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luvismenu · 1 day ago

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Promise You - JJK ,, Christmas Special !!

note: little surprise at the end hehe

series taglist: @daisies-and-dandelionpuffs @jkvamp @vrsltz @jaytheatiny

permanent taglist: @internetrando64 @jkvias @lovieku @deluluisdasolulu @ddanasjk @onlyforyoukook @diamondjeon @nnybtitts08 @lil0u0 @butnotmontana @fr0ggieth1nk @minimoninini @whoa-jo @lola75111 @iswearimover5feetall @rispwr @genevieveeeee

@134340-kr @mar-lo-pap @fluttershypoo @kyuupii @https-mei @elinaki92 @jungkookmyoneandonlybaby @hoseokteardrop @winterbeartaehyungbestboy @jaykay-world @jmscaffeine @libra04 @beigerin @nikidream24 @svnbangtansworld @mimi1097 @kookoo-kachoo @junecat18 @iheartchanelle

it’s christmas.

who doesn’t like christmas?

probably jin, because he seems to have some weird 'beef with santa'.

you watch as jin and jimin argue across the room. jin’s going on about how santa is just for kids, and jimin’s arguing back, saying, “so what? i’m a kid at heart!”

their bickering is loud enough to make everyone laugh a little.

“merry christmas, ___,” a warm voice pulls your focus away from the spectacle. you see namjoon approaching, a soft smile on his face.

you smile immediately. “namjoon! merry christmas.” you give him a quick hug.

“sorry i’m late,” he says, pulling back.

“don’t worry,” you wave it off. “we just got started anyway.”

the room feels warm and lively, filled with laughter and 'jingle bell rock' playing in the background— which was taehyung's choice ofcourse.

he smiles at you, “where is—”

before he can finish, a loud popping sound makes both of you turn your heads.

across the room, you see taehyung holding a christmas popper in his hands, looking half guilty and half amused. colorful bits of paper rain down around him, scattering all over the room like festive confetti.

“oops?” he says with a sheepish grin, earning a round of laughter from everyone including you.

“taehyung, seriously?” hoseok groans, though there’s no real anger in his voice. “you wasted one already? it’s too early for this!”

taehyung just shrugs with a wide grin, completely unapologetic, while hoseok continues scolding him.

namjoon shakes his head, chuckling before heading over to join the group, easily slipping into their conversation and laughter.

you stay where you are, watching the scene unfold. it’s a little chaotic but in the best way possible, the kind of chaos that makes your heart feel full. the room glows with christmas lights strung along the walls, and the fireplace crackles gently, adding warmth to the cozy atmosphere. the tree stands tall in the corner, ornaments sparkling against the soft glow of the string lights wrapped around it. the scent of treats; cookies, peppermint, maybe even hot chocolate lingers in the air, blending perfectly with the laughter and chatter of your friends.

everyone’s dressed in comfy sweaters, all in shades of red and white, giving the room a festive glow. it makes the whole scene feel even more special— like a celebration straight out of a holiday movie.

and well,, it is a special occasion.

it all feels perfect, like a moment you want to live in forever.

your thoughts are interrupted by the feeling of strong arms wrapping around your waist from behind. you don’t even have to look to know who it is. you immediately relax against him as he pulls you closer, his breath warm against your neck.

he nuzzles into the curve of your neck, his voice low and soft as he whispers, “merry christmas, love.”

a small smile tugs at your lips as your hand moves up to his hair, fingers threading through the soft strands. you stroke his hair gently, a quiet moment between the two of you amidst the lively chaos around.

“merry christmas, kook,” you murmur, your voice just as soft.

for a second, it feels like it’s just the two of you in the room, wrapped in your own little bubble of warmth and love.

“geez, can you two not make love in front of us?” taehyung groans, rolling his eyes dramatically. his comment makes you chuckle, and you feel jungkook smile against your skin.

“yeah, ever since you two got married, you’re extra touchy,” jin chimes in, his mouth half-full of a cookie. the others nod in agreement, you can see the teasing grins on their faces.

it’s true, you and jungkook are married now. after a year of dating, he surprised you by popping the question and you’d said yes without hesitation. the memory of that moment still makes your heart flutter.

marrying him was the best decision you’ve ever made. it’s been nine months since your wedding, and every day feels like a dream. life with him has been nothing short of perfect.

well… almost perfect.

there is something you’ve both been waiting for.

something more..

jungkook’s voice breaks through your thoughts. “if it bothers you that much, maybe you shouldn’t be here waiting to eat the cake and food ___ spent all day preparing for you,” he shoots back, his tone playful but with just enough edge to make jin roll his eyes.

lifting his head from your shoulder, he presses a soft kiss to your skin before letting his hands rest gently on your stomach. the small, tender gesture feels like a secret between the two of you, and your heart swells at the thought of what’s to come.

“everything looks amazing, you guys worked hard,” yoongi chimes in, his tone warm and genuine.

“credits to my beautiful wife, my bb,” jungkook says, grinning proudly, making you chuckle.

“and thanks to my handsome husband for handling most of the decorations,” you reply, shooting him a playful smile.

taehyung groans dramatically, throwing his hands in the air. “oh my god, it’s like watching those high school couples. we get it! you both love each other.”

everyone bursts into laughter, and jungkook, ever quick with a comeback, smirks. “damn right we do.”

the room fills with lighthearted teasing and laughter, the kind of warmth that only close friends and family can bring.

. . .

“alright, guys, time for the cake!” jungkook announces, his voice loud enough to grab everyone’s attention. one by one, everyone settles into their seats on the couches, the chatter quieting down. you smile at jungkook, who beams back at you.

“who’s gonna do the honors?” namjoon asks, looking around the room as everyone exchanges glances.

“___ and jungkook?” yoongi suggests, tilting his head towards the two of you. all eyes turn your way.

you share a look with jungkook before smiling. “well, this is for everyone, so... how about we all do it together?”

jungkook nods in agreement, and the idea is met with smiles and enthusiastic nods.

“sounds good,” namjoon says,

you and jungkook hold the knife together, and one by one, everyone places their hands on top of yours. it’s a little crowded and awkward, making everyone laugh as you try to maneuver.

the knife finally slices through the cake, cheers and claps filling the room as pieces are cut and shared. the aroma of the cake mingles with the festive warmth of the room. everyone grabs their plates, helping themselves to a piece.

you and jungkook linger near the table, his hand slipping into yours as you both watch your friends enjoy the treat.

“i think you missed a little something there,” jungkook says suddenly, nodding toward the empty cake platter.

“missed what? we literally cleaned it out,” taehyung asks, confused.

“just take a look, for god’s sake,” jungkook says, pointing to the platter.

everyone leans closer as hoseok reaches for the platter. that’s when they notice something— a small piece of paper poking out from under the edge of the platter.

hoseok picks up the paper carefully, as everyone leans in more.

“what is it?” jimin asks, eyes wide with excitement.

hoseok’s brows furrow at first, but then his face lights up with a grin as he glances between you and jungkook. “uh… you guys should read this.”

“just read it already!” taehyung says, impatient like always.

hoseok clears his throat, holding the note up. “‘merry christmas to the best family we could ever ask for. we wanna share that..” he pauses. “next christmas… there’ll be one more family member here to celebrate with us.’”

a wave of stunned silence falls over the room before jimin gasps loudly, eyes darting between you and jungkook. “wait— are you serious?!”

you bite your lip, unable to hold back your smile, and nod. jungkook grins, his arm making it's wayaround your waist.

“oh my god, you’re pregnant?” jin blurts out.

“yes!” you and jungkook squeal.

the room erupts into cheers and congratulations, everyone rushing over to hug you both.

“we're gonna be uncles,” taehyung wipes a fake tear as he pulls back.

“we’re so happy for you,” yoongi says, his voice soft but sincere, a small smile tugging at his lips.

“seriously, can’t believe the youngest of our group are the ones who got married first and now… kids!” jimin exclaims, shaking his head in disbelief, though his wide grin shows how happy he is.

jungkook chuckles and leans over, pressing a gentle kiss to the side of your forehead. his hand rests securely on your waist, and you look up at him, your smile full of love.

“thank you, guys,” you say as you glance around the room at your friends, all of them beaming with happiness for you both. the room feels even cozier now, the love and excitement in the air making the moment even more special.

“we’ll take good care of our little jeon-to-be,” namjoon says with a wide grin.

everyone immediately chimes in, nodding enthusiastically and saying, “yes, we will!”

you and jungkook exchange a glance, a shared look of love and gratitude passing between you. then you both turn to your friends, a playful but heartfelt seriousness in your voices as you ask, “promise us?”

they all smile, the room filled with genuine affection, and they say together in unison,

“promise you.”

a/n: merry xmas my lovelies <3 did u miss the promise you fam? (i fs did)

#bts fanfic #jungkook x y/n #fanfic #bts fic #fluff #bts fanfiction #jungkook fic

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caltropspress · 10 months ago

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Earl Sweatshirt: A Geography of Grief and Growth

I made myself the poet of the world. The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic….I had soon to change my tune.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments.

—bell hooks, “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” (1994)

Breakin’ ’em down to micro-fragments.

—Saafir, “Battle Drill” (1994)

What is asked of me is not to ascend but to descend.

—Robert Bly (1990)

Earl Sweatshirt’s arc, swerving and dervishy, isn’t difficult to see, as we’ve witnessed it with him—we’re either interlocutors or interlopers, both with questionable motives. So when Earl looks back on school daze, as he does on “OD,” we look back with him (though ours is often an imperial gaze [HOW COULD IT NOT BE?]). We tee-hee and titter as we hear that “somebody tooted in the student commons,” tooted being the most puerile word for gas he could have chosen. An array of scatological options were ignored. It’s a deliberate gesture toward juvenilia. He doesn’t want his expression to be too mature, ha. He wants to welcome you to the romper room, ha. Remaining a kid until the moment he expires, apparently. So he sets the adolescent scene: the student commons. “The bell rang,” and the accused student was spared the prolonged opprobrium. In about four seconds, the student will begin to post. He “went home and argued in the comments,” channeling his embarrassment elsewhere, talking shit (shit) on the internet behind the safety and quasi-anonymity of a screen—an odd facade. He can walk right up to your avi and diss you. That’s his philosophy. The public humiliation replaced with a private self-possession. The discomfort of the crowd exchanged for the solace of solitude.

2. DID AN ANGEL SPEAK?

The sonics of “tooted” and “student” are twee, giggle-inducing. We laugh along with the concatenation of m and n phonemes [somebody | student | commons | rang | went | home | then | in | comments]. The near-homophonous commons and comments scan hysterical. With “OD,” it’s easy to confuse adolescence with adulthood. That “somebody” committed this social transgression seems defensive. Maybe it was him—the subject, Earl, Thebe—seeing as how the rest of the song is delivered in the first-person. Embrace the Age of Immaturity. Channel the Fat Boys: Darren Robinson’s flatulent beatbox. Place it beside the disorderly lyrics that Bobbito spits: “I write my own shit from finish to start, / Diminish the heart, / I eat a knish and then I fart.” Like the Cenobites, Earl kicks a dope verse, and only that. “I keep my sentences short,” he says on “EAST.” Beauty is brevity, brevity beauty. A “brevity pack,” as Earl has referred to the Feet of Clay songs. He strives to be live ’cause he got no choice. He runs his own business like James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, a similar flatus incident unravels. At Clongowes Wood College (Stephen Dedalus’s Coral Reef Academy), a “stout student who stood below…on the steps” by the name of Goggins “farted briefly.” Sonically, the sentence shares much with Earl’s opening line. Dixon asks, in a “soft voice,” “Did an angel speak?” But the others react with bellicosity and name-calling (stinkpot; flamingest dirty devil). Goggins doesn’t retreat home; he simply asks, “It did no one any harm, did it?” You still bet that you can harm me, but you don’t alarm me, Goggins might say another way, reprising Del the Funky Homosapien, echoplexing Masta Ace.

