#this was in the top 10 shittiest day of my life

[harrygoeswest]

Harry Styles is your sworn enemy. You've decided to take a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, and so has he. And there's only one bed…

~~~

A/N: Hiiiiii! I think I announced this like 3 months ago and never finished it, but we're finally here! I actually really fucking love this story. I've never done this 'one bed' trope before, nor an enemies-to-lovers OU, because EVERYONE loves H man, right? Well, not this YN. And he's not too fond of her either. I'm really excited to share it with you. Again, what started as a one shot grew into a two-parter because I simply cannot contain myself when the ball starts rolling. Anyhoo, to my forever friend @all-things-fic, thank you as always for reading this through and making me snort at your comments and being the ultimate validator <3

Word Count: 13,261 Trigger Warnings: Swearing (obvs), vomiting, bed-sharing with a sexy man

~~~

Rain. Persistent, unabated, never-ending, relentless rain. It was all you’d heard and seen all day and you were sick of it. You’d never really minded it until today, but thanks to one shit-show after another, you were ready to relinquish it. You wanted it gone. Your summer holiday was already off to a bad start.

“Bad day?”

Where to begin?

A cabin in the Scottish Highlands had sounded like the perfect escape for a four-week break away from the city. You had work to do, deadlines to meet, but at least you could do it without being interrupted. Without the sounds of pedestrians and car horns and wayward seagulls and bike bells. Yep, the Highlands still sounded perfect, but the endless string of catastrophes made you wonder if it really was perfect or rather just a ridiculous indulgence.

No. You deserved this break. Bad day or not, the holiday was needed.

When your brother had told you a year ago that he’d bought a holiday home in the Highlands you hadn’t exactly been surprised. He and his wife had been talking about it for years, and he’d finally earned enough money through his music career to be able to do it. Sadly, with your own deadlines and packed schedule, this was the first time in said year you’d been able to find time to go.

Apparently the all-knowing entity in your life had other plans.

You were supposed to come by plane first thing this morning, but your car had broken down on the way to the airport and you spent 3 hours waiting for the AA to rescue you. You had then managed to rearrange your flight to a later one, but because of the weather, all other flights out of Bristol had been cancelled for the day. You then spent a ridiculous amount of money on a 10 hour train from Bristol to Inverness with a change at Edinburgh in between, and were now forking out on a taxi to take you the rest of the way.

At that particular point in time, a cabin in the middle of nowhere seemed like a dreadful fucking idea.

“Could say that.” You managed weakly.

The driver chuckled to himself and you tried not to squeal. “Nearly there now. Fifteen minutes or so.”

There is a God!

Forty-five minutes later he finally stopped in the middle of a single track road. Your eyelid had been twitching for half that time, and a headache was forming in your left temple.

He turned over his shoulder and flashed a grin. He was missing an incisor and three of his other teeth were gold. “This is as far as I can get you. Cabin is at the top of that hill.”

You gave him a look, then peered out the window. All you could see was rain and mud and a black night. “What hill?”

“You’ll find it. Fare is sixty.”

“Sixty quid?”

He nodded. “Scottish if you’ve got ‘em. I’m a collector.”

“We agreed on forty. And no, I don’t have any bloody Scottish notes.” A Scottish man collecting Scottish money! On what planet?!

“No, sixty.”

You muttered expletives under your breath and shoved the money at him over his shoulder.

“Y’alright gettin’ your own case, love? Don’t really want t’ get wet.”

“Un-fucking-believable.”

In the shittiest, snappiest manner you could muster, you got out of the car and retrieved your luggage from the boot, slamming every door you touched. The driver immediately pulled off once the boot was closed, pipping his horn.

“Wanker!” You yelled after him.

Finding your bearings, you located the ‘hill’ he’d been talking about, forcing down your frustration at the size of the damn thing as you started up the pathway. You dragged your suitcase behind you through the mud, grateful it had a hard and waterproof plastic exterior. At least after all this you’d be able to take a shower and change into clean clothes.

It took you an embarrassing amount of time to reach the cabin, thanks to not only the rain but also the brutal wind. When you finally reached the porch you fell onto it, greeted by the most intense relief you’d ever felt. You took a minute to recover from your exercise, and then fumbled around on the dark porch for the stone your brother had left the key under.

“Aha.” Delighted when you found it, you pulled the key out of the rock and shoved it in the door, unlocking it.

Heat floated over your body, as did warm, homey light. Weird. Why were the lights on?

Then did your eyes land on the thing that was most definitely out of place. 

A loud, shrill scream ripped from your body.

A man was in the cabin. A naked man. Mostly. The only thing saving him and you was the towel wrapped around his waist. Shiny back, muscly arms, damp neck, wet hair. At the sound of your wail he turned around, equally as alarmed.

“What the-?”

In his panic, the grip he had on his towel slipped, and you were given more of an eyeful than you ever bargained for. 

You screamed again and reached for the closest thing to you, then lurched it across the room at him. Then your brain caught up with you, and you pulled the door closed again, separating you from him. You were back outside in the cold.

That man wasn’t just anyone. He’d never been just anyone. He was your sister-in-law’s friend. He was your brother’s boss, to a degree. He was your worst fucking nightmare rolled into physical human form.

He was Harry fucking Styles.

This was officially the worst day of your life.

“No, no, no, no, no.” You repeated, over and over again as you paced the porch, head in your hands. You knocked into your suitcase multiple times and it ended up falling down the porch steps into a muddy puddle. You tripped over a loose piece of decking at least twice. You caught your hip on the porch bannister, too. But none of it registered with you while your brain cycled between images of Harry’s naked back and his large appendage.

How could this be happening? What had you done to deserve such a catastrophic start to your holiday? You couldn’t stay here. Not with that man. That man that you hated, and who hated you in return. This was a disaster.

You dug your phone out of your sopping handbag. No signal. 

“Oh, come on.” You hissed.

Stubborn as always, you tried to call your brother anyway. Repeatedly. Twenty times, at least, each one failing to connect. You couldn’t even leave a voicemail. You raised the phone to the sky like it was baby Simba. Still nothing.

“Fuck!”

The door swung open, and Harry said your name in a low grunt.

You swivelled, glare like a dagger. “You. Why the fuck are you here?”

“Why am I here?” He scoffed. He was clothed now, in a t-shirt and jogging bottoms. “Why are you here?”

“This is my brother’s cabin! I have a key! He said I could stay here!”

“Well, guess what?” He leaned forward, arms crossed. “Holly said I could stay here, too.”

You wanted to throw your phone at his stupid face. “Fucking great.”

“There’s obviously been some misunderstanding.” He straightened.

“You don’t say…” 

His gaze narrowed. “You’re impossible.”

“At least I’m not the one who’s stupid enough to state the obvious.”

You turned away again and tried your brother one more time. The beep beep beep that told you the call had failed yet again had your stomach in knots.

“There’s no phone signal here.”

“Yes, thank you. Just go back inside.”

“No.”

“For the love of Christ, why not?”

“I’d rather see what you’re going to do with yourself.”

You turned another glare on him. “Oh, I’m so glad that the shitty situation I’ve found myself in is entertaining you, Harry. Please, mock me some more. The resulting anger might actually take the chill out of my fucking toes.”

He looked like he was about to open his mouth, but you didn’t let him.

“You know, this really has been the day from hell. It’s been a categorical disaster from start to finish, and finally getting myself here only to find you, of all people, really is the cherry on top of my whopping slice of shit pie. So please, do me this one favour, and sod off back inside.”

His jaw ticked, and he emitted a low growl before he slammed the door of the cabin and left you in the cold, wet night.

A sob wracked through you, and you flopped down on the top step just to let your body deflate for five minutes. It was so cold you were shivering. Your clothes clung to your body like sheets of ice, your lips were cracked, and a bite ate away at your toes.

You knew you couldn’t do much tonight. You’d have to wait until tomorrow, for when the storm hopefully passed, and you could call your brother to give him a gobful and then walk into the village to find a B&B or cheap hotel. You hadn’t forgotten that your train ticket was a set day return for four weeks’ time. You’d just have to wait until Harry was gone before you took your time to enjoy the cabin like you’d planned.

When you finally calmed down you dragged your suitcase out of the mud and dropped it on the driest part of the deck. You dug around for the jumper you’d brought with you and pulled it over your frozen torso. You also took your shoes and socks off and put two clean pairs on. Once you were wrapped back up in your coat, you settled on the armchair that was the least wet and tried to go to sleep.

After five minutes or so, the cabin door creaked open again.

“Come inside, please.” Harry’s voice was void of any emotion.

“No.”

“You’ll get sick if you stay out here.”

“Rather that than share a bed with you.”

“And you think I want to share a bed with you, either?”

“Then we’re both on the same page. I’m fine out here.”

“You are not fuckin’ fine out here. It’s shitting it down, for fuck’s sake, you could get a flu. Or worse.”

You hadn’t opened your eyes so you had no idea what his facial expression read. “I’m surprised you give a shit enough to care.”

“I don’t particularly, but I like your brother and I don’t want him thinking I didn’t at least try to get you to be sensible when it’s fucking biblical outside.”

“I’ll pass.”

Harry took a deep breath, and he muttered, “Bloody insufferable woman,” before he slammed the door again.

You snuggled further into the chair, shoving your hands under your face. You thought that would be the end of it, but no more than thirty seconds later the door swung back open. You pretended to ignore him, expecting a verbal taunt. Instead, all you got was scuffing noises.

Pushing down the urge to growl like he did at you, you squeezed your eyes shut and faked indifference at his huffy grunting. Until he dragged you out of the chair and hauled you into the cabin in three easy movements.

“What are you doing?” You demanded, scowling at him as he locked the door behind you.

“You can be as stubborn and petty as you like about this, but you are not staying outside in the rain. End of story.”

“I was fine!”

“You were not fine.” He folded his arms again. “Look at you, for fuck’s sake. You’re about five seconds away from catching hypothermia. You think I want that on my hands? You, of all people, needing my attention every day for the next five weeks? I don’t, by the way. I came here for a holiday, too.”

“I didn’t bring myself here to be a God damn burden to you, Harry. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Why don’t you go and get in the shower, and maybe you’ll calm the fuck down.”

You inched closer to him. “Oh, I’m sure you’d love that. Me, following your orders like some sycophant.”

He took a step closer to me. “I would, actually. It might make you somewhat tolerable.”

“Get fucked, Harry.”

“Sounds like you need that more than I do.”

You produced a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal, and shoved at his chest once before you stalked away. “Prick.”

He hummed, entertained. “Try not to think about mine while you’re in there. I’m sure the sight of it has left you with enough to be desired.”

Too tired to argue with him anymore, you threw your middle finger at him over your shoulder.

Whether you’d been forced inside against your will or not, you really did want a shower before a permanent chill settled over you. You turned the water on and let it run hot. The second it swilled over your body you let out a helpless moan. 

You stood stoic underneath it for an indeterminate amount of time, just willing your body to warm up. The day washed away from you, worries temporarily forgotten while you soaked up as much heat as you could. Oh, it was glorious. A shower had never been so rewarding.

After a while you realised you didn’t have any of your shower stuff with you, still locked in your suitcase, and you let out a huff. You surveyed what Harry had brought with him and spent too long debating whether it was socially acceptable to wash using your mortal enemy’s shower gel. You decided against it and would properly wash in the morning.

Taking another ten minutes, you decided you were ready to face Harry again and whatever bollocks he might throw your way. You found a towel and gave your hair a dry, then wrapped it around your body. You hadn’t thought this through in your desperation to get away from him.

You stepped out of the room with purpose and marched over to where Harry had abandoned your suitcase after dragging it inside earlier, and carefully picked your way through it to find your pyjamas and toothbrush. Without giving the man even the slightest glance, you locked yourself back up in the bathroom to change and clean your teeth.

“Forget your clothes?” Harry asked at your second reappearance.

“Why ask a question you already know the answer to?” You gave a roll of your eyes.

He sat straighter in the armchair he was settled into, “Why answer a question with another question?”

You ignored him. Instead you gave yourself the opportunity to actually take in your brother’s second home. You realised it was tiny. Like Tiny Home tiny. When he said he’d bought a cabin you thought he meant something like a chalet. But no, this was small. A kitchenette had been built into the right-hand wall by the front door with a fridge, a two-plate hob and a stainless steel sink. Two armchairs sat either side of a small birch table, and a double bed at the back of the room with a cherrywood wardrobe. A woven rug gave the space a homey feel, balancing the bare oak that gave foundation for the rest of the place.

A sinking feeling buried in you when you realised there wasn’t a sofa.

You rubbed a hand into your cheek, feeling slightly cheated by your brother and his wife. 

“You look like you’re about to pass out.” Harry said into the quiet, all malice and jest lost.

“I feel like it.” You admitted, turning your stare on the bed. “I’m just tired.”

He cleared his throat and stood. “I sleep on the left.”

You refrained from giving him another eye roll and instead focussed on settling down. You left your phone on the dining table, plugged in to charge overnight, poured a glass of water which you drank in one long swig, and then returned to the bed.

“What are you doing?”

Harry had settled on the left side of the bed but with his head at the foot and his feet at the top. If he slept on the left, did that not completely defeat the purpose of his claim?

“Top and tail.”

“Yeah, no. Absolutely not.” You shook your head.

“Why not?”

“I am not giving you the opportunity to stick your foot in my face at any given point in the night.”

He kissed his teeth and sat up with a scowl. “Woman, you have got some major fuckin’ trust issues.”

“With you I do, absolutely.”

You waited until he was in bed the right way up before you slipped in yourself and turned the light off. The room was cast in darkness and your eyes struggled to adjust. You faced away from Harry on your side, wriggling to find a comfortable position, and you could hear him doing the same.

His foot was definitely on your side of the bed so you kicked it away. He then tried to take the covers off you, but you were quick to snatch them back. He let out a deep sigh.

“Can I have some of the quilt, please?”

“You’ve got some.”

“I have none.”

“Bullshit.”

He ripped the covers away again, and you fought the urge to squeal.

“Give some back.”

“You have some.” He said in the same tone you had.

“Harry.”

“What?”

“I’m cold.”

“You’ve just spent an hour using up all the hot water so I refuse to believe that.”

“What is your problem?”

“You are.”

You grit your teeth. Folding your arms, you scooted as close to the edge of the bed as possible without falling off. Arguing with him was fruitless, it just left you angry and wired.

Tomorrow, you resolved to find somewhere, anywhere else to stay. For now, you’d try to sleep uncomfortable and coverless.

~

Had you slept?

No.

For hours you’d imprisoned yourself on the edge of the bed, cold and coverless, hugging yourself in an attempt to keep warm, and squeezing your eyes closed just praying that sleep would come. But it never did. You’d think after the day you had yesterday it would be easy to just drop off. Why would it be that simple for you?

You knew it was light outside now thanks to the inside of your eyelids. You decided then to give up. Sleep wasn’t coming.

As you opened your eyes you realised how close to the edge of the bed you were. At the same time, Harry wriggled again, further onto your side of the mattress, and his knee nudged your backside.

Oh no.

Struggling to find anything to hold onto, your body tumbled over the edge. A panicked yelp tore out of you, followed by a grunt and a thud when you hit the floor.

“Ow.” You whimpered. You’d fallen on your front, knee and toe first followed by your head. You rolled onto your back and held onto your forehead as if it might stop the pounding you felt.

Laughter started, and your eyes flew open to find Harry hovering over the side of the bed, green eyes shining. You were, actually, somewhat offended by how entertained he was. If it was acceptable to hit people, you’d be hitting him.

“You alright down there?”

“No I’m not fucking alright, Harry.”

Your own anger made the throbbing in your head worse so you stayed on your back.

“Alright, was only a question.”

“This is your bloody fault - you’re a bed hogger!”

“Yeah? Well you snore!”

“Considering I didn’t get a single second of sleep last night I don’t know how you’ve landed on that conclusion, and I can only assume you’ve made it up to piss me off.”

“You were snoring.” He said in a flat voice.

“No I wasn’t.”

The throbbing got worse again, so you squeezed your eyes shut and took a deep breath. Then another.

“You’ve hit your head.”

If the thought of rolling your eyes didn’t make you nauseous you’d absolutely do it. “If there was an award for Best Observationist, you’d win it.”

“Do you need ice or something?”

His voice had changed and it somewhat startled you. You peeled an eye open again to find he hadn’t moved - he was still hanging over the bed. His expression, however, was neutral.

“Yes. Please.”

He gave a curt nod and then disappeared. You closed your eyes again, willing the throbbing away.

“There isn’t any ice.”

You refrained from screaming, knowing it wouldn’t do you any good. “Okay.”

“Here,” his voice was much closer, and he gave a little pat to your knee, “this might help.”

Peeling an eye open, he flashed a couple of boxes of painkillers. “Panadol.” Of course the man had branded paracetamol. The 95p boxes of Sainsbury’s own shoved in your kitchen cupboard looked shameful right about now.

“Extra strength. And that rapid relief ibuprofen.”

“You brought painkillers with you on holiday?”

He shrugged. “I’m here for a long time. Hangovers need encouragement to get fucked.”

You raised a sceptic brow. “And here I thought some magical mystery Nutri-Bullet recipe would be your saviour.”

“Funny.” He muttered.

Huh. How unlike him not to shove a witty rebuttal at you.

“Do you need help getting up or are you just gonna sit on the floor all day?”

Your scowl returned. “I’m fine.”

On shaky legs and with a fuzzy head, you grabbed the side of the bed and hauled yourself up. You weren’t sure if the sudden ringing in your ears was something you should be worried about, but you persisted.

Once sat, Harry handed you the tablet boxes and fetched a glass of water for you while you thumbed out two of each.

“Thank you.” You mumbled.

“Please and thank you in the space of ten minutes?” He goaded. “Sounds like you’ve got a concussion.”

“My parents didn’t raise me in a barn.”

He stood with his broad arms folded across his chest while he watched you swallow down four tablets, face a mishmash of irritation and something else. You refused to believe it was concern so you attributed it to frustration. You were just ruining his holiday the same way he was ruining yours.

You decided to finish the water, and then Harry took the boxes and the glass from you. You laid back down, shielding the room and your eyes with your arms.

“Sure you don’t need a hospital?” His voice was far away.

“Yes. I just need to close my eyes for a bit. I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t answer, and you were thankful. Any more talking and your head might have exploded.

~

You’d fallen asleep. While you hadn’t intended to, you couldn’t help but be grateful for the respite. There was no way you would’ve been able to do anything on zero hours sleep, so a few was better than nothing.

You sat up, noticing that you’d corrected yourself direction-wise on the bed and pulled the covers over you. You must’ve done it subconsciously.

The cabin was quiet. Almost eerily so. There was no sign of Harry anywhere. The only sign that he’d been there at all was his own suitcase tucked away in the corner. No sound came from the bathroom, and all you could hear outside was birds.

Birds. Not rain.

You scrambled out of bed towards the front door and hauled it open, but it was locked. Harry had locked you in. You found the key your brother had left for you on the table and put it to use.

It was glorious outside. Not a cloud in the sky, blue everywhere, green even more so. And it was warm. Summer dress warm. Your feet itched to go outside, but you knew you needed to take it easy. The headache hadn’t completely subsided, but it was tolerable. Barely there. A shower and some food would fix it.

You closed the door and locked it again, determined to start your day. Steadily.

You were about to head straight for the shower when you noticed it. A brown paper bag trapped under a pretty mug, and a jar of instant coffee wedged inside it. The mug lived here - you recognised it from Holly’s old flat. But the greasy brown bag did not. You noticed the letters GF scrawled on the front.

He remembered.

Warning bells started screaming inside your head as you plucked the bag out and opened it up. The smell of cooled buttery pastry wafted from inside, and you pulled out the biggest croissant you’d ever seen.

The message was clear as day. Eat and get some caffeine in you.

This was bad. Angry Harry you could deal with any day of the week at any time of day. You could even cope with jester Harry, because you gave just as good as you got. But this? Base-level concern? It threw you for a loop.

Regardless, you were starving. So you boiled the kettle and made your coffee just how you like it as you tore off pieces of pastry and gobbled it down. While you waited for your coffee to cool once your croissant was demolished, you took a quick shower.

Half an hour later you were out the door and feeling a hell of a lot better than you had done for weeks. You wandered down into the village, the sun a glowing comfort on your bare skin.

You had a mission today: alternative accommodation.

You kept an eye on your phone for patches of signal, and called your brother whenever you found some. He never answered. Part of you wondered if he was ignoring you, and if that was the case you were going to have a very big problem. He only ignored you if he was avoiding you.

And that wasn’t even your biggest problem.

“I’m sorry, we’re full.” The receptionist at the final B&B said with barely an ounce of emotion.

“The sign outside said you had vacancies.”

“I just sold the last one over the phone. Haven’t had time to change it.” She gave me a smile that didn’t touch her eyes.

You fought a petulant sigh. “Do you know where else I can stay? I’ve tried every B&B here and no one has any vacancies.”

“Why don’t you try an AirBnB.” She suggested with a tone dripping in sarcasm. “You young people seem to love those.”

Ah, so this was a territorial issue. You gave her a flat glare and left without another word.

Yet again, you found yourself in a rut. Your good mood had been successfully wiped away. Maybe you would check AirBnB, but the thought of spending another obscene amount on accommodation filled you with a sickly feeling.

Your phone started ringing, much to your surprise. Holly. “Is my brother ignoring me?”

“I don’t know, but if he was, he probably wouldn’t tell me.” She laughed, always a fan of your no-nonsense approach. “I thought I’d call since I haven’t heard from you. Did you make it there alive?”

“Alive is not the word I’d use to describe my current state. It’s also impossible to call someone when the phone signal is worse than a World War II air raid shelter.”

Holly cackled. “You’re such a nerd. What’s wrong?”

“Either you’re playing dumb to avoid my wrath or you’re very stupid.”

She gasped your name but she was most definitely entertained. “What do you mean?”

“Harry is here. Using your holiday home.”

An extended period of silence followed, completed with a breathy, “Oh… shit.”

Oh shit, indeed.

“Well,” she seemed to shake herself, “it can’t be that bad.”

This one was truly off her rocker. “Can’t be that bad? Holly, how many times have you been in a room with me and Harry at the same time?”

“Plenty.”

“Exactly. How many times have we had a fight whilst in said same room together?”

“Almost always.”

“Not almost always, just always. We. Do. Not. Get. On.”

“Oh, babe, I think you’re being a bit dramatic.”

“There’s only one fucking bed!”

Holly went quiet for a minute, and you realised you’d earned the attention of a few passers by. You sat down on a nearby bench, wary of the throb in your head getting worse.

“Are you okay?” She finally asked.

That set you off. You launched into your shitty day from yesterday, from the car breakdown to the taxi driver to hitting your head this morning. Words without breath had never left you so fast and the feeling you were rewarded with after was less than satisfactory. Deflation. Sadness.

“Oh, hun, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going.” You were certain she was lying about that last sentence but you didn’t interrupt her. “I’ll get in touch with Harry and tell him to rein it in.”

