remember when hugh dancy was like "its about the feeling of being seen in a world where you don't feel seen" about hannibal and i was just expected to continue on with my day as normal

Boneless Wings

 {AO3 version}

So, blah blah blah, it’s their standard-issue disaster: pack of dumbass witches (always with the dumbass witches. Where do they find the time for this shit? Somebody get these women signed up for a Peloton subscription or a macramé class or a vibrator of the month club, seriously, whatever it takes—), ancient curse, Castiel being the actual angel of stepping in it, nobody cares. 

The point is, two hundred and forty-one hours of binge-worthy drama later, Dean and Cas are living in a semi-detached just a short thirty-minute commute to somewhere equally lame, Castiel has two literal-ass wings, and yes, Susan, they kiss now. 

The neighbors are weirdly cool with it. 

For those of you perving along at home, Dean could absolutely provide a list of the hundred or so ways that having a boyfriend* with giant fucking actual wings is super hot and/or awesome.

This is not that list.

(*you can just shut right the fuck up , Sam, because it’s either this or Dean will start saying lover. And nobody needs that. Nobody wants that.)

1.  Bird mites. Holy shit. 

 2.  Sharing a bathroom. The shower curtain rod, and consequently the security deposit, are early casualties. The medicine cabinet follows swiftly behind. Shower hijinks are not even an option.

 3.  Dean comes home one day from a gig and there is a giant plastic green turtle in the backyard. A closer inspection reveals that the turtle is actually a mule for about half a truck bed of industrial dust ‘n grit. It is, in fact, a kiddie sandbox. Dean points out that they do not, in fact, have a small child (FINGERS CROSSED), so...?

Cas then earnestly shows him an entire playlist of exotic birdy dust bath videos on Youtube. 

Dean then earnestly shows him the garden hose. 

4.  The down just gets, like...everywhere. EVERYWHERE. How many times have Sam and Dean practically sold their kidneys for a single angel feather for some dumb spell to solve some pointless Occult McProblem? And now Dean is picking them out of his damn teeth every morning. (No, gross, not because of... Jesus, no, that is not a thing.)

On the upside of this one, Dean finally has an excuse to buy a Dyson, which he’s secretly always thought looked awesome. It is. 

 5.  When Dean is scraping out the umpteenth canister of fluff he jokingly suggests they use some of it to supplement the tragically flaccid down comforter currently shaming their bed, and Castiel pitches an existential fucking sulk. Dean wants to experience happiness again, so he does not point out that it get ass-bitingly cold here this time of year, and decent bedding is not exactly inexpensive, and the Dyson kind of maxed them out on household purchases.

But whatever.

 6.  Castiel is indulging in what Dean thinks of as a sky pout when he flies right into a head-on with li’l Timmy NextDoor’s new Christmas surveillance drone. It dings the shit out of one of Cas’s left primary feathers (the scientific term is “those big motherfuckers”), which apparently hurts like a bitch. Cas is grounded for a few weeks after that and is cutely pathetic about it and at first Dean is absolutely down to kiss it better. By the end, Dean is almost ready to strangle Cas with his own necktie, but he has learned a lot of surprisingly interesting stuff about ancient Mesopotamia, like that it was super horny.

 7.  After the snow melts, Dean starts finding shit on the front step with the morning paper. It’s not even a good newspaper; Cas signed them up for the local fish-wrapper (or maybe it was Sam, before he fled for the hills— he occasionally breaks out in a  “support local journalism” rash). The crossword puzzle is insulting, but the paper does at least syndicate Carolyn Hax, whom Dean secretly suspects of being an absolute wildcat in the sack, so he grudgingly expends the calories to bring it in every morning. 

Anyway, at first the stuff he discovers crapping up the welcome mat is just shiny bits of trash — couple granola wrappers, some MGD pull-tabs, a few field-stripped twisty-ties. Probably just windblown, and he tosses it in the garbage can. 

Then a couple weeks in, things start getting...grisly? It escalates real slowly, from a variety platter of mouse bits to squirrel à la power line and then half of a dry-aged raccoon and an opossum that has recently graduated from playing dead to professional dead-being. The neighborhood crows obviously love that their front step is now a roadkill café; Dean has to bat increasing numbers of them away with the kitchen broom in order to relocate their horrible snack to the edge of the nearest storm drain.

Then one morning there are like twenty crows and they’re in just the cutest little football huddle-up around what turns out to be a human fucking finger with a retro-fun mood ring still on the knuckle (it’s feeling: Sad) and Dean fully loses his shit. 

Cas hears him freaking out and comes whomping out of the garage ready to, whatever, flap somebody to death maybe, but as soon as he establishes that Dean doesn’t need anything more than a fresh pair of boxers, he de-poofs a bit and assesses the whole human finger/crows situation in his usual infuriatingly unrushed way. The crows had mostly bounced up to the cable line over the house, safely out of brooming range, but one by one they start to drop down and hippity-hop back towards the world’s tiniest crime scene.