Earl “watched the doppler move,” the wavelength shift—the siren song of the “toot,” something insidious—or maybe it’s just the tremors we’re feeling. Woop, woop: that’s the sound of the beast, KRS would say. The frequency shivers. The shift, the movéd doppler, means Earl is immediately older, he’s the child who “get[s] introduced to violence,” even if he acknowledges the line was inspired by his nephew on a playground in South Africa, experiencing apartheid reincarnate as a whiteboy cuts him in line for the slide. Cranly, bullying Goggins, “shove[s] him violently down the steps.” The doppler moves. It slides into violence—like the violence visited upon the MOVE compound located at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philly in 1985. Gradations of black/white. ELUCID mentions the “gray on [his] face showing age” on his Osage (2016) project. Isn’t it strange—how the youngins can turn cold, hoarfrosty, in an instant? The grayscale cover to ELUCID’s tape is graced by a photograph of Birdie Africa, the sole child survivor of the siege. The bone fragments of the MOVE children have since been used in anthropology courses at UPenn and Princeton—case studies. It’s a good trope. Fascinating stuff.

4. TRYIN’ TO TRANSFORM YOU BOYS TO MEN LIKE DAYCARE

When JuJu of the Beatnuts asked, You want pain?, he wasn’t referencing the dramatical-traumatical pain Earl negotiates—JuJu’s question posed a ruffneck and ruffian pain on “Watch Out Now.” Somewhere closer to Marcy, where Jay-Z’s streets was watching. Earl clocks minutes, anaphoric with what he watches (I watched the doppler… / I watched a child…), much like Dylan’s portentous hard rain in which he saw endless racialized visions: “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”; “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”; “I saw a white ladder all covered with water.” For Earl, the ladder is a slide. The saw is watched. Witnesses all.

In “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting”: “I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” hooks says that she “came to theory young, when [she] was still a child,” citing Terry Eagleton who argues that “[c]hildren make the best theorists.” Children, Eagleton insists, possess “a wondering estrangement.” No wonder, then, that “since a jit” Earl has found no use in “giving up.” He rather make it make sense.

I beat you to the point. Having gained experience, there’s nothing you can tell Earl that he doesn’t already know, that he hasn’t already seen. He’s seen enough, had enough. He doesn’t await the mob’s pursuit; he places the noose on himself, he RE: DEFines it within his own lexicon. His noose, therefore, “is golden.” He’s a young youth, rockin’ the gold [noose], DEATHWORLD goose. He speaks with criminal slang, with a split tongue like ELUCID. Where ELUCID was “true and living, actual—no dull axes, owner of all heads,” Earl is “true and living, lonesome,” with no skulls to keep him company. He has to square up with the “pugilistic moments” on his own.

7. I AM OLDER THAN I ONCE WAS AND YOUNGER THAN I’LL BE

I’m thinking of “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991) by Thom Jones, whose epileptic protag describes a “grainy black-and-white photograph” of the bronze statue called The Pugilist at Rest. The pugilist, with a pocketful of mumbles, has “slanted, drooping brows that bespeak torn nerves” and a forehead “piled with scar tissue.” Torn nerves and scar tissue—sounds like the physical manifestations of grief. And, yes, Earl has grieved, and he continues to grieve—as listeners, we’re accustomed to his grief pedigree, as per Ka. In the past, Earl was “panicking a lot”—he just “want[ed] [his] time and [his] mind intact.” That’s a cold fact.

The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” readies himself for a cingulotomy—a psychosurgical procedure that will “cauterize a small spot in a nerve bundle in [his] brain.” In other words, he wants to keep his mind intact. The neurosurgeon promises the operation will lift “the heaviness of a heart blackened by sin,” which is what convinces the narrator to agree to it. Good grief, he thinks, he’s been reaping what he sowed. He “can’t go on like this,” barely living “with a deadening sense of languor,” a phrase which calls to mind Earl’s lethargic, slugabed flow. Feeling insane in the membrane, like he’s a Soul Assassinated, exploring the depths beneath his whooligan behaviors. 376 was a brothel. “Good and evil are only illusions,” Jones writes. In anticipation of the surgery, the protag considers the worst-case [so what, so what] scenario: “If they fuck up the operation, I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow.”

8. MOURNING & MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLIA

Grief carries its own antidote along with it.

—Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)

“Grief is the door to feeling,” Robert Bly says. But Earl, on “Grief,” told us he “ain’t been outside in a minute”—and that minute, whether we’re speaking with criminal slang like Nas on “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” or not, is an eternity. Earl hadn’t crossed that threshold, hadn’t kicked in that door. MIKE would realize it much later on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” how you “had to walk through the grief,” even if it “was the worst feeling.” In 2015, though, Earl found these passageways distorted. Like the undulating photograph on the cover of his first mixtape. Like the blur-obscured selfie on the cover of Some Rap Songs. Like the static-scrambled cover of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Earl’s dealt in fragmentary confuzzled noise for a full career. He’s been standing on the corner, red burnt, moving down alien lanes paved by GBV, greenthinking to himself. It ain’t hard to tell that Earl “don’t act hard” and yet is a “hard act to follow.” The density or opacity of his exterior notwithstanding, grief don’t come easy. “As men,” Bly says, “we’re taught not to feel pain and grief as children.” So Earl spits somnolent, numb-tongued and slack-jawed. Like he said on “Cold Summers”: muffle my pain and muzzle my brain up.

“I’ve been alone in my shit for the longest,” he spit on “Grief,” and in work as recent as “Vin Skully,” he’s still figuring out “how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit.” Bly says that “we receive something from our father by standing close to him—something moves over that can’t be described in material terms.” Bly speaks of being in a “conspiracy with his mother” from early on. Earl finds himself “thinking ’bout [his] grandmama” while he wallows and lies in a bottle. “Grief” catalogs all the things his mama taught him. Earl’s work, of late, is autodestructive. He peels away and pastes back haphazardly. He vibes with this Bly shit: “If you can deny something so fundamental as grief in the whole family, you can deny anything. And then how can you write poetry if you’re involved in that much denial?”

Bly goes on to quote Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who gave us The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979): “When you were young, you needed something you did not receive, and you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame—mourning. Mourning makes its way through moaning and mumbling—Earl’s current intonation. On “Grief,” he “cut the grass off the surface [and] pray[s] the lawnmower blade catch the back of a serpent.” Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower” (1979) leans more literal: “The mower stalled, twice; I found / A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed. It had been in the long grass.” Larkin’s speaker genuflects before the innocent critter, recalling how he “fed it, once.” Now, he mourns how he has “mauled its unobtrusive world, / Unmendably. Burial was no help.” Earl, of course, is less forgiving of the serpents in the grass. They’re threats, not friends. Still, a void opens up when the mower—(and let’s not forget the lawnmower is a modernized scythe)—does its mowing. Grief is the door to feeling, and on the other side:

Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

9. NOBODY KNOW WHO MADE THIS WELL, FOR IT WAS HERE WHEN I WAS BORN

“Come get to know me at my innermost…”

Riveting, Earl raps. Earl raps are riveting. We fix to the flow—riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s. We’re invited to know Earl, to become familiar, and his “innermost” is a constant vacillation between optimism and [afro]pessimism. The sudden switches—these switches on bitches like fixed with hydraulics—establish what Danny Schwartz, writing for Rolling Stone, called an “uneven terrain.”

Earl’s “family business [is] anguished,” and that’s recognizable. We’ve known Earl (on “Chum”) with the “pendulum swinging slow” and low. He holed up, hostage-like, in his “heart’s bottomless pit.” Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) brand of captivity. “I was sick,” that narrator says, “—sick unto death with that long agony.” Something tells me there should be an exclamation point there (SICK!). Earl Sweatshirt was down, down, down. “I was in the fucking pits for like 10 months post my pops dying,” he said in an interview. The Spanish Inquisition ain’t shit.

But for these countless downs, “OD” tracks the ups like naloxone in the nasal membrane. “Now I need atonement,” Earl notes—he makes a case for reparations. He “sets the goal[s]” like some motivational speaker. If “half [his] wings is broken,” he can “spread the other for [his] brodie OD.” Somewhat circumspect as he’s “tiptoeing,” yet the approach is laden with “too much love.” Even when his “sister showed in a rut,” he’s joining arms with her and “getting over, sending up.” That rut she walks—like Eudora Welty’s worn path (1941)—is a path through the pinewoods, and she’s suddenly Phoenix Jackson. “She was very old and small,” Welty writes, and she moves “with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.” Even with her pentium processing and pendulum low, she swings back up—the rise of her namesake. She screams phoenix, her feathers and flames are one skin. “Living in the moment,” Earl raps, and his craft is bars. “You been corrupt”—and, sure, who hasn’t?—but you recover with “some ginabot.” Welty’s Old Phoenix surveys a spring “silently flowing through a hollow log.” She bends and drinks and says, “Sweet gum makes the water sweet.” It’s the equivalent to Earl putting “shilajit in his sippy cup,” which is “healing cuts revealingly.” And, yes, from a “sippy cup,” so we’re back to toddling around again (“Since a jit,” he says). “I can’t give enough,” Earl raps, his last winding-sheet made of nard and myrrh.

10.

We crouch and teeter, caterwauling along the ledges, for we’ve got these clumsy feet of clay. This is the intended effect[/defect]; this is the rubble of what Earl calls the “crumbling empire.” This is us feeling the violent vibes of the “death throes” he speaks of. Why would we expect anything to resemble traditional song or rhyme structure when the earth quakes, civilization trembles, and Earl’s dungeon shakes? His chains have fallen off. The tenor is tremors. He’s living the trife life—hell on earth—but still living. Earl’s done trying to not look down—he embraces an outer appearance which scans dour; he deliberately gazes into the pit, inviting the vertigo, for it “haunts the whole of existence,” as Fanon says. But Frank B. Wilderson III promises a “vengeance of vertigo.”

11.

Gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip, and Earl’s lips. He’s “refilling the pump”—his heart, yeah—but with a sawed-off shotgun, hand-on-the-pump posture. There’s “no concealing it,” not even with a concealed carry permit. He brandishes right back at “the enemy up in arms bearing snubs.” The mood swings; been down so long it looks like up to him. The turns require tourniquets. This is some Battle of Dak To torture—somewhere between Retaliation and the Heavenly Divine. Emotional turmoil seems violent by design, and Earl’s “memory [is] really leaking blood.” Fear not, the blood is “congealing, stuck.” Like Havoc says, “The Mobb rollin’ thicker.” Prodigy cites it, too: “This ain’t rap—it’s bloodsport.” But Earl has known that all along—he’s been “mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did” since 2013.

12.