“I don’t need you to curb the man on my behalf, Hol. I can handle him myself. I just… I really wish he wasn’t here.”

“Do you want me to make him leave?”

A rare sight of guilt crept its way into the centre of your stomach. You battled the urge to say yes, because you knew if Holly asked him to, he would absolutely go. “No… hardly fair. He was here first.”

“Yeah but I bet you would’ve been if all those things didn’t go wrong yesterday.”

You grunted. You were supposed to arrive just before 9am yesterday morning, not close to 11pm. “Don’t make him leave. I’m a bitch but I’m not a complete cunt.”

“You’re not either of those things by any stretch. My friend just happens to know how to really rattle your cage.”

Ain’t that the truth. “I’m trying to find a B&B or something but they’re all full.”

“Oh, please don’t spend more money.”

“I can’t stay in your cabin, Hol. I didn’t sleep last night and that man does not know how to share a queen bed.”

“It’s actually a three-quarter bed.”

“Fuck off.” You groaned.

“Look, we wanted it to be as spacious as possible there. We didn’t anticipate two people who claim to hate each other having to share it. It’s for cuddling.”

That urge to smack someone reared its ugly head. “You’re ridiculous.”

She laughed from the back of her throat, and as irritated as you were it did make you smile. “Take a long walk, babe. If you’re in the village there’s a great ice cream place near the church that’ll make you forget all about He Who Shall Not Be Named.”

You rolled your eyes. “I can say Harry, for fuck’s sake.”

She screamed as if she’d been burned, teasing you.

“Shut up.” You actually managed to laugh. “Fine. I’ll go find some ice cream. But if they’ve got WiFi I will absolutely be looking for an AirBnB.”

She sighed. “Fine.”

“Do me a favour and tell my brother to stop being a wuss.”

“Oh, come on, you know he can’t handle your wrath. You can tell him yourself, anyway.”

You started looking around to see if they’d actually come up and were just loitering nearby to piss you off.

“What?”

“We were going to surprise you but I think you might murder us if we did. We’re on our way to you. My Nanna will be coming, too - we’ve got a table booked at the pub in the village.”

Unbelievable. “You little minx.” 

One of the reasons Holly and your brother bought a holiday home in Scotland was to be able to spend more time with Holly’s family. While she grew up in London and has never left it, her mum’s side of the family are all in Scotland.

Holly giggled, obviously delighted with herself. “Sorry. We’re set to arrive in about two hours.”

“But where are you staying?”

“My Nan’s house.”

“Not got a spare room, has she?” You mumbled.

“I know you don’t mean that, but she doesn’t. We’re staying on her pullout.”

“Damn.”

“We’re gonna go straight there and then come to you afterwards, alright?”

You took a deep breath and stood up from your bench. “Yeah, alright. I’ll see you in a few hours, then.”

“Byeee!”

You were already making a beeline for the ice cream shop by the time she put the phone down.

It was a cute little parlour, like something straight out of a movie. Retro tiles covered the walls and floor in pinks and yellows, two long display freezers to the left full to the brim with every single flavour one could ever imagine. Tables spread across the right and spilled onto the street, and booths in the corner each had a miniature jukebox on top.

“How can I help you?” A man behind the counter asked, dressed in a full uniform complete with the little hat.

“Hi, um,” you gave him the best smile you could, even if you were overwhelmed, “do you have any gluten free cones?”

“Sure,” he gestured to the stand on the top with a variety of cones, from small to ridiculously large in size, “just this one.”

The cone in question was the most pathetic-looking of them all. You did your absolute best to hide your disappointment. “Great, then I’ll have one of those. Chocolate, please.”

“Which type?” He lifted a brow.

You realised then that there were about ten different chocolate flavours. “Er… which is the best one in your opinion?”

That perked him up. He spent the next five minutes listing off reasons why the chocolate and hazelnut flavour was his most popular of all his options.

“I guess that’s the one I want, then.” You forced another smile.

“Coming right up.”

Something made you shiver, but it wasn’t a gust of wind or the freezers you stood by.

“At least try and act like you’re excited about it.” A deep voice murmured, far too close to your ear for your liking.

You practically hissed and took a very purposeful step away. “Jesus, Harry.”

He laughed, but the sound wasn’t spiteful like it usually would be. “Only you could make ice cream seem rubbish.”

“I don’t think ice cream is rubbish,” Was your only retort. You just wished gluten free cones didn’t look so fucking sad.

The owner handed you your cone and you paid him in cash. “Do you have WiFi in here?”

“Sure. Password’s on the wall up there.” He pointed at a laminated sign, and then turned his attention to Harry. “Hey, aren’t you that guy?”

Your cue to leave.

While Harry had an awkward conversation with the parlour owner about which guy he was, you connected to the internet and took a seat on the patio outside with your back to the sun. A satisfied hum left you at the warmth on your skin. You concentrated on demolishing your ice cream before you made a mess of yourself.

Unfortunately, Harry decided today wasn’t the day he was going to leave you alone. He sat down opposite you with a three-flavour cone, the colours unsettlingly unnatural. He looked uncomfortable, and this time it wasn’t because of you.

“What on Earth is that?”

“This is a masterpiece.” At least he could still behave like an idiot even when he’d been ‘spotted’.

“It looks disgusting.”

You watched him with a deep-seated discomfort as he shamelessly licked around his cone. Unfiltered moans came out of his mouth, but you were certain he was acting up for your benefit.

“What flavours are they?” You just had to ask.

“Mint chocolate, bubblegum and ginger.”

“Ginger?” You almost choked on a hazelnut. “Sir, you have a serious problem.”

He laughed again, that same obnoxiously easy sound as before. “Did you just call me sir?”

“I did and I immediately regret it.”

He made a noise, an amused squeak of sorts. “Why did you look so horrified by yours, anyway?”

You shifted in your chair, having just popped the end of the cone in your mouth. You glanced over your shoulder to make sure the owner wasn’t listening, pleased to find him distracted by a large family. “The gluten free options for cones was utter shite.”

“How so?”

“Well, he only had one type, and it was poxy as shit.”

He snorted. “I thought it looked small. I don’t imagine it being a lot of fun.”

You were immediately reminded of the croissant he’d picked up for you. You knew that you needed to say thank you, even if it did feel like taking a punch in the gut. “Thank you for the pastry.”

He paused mid-lick as if you’d just spoken a foreign language. He looked ridiculous and almost child-like, green eyes wide and pupils so narrow thanks to the sun they were barely visible. He rescued a drip before he made a mess. “Welcome. How is your…” he tapped his temple.

“Yeah, better.”

“Good.”

You returned to silence, and you got busy looking for a new place to stay. The options were… lacking. You knew the decision to go away during the school holidays would be a silly one anyway, but you wanted the heat. You wanted a summer holiday. Not a cold and wet one. But at such late notice in an area with limited options to begin with, all that was really left were large houses for groups of ten or places miles and miles away that would cost yet more money to travel to. The only other thing you could think of was buying a tent and pitching up on a nearby campsite, but you fucking hated tents and camping.

As time wore on and Harry’s ice cream disappeared, you noticed him growing more restless. You glanced up a couple of times to find him with his head down, but you eventually figured out the source of his discomfort. He was shooting looks at something over your shoulder while constantly readjusting his ball cap.

You straightened in your seat and twisted yourself slightly to get a better look.

“Don’t turn around.” He muttered without looking at you.

You frowned. “Why?”

He never gave you an answer so you did it anyway. A couple of tables over someone was doing a very bad job at hiding their phone.

For God’s sake. 

“Do you want to swap seats?” You offered.

He gave you a startled look, and admittedly you were surprised at your own suggestion. “No.”

“You sure? The back of your head is way less appealing than the front of it.”

You could see the confusion spread across his face and you wished immediately that you could take your words back. He was too wound up to mention it now, but you knew he definitely would in the future.

“They’ve already got about fifteen minutes worth of pictures, there’s no point moving now.” He huffed and readjusted the hat on his head once more, eyes downcast.

You pursed your lips in thought. After a moment you readjusted your seat so that you were hopefully positioned right in the way. Harry gave you a blank look, eyes still darting to the people behind you.

“Do you want to go?”

“Not particularly.”

You knew what he meant. He shouldn’t have to leave just because other people didn’t know how to behave like normal human beings.

A minute later the table behind you stood and left, so something had at least worked.

“Thank you.” He said it so quietly you nearly missed it. “Your lack of subtlety was almost entertaining.”

You weren’t offended by that. You hadn’t meant to be subtle. “I know we don’t get on but I respect your privacy. You should’ve asked them to delete it.”

“Then it just makes me look like a prick.”

“But you are a prick.”

He broke into another laugh. That laugh that held no malice or spite. The one he’d only debuted today. Then he slid back to stoicism. “I’ll be all over the Daily Mail again tomorrow anyway.”

Something weird happened. Anger materialised in your chest, and it wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling in the slightest. What was unusual was that it came on Harry’s behalf. Usually you felt this way because of Harry, not for him.

You cleared your throat. “It’s okay to tell people to fuck off every once in a while, Harry.”

“Not when you’re me, it isn’t.”

“It is when people don’t know how to set boundaries.”

“Don’t worry about it. Seriously.” He readjusted his cap again and sunk further into his seat. “Not the first time I’ve been spotted on holiday.”

“With a mystery woman, no less.”

He snorted. “Sorry in advance.”

“For what?”

“You’re about to become the most interesting person on the planet. I’d privatise your Instagram.”

“It already is. Nor is it very interesting.”

“Just… I don’t know. I know what they’re like.”

“You think I give a shit what a bunch of people on the internet think about me?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“Have I ever given a shit what anyone else has thought about me?”

He tipped his head. “No.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s their boundaries I’m worried about.”

“Don’t be. If those pictures do make it anywhere, I’ll have no problem telling the next person to fuck off if it comes to it.”

The smallest smile tugged at his lips. “Then I really hope for their sake that there isn’t a next time.”

~

You hadn’t left the parlour until you’d come up with a solution to your living arrangement. It took longer than you’d like, but eventually you settled for the only option; in two weeks you’d let Harry have the cabin and move into an AirBnB a few towns over. A bungalow this time with a very big bed. You’d had to fork out a deposit since it was a booking of more than 7 nights, which put another lovely dent in your bank balance. You were really trying not to think about it. 

Harry hadn’t passed comment when you told him. He just gave a blank stare and a curt nod, which was very unlike him. When it came to you, he’d never had any problem parting with his opinions.

You’d been ambushed on your way back to the cabin by your brother and Holly. After changing and freshening up you all walked down to the pub together to meet Holly’s Nanna. You had met her at the wedding but only briefly. Your brother and Holly’s special day had been somewhat dampened by the fact that Harry materialised again whenever you forgot about him and ended up drinking yourself into an early bedtime. The next morning you were rewarded with the worst hangover of your entire life.

Nanna was amazing. One of those larger than life women who weren’t afraid to drop the c word a couple of times without so much as batting an eyelid, and using Malibu as an excuse for a good time. You’d been seated on a round table which relieved you to no end. You were sandwiched between Nanna and your brother which meant there was a decent amount of distance between you and Harry.

“I need you to tell me something.” Nanna patted your arm, giving you her full attention.

It was like being addressed by royalty. “Anything.”

“I hear there’s a story about your brother involving nappies and toothpaste. A serial offence. He won’t tell me and Holly conveniently doesn’t know about it.”

You gave your brother a look.

“Please don’t.” He begged.

“But Nanna asked so nicely.”

“You’re about to embarrass me in front of the man I work for?”

You don’t look at Harry. “It’s not like you haven’t managed that all by yourself on previous occasions.”

“Yeah, don’t stop on my account.” Harry coughed, battling laughter.

“Great, we’re all on the same page.” You grinned. You turned back to Nanna, “Once upon a time, my little brother had to sleep in a crib and wear nappies just like all the other babies. He was cute, it should be said. I have a picture on my phone somewhere of him running around the garden with no clothes on.”

Your brother rolled his eyes and sunk into his seat with a scowl. Holly gave him a patronising pat on the shoulder.

“Anyway, beside the point. Like most toddlers he was an absolute tyrant, compared to me - I was an angel.”

“Hard to believe.” Harry muttered.

“Aye,” Nanna shot him a look. She’d been smitten with him all night until that point.

“Don’t worry about it - we’re in an ongoing feud.” You brushed the matter away and continued with your story. “During his reign of tyranny, he adopted a very obscure but passionate obsession with toothpaste. Colgate Cool Stripe only - no other product lived up to his expectations. It all started when, one day, our mother accidentally used adult toothpaste instead of the toddler stuff. An uphill battle began.

“Any time he had to clean his teeth, he’d try and use Colgate instead of the kiddy stuff, and mum or dad would fight with him until he surrendered in a screaming fit and had a toothbrush forced into his face hole.”

Someone sniggered, and your chest inflated. Making people laugh had always pleased you.

“His addiction got so bad, one night he managed to escape from his cot and into Mum and Dad’s bathroom. They found him on the floor with an empty tube and Colgate smushed all over his cute little face. Hours later he had a terrible accident. I won’t go into graphic detail since we’ve just had our dinner.”

Nanna started laughing, a throaty and hoarse sound. Given the amount of times she’d excused herself for a cigarette, you attributed that habit to the unique noise. “And this happened more than once?”

You nodded. “They tried locking it in the cabinet a few times, but he’d always find it. Eventually they changed tactics and just bought Aquafresh instead.”

Nanna hummed and gave him a pointed look. “I’ve always thought you were a picky bastard.”

“Nanna,” Holly gasped, shaking with laughter. She leaned her forehead against her husband’s shoulder.

“I can’t be that picky if I ended up with your granddaughter.”

Holly threw her hands up. “Does anyone else want to bully me today? Between that and being called very stupid I think I might have room for one more insult.”

“Your shoes don’t go with your dress.” Nanna said.

After a beat of silence, the table erupted into laughter.

The waiter returned to offer dessert, which you would usually forego since pubs rarely tended to offer gluten free choices without putting up a fight. You’d learned to live a sad, dessert-less existence. But everyone else was having one so you succumbed to peer pressure.

“What ice cream flavours do you have?”

“For the sundae?” The young girl asked with a confused frown.

“No, I’m coeliac so I can’t have it.”

“Oh,” her cheeks turned pink, which was not your intention, “sorry. Um, just the usual flavours, then.”

Neopolitan.

“Great, can I have two scoops of chocolate.”

“Sure.”

She was very quick to hurry off. Something bothered you about that whole exchange but you couldn’t put your finger on it.

“Aren’t you bored of chocolate ice cream?” Harry asked, but he was fiddling with his napkin rather than looking at you.

“Never.”

Holly kicked his leg under the table but you pretended not to notice.

After the bill was settled, which Harry tried to sneak off and pay for without telling anyone, you bid goodbye to each other and sent your brother, Holly and Nanna off together in a taxi. The waitress hadn’t stopped giving you wary glances ever since you asked for ice cream, and you still couldn’t place what went wrong. You might have been a little short with her but it wasn’t meant with any malice.

It didn’t really dawn on you what was wrong until you were walking up the hill to the cabin with Harry.

A curdling feeling in your stomach had you feeling very queasy very quickly.

“Oh no.” You mumbled, keeping your gaze on the grass below you. Your vision swung and you struggled to keep your balance.

“What’s wrong?” Harry asked, turning back to you. He’d been a couple of metres ahead of you for the entire walk so you didn’t have to force a conversation.

You sat down on the grass to keep yourself gravitated, but it was no good. You weren’t nauseous because you were dizzy, you were dizzy because you were sick.

You spent the next ten minutes vomiting into the bushes.

Harry had kept a relative distance from you while you were sick, only handing you a bottle of water when you seemed to give up the last of your stomach contents and take a big breath.

“Are you okay?” He asked in a cautious voice.

Unattractively, you swilled your mouth out and then necked the remaining contents of the bottle. “Yeah, fine.”

“What happened?”

“I think something went wrong at dinner.”

“What do you mean?”

You gave him a levelled look, trying to communicate with your eyes. It seemed like a ridiculous idea considering you could barely communicate together with words, let alone silent glances.

“Ah… did it say gluten free on the menu?”

You nodded.

“Did you tell them?”

You shook your head. Sometimes you liked to put faith in humanity and believe you’d be fine putting yourself in the hands of others. When you were dining with practical strangers, making a fuss about your condition made you feel like a twat, so you kept quiet about it. Now you wish you’d said something.

“Are you gonna make a complaint?”

You shook your head furiously and readjusted yourself to sit back on your arse rather than your knees. “Happens all the time, sadly.”

“That girl knew they’d fucked up, didn’t she?”

“You saw that?”

“I saw you looking at her a lot after the ice cream thing.”

You made a strange noise. “It is what it is. I don’t blame her for not saying anything. For all she knows I could be going home unscathed.”

“But you’re not.”

“Don’t worry about it, Harry. I’m not into making a scene.”

“You could’ve been seriously ill.”

“I know that.”

“If you don’t tell them they fucked up, how are they going to know to stop it from happening to someone else in the future?”

You took a deep breath and looked up to the sky. You and Harry had made progress today, on some weird level, but this was not part of that progress. “Fine. I’ll do something about it tomorrow.”

“No you won’t.”

“Leave it alone, Harry!” You finally snapped. “How I handle my health issues is none of your fucking business, especially when you haven’t got a fucking clue what it’s like to have them. Just drop it.”

His jaw ticked. “Fine.”

He disappeared up the hill and into the cabin without so much as another word.

You collapsed onto your back and let a tight sob wrack through you.

You contemplated what the fuck you were doing. This holiday had been nothing but a shit show from start to day 2 and you didn’t want to do it anymore. You should’ve gone home this morning. You’d refused to quit so early on given how long it had been since you had any real time off, but the universe was clearly working against you and you wished you hadn’t bothered.

As it always did, a second round of vomiting ensued, and you were back on your hands and knees hacking up bile while your stomach protested. You cried more as you threw up.

As the convulsions subsided you collapsed onto your back again, but the smell of it was starting to affect you. Slowly, you stood on shaky legs and attempted to make your way up to the cabin.

You hadn’t realised, but Harry was standing at the top of the hill wearing a frown, hands shoved into his pockets. When you caught sight of him you were ashamed. You knew what he’d said came from a good place, but it just really ground your gears when people who had no idea what it was like tried to tell you how to handle it.

He made his way back to you and silently placed his hand on the small of your back. It was warm and unfamiliar, but you couldn’t work out if the trembling from you was because of that or because you were just sick.

“How much more did you see?” You asked, helpless.

He gave you a startled look, like he was shocked to hear you so vulnerable. “Enough.”

You sighed and kept your gaze on the floor, trying not to fall over.

“Do you have any medication or anything?”

You shook your head. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

Once you got to the cabin you headed straight for the bathroom and changed into your pyjamas. You then poured yourself a glass of water and took it to bed with you. You were asleep within seconds.

~

You slept through the night that night. When you woke you felt a shit-ton better than you had the night before, and it left you with a smile on your face. You wriggled your legs and toes underneath the sheets and stretched your arms.

You realised the bed was empty, but when you peeled an eye open it was obvious Harry had slept on his side at some point. You sat up to an empty room. There was no sign of Harry, again.

You didn’t know much about Harry’s daily routine but you would put money on him being an early morning runner. You shivered at the thought.

He appeared whilst you were in the middle of your second round of toast. It was the only thing you could think to try and stomach after yesterday’s disaster. Harry was in regular clothes, not running attire. You owed yourself a fiver.

“Ah,” he paused at the sight of you eating toast, and limply lifted his hand. The same greasy brown paper bag rustled in his grip.

“Don’t be shy.” You patted the table after swallowing your mouthful. “I’ll still eat it.”

“You’re that hungry?”

You couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s what happens when you’re forced to empty your entire stomach contents.”

His nose wrinkled. “Right.”

You took a sip of coffee while he made himself comfortable in the seat opposite you. 

“How do you feel?”

“Well, I slept the night through and didn’t hit my head this morning which is a major improvement on yesterday.”

“That’s something. Do you feel right enough to go out?”

“If I weren’t on holiday I’d be right back to work, Harry. No rest for the wicked and all.”

“Is that a yes, then?” He cocked a brow.

“Yes, Harry.”

“Okay. I was gonna go down to the lake… it’s really warm out.”

“Are you telling me, or is that an invitation?”

He picked his pastry apart. “Both? I don’t know, it might do you some good.”

Concern? From your nemesis? This was bad. “Oh, don’t go coy on me, Harry. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Knew I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“That’s more like it.”

His mouth lifted at the corner for the shortest fraction of a second.

“Is it pebbly or sandy?”

An olive branch.

“Both?”

The worst kind of lake beach, then. “The type that calls for a special type of shoe.”

He grimaced. “I know.”

“It’s fine. We make do.” You pronounced, and stood from the table with your dirty things. “Give me 20 minutes and we’ll go.”

~

“That alright?”

You peered up at the man blocking the sun with a pinched look. He stood before you in a faded white t-shirt and board shorts, holding an ice cream cone with a single chocolate scoop on top.

“As long as it’s the right cone, it’s perfect.”

“I double checked.” He promised as he handed it to you, and then sat with his own.

This was day four on the beach by the lake. While you and Harry spent the time there together, you did your own thing. He spent most of his time in the water like a fucking fish, and you spent yours on a towel with a book and enough food to feed the 5,000.

You’d found a tolerable medium with Harry. In the day you gave each other your needed space, and at night time you tried not to touch each other in bed. Or smother each other. So far it had worked well.

You hadn’t seen Holly or your brother since that night at dinner. They’d actually been visiting for a relative’s birthday party and had already gone home, leaving you and Harry to suffer together.

“I think you’re running low on your special bread.”

You snorted and covered your mouth. ‘Special bread’ made you sound like some kind of escaped lunatic.

“I don’t know why I said it like that.” Harry shook his head. “But the fact remains.”

“We’re running low on a lot.”

“Maybe we should go shopping.”

You groaned. This is what your life had come to: grocery shopping with a celebrity.

“I’ll make it as painless as possible.”

“Where even is the nearest supermarket?”

“I don’t know - I went shopping on the way here.”

“So did I.”

Has there ever been a more ridiculous conversation?

Harry found his phone and checked for signal, soon letting out a soft sigh. “Five weeks without WiFi was a stupid idea.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

You decided to check a map on the notice board outside the public toilets on the lake site and decided there must be a supermarket in the nearest town. Harry drove you out into the Scottish countryside following his sat-nav’s directions to the closest town.

It was a little odd being in the same car as him. While your brother’s work relationship and subsequent marriage had brought him into your life for many a family gathering, you’d never found yourself in quite such a confined space as this. Apart from the bed situation. You were certain he was being quiet on your behalf, because silence was better than small talk. The decision to go shopping had proven that much.

“Unbelievable.” He muttered the second you entered the supermarket.

You followed his nervous gaze to a man with a camera doing a shitty job at hiding. “Go back to the car if you want to.”

“Hardly fair.”

“Being uncomfortable isn’t fair.” You insisted. “Go take a drive and be back here in half an hour. I don’t mind.”

He sighed and handed you the list you’d prepared before leaving. “I’ll be back.”