If Dean were five percent less freaked he’d be tempted to go inside and find out how much of a dent he can make in a six-pack before Castiel finally dings and spits out his results, but he isn’t, so he just stands there in silence clutching the broom like it’s a shotgun.

Eventually Cas says “hm,” and then he looks at the crows and makes some noises that sound like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal, and the crows make some scrawps and chuks back, and then one of them delicately noodges the tip of dead finger with its beak and then hippity hops back a foot or two, bows, and then they all fly away over the shitty little beige duplex across the street like they’re running ten minutes late to an important bird appointment.

Castiel stands up (Dean reflexively backs up into the doorway, as this involves Cas bomfing out his wings a bit for ballast and Dean has caught a blow to the nuts on more than one occasion), dusts off his goddamn slacks, pulls a plastic evidence baggie out of thin goddamn air or maybe his socks, and casually bags the finger like they’re doing a standard FBI wheeze. “So what,” Dean says, as Cas diligently zips the baggie, “the fuck?”

“Oh,” Cas says, blinking in surprise that Dean is still there and interested, “they think I’m their god.”

Dean kind of stares back at him, the six feet of dude and like sixteen feet of bird, and thinks sure, okay, but his face must still be stuck on “Tippi Hedren attic scene” because Cas puts a reassuring hand on Dean’s shoulder and adds “Don’t worry. I’ve told them I don’t require further offerings, and I reassured them that you’re my consort and were simply jealous of other potential mates.”

It takes Dean two weeks to come up with a response to that, but by then it’s become evident that no bird is ever going to shit on the Impala again, so he decides to just chalk it up in the win column and move on.

You know. The family business.

8.  No matter how tightly he folds them, Cas can’t fit his wings through the definitely-not-up-to-code doorway of the wood-paneled family rec room in the basement, so Dean claims it as his man cave and dubs it the “No Fly Zone.” 

Castiel doesn’t find this funny, but Dean really only uses it to fold laundry. 

 9.  Transpo is an obvious issue. Cas can almost stuff himself into the Impala if he sort of reverse-cowgirls the back seat, but then the wingtips smoosh up against the windshield and Dean’s visibility is approximately zip. And, sure, Cas could fly himself anywhere they really needed to go, he’s basically a Chevy Of The Air, but sometimes it’s raining, and the seraph Castiel — Shield of God, Heavenly Soldier of the Lord, multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent, will smell like a wet fucking chicken for days afterward. Febreze does not help.

Dean spends a few nauseating weeks contemplating the purchase of — and here he learns that the human gag reflex can be conditioned, but never truly eradicated — a convertible. Once Cas brings up the possibility of a minivan or perhaps a station wagon (he’s taken to studying family motor vehicles with all the intensity of a birder with a life list) and Dean makes him sleep on the couch.

Dean gets his own living room rotation after he shows Cas a Craigslist posting for a very reasonably priced horse trailer. Castiel points out that it’s used and Dean notes that neither of them is exactly mint in original packaging either. Castiel points out that he’s not a horse, and after a few necessary but admittedly unoriginal jokes, Dean pulls up a website with an exhaustive photographic tutorial on how to convert a horse trailer “for the safe and sanitary transport of ostriches, emus, and/or cassowaries.” Cas points out that he’s not an ostrich, emu, and/or cassowary, and Dean counters that he clearly isn’t, because an emu would probably show a little more gratitude, and that’s how Dean learns that the couch has a broken spring under the left cushion. The transpo issue remains unresolved.

 10.  Dean keeps a pair of shop-grade safety goggles by his side of the bed. It’s not the sexiest look, but it turns out feathers are stabby as hell when encountered at a particular angle. Cas can do the healy thing, of course, but they learn the hard way that cornea perforation is not really a mood enhancer. On the bright side, Castiel accidentally corrects Dean’s incipient presbyopia, which means Dean doesn’t have to hold the newspaper at arm’s length anymore when he’s idly speculating what Carolyn Hax looks like below the neck. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

 11.  You’d think that, when you’re coming down from a time-limited but incurable curse that makes you feel like every cell of your body has its own cute little individual headcold — because you missed a hex bag due to the fact that you were preparing your legal response to Sam turning up to the hunt wearing a goddamn hair scrunchy, as if he were fresh off the set of a very special episode of Clarissa Explains It All — anyway, you’d think that being wrapped in the warm embrace of an angel’s wings would be nice. 

But you would be wrong, because apparently your boyfriend has been out communing with the bees again, and those feathers pick up ragweed pollen like it’s their goddamn job, and guess what else angels can’t cure? Dean will take Motherfucking Seasonal Allergies for 600, Alex. 

12a.  One of the neighbors has that homesteading hippie brain disease that drives an otherwise normal-seeming person to brew their own beer and raise a bunch of chickens despite living within five hundred yards of a fully functioning Hy-Vee. There’s a week where one of the wee little velociraptors seems to be processing some kind of trauma because it starts yelling at dawn and keeps going until well past the hour that swearing is allowed on network TV. 