HipHopDX’s Kevin Cortez referred to listeners having to “sift through the muddle” in order to appreciate the bars, but where muddle suggests a disorderly conduct, a kaos network, Earl’s style, more appropriately, models. The woozy, wavy, and inner-conflict-war-torn vocals model an abstraction that anticipates the listener’s loyalty. This is what I’ve got, brief and cryptic as the gesture may be, the model says. Writing for NME, Dhruva Balram described Earl’s lyrics as “slurred,” but slurry is the form.

13.

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side…

—Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2005)

So if we’re giving ourselves over to the woozes and waves, we’ll just as well find ourselves lost. Let’s go—like those tourist books run by students—and let’s wander eastward. Follow our napkin-scrawled directions and disorientations to a somewhere elsewhere. Let’s go east for a second, for a spell, on a lark, in the dark (word to AKAI SOLO). Earl’s bloodwork contains “pieces of slums”—or more aptly, [sLUms]. He’s hand-to-hand with that Jungle Boy MIKE, but also the god Mike Davis. “[T]he cities of the future,” Davis wrote, would be “constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” Just the same as an Earl Sweatshirt verse is built—under the tutelage and overstanding-sharing, symbiotically, with MIKE. Davis says our cities aren’t “cities of light soaring toward heaven,” but a world that “squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” Smells like somebody tooted in the student commons. Smells like a slum village, something we’ve smelled before—possibly coming straight from the slums of Shaolin.

14. ACID EASTERNS

Earl trekked to the East and squinted into “one beacon in the dust weaving”—like Clint Eastwood arriving out of the hazy horizon ether of High Plains Drifter (1973). But Earl is heading to the East, blackwards. And though Brother J claimed you can’t define what’s direct from the East, Jeru told us on The Sun Rises in the East that you can’t stop the prophet either. So on “EAST,” Earl traverses a tricky terrain—it’s tricky, tricky, tricky because it’s an acid western landscape: an acid eastern.

The path isn’t direct or linear—it zigs and zags like rolling papers, and stimulates the same. “Double back when you got it made,” Earl says at the start of his journey “EAST.” The objective is to talk sense condensed into the form of a poem like Special Ed once did on “I Got It Made.” Instead, Earl’s poems—his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems—skew [non]sense, go form[less], and vaporize rather than condense. Lyn Hejinian in cinnamon Timbs: “constant change figures / the time we sense.” The narrative is hallucinogenic (note: “how the story careen against the bars”). Earl’s bindle contains “thirty racks and weed [with] no fat in the collard greens.” That’s how he gets funky on the mic like an old batch. That’s how he gets sincerity on the mic: “Off top it’s me—no cap, / I don’t bottle things.” That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, maybe. But Earl’s “canteen was full of the poison [he] need[s].” He gets where he’s going like El Topo, bereft. The “trip was long and steep”—that being an acid trip—so let me see you try to ride a horse into the chasms of the canyon.

“EAST” is a death meditation, a grand duel between Dantean and Donneian lyric voices [he damn-near well should’ve double-tracked the vocals]. In a 2015 interview with SPIN, Earl is asked about the worst thing he did that year, to which he replies: “Umm…acid?” He elaborates: “I took it at a time when I really didn’t need to be taking acid. I had like a fucking existential crisis at, like, four in the morning. But it was tight. We reeled it back.” Jodorowsky called El Topo (1970) an “eastern” in that it “incorporat[ed] ancient eastern wisdom in the materiality of American cowboys.” For Earl, it’s more a rhinestone cowboy—he holds the cold one like he holds an old gun (as evidenced in the “EAST” music video). DOOM was no stranger to grief, of course, and the rumors persist regarding the bad acid that precipitated Subroc’s early demise (“Bad Acid” also being the original title for “December 24”).

Estranged Earl, alienated—a high plains drifter (not Clint Eastwood, though) who rechristens a town “Hell” through a baptism of blood. Like the Beastie Boys’ version, Earl pulls out a pair of pliers and pulls a bullet out of his chest. He pulls through, true and living. “I’m long distance from my girl,” Mike D raps, so he’s “talking on the cellular,” but Earl is more alienated than that—beyond racking up roaming charges, immersed in dead zones. He “lost [his] phone and consequently all the feelings [he] caught for [his] GF.” Relationships can’t be sustained in these bleak and barren locations. All the blood has been drained from the ruddy faces—sanguine scenery. In his essay “On the Acid Western,” Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses how the subgenre “refuses to respect or valorize bloodshed.” Memory really leaking blood. Congealing. Stuck. To paraphrase Rosenbaum, Earl’s acid eastern “formulat[es] a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify [his] hallucinated agenda—a view at once clear-eyed and visionary, exalted and laconic, moral and unsentimental, witty and beautiful, frightening and placid.” Earl’s “innocence was lost in the East,” and obsessives speculate whether this refers to Samoa or New York City—how far east we going? Countless spirit-questers pit-stopping at ashrams, searching for that Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal guide.

“I wait a beat,” Earl says. His canteen stays filled, auto-replenishes. His “cognitive dissonance shattered” and the “necessary venom restored.” Jodorowsky reportedly once taped snakes to his chest for an experimental theater performance. As if it matters if you think it matters anymore. Or, as ELUCID says, “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Acids and bases. Occident and Orient. Western and Eastern. Up is down.

15. NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS

Earl’s “EAST” accordion beat—or whatever Orkes Gambus Al Fata instrumentation is at work—is more madcap than madvillainous. In my head is Erick Sermon, though, speaking about how “the flow slow…like a jazz player, or someone on the accordion” on “Knick Knack Patty Wack.” But I’m less concerned with the flow of air through bellows—compressing and expanding—than I am with Earl’s rendering of wind. (Somebody tooted.)

“Let the dead be dead,” Carl Sandburg says at stanza’s end in “Four Preludes on the Playthings of the Wind” (1920). Later, he reports, “The only singers now are crows crying.” And so Earl, a lonesome crow, reminds us—and himself—that “the wind get the ashes in the end” on “December 24.” The whining, wheezing consonance of /-nd/ in “wind” and “end” manages to evoke both the wind itself and the circularity of life. The bar whooshes and whips until we’re at our end, the terminus. That circularity, that full circle: ashes to ashes. “We are the greatest city,” Sandburg repeats, “the greatest nation: / nothing like us ever was.”

Global winds be blowin’—[Of the Soul]—and so billy woods cites that same line on “Haarlem”: “Thebe said the wind get the ashes in the end, bruv.” Check the configuration of the rhime:

The wind | gets | the ashes | in | the end {birth} {life} {death}

Even that get does work—whether it’s the violence of Death Grips’ “get got”; Too $hort threatening you to “get in where you fit in”; or the satirical sadism of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. The wind wins out—it gets what it wants. On “EAST,” the wind—infinitely personified—“whispered to [Earl], ‘Ain’t it hard?’” It ain’t hard to tell that it is. How about some hardcore? Yeah, we like it raw like M.O.P. But those burns yield ashes. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1989), she struggles with the words she uses, knowing “[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet [she] needs to talk to you.” I know it hurts to burn, she writes, but writing is no less ardent. “The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning.”

Let me bring it back to Robert Bly. “In the ancient times,” Bly says, “the movement for the men was downward—a descent into grief. It’s referred to in the fairytale as ‘the time of ashes.’” Ashes, he explains, is the “code word for the ‘out of it’ time.”

We know what it is like to take ashes in our hands. How light they are! The fingertips experience them as a kind of powder… Ashes, we note, find their way into the whorls of our fingertips, cling there, make the whorls more noticeable, more visible, more clear to us. We can take our own fingerprints with ashes.

Ashes, then, aren’t simply for the wind’s taking—ashes are for us, are necessary for us to transcend the grief the boys, the men, and the man-child experience. Bly points to the various cultures that have used ashes in initiation rites: “Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.” Ready to give up, so you seek the Old Earth. The elders cover your face—even your whole body—with ashes “to make [you] the color of dead people and to remind [you] of the inner death about to come.” Consider Earl’s ashen white face produced in the negative imagery of the “Grief” music video.” “The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death,” Bly says. “Ashes when put on the face whiten as death does.”

Earl Sweatshirt is a far cry from knocking blunt ashes into caskets.

16.

Feet of clay, hands of light…

—Moor Mother and billy woods, “Furies” (2020)

For Cheryl I. Harris, Earl’s mother, the feet of clay refer to a vulnerability we all possess no matter how formidable we may appear to become. Earl invokes the King of Babylon’s dream, a dream of an idol “meant to represent all the empires of the world,” echoing Sandburg’s imperious “greatest nation.” Earl believes “we at the feet of clay right now…We posted up live from burning Rome.” Imagine the ash pile. So Earl is here, ostensibly, to turn the disco into something dismal—how Mtume becomes “MTOMB” with its entombed sonics, as if he’s rapping from within a wall, the victim of some Poe immurement.

17.

“I remember woods,” Earl raps on “OD.” “I remember Endom when he wasn’t remembering much, / I remember love healing the ruptures.” I remember is also the refrain and title of Joe Brainard’s poem-memoir, a term which aptly describes much of Earl’s recent output. Brainard’s memories bum-rush into the present:

I remember a dream I used to have a lot of a beautiful red and yellow and black snake in bright green grass. I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall. I remember liver.

If Earl recalls love “healing the ruptures,” then he also likely recalls Fanon: It is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone. But Fanon also speaks of young Black men “maintain[ing] their alterity. Alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle.” Earl, “feeling rushed, grew up quick.” He echoes Biggie, who “grew up a fucking screw-up,” and Raekwon, who “grew up on the crime side” (though Earl’s mama taught him, as we know from “Grief,” how to avoid the pigs, persecution, and prosecution). Eyes on the clock, Earl acknowledges this “trip around the sun” is his “25th,” so “give it up”—his survival alone deserving of a standing [on the corner] ovation. He celebrates life with “gin and rum.” Again, notably not gin and juice—murder was never the case. The only death is the inner death, the death of the ego-bound boy, that Bly describes. Earl’s gin is the drink of be[gin]ning, of genesis (“Light them Phillies up then…”), of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, when I was dead-broke, man… “We wasn’t supposed to be alive,” Earl says, yet here he stands.

18. RUMINANT

Stare at the Feet of Clay album cover—an evocation of folkloric imagery: a Grimm forest with gnarled tree branches—and the enchanted, diabolic goat lying in wait. Earl’s parasocial following speculate G.O.A.T., of course, but I’m more inclined to mythopoeic possibilities. The Feet of Clay goat glares like Baphomet but frolics like a faun over fractured beats. “OD,” Earl has stated, “brought [him] up out of [his] little wreck”—a wreck of wracked nerves. Adrienne Rich encourages “diving into the wreck” (1973).

I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power.

Earl’s right there with her, submerged and blacking out, but still surviving: Really leaking blood, but refilling the pump.

In her essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks invokes Rich’s struggle to navigate the “oppressor’s language.” For hooks, as a Black writer, managing that is even more difficult and historical. “I think now of the grief of displaced ‘homeless’ Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed ‘the oppressor’s language.’” hooks explains how Black folks have “remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination.”