“Yes, please don’t use this opportunity to abandon me here.”

He smirked. “Don’t put ideas in my head.” He took his wallet out of his pocket and handed you his card. “Use that.”

You frowned at it, and then him in turn. “I don’t mind paying for it.”

“Pay with my card and then send me half when you find signal or internet or whatever.” He turned away, but threw, “Half an hour,” over his shoulder.

You had to take a moment to collect yourself. Now you weren’t grocery shopping with a celebrity, you were using one’s credit card.

Before you started your shopping, you had one more thing you had to do. Stalking the man who was stalking your reluctant companion was easy because he didn’t try very hard to be subtle. You tapped him on the shoulder.

He spun around with a bewildered look on his face. “Yes?”

“Delete them.”

~

True to his word, Harry returned half an hour later with a confusing smile. “Guess what I found.”

You let him take the bags out of your hands to shove them in the boot of his car. “What?”

“A fucking Costa.”

“No way…”

“Yes way.” He grinned.

“Where?”

“Literally around the corner.” He thumbed in that general direction. “I got two ‘cause I didn’t know which one you liked.”

“As long as it’s got coffee in it, I’ll consume it.”

Sure enough, two starkly different iced coffees sat in the cup holders in his central console. 

“Which one do you want?” You asked. He did buy them after all.

“I don’t mind. You choose.”

“Please pick one.”

“No.”

“Harry.”

“Fine.” He plucked one at random and started drinking as he pulled off. “Happy?”

“Yes. Thank you.” And you meant it, too.

Silence settled between you again as you slurped away at your coffee. It was comfortable this time. You put the window down and stuck your arm out to feel the breeze through your fingers.

“Do you ever wonder how we got so…”

You looked over at him with a curious expression, but he never finished his sentence. “What?”

Harry shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Oh, come on, Harry.” You poked his arm. “You’ve never been one to mince your words in front of me before. Don’t start now.”

His lips twitched with a smile, but it was quickly replaced by something else. A kind of sad contemplation. “I don’t want to ruin a rare nice day.”

Now you were the one struggling to find words. Animosity was just the default practice for you and Harry when you were around each other. After so many years of battling over often ridiculous things, he was right. This was a rare nice day. You hadn’t argued once. Come to think of it, you hadn’t argued at all since the day you were sick. That little spat on the hill was the last one.

But curiosity ate away at you. What was he going to say that had the potential to ruin your good time? Knowing Harry, it could be any number of things.

“I promise I won’t lose my shit if you tell me.”

His face lit up with amusement, but he never laughed. “Shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Right there, in that single moment, you were reminded just why the world had an obsession with the man sitting beside you. Even in the blandest setting, Harry Styles looked like the man who would promise you everything you’ve ever wanted and be able to deliver it to you. The man who held enough charisma both on and off stage for a hundred other men. The man with pretty eyes and pretty pink lips. The man who looked damn good whether he was clean-shaven or harbouring two weeks of scruff like he was now. The man who would spoil you to no end, who would give you a life of comfort and stability, who would drop everything at a second’s notice to be yours. Fuck, he looked like the man who might even die for you.

You’d seen Harry in love and the man gave his whole fucking heart and soul to the person he was with. His inherent attractiveness was just a bonus.

“Tell me, please.” You tried again.

He considered it for a moment, chewing the inside of his cheek. Eventually he sighed, “Do you ever wonder how things managed to get so bad? Between us?”

Ah.

A loaded question, indeed.

“Do you want the honest answer?”

He glanced your way, jaw suddenly tense. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t tend to wonder about it because I haven’t forgotten at all how we did.”

“Walk me through it.”

“Are you sure you want that?”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from the most honest woman I know.”

You were biding your time, mulling over your response. Perhaps this would ruin your nice day, but this was the most open conversation the two of you were ever going to have. Not talking about it would be both a missed opportunity and a disservice to yourself.

“Okay. You’re not going to like it, though.”

“I didn’t expect to.”

You took a deep breath. “The first time I met you didn’t go at all how I expected it to. In hindsight I guess, to you, I would’ve just been a footnote. Your friends have other friends you probably meet all the time and I was just one of the next hundred. Holly and my brother had only just started dating, but Holly and I got on so well we started doing things together as friends without him. She invited me to lunch with… you know, the usual suspects.”

He nodded once, slowly. The usual suspects he wasn’t speaking to anymore for various different reasons. You didn’t keep tabs on Harry’s life by choice, but Holly and the internet provided more about it than you cared for.

“Maybe you were just young. Or maybe there was something different that I just missed or didn’t understand, but you weren’t at all like I expected you to be. Everyone - my brother, Holly, my parents -, everyone said you were amazing. ‘The nicest boy you’ll ever meet’. And sure, you were nice. Charming, even. And you had everyone’s undivided attention, including Holly’s. And mine. But Holly’s more so.

“That girl loves you. And I watched her love you up close and personal and it was amazing and beautiful and I really wanted her to give just even a portion of that love to my brother. And she did, but it didn’t come without a fight.

“I didn’t care that you spent most of that lunch ignoring everyone else at the table. Or maybe I did. I just knew that you only cared about Holly’s undivided attention and she had no quarrels giving it to you. There was a time I thought you might be secretly in love with each other,” you laughed at the reminder because it seemed stupid now, “but when I brought it up with her she laughed so hard she cried and then pretended to vomit.”

“Damn,” Harry produced an offended laugh. “Didn’t know I was that repulsive.”

“Anyway, it didn’t stop her from loving you. Never has. Soon after, I spent a week with her and my brother in Spain on some all-inclusive thing. Before you ask, I was forced to go. Being a third-wheel is absolutely not my style.”

He chuckled. “I didn’t think it sounded like you.”

You shook your head. “Not at all. Anyway, I watched Holly send constant photos, messages, gifs, any and all digital media to you while we were on that holiday, cataloguing the entire thing. I don’t think you realise how many times I heard oh Harry’s gonna love this. But what got me is you never replying to her. Not once. Her phone screen was just a sea of blue messages against a backdrop of silence. At one point I considered she’d got the wrong number, but then you texted her the day we left with something really dull and generic and I really wanted to hit you.”

“I don’t remember this at all.” He admitted, face paled.

“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a busy man. I reminded myself of that a lot to start off with, but the whole thing became a recurring pattern. Maybe you think I’m stupid and it’s a bit of an overreaction for it, but I’m quite observant when I want to be. You’re Holly’s best friend, even if she’s not yours. Every time she says it, it’s like she’s been given the greatest gift in the entire world. And she’s such a bright, incredible person. She’s my best friend. Not just because she’s married to my brother, but because she’s the best person I’ve ever met and nothing will ever change that.

“Over the years I’ve watched countless messages and phone calls from her to you go unanswered, seen her face turn down with sadness when you don’t call her back or text out a reply. She deserves more than that. 

“I’ve noticed you do it to my brother, too. I know he works for you so maybe it’s not the same, but it’s safe to say that in their house, Harry Styles isn’t a name that lights up their phone screens very often. Ever.”

Harry fidgeted a little and cleared his throat. “All this time I thought I’d done something to you.”

“No. Worse. You continually managed to upset my best friend, even if you didn’t know it, and in turn you upset me.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“It’s not me you need to apologise to, Harry. She’ll never admit that she’s hurt by your silence because she doesn’t want to lose you. This is why we’re so very different. I don’t hang around for people who don’t appreciate the good they have in their life. I’m a good person, and Holly is an even better one. She deserves more than your attention when she’s only sat in front of you.”

“You’re right. I’m an idiot.”

“Yes you are.”

His lips twitched again. “The next time I’m in the village with signal I’ll call her. Promise.”

“Don’t promise me. Promise yourself, and her. One day she might snap and decide she doesn’t want to wait for months at a time to hear from you. Because hearing about you through my brother doesn’t count.”

“I know. I get it, I really do…”

“Good. Now, my turn.” You let out a long breath and turned in your seat. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you-,”

“You called me both insufferable and intolerable in the space of five minutes when I got here.”

“Let me finish.” He said, exasperated. “I don’t hate you, I’m scared of you.”

“Calling someone intolerable because you’re scared of them doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, let’s put it this way. While perhaps you were right, at first I thought you were just another friend of a friend who’d made an appearance for uncertain reasons, it became apparent very quickly that you weren’t going anywhere. It also became very apparent that you were not my biggest fan. That first lunch was one of a kind because you barely said a word. Every other time after that, which I now realise happened to be family-oriented, you hardly shut up.

“I’ve always noticed it. You command the attention of everyone in the room. You’re a storyteller. You could turn an anecdote about a trip to the petrol station into a fairytale. You give everyone in the room your undivided attention, and when I realised you never gave it to me, well… safe to say I was wounded. Holly talked you up to high heaven. Your brother loves you. My own mother loves you even though we don’t get on.

“There’s something about you. And the fact that the only attention you ever gave me was a dirty look or a snippy remark made me petty. So I started giving it back, and I think the more I did it, the more I lost sight of the kind of person you actually are, because I only focused on the side you showed to me.”

He turned into the driveway of the cabin, and you thought he was done. But when the engine shut off, he said one last thing.

“In one of your many little outbursts you said I’ve got a severe case of oosoom syndrome. I never bothered to look it up because I didn’t want to know what kind of idiot you thought I was, but it’s just clicked.”

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

He nodded and turned to you with a calm gaze. “I get it now.” He wasn’t just talking about the idiom.

“Good.”

~

The rain was back and heavier than ever. The ground surrounding the cabin was a swamp, the hill that led down to the village was indiscernible thanks to the downpour, and the day was dark and moody. Inside the cabin it was muggy and humid and you felt ridiculous sitting at the dining table in a vest and denim shorts, but you were.

Harry sitting opposite you looked more rugged than usual. His hair was pulled back with a clip, his stubble was shifting into a beard and his clothes were wrinkled.

“Hmm…” He gave an obnoxious tap on his chin.

You rolled your eyes and sunk into the seat. “Just put me out of my misery and show me your cards.”

He laughed, peering at you with a lightness in his eyes that was so unfamiliar it almost had you shell shocked. “Fine.” He placed his hand on the table showcasing his win.

It was day three of this charade. It hadn’t stopped raining and all you’d done was cycle between card games and Monopoly. He always won. You were so fed up of him winning that this was the last straw.

You stood and swiped his hand off the table so that they landed in a flurry on the wooden cabin floor. 

“Hey…” he pouted.

“That was childish of me, I’m sorry.” You groaned, and crouched down to pick them up. “I’m so bored, Harry. I think I’m going mad. We don’t even have a TV. We’re in the middle of nowhere with a pack of cards missing the Ace of Spades and Queen of Hearts and an old beat up Monopoly box with half the properties missing.”

He blinked at me. “I know this. I’ve been with you the whole time.”

“Sorry.” You muttered. “When I’m frustrated I just state the obvious.”

“But I thought that was my job.”

You rolled your head back and sighed at the ceiling. “I need to do something. Anything. I don’t want to sit in here anymore. I need air.”

“It’s pissing it down.”

“I’m aware. You have a car… just humour me for a bit. An hour tops.”

“You want me to drive you around for an hour? In a smaller space than we’re already in?”

“Okay, fine,” you sat back down in your chair and attempted to plead with the normal side of him, the non-celebrity side, “what if… when me and my brother were little and we went away with Mum and Dad, if the weather was crap like this we’d get in the car and drive to the nearest supermarket. And we’d have lunch in the cafe and then do a bit of shopping and then come back. And we’d all get one thing to bide the time before the weather got better again. Why don’t we do that?”

A smile was forming on his lips. “You want to try shopping with me again?”

“That prick and his fancy camera won’t be going back there, trust me.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why, what did you do?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.” You patted his hand. “Please, Harry. Rescue me from insanity.”

“Fine, but only ‘cause you asked so nicely.”

“Yay!” You stood and clapped your hands together. “I’m gonna change.”

Half an hour later you were back at the supermarket in the town over and ready to find as much new entertainment as possible.

“Do you think we should buy them a TV?” Harry contemplated aloud as he stood in front of a large flatscreen.

You gave him a scrutinous look. “And put it where?”

“Good point.” He sighed. “We’re missing Love Island.”

You barked a laugh and carried it down the aisle with you. “That is not what I expected you to mourn over.”

“I’m full of surprises.”

You found your way to the games and books. “Can we get a jigsaw puzzle?”

“Why are you asking me? Get whatever you want, mate.”

You perused the options with as much interest as a car fanatic in a vintage car garage. “Farmyard or harbour? Or circus? Or mountains?”

“Whichever will keep you occupied for the longest.” He said absently, moving down the aisle to the board games.

The circus one had the most pieces and highest level of difficulty, so you plucked the box off the shelf and followed after him. “Have they got the Game of Life?”

He started laughing but never answered you.

“Oh,” you pouted, tapping the spin-off version that was much shorter and way less entertaining.

“Bop-It?” 

“When I was little I completed that.”

He raised a brow at you. “Can you even complete Bop-It?”

“Yes,” you snatched the box off the shelf, “and I will prove it to you when we get back.”

“We’ll see about that.” He whispered, smirking. “We need an actual board game.”

You gazed over the options with the same level of interest as the jigsaws. “You choose. I’ve picked the last two.”

“Absolutely not, I’ll only pick wrong.”

“What’s your favourite?”

“Cluedo.”

“Then get Cluedo.” You pointed at it and walked away.

Two hours later and three books heavier you were back at the cabin and starting your jigsaw puzzle. You and Harry sat on your claimed sides of the table, box lid propped against the window and a selection of snacks between you.

“Where the fuck is the fourth corner?” You grumbled, digging through the box like a cat in a litter tray.

Harry glanced at the box lid, then at the jumbled selection of tiles, and plucked it out without hesitation. “There y’go.”

You blinked at him. “Is there anything you’re not good at?” You pinched it from him and placed it in the relevant corner. “Thank you.”

“A compliment and gratitude? It is a good day.”

You stuck your tongue out at him.

“I’m not very good at the splits.”

That made you laugh, right from the back of your throat. “Have you tried?”

“Many times.”

“For what purpose?”

“I had a thing for my yoga instructor once and she was convinced I could do it so I kept trying just to impress her.”

“My God, you are a sap.”

“Pathetic, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice to know you failed at something for such a pitiful reason.”

He gave you such a megawatt smile you had to look away. “I’m just like any other boy.”

“I can’t believe you had to try hard to impress anyone. It almost doesn’t seem natural.”

“You make me sound like a robot.”

“I don’t think you’re a robot. I just think sometimes things seem to come a little too easily to you. Skills. Work. Friends. Women. Probably men, too. Some of us have to try really hard to get those things.”

“You have friends. A good job. And I refuse to believe people aren’t interested in you… romantically.”

You lifted a brow at him. “Refuse?”

“Are they not?”

“Have you ever known me to be ‘romantically’ involved with anyone?”

“Yeah, that lad you took to your brother’s wedding.”

Colin.

“He’s gay.”

“Oh.” He scratched his nose. “I wondered why he kept eyeing up one of the groomsmen. Your cousin?”

“Also gay.”

“Have you never had a boyfriend?”

“Not since school, no.”

“Have you… are you… you know?”

You gave him another raised brow. “You’re not seriously asking me that.”

He rubbed his hands down his face and groaned. “I’m sorry. Ignore me.”

“Just because I haven’t had relationships, doesn’t mean I’m a virgin, Harry.”

The tips of his ears turned pink. “I think we’ve gone a bit off track here.”

“You’re tellin’ me.”

He slotted a piece into place next to one of the corners. You slotted another one in after that. The pattern repeated itself, in silence, for the next twenty minutes.

“When do you go to your AirBnB?”

You met his gaze with a calm expression. “Six days. Five nights.”

“Okay.” He said as he stood. “Are you hungry enough for dinner yet?”

“If you are, we can eat.”