When Dean finally hammers on the front door the next afternoon the neighbor apologizes with some extremely nasty home-brew (HIPPIES) and some absolutely devastating weed (HIPPIES!) and explains that “Ginger is going through a rough molt” and then he kind of nods his head towards Dean’s side of the fence where Cas is futzing around in the squash plants and stage whispers (this is a direct quote) “You know how they get.”

Dean is about to rip the dude a new one for comparing his immortal space-kaiju lover to a fucking Australorp yard pullet when Castiel pops his head up over the white pickets and breezily contributes “Bad molt, yes, those are terrible, Dean can tell you all about how insufferable I am those weeks,” and sometimes Dean just doesn’t know why he even tries.

 12b.  The less said about angel molt, the better. 

Seriously, the freakin’ eyes-on-his-hands naked mole rat dude from, whatsit, Pan’s Labyrinth of Subtitles, would run screaming from this shit. 

 13.  There’s a 4th of July BBQ Potluck Block Party and Dean’s inability to stand idly by while good meat is abused ( shut up Sam ) means he winds up manning the grill and dismissing the pretenders to set some strictly inedible things on fire. Cas hangs out next to him and uses his flappers to kinda whupf the smoke away from Dean’s eyes now and then, which rules. It’s actually a pretty chill event until Sharon and Don From Number 4267, The Green House With The White Trim, turn up with a giant Pyrex full of naked, still-marinating teriyaki wings. 

Sharon And Don look down at their wings and then up at Castiel and then down at the wings and then up at Castiel and they are clearly teetering on the edge of a Midwestern politeness failure-based nervous breakdown. But then Cas, smooth as a margarine commercial, gently takes the dish from Sharon’s frozen hands, examines the contents for a silent moment, and says “it’s alright. They weren’t personal friends.”

He gets an extra burger for that one.

 14.  Cas keeps absent-mindedly trying to groom Dean — who, in case it still needs to be said at this point, possesses zero-point-zero feathers of his own — so he goes after Dean’s hair, instead. Dean has to stop him after his second hour of trying to straighten out a cowlick. “I don’t understand how you can steer properly with this deformity,” Cas says, as if it’s a genuine miracle that Dean isn’t constantly careening over ottomans like Dick Van Dyke. He’s even more horrified by Dean’s (frankly minimal) use of hair gel. “Jesus, Cas, it’s not like I’m drinking it,” he says, but then one time they have an epic make-out session shortly after Dean performs his masculine beauty rituals and there’s some smearage of various types of Product (tm) on the flappy areas. 

And, sonuvabitch, for the next six hours Cas is spirographing around the house like he has a heavenly inner ear infection, and he only stops veering into the doorframes after Dean wipes down every. Single. Feather. With mineral oil and about eighteen clean shop cloths. Dean switches to something called hair wax, which costs thirty zillion times more per ounce and makes him smell vaguely like church, but is a lot less gloppy. The things we do for love.

 15.  Seating inside the house is a bit of a conundrum, too. Cas can kind of flop his wings out to the sides if he sits in the middle of the couch, but then Dean’s stuck on the recliner, which is basically in the next county. Bar stools are disastrously tippy, Dean’s lower back and hips have not endured mumble-mumble years of hunting just to be subjected to a damn beanbag chair, and, after a brief flurry of optimistic excitement, Dean determines that they’d have to take the front door off to get a massage chair in. He finds a swing online that if, he can get the hardware properly installed in the crossbeam, is rated for up to 500 pounds, so he texts Cas the URL so he can check out the specs. After half an hour he writes back —

CASTIEL: Dean

CASTIEL: I believe this swing is intended for sexual congress.

DEAN: ...

CASTIEL: I can infer from the ellipsis that you have spent several minutes attempting to draft a response.

DEAN: ...

CASTIEL: Dean

DEAN: it’s multipurpose

  16 . On the plus side, though, big-ass wings make for a pretty good drying rack. He can get every sock in the house laid out on those suckers in a single round and, one episode of Dr. Sexy later, they’re perfectly dry and toasty warm, without any of the pair-busting casualties Dean has learned to expect from the apparently socknivorous dryer in the basement. 

Dean assumes it’s just the product of good air circulation and body heat until he realizes that he hasn’t had to toss a pair for being too worn out in...maybe six months? So he asks Cas “Are your wings... healing the socks” and after an entire Abbott and Costello routine centering around heal versus heel, Dean determines that the answer is: yes, his boyfriend’s wings are channeling the almighty power of Heaven to magically repair the socks Dean buys at Target in twelve-pack bags. On sale.

This is actually kind of sexy, if Dean is being perfectly honest, so, you know what? It doesn’t belong on this list.

 16.  So nobody really freaks out or bursts into tears or calls the news or the FBI or anything when Cas goes out in public with him, which Dean is secretly a little disappointed about, because come on. (Maybe giant wings just reads as a gay thing? Was there an episode of Will and Grace about this that Dean missed back when he was ass deep in wendigos or something?)

But no. Dudes tend to just glance at them across the Home Depot parking lot, throw them the Mutual Dude Acknowledgement Nod, and say some shit like “Comic-con,” or “nice anime” in a knowing tone. Then they go back to rolling their carts full of gaskets or hammers or whatever back to their mom’s station wagon. 

