”

“And who do you think deserves more attention?”

“Well, many others.” She said, then smiled sheepishly, “Although I have an affinity for Paul Verlaine.”

Oda laughed, “Ah, one of the romantics*. I must admit they do have a dreamy quality to their musings.”

Her eyes lit up at that, “Right? I understand the appeal of realism and all, but nothing compares to this particular form of expression, and Verlaine definitely did it better than anyone else.”

“That might have had something to do with his muse.” Oda reflected, “They do say he was on love with Rimbaud.”

“He shot Rimbaud.” she laughed, “Twice.”

Oda grinned coyly, “We all have our love languages.”

They sat there and talked for hours, about anything and everything, and each time she laughed at something he said, Oda swore he heard windchimes somewhere in the distance. It was almost evening by the time they realized that they couldn’t stay there forever, curled up in a world of their own that started and ended in a cozy little café. When she left, all Oda was left with was a messily scribbled phone number and beautiful name to go with it. He smiled.

It was summer the first time the thought crossed his mind that he might be falling for her. They had been going out for a few weeks now. It was a stiflingly warm night, and the smell of freshly mowed grass mingled with that of the salty sea breeze as they walked back after having dinner together, his hand intertwined with hers. They had stopped at the docks to admire the nighttime sea for a moment, when he finally plucked together the courage to tell her what he did for a living, telling her that it was fine if she wanted leave after this.

She cried. Each tear felt like a rip in Oda’s heart and he desperately wanted to console her, but he wasn’t sure if she would like being touched by him now. Then she got angry.

“You told me you wanted to be a writer.” She said through gritted teeth, “Tell me, then. Have you ever taken a life?”

The question took Oda by surprise. It took him a while, but he answered nonetheless, “…Never.”

“Why?”

“Because…” he began, then frowned, looking down at his feet, “Because then I wouldn’t have the right to be a writer anymore.”

More tears spilled down her cheeks, “Then why do you consider me shallow enough to leave you now? Do you really think that low of me?”

Oda was dumbstruck, unable to articulate even the simplest of thoughts. He had been ready for anything she might have had to say, but not this. Even after he told her everything…she still refuses to leave?

“Say something.” She frowned, lightly putting a hand on his chest, “You cannot hope to be a very good writer if you cannot even find the words to articulate –“

Oda couldn’t stop himself. He kissed her. The kiss was soft and true, tasting of subtle longing and slightly of the saltiness of her tears. And something else he couldn’t put his finger on, something far sweeter and much more delicate. They were both out of breath by the time he let go, and as he looked at the small smile fighting its way to her lips, at her rosy cheeks and shining eyes, Oda was sure he was in love.

It was autumn the first time he told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. It was once again a lazy afternoon, and they were lying on the bed in his small but airy two room flat, limbs tangled with each other’s and a thin cotton sheet the only thing covering their naked bodies. She traced little circles on his chest with her finger.

“Sakura really looks up to you, you know?” he said out of the blue.

She smiled, “Yeah? Well, she’s a good kid. So are the others. You’re doing a great job, Odasaku.”

“You think so?” he murmured, turning on his side to face her, “I just…I don’t want to make any mistakes when it comes to them.”

“And you won’t.” she said, lightly cupping his cheek. His crystal blue eyes looked even more breathtaking when the golden autumn sunlight hit them like that. “You know why? Because you’re a good man. And because I would never leave you to do this on your own.”

Oda’s eyes widened, a strange kind of warmth spreading throughout his chest. “Do you really mean that?”

“Every last bit.”

For a brief moment, he thought he saw every beautiful version of future flash before his eyes. A beautiful sea-side cabin, where the salty breeze accompanies him as he writes everything he has ever wanted to put down on paper. Stories of people and lives and love and beauty. Stories about the kids, about her and about himself being forever locked in her embrace. It was a beautiful version of reality, one he wasn’t sure he deserved but one he wanted nonetheless.

And here she was, telling him she wanted the same thing.

He sighed, dipping slightly forward to rest his forehead on hers, “Sweetheart…whatever will I do without you?”

“That’s irrelevant.” She murmured, place a small kiss just at the edge of his lips, “Because you won’t ever have to find out.”

It was winter the first time he realized just how out of reach that beautiful reality really was. The world had never been fair. Bad things happened to good people everyday and the pursuit of happiness was utterly meaningless. Everything was meaningless. God didn’t exist, and if he did, he wasn’t worthy of being called one. What kind of cruel, sadistic God allowed innocent children to die at the hands of mercenaries?

Oda Sakunosuke had nothing left to live for anymore.

Or so he thought. If he had put aside the sheer rage coursing through his veins and clouding his eyes for one moment, he would have realized that he had one last solace left in the world. One last chance at salvation, waiting for him to crawl back home to her and into her welcoming embrace. She would weep with him, weep for him and soothe him as he screamed his throat raw and let out every last bit of pain and ache the world had shoved into him. And regardless of the amount of blood on his hands, she would gather him up and piece him back together again.

But rage and hopelessness and sheer, white hot fury had blinded Oda, and he could no longer see anything but red. Gide wanted a reckoning and Oda would give it to him, even if it ended up destroying him in the process. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

There were a few thoughts that crossed Oda’s mind as he lied there in Dazai’s arms, his heartbeat slowly failing him.

One of them was that he wanted a cigarette, which is an odd thing to think as you’re dying, but he allowed himself the liberty. The second was that he would never be a writer now. But that hardly mattered at this point. The third was that Dazai was crying. Oda had never seen him cry before, but he figured it was good for him, because underneath that fragile façade of the horrific ‘demonic prodigy’, Oda knew he was just a scared, broken little boy who just wanted to feel something other than empty for once. If his death was what pushed Dazai out of the darkness, then Oda wouldn’t consider it to be completely in vain.

The last thing he thought, as his vision began to grow darker and darker, was that there was a girl still waiting for him at home. They had had a fight before he left, and he had left her crying on the doorway in the biting evening air that chilled everything to the bone. He had left without telling her where he was going. He wished to God he could turn back time, even for a little bit, and say all the right things to her, or at least a proper goodbye. But it was too late for that now.

She would probably get the news from Dazai. He wondered briefly how she would take it. Would she cry? Would she get angry at his foolishness? Would she despise him for leaving her? If she did, he thought, he wouldn’t blame her.

Gide was dead. Oda had had his revenge, his hollow moment of triumph. But he didn’t feel any better. All he felt was this all-pervading sense of cold emptiness, knowing that his momentary victory came at the price of leaving two people behind to pick up their broken pieces. To clean up the mess he created.

He was very cold now, and too drained to open his eyes anymore. As the last of his strength left him, he only wished…something good comes of his death.

*romantics here refers to being part of the early 19th century literary movement, Romanticism, and has no relation to the present day connotations of the word.