He gave a stiff nod. “Okay.”

~~~

Part 2

Talk to me?

[housewarningparty]

book asks: 3, 6, 10, 11, 20

3. What were your top five books of the year?

Red X by David Demchuk - this was the first book I read this year and it's stuck with me this WHOLE time. It's a tough book to describe succinctly - it's a supernatural horror novel fictionalizing the events surrounding the very real disappearances of men in Toronto's gay village between the 70s and the 00s, but interspersed with non-fiction essays by the author. The relationship between queerness and horror is one that's fascinating to me and Demchuk really tears into it here. Cannot recommend it highly enough, though I'd check storygraph for triggers if you're a sensitive reader.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield - one part moody, existential relationship novel, one part Lovecraftian body horror. It's gorgeously written, bracingly sad, and the dread is smothering. Very atmospheric and contemplative, while still maintaining a sense of urgency.

Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk - this was so much fun. It combines a few things I love - a good noir detective story, some urban fantasy, lesbians. It follows a supernatural PI attempting to solve a series of grisly murders in 1940s Chicago - with her life on the line.

The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp - OKAY TALK ABOUT FUN. I listened to this on audiobook and really recommend the format, actually - the narrator was great. The book is presented as the posthumously published final book of Jack Sparks - think of the shittiest, most miserable VICE-style journalist you can imagine, now have him set out to disprove the existence of the supernatural, only to end up immediately possessed. Sounds good, right? It IS. I'm REALLY stoked to read more Arnopp next year

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold - the only non-fiction in my top 5 this year. This book, as you can probably tell, is a historical biography of the five "canonical" victims of Jack the Ripper. It's less true crime than you'd think - there's very little in the way of grisly details of the crimes. Instead, Rubenhold chooses to focus on putting together as compete as possible a biographical record of each of the women, while helpfully contextualizing the facts of their lives with details of Victorian-era life. The dismal similarities between recent "culture war" rhetoric and the attitudes of Victorian moralists were striking, depressing, and vital to understand. It made this book feel even more timely.

6. Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?

ooh yeah a bunch. I have a bunch of sequels I mean to read and didn't get to - most notably the last two books of the Foundryside series and A Desolation Called Peace. Also The Thousand Eyes, which is the sequel to The Unspoken Name by AK Larkwood. God, I suck at sequels I'm so bad at reading sequels. I wanna get better. Also I was going to finally read Ghost Story by Peter Straub this month, but I haven't gotten to it. I'll save it for next year, I think.

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

Our Wives Under the Sea, I think. Really striking.

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

The most extreme example was probably Dracula which I happened to read like a month before Dracula Daily kicked off lmao. But yeah - I'm not super well read when it comes to pre-1900s fiction. I was surprised by how readable it was. Certainly not without its issues, but it was REALLY fun and now I've unlocked a whole literary canon of Dracula spin-off works. I'm so stoked.

20. What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?

So embarrassing but my most anticipated release was Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez which I haven't actually read yet. I bought myself a copy for Christmas! I'm gonna read it next year!

end of year book asks

[lateniteponders]

New Job, Part 4: The Final Part

Hey there! Sorry I’ve been MIA.

I am so happy that this is the last story of the SHITTIEST job I have ever had (yes, even worse than when I worked in a restaurant).

Well, when I last posted my schedule was TBD and I wasn’t t sure if I could get Aug 25-28 off for a family wedding.

WELL…we get our schedules during the 3rd week of training. I am prepared to get up and walk away if the schedule is an overnight shift, as that was not at all explained to me during the interview/onboarding process. I get my schedule, and it is 6:30AM-3:00PM Mon, Tues, Weds, Fri and Sat. I get Thurs and Sun off each week. Tad early, but “hey it could be worse” I thought to myself. HA HA HA.

Then, on Week 4 of training, they show us how to see our schedules online and how to navigate the schedule website….AND THEN THE BOMB. We are told that we are REQUIRED to work “Mandatory Overtime” and said OT is 6-8 hours/week. I’ve had a lot of jobs…NONE of them have forced me to work OT, it has all been voluntary. On top of this BS, I also discover this call center is 24/7, 365 days a year. Yep, that means you have to work holidays! I mean, you can ask off.. but the scheduling staff have to approve it…so basically no. At this point I am sending out applications left and right.

Then the wedding….after nagging and nagging I FINALLY get Mon 8/28 off. But not Fri 8/25…because I do not have enough PTO hours. “Can I take an unpaid day off?” NOPE. If you don’t have PTO, you don’t get off. Also you only get 4 hours of PTO every paycheck, which is bi-weekly, AIN’T THAT NEAT? AFTER THE OFFER LETTER SAID WE GET 15 DAYS OF PTO? Then the week of I ask to use 2.5 hours left in my PTO balance to leave at 3PM on 8/25 since we have to drive 4 hours to another state. This gets approved…..then I’m told I will get half a point on my attendance record for “leaving your shift early with notice”. I asked about this on Mon 8/21. HOW…JUST HOW? At this point I’m like fuck it, give me a whole point or half a point. Whatever.

We go to the wedding, have fun and get a break from our dogs and then come home…..then my coworker texts me. Remember that Mandatory OT? 7 hours has been assigned to me on my day off, Sun 9/3. I am outraged, because no notification has been sent to me about this. I’m able to work out a deal with my new supervisor and switch it to Thurs 8/31…..but that’s where it went downhill.

For the whole month of September I have been working around 50 hours every week. I’m dealing with nonstop phone calls about people and fraud on their cards…usually because they’re Boomers and click on links on Facebook or in spam emails. I am pulling 10 hour shifts to meet the OT requirement and in order to keep my days off, well, my days off. I am a miserable cunt. I worked, made dinner, fed the dogs and went to bed and repeated it again the next day.

Well after applying nonstop during my shift, because my only motivation was to not get fired, and having a few interviews…I finally land a new job! I gave the current shithole company 24 hours notice and their response was “OMG WHY WHAT HAPPENED?” And I fucking called them out on their BS. They send daily emails about how to have a “great work-life balance” and told them that was nonexistent for our team, that the supervisors were horrible with communication and that I was physically and mentally exhausted. They asked what they could do to change my mind. I told them to change my schedule and stop the OT…but the client wouldn’t like this. I dick around on my last shift and clock out at 3:30pm on Sat 9/23. Me and my husband go out drinking and have a grand ole time.

Then…the shit show of returning my work equipment begins. I fill out the form my boss sends me for FedEx and find a local Dollar General that can handle pick ups. Perfect right? No, because FedEx sends me a QR code and not an actual shipping label. And the Dollar General cannot scan or print labels. I live in a small town, in a rural area. The closest FedEx store that can scan and print labels? TWO hours away from me….across the state boarder. Fuck no. I then email and text my supervisor and FINALLY the IT teams sends me a PDF of the actually shipping label for printing. I took it to the library, printed it and took it & the box to the dollar general and dropped it off. DONE.

The New NEW job is going to get it’s own post, because they don’t deserve to be in the same post as ShitHole Company.

I’m glad to be rid of this shitty job and am actually excited to start the new NEW job lol 😊

[thats-the-teen-spirit]

damn 2022 is already out to get me, that was fast

[justsomegalwhoshere]

#1 Hair Stylist

Note: this was supposed to be short but turned out a lot longer than I expected. I blame @hanji-is-life is life for making me wanna write domestic shit, quit it 😤 plz never stop

Warnings: a bit of cursing because Bakugou is bakugou, not prof read, just domestic fluff

Being a pro-hero and being married to Dynamight himself wasn’t easy, but you managed. Having a family with said pro-hero is also tough, but you still manage (somehow). You and bakugou had a small family that consisted of two little girls, a 9 year old and a 6 year old. You loved your little family and always spent as much time as you could with them.

Today was not one of those days where you had time.

You had woken up late after snoozing your alarm 5 times (thank god Katsuki yelled at you to get up after the last time) and you were now running all over the place to get ready before you were late for your shift. As you started making lunch for your daughters before they head to school, you felt some tugging on your pants. You looked down and smiled seeing your 9 year old, Katsumi, looking up at you, holding a hairbrush.

“Morning sweetie. Did you sleep well?” You ask as you quickly stuff two sandwiches into two lunchboxes.

She nods and extends the hair brush as you run out the kitchen to retrieve your bag. “Mhm. Can you make my hair mom?” She asks as you return shoving your stuff in your bag.

You sigh and kneel down to face her. “I’m sorry honey, I’m in a rush so I have to leave soon, otherwise I would.”

Your daughter pouts and extends the hair brush harder. “But I want you to make my hair pretty for me” she whines.

You kiss her forehead and get up while slipping your shoes on. “I’m sorry kiddo, I can’t right now. Try asking your dad. Bye! Have a good day at school!” You shouted as you closed the door behind you.

Katsumi stared at the door as she kept pouting. You always did her hair in the morning. It wasn’t fair that you had to leave without making her hair. This was nonsense.

“You just gonna stand there all day squirt?” That made Katsumi turn around and face her father. Katsuki bakugou, the number 2 hero, 6’1, big and scary. At least, that’s how he looks to the rest of the world. When he’s with his family, he’s extremely soft. Bakugou only wanted the best for his girls, no matter what it was.

Katsumi decided to use that to her advantage.

She held up the hair brush once again. “Can you make my hair dad?”

Bakugou frowned. He saw you do the girls’ hair all the time, but he’s never done it once. He shrugged accepting the brush and following his daughter as she skipped to her room. How hard could it be?

...

“Ow! That hurts dad!”

“I’m trying ok!?” He yelled a bit harshly. Apparently brushing a 9 year olds hair was A LOT harder than it looks. He didn’t even know it was possible to get it this tangled.

“What did you do this morning that caused it to get this knotted!?”

“Nothing!” Katsumi shouted back. “All I did was sleep and get up!”

Note to self: get something that’ll make Katsumi stop tossing and turning In her sleep.

“Ok it’s all smooth now, I gotta eat” Bakugou said getting up, but was stopped by a small hand grabbing his own.

“You still haven’t styled it!” Katsumi replied with her 100th pout of the day.

Bakugou sighed and sat back down. “Ok, how do I do this?” He asked, grabbing what he assumed was a hair elastic.

“So you grab all the hair and tie it. And then you have a ponytail” she instructed.

...that had to be the worlds shittiest instruction, but Bakugou made do. After some yelling back and forth and some trial and error, Katsumi had a half decent ponytail in her hair.

“Thanks dad!” She chirped, jumping up and kissing his cheek.

“Yeah yeah, go eat breakfast, I gotta drop you and your sister off to school” Bakugou nearly growled.

“Daddy?” Bakugou saw the small head peak from the doorway. It was his 6 year old, Sakura.

“Can you make my hair too please daddy?”

Bakugou sighed. This was gonna be a rough morning.

...

Later that day, you two were making dinner while Bakugou complained about making your daughters’ hair.

“Who knew a 9 year old was so picky!? I didn’t know there’s were 10 ways to make a ponytail!” He fumed, angrily chopping vegetables. You simply chuckled in response.

“I think it’s cute how the big, strong, scary dynamight softened enough to make two girls’ hair this morning” you replied. “It looked nice by the way. You wouldn’t mind doing it tomorrow would you? I have work early tomorrow”.

Bakugou minded very much, but he didn’t say anything, except with a grunt acknowledging he heard you.

...

A couple weeks later and bakugou was getting really good with the whole hair style thing. Katsumi and Sakura even started coming to him now asking for him to do their hair.

Today threw him for a loop though.

“Same thing as always, squirt?” He asked Katsumi as she sat down.

“Nope!” She responded, pulling up a picture on her iPad (which was used only for homework, Bakugou was not letting her get addicted to that thing). “Can you do a braid for me?”

“Hah!? The hell is that?”

“I have a picture here-“

Bakugou snatched the iPad out of his daughter’s hands and looked at the photo. Oh, it the weird twisty thing his wife does with her hair for hero galas.

“I guess I can try. Hold still, this’ll probably hurt” Bakugou grimaced as he watched the tutorial on how to properly do a simple braid.

...

A couple months go by and your girls stop asking you to do their hair in the morning, instead going straight to there dad. Well, Sakura sometimes asked you since she felt bad (? Did she pity you?), but she mainly asked her dad.

At first you felt something was wrong. Maybe their dad bribed them somehow into getting a horrible hair style done? Maybe he was jealous and had something to prove? You didn’t know. You decided to check it out, walking to Katsumi’s room, where all the styling was done.

Said child walked out with a perfect mermaid tail braid.

“Hi mom!” She chirped.

You stood there dumbfounded as she went to go eat breakfast. Even you couldn’t style her hair in a mermaid tail! You calmly opened (practically broke) the door and see Katsuki with Bobby pins between his teeth, sectioning Sakura’s hair with a comb.

“Hey” he grunts out with Bobby pins in his teeth as he twists his daughter’s hair. “Need something?”

“I- no” you responded. “I genuinely thought you bribed the girls into not asking me to do their hair in the morning.”

Bakugou chuckled as he removed a few Bobby pins from between his teeth. “I didn’t do shit. They just like me better” he smirked.

You were about to retort with how much better your styles were when you realized how he styled Sakura’s hair. It was like a rose was settled on top of her hair.

“H-how did you do that?” You breathed out as Sakura walked past you nonchalantly and bakugou bursted out laughing while getting up.

“You should see the look on your face! It’s priceless. I gotta get ready for work now. Can you drop them off? Thanks” he gives you a quick kiss as he walks out of the room.

You sign and shake your head. Even though your husband looked like a big, scary man, you knew better. He really was something else.

[blouisparadise]

Upon request, here is a rec list of bottom Louis fics where Harry is pining. We also have a pining Louis fic rec list here and a mutual pining fic rec list here, if you’re interested. If you enjoy this rec list, please support it by giving it a like and a reblog to spread the word. Happy reading!

1) Could Be Kissing My Fruit Punch Lips | Explicit | 4554 words

Harry happens upon a porn site that specializes in live videos and sort of falls in love with the cute boy he only knows as Kitty.

And then he gets the surprise of his life when he finds out Kitty attends his university...

2) Put You On Repeat, Play You Everywhere I Go | Explicit | 8290 words

Harry is a college radio show host and Louis is a contemporary dancer attending said college. After a drunk hook-up, naturally a whole bunch of pining, dedicated love songs and make-out sessions on dance studio floors ensue.

3) Focal Point | Mature | 8935 words

By the time you read this, I’ll be gone, so don’t bother looking. Last night was lovely, Harry, I’m sure you agree. Sorry to run, but that’s just how life works sometimes, I’m sure you understand. Don’t forget about me. xx P.S. Thanks for the money.

4) Sit Next To Me | Mature | 12299 words

Harry Styles of One Direction always gets what he wants. Well, nearly always. What he can’t seem to figure out is why the very fit man who comes to assist Liam’s tattoo artist seems to have zero interest in him. Is Louis Tomlinson the straightest man alive? Or does Louis showing up for every show on tour mean something more is going on?  

5) Doesn't Have To Be A Real Thing | Explicit | 12532 words

In which Harry helps Louis get over his ex and it kind of becomes a regular thing. It’s totally casual – they have an understanding. But what happens to Harry when Nick reappears in Louis’ life?

6) Love Is Like This; Not A Heartbeat, But A Moan | Explicit | 13150 words

In which Harry loves Louis, but Louis has been cold to him ever since he presented as an omega at age fifteen.

Eight years later, Louis approaches Harry with a request, and who is Harry to deny him?

7) Wake Me Up With It | Mature | 13699 words

The one where Louis makes Harry tell him a kink he's never gotten to try out, and then he offers to do it with him, which leads to Harry's heart exploding afterwards when Louis seems to have meant it as a one time thing. Featuring a pining Harry, a scared Louis, and an excessive use of the word baby.

8) A Love Reaction | Mature | 15802 words

It's never been a thing. Not until now.

9) Dance Like Warriors On A Battlefield | Explicit | 20028 words

Down in the arena, the triumphant gladiator places his foot on the back of the loser, holding him there as he waits for instruction on his next move. Kill or let live. It’s barbaric, really, the bloodlust involved in this sport. Louis is pretty sure that if it wasn’t for his distaste for the killing there would be a lot more blood soaking that sand.

As it is, his father rarely gives the kill order anymore. He gives the order to let the loser live. Louis rolls his eyes, turning away. He doesn’t miss the way the gladiator’s eyes linger on him.

10) A Springtime's Wilt, An Autumn's Bloom | Explicit | 25953 words

Harry is Louis' personal chauffeur, and although he hides his feelings for his boss behind a wall of rigid professionalism, Louis still manages to squeeze through the cracks.

11) I Didn't Fall For You (You Fucking Tripped Me) | Explicit | 20681 words

These days Louis tends to steer clear of dating alphas. He’s dated too many knotheads in his time, and he’s ready to just focus on school and his friends and his pet monitor lizard, of course. Too bad the alpha next door won’t take a hint and stop using the worst pick up lines of all time on him. He’s really got to stop laughing with him--and talking to him and walking to class with him and letting him bring him coffee and tea and gifts for his lizard and watching Netflix together and...

12) England Has My Bones | Explicit | 24087 words

The next time Harry thinks about calling, it’s 4.14 in the morning on a Parisian hotel balcony.

13) Indestructible | Explicit | 24243 words

“Hi,” Harry murmurs, and Louis hiccups out a sob.

“Hi,” he manages, still clutching onto Harry’s shoulders. Harry’s fingers drift across Louis’ cheeks, and there’s something off about Harry’s expression, but Louis can’t figure out what it is.

“I’m okay,” Harry says, and Louis is going to say something to that, even if he doesn’t know what, except Harry’s kissing him.

Louis freezes.

14) To Be Loved (And To Be In Love) | Mature | 30227 words

The one where Louis’s popular, Harry’s not and they bond by trying to get their friends together while accidentally matchmaking the entire school.

15) Not Quite | Explicit | 34163 words

Niall gives Harry an exasperated look, nodding slowly. “Okay...so do you want to explain why we’re hiring Louis? And do you want to explain it without making any mention of his soft hair or ample buttocks?”

16) And Touch Me Like You Never | Explicit | 35971 words

The one where Harry and Louis agree to be each other's New Year's kiss and it ends up being a lot more than they bargained for.

17) The Sweetest Incantation | Explicit | 40600 words

Harry is a witch who's still working on developing his powers and Louis is a werecat who falls into his life and turns it upside down.

18) Your Touch Shouldn't Make Me Feel Like This | Explicit | 48883 words

Uni AU in which Alpha Harry has been in love with his omega friend for the longest time and one motorbike trip to the countryside with Louis made him realize that he could no longer hold back his feelings.

19) Some Things Take Root | Explicit | 50269 words

AU. Louis’ ex doesn’t get jealous of anyone besides Harry. Harry helps Louis use that to his advantage.

20) Social Cues | Explicit | 55860 words

To Harry, Louis was becoming as tangible and essential as music in his life. He still was a mystery but at the same time, he was one of the most real things Harry had. He just hoped he could live up to the image Louis probably had in his mind of him.

He could play the part, after all, what was published of him wasn’t as detached from reality. He didn’t think of himself as a rockstar cliche, although he couldn't deny he did sleep around, partied a lot, and did some drugs. But then again, wasn’t that what the majority of his friends back in his hometown were doing at college?

Harry wanted to impress Louis, he didn’t want to disappoint or leave his expectations unfulfilled, so he’d give him the full rockstar experience.

It was a very simple plan, what could possibly go wrong?

21) Amazing Sin | Explicit | 56034 words

The story of Louis ‘Steal Your Man’ Tomlinson.

22) You're Supposed To Be Smart. | Explicit | 83318 words

Louis is an oblivious idiot who get's high scores in exam and will probably graduate with flying colors and Harry Styles is a right idiot who swore to always protect Louis but can't ask him out on a date.

23) Your Name is Tattooed on My Heart | Explicit | 86809 words

Louis is ready to find the love of his life, but first he has to stop falling for the punk rocker next door.

24) Falling Into You | Mature | 143112 words

In the grand scheme of adolescence and boyhood, Harry was still working himself out, so far with little luck. But four things he could say for certain: 1) he'd been at the top of his class all through primary and secondary school, 2) he was the shittiest alpha to ever walk the earth, 3) Liam Payne never let him forget it, and 4) he’d been in love with this boy, Louis Tomlinson, ever since he was fifteen years old.

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.

[felswritingfire]

Relationship Headcanons (SFW)

Kaioh Retsu:

I'd like to start this off that he'd be really picky with his partner. Like, super picky not because he means to- it's just diffcult for him to be genuinely attracted to someone enough to pursue a relationship with them.

Looks aren't all that important to him, but personality is an extremely important aspect. He prefers people that are a tad more outgoing, but knows when to reign in their excitableness- that being said he also really likes shyer people as well; he thinks that they're very cute (what I'm getting at is that I high-key headcanon him as Pansexual-)

Before he got with you, he made sure that you understood his fighting career and how dangerous it could be. He'd leave it up to you if you'd like to pursue a relationship after he tells you, but he'll respect your decision if you say no. But he will be e l a t e d if you say yes

Away from that, though, when he does find a partner that he wishes to persue a relationship with- he is super, super sweet!

He's an extremely considerate and understanding partner and just really wants to prioratize you're comfort

If you want a more laid back partner, he is your man- there's barely any arguements in the relationship, and if there is anything bothering you and/or him, he'll bring it up in a conversation so you guys can talk about it

It takes him a bit to be completely open to physical affection, even when he does get used to it, he's still a soft maybe on PDA; he won't hesitate to hold your hand tho. He loves holding your hand. LOVES IT.

The first time he held your hand though, it was about 1 1/2 months into the relationship (no one else knew about your relationship prior to this), and Katsumi, Katou and Doppo almost shit themselves because "oH MY GOD, RETSU'S GOT A GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND/SIGNIFICANT OTHER! RETSU'S GOT A GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND/SIGNIFICANT OTHER! RETSU'S GOT A GIRLFRIE-/BOYFRIE-/SIGNIFICA-" (and yes, I have a feeling these three have just enough dumbass bastard vibes enough to chant this)

Retsu was red for a week because these guys are (lovable) assholes. And Katou gets socked in the face because he just straight up went: "So, you bend them over ye-" and then he got a broken nose

On a different note, he's really touchy-feely in private

HE LOVES COOKING FOR YOU

And if you can cook- then, baby, it's partner cooking

You are 10/10 meeting his master, he's also excited when you guys get along

You also end up becoming well acquainted with the others (Katsumi, Doppo, Baki, Etc.) If you weren't already. And, boy, do you end up with some life long friends from that (and good training partners if you fight!).

Even if you do fight, he's protective of you. He'd try to sheild you from anything- even Yujiro if you, God forbid, caught his attention (this could be from just being a pretty face that appeals to him or a SUPER strong fighter that he wants to be his pray). This man is very ride or die.

If you're with him for the Convict Arc, and you are a skilled fighter, be prepared for the fact that he almost shit himself if one of them attacks you. It's their funeral if they end up hurting you- no matter how bad- they're dead.

Now you manage to fuck one of their shits up? He is both simultaneously worried about you, proud of you and being like: Oh shit that's hot-

Retsu doesn't get jealous. He gets mad if someone is trying to come onto you and making you uncomfortable and will not hesitate to get in their face. But not jealous. He's a man who is every comfortable with himself and the relationship. He wouldn't have started dating you if he had even the slightest inkling that you were going to cheat on him.

No matter how tall or short his partner is, he likes to rest his face on their chest.

Jack Hanma:

You two, MOST LIKELY, met a Restaurant- like, maybe you got stood up by some asshole and you just happen to notice this monster of a dude sitting at the table right next to you shoving an entire steak in his mouth, holy shit?????

When he catches you staring at him in bewilderment, he just gingerly dabs his mouth with his napkin and says, "What you've never see someone eat before?"

"Oh, I've seen that plenty of times- I've just never seen someone shove a whole steak into their mouth." You snark back.

He's honestly a little flustered on the inside, because yeah, you're right. But on the other hand, this (he thinks) is prime flirting time. So then you guys hit it off from there and by the end of the night you two have become friends and exchanged numbers.

If you have daddy issues too, prepare to bond over them, because he will not hesitate to bitch about his dad, because fuck that guy

Once you do get in a relationship, you realize Jack is a very quiet lover. He's calm and collected and he doesn't say much

But he listens and you know he does because he'll hum and grunt, stealing little glances at you if you're chattering away

He's really attached to you and is another extremely sweet partner

He's also really observant and will snag things that he knows you've been eyeing

Meeting his little brother is a must, you gotta meet Baki and be approved, which you most likely will be because Baki is a super sweet dude and he knows that his brother would pick an asshole to date

He dreads the day that his dad will meet you, because it'll happen inevitably, but he doesn't want you to happen

When it does happen I feel that it's a similar situation to Baki and Kozue, the only difference is is that Jack is hella pissed and on the verge of going ballistic, because what the fuck, dad???? ME AND MY S/O WERE HAVING A MOMENT, ASSHOLE-

He's a soft maybe on PDA, it reay depends on the time of day with him

When he is in a mood though, he'll hold your hand or wrap an arm around you to keep you close

He likes to lay his head in you lap at home and just stare up at you

You're the most beautiful thing he's ever seen

Likes to give you kisses on your cheek and forehead

He also likes to pick you up and carry you: you talking your friend? Sorry, baby, it's time to go. Shopping? I don't want to be here any more and I'm bored, let's go. My dad's here? TIME TO SKADDADLE, BABE.