Earl Sweatshirt, especially in his later work, has “altered [and] transformed” English, just as “enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language.” The emotional wreckage is also a linguistic heap of fragments—micro-fragments, if we’ve learned anything from Saafir. Earl, in the tradition of his ancestors, “put[s] together [his] words in such a way that the colonizer ha[s] to rethink the meaning of the English language.” “The grammatical construction of sentences in these songs” by Earl, just as by the spirituals of hundreds of years prior, “reflect[s] the broken, ruptured world of the slave.” That crumbling empire Earl mentions was faulted by feet of clay.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2019, sharing a dais with his mother, Cherly I. Harris, Earl spoke to this lineage directly: “Rap music is slave music—the modern-day iteration of it. Slave communication had to be encrypted. You got a code.” He shifted: “If I know what I’m saying…I can teach it to you.” On Feet of Clay, Earl is teaching to transgress. “I’m cracking my own code,” he says to an audience member during the Q&A, “how it comes out garbled…,” and then he trails off, as if making a deliberate effort to keep his answer cryptic.

hooks always saw language as “a site of resistance.” This included the incorrect usage and placement of words—she called such practices a “rebellion.” Weaponizing syntax. hooks recognized rap music as a continuation of this fight—the latest [sound]clash, hip-hop artists as rebels without a pause—while still acknowledging the collateral damage it might cause.

Rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined.

Or, as Earl once said on “Chum,” “Too Black for the white kids and too white for the Blacks,” an axiom he’s come to loathe. Perhaps Fanon had the better bar on this subject: “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me. He went through my pockets. He thrust probes into the least circumvolution of my brain. Everywhere he found only the obvious. So it was obvious that I had a secret.”

Despite the pitfalls (and, yeah, the pit is bottomless), Earl’s words play [wordplay] a part in retraining minds, all while exorcizing his own demons through a steady diet of ashes and fractures. hooks promises us that “in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately.” Through his embrace of a language that indulges in passion and cerebral coding, Earl “heal[s] the splitting of mind and body” so common within Western metaphysical thought. Earl Sweatshirt speaks “words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality”; he builds blips into a reality that is worth the rewind.

Images: Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot) | Teen at 1990s computer photograph, Unknown (c. 1996) | James Joyce, Age 2, Unknown | ELUCID, Osage album cover (2016), photo by Michael Mally, Philadelphia Inquirer | The Boxer at Rest, bronze statue, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy (330-50 BC) | Alphonse Legros, The Pit and the Pendulum, second Plate (1861) | High Plains Drifter, dir. Clint Eastwood, 1973 (screenshot) | Subroc on an Apple IIc, Unknown (c. 1987) | Earl Sweatshirt, “Grief” music video, 2015 (screenshot) | Arthur Rackham, The Water of Life, Grimms Fairy Tales (1916) | Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1995 (screenshot)

#earl sweatshirt #underground hip hop #rap #backwoodz studioz #elucid #billy woods #moor mother

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m3-kk · 9 months ago

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Sharing my TCF notes because sharing is caring 😬 ⬇️. (All of them… so far)

Ch. 086- sad time for Raon :(. REVENGE HAHAHA LETSGOOOO

Ch. 335- Eruhaben protect Roan & Cale from ugly WS 😆

Ch. 352- Cale’s greatest fear…😭

Ch. 378- Choi’s uncle (DS) left info book written in KOREAN?!?! 😵

Ch. 394- Letter from Death & shiz show😬

Ch. 395- CALE IS AFRAID?!?! 😱

Ch. 401- “Plavin was laughing on the outside but crying on the inside.”😌

Ch. 404- “And Miss Cage, please cuss out the God of Death for me.” -Cale 😇

Ch. 411- They were talking about the Lion King (person) and I thought they were talking about the movie 😭

Ch. 414- Choi Han woke up crying “Kim Rook Soo” 😰

Ch. 415- “What am I supposed to call the friend of my nephew once removed?” -Choi Han 😳

Ch. 423- “Oh, by the way, the original owner of your body is living well too. He said he is happy.” -Lee Soo Hyuk ☺️

Ch. 423- CALE CRIES! BABY NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! 😰

“It's a new record! You were unconscious for 20 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes, and 19 seconds!”- Roan Miru🤠

Ch. 431-

“You son of a bitch!” -Bear King

"Why am I your son? Such an idiot.”

-Whale Archie🫡

Ch. 434- Which Henituse sibling wants to become what?🥱👑⚔️

Ch. 435- Sworn brothers 🤞

Ch. 455- Ron says he has a cute young master (Cale) who he doesn’t want to disappoint.🥹

Also that Roan is cuter than Cale 😂

Ch. 457- “This is nice.” Beacrox commented before swinging his greatsword horizontally.🙂

Ch. 461- Cale’s merchant name is Bob XD

Ch. 465- The Sound of the Wind was a top underneath a boulder surrounded by whirlpools.

The Indestructible Shield was a pit under the tree.

The Scary Giant Cobblestone was a stone in the Super Rock villa.

The Fire of Destruction was a sculpture at the center of the magma.

The Vitality of the Heart was a stone pillar at the center of a whirlwind.

The Sky Eating Water was a chained spear.

Ch. 476- More Dragon Family Drama wtf

Ch. 481- To the Fake World Tree

Ch. 501- Illusion of Other World..RAMEN!

Ch. 504- Stick from World Tree (Cale’s blood is special?!)

Ch. 515- Vampire Duke Fredo (seems nice)

Ch. 516- Demonic Race, Rosalyn, White Star after cookie prince?! NOOO

Ch. 520- WEAKLING. Alberu is a mage swordsman badass dark elf

Ch. 526- These brothers are so cute OMEGALUL

Ch.555- Sealed god test, wtf this is so sad I’m crying I’ve never been so genuinely sad

Ch. 559- CHOI HAN OUR LOVE THANKS🙏

Ch. 581- AWW BESTIEEE

Ch. 584- Cale saying he could beat 3 strong peeps

Ch. 589- Alberu goes to Blood Boulder

Ch. 601- AHH CALE BDAY AHHH

Ch. 612- THEY GAVE ALBERU A GUN!!

Ch. 618- Cale explains to LeeSooHyuk the truth

Ch. 622- HOMEEEEEEEE AYYAYAAY

Ch. 627- @Capital w/ Dad y Alberu YAY

Ch. 628- BUBBLEGUM PINK DRAGON

Ch. 629- We are a big family!

Ch. 631- 5 FUCKIN DRAGONS AHHH-

[THE AUTHOR STARTS SAYING SHIT LIKE “IN THE FUTURE.. “ LIKE F U MAKIN ME ALL SAPPY N STUFF WTH UGHHH!!!]

Ch. 640- 2 Cats are Molan house’s future 🥹.. They can’t go berserk?..

Ch. 645- Roan & Cale Solo Fight letsgo!!

Ch. 646- Cale uses ‘instant’ to destroy 2 unranked monsters.. I’m crying actually..

Ch. 647- wtf I’m crying, goosebumps fr

Ch. 649- Roan has grown so much 🥹

Ch. 652- COM. WITH EARTH 2 AHHHH—

Ch. 655- Cale is healing❤️ OG Cale!KRS

Ch. 656- SOO much info from OG Cale!!

Ch. 658- CALE IS AWAKEEE YAYA

Ch. 662- OMG Cale’s BioMom was cooking

Ch. 663- WE KNOW HOW TO KILL HIM HA

Ch. 670- World Tree-nim

Ch. 677- Explaining ALOT lore dump!!

CB. 681- WOW the end of that chap tho

Ch. 682- I stan Cale’s hatred for the White Star. We love the PJs! Alberu is moon that’s so *legs in air kicking*

Ch. 683- So are we gonna kill WS or whatt?

Ch. 684- HAHAH OMG CALE’S BDR POWER IS SO SCARY EVERYONE THINKS ITS THE WS!! HAHAH ITS CALE’S THOOO

Ch. 685- omg.. DANGGG!! Our Cale is truly terrifying! New Pokémon acquired! White star!! 😏 wait we have a tiny WS in our pocket how cute! 🥰

Ch. 686- HAHA BOOM BOOM 💥

Ch. 688- Rashell says he wouldn’t be able to sleep if many humans died 🥰

Ch. 689- ROCK SHEILD LETSGOOO

Ch. 694- DEAFEATED! Alberu faints and thinks he’s like Cale now 😭

Ch. 695- NAHH WE LOVEEE

Ch. 699- ENTERED THE TEMPLE! We can’t leave…? CALE IS GHOST AND WATCHING OTHERS TESTS HUHHH?!! (DespairTest2)

Ch. 700- This chapter is just amazing, these people are so smart ughhh I’m screaming! In a happy way tho

Ch. 701- OK we have Choi Han, Clopeh, Rosalyn and Cale so far.. MARYYY

Ch. 702- +1(Roan) Cale can use the cintamani to contact other world. PEOPLE CAN SEE HIM YAY!

Ch. 705- Talking with Cale & others through the Cintamani :>

Ch. 706- Tonka! And Dark elf Tasha&Alberu

Ch. 707- My heart, Alberu was so sad and lonely back then…

Ch. 709- Eruhaben! WS is badddd

Ch. 710- Whyyyy I’m actually feeling despair it’s so complicated ugh and no ones receiving correct info ughhhhh

Ch. 713- Mary is #GIRLBOSS for not being tricked! ❤️❤️

Ch. 717- So glad that was settled 😮‍💨

Ch. 718- So the test Cale was in wasn’t the original one so now we are doing the actual sadness test ok 👍

Ch. 719- WOW NOT CALE ALREADY FINISHING BLUE TEST.. also someone else?

Ch. 721- Toonka left the test, Cale met Choi Jung Gun, I’m I’m scared 😶

Ch. 722- Rosalyn finally put the tests goals into words! She’s so smart. I love herrr

Ch. 726- Cale confronts CJG and he’s being used as bait bc a hunter is here oh no. Cale is going to cause chaos ialrk

Ch. 727- WOWW Cale was about to be isekaied lol. Good thing we have ancient powers! 2 Hunters?! 🫣

Ch. 730- Cale actually skipped a level bfr

Ch. 731- Cale has to observe past Roan (during the night) and Alberu (during the day)

Ch. 732- FLIPPING OVER THE FIRST PRINCES PALACE HAHAHAHAGA

Ch. 735- Freeing Roan! Again Again?

Ch. 739- Still loving how Choi’s test is taking care of tiny KRS. Alberu test completed!!

Ch. 740- I’m loving Clopeh during this test so far. He knows his goals and he sticks to them. He’s crazy!

Ch. 744- Damn Dodam Miru. I think DM’s world is not an illusion. Cale “tricking” the Wrath test is crazy I love that sly bastard!

Ch. 745- Cale hates when the children hate their side dishes ahah! The Wrath test is actually really difficult it surprised me frfr! Clopeh & Cale are angy

Ch. 749- How dare this low-life Dorph ever consider sacrificing the great and mighty Roan Miru. I pour all of my hatred and anger toward him. He needs to die. 😡

Ch. 750- Finally! Flipping every over heh!

#cale henituse #tcf cale #tcf novel #lcf #lout of the count’s family #trash of the count's family #notes #sharing is caring #Me_Kk

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sadlynotthevoid · 1 year ago

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LCF AU where after both Cales have lived their (hopefully long) lives, both worlds restart— and fusion in one.

They wake up as kids again, their lives so similar to their first ones, but their world is an amalgam of earth-1 and ogCale's homeworld.

There are elves and dragons and magic plants, but people use cellphones, internet is a thing, and carriages don't need horses.

It's disconcerting and surreal.

However, Cale Henituse—not Kim Rok Soo. Not yet, and maybe never again. And he had just got attached to that name. Sigh. Now he's back at this body, this face and identity. He's too old for this.— is more concerned about the whole "back in time" thing.