Little girls tend to go googly-eyed — Castiel seems to fall into the same category as a Disney princess, despite the stubble and the drabcore wardrobe, and Dean can’t count the number of times some mom has approached Dean at the grocery store (like he’s Castiel’s manager?? Which, okay...yeah, actually) and asked if they do birthday parties. The money would actually be pretty tempting if Dean weren’t five thousand percent sure that Cas would get them both arrested by launching into an anatomy lesson about duck sex or how God is a loser who favors relaxed fit jeans and Wild Turkey.

The worst is white ladies of a Certain Age, and it always seems to happen in the pudding aisle, for some reason. They either go cross-eyed with horniness and become indiscriminately handsy (Dean can’t blame them for the impulse, but also back off, Karen), or ask Cas for prayers for their cat’s chronic asshole problems (which Castiel WILL take seriously). 

Worst of all is when some hippie spinster clocks them. This woman inevitably reaches right for the feathers and asks in a willowy voice if they’d ever consider turning some of them into dreamcatchers to sell at her studio, which is literally always named The Faerie’s Glen. Then Cas gets confused about why, exactly, a sixty year-old WASP in a peasant skirt would need to call on the infant-protection powers of an Ojibwe spider goddess, while Dean just wants to bite the lady’s fingers off. 

Either way, it’s always a bad scene, and many fully loaded grocery carts have been lost to the fallout.

17.  For some metaphysical reason Dean is too dumb to suss out but also too smart to question, lugging a pair of Cessna-sized flappers around this mortal dimension actually seems to tucker Cas out. He doesn’t need to zonk out every night, but he semi-regularly throws in the towel and actually crawls in with Dean for the duration. 

This would be swell in theory, but the guy absolutely cannot settle the fuck down in less than three (3) human hours, which is the exact amount of sleep Dean requires to maintain his famously sunny demeanor. It’s not just ye olde tossing and turning — Dean can handle that, sharing a bed with Sam is like sleeping next to a kangaroo with restless leg syndrome — no, it’s a nonstop parade of little flippy-flappies and shiffle-shuffles and spontaneous outbursts of preening. 

So Dean makes him a Baby Sleep Sack. 

This is something Dean knows about due solely to one super dumb hunt involving a banishing sigil that had to be drawn in — he still feels like this had to be a misprint — human breastmilk, and that was obviously not happening. But the monster of the week wasn’t going to banish itself, so they wound up at the nearest Walmart, at 4am, picking up what turned about to be an unnecessarily generous supply of baby formula, along with a fresh box of shotgun shells because God bless America*. It doesn’t work, although “lots of stabbing” turns out to be a solid fallback plan, but the point is that while Sam was debating between Digestion Support or Neurological Development, Dean acquired an unprecedented familiarity with some of the products currently available to the sleep-deprived parent. So Dean finds some DIY Baby Sleep Sack knockoff patterns online and determines he can replicate and scale up the concept with some beach towels and duct tape, and the next morning he presents the lumpy but totally functional prototype to Castiel. 

Initially Cas thinks it’s a sex thing (reasonable, it probably is), but once they clear up that misunderstanding, he’s obviously a little peeved by the concept of being swaddled as if he were a gassy baby instead of a deathless sky monster in a sexy dude-shaped can. But Dean must be giving off some serious man on the edge vibes because Cas grudgingly agrees to let Dean tape him up the next time he’s feeling dozy. 

It’s real awkward and takes forever to get Cas bundled up right, and then he’s just kind of lying there on top of the sheets, like an enormous, grumpy baked potato. 

“I could easily break out of these restraints,” he says in a pissy tone after Dean has crawled in and turned off the light, and Dean rolls over to tell him “no shit”, but then he has to stop himself because the guy is already asleep.

Eventually they upgrade to a version made out of some of those trendy weighted blanket things, a few yards of parachute silk, and a whole lot of velcro. The dude looks so damn peaceful that Dean is honestly a little jealous.

*he doesn’t, actually. 

 18.  There’s a sunny afternoon that isn’t the usual Kansas is trying to murder you level of humid so Dean rolls the Impala out into the street for a wash. Cas helps him out a bit initially, although tragically not in a way that involves removing any unnecessary articles of clothing, but Deans sends him to grab a new tub of wax from the shed and he never comes back. After half an hour Dean needs a beer break and goes looking for him, expecting to find Cas lost in thought over whether Turtle Wax is made of actual turtles, or is made to put on actual turtles. Instead he finds Cas crouched on the shimmering pavement at the back of the driveway, sun beating down on him like it has a personal vendetta, and he’s got both wings stretched out real low above the ground. Dean kind of flips out because it’s the type of pose that just screams “stabbed in gut by angel blade” or “migraine from Hell, literally.”

Then Cas looks up, which pulls his wings up a smidge too, which in turn reveals that fully half a dozen neighborhood cats are lounging in the shady patch beneath his wings, spread out on the concrete like blobs of furry peanut butter. No, it’s actually eight cats. There are eight cats.