He's huge, so I doubt your taller then him, but, hey, I might be wrong, but he really likes pulling you into him and holding you to his chest

He takes you out on dates to fancy resturaunts

He has some insecurities from whenever he was young, so when he gets jealous he gets HEATED

Like he is ready to kill a man, pls do not push his buttons when he's like this, just take him out of the situation and shower him in love snd affection because he worries he's not good enough

Please smooch him. He's sweet

If you're a fighter, he'll spar with you, but very gently, which may or may not piss you off tbh

But he means well

Absolutly head over heels for you

Hector Doyle:

Ok, I want to say, Doyle is a very tricky man who loves his teasing.

It'd be pretty "obvious", from his stand point, if he had a thing for you and wanted to pursue you. To you and everyone around you though, he just kinda comes off as,,,,a creepy dude???

Like, this poor guy has the shittiest time with... Personal interactions, unless it's fighting or social situations where he has a "word template" to go off of. He's just a real awkward dude and he kinda, low-key, has no tact sometimes; like when he just stares at you from across that Café you like to go to like some sort of freaky stalker guy planning to kill you. It doesn't help that you two bump into each other a lot and he just blurts out "You're hair looks really soft" BUT YOU TWO DON'T REALLY KNOW EACH OTHER AND WHY IS THIS DUDE TALKING ABOUT TOUCHING YOUR HAIR??????

When you two do, somehow, finally manage to talk to one another, he explains all the freaky stares and comments and he's like obviously I was flirting? Isn't that how it's done?

No Doyle. That is not how it's done.

Once you two manage to establish a relationship, it's kinda up to you to make a lot of the first moves again, Doyle is very ignorant to how social interaction works, this applies to relationship etiquette as well. That being said though, he has some sort of knowledge about how relationships work from books and shows, that also being said, his version of relationships is probably outdated because of the type of books and shows he watches/reads (Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Picture of Dorian Grey, etc.)

You gotta be prepared to put in the work to reap the rewards in this relationship-which are a lot actually!

For one thing, he is an extremely loyal partner and a really good listener (this not pertaining to the end of season 3, you know?) And he surprisingly has really good advice to offer

And! Once he figures out flirting, he's really good at it! He end up flustering you a lot, so be ready for that.

He's an unintentional hard yes on PDA. He just doesn't care. Your his and he's yours- he can smooch you when he wants. BUT, he is still really weary of this since he is a convict and he doesn't want you to be used against him. Or get hurt because of him. But he does end up touching you in whatever ways he can to be close to you: so, a slight bump of the hands her; maybe if you two are in a crowded enough bar, his hand caressing your lower back or resting in your back pocket; feet resting on top of one another under the table in the very back of that Café where no one can see you two-

At home it's a completely different situation- he likes to grab your hips and press you against the wall and just kiss the ever loving F U C K out of you; his hands will wonder and this usually leads to some fun times, but sometimes it just ends in some cute ass cuddles.

And might I just add on to the whole Convict part: he didn't tell you that he was a deathrow inmate until the fourth date. And he just brought it up casually, on the inside he was nervous as hell, but on the outside he's like, normal calm and collected Doyle (I mean, if you didn't already know).

Doyle gets jealous every once in a while, but it's still pretty rare, usually he just, kinda shooes them off. But, when those rare moments do occur, get ready for a blood bath because whoever thought it was smart enough to try and flirt with you is either getting a verbal beating of a life time or a physical one. And let me tell you, either one is crippling, one just means you can walk away in tears while the other you're most likely dead

After that mess Doyle'll drag your ass out of there and take you back to the apartment where he's even more touchy then usual.

He tries his absolute hardest to shield you away from the other convicts. He doesn't trust any of them and is so, so afraid one of them will do something to you.

Similarly with Retsu, even if you do fight he'll be protective of you, but he'll most likely be more relaxed about it if you can fight.

In that same vein, he'd totally spar with you. And if it gets heated that just means he manipulate it into some fun times ;)

Really like movie night as a date night. He's been exposed to so many mainstream shows/movies because of you, it's great.

Sikorsky:

THIS BITCH- THIS SUAVE BITCH-

He walked into wherever you were and pinpointed you, out everyone else in the room, as the hottest piece of ass in there. Waited for you to notice the heavy weight of a heated gaze on you, look up and make eye contact with him before he gives you this lazy smirk and saunters, easy, slow steps, with all the confidence of Apollo, over to you and leans against the wall with one arm and starts chatting you up. It doesn't matter if you're taller then him, you will feel small and a lil' intimidated/turned on.

I ain't gonna lie, you guys probably start out as a one night stand and became a friends with benefits after you fed him waffles in the morning after aforementioned one night stand and got to know each other, knowing Sikorsky- he just ends up coming to you every time he needs to blow off steam, which is, admittedly, a lot.

Sikorsky is a big ol' dumbass when it comes to the dreaded things called emotions, so he drops of the face of the Earth (at least to you) after he realizes how bad he's got it for you.

He pops up again after he had time to think about it and mull it over. And, would you look at that? He brought flowers and chocolate!

He's real shit at using his words to express himself, he's more of a actions type of guy, opposed to words, that doesn't mean can't be eloquently spoken, he just has a hard time when he's getting frustrated/experiancing heavy emotions; so gift giving is his go to as an apology!

He's actually a really observant lover due to this! He also remembers really important dates too!

He's really good with his hands so more often then not, he'll offer to give you a message after you had a long day at work, this sometimes leads to some sexy time; even if it doesn't though, his hands still feel amazing: they're rough and calluses, sure, but it sends such nice tingles down your back, you can't help but sigh.

He's really gentle when he holds your hands because he knows that his grip strength is off the wall and, he won't tell you, but he is terrified of hurting you.

Another hard yes on PDA but this time it's intentional. Sikorsky likes to prove his dominance over you, which may or may not lead to some arguements between you guys, and flaunt you relationship so he will openly shove his tongue down your throat to prove a point.

He has a tendency to grab your hips and press you flush against him, or even pull you onto his lap in resturaints, he'll whisper dirty things into your ear like this, so be prepared.

He likes to push your buttons once in a while because he thinks your hot when you're mad. He's a little shit and sometime has the mental fortitude of a 12 year old boy. It just comes with the territory of dating him, unfortunately

Sikorsky gets jealous easily and flies off the handle way too much, you'll have to really talk to him about that. But afterwards he'll drag you of there and, instead of making it to your guy's humble abode, he'll take you into the closest alleyway and start making out with you hard. It's almost too much, but it's kinda hot????

Anyway, Sikorsky may not seem like it, but he has your back. He wouldn't let anything happen to you without a fight. Even if you're a fighter.

SPEAKING OF IF YOU'RE A FIGHTER, SIKORSKY WILL FIND IT HOT AS F U C K. LIKE, TRY AND KICK HIS ASS, BABE, DO IIIIT

You will def. be his training partner, whomst he will smooch and smack your ass at any given opportunity

He likes to lay his head on your ads and straight up be like "don't fart, babe, or I'll slap your ass so hard that you won't be able to walk for a week" and you've never want to slap a man more in your life.

[wafflehousegay]

how to study when you REALLY don’t want to

we've all been there. You have a paper due in the morning, it's 10 pm, and you're sitting at your desk, feeling dead. Or maybe it's 3 pm, and you're just SO overwhelmed with an endless to do list and so many pages to read or annotate or take notes on that you just think,

screw it. I just won't do anything. 

Listen, I get it. I understand. I LOVE learning, but I often find myself bogged down by homework, that incessant, painful reminder that you're being forced to learn.  Nobody likes that.

So below are some of my tips for studying, especially when you really, really don't feel like doing it.

What's your absolute dream school? Columbia? That's amazing. Harvard? Incredible. Florida State? Awesome. Wherever you want to be in two years- whether it be college, grad school, teaching, etc. Picture yourself learning in your dream learning environment, doing what you love the most. Maybe for you, that daydream means picturing yourself in a New York City coffee shop, working on Literature homework from Barnard College. Or maybe it means cramming biology in a crowded, raucous library at UMass. Whatever makes you get excited about learning- take the fuel you feel from those daydreams and use it to fan the flames of your love for learning. 

Treat every single class like it's your absolute favorite class ever. Listen. I don't care if you have the shittiest teacher on planet earth. I don't care if you couldn't give less of a fuck about quantum physics or functions or whatever. You have the privilege and the opportunity to learn anything and everything, and we could all do good to stop taking that for granted. Treat AP Calculus like it's your favorite subject EVER, even when- especially when it feels like pulling teeth. But how? You might be asking. The secret is that it's really, really not that hard. There are so many ways to motivate yourself to do that subject you've been putting off for days, and you know it!! Use studyblr to find inspiration for That Subject™, make a study group, trap yourself in your dorm/library/coffee shop until you just finish one problem set, just START. Chances are when you see other people being productive and getting shit done in that subject (cough studyblr cough) you'll want to do it too. 

Eat, sleep, and live. Listen to me: you HAVE to stop killing yourself to do more school. Your to-do list ISN'T GOING TO JUST GO AWAY. There's always going to be things you have to do and things you could be stressed about. But stress, school, and homework are not excuses to abandon self-care, friendships and having a social life. Go out with your friends! Go to the movies! Go to that football game! Get the important stuff done and stop worrying about your endless list! Having somewhere to go will motivate you to get done faster, and you're going to feel a lot better after going out and having fun than sitting at home alone procrastinating. Chances are, you'll be more energized to get some work done too. 

Pay attention to what your body's telling you. Switch out midnight iced lattes for smoothies and fruit. Eat lots of food that makes you feel good, healthy and fulfilled. Stop snacking on the same 4 chips every time you study and start learning how to fuel your body and your brain. If you know you can't eat a full breakfast before school, find things you can eat, and I mean MORE THAN JUST COFFEE STRAIGHT FROM THE POT. Track what you eat for an entire week, and I mean EVERYTHING. Track your water intake, coffee intake, and soda intake. On top of food tracking, also track your mood, productivity, and overall feeling of wellbeing. At the end of the week, see what's up! Look for patterns, dehydration, food inconsistencies, gross stuff you eat a lot, things you want to change, all of it. And then actually MAKE THE CHANGES.

I know I'm going to sound like your mom friend here, but that's kind of what I am, so: drink👏🏻more👏🏻water👏🏻!!!!!!! I cannot STRESS THIS ENOUGH!!!!!!! FUEL YOUR BODY!!! YOU WILL FEEL BETTER!!!

in conclusion...

- picture yourself learning in your dream learning environment

- picture the payoff, you doing what you want to do - nursing or teaching or building fancy ass AI robotos or whatever it is

- do NOT take your education for granted!!!! learning is such an opportunity and not everyone gets it

- treat yourself like a normal human being.  take care of yourself.  shower.  eat.

- pay attention to your body.  pay attention to what you need.  pay attention to what you WANT

- drink your water, listen to some jazz, and just start somewhere.

- small progress is still progress 

[solar-pxwered]

A List Of Norman Reedus Movies/Shows I Have Seen And My Opinions On Them

1. The Boondock Saints

The Best. A classic. Bloody and inappropriate and if I remember my count correctly, contains 194 “fucks” or variations of it (this movie certainly illustrates the diversity of the word). Terrible Irish accents. A KICKASS soundtrack. Willem DeFoe crossdressing. Dropping toilets on people’s heads. Over the top action sequences. Cheesy dialogue. Campy as fuck. I freakin’ love it.

2. The Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

Some people didn’t like this one as much as the first one, and I admit that I wasn’t as fond of the new detective in this one as I was of Smecker...but, overall, I really enjoyed it and I drove 2 hours to see it in theaters. I love Romeo more than Rocco. The humor was on point. It was nice to see the original actors for Doc, Dolly, Duffy and Greenley. There was more terrible Irish accents, another KICKASS soundtrack, cheesy dialogue, over the top action sequences, still campy as fuck. I freaking love it.

3. The Walking Dead

Cannot even describe how much I love this show. I have ALWAYS loved zombie related shows and movies so this show was right up my alley from the very beginning all the way back in 2010. I watched it religiously every Sunday. I adore this roller coaster ride of a show and I especially adore Daryl, Carol and Jerry. This show has it all: Comedy, drama (hella lots of that), tragedy and triumph...and it never fails to pulls me in and hold my interest.

4. Mimic

Honestly, I saw this a LONG time ago and I hated it because...well, because I have a cockroach phobia, ok?! Don’t judge. Norman’s part was pretty small, not one of his lasting impressions on me.

5. Six Ways To Sunday

This is a weird one. It’s about an overly innocent 18 year (played by Norman) who gets involved in the Mob and develops an alter ego that’s violent and his complete opposite. There’s murder, prostitutes and good ol’ fashioned mother-son incest and it wasn’t a movie I suggest for the lighthearted or anyone with those sort of triggers. 

That being said, I watched the whole thing and didn’t hate it. It was just uncomfortable...as seems to be a theme with Norman Reedus movies.

6. Dark Harbor

This fucking movie...

Ok, so, I’ll be straight with you: I really enjoyed this dumbass movie. It had me guessing right up to the very end and it took me on a very strange ride along the way. 

If watching someone sexually feed a woman a poisonous mushroom, lots of dark eyed staring scenes or Norman Reedus making out with Alan Rickman is your thing, then go for it. 

7. Let the Devil Wear Black

It’s modern Hamlet. What else is there to say? If you like Hamlet, you’ll like this movie. If you like pre-car accident, baby face Reedus with the black hair, you’ll like this movie. I liked it.

8. 8MM

You know what the best thing about this movie is? Nicholas Cage. He steals the damn show no matter what movie he’s in and no one can even deny that fact. Norman’s part in this one is pretty small too but I liked this movie anyway because...well, Nick Cage. Enough said.

9. Bad Seed

I honestly can’t remember how this movie ends, all I remember was that it wasn’t at all how I expected it. I liked this movie because it’s a psychological thriller and that’s my most favorite genre of all time. The movie’s premise is a guy suspects his wife of having an affair and comes home one night and finds her murdered so he goes after her lover (Reedus) to try and kill him because he believes he was the one who killed her. It’s a cat and mouse chase sort of thing...now I need to rewatch it because I can’t, for the life of me, remember how it ends.

10. Gossip

Ok, no JOKE, this is the best movie I ever randomly discovered and I can’t believe how many people have never heard of it! It’s got some big names in it (Lena Headey, Norman Reedus, James Marsden and Kate Hudson to name a few).

It’s a psychological thriller/mystery drama in which three friends start a rumor at their school as a social experiment for their class. The rumor grows, however, and suddenly it’s out of their hands and spiraling out of control. People start getting hurt, reputations get dragged through the mud and then it escalates to the point of someone losing their life. The three main characters {Reedus, Headey and Marsden) try to figure out the truth behind the out of control rumors and discover more than they ever imagined, or ever wanted.

I HIGHLY recommend this movie. I really, REALLY do. The ending is one of the best twists I’ve seen in a LONG time.

11. The Beatnicks

This movie is so weird. It’s like...it’s just really weird. It revolves around two beat poets who find a magic box that somehow magically helps them get good at being poets but it’s like...an evil box and so they decide to only use it once and then get rid of it. Yeah, it’s a weird movie. Not my highest suggestion.

12. Blade II

Ok, if you’ve never seen the Blade Trilogy then I just don’t even know what to tell you. 

My favorite of the three movies, Blade 2 gives us the glorious Reedus character of Scud, the pot smoking, horrible-shirt-wearing, mechanical genius and Blade’s sidekick. Not only is he precious and adorable, the movie in all is enjoyable and has a fun rave-esque soundtrack. 

The one thing I hate? *SPOILER ALERT* Scud’s scummy betrayal.

13. Tough Luck

This is another one of those movies that I liked but it’s just so freaking weird. 

It’s a psychological drama where a down on his luck con artist, Archie (Reedus), tries to rip off a carnival worker and gets caught. As punishment, he’s hired to work at the carnival  to pay off the debt. He gets involved in a scheme to murder the owner’s wife, but falls in love with her in the process.

Things go to shit. He gets the short end of the stick. More plots and lies develop. It’s all twisted until the end and the answers fall into place.

I really like this movie, it’s one that I kept and still have my copy of. 

A word of warning though, never leave this movie on your movie shelf for your father to find and watch while you’re away at college, resulting in your mother calling you and asking you why you have such a nasty movie. Because the sex scene at the end is OUTRAGEOUS. I mean, it is the FUNNIEST fucking sex scene I have ever seen in my life and I can’t ever watch it without cringing and laughing. My mother, however, didn’t think it was funny at all and my father was too shocked to even form a sentence.

I highly suggest this trippy as hell movie.

14. Octane

Ok, to be fair, this movie is actually alright, although Norman’s character gets the shittiest death possible. I mean, imagine dying because some psycho vampire kisses you and bites your tongue out. That’s one shitty death.

But, overall, this is a good thriller. Johnathan Rhys Meyers plays the villain and he’s always pretty quality. The story is basically a teenager has a disagreement with her mom and gets picked up by this drugged up, blood sucking, vampire wannabe cult and indoctrinated joining them. Her mother joins up with a tow truck driver (Reedus) whose daughter was also kidnapped years ago and who has been hunting the cult down ever since. 

It was a cringe filled, yet interesting, movie and I didn’t hate it.

15. John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns

This is John Carpenter....OF COURSE I liked this one. 

I won’t say what it’s about because that would ruin the story, but it’s part of an anthology and John Carpenter loved Norman’s role so much he STILL talks about it today and suggests Norman to people in the industry.

It’s a good one if you’re into horror shorts or anthologies or the genius of the legend that is John Carpenter.

16. A Crime

I had completely forgotten about this movie until I started making this post, but now that I remember...I REALLY liked this one!!

This is a pretty sad one, but it was very good and Norman’s acting in it is absolutely wonderful. His character’s wife was murdered and the suspect was never found so his neighbor, who really likes him, creates a fake culprit so that he can finally get some closure. 

This is a good one. I suggest this one if you’re in the mood for a strange sort of romance movie that has underlying thriller tones.

17. Moscow Chill

I remember watching this one, and I remember enjoying it, but I honestly can’t remember anything about it except that it’s a Russian film in which Norman plays a computer hacker who gets hired to hack into a Russian bank and gets caught and put in prison. But I honestly can’t remember what happens in detail.

If you like foreign movies with hacking and subterfuge plots, then give it a try because I do remember enjoying it while I watched.

18. Red Canyon

This one is kinda fucked up. Imagine Daryl Dixon mixed with Breaking Bad mixed with Deliverance and you’ve pretty much got the story...

A brother and sister return to their mother’s hometown to settle things and put their horrible past behind them...but upon returning they end up reliving the nightmare all over again.

It’s a good thriller/horror watch, but there are scenes of sexual violence so if that’s not something you can handle, then don’t watch this one.

19. Hero Wanted

This. Is. A. GOOD. Movie.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the lead and he does an AMAZING job. Gooding’s character is a garbage man who falls in love with a girl who never takes any notice of him. To get her attention, he stages a heist in which he is supposed to jump in, save the day, and win the girl...only the heist turns out to be real and he is shot and the girl is also shot in the process. He sets out for revenge and gets in way over his head.

Norman’s part in this isn’t very big...but HOLY SHIT, was it impactful. His character didn’t have a lot of screen time, in comparison to a lot of other people, but he had a solid backstory and reason for being involved and MY GOD did I cry about it. This was actually the first movie of his I watched AFTER discovering Boondock Saints and it solidified my love for his acting abilities.

A very good watch. Highly suggest.

20. Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

This one is pretty ok, actually, as far as lame horror movies go. 

The plot is simple: Blonde, beardy, corn farmer Norman gets slowly driven insane by the haunted scarecrow in his field that he thinks putting up is a good idea for some damn reason. He starts to get more and more violent and rapey as time goes on until his family is forced to take up arms against him.

It’s not bad. Second part in what I THINK is a trilogy? I’ve only ever seen the first two. If you like horror movies then this one is a good watch. As I mentioned though, there is an attempted rape scene in this one so just be aware.

21: Pandorum

It’s an alien movie. Astronauts run into a species that is stronger and hungry for tasty humans. Shepard (Norman’s character) doesn’t make it out alive. If you’re not in the mood to see Norman get LITERALLY gutted or other characters get nommed by aliens, then don’t watch.

If you ARE, then go ahead and watch, because it was pretty alright.

[onisiondrama]

"taking accountability" April 30, 2021, Speaks - James announces he is going to use jump cut editing again so he can keep his videos short enough for Twitter. - He started making Youtube videos because he wanted to help people and make a positive impact in the online community. He thought he had good ideas and millions of people agreed. Eventually, millions of people turned on him because he's a shitty communicator. He trolls too well. People believed he wasn't trying to make people laugh when he poured kombucha on his head. - A lot of Youtubers say they want to take accountability, but they make stupid excuses for why they're a piece of shit. James Charles recently made a "taking accountability" video and blamed all of his problems on teenagers who can't legally consent. He points out James Charles in California where the legal age is 18. He says Shane Dawson was caught doing terrible things and blamed it on his childhood. - You're supposed to take accountability and not make excuses when you make a "taking accountability" video. When you're not caught doing anything or didn't confess, you don't have to take accountability because you didn't do anything. - He wants people to know the difference between people who take accountability and people who are full of shit and make excuses for shit they were caught doing. - Says if you don't know his story, he was blackmailed by an adult (Sarah) because she threatened to destroy his life he he didn't sleep with her. He slept with her and she destroyed his life anyway. She said she was joking when she said she would destroy his life even though she destroyed his life. That means it's clearly not a joke. She apologized twice for raping him and admitted to it on a livestream.

"The Video My Liar Ex Forgot Existed... WHOOPS" May 1, 2021, Speaks

- He says Sirius XM is the shittiest service on Earth. He bought a car with Sirius XM and they called him 20 times asking if he wants to sign up. He keeps hanging up because he doesn't want their shitty radio. He says he thought spam calls were illegal. He tells telemarketers to get a different job. - He says there's a video of him speaking poorly to someone he dated (Shiloh), but it's not him talking. It's him as the Joker and he's dressed as the Joker. If people told you this, it would debunk their case. He speaks to Harley Quinn the way Joker does all the time. His ex says it's real because she's out of her fucking mind. - He says if you don't believe him, look at these bloopers after she was fake crying. He again points out they're dressed as Harley Quinn and the Joker. [He plays the clip where he makes silly noises and asks Shiloh in a silly voice if she's going to cry and if she's going to be super sad. She laughs with watery eyes.] - He says feminism is a lie. He says it's a mechanism to make you believe what she says and he can't say anything back because you deplatformed him. He says a lot of women know feminism is a lie, which is why a lot of women are anti-feminists. Those women are woke.

"Everything Is The Man's Fault" May 1, 2021, Speaks

- James says this is probably going to be a controversial video, but it's the truth. Society will hate you and you'll die a horrible death, but one day people might look back and realize he was telling the truth. Just like him with Shane Dawson. - He dated a chick (Shiloh) 10 years ago and she did a documentary trying to convince people he was a cult leader. - She said something in the doc that didn't happen the way she said it did. He says when he fucks up his hair, he shaves his head. It's what he always does. She agreed to have half of her head shaved as part of a prank. She wanted to look like Skrillex. Problem is, she had really poofy hair, so when she shaved it it was like [he makes a poof sound while gesturing his hands away from the left side and top of his head.] He says it (the hair) didn't make sense. If he was in that position he would shave his head and start over, so he proposed that idea to her. She agreed and they shaved her head. - To prove she didn't look ugly bald and he was still attracted to her- there are people all over the world who are beautiful and bald, like some people from Africa who shave their heads. He points out they were both adults. He says he slept with her after she told him she should shave her head. (Why is he changing his story in the same video? I thought he suggested it?) He shaved her head because she told him. He said he was caring about her feelings (I think he's referring to sleeping with her after?) and he wanted her to not feel ugly, but nobody cares. - He says he guesses if in the future a woman asks him to shave her head, he should duct tape his mouth and throw himself in a cage because everything he does is seen as a threat. If they say yes to something, you can't trust them because 10 years later they might say they didn't want a haircut they told you to give them. - He says that's the current male position. If you're a Youtuber and someone wants to date you, get your stuff surgically removed. Don't bother dating because later on they'll say you're a monster for giving them a chance.

[newmusickarl]

Top 20 Albums of 2020

1. Orca by Gus Dapperton