Not because of the chance to correct mistakes nor the possibility of change events (his mom was already dead when he remembered. He doesn't know how to feel about it). No.

What worried him at the moment was:

How can he manage to search for Rok Soo, deal with any bastard that hirt him and take him to safety (his house, preferably)— with this tiny body with little to zero training nor powers?

He doesn't have an army of overpowered friends ready to jump at his signal, unlike others.

Well, he'll have to do it like in the old times: wait until Ron is distracted and sneak out of the house.

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

Bonus:

Cale, Bassen and Rok Soo: *eating breakfast happily in peace*

Deruth:

Violan: *looks at the kids* *sends a Look at Deruth*

Deruth: ...Cale?

Cale: yes, father?

Deruth: won't you introduce your... friend?

Cale: He's not my friend. He's Rok Soo, me and Bassen's new brother.

Bassen: *silently nods*

Deruth: *chokes* Cale, you can't suddenly bring a random person here and declare him family without consulting anyone. That's— That's not how it works.

Cale: Yes, it is. That's how you did it.

Cale: And he's not a random person, he's Rok Soo.

Cale: Besides, I consulted it with him and Bassen.

Deruth: *still processing the first sentence, dying inside out of the emotional damage* I— I see.

Violan: Well, welcome to the family, Rok Soo.

At the background, Hans almost fainted trying not to laugh during the whole talk.

------

So, yeah, AU where both worlds fuse in one and og!Cale takes KRS into his house and pretends that's absolutely normal so no one can protest.

Btw, little KRS was living with his shitty uncle. He already had an overly complex plan to leave but it needed more time and implied more pain by his part than what he preferred. Then one night he woke up with 10-year-old Cale Henituse entering though his— now unlocked— window.

If you're wondering how did Cale do to break into Rok Soo's uncle's house, let's say that they both weren't the only ones who remember. Eruhaben does, too.

#lcf au #original cale henituse #kim rok soo #what do you mean that's not how adoption works?

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noxiousgrace · 11 days ago

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Cale henituse taking an edible and forgetting he no longer lives in the 21st century

In the year of our lord 783 of the felix calendar (wait is felix the jesus of the raon kingdom??? Why'd the year count start w that guy)

This is krs!cale by the way

-------

Cale, lowkey woozy: bro...

Ron: yes, young master-nim?

Cale: did you put weed in my brownies?

Ron: no? Why would i put invasive plants in your snacks? *Confused benign chuckle*

Cale: why.. *smacks lips* why is the world so topsy turny ron? Hm?

Ron: ah, it must be the sleeping herbs.

Cale: no, you just gave me an edible.

Ron: ...is it not supposed to be edible?

Cale: *snort* that's something a boomer would say

Ron: a what?

Cale: *waves hand* whatever, you wouldn't understand internet culture anyway.

Ron: *is honestly just confused*

Cale: *already forgot about the subject at hand* i remember this one time i was in highschool *snort*

Ron:....?

Cale: i was with a bunch of kids, theatre kids, and we all did *snort* edibles and thought it would be fun to play truth or dare

Ron: young mas-

Cale: *talking over him* and well, I didn't think it was a good idea cuz we were probably gonna do something stupid and like *wheeze* we made this one guy dress up as eric cartman *absolutely losing it, smacking his knee and laughing*

Ron: *honestly thinks cale is hallucinating at this point and is debating on calling a priest*

Cale: and we fuckin made him sing an entire lady gaga album, can you immaaagiineeee?? *Wheeeeze*

Cale: and oml what he did after was insane! So we didn't get off very well so he thought it would be sooo funny to like... *He looked up at the ceiling, completely losing the plot again* hehsh did i ever tell you this ceiling lowkey looks European

Cale: *starts mumble singing* gay or europeeaann,, it's hard to guaranteeee,,, is he gay or europeeeann???

Ron: *has already left the room in order to get someone to help cale*

---

*cale has migrated into the library*

Priest: young master-nim pleas-

Cale: whyyyy did you get an entire squad of exorcists in here ron????

Ron: young master, you're not yourself *he actually looks concerned*

Cale: *wheeze* what are you? Y/n???? My coworker wasn't crazy after all,,,

Ron: ...??

Cale: No because drinking games are crazy

Cale: anyway i miss mmorpgs man *sigh* i miss my wife tails

Ron: wife???

Cale: *ignoring him* pink fluffy uniiicorns dancing on rainbooows *knows this song from the one time he had to babysit the neighbors kid*

---

The day after

Ron: young master-nim

Cale: *jumps out of his skin because of rons sudden appearance* what????

Ron: what is a boomer? You were saying a lot of funny things yesterday.

Cale: *sweating bullets* I've been having weird dreams lately???

Ron: uhuh *it's obvious he doesn't believe cale but just leaves it alone for now*

#ooc #probably completely out of character #I'm writing this at 5 am not sorry #too lazy to think about a real plot #i just want to see cale take an edible #can you tell I've never had an edible #whoever has taken an edible pls add onto this or correct me #i need krs letting it loose and spilling tea #he's the kinda guy everyone rants to cuz they know he wouldn't tell anyone cuz he doesn't care #live laugh krs #i love krs #krs!cale henituse ily #if this was an au fic og!cale would probably be the one to give him an edible and take one too #giggling #idk man #tcff!!!#i think he had weird coworkers at his part time job #there's no way the quiet guy archetype wouldn't attract an ao3 freak #he's probably had to listen to so much weird gen z stuff cuz of the crazy ppl he attracts #and yes i believe in babysitter krs #i love the idea of babysitter krs

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taruusmoon · 1 year ago

Text

I MISS YOU, AND I’M SORRY, BADA LEE

a/n: Dal means moon in kr, and dalbit means moonlight. Used of Minka Kelly as adult Jessica, and Natalia Azahara as young Jessica. English is not my first language in sorry if there is something bad.

Masterlist

Chapter1: The Beginning.

There were two things Jessica could never change about herself, no matter how old she was. And those were that she didn't know how to say no and that she was always going to want to see Bada Lee one last time. And those were the main reasons why she was currently inside a recording room at Nemare Record, with a woman touching up her hair and a guy placing a small microphone in her white blouse, about to tell her worst love story for the documentary of the woman who had broken her heart so many times many years ago.

“Do you feel comfortable?” asked the girl in charge of the interview, who was sitting across from her with a soft smile and a spark of excitement in her eyes. “We'll do this as quietly as possible and I'll go at your pace, okay?”

Jessica nodded without saying anything. The truth was that she felt quite comfortable; she didn't think it would be difficult to tell her side of the story, and also, for some strange reason, the girl gave her a sense of security and confidence, even if she didn't even know who she was, her name, or the relationship she had with the Lee sisters.

“May I know what your name is?” Finally, after thinking about it for a long time, Jessica asked. “I thought the person who was going to interview me was Juliana”

“I've been waiting for that question since you passed that door." the girl with the big round eyes answered with a smile. “But I think I'll tell you later. Juliana was going to be the interviewer, but there were some sudden changes. I hope you don't mind.”

“Oh no, don't worry about me; it's fine” she replied. “It's just that you remind me of someone.”

The girl smiled but didn't answer; instead, she looked at the door of the office.

“You're ready” murmured the girl who was fixing Jessica's hair. “You have very nice hair.”

In a soft way, Jessica murmured a thank-you, accompanied by a smile, and the girl said goodbye with the man who had been in charge of placing the small microphone in her blouse. Soon, Lindsey, the main producer of the documentary and the one who had insisted so much on her participation, approached the interviewer, talked about some other changes in the interview, and handed her a notebook full of notes.

“Hey Jess” the door to the recording studio opened, and in walked Brody Rosales with a big smile on his lips and open arms, ready to wrap Jessica in a tight hug. “It's been so many years; how do you feel about the lights? Don't they make you uncomfortable?”

“The truth is, I don't know how I should feel," she replied with a wrinkled nose. “It’s been a long time since I've been in front of a camera with so many lights.

Brody let out a laugh along with Lindsey, causing a slight smile on Jessica's face.

“Don't worry, you look good” Lindsey said, walking with Brody behind the cameras to sit in the chairs. “I don't want to rush, but it's time to start the interview" she said, looking at Jessica for a few minutes before proceeding. “Whenever you are ready, Jessica.”

With a long breath, she wiped the sweat from her hands on the satin pants she was wearing. “I think I'm ready.”

Brody nodded and raised his hand, giving a signal to the assistant cameraman. The boy placed the clapperboard in front of the lens and made it sound, starting the interview that would give way to all the memories of what Jessica once lived.

“Tell me Dal” The girl began to speak when the man behind the camera indicated her. Jessica felt her heart pound against her chest, surprised that the girl in front of her had called her by a name she had refused to use again. “Tell us about your start in this story: where you were born and how you met the Lee sisters.”

“I was born in Colombia on June 1, 1976” she began after a few seconds, still surprised at what had just happened. “My mother died in childbirth, and I was left in my father's custody until he also died of an overdose when I was eight years old. Since then, my aunt has taken care of me.”

“How did you come to the United States?”

“When I was nine years old, my aunt was given the opportunity to move to Los Angeles because the company she worked for opened a branch here, and they were looking for experienced people to work here. We were not a family that had everything, but my grandparents fought for their children to have an education so they could have a good job.”

“Was it there that you met the Lee sisters?”

“Yes” she said as she tried to remember more accurately how the sisters had entered her life. “First, I met Seoyoung. We went to the same school and the same class, but we didn't share classes, so I didn't talk to her at that time. It wasn't until I met Bada in guitar lessons that my aunt thought of enrolling me. There weren't many of us; the teacher only accepted four students per class, so it was just Bada, two other girls, and me. We didn't become friends right away because she is older than me by three years, nor did we have anything in common except that we were both forced to be there.”

“Didn't you like the guitar?” asked the girl with a smile.

“It's not that I didn't like it” she replied, lifting her shoulders. “I just didn't like it; I preferred other kinds of sounds, and I loved the drums, but my aunt didn't like it very much, and she didn't really listen to my opinion. She also said that the guitar would look better than the drums in my student curriculum, so I didn't say anything back and just obeyed her; after all, I owed her my life.”

“How was your relationship with her? Did you get along with her?”

“Yes, she has been my mother figure since I was born” Jessica said sincerely as she felt a small pain settle in her chest at the memory of her. “I loved her too much, and I will never forget her.”

“My condolences Dal” there it was again—the damn name she hated so much. With a long sigh, Jessica gave a dull smile.

“Don't worry about that; that part of the story comes much later” she denied it in an attempt to erase the melancholic air that suddenly flooded the place. “Let's continue with Bada. As I said before, we didn't talk at first because we had nothing in common. However, she had an energy that captivated you; she made me laugh with her witticisms, so after the first guitar recital we had, I talked to her. I wasn't outgoing, but Bada Lee was outgoing for me, so we quickly became inseparable. And when I entered the same high school as her, then it really started.”

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

“Bae Dal, Bae Dal!”

A thin voice that Jessica quickly recognized drilled her ears as she walked through the halls of Westcoast High School. She immediately turned around to find Bada Lee, her best friend and loyal confidant. The girl ran quickly with an excited expression on her face, and when she was closer to Bae Dal, she opened her arms to wrap them around her.