“Ling-Ling was feeling a little overheated,” Cas says, as if this explains everything. 

And, you know what, at this point, it does.

 19.  Dean has faith that eventually Sam or Cas or the third demon from the left in the second row will turn up a solution for the whole business. Castiel will get to tuck those bad boys back into the secret wing-closet dimension and he won’t have to worry about getting stuck in stairwells anymore, or being reported to the FAA (again). Then they can finally pack up the house, plaster over the more egregious spots of drywall damage, and go back to killing things outside of the tri-county area. The whole thing has been a pretty embarrassing interlude for a couple of dudes who’ve kicked Satan’s ass multiple times — Sam is probably telling other hunters that they’ve been deep undercover to take out a nest of suburban vampires, or a pack of ghouls with mortgages, instead of vacuuming angel down out of the AC unit and considering a Costco membership. 

And sure, there have been some...serious pluses to the situation (see: the other list), but, in his weaker moments, Dean has to admit that he’s kind of going to miss some of the goofy, irritating shit, too — like finding a six-inch feather in the veggie crisper (how? why?), or watching Cas fwap his wings out just in time to accidentally clothesline a jogger, or even the strangely compelling, sorta cheesy smell that starts to float around the house if Cas goes a little too long between hosedowns. 

He has actually grown fond of this shit. Which is 100% the least sexy thing on earth, it’s some genuinely, seriously pathetic goo goo crap, and that’s why nobody will ever hear a fucking word about it. People will ask “so what’s it like, with the wings” and Dean will waggle his eyebrows suggestively and review the highlight reel over an inadvisable amount of rail whiskey. His secret’s safe with, well. Him.

 20.  Seriously though, the bird mites. 

Gross.

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY- The swedes/ platonic/ part 7

Retrieving her groceries from the counter, Winnie gave the cashier the briefest of smiles before waddling out the door, her face poking out amid a mountain of paper bags. She shook her head, with a call of, ”I’ve got it,” and ‘“Thank you!” and stumbled down the steps. She pressed her body into the railing, leaning on it like a crutch as she went, lopsided. The bags crinkled and quivered in her arms.  Likewise, her stomach crinkled and quivered into knots.

  Winnie swerved to avoid a man, nudging aside one of the smaller bags with her nose so that she could see. She would have asked her companions for a lift, but this was the time they spent relaxing. It was little and precious, and so she had infused every speck of energy with herself to walk the entire way there. She had a map and had been to Dallas on a couple of occasions in the 90s. It should have been a piece of cake, except it wasn’t.

 Twice on the way she had had to ask for directions, and twice she had paused to scribble down a road name or lean down to add a detour to the large map in red pen. Alleyways, shortcuts- that sort of thing. She hoped they would be of some help when they went about on their missions but she could never tell.

Her thoughts skidded into a halt as she slammed into something very solid and very tall. She crashed backwards and her back hit the sidewalk with a deafening smack, groceries flying from her hands and spilling onto the ground below. It was like she had walked into a brick wall. Except this brick wall extended a huge hand, gripped her arm and pulled her up. To steady herself, she  planted her feet heavily on the ground, dazed.  She winced as pain shot up her back and throbbed. Already she could feel the bruise forming between her shoulder blades: That would hurt in the morning.

People stepped aside with wary glances, careful to avoid the spillage but nobody paused to help, instead streaming straight past with a steady murmur. A stodgy river of humanity.

“Sorry,” Winnie blurted out, smoothing her jumper shakily ,” I didn’t mean to..,”

“It was me, don’t worry about it,”

“Oh,”  Despite the pain, Winnie fell to her knees scrabbling to collect her belongings before- a tomato exploded underneath the feet of a young lady, who shot her a haughty look and strutted away in her heels. Winnie dropped her gaze at once and bent her head over the mess. Her stomach sank like a stone. Great. Their first proper meal in 60’s Dallas and she had ruined it. She would have to throw away at least half of her vegetables, and she dreaded to think of the pork.

“Here let me get those for you,” The man interrupted her thoughts. She blinked rapidly, dazed. He’s still here? The man knelt down before her, scooping her food back into the bags like a machine. He was the biggest man she’d ever seen, dressed in a large navy coat, blue button up and a pair of black fingerless gloves. His hair was short and scrubbed back, and as he slipped one of the wrapped fish into the bag he glanced at her,” “Sorry. Lost a tomato there...,”

‘It’s okay..” She picked up the huge loaf of bread,  undid the wrappings, and checked it over for dirt. Nothing. She sighed and pushed it into the closest paper bag. While the man sorted out the rest of the bags, she busied her self with the last one. Bread, milk, cheese. All of them untouched. It was one of the lucky few that hadn’t belched all its insides out onto the pavement. `

As they stood up, he handed her each bag with gloved hands, the fingertips poking out. She fumbled for a moment, nestling the bags in the crook of her arm, and lined them across her body, checking to make sure they were secure.

“You got it?”

“Uh huh,” She stumbled, shifted the bags onto her hips and gave a heavy sigh.