“This past year I have been consumed by an imbalance of health. I have been more physically and emotionally imbalanced in 24 hour time spans than the difference between the longest stages in my life. Throughout this I remained to portray an optimistic façade but in fact I was wavering on the edge.

This new music was conceived by my heart and my heart only. It is the product of pure and utter pain that would destroy any attempt at hiding my vulnerability. There was no rhyme or reason except that I would let its condition overcome me. I am just the mouthpiece.

Throughout the creation of this project I discovered my beliefs. They go as follows:

Self-expression is a universal language

Humans can and will learn from their awful mistakes

Health is never exclusively defined by something’s physical appearance

This album represents everyone and everything’s ability to hurt. Its contents represent everyone and everything’s ability to heal. And its journey represents everyone and everything’s ability to help.”

-          Gus Dapperton on the creation of Orca

So here it is my Album of the Year for 2020. Ultimately my Top 3, After Hours, Punisher and this album from Gus Dapperton, could have arrived in any order. On different days for different moods, each one has been my Album of the Year. 

However, when I looked at the album that had resonated with me the most during this challenging year, the album that hit me the hardest in the gut like any great record should, it was Gus Dapperton’s Orca that narrowly came out on top. In addition, when looking at the recognition Phoebe and Abel have rightfully received for their records this year, and the bewildering lack of recognition Gus has received, it confirmed for me that it should be acknowledged ahead of the other two on my list.

If you read that opening quote from New York based singer-songwriter Brendan Rice, aka Gus Dapperton, about the making of the record, it probably is not surprising that Orca was the stand-out album of the year for me. This is an album all about going through the shittiest of times and yet somehow making it out onto the other side. It is an album about mental health and the reprieve one can find from opening up to those that love and care. Ultimately, as Gus says, it is an album about pain and redemption.

Released just over a year after his impressive debut, Gus has already come on leaps and bounds as a songwriter, with Orca offering an engaging mix of playful, observational lyricism and heartfelt stories of self-destruction, addiction and navigating the highs and lows of life. His signature slacker-pop sound has also never sounded fresher too, with Orca packed front-to-back with infectious melodies and dreamy grooves that help to take the edge off the harrowing themes found in the lyrical content.

However despite all the lyrical and sonic wonderment on display here, what really makes this record soar is Gus’ voice – his unique, growling vocal tones making the listener feel the anguish and emotion of every beautifully crafted lyric of every single song. What’s more, by keeping Orca at a tight 10 tracks in length, Gus never once allows the record to dip into the unnecessary or uninspiring.

If I was forced to pick just a few highlights it would be the sweet, string-tinged confessional Bottle Opener, the glistening guitars and earworm chorus of Post-Humorous, and the banjo-driven ballad Medicine, a song that Gus himself has called the best thing he has ever written - on that one, it would be hard to disagree with him if it wasn’t for the existence of First Aid.

First Aid is an angsty, hard-hitting lament that is perfectly represented by the song’s striking, self-directed music video, which you can watch above. Both the song and video see Gus confront head on (literally in the video’s case) his mental health issues. Here at the end of 2020, it is still one of the most heartbreaking, emotionally-stirring, but ultimately uplifting songs I have heard all year.

All in all, this really is a wonderfully heartfelt record, and one that once you listen to it once, you will just want to keep revisiting. This is an album that really didn’t deserve to fly under the radar like it has done this year, but I’m glad I have the opportunity through this annual tradition to recognise it for what it is – the 2020 Album of the Year.

See you in 2021!

Best tracks: First Aid, Medicine, Post Humorous… and everything else too

[iris-ymir]

Guilty or Innocent - Iris

Asked someone to marry you? 

“No. Not mi thin’. The whole... damn idea about marriage and shite? I dunno. Like... spending rest or yer life with the same person? Absolutely! Its just... Dont get mi wrong here! But the whole mess about marriage, and such.. It sounds so damn artificial. Do I wanna live with someone for the rest of mi years? Sure! But I dont need a fockin’ ring to prove it to anyone.. Then again.. If someone was to ask mi to marry her? Yeah, why not? If ya want a damn ring, lets get a damn ring!”

Kissed one of your friends?

“Shite... Well, yeah. About that... I have kissed many of mi friends actually.. And let mi tell ya. It always ends up into a fockin’ mess. One way or another! I... guess I should stop kissin’ mi friends..?”

Danced on a table in a bar / tavern? “You.. happen to know what Im doin’ for livin’? Yeah. Basically that.”

Ever told a lie?

“Just show me a fockin’ person who has not, and I’ll show ya a bastard who’s lying right there, on dat very damn moment! We all lie... Some more than others, but thats not the point, righto?”

Had feelings for someone you can’t have?

“Yeah... Ya remember I just told ya about kissin’ mi friends and shite? Well dat. I messed up real good. Like... the royal mess up! I still have feelin’s for her... Could rip mi damn heart out for her... But I think she just might be lost for mi for good... Im not giving up though! But as thin’s are.. What happened between us... Heck. It might be a lost fockin’ cause.”

Ever kissed someone of the same sex?

“Im... so very much a bean flicker, ya know? Never had interest in opposite sex... Does dat answer yer question?”

Kissed a picture? "No? Seven hells, why would I be suckin’ on some damn piece of paper?”

Slept until 5pm? “Im a night owl.. I wake up sometime durin’ the afternoon. So yeah. I will sleep until 5pm, if you dont come and wake mi up. Which is fockin’ annyin’ by tha way.. Just let mi sleep..”

Worked at a fast food chain / restaurant “Nope.. And dont have a slightest interest in such! ...I would make a fockin’ horrible restaurant worker... Now this.. may sound rather miserable, but my current job is actually mi first real day job ever! ...Or well.. A night job? Anyway.. Yeah.”

Stolen something? “I would say... Try living on streets of fockin’ Limsa Lominsa for good 10 summers, and then... if yer still alive and kickin’, try asking yaself dat question! ...Yes. I have stolen for livin’.”

Been fired from a job? “As I mentioned just a moment ago, this is mi first day job ever... And I have been able to keep it so far! ... And Im about to keep it! I want to see the faces of every poor bastard, who ever said I could not get, let alone keep a job! And well... I actually kinda like mi job, so there’s also dat. And I get a decent money out of it.”

Done something you regret? “... Really? We need to go back to this again? I had.. a really bad week some time ago, ya know. I did.. lot of shite.. The whole thin’ is just.. so foggy in mi head, its annoyin’! But yeah. I think I almost slept with mi friend.. broke lot of stuff.. a damned heirloom notestand.. And in the end, I went and kissed another friend against her will... The... one I fockin’ love.. Damn, I miss her. But it was not mi damn fault!! I had just like the shittiest week ever! ... I dont know... Maybe some of it kinda was.. Can we just go on? I focked up, okai..?”

Laughed until something you were drinking came out of your nose? “Nnno. Cant remember such thin’. Sometimes a drink has gone like... into mi nose for one or another reason... But actually out of it? I dont think so. Then again, who am I to say! One just cant remember everythin’ ya know?”

Caught a snowflake on your tongue? “No, I have not. Tha Shrimp does it, so.. technically I have? But as miself? No. I have not. On purpose at least.”

Sat on a roof top? “Used to do that in Limsa Lominsa. It was.. an awfully calming feeling, ya know? To get away from all the shite, going on down on the streets. Just... sit alone, watch the ships getting loaded.. Watch them sailin’ away. I dont do it anymore though.. The roofs in Ishgard are fockin’ slippery.”

Kissed someone you shouldn’t have? Iris gives the other a long, dead stare. “... Fockin’ really?! Didn’t I just told ya dat. Ya want some heckin’ details?! Right!  So, yes, I was wasted... I shouldn’t have to... And damn yes, it was foolish of mi! Silke. The gal I fancy.. Ya know the type that just... puts damn butterflies into yer tumtum.. rises yer head up to the fockin’ pink clouds faster than anythin’ ya can buy from the streets of Ul’dah.. A damn purdiful fockin’ lass... Damn best thin’ that ever happened to mi... And I focked it up by hecking going and kissing her! So... Ya happy with dis subject now, or are ya gonna poke dat infected wound some more? If so, Im done with dis...”

Sang in the shower?

“Ummm... No.”

Been pushed into a body of water with all your clothes on? “Pushed? I... dont think so! Thrown into water with mi clothes on though... Yes! And I tell ya now! That damn merchant had a heckin’ cart full of those apples! Most of dem would have gone on waste aniway! But nooo.. I get thrown into sea, for one damn apple! One apple!! And it was not even worth it. The apple was dry like Sagolii sand the merchant’s fockin’ muffin-hole was propably full of!”

Shaved your head? "Well, I did not!! Blacksoul did durin’ the time he fockin’ kept mi as his personal damn doll or somethin’.. So yeah! It is growin’ back now, but if it looks like a damn rake-raped crow’s arse to ya, its not my fault!!”

Made a boyfriend / girlfriend cry? “I... dont know, actually! Not during mi time with her, no. We kiinda only had a fleetin’ moment though, so did not ‘ave like... too much time to make the lass cry! ... I guess she still believes mi to be dead though. So its possible she cried for mi presumed death in the hands of her husband’s underlin’s... I hope she did... Yeah.”

Shot a gun? “I did, yeah! Ya know... One of those Ishgardian ones. Loud... lot of smoke... A decent kick. Kinda like a bar night to live for! You know, Im actually even rather decent with guns.. Not my style, though.”

Still loved someone you shouldn’t? “You gotta be kiddin’ me!! ... Oh wait. Someone I shouldn’t? I dont think so... Seven hells, we heckin’ belong together!! ...She has just... yet to understan it... She will! Sooner or later... Hopefully sooner. Fock’s sake, I miss that silly gal and her nice ass...”

Have / had a tattoo? “Yeah, the one around mi eyes. I also have another one on mi thigh... Iris flowers and thorns... Four of dem. For four kinda important people in mi life. From which, I have actually lost... every single one... Fock’s sake, whats wrong with mi?!”

Liked someone, but will never tell who? “Nno. I have... some difficulties in the ‘never tell’-thingie. Im more of a... ‘tell too much’-type o’ person. But ‘ey! Kinda honesty is a good thing, right?”

Been too honest? “If bein’ too ‘onest means kiinda colorin’ the truth a little to make it hit on the mark better. Yeah. I guess so. I just may overact a bit time to time! But den again... Makes the truth more interestin’ huh?”

Ruined a surprise? “No, I hardly part-take in suprises in general...”

Been told that you’re beautiful by someone who totally meant what they said? “Actually... No. I dont know!! Well, mi first girlfriend did, but did she totally mean what she said? Damn, I dont know... Considerin’ the fact she... most likely kinda sold mi out not too long after, it makes it heckin’ hard to believe anythin’ that ever crossed those sweet crimson lips of hers! I wonder why no-one has ever said it though... Im smokin’ hot!! ... So tell me. Am I beautiful..? Hm?”

Stalked someone? “If we call people watchin’ stalkin’ here, then Im damn guilty as a plague rat! But like... in the creepy wai? No! Why the heck would I do somethin’ like that. Dats just sick...”

Thought about murder? “If someone has just taken a royal shite on ya, sweet damn, thats reason enough to just shank the bastard, and scatter the innards into the sea! Most people are so fockin’ rotten though, I dunno if even damn fishies care for their foul organs... Could always make dem into a bagpipe and gift it to their family and friends... Maybe then they could actually get a taste of whut kinda shitebag they been hangin’ around with...”

How about mass murder?

“... Well, as dey say... Apple does not drop far from a tree, and sometimes those apples are rotten before dey hit the ground. So yeah. The last question in mind, why not?”

Cheated on someone? “No! Think anythin’ you want of mi, but Im fockin’ devoted!! ... Well, I have only had one relationship, that lasted for like... couple of months... But damn I was devoted... Up until she choose her husband over mi...”

Gotten so angry that you cried? “Happens time to time... Cryin’.. cleans the system, ya know. Just... Get into middle of nowhere, and scream yer lungs out!”

Tried to stay away from someone for their own good? “... Im kinda doin’ that right now. Dey will be better off without me. She’s got her damn hero dere, taking care of her... Where does she even need mi anyway? Heck, we barely even knew eachother... ... I think Im better off without dem too.. Shite.. Dey were awfully nice towards mi though.. Do I really miss dem? ... Maybe. But it all went down in flames and bloody sheets, can we talk about somethin’ else?”

Thoughts about suicide? “Sometimes the road just rises up against you... I kinda understand it on some occasions! But overall? Kinda waste...”

Had a girlfriend / boyfriend? “Yes? That one mess I mentioned earlier? Ya payin’ attention to dis?”

Gotten totally drunk during a holiday? “Used to... Especially in Limsa, it was kinda mi way to get over the holidays. Hated to see bastards walking around all merry and shite. So I drowned mi holidays in a glass. Last Starlight was different though.. Blacksoul kinda forced mi to stay sober over the holidays... Well.. Mostly sober... Dont ya go tellin’ the old goat, but I... I think I kinda liked it. The whole Starlight with Blacksoul and Gramps... I had never really celebrated it with anyone... As miself. Heck, I just wanted mi Silke to be there, heckin’ messin’ around... I wonder if she ever got mi gift...”

Tagged by wonderful @mai-takeda​!! 🌹 This was lot of fun..

Tagging @umbralich​ (Silke) @sharkycatsifoh​ @hangedemperor​ @kyrie-silverwings​ @under-the-blood-moonlight​ @alun-ura​ @isuke-ejinn​ @ishgard​ @torr-sceadu​ @lydha-lran​ @glorysworn​ @lavender-hemlock​ @kazexvoss​ @glorified-thieves​ @captainkurosolaire​ @illia-ast​ @thefreelanceangel​ @sdavi-kitanni​ @kitsune-kirei​ @violet-warder​ @desimirffxiv​ @unatobajhiri​ @gildedandgolden​ @eo-sul​ @robyn-sawyer​ @eitur​ & anyone who wants to do it! Cansider yourself tagged!

[happymetalgirl]

2019

Despite all the hubbub about year-end wrap-ups, and decade-end wrap-ups this year, it feels to me like as soon as the year is over and the next one starts people immediately stop caring about all the top tens and bottom tens.

I got really busy over this past December and, along with missing out on reviewing several albums I wanted to review, I totally missed writing the extensive year-end lists I had planned. Last year I had listed over 50 of my favorite albums and nearly 100 of my favorite songs, and I wanted to do lists this year that would follow 2018′s lists respectably. Unfortunately, time got the better of me, and it still has the better of me, but I feel like I still should at least offer some kind of closure on last year.

It’s not going to be nearly 150 entries, but I do want to very briefly give an abbreviated list of my favorite songs, my favorite metal albums, my favorite non-metal albums, my least favorite albums of 2019. I’ll be keeping the lists pretty short, but I’ll go numerically still, starting with the bad news first.

The Bottom 10 Albums of 2019:

Maybe it’s my being calloused to what’s awful, or just doing a better job of avoiding it, but I feel like I wasn’t as angry at my bottom ten this year (2019) as I was at the two that preceded it, and perhaps it’s because I feel like I got pretty much what I was expecting with most of what I heard here; not as many of these were tremendous letdowns like Bullet for My Valentine with Gravity or just horrendous beyond comprehension like Black Vale Brides’ Vale. But just because I expected the shit didn’t mean it necessarily went down any easier when I had to ingest it this year.

Like the two years before 2019 when I did worst-of lists, a lot of the worst of the genre came from obviously contrived mainstream playlist/radio bait projects from bands to which it comes as no surprise. This year didn’t include as much shitty political commentary (being that I could probably fill this list with NSBM if I actively sought that shit out) or nostalgic cash grabs as the past two years, but the staleness of the long-tired formulas by which these radio-aspiring bands adhere to in their pursuits of mainstream crossover (or maintenance) only grows more frustrating the older they get. And the amount of surrender by so many bands to Imagine Dragons’ way of dominating the rock charts has been similarly frustrating. Often cited as the new Nickelback, we now kind of look back on Nickelback with a little bit of rose-tinted hindsight with the realization that it was mostly their omnipresence that irritated us all, and the case is the same for Imagine Dragons, but I don’t remember quite as many bands trying to copy the very unoriginal Nickelback and replicate “Photograph” or “Rockstar”. But I have heard so many acts churn out knock-offs of “Radioactive”, and “Believer”, and “Whatever It Takes” in obvious attempts to get themselves into that band’s royal court on the rock charts. There was of course plenty of unimaginative atmospheric blackgaze and post-metal to be found, but even the worst of that was just ineffective and boring at worst and not so much torture upon the eardrums like the albums to follow are.

10. Bad Wolves - N.A.T.I.O.N.

We didn’t get a Five Finger Death Punch album this year, so Bad Wolves came to the rescue to fill that void in 2019, despite also releasing an album in 2018. Though I’ve seen already that FFDP are slated for a release in 2020, so, great... While I would say that N.A.T.I.O.N.’s few high points made it a slightly better project overall than the band’s debut, those highlights were not nearly enough to outweigh the bafflingly poorly arranged variety pack of trashy alt rock ballads and formulaic alt metal from ten years ago that made up the majority of this album. As erratic as its flow was, everything on this album was so predictable once you got a ten-second taste of any given song, a few too many of which reeked heavily of Nickelback (and I know I just got done saying not that many bands really copied them, but that’s how obsolete and dated this album sounds at times). It’s obvious trying to market to FFDP’s demographic and co-occupy that giant, lucrative SiriusXM niche with them, and I’m just not thrilled to have basically a clone of FFDP walking around, taking up space in the metal ecosystem to keep an eye on.

9. Municipal Waste - The Last Rager

It might seem mean to put an EP down here, but my god this was terrible. If it had gone on longer it would undoubtedly quickly make its way to the top (well, bottom) of this list. I feel like my negative review of Slime and Punishment and this EP could at face value be miscontrued as me just being a sourpuss and a way too self-serious critic or just having it out for Municipal Waste, but I love thrash, I love totally not serious music, and I wish there was more high-profile fresh thrash being released these days. I wish one of the few notable thrash releases I heard in 2019 wasn’t bottom-ten quality. But that is just where Municipal Waste are right now, lazy, run-of-the-mill party thrash that is so deficient in that real vibrant party energy that this style of music needs to work. Yeah, I get that it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, but it’s so clearly recycled that it’s not even fun, the one thing it’s supposed to be. It’s like the shit near the end of the human centipede.

8. King 810 - Suicide King

I really wasn’t expecting much from this album, and that’s pretty much what I got, with the added bonus of a weirdly amateurishly experimental flair to King 810′s usual street-cred chest-puffing brand of retro rap/nu metal. I imagine fans of the band enjoyed the added theatrics and the usual chug-backed struggle bars, but I found the whole thing to be just kind of ham-fisted and kooky. It wasn’t one of the more infuriating releases I heard all year, but I sure as hell won’t be eagerly returning to it.

7. Attila - Villain

This was another musically recycled album from a band that usually makes their appeal through fun, nasty bangers. While the music on the album was, sure, as derivative as Attila’s deathcore usually is, the primary issue with Villain was the soured attitude of the band’s usually charismatic frontman. Fronz went from being the life of the party (who, while oozing with fratboy energy that you really wouldn’t want to be around anywhere else except a crowded rager, you could at least count on to be cool and keep the party going) to that loud, overzealous asshole trying to turn up when it’s totally not the time and then getting pissy when met with resistance, making it about him and making everyone around him uncomfortable and totally. Fronz sounds like a drunk asshole challenging you everyone to chug faster than him at best and like a pushy frat bro at worst, embodying the title of the album way to much in a manner where it’s justified that he be viewed that way, if not generous given the term’s romanticized connotations. Silver lining: I listened to “It Is What It Is” during a workout the other day, and that track is a qualified banger.

6. Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus

I think this is the only doom metal album to reach a bottom ten spot for me at any point this decade, and I’m not surprised that it’s Saint Vitus doing it. The band’s self-titled record was so derivative and wholly unoriginal, it was like listening to a cheap Sabbath cosplay. It was so long ago that I listened to it in full that I honestly don’t remember anything specific about the album, but I sure remember how I felt while listening to it every time.

5. Steel Panther - Heavy Metal Rules

Probably the biggest letdown on this list, I actually really enjoyed the band’s 2017 effort, Lower the Bar; I felt like they had got a better handle on their comedic parody of 80′s glam metal than any of the three albums before it, despite it not getting as much attention as their debut, for instance. This one, however, captured the cringe and cheese of the 80′s just fine, but with the jokes falling flat or way too repetitive, it just sounded like a less subtly raunchy version of an actual hair metal album. It’s another album that’s just supposed to be fun, but wasn’t nearly the experience it set out to be, the difference being that this one’s failure seems to have come more from a bout of writer’s block than anything else, which is understandable, five albums in, to a project that specifically makes fun of one dead subgenre of metal.

4. Arch Enemy - Covered in Blood

This has to be one of the shittiest covers albums I’ve ever heard, with Arch Enemy earning record points for monotony on this one. The whole thing sounds like the band just tossed a hefty album’s worth into an Arch Enemy processor that just stripped away all the songs’ character and replaced it with low-effort growls and robotic melodeath guitar playing. At its best, the band offers up passable by-the-books rehashes of songs up their melodeath alley; at its worst they butcher songs they have no business putting so little effort into covering. And it’s fucking 70 minutes long! So they get points for the agonizing length too, as well as incompetence points (I’ve yet to hear a death-growled cover of an Iron Maiden song go well), and, yeah, laziness points too. So many of these were recorded already years ago as bonus tracks to past albums, yet the band couldn’t spare the effort to make the new recordings like a little bit exciting.

3. Papa Roach - Who Do You Trust?

I’m not even mad about this one; I knew it was gonna suck, my curiosity just got the best of me and I was treated to some of the most laughably amateurish lyricism and poorly dated rap rock and alt metal instrumentation I’ve heard since the Prophets of Rage album two years ago. Jacoby Shaddix is doing features these days with hit or miss results, but what the hell is Papa Roach going to be this coming decade? More of this? I just don’t know whose socks this is supposed to knock off. Who’s getting hyped for more Papa Roach in the 2020′s? Probably me, just to see how poorly this band continues to try to keep up with the already sluggish pace of radio rock trends as the signature style they feel obligated to keep a tether to ages poorly.

2. Skillet - Victorious

Now this one I was kind of mad about, and I was expecting it to be pretty bad too. Skillet sold their soul to the whim of pop rock radio early last decade and haven’t been interesting to listen to for a long time now, to the point where it’s so obvious that raspy frontman John Cooper started his own side outlet for his more passionate urges while he lets the winds of pop rock and Christian rock playlist curation steer his main project for little more than a paycheck. The band’s reputable touring work ethic is such a stark contrast to their transparent artistic laziness and spinelessness. Again, despite the formulaic broad-reaching rock radio fodder, embarrassingly cheesy ballads, the token heavy tune at the end for the long-time fans, and even the obviously contrived Imagine Dragons mimicry being totally predicted, it was still so frustrating how blatantly soulless and capital-motivated this thing was to hear.

1. Mark Morton - Anesthetic

I didn’t really have any expectations for this album, but my god was it the year’s quietest disaster of a collaboration project. I didn’t hear anyone else talking about this thing after it came out nearly as much as I did leading up to it, and thank god. The album is supposedly a solo project from the Lamb of God axeman, a distilled showcase of his creative voice, but the whole thing feels like it was in the hands of label execs the whole time and he was just the guy who recorded guitar tracks to all these songs. For some reason, a lot of these “star-studded”, compilation-album-feeling projects in the metal world don’t seem to come out so well, maybe because no one involved is bringing their A-game to a feature in a compilation album, and that is exactly what Anesthetic suffers from, and it suffers fucking hard, not just from the utter lack of cohesion and poor flow from track to track, but from the phoned-in performances of the guests on the variety of generic, underwritten, surface-level songs. Like, again, this is a project under Mark Morton’s name, one that’s supposed to be guided primarily by his artistic vision; you’re telling me, Spinefarm Records, that the Lamb of God guitarist’s vision of a solo album is various flavors of neutered rock/metal radio bait? And he was satisfied with everyone’s contributions to this thing? The whole thing feels like he was just along for the ride and the project was never even in his hands, like Spinefarm had the idea/opportunity to do a various artists comp. album but thought putting under Morton’s name would be more marketable or something. Maybe that hypothesis is totally off, but regardless, this album is a colossal failure on the performance and writing fronts, the worst thing I voluntarily heard in 2019.

My 20 Favorite Songs of 2019:

Okay! With the trash taken to the curb, I feel like it might be time to address before getting into my favorite songs that they might not resemble my favorite albums quite as much as previous years, one, because this is very abbreviated, and, two, because some songs really lend themselves to enjoyment outside the context of their album more than other songs. One band here lands three entries and probably would have landed a whole lot more on a slightly longer list simply because of how great of music their album this year was for me to work out to. But I tried to diversify this list a bit so that it wasn’t just my favorite additions to my workout playlist. The top albums, I promise, are a far better representation of the year in metal for me. But anyway...

20. Periphery - “Blood Eagle”

Periphery have pretty much crystallized their brand of djent now and spent much of this year’s album doing a little adventurousness with it, but the first single, “Blood Eagle”, was one of the more traditional, crushing, explosion tracks from the album, harnessing hardcore groove, punishing accents, tasty guitar tones, and emphatic vocals of both the coarse and soaring variety. The song isn’t anything new for Periphery, but it’s a tremendous example of how potent they are at their heaviest and how easy it is for them to disprove their detractors who lampoon them for Spencer’s clean singing.