“You finally came, Bada Lee” Jessica told her as she rested her head on her hair. Bada was barely two inches taller than her, despite being older.

“What class are you in? Do you want a ride?” Bada asked with curiosity in her voice.

“No, don't worry" Jessica replied as she separated. “The principal has given a sophomore girl permission to show me around; she's in the cafeteria right now.”

“Okay, then come with me; I want you to officially meet Seoyoung.”

Without a squeak, Jessica nodded quite excitedly, and the two started walking with their arms intertwined to the cafeteria. Jessica knew Seoyoung only by sight; she was a year younger than Bada's younger sister, but they were still in the same grade because Jessica had entered high school a year earlier. They didn't share any classes or the same social circle, but people liked to associate them because they were both of Asian descent, and everyone thought they were family or friends just because of that.

“I've never talked to your sister” Jessica said to Bada when the two of them spotted Seoyoung in the dining room line.

“There's always a first time for everything, Dalbit” she replied, pulling her arm to her sister's side.

When Seoyoung noticed the girls, she looked at Bada with a smile and at Jessica with a surprised gesture. There, Bae Dal understood that she didn't know that Bada and she knew each other, nor that they were friends, but she didn't really care either.

“Lusher, this is Bae Dal” Bada pointed at her, and Seoyoung smiled friendly. "Remember I told you I had a best friend in guitar lessons? Well, it’s her.”

“I know who Bada clearly is” Seoyoung replied. “But I didn't know you were friends. Nice to finally meet you, Jessica.”

Jessica smiled and replied, "Nice to meet you." Bada didn't say anything else, and as soon as Seoyoung took her food, she led them to her group of friends to sit next to them. Jessica didn't have many friends in high school except for Valerie Monroe, a girl she had met in middle school, but at that moment she didn't know where she was, and she didn't feel like looking for her; she would see her in calculus class.

“Are you ready to tell dad today?” Seoyoung asked Bada while peeling a tangerine. "Taeyoung has been so excited that she won't put down the guitar for anything. ”

“Yes, I know. I didn't think Tata would be so serious when we told her we wanted to form a band” Bada laughed.

“What band are you talking about?” Jessica interrupted as she uncovered the small container where her aunt had put the lunch she had prepared for her.

“Lusher and I have been thinking too much about how we want the band to become something real” Bada said.

A long time ago, Bada and her sisters started playing songs from other bands in the basement of their house. The sisters' father had an old drum set inherited from one of his uncles and had taught Seoyoung how to play it; since then, she has insisted that her sisters play some songs together. All three were big fans of rock bands, and with the enthusiasm they had, it didn't take long for them to find themselves wrapped up in the desire to become one of them.

“I firmly believe that we would be one of the greatest rock bands of all time.”

Bada Lee blurted out the words so confidently that Jessica believed her without question. She knew how persevering her best friend was; she knew how hard she would work; and she knew she was capable of sacrificing anything, even what they were about to build.

Three weeks after that conversation, Jessica found herself sitting in the basement of the Lee sisters' house for the first time, listening to the compositions Bada had created.

“It sounds amazing, Bada!” she shouted with excitement as she clapped her hands. “I really think that you guys have something different and that if someone listens to you, then they would make you sign a contract immediately.”

“The problem is that no one listens to us” said Taeyoung, the youngest of the three sisters and the guitarist of the group. “We're too young to play anywhere, and dad still doesn't take us very seriously.”

Taeyoung was right; she was only ten; Seoyoung was twelve; and the only one who could be considered older was Bada, who had just turned fifteen. They had no chance; they couldn't play in local bars; they couldn't play in a high school because Taeyoung hadn't attended one yet; they had no way to make themselves heard in the crowd.

“How about inviting your friends to the Bada rehearsals?” Jessica said with a hesitant expression, receiving a confused look from the girls. “Your friends have more friends; you can invite them to the basement to listen to you, and they will spread the news. You can start creating a small group of listeners.”

The sisters weren't convinced at first, but they agreed anyway, convinced their parents to let them open the basement door, and six months later they had at least twenty-five teenagers sitting on the sidewalk in the garage having fun. At the end of the year, Westcoast High School invited them to play at the prom.

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

“You'd never been to her house before then?

“Never” Jessica answered. “Bada and I saw each other only twice a month for guitar lessons, so my aunt didn't know her very well and wouldn't let me go to her house. It was finally in high school that she got to know Bada and her parents; they became close friends, and until then, I was finally able to visit her.”

“Understandable” the girl laughed and continued. “So thanks to you, The Rivers became known in the neighborhood?”

“No, of course not” she shrugged her shoulders and denied. "I only gave the idea; they, with their talent, made sure that Bada's friends brought more friends, and those friends brought more friends. If they weren't good enough, even if I paid all the kids in the neighborhood, they wouldn't see them again.

“What happened after that? Did you and Bada stay friends the whole time?”

“After you played at the prom, a lot more schools wanted them. They played at homecomings, proms, and even started playing at a sweet sixteen for a girl or two in the neighborhood. They were making a name for themselves through hard work.”

“What about you and Bada?” she insisted again with the question in a different way.

“We remained friends, although we spent less time together because she was always rehearsing or studying. We both quit guitar lessons, then Bada entered college, so Seoyoung and I were left alone in high school and stopped seeing each other even more, but we always tried to visit each other anyway. I don't think either of us wanted to leave the friendship, and we were constantly fighting with time to not get separated.” Jessica paused for a moment, frowning in an attempt to remember more accurately everything that had happened in her high school days, then continued. “But there was a moment when I turned seventeen that we parted ways for good. I moved away from Seoyoung in high school and started hanging out with other kinds of friends. I tried alcohol and cigarettes for the first time. And I also left Bada aside because I wanted to shut up the feelings that had suddenly invaded me.

“What kind of feelings Dal?” she was careful to ask, but still, the question took Jessica by surprise. She hadn't expected to get to that part of the story so soon. “If you want, we can stop for a moment.”

“No” Jessica said, looking at the girl straight in the eye as she searched for the right words. “The truth is that I realized that I liked Bada long before when we were still in high school; however, I understood the feelings until that moment, even though I denied it for many reasons, but the main ones were because she was older than me and because she was a woman. And I could not like a woman. I avoided her from that moment on; when she called me, I would tell her that I had somewhere to go, and when she came to visit me, I would tell my aunt to take care of her and tell her I was not there. I am aware of the damage I caused her, and I think that somehow everything that happened afterwards was my karma.”

“How much longer could you avoid her? I have known Bada for a long time and I know how persistent she can be.” At the girl's words, Jessica couldn't help but laugh. She was right; Bada was the most insistent person that could exist in her life.

“It lasted me a little more than a year” she answered with a smile. “And it would have lasted longer if it wasn't for how intense Bada is.”

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

“How much longer do you plan to avoid me, Jessica?

As soon as she heard the voice, Bae Dal put down the cup of espresso she was preparing on the table and slowly turned around. Bada had a furious expression on her face that softened a bit when Jessica's round brown eyes looked up at her in surprise.

“When were you planning to tell me that you were working here? Why didn't you tell me that Aunt Lorena has a heart problem?”

Jessica didn't know what to say; she couldn't find the right words to answer Bada’s questions, and she didn't wanted to answer them either. She hadn't started working at Pope's cafeteria because she wanted to; she had done it because her aunt Lorena had been fired from her job and hadn't been able to get a new one because of her illness.

“Are you going to answer me, Jessica?” Bada raised an expectant eyebrow and leaned her arms on the counter. Jessica felt her stomach hurt because Bada never called her Jessica.

“As you can see, I am working, Bada, and if you will excuse me, I have tables to attend.”

She picked up her coffee cup again and walked out to the table area in the direction of an adult couple who had ordered an espresso. Bada, as insistent as she was, walked away from the counter and followed her around the restaurant with furrowed brows, annoyed at being ignored.

“Didn't you want to be like a preschool teacher or something?” Bada said behind Jessica, and Jessica ignored her as she put the coffee on the customers' table. “What are you doing working here? You should be in college; Seoyoung told me you got a scholarship at the University of California.”

Suddenly Jessica started to get exasperated with Bada's words, and without a second thought, she turned around and confronted her. “Enough Bada!”

Bada stopped and opened her mouth in astonishment. The people at the tables looked at them in silence, and then the kitchen door opened, revealing Pope with a spatula in his hand. The man in his late sixties stared at Jessica and then looked at Bada.

“Take a break Jess” he said, and then walked back into the kitchen.

In an attempt to fill herself with patience, Jessica took a long breath, then let the air out and carelessly grabbed Bada's arm to pull her to one of the tables, pulled out a chair, sat her down on it carelessly, and then sat herself in the chair in front of the older girl. Bada folded her arms and raised her eyebrows attentively at what Jessica was going to say to her; she didn't look at all guilty of the scolding they both knew Pope would give Jessica when she left for her interruption.

“Things got difficult, Bada” she finally found the courage to say. “Lorena has a heart condition that makes it impossible for her to continue working at the company, and it's been hard to keep the house. I had to drop out of college because the scholarship didn't pay for one hundred percent of the tuition, and what i earned here at Pope's barely covers the expenses of the house and my aunt's insurance.”

“So when things get tough, do you just disappear?” Bada frowned and leaned her arms on the table to get a little closer to her best friend. “You know my parents would be willing to help you if I asked them. I don't know. We could lend you a hand with buying food every month; you know, it's not something that's impossible for us.”

“You don't understand, Bada” Jessica muttered, taking a long breath. "I don't want people to look down on us; I don't want your parents to deal with this. I know I can do it myself.”

“No Dal the truth is that I don't understand. I know you can do it alone, but you don't have to.” Bada denied and took her hands on the table. Jessica immediately turned to look at the people in the restaurant, but no one was looking at them. “I don't understand why you can't accept our help, and I don't understand why all this has to be a reason for you to stay away from me.”

The older Lee was right; Lorena's illness and leaving college were not reasons for Jessica to stop talking to her. And in fact, they weren't; Dal hadn't distanced herself from Bada because of that. The real reason was that a year ago, in the middle of one of the band's rehearsals, she finally understood why her heart beat stronger every time Bada smiled at her in the middle of a song, and also that her skin prickled every time she took her hands in her to help her move her fingers over the strings of her bass when it occurred to her -out of nowhere- to give her lessons on how to play the bass. But clearly, that was not something she could tell her, so she decided it was best to cut the subject short.

“I'm sorry Bada I..." she stammered knowing that as soon as she apologized Bada would forget everything. “I'm really sorry, it's just that everything has been so overwhelming that I didn't know how to tell you, and I also didn't want you to stop paying attention to the band by listening to my problems. I didn't think about avoiding you my whole life, but then I got into college so I stopped having even more time. I couldn't find the time to talk to you again.”

Long ago Seoyoung had secretly told Jessica about how Bada could forgive her anything and move on. And at that moment she knew she wasn't wrong, because as soon as the apology left her mouth, Bada took a seat in the chair next to her and hugged her. She didn’t asked more questions, questioned her decisions no more and simply forgot that Jessica had avoided her for over a year.

“Just don't do it again Dalbit, please.”

Jessica didn't answer her because she didn't feel brave enough to promise she wouldn't do it again; she wasn't so sure she wouldn't do it again if she felt insecure about her feelings for Bada again. She just let the girl hug her; after all, she had missed her all that time they didn't talk.