“Shit,”The man muttered,” I’m going to be late,”

Winnie lifted her head,”Listen.. Thank you-“  But the man was gone.  Huh.. weird guy. He had to be going to work, or seeing someone special.  Sometimes she forgot people had their own everyday lives, completely oblivious to the comings and goings of the the Commission. Of course, she didn’t know much about the Commission either. Only that they sent the little capsules like clock work, and that they regulated time. That was it. They had refused to tell her anything else. 

Winnie sighed, rested her chin on top of one of the bags, and decided to take a detour. No one would know, and she’d be perfectly safe. So she made her way about, just a mountain of bags underneath a pair of dark, jean-covered legs.  Her arms pressed the groceries closer to her chest protectively. Now, she knew exactly where to go.

This time, she found Elliott shaking on the doorstep, cigarette clamped between his lips. She edged closer, trying not to breathe in the stench of tobacco. He noticed her at once, but said nothing. Then, after a moment of silence, Elliott hesitated and spoke quickly.

“Hey Winnie...,” He exhaled a curl of smoke ,” Can I show you something?”

As they entered his apartment, Winnie set down her groceries carefully by the door and brushed herself down. The home was exactly as as it had been on the previous day- the same untidy, unruly appearance, same stacks of paper that seemed to serve no particular purpose.  Except one of the bundles of paper had been opened. Pages spread across the desk, sifted through and regularly thumbed,  black annotations spidering across the typed up writing.

To one side, Elliot fumbled about, pushing a huge piece of fabric that had been fixed to the wall aside with his fingers. A large corkboard stood resolute underneath, covered in grainy photographs, notes and annotations. Winnie looked curiously on. Now that her arms were free, she fiddled with the strap of her satchel.. Clearly he’d uncovered something- something had to have happened. Elliott faced her with a tight smile.

“ Over the past three years I’ve witnessed five energy surges- six now-  and these people appearing outta thin air,” He stated. His arm was flung out, gesturing to the board wildly, as if he wanted to force his point out with action.

“See?” He stabbed one of the photographs with one finger and looked at her for a reaction. Winnie squinted. She could just about make out the marked curves of a face, the shadowy figure staggering on the ground. Her mind ran at once to their own travels. Could these people be from the Commission? And if so, where were their briefcases? She leaned in curiously, scanning each photograph for one but found none.But then she stopped. She stared. Grainy, smaller with the angle of the camera but nonetheless unmistakable, was the man from earlier.  Winnie blinked and shook her head, her lips parted slightly.

“And yesterday I had one of em come here,” Elliott continued, ” He came here and there’s more of em.. and..” There was no time to decide whether or not she believed him. His hands shook violently, caught in a never ending tremor.  In that moment, she knew he was telling his truth. She shoved aside all thoughts of the man and bade him sit down. Her eyes peered worriedly down at him. 

Elliott swallowed and nodded, lowering himself onto a desk chair. His fingers gripped the edge of his seat, eyes wide and staring into space. God he looked terrible. Worse than before, If possible. Winnie leaned against the workbench, waiting patiently for him to continue. 

His dark eyes settled on her for a moment. Without warning, his hand shot out and seized her arm tightly, and a cry flew from her lips before she could stop herself.  Her eyes widened. It took everything she had to force the familiar buzzing in her chest down before it burst forth from her, screw it up like a paper ball.  Unpredictable, unexplainable. She could not afford any mishaps. Elliott could not know. 

“You can’t tell anyone, you hear me?” He demanded, flecks of spittle flying from his lips. His face was red and she shrank back. When his fingers dug into her wrist, Winnie squeezed her eyes shut and tried to blot it all out, nodding violently.

“ I promise,” She managed, her heart pounding in her chest, flooding her ears.

“Good,” His grip slackened and she wrenched herself free. Her knuckleduster pressed against her hip, but she would not use it. She could become violent and run, but she was resigned to it. He was desperate, but he did not deserve it, she told herself. Though her heart still pounded, though adrenaline pumped through her veins, she would not harm him. Never. 

There was a long, painful silence, and  after a while, Elliott looked up slowly, shamefully.

I’m sorry Winnie,” He said in a small voice. 

“It’s okay....,” Winnie lied, slipping her hands into the pockets of her jeans.The coolness of the knuckleduster was somewhat reassuring in all this. she held it tightly like a wishbone, still shaken up. 

Elliott relaxed back in his chair and spoke again,” One came here yesterday. He could teleport or something...- I don’t.. I don’t know what it was,”  He rubbed his temples with his fingers meditatively, as if trying to settle himself. 

” He could... teleport?”

“Yes.. that’s what I said..” Elliott looked at her closely,” You don’t believe me?”

“No, no, no,” Her mind ran to her own abilities. She was the only one that had these powers( That she knew of).  Was it possible that there were more people like her? In this time? She vaguely remembered an academy with children like her. But that had been years ago. Six years ago, in fact. Although technically she hadn’t even been born yet.

 ” I believe you,” She promised. Elliott  sighed heavily, eyes moving to the grocery bags, discarded by the door. 