19. Panopticon - “The Crescendo of Dusk”

Despite being a one-off piece kind of off the beaten path for Panopticon for a two-track EP recorded during the previous double-albums’ sessions, this song is a fantastic example of bold, cathartic blackgaze whose soulful choral climax is built up to and pays off phenomenally, and that’s not the side of atmospheric black metal Panopticon usually wanders too. It’s a gorgeous piece that is worth it for every moment of its 12-minute runtime.

18. Car Bomb - “Scattered Sprites”

Switching quickly to a much shorter and more jolting song, it was hard to pick a prime highlight on Car Bomb’s new album, but ultimately I found myself loving the tasty, effects-laden, Meshuggah-esque 8-string mathcore groove of “Scattered Sprites” and the rest of the song’s fascinating tonal jumps from Deftones-ish atmosphere to crushing distorted madness. It certainly represents very well the constantly transforming beast that the band’s fourth album was.

17. Spirit Adrift - “Angel & Abyss”

On yet another album full of songs that would have packed a longer list, Spirit Adrift’s standout moment on Divided by Darkness was, for me, the melodically soulful trad-doom power ballad of sorts, “Angel & Abyss”. The melodic guitar leads being the obvious driver of the song’s feels, the clean and rhythm backing and the seething vocal delivery are perhaps the underappreciated foundation for the extra emotive NWOBHM-influenced guitar leads to shine through.

16. Inter Arma - “The Atavist's Meridian”

Definitely the standout track from Sulphur English, “The Atavist’s Meridian” is a menacing mammoth of a song, twelve-and-a-half minutes of brooding, towering sludge and haunting echoed throat-gurgling growls. Even when the wall of sound gets less jagged, the lour does not let up as the band maintain their fearsome, ominous presence in the song’s more atmospheric middle section and burst back so satisfyingly to round it out. There are bands out there that stick to this form of sludgy, death-y doom metal much more exclusively and religiously than Inter Arma who wouldn’t be able to top this.

15. Opeth - “Charlatan” My favorite cut from Opeth’s most ambitious album this decade, the band actually sound energized and adventurous on this song rather than just playing 70’s prog dress-up. The Meshuggah-esque bass groove on here is of course right up my alley, but the whole song is full of actual progressive dynamic that keeps you fixated on it and it’s intriguing emotive journey.

14. Sermon - “The Preacher”

Being the second-to-last song on the album, “The Preacher” kind of goes hand-in-hand with “The Rise of the Desiderata” as part of the album’s climactic ending, and it’s as meticulous and calculated as every track on the album with its small, this song being a standout for its particular dynamic between is louder and softer sections, making it such a thriller of a track that serves its role as part of the album’s climax beautifully.

13. Misery Index - “New Salem”

I’ve loved Rituals of Power all year and there have been several standout tracks for me, but “New Salem”, with its gruff refrain and relentless powerviolence aggression, has been my favorite from the album this year, one of them top workout playlist tracks for me this past year. It’s a pretty straightforward, fast, brutal track, but god is it effective.

12. Korn - “You’ll Never Find Me”

From the irksome guitar wails from Munky and the thick and tasty seven-string accents from Head, to Jonathan Davis’ volatile vocal delivery, “You’ll Never Find Me”, is one of the (several) prime examples of Korn’s committed return to their old-school sound on this album that really fucking stuck the landing and impressed. That build-up to that fucking intense headbanging crash at the bridge is exactly what made me such a fan of Korn’s early work in the first place, and this song is one of, again, several that shows why more than twenty years down the road while all their imitators have come and gone, Korn have been the dedicated champions of nu metal.

11. Cattle Decapitation - “Time’s Cruel Curtain”

It was honestly hard picking a favorite from Death Atlas, but I felt like this song captured the album’s lyrics’ overall dread and gloom in the musical sense pretty well through the dissonant clean guitars and Travis Ryan’s melodic snarling, which is particularly gut-wrenching on the chorus. And it’s as fierce, fast, and disgustingly brutal as we’ve come to expect of Cattle Decapitation now.

10. Motionless in White - “Thoughts & Prayers”

One of the many vibrant, tasty alternative metalcore bangers from the band’s fifth LP that dominated my workout playlist this year, “Thoughts and Prayers” is undoubtedly the most blasphemously in-your-face, Slipknot-influenced cut that highlights the highs of metalcore heaviness the band have no trouble reaching. The defiant attitude of the melodic chorus’ refusing of prayers for help, and really the whole song’s self-sufficient denial of religion over some of the band’s most potent metalcore to date, got me past a lot of physical thresholds this year.

9. Babymetal - “Arkadia”

Babymetal on their first two albums for me have been a project trying to iron out their vision of J-pop metal fusion in real time with the first and second albums’ primordial experiments producing the odd hit among many more misses, but this year’s Metal Galaxy was far more consistent, less stylistically clumsy, and packed full of hits. And if this list was longer, there wold be several bops and bangers from that record here. And while circumstance had just one song in my top 20 this year, what a tremendous entry it is. The album’s closing track, “Arkadia” starts out like a basic-ass Dragonforce cut, but the triumphant melodies quickly lead into higher and higher echelons of catharsis with the guitar vocalist Su-metal delivering the most powerfully soaring performance of the band’s career. It’s like a Dragonforce song that blows most (if not all) Dragonforce songs out of the water through its sheer unashamed passion. And while I know there are many in that camp who stiff-arm Babymetal and would wretch and rage-quit upon simply hearing Su-metal’s voice come in, I imagine they would have a hard time denying this song’s power if tricked into listening to a guy’s vocal cover over the instrumental.

8. Rammstein - “Puppe”

While Cattle Decapitation’s “With All Disrespect” is certainly a gut-punchingly grim outlook on humanity’s self-destruction, this standout cut from the German industrial metal juggernauts’ self-titled album is undoubtedly the most chilling cut on this list, and quite possibly Rammstein’s entire catalog. Till Lindemann’s poetic narration of the song’s dark story is expertly timed and laid out, but his gripping, manic, wholly unsettling vocal performance, coupled with the rest of the band’s brilliantly scored instrumental tracking, is what paralyzes you in terrified awe of the song.

7. Motionless in White - “Disguise”

Another alt-metal banger that dominated my workouts this year, the opening title track to the band’s fifth album isn’t really doing anything all that revolutionary or stylistically original, yet it’s somehow distinctly Motionless in White and it succeeds and makes it here simply because its execution of such a straightforward, yet often fucked-up style is so on-point.

6. Sermon - “The Rise of the Desiderata”

The grand finish to one of the subtlest, yet most magnificent progressive metal albums of the decade (spoiler I guess), “The Rise of the Desiderata”, even outside the context of the album building up to it, is a tremendous work of patient, well-measured progressive metal that exemplifies so magnificently what that band did with such a small musical arsenal on Birth of the Marvelous. The slow, brooding build-up to the absolutely orgasmic finish is hardly a mere waiting game, with not a dull second of the song, and the thematic climax of “rise! rise!” chants the song finishes on is, for me, the kind of representative of rewarding and immersive journey prog metal is all about!

5. Motionless in White - “Holding on to Smoke”

This one was the sleeper hit (in my eyes) for the band this year; in the album’s marginally weaker second half after the slew of bangers that occupied the first, “Holding on to Smoke” is the perseverant anthem among anthems that almost single-handedly lifts that second half. But outside the context of the album, “Holding on to Smoke” is not excessively heavy like “Thoughts & Prayers”, not even as catchy as the bouncy “<c/ode>”, and not even as sick in the breakdown department as “Disguise”, but it more than makes up for it in sheer performative passion and the compositional consistency that characterizes the whole album and strings the determination teeming throughout the song together into a hugely triumphant banger of a track.

4. Periphery - “Satellites”

Periphery really outdid themselves on the grand, ethereally cathartic closing track to their fourth (and best) self-titled album. Unlike the directly aggressive “Blood Eagle”, “Satellites” is a much longer, more multi-staged, moodier piece that gradually builds up from bright, somber reverb-driven ambiance into several tremendously heartfelt and instrumentally full-bodied crescendos, with the band timing their bursts of heavy energy perfectly. Spencer wildly outdoes himself in particular with his gloriously high-flying vocal performance during the song’s cathartic climax. It’s such a great ending to a great album, and such a great picture of Periphery’s constant perfecting of their sound.

3. As I Lay Dying - “My Own Grave”

It was released in 2018, but I included it here instead of that year’s list because I had the hunch at the time that it would be part of an As I Lay Dying album, and it was. But the first song the band released after their unlikely reunion was always going to be a contentious one given the situation with Tim Lambesis, and being that the song was released at a time when Tim would have still have almost two years in prison to go if he had done his full original sentence of six years, the importance of the band’s first release since that whole terrible situation transpired is hard to overstate. Everyone else in the band had to justify linking back up with a convicted felon and reentering the fold of music again, and “My Own Grave” is exactly the statement they needed to make. During his trial and after his early release, Tim had kept pretty quiet, but from the one somber video exposition he gave before entering prison, it was pretty clear he knew and finally accepted how badly he fucked up, and that awareness of his own terrible failure, succumbing to evil, and his understanding that he still has a lot to do to make things right is what makes this song so vitally confessional and the determination expressed so powerful. And this all comes through not just in the lyrics, but in the passionate performances from everyone on the song as well. It’s an emphatic triumph in classic metalcore fashion through (higher, more real-life stakes than usual for the genre) the worst of one’s own faults.

2. Demon Hunter - “Peace”

This one is kind of the enigma of this list, a more subtle, hard rock track than the rest of the heavy, boisterous bangers here, but what an excellent song it is from the mellower of the sister albums the band released in 2019. Ryan Clark’s smooth, baritone subtlety serves as a veneer of calmness in the face of collapse as he sings a tearful welcoming of the peace from the pain of a sin-ridden world that finally comes with death. There’s almost a suicidal angle to the song, but it might be more representative of one’s readiness to be taken into a divinely peaceful afterlife after a lifetime of struggle, which is pretty insightful from Ryan Clark and captures that feeling in a tangible way even for people with (ideally) many years ahead of them like me, I must say. Either way, it’s a much more sober pondering on one’s own mortality and the temporariness of everything around us than its upbeat rock tempo initially lets on, the kind of meditation that gives people hope and faith in a heavenly afterlife.

1. Rammstein - “Deutschland”

Simultaneously subtle and directly expressive, Rammstein’s lead single from their self-titled 2019 album may not have been as musically outrageous as its grand, ambitious video was, but the song itself sure stands on its own just fine as a tense, conflicted song of pleading heartbreak to a nation and its history, and who better in metal to write a threnody for a Germany caught in the middle of the rest of Europe’s refugee crisis and its own version of many nations’ recent fights against a resurgence of right-wing extremism than Till Lindemann. The tone of the song is so mournful and heartbroken, as though it’s a song about leaving a lover you still want to love, yet stern and firm in its principle.

5 Outside Albums of 2019:

I’ve made a point the past two years to highlight the music I enjoyed outside the metal sphere, usually keeping it to a few mini-reviews of five “outside” albums, and this year it was certainly hard to narrow down the immense amount of quality hip hop, indie rock, experimental rock, especially jazz (Jesus, there was so much good jazz this year), and even some respectable pop music I heard this year. The paragraphs are going to be shorter this time around, but I still wanted to show my appreciation for these albums.

Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

Formed by David Berman, the former frontman of Silver Jews (who helped pioneer the flavor of indie rock/alt country in the 90′s and early 2000′s that got me more into indie music) ten years after the termination of Silver Jews, his short-lived return from retirement from music through Purple Mountains’ sole eponymous album only became more tragic after Berman committed suicide less than a month after the record’s release. The subject matter was as confessional and depressive as anything from Silver Jews, my favorite song from the record immediately after its release, “Nights That Won’t Happen” (a song very clearly indicating Berman grappling with the guilt of his suicidal mindset), being an even more bleak song in the posthumous context. Upon learning that Berman had come back to music, formed this project, and made this record full of emotionally retching expositions of his mental state in an effort to pay down a crippling mass of debt (which I’m sure had a significant impact on his decision to end his own life), it makes the album all the more devastating and my feeling toward it much more complicated. Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar, Purple Mountains takes on a different light in the aftermath of its creator’s death so soon after its release, the songs on Purple Mountains pretty much as prophetic as those on Blackstar, though Berman’s foreseeing of having to take his death into his own hands as opposed to Bowie’s waiting for the inevitability of the progression of his cancer gives this album a much less celebratory, commemorative feeling than that of Blackstar, though listening back through it now with 20/20 hindsight really puts the similar element of inevitability into perspective too, and it makes it hard to really enjoy this album in a sense similar to how I enjoy most of my metal and most other music. Knowing that this album was secondarily a last ditch effort by Berman to lessen the burden of the tremendous anxiety caused by his poor financial state, and primarily a means of talking himself through his decision to end his life in the likely event that the album and its touring cycle didn’t make that burden bearable enough, it’s very hard to listen to and be thankful for this album that kind of indirectly killed its creator. The existential dread of crippling debt is no light weight, however, and the art Berman made and was proud of should not bear the brunt of the blame for what the procedures of a heartless and oppressive economic system at least catalyzed, if not caused. Purple Mountains is a hard album to listen to, but its tragic surroundings aside, it is a welcome return of one of indie music’s most brilliant and influential voices, even if just for a moment.

Denzel Curry - ZUU

On a much different note, Denzel Curry made a quick return to the studio after creatively upping his game yet again on his 2018 album, TA13OO. And while not as ambitiously conceptual or dense as TA13OO, ZUU was yet another banger-packed display of pure rapping prowess. It’s been stated that good form is just that, temporary, and a mere snapshot of an artist’s trajectory, and that it takes time and consistency to prove class. Well Curry is undoubtedly in very good form right now, and has been for the past five or six years and has been making the most of it, only getting better and better across his main projects and his consistently fire guest appearances. And sure it’s arguable that he’s just making the most of his hot streak by putting out as much as possible while he’s one fire, but it’s at the point where if this was a flash in the pan it would have been over by now, and Curry’s still going. The dude put out a megamix of spare verses already this year, and it’s killer! The man at this point, in my eyes, is class, and definitely one of hip hop’s most exceptional forces now that he’s finally getting his long-deserved acclaim. As far as ZUU goes, yeah it’s quick and more about tight bars and emphatic delivery than any grand concept, but to reduce assessment of this to as if it mere turn-up music would be improper, as Curry uses this album to jump at the opportunity given to him by the traction of TA13OO to elevate his hometown and pay tribute to his friends and family who have been with him throughout his journey, and shed light on the roughness of the reality of life for the people he cares about in Carol City, Florida. And he pays tribute to those who got him here with such passion and splendor that it’s tangible and invigorating even from far outside.

Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

I saw a fair amount of people (mostly outside her fanbase) complaining about Angel Olsen’s handling of her more instrumentally dense fourth LP, which I don’t get at all. Olsen had tread the ground of minimal indie folk thoroughly on her early work and she proved she could handle a bigger instrumental pallet on 2016′s My Woman, of which All Mirrors is a well-executed expansion on that bolsters Olsen’s emphatic sonic presence without suffocating her out of her own songs, which I never had any worries about with the raw vocal power she’s showcased convincingly before. And Olsen remains at her open, heartfelt best in terms of lyricism and songwriting on the album, no drop-off in emotional potency or sonic beauty, so I’m a little confused with some of the griping over this album. I love it and highly recommend it.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah - Ancestral Recall

It was hard to pick a from the several great jazz records this past year (so much great afro-percussion-driven stuff coming from the UK lately that has been scratching my itch like crazy), The Comet Is Coming had an LP and a similarly impressive follow-up EP both in 2019 that made thrilling use of electronics amid the energetic jazz madness and Matana Roberts had put out an intriguing spoken-word concept album tied together with some of the most eccentric avant-garde jazz instrumentation I heard all year. But I ultimately went with the dynamic and delicious Ancestral Recall from Christian Scott, whose impressively holistic weaving together of traditional jazz elements with hip hop and modern jazz atmosphere, despite not being as quite up my violent jazz alley as other records this year, I could not deny the magnificence and accomplishments of. The electronics are kept to a minimum and used only to highlight the work of the piano, horns, and percussion typically associated with the genre, but none of it feels at all unnatural or clashing, rather a cooperative interplay between old and new that elevates both and shows what they can achieve in harmony. And yes, there are plenty of boisterous trumpet performances from the main man to quench that thirst. But it’s an album about respect for the foundational work of the genres incorporated and expanding on it rather than demolishing and rebuilding it.

clipping. - There Existed an Addiction to Blood

My favorite non-metal album of the year, clipping. really took the campy genre of horrorcore to far more cinematic and tangible realms through their signature noisy/industrial approach. And There Existed and Addiction to Blood is a project where after hearing it, it left me with a sense of “well, duh”. Of course clipping. would absolutely nail an actually immersive and not totally laughable horrorcore album. The members’ experiences in cinema serve as a tremendous asset to this album as William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes produce an industrially enhanced horror score to soundtrack Daveed Diggs’ gripping rapped storytelling, which takes so many of the genres tropes and breathes fresh air into them to make them far more vital and consequential in this day and age. And the songs (many of which are serious bangers) are immersive, cinematic, and intense in a way that I could see a lot of metalheads enjoying. I could seriously go on about the chilling bursts of distortion on the twisted club turn-up track, “Club Down”, or the cold swagger of Diggs’ delivery on the industrially tense “All in Your Head”, or the suspense of the more instrumentally traditional house-hideout cut “Nothing Is Safe”, but I would be going on for paragraphs, and I said one. If there’s one album for people reading this section to check out, it’s this one.

My 30 Favorite Metal Albums of 2019:

Yeah, 30 is keeping it really short here; I feel like I could have included a couple dozen other very praiseworthy metal albums here, but this post is massive enough and I don’t have time for that. As far as patterns or trends go, metal’s respective subgenres largely continued to mind their own business as the divergent evolution that the genre has been undergoing since the passing of its peak of mainstream limelight has progressed. The metallic hardcore revival is still going strong with a lot of bands outside that scene taking notice and influence from these vibrant younger bands (Code Orange being the obvious prominent example) and their ancestors. I heard a lot more hardcore-influenced breakdowns and noisy industrial-ish guitar work this year than usual, and even though it graced that shitty aforementioned Bad Wolves album, the metallic hardcore song was a highlight and most of the hardcore influence I’ve heard outside that scene has been implemented well. The year also saw a lot of big, storied names in metal releasing high-profile projects and really coming through and exceeding most realistic expectations (with one quite notable exception), so a good portion of this top 30 is going to contain your basic bitch, Loudwire-type picks, but, you know, those acts delivered and earned their way here in my eyes. This whole thing has gotten pretty out of hand, and what was planned as a quick year’s recap is now a gargantuan mega-post, so I’m going to TRY to make these quick.

30. Full of Hell - Weeping Choir

It’s hard to complain about a pretty continuous sequel to one of the most addictive deathgrind albums in years (Trumpeting Ecstasy); I’m sure not griping about it. Weeping Choir may not have as high of peaks as its predecessor, but it’s a similarly compact, dizzying, and forward-thinking release that definitely earned similar respect.

29. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest

Thank god King Gizz released this, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bonafide thrash album in this top 30. Despite not really being a “thrash band” or even a “metal band”, King Gizzard’s adventurousness and versatility makes their adaptability to this style come as no real surprise. In fact the naturalness with which the band play shows that they have clearly always had a true reverence for the genre and have wanted to make this album for a long time. The album is as fuzzy as King Gizz usually is, taking on a very old-school vibe in tribute to the genre’s progenitors without being mere nostalgia. I doubt they’ll do it, but I can dream of more of this from the Gizz.

28. Knocked Loose - A Different Shade of Blue

Knocked Loose have quickly established themselves as one of the strongest forces in metallic hardcore these days, with each album improving significantly off the last, and A Different Shade of Blue being the latest in a string of stronger and stronger releases from them, embodying pure hardcore aggression with precision accuracy and efficiency.

27. Lord Mantis - Universal Death Church

Looking back through this band’s catalog (I hadn’t heard of them before this album), they’ve always taken a very sinister and esoteric approach to experimental black metal that makes them and Profound Lore a match made in heaven as a prime representation of the boundary-pushing ethos the label does well to curate, and Universal Death Church is a fine example of the band’s signature incredible capacity to make black metal nastier and more nightmarish than it already is.

26. Infant Annihilator - The Battle of Yaldabaoth

The Battle of Yaldabaoth is such a ridiculous album and such a treat for it, the unreal, gratuitous techdeath wankery so obscene, it’s impossible to take too seriously and not love for its absurdity. It’s a fun album and one that fast-forwards much of the increasingly fast and techy death metal straight to its next musical checkpoint.

25. Venom Prison - Samsara

A far more holistic death metal album than Infant Annihilator’s, Samsara is just teeming with performative power and calculated technicality. I had said at first that it wasn’t really much of a step up from Animus, but as I’ve listened to it more throughout the year, the band’s subtle maturation really began to show and the album grew on me more and more, so it’s definitely one of the year’s best death metal records.

24. Misery Index - Rituals of Power

Even more emphatic than Samsara was Misery Index’s reaching the pinnacle of their form of powerviolence on their best album to date, Rituals of Power, which suffers no loss of intensity in its incorporation of infectious (though still hardly melodic) hooks, and it puts them at the top of their league.

23. Demon Hunter - War

I had originally cited the more measured, hard-rock-driven partner album, Peace, as the better of the two records Demon Hunter had released this year, but over time, so many of the tracks on the intentionally heavier War that I thought might wane on me stayed strong and some of its other tracks grew on me. The album and its counterpart were such a refreshing pair of releases for the band that I hope revitalizes them going forward.

22. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

And we’ve got the most basic pick of the list so far here, post-Watershed Opeth. That term has annoyed, frustrated, and infuriated so many within the band’s fanbase who have, at this point, given up (either out of acceptance or intolerance) on hopes of the band’s death metal sound ever returning to the progressive music they make, and I myself have found the band’s lack of ambition beyond simply eschewing growls and metallic elements on the band’s past three albums to be a bit underwhelming with the clear 70′s-prog LARPing finding them punching pretty below their weight. Wow, that was an annoyingly long sentence too. But Opeth finally came through with an album that did more than just imitate the likes of their prog idols like King Crimson, Styx, Yes, and Pink Floyd. In Cauda Venenum is a theatrically big album that puts the band in the kind of creative context in which they’ve proven to succeed in and established themselves in their career in it as the death metal pillar of the prog palace, and the band came through with a rewarding progressive rock album without needing to bring their death metal elements out of retirement.

21. Deadspace - Dirge

Dirge was not the album I expected from Deadspace, but it shifted them from their more somber atmospheric style of black metal into something so much more suffocatingly dark and sinister that they went on to produce another full-length album and an EP in the style of before the year’s end, and I have been loving the Australian band’s more menacing side since the transformation. The band’s first album in this newly terrifying style for them is a masterpiece of vile, demonic black metal that still features what has made Deadspace a worthwhile figure to follow in the worldwide atmospheric black metal scene, and I imagine there is plenty more to come from the tenacious Australian group and have been so proudly supportive of, which I am eagerly looking forward to.

20. Uboa - The Origin of My Depression

This is the first not-completely-bonafide-metal-album entry on this list, but it is a worthwhile and impressive one that I think a lot of fans of the kinds of experimental and black metal that incorporate dark ambiance, industrial elements, and harsh noise could get into. But it is an album as intensely depressive as its title suggests, a meditation on the turmoils associated with its creator’s gender dysphoria and the efforts to cope with and mitigate it that comes through in all shades of pain, from melancholic-ambiance-backed stone-faced recitations of doubt about self-worth to seething, agonized screams of torment for release from the hell of the creator’s condition over abrasive industrial noise. It is not by any means easy listening, and its lyrics demand a lot of emotional energy. Be advised. But also it’s really painfully cathartic and expresses an important and often quieted perspective for those not affected by gender dysphoria to hear.

19. Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

I do like this album a lot, I really do, but it has to be the most overrated album on this whole list. So many people wetted their britches over this damn album and jumped to call it a perfect masterpiece of death metal. It’s a very very good death metal album, but it’s not beyond improvement. And, again, it’s good and I don’t want to be tempering the jubilee over this thing in this list where I’m supposed to be highlighting my appreciation for it, but it makes me wonder if this is how people who aren’t that into Meshuggah see the band’s adoring fans (like me). But Hidden History of the Human Race, mind-blown ancient aliens sci-fi concept aside, is a great continuation of the semi-psychedelic modern twist on early death metal that started on Starspawn, and the band’s progressive compositional abilities certainly do deserve a lot of praise, and I do hope that they continue building on this.

18. Inter Arma - Sulphur English

Another band making continual improvements on their sonic foundation, Inter Arma have never let their labels of death or sludge or doom or post-metal box them in or make them feel forced to pick one and stick with it, and Sulphur English is a fantastic example of how wide the band’s capabilities span, with elements of all the aforementioned subgenres mashed together in so many different configurations together and on their own, and it makes for such an overpowering record whose wall of sound really takes a lot of spins to withstand the continuous impact of.

17. Fit for an Autopsy - The Sea of Tragic Beasts

Okay, I’m gonna have to really start being shorter now, because now we’re getting into the top of the list, the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop. And I’ll be here until 2021 if I don’t slow down. Anyway, Fit for an Autopsy reinforced their melodic supplementation to their brand of deathcore on The Sea of Tragic Beasts, and clearly put the work into making sure it meshed well with their style. And the work paid off. While a lot of deathcore these days is kind of departing from that original “core” core that the genre’s early contributors established for more straight-up death metal and other progressive or techy styles (basically just retaining the affinity for breakdowns), albums like this are a fine example of how beneficial this evolution is for the genre.

16. Rammstein - Rammstein

It’s hard to be brief with an album ten years in the making, featuring the best song of the year, but I’ll try. Rammstein’s long-awaited follow-up to Liebe ist für alle da does very much pick up where the band left off in 2009, feeling like a natural successor rather than some contrived nostalgia trip to Sehnsucht or Mutter to appease fans for their patience. And for as much as I unpacked every song in detail in my review, the album as a whole is hard to sum up beyond simply a solid offering of Rammstein tracks, several of which have grown on me since my write-up, like the ballads “Diamant” and “Was ich Liebe”, and especially the whimsical “Ausländer”. Lindemann’s lyricism remains a strong point for the band, and the tight compositions another positive on the album. I just hope it’s not so long until the next one.

15. Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Like I had said in my review, every new Slipknot album is one of the biggest events of the year for metal, if not the biggest, and aside from Tool’s underwhelming return to the studio with Fear Inoculum, We Are Not Your Kind was definitely the year’s biggest release. As has become kind of the norm for them now, Slipknot’s sixth album was steeped in its own turmoil, this time being the confusingly ugly departure of Chris Fehn. Nevertheless, the rest of the band pulled through with a solid album that did quite well to highlight the band’s various strengths and a good balance of classic Slipknot aggression with forward-thinking experimentation with their sound. Yet another big name delivering the goods this year.

14. Korn - The Nothing

And speaking of success from storied bands, Slipknot’s supposed nu metal rivals also really came through this year with one of their best albums in a long long time, and this is coming from someone who has been a fan of Korn’s later era, their untitled album, See You on the Other Side, etc., but the band’s increasingly more committed return to their old-school sound this decade, after the flop of The Path of Totality, has culminated magnificently on The Nothing, which essentially sounds like a modern-produced Untouchables or Issues. The songwriting is consistently well-measured and Jonathan Davis’ chilling performances in the wake of the loss of his wife especially give the album such a real sense of turmoil that heightens the intensity of everything around them. As therapeutic as music is in times of great pain and loss, and as great as this album is, I hope Jonathan’s grief wasn’t exploited or exacerbated for this art, and I hope he is doing okay.

13. Baroness - Gold & Grey

This album got a lot of flack for its indeed frustrating production, with a lot of critics not being able to get past the blown-out, fuzzy, lo-fi crackle that blurred a lot of the songs’ finer details away. And I agree that the band certainly could have put their sonic strengths in a better light with clearer production and probably should going forward. Nevertheless, underneath the hazy veneer of grainy mixing, Gold & Grey boasts great songwriting in the styles of Purple and Yellow & Green, as well as treading newly segue-heavy ground for them. And after a few listens getting used to (or getting over) the album’s production, the sharp-as-ever songwriting and booming-as-ever vocal performances from John Dyer Baizley really come through and are worth appreciating.

12. Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Arguably the weirdest album to come out of 2019, yet so much more than a novelty project, Grand Guignol Orchestra takes the creepiness of the often-mishandled dark carnival aesthetic and applies it to the band’s twisted brand of avant-garde black metal to make something truly weird and unsettling, yet fixating. The psychotic clown-like screams and wails across the album reinforce this aesthetic to the point of perhaps creating a new subgenre of metal: carnival metal perhaps.

11. Waste of Space Orchestra - Syntheosis

The work of two whole bands (Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising) joining forces in their entirety, Syntheosis is a surprisingly cohesive and immersive project, as synth-driven as its name suggests and cinematic in its massive sound. It’s a weirdly atmospheric form of experimental, psychedelic black metal that is both serene and crushing; the artists involved clearly had this ambitious project in mind and they worked meticulously to make sure their vision was realized.

10. Spirit Adrift - Divided by Darkness

Again, really trying to keep it short here, but what an album from Spirit Adrift. Divided by Darkness is the album that sounds most like and reminds me most of the most recent perfect album I heard (2018′s Desolation by Khemmis), and the emotional potency bubbling up to the brim of this album’s doomy melodies and soaring vocals is similarly enriching, while not as ridiculously perfect as Khemmis’ latest release, Divided by Darkness takes Spirit Adrift to new heights and makes them one of modern doom-influenced melodic metal’s most promising figures.

9. Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites

The departure of longtime guitarist/vocalist Dallas Toler-Wade was arguably a blessing in disguise for Nile, with their ninth album, Vile Nilotic Rites, being a roaring comeback from the relative lull of their previous two albums, much of which is due to the reinvigorating performances of new guitarist/vocalist Brian Kingsland, whose more traditionally roaring growls breathe new life into and provide a fitting new angle to the band’s Egyptian-themed brand of extremely fast, technical old-school death metal. It’s great to have them back in such emboldened form.

8. Lingua Ignota - Caligula

This is the album that just got me. Very much in a similar, yet more neoclassically-inspired vein of industrial darkwave as Uboa’s album, Kristen Hayter herself has said that Caligula is also not a metal album, and she’s right, but holy shit does it hit harder than a lot of metal tries so hard to hit. I had been trying for months to write a review for this album, but it never came, partly because the subject matter from which the album is pulled is tender and not easy at all. But it’s incredibly important to talk about, and I want to give Caligula some of the written attention it deserves from me. Sure if I just put the album on for unassuming listeners, they probably wouldn’t immediately pick up on the manically shrieked and operatically wailed languishing and biblically proportioned defiance being curses of the project’s creator toward her sexual abuser, but the resilience she puts forth into these proclamations of insubmissive survival is certainly tangible even without knowledge of the heartbreaking history that birthed it. And while it makes tremendous compositional strides from All Bitches Die and Let the Evil of His Lips Cover Him, Caligula, like the two albums before it, is such an enigmatic album that feels wrong to consume in the conventional sense or without anything other than pure undivided attention and empathy for what Hayter is so courageously pouring out of her mind and body for the music. It feels wrong to just put music on as a background for room-cleaning or even working out that comprises real, unbridled emotion about its creator’s rape. Yet I know that everything about Caligula and Lingua Ignota has been about surviving that and overcoming that suffering, so it certainly deserves to be listened to and respected; I would posit, though, that if you’re going to enjoy the sounds borne from Kristen Hayter’s subjection to sexual abuse, its candid portrayal of its aftermath should at least serve as further deterrent from committing such abuse to another person, if not convicting you to stop doing so if you are or actively seeking to prevent it where you know you can.

7. Periphery - Periphery IV: HAIL STAN

Periphery have been a band who I have gradually come to realize I quite respect and rate very highly. Their Juggernaut double-album in 2015 was the major catalyst in this and has become one of my favorite albums in djent (if not my favorite if you don’t count Meshuggah’s music as djent). And while I wasnt as into their 2016 album, Periphery III: Select Difficulty, I have definitely seen this band’s continuous improvement and strong upward trend that their fourth self-titled record has continued. The band went for more than just thick, tasty djent on this album, though the thick tasty djent that is here (like “Chvrch Bvrner” and the aforementioned “Blood Eagle”) is some of their thickest and tastiest. But the band expanded their sound to more ethereal corners that produced impressively cathartic results (such as the aforementioned “Satellites”, and the swaggering “Crush”, and the bright “Garden in the Bones”). Major respect to this band that keeps getting better and making it harder on their stubborn detractors.

6. As I Lay Dying - Shaped by Fire

To say this album was controversial would be an understatement, and to point out that it was important that As I Lay Dying  come through in several big ways would be as well. Yet for every bit of vocal disapproval and expression of how irredeemable Tim Lambesis was there seemed equal rejoicing about the metalcore legends’ return. It was important, though, that the band come through with and album the showed their understanding of the heaviness of the context and didn’t come across as trying to bypass it or sweep things under the rug, and they did a tremendous job of rising to the occasion. The band continued where they left off before their disbandment as the strongest force in metalcore, sounding even more impassioned and vital upon their return, clearly enriched by the real-life consequentiality of their music. And while it certainly looks even more impressive given the withering state of NWOAHM metalcore in 2019, let that not detract from the incredible power of the genre’s juggernauts’ return to and improvement upon their best form of themselves before their disbandment.

5. Motionless in White - Disguise

When this album came out I honestly didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it. I had hoped that the band would expand on the best tracks from their previous album, Graveyard Shift, the alternative metal bangers, and focus on what worked well for those songs, and to my surprise that’s actually what the band did on Disguise. I had initially said that the high points on Disguise were not as high as the peaks on Graveyard Shift but after listening to Disguise so much this year, it’s shown itself to me to be such a ln impressive improvement on the direction that Motionless in White we’re heading in, and to put it any lower on this list for the sheer fact that it’s not a particularly critic-friendly album would be dishonest. But after getting more into their catalogue I think that this band are one of the best in their field, and sure, they’re very much an amalgamation of their influences, but goddamn do they channel those influences so effectively into so many flavors of delicious, nu metal, gothy, metalcore bangers. And it’s totally accessible too, I wish more of the bands who are trying to achieve more mainstream success would take the approach Motionless in White are taking, because this shit is actually really fucking enjoyable and full of soul.

4. Numenorean - Adore

Making strides from their debut full-length, Numenorean’s sophomore album is a great example of atmospheric blackgaze at its best without resorting to cheap Deafheaven imitation. Numenorean have found their own way to harness the power of blackgaze into emotionally vibrant compositions that come through triumphantly. I just hope the band can keep this up and expand on what they did here.

3. Car Bomb - Mordial

I had this as the number one album for a hot minute, and even teased about it maybe being a perfect release in my eyes as well, and even though it’s neither of those things, Car Bomb’s deeper foray into melodic and slightly atmospheric territory with their Meshuggah-esque brand of technical mathcore produced some seriously impressive results that I can’t wait to hear more of in the coming years.

2. Sermon - Birth of the Marvelous

I already said so much about this debut album, and it was so close to clinching that top spot, but Sermon deserve to be basking in so much more acclaim than I have seen for them, as this album is a nearly perfect prog metal example of how to do a lot with relatively little. I had expressed my disappointment in Soen’s and Tool’s albums this year, but I think this album really fits nicely into that cleaner section of progressive metal and knocks it out of the park. I know I’m repeating myself a lot from my review, but every little detail and accent is expertly calculated to make as positive of an impact as possible on the album, every note is arranged with both microscopic precision and with the grander scheme in mind, and I cannot get over how mind-blowingly well done this album is with so few bells and whistles or shortcuts. This is THE new band to keep an eye on.

1. Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

I don’t know if I like giving the top spot to such a grim, hopeless album, but fuck have Cattle Decapitation earned it, and I can’t blame them for their pessimism either. After aptly applying the disgustingness of goregrind to commentary on human mistreatment of animals and the ugly underbelly of the food industry, Cattle Decapitation turned their sound and their scope to even grander proportions, expanding the boundaries of deathgrind and the possibilities of dirty vocal technique to criticize humankind’s fucking up of the entire planet and foretelling the catastrophe that science has long foreseen. Despite their already bleak outlook on Monolith of Inhumanity and The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation somehow sound even more hopeless in Death Atlas, and Travis Ryan’s greater expansion of his melodic vocal application helps facilitate this, and the band takes their ever-furious rapid grinding battery through so many channels to enhance its epic scope. I should probably try my best not the just regurgitate my very long review of this album, but the band are essentially reading humanity its eulogy in advance and beckoning the end of our species in no romantic fashion, beckoning the universe to ruthlessly purge the species they refer to as a shit stain and move on like we never even happened. This is obviously an exaggeration of their frustration at the inaction and denial of many of the consequences our actions are inviting into our future, but it’s so fitting for the grave circumstances at hand. If there’s any band whose lyrics and sound represent humankind’s self-inflicted ecological apocalypse, it’s Cattle Decapitation, and of there’s any album that paints an adequately dismal picture in fittingly horrifying bluntness of where the world is headed that needs to be understood, it’s Death Atlas. The best and most important album of the year.

And that’s it. 2019, great as always for a genre that refuses to go quietly into the night. A lot of people have been doing decade-summarizing lists, but seeing how long this was, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Maybe I’ll just post a quick tribute to a few of my favorite albums of the decade that I didn’t get to write about before. But for now, 2019 is over, here’s to 2020, it’s going to be a big year, and I have a few things about that I need to say about that, so that’ll be coming soon too.

[modestmuses-a]

-lifts leggy- dish out the dirt on my url i dare u >:3c

send me a url | accepting

My opinion on:

Character in general: Ava is an adorable gremlin for whomst I would lay down my life and these are just the facts.  The fact that she has been dealt the shittiest hand in life and still manages to remain a generally kind and positive person fills me with so much love and tenderness, I cannot even--

How they play them: You do Ava so much justice, way more justice than her own author can even be bothered to give her. :^)  You actually let her trauma affect her for more than two seconds, and your characterization is really consistent.  I oughta know about its consistency considering I’ve had like... 10 bajillion threads with you over the past year.

The mun: Man!!  You’re so easy and fun to talk to, it’s amazing.  We hit it off pretty much immediately one year ago, and now??  You have become one of my best friends, someone I can share anything with and talk to every day.  Also, you send me such quality memes. ;)

Do I:

RP with them: Too much lmao

Want to RP with them: Too much lmao...  There is zero reason for us to have like 17 threads going at one time And Yet...  Whenever I add a new muse, I always send them to your inbox first.

What is my:

Overall opinion: My favorite RP partner on this site.  I know I shouldn’t be playing favorites, but listen...  Rowan is such a wonderful person, and his portrayal of Ava is top-notch and very fun to create different interactions with.  Just a real stand-up dude with a cute muse.  I love him.

[sweetboybucky]

Does a sleepover mean I can just come over and nap? It has been a looong day, flower. How are you? Are you excited for autumn? Halloween? Does Bucky dress up for Halloween? I feel like he’d be down for some couples costumes, but which ones? Love you 💙

Please come over and nap, I am so tired. I’ve got work tomorrow and the busiest month of my life coming up soon and I am already exhausted just thinking about it all. (But I’m sorry it’s been a long day for you, darling - are you okay? I hope you’re doing well. You deserve all the flowers in the world, you know. And lots of sunshine, too ☀️)

I’m okay! Aside from that busy work schedule coming up (I’m scheduled for a 10 hour shift on the busiest day of the year at my store. Kill me now.) I am partly excited for autumn, just not the horrible cold that the Midwest will bring with it. The leaves are pretty though, and I like the sweaters. 

Bucket absolutely dresses up for Halloween. He loves it (mostly for the candy) but also for the costumes. He likes stupid costumes. He dresses up as an avocado one year just because. The next year he channels Mean Girls and wears some tiny crop top and mouse ears. After that, he’s Captain America. He makes the shittiest cardboard wings possible. Then he’s a cactus. When people ask about his costume, he tells them he dressed up as Steve. Cause he’s prickly.  

He likes couples costumes, too. Movie couples are good - Ferris and Sloane, Andie and Duckie, Princess Buttercup and Westley, Solo and Leia (and he wants to be Leia because hello who doesn’t), Napoleon Dynamite and Deb. Harry Potter costumes are also great. Other stupid or funny costumes work, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster (because he believes in both) or just dressing up like aliens. He just wants to have a good time and get candy. 

Only by you my heart always moves, gorgeous 💚

[blouisparadise]

It’s been a while since our first A/B/O fic rec was created and because a ton of amazing A/B/O fics have come out since then, we decided to make a second part to this list. These are all alpha Harry/omega Louis fics (of course).

Happy reading!

Edit: We’ve added a third part to this rec list, which can be found here!

1) We’ll Stumble Through Heaven | Explicit | 6504 words

Louis likes to be a good boy for his alpha.

2) The Unsuccessful Promise | Teen & Up | 7152 words

At the end of the previous school year, Louis swore to everyone that he would return in the fall as an alpha. He made this promise especially to his arch-nemesis Harry Styles, who has already presented as an alpha himself.

Unfortunately over summer break, the worst thing possible happens: Louis presents as an omega. Now school is back in session and he has to return and face the consequences of pre-determining his status.

3) Something To Prove | Explicit 9425 words

Louis is the first and only omega to work at Red Valley Medical Center. Despite being more than qualified, he still faces prejudice for his career choice everyday. From patients refusing his treatment to condescending alpha doctors intervening with his work, practicing medicine in Boston is more challenging than Louis had ever thought it would be.

4) Night Out | Mature | 9741 words | Sequel

Symphony hall was the first place Louis had felt at home in this city, and he always had the box to himself. Until tonight.

5) Enjoy The Ride | Not Rated | 11103 words

The one where Louis, an omega more than tired of being treated as lesser than alphas, is forced on a road trip by his beta besties only to meet Harry who might just be the alpha he never knew he wanted.

6) Overwhelming | Explicit | 13261 words

Louis is an omega attending university to get his degree and most definitely not waste his time with unimportant things such as finding a mate. Harry is the alpha who manages to unwittingly mess up that plan.

7) No One Else Will Do | Mature | 13237 words

It takes Louis’ early heat for Harry and Louis to figure things out.

8) Anybody Have a Map? | Not Rated | 13873

The one where Louis met Harry in NYC where they bonded as fellow Brits in the large city. Years later, with Louis’ upcoming heat, maybe it’s time for their friendship to become something more.

9) If You Want More, Then Here I Am | Not Rated | 14558 words

The one where Harry and Louis are soulmates, but they can’t quite seem to get on the same page.

10) Just Let Me | Mature | 14714 words

The party was going well. So well, Niall had already sworn undying love to one multi-tiered chocolate cake, two friendly corgi-poodle mixes, Zayn’s hair, and the entire population of Los Angeles. So well, Zayn had only laughed and ruffled Niall’s hair and not even twitched towards a cigarette. So well, nearly everyone had spilled far past the boundaries of the night’s original plans, extracting bottles of vodka from the cabinets and losing a lot of clothes. Harry had proclaimed that he was finally going to throw a small and very grownup dinner party and of course here they were three hours later, fifty people half-naked in the pool. Soon to be full-naked, if Louis had to guess. Everybody in LA loved a heated pool. Everybody loved Harry.

11) Baby Honey | Explicit | 14744 words

When the next great war strikes, all alphas have to ship out. Alex leaves a little more behind than some of the others.

12) Never Understood What Love Was Really Like (But I Felt It For The First Time Looking In Your Eyes) | Not Rated | 18431 words

The one where Louis meets Harry at 14 and things don’t quite go as planned.

13) I Didn’t Fall For You (You Fucking Tripped Me) | Explicit | 20681 words

These days Louis tends to steer clear of dating alphas. He’s dated too many knotheads in his time, and he’s ready to just focus on school and his friends and his pet monitor lizard, of course.

Too bad the alpha next door won’t take a hint and stop using the worst pick up lines of all time on him. He’s really got to stop laughing with him–and talking to him and walking to class with him and letting him bring him coffee and tea and gifts for his lizard and watching Netflix together and…

14) Out Of The Wild | Explicit | 21502 words

Louis has spent most of his life as a wolf in the wild, Harry has spent most of his life as a human in the city. Their worlds collide during the audition process for the hottest new singing competition. What happens next should have expected.

15) Mark My Word (We Gon’ Be Alright) | Explicit | 35524 words

An A/B/O AU featuring an oblivious Harry as the pack leader, a pining Louis as his second-in-command, and an entourage of friends and family who are a little too good at keeping their mouths shut.

16) Worth Dying For | Explicit | 44906 words

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Louis says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. In the center of the table, a set of three glossy photos stares up at him, mocking him.

“A security detail is non-negotiable, Louis, you know this,” his mum reminds him, tapping the middle photo with two fingers.

Louis doesn’t look back down at the pictures, gesturing towards them wildly, over-dramatically. “This is not a security detail!” he protests. “This is a lanky college student. In what world do you hire someone like this kid to protect me?”

17) I Found A Love For Me (Darling Just Dive Right In) | Explicit | 46652 words | Sequel

Louis, an omega with very little control. Harry, an alpha with a lot of emotion. Neither of them have any idea what do to with this little thing called love, but they’ll be damned if they don’t put up a good fight.

18) I Want You So Much (But I Hate Your Guts) | Mature | 83648 words

AU in which Louis gets accepted to play for the Manchester University Alpha-Beta Football Team. The only problem: Louis is actually an Omega. He is determined to make it big in the football world, though, and he can’t do that bound to an Omega team. With the help of a faked doctor’s certificate and some pretty strong suppressants he is ready to fight for his dream.

That Harry Styles (Alpha, second year and youngest football captain of the A-B team in ages) doesn’t seem to like him complicates matters, though.

19) Where You Lay | Explicit | 86035 words

Note: There’s a small implied BH mention.

When Louis's upcoming heat threatens his success at his new dream job, he asks the best (and only) person he can think of to help him through it: his best mates' best mate, Harry Styles.  Harry reluctantly accepts, and together the two navigate a strange friends with benefits relationship that quickly turns complicated.

20) A Taste Of Desire | Explicit | 104414 words

A Victorian ABO where Harry is the owner of the most successful cotton mill in Manchester, and Louis is an opinionated social activist about to disrupt Harry’s world.

21) Falling Into You | Mature | 143109 words

In the grand scheme of adolescence and boyhood, Harry was still working himself out, so far with little luck. But four things he could say for certain: 1) he’d been at the top of his class all through primary and secondary school, 2) he was the shittiest alpha to ever walk the earth, 3) Liam Payne never let him forget it, and 4) he’d been in love with this boy, Louis Tomlinson, ever since he was fifteen years old.

22) Cold Little Heart | Teen & Up | 194740 words

Louis is a soft omega with an abusive past and an alpha child. A few months after getting a divorce, Louis meets Harry, an ex-military alpha wolf that offers him something odd.

In exchange for teaching him how to cook, Harry will babysit his son, Abraham. Louis really could use the help.

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.