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

“So you used the "power" you had over her to get her to forgive you?” the interviewer asked, furrowing her eyebrows in confusion.

“It wasn't that I had power over Bada” she clarified. “Neither of us could really resist the other when it came to apologies. I would rather believe that we were each other's weak points.”

“I see, and what happened next? Did everything go back to the way it was before?”

“For the most part yes. I went back to attending her rehearsals whenever I could; her parents helped us with food expenses, and Lorena slowly started getting better every day until she managed to get a job again. Everything seemed to get better all of a sudden.”

“What about your feelings? How did you manage to hide them and go back to acting as her best friend for so long?”

“I guess I was a very good actress because nobody found out or suspected anything; everything went on as normal until Bada turned twenty and I was eighteen.”

The girl didn't say anything; she just looked at Jessica expectantly because she knew what was coming since she had heard that part of the story some time ago, but from another mouth and another perspective.

“Two days after her birthday, Bada wanted to teach me how to play the new song he had composed” Jessica explained slowly, almost not wanting to continue. “Things became more intimate that morning without us noticing, and then Bada kissed me. It wasn't the best kiss; she only pressed her lips against mine for less than five seconds and then broke away. But just those short seconds were enough to change our lives.”

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

Even if it had already been two days since Bada Lee's birthday, the cake was not over. The girl's parents had made a big celebration with a huge vanilla cake that was Bada's favorite. And the truth was that Jessica wasn't complaining; she loved vanilla cake, so every time she went to the kitchen, she would take a small piece of cake after asking permission from Bada's mother.

“Jessica, I already told you, you don't have to ask for permission” Bada's mother said with a smile without taking her eyes off the TV, where a concert of a well-known alternative rock band was playing.

Without another word, Jessica went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a glass tray to cut a piece of cake. She put the tray away again and walked out of the kitchen towards the basement with a plastic plate in her hand. Bada's mom watched her with a smile on her lips until she saw her pass the basement door.

“You're going to make yourself sick to your stomach if you keep eating so much cake, Dal” Bada scolded her, sitting on the old leather couch, as she quietly and patiently tuned the strings of her bass guitar.

That morning, Bada had woken her up very early. After Pope had given her the morning off they had decided to have a sleepover since Bada was very nervous about the performance they were going to have that night. A well-known bar in Los Angeles area had contacted the sisters' father and had hired them for three hours to play at the owner's daughter's twenty-first birthday party. It was by far the biggest event the band had managed to get booked for, and after talking for hours, the girls convinced their parents to accept, although they too had to attend since Seoyoung and Taeyoung were still minors.

“I want to show you something; come here.” Bada took the plate from Jessica and put it on a small table next to the sofa, then took her by the hand and sat her on the sofa. “I've composed a new melody, and I want to show it to you.”

“You know that playing guitar and bass is different, right.” Jessica complained, but she still let Bada put her arm around her waist to place Jessica’s right hand on the strings and her left hand on the neck.

“I know” Bada whispered very close to Jessica's ear, causing a little shiver to run down her spine. “But somehow, you always manage to learn everything I teach you.”

Bada wasn't lying; Jessica had a rare facility for learning to play instruments and could even play some of the band's songs on the drums. Seoyoung always hinted to her that she could be the second guitarist, and even Taeyoung, on many occasions, gave her, her own guitar while she concentrated on the vocal part. However, being part of a band was not within Jessica's desires, nor did she want to be famous; her place was backstage, waiting excitedly for the hugs Bada gave her every time they finished a performance.

When Bada put her hand on Bae Dal's hand and began to move her fingers on the strings, Jessica held her breath. Jessica felt nervous even though the girl always taught her to play her songs in the same position, she still couldn't get used to feeling her breath so close and her arm around her waist. After a few minutes, she managed to feel the direction of the song through the sound caused by the bass strings. It was not a strong song like the ones Bada used to compose; this seemed to be a melancholic song more of the kind that Seoyoung composed.

“Is it a sad song?” Jessica asked with her eyes fixed on her own fingers as she played the bridge of the song without Bada's help. "It gives me a feeling of anguish.”

“I haven't written the lyrics yet; I only have the instrumental” Bada answered, sliding her arm out from Jessica's waist until she left her hand on her back. "But I don't want it to be a sad song” she then added in a whisper.

“And what do you want it to be?” Jessica stopped playing the bass and turned her gaze to Bada, who was already looking at her.

“I don't know yet, but I think it's going to be a stupid love song.” Jessica laughed, and Bada thought it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard, so she also smiled with her heart pounding hard against her chest.

A while back, Bada began to worry about the sudden path his thoughts began to take regarding Jessica. Bada had always been a physical person, with her family, especially her sisters, and when Jessica came into her life, she inevitably started to be physical with her too. The girl accepted any physical act she gave her and even sought out her touch as well. After all, they were best friends. That was the thought Bada had for a while. Until two weeks ago, when she found herself feeling little butterflies in her stomach every time Jessica gave her a kiss on the cheek or when she suddenly took her hand as they walked down the street. Bada tried to stop her thoughts and sort them out, to limit herself to hiding her reactions and try to see her coherent side, but simply nothing worked because she always found herself thinking about Jessica many times a day—about the tan color of her skin and the thick brown lips with a slight hint of pink.

“Five dollars for your thoughts.”

Suddenly Bada came out of her thoughts when Jessica's words reached her ears. She wanted to reply but didn't know how to explain to her best friend the butterflies that fluttered in her stomach nonstop, so she simply looked at Jessica straight in the eyes. The girl frowned as she noticed the sudden distressed look Bada was giving her.

“Are you okay, Bada?" She asked and directed her right hand to her best friend's cheek. “You can tell me anything you want; you know that.” She gave a soft smile to reassure Bada a little, but even then the girl didn't say anything.

Jessica stared at Bada still with a smile, waiting for her to say something, but instead she watched the girl slowly lean towards her hesitantly until their noses touched. They looked at each other for a moment until Jessica, by inertia, closed her eyes, and Bada took it as an affirmation to move closer, until their lips lightly brushed, staying like that for a few seconds. Then it was Jessica who cut the minimal distance, capturing Bada's lips shyly. Neither of them moved for long seconds; although it wasn't Bada's first kiss, it was Jessica's first, and they both knew it, so the older one didn't want to ruin Bae Dal's first experience. And Jessica didn't want to ruin things with her inexperience.

“Bada Lee you know, wher..." the door’s basement suddenly opened, causing the two girls to separate and turn around. "Sorry to interrupt” Taeyoung blurted out with wide eyes and an amused smile on her face. Seconds later, she turned to run out of Bada and Jessica's sight.

“Taeyoung come here!” Bada immediately got up and ran after her younger sister, leaving Jessica on the couch with a frantic heart.

Without a second thought, Jessica stood up, left the bass on the couch, grabbed her backpack, and then left the basement. She didn't bump into anyone on her walk through the house to the front door, and she was thankful to that; she didn't want anyone to see her flushed face or ask why she was leaving in such a hurry. She arrived at the bus station with bated breath, and it wasn't until she was on the seats with the air in her face that she was able to think things through clearly.

Bada Lee; her best friend, had kissed her. What was that supposed to mean? The question ran through her mind all day; even Pope had asked her if she was okay when he caught her staring at a point on the wall countless times. She didn't say anything though, preferring to keep the event to herself and Bada, as well as to Taeyoung, who had discovered them.

“Jessi” Pope called her with the phone in his hand. "Bada is on the line.”

A little hesitantly, she left the last chair on the table and walked to the man, wiped her hands with her apron, and then picked up the phone and placed it against her ear. At first, she said nothing, but after a few seconds, she took a long breath.

“Hey Bada.”

“Hey Dalbit” Bada called her in an excited voice. “We are about to leave the house, and my parents wanted to know if you need us to pick you up at the restaurant. The girls and I want you to be at sound check."

“Uhm” she thought about it for a few seconds thinking about denying it and making the excuse that she wasn't feeling very well. However, if Bada was acting so normal, why couldn't she do it? “Yeah sure my shift is over; I'll just change and wait for you.”

“Okay, I'll see you in a few minutes. I love you, Dal.”

The call ended after Bada's words, and with a sigh, Jessica took off her apron and then headed to the area where she kept her backpack. She walked to the bathroom to wash her face and change out of her waitress uniform into light baggy jeans and a white t-shirt. When she was ready, she slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked to the exit of the restaurant.

“See you tomorrow Pope” she said with a smile, that the man reciprocated without hesitation.

The cold air hit her body, so she immediately put on the black bomber jacket she had stolen from Bada's closet that morning. It was half past nine in the evening, and the first blizzards of winter were beginning to show. Lazily, she sat on the sidewalk, looking up at the full moon that night, as she thought about what face she would make when she saw Bada again. She didn't have much time to think, though, because thirty minutes later the Lee family car parked in front of her.

“Do you want a ride, pretty girl?” Seoyoung said to her in the back seats with her head out and an amused smile. Jessica suspected that Taeyoung had said something to her.

“Only if you're my guide” she replied with the same flirtatious tone as she sat next to Seoyoung, under Bada's teasing look at the fake flirting between her best friend and sister.

The ride to the bar was chaotic, the sisters' father had put on a tape of the girls' favorite band, and they had been singing the whole way. Bada acted as if nothing had happened that morning, and Jessica did the same. They talked as usual, sang together as they usually did; they treated each other like the best friends they were. Once they arrived at the bar, they carefully put down their instruments. As soon as they entered, they were greeted by the owner of the place, who greeted them with a huge smile and led them to the stage. Almost immediately, Seoyoung sat on the bench behind the drum set with an excited smile and bright eyes at the sight of the almost new instrument. Taeyoung sat on the stage, ready to take her time to tune her guitar. And Bada, along with Jessica, took care of connecting all the wires with the help of the sisters' parents.

“I brought my camera to take some pictures of you” Jessica murmured to Bada as she pulled out the little old camera her aunt had given her for her birthday. “I was thinking we could develop some pictures and send them to some music company, invite them to your events because I think after today a lot of people are going to start looking for you.”

Bada couldn't help but smile as she watched the excitement on Jessica's face. The girl had always been her biggest supporter and the one who supported them first and foremost, so it had been quite easy for her to see herself falling in love with her, had indeed been like a muscle memory.

“Look, Bads, a lot of people are starting to arrive!” Seoyoung reached the table where Jessica and Bada were sitting. “Tonight is going to be our night, I'm sure.”

And Seoyoung was right. The owner's daughter's birthday was attended by many, many people, and since the bar had not been closed for the event, regulars had also come. The sisters played five of their own songs that night, and when the audience asked for more, they couldn't refuse; then they also dropped a cover or two of some of the most famous bands of the moment.

Jessica had her arm linked with the girls' mother the whole night. She felt her heart beating stronger with every song Taeyoung sang, with every beat Seoyoung gave to the toms, and with every look Bada gave her while playing the bass.

And Bada on stage felt like rage ran through her body with every chord she played. She felt like the fear of the first time playing in front of so many people no longer existed, and now she could say that she was capable of anything. That's why once they got off the stage, after hugging her parents and sisters, she took Jessica's hand and slipped through the crowd that congratulated her, until she reached the bathroom of the bar.

“You were amazing Bada Lee” Jessica said, hugging her friend tightly. But Bada grabbed her arms and pulled her away from her body.