“Come on.. I’ll drop you home,” He muttered.

“ Are you sure?” Her eyes glimmered as she looked at him, tiredly,” I can walk.”

“Yeah.. I owe you that at least,”

She spent the car journey in silence, listening to the radio spit out tunes, bobbing her head along to the music as if it wasn’t 30 years outdated. Which it wasn’t. These musicians were still in their prime, she had to remind herself. No use getting caught up in the specifics. Time travel made her head hurt.  She gazed out the window as Dallas rolled by, These streets. These people. They were constantly changing and by the time she came back- if she came back- it would be completely different again. Shifted by time.  That’s the thing about time. Time changed things, changed people too.

She glanced at Elliott, who gripped the steering wheel tightly as they drove.  Clearly he’d had enough on his plate before some teleporting boy popped into his life. No wonder he’d snapped. Still, she stiffened in his presence, her fingers fiddling and pinching the sleeves of her jumper, pulling them down to cover her hands. 

When they arrived, Winnie was out the door in an instant. . She took the bags from Elliott, accepted another flurry of apologies, her heart a stone heavier, and sighed.  

“It’s all good,” Winnie said shortly, forcing a smile.,” I’ve got it,” She shifted and cradled them to her chest. Elliott glanced at her and nodded.

“ You sure you don’t want me to help you to the door?” He asked quietly. His voice was thick and his hand gripped the door of the ancient car.

“It’s fine,” She said. Her mood had greatly diminished, melting into grey, rhythmless sludge. But she would have to hide it if she wanted them to concentrate. No use them worrying about her. They had their job- that was more important. Elliot disappeared into his car, her shoulders slumped to her sides gratefully. 

But as she turned to leave, Elliott poked his head out of the window and called her back down.“Listen.. thanks for hearing me out Winnie. I needed to talk to someone who doesn’t think I’m crazy.” His voice cracked.

” It’s okay,”A glimmer of a real smile inched onto her lips,” At least you’re not a serial killer,”  Oh the irony. 

“Right...”

She waited until the ancient silver car had disappeared into the distance, leaving nothing but rising fumes to turn towards the house. You never could be too careful. She of all people should know that. 

As Winnie shuffled away in the direction of their home, a woman watched from afar, humming soullessly under her breath.  She smiled like a spider. A sharp smile, twisted with malcontent and churned with expectation- a sort of a lust for power over the fly. Her fingers spun silk, her jaws were poison and her eyes were everywhere. She had found a liability, and she was going to wrap it up and exploit it. All to intertwine them in her bloody plot.

There you go! Sorry if it’s not as good as usual.  This one hurt my head (and my butt because my chair is broken).

:3 

@gorgeourrific-nerd

Homeward bound (Gospel Without Compass)

Title: Homeward bound (Gospel Without Compass) Author: OnceABlueMoon Rating: T Pairing: Fran & Hibari Kyoya

Tags/Warnings: 

Summary:  Bodyswap AU in which Fran gets lost in the large scheme of things, and Hibari picks up drifting feathers.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Katekyo Hitman Reborn.

FF.net | AO3 | My other entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

My fic master list here.

Written for the @khrrarepairweek Day 6 - Cloud Day: Bodyguard/Hitman AU | Kidnapping (…even though the kidnapping ended up so out of place that it became an omake).  The original inspiration, however, was a lovely ask from @metronomeihear with the prompts ‘’Hibari and Fran’’  and ‘’the pretender’’. I adored writing this!

It’s terrifying, Fran thinks sometimes, how easy it is to melt into Hibari’s skin. It’s so obvious to him, when he sees his own body walk by, green hair loose underneath the hat; that’s not his gait- he walks a millisecond slower, just a little less brisk. That’s not his joke- sure, it sounds like it’s his, but it isn’t, because Hibari talks just a little lower, the way Fran’s own voice is not meant to be used.

It hurts, knowing the others don’t notice.

Kusakabe noticed it immediately. Sawada’s eyes linger on him when he enters the room, but he’s got hyper intuition. It’s not cheating- Fran’s Varia, in the Varia there is no cheating, only power, and those who don’t have the power to succeed are eliminated.

The Varia is cold halls, corpses in closets, the smell of rotten-don’t-find-out-for-you-own-sanity. Slinking through the mansion is strange, as if walking through a space that doesn’t exist, a parking lot, an airport, a stairwell.

Places that don’t have a right to exist, other than being a portal to another place.

The sound of shattering glass, a screaming Squalo and swoosh from a knife in the dark, aimed at his heart.

The Varia mansion doesn’t feel like a home, but the others treat it like one, so maybe it’s just Fran.

He doesn’t belong there. Nor did he belong with Mukuro and his gang.

It was illusions, and strange places. It was a man in his head, who had a guarded, hot-cold, hurt heart entangled in a war with his mind. It was fashion disasters, and screaming, a woman playing on her clarinet, speaking French together late at night. It was calling Ken a dog, while simultaneously being the one receiving the treats. It was asking Chikusa to teach him tricks with yoyo’s- a childish fit of adventure, quickly brushed off afterward (and if Fran was often found swirling Bel-senpai’s knives around his finger, fingers jerking as if reeling something in then that was his business).