“Sorry for telling you this in a bar bathroom, but if I don't, then I'm never going to feel brave enough to say it again.” Jessica frowned in confusion. “I like you, Bae Dal, and this morning's kiss only make me realize that I love you more than just as a friend.”

Jessica smiled slightly, her eyes suddenly began to crystallize and without thinking she cupped Bada's cheeks and stood on her tiptoes to press their lips. A long time ago Bada had gotten taller but it wouldn't be an impediment to kissing her. A little surprised Bada frowned but immediately rested her hands on Jessica's neck and reciprocated the kiss. Jessica was a little clumsy but that was the least of it, Bada didn't mind any of that. After a few seconds they both needed to breathe so Jessica was the first to pull back.

“I like you too Bada Lee, I've liked you since high school.”

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

Jessica closed her eyes as she remembered that special night and all the feelings that came over her with that first kiss. The fear of not being reciprocated, the excitement of Bada being the first person in her life, she had many different emotions that day, but they had all been worth it by the end of the night.

“That night was…” Jessica tried to talk, but she couldn’t find the right words.

“Jessica, are you still in love with Bada Lee?” the girl asked. Jessica looked at her with a soft smile.

“I've been in love with Bada Lee since I was fourteen, and i will love her my whole life.”

˗ ˏ ˋ ♡ ˎˊ ˗

Tag list: @jofiels-world @badasgirlfriend @zhivaxo

It’s been a long time coming for… jk.

#street woman fighter 2 #streetwomanfighter #swf2 #team bebe #bada lee #street woman fighter x reader #swf2 x reader #bada lee x oc #bada lee x reader #badaleerockbandau

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wadesprincessboy · 7 days ago

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Remember my post awhile back about "CringePunk" well I'm rethinking it a bit, and I think I want to detach it from punk a bit. It still holds punk values, but is less focused on punk music and style, and more on the cringe aspect.

Think bright colours, obnoxious patterns, cringey merch for cringey media, kandi, bunny hats, big eyeliner, big stompy boots, etc etc

I'm imagining a look similar to scene and rave but with different values and music

The music would be things like nightcore, the living tombstone, heck even show tunes and glee cast covers, really anything that you'd be embarrassed to say you listen to because others would cringe

Theres also a big focus on childishness. Liking childrens shows and media, playing with childrens toys, big bold colours and clashing outfits, even age regression/dreaming, are encouraged and apart of cringepunk.

Cringepunk would also be inclusive to therians, furries, alterhumans, and any hobbys considered cringe.

What separates this from just plain ol' childishness and cringe ? Why do you use punk in the name ? WELL-

What separates it from those things and why it uses punk is kinda the same. The values at the end of the day, are punk. Its its own subculture but the values are the same as punk. Those being: non-conformity, anti-authoritarian, and a big focus on DIY and individuality. You could also consider CringePunk to be a PLUR type subculture.

Overall, CringePunk is about being free to be you no matter what others think. No matter what is trendy and no matter how many people will laugh. It's about finding joy in cringe and being you. There are no rules and you can do whatever with your fashion and music, the only guideline is be cringe and be free!

I realise this is unlikely to ever catch on, as subcultures tend to grow through natural processes, not through some loser coining them on tumblr, but im giving it a shot! I hope this resonates with someone and more people are cringe and free in their lives, whether they use the label CringePunk or not.

BELOW THE CUT ARE A PLAYLIST AND MOOD BOARD FOR CRINGEPUNK!!!!

Eyestrain + gun mention below !!!!!!

(Eyestrain + gun mention below)

#cringepunk #cringe #i am cringe but i am free #punk #alternative #Spotify

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amadholes-lostre · 3 months ago

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Citadel redesign/some lore improvement or change

I have an idea of some time now (6 years lol) of changing the Citadel structure and that the CC/race themselves. Mainly that while I like the Citadel design itself (one of my favorite space stations), it's not that impressive, especially the size and shape itself. Citadel is meant to imitate an O'Neil cylinder, which is not good as those space habitats meant to be built by today technology. What happened if an alien race, who built hundreds of cylinders already, come across the Citadel? They will laugh themselves silly. So, I came up with my own version.

The Citadel itself

I based the idea of mixing the Original Citadel and Omega stations itself, with the arms fully open and spread.

With the arms attracted around Omega uppermost section. The version itself looks like this:

The Citadel total height is 1,000 km, from the upper-section (the round head) to the cylinder bottom (referred to as the lower-section). The antenna-like structure in the mid-section is the main space port, where all the goods are imported and exported. The lower-section is a regular cylinder (I think 500 km in height), using configuration for gravity.

The upper-section uses eezo for artificial gravity and uses "levels" for separating. Each levels has 2.5km of space height, connecting by pillars. So, in a way, the upper-section is similar to Aincrid from SAO.

The arms- which has 5- 500 km in length, and around like 20 km in height. Like the upper-section, each level has 2.5km space height, with a total level of 6. Some levels have strict biome and meant for national parks (with some towns and whatnot). Some are only meant for certain species like volus so they could live without suits. There're likely 2 levels that are heavily urbanized, with some population density of 100k km².

The arms (and majority of the upper-section, let's be honest), are fully enclosed, meaning the uppermost does not have glass/transparent metal. How they receive light is through hundreds of light overheads with radiators. So they do have some kind of sky, being bluish hue, but it's possible seeing the next level floor. It's like the sky in Requiem from Halo 4.

(Notice the mechanic sky hued by the atmospheric gas.)

There're parts where glass/transparent metal is placed so people can gaze at the Serpent Nebula or the stars, usually parks and lounges. However, there're likely private space that rich people could own (like owning an apartment/housing adjacent to the glass/transparent metal).

The very uppermost in the upper-section is where the Council and species-nations/states embassies are located. I called this part The Crest. The Crest has it own space port meant for diplomats, nations/states military (like the Normandy), certain organizations, or very wealthy people kr business.

The arms could close (like the original), sealing upwards to the Crest. That, and with the kinetic barriers, it's nearly impossible to break through (unless you have 1 peta-ton weapon). The Citadel Fleet itself is far bigger, having 30k of warships guarding, with the Turians having 20k, including 1.8k dreadnoughts and battlecruisers. Asari also has 25 Ascension-class, with the lead ship, Destiny Ascension, being the flagship (their main reactor generates 2.5 peta-joules per second; fuck you Halo fans 🖕🖕, suck at these blue clit lol). There're also hundreds of space defense platform, ranging from arsenal missile platform-using metallic hydrogen as payloads and rocket propellant- to fucking mass accelerator (each ranging from 250 tera-joules [60 kiloton] to fucking 100 peta-joules [24 megatons]). They are going make you work for it lol.

I don't really know the total population. Either 15 billion or, at maximum, 100 billion. There are likely people who not only never leave the Citadel, but never even venture out of their arm or level.

I can't really think anything else to add that isn't about the station itself.

Turians

Nothing much to add, except fleet and ship size. There is an ME book that said there're tens of trillions of beings, and I took that fact seriously. However, of that true, than their fleet numbers has to be fucking huge. I saying they have likely 10 million ships, with 900k dreadnoughts (400k) and battlecruisers (500k). An average dreadnoughts size is 2.5 km in length, with a reactor core of 450 terawatts. Battlecruisers is 2km in length with a reactor of 340 terawatts. Their ships size are similar compared to other species nations/states military, though they have a numerical size advantage to back it up. (It's not the ship size or crew that makes a ship expensive, but the mass effect/eezo core is what limit it.)

Like what many codex and books say, Turians have multiple alien clients, with a more concrete number of 5. Two submit willingly for protection, however really fuck-up their chance having a seat in the Council. The other 3, however, were forced into submission, doing a "fuck around and find out" situation. Turians did so, so they will never be a threat to them again. Because of this, some of their client race form extreme Sangenists rebel/terrorists (Sangenism from Latin, Sanguis [blood] + Gen [race/people], mainly species nationalist). Humans almost suffer the same fate if the Asari didn't interfere.

Asari

Nothing much change for the Asari either, only adding or making it definite. Asari has around 25k planets and satellites (Turians has maybe 30k planets and satellites), the majority of which are in the Athena Nebula. They don't really have a large population. Actually, humans (300 billions, will explain) will nearly reach theirs at (1.95 trillion) by the end of the millennium. This is thanks of never needing to expand their lifespan.

I think this is already canon, but Asari mostly romance their own kind (I saying 80%), with only being a taboo of having a pureblood. Also, they are not actually omnisexual, with around 70% preferring females, other mono-sex, or hermaphrodite (i think the hanars are hermaphrodite, not sure).

They have 100 Ascension-class dreadnoughts, though it's a fucking financial nightmare due how large the Eezo Core has to be. I think increasing it twice or thrice it size. Something like this:

Humans

Instead of the canon events taking place in the late-22nd century, this took place in the late-23rd century. Humanity did discover the Prothean artifacts at Mars in 2148, however they didn't contact the Turians until 2256. So they have like a century of colonization expansion.

The reason why Humanity population explored is due to discovering expanding a human lifespan (decreasing telomerase shortening through mitosis) in around 21th century, increasing average life expectancy to 180 years. Even though this solves the so-called "fertility crisis", it cause an overpopulation crisis since now the death rate is nearly absolute zero lol. Actually this common for any other race that increases their lifespan. I took the idea from my races, Indrin/Rin/other species, who, in 1955, have a population of 50 billion, and by 3456 (first contact with Earthian humans), reach 25 trillion.

Other races/history/etc.

The books and codex said there're dozens of species instead of just the ones in the game (the game engine could only handle so much). I put the number at least 76 species, with a total population of 1.5 quadrillion. Turians have one of the highest populations, at least 20 trillion, and Turian females are one of the most common bedmates (genetic donors) or lovers for Asaris. At least have of the species are gonochoric (having only two sex for reproduction like humans), though some of those races are not similar to humans (I strongly in the belief Turian males do not have dick; Garrius tribs the living shit out of femshep [I'm a strong Shiara shipper lol] and he does well). Mono-sex species like Asari (though even other mono-sex species found Asari odd for theirs) are evenly proportion with gonochoric, other S.R like hermaphrodite, multiple different sex (think Andorian from Star Trek), and others.

Can't really think of anything else: some ideas i have like the formation of the Citadel Council and why the Treaty of Farixen was signed. The idea I have is that there were multiple other international organizations like the CC (though CC is the strongest) and that it lead to multiple arm races, some of which lead to wars (causality up to dozens of billions of death). These I.O. merge with the CC and the Farixen was signed so that there wasn't another interstellar war. Another idea is that the Rachnie War (taking place at 900CE, last for 1 century with interspersed skirmish for another 2 century) led to 1 trillion deaths (oof) and the Krogan-Citadel War (1300-1400 CE) cause 250 billion deaths (the Krogans throw a fucking Moon-size satellite at a Turian planet the fuck?).

I also thinking of an alien nation having a robotic army before the Rachni War, and use it against a war with the CC (like the CIS Droid Army from Star Wars). Only, the robots, after gaining sapient, didn't like to being told and cause a brutal genocide against them. Through the CC managed to stop them, this incident, and Quarian Genocide, what drives the fear of AI to them.

Not much else to add, Bye-Bye!

@dr-jekyl @dr-ladybird @stealthydentist @keeper-of-the-flames @berryshiara @masseffectfanwork

#mass effect #asari #asari headcanon #asari fanlore #citadel #citadel council #turian #turian headcanon #turian fanlore #sci fi

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