It was… Avoiding Mukuro’s previous apprentice when she visited, because Fran was not made for warm cheeks and Kuromu (Chrome? He was never quite sure about the pronunciation- Mukuro kept switching between them) was way too pretty.

And before Mukuro, there was his grandmother, apple pie and the sound of Au Claire de la lune- as if she knew that no door of love would ever be open to him.

He doesn’t remember his parents.

But that’s all backwards. He was with his parents. They died. Not much difference, it was, with his grandmother. He certainly couldn’t protest as a baby.

Maybe that’s why he didn’t protest either when Mukuro came to get him. Maybe that’s why he stayed, when Squalo and Bel-senpai stole him away in the night. He never struggled, that’s for certain.

At this point in his life, it’s more than clear: Fran is not the one moving, he’s the component that stays in place, until others move him. Like a coffee cup, lifted from the cabinet, filled, drunk from, and when the liquid was gone and only the bitter suds remained, they rinsed him off to be drunk from by the next person.

So when he woke up, like this, in Hibari’s body… He just went with it.

It’s not strange. Not at all.

Fran has no home, has no place where he belongs, lives his life like that cup until it falls and shatters.

So why, oh, why, must Hibari look at him like that?

Those are his own eyes staring back at him, and pity tastes like burned toast.

Fran’s never been shy about spitting food he doesn’t like out.

Hibari has never been shy either, about biting people to death or otherwise. If there was a time he might’ve clutched his mother’s skirts, then it was an act from a past, long-forgotten life. (The blood, though, he never forgot. Neither did he forget his uncle’s face when he came to Namimori to visit his sister, only to find out the Triads already visited and left him a little present in the form of her dead cold body and a deeply traumatised, disturbed nephew.

Fon is the one who coaxed him out of the forest, wild as an animal, raw and hurting and if there’s anyone who understands what it’s like not to belong, it’s Hibari.

The difference between the pineapple’s green apprentice and him? Hibari has learned the world will never change, not unless you make it. Fran… Took one look and was content to remain where he was, shoved and passed around by others. Too lazy to lift a finger, or perhaps, too sad.

He doesn’t know what it’s like to have your mother’s still warm blood on your face, to watch her mow down two men with her, telling you to run because those bastards can’t have the satisfaction of killing you both.

Would it have cost her so much to tell him that she loved him? …Would it have changed a thing?

Hibari has calmed down. He is a murderer, he is mafia. He is Namimori’s protector, he is Namimori’s demon. He has a fire in his soul, but his soul is not a fire, and his bones are deep, dark and old.

He is the forest to Fran’s pine tree, mirror image of what could have been and perhaps, a vision of the future.

Neither of them are interested in that.

Fran isn’t even interested in getting his own body back- but Hibari is, because Fran is short and does not have the proper muscles for tonfa wielding. Also, Hibari isn’t going to be an eighteen-year-old snot again, so that’s that.

Now. To get the carnivore into line.

Receiving memories from ten years in the future, just a month or two, didn’t feel like gaining memories- no, it felt like losing them.

There was nothing stranger than a ten-year gap between your current self and the one you remembered there being in the future- you were that person, yet not, and it messed you up.

Nobody had expected the effects to reach this far, though.

Chrome’s eyes flit through the room. Nothing unusual ‘bout that. She did that- it was a thing. Fran wants to bash his head against the door, until it’s good and bloody. This is absolute hell. Whenever he snaps back, somehow, she’s right there, next to the Boss, painting his toenails as he did hers (how she survived he had no idea, but then again, she had been Mukuro-sama’s apprentice, and it showed). Whenever he snaps forward- like an elastic, boom, back into Hibari- she’s somehow in front of him, all purple hair and… and…

Squalo, that filthy traitor, called Fran out on his blushing.

God have mercy on him.

(Hibari offers to beat him up next time they swapped, and Fran doesn’t know how to deal with that either. Is Hibari defending his… honor? Feelings? Saving his own skin by making sure Fran didn’t do something stupid like getting killed over his hormones? Nah, too much effort, and Hibari knows that. 

...Doesn’t he?)

Maybe in another world, Mukuro came after Fran. Maybe in another world, Fran learned to fight. Maybe in another world- but there is this world only, and Fran must live in it.

‘’Then live and fight, carnivore.’’

There are many things that Fran has learned by now, and though sometimes Hibari’s body feels more like home than his own, how sometimes his skin itches as if he doesn’t belong in his own body… Fran is home. In Namimori, where the sun shines, where Kusakabe keeps a watchful eye on him, where Sawada Nana smiles knowingly and gives him a juice box and a snack for on the way. The Varia halls are still cold, but somedays, Boss’ smirks just shy of amusement, somedays, Squalo looks at him and speaks a little softer, somedays, Belphegor saves dessert for him. Other days, Lussuria drags Levi and Fran shopping, and they bond over sore feet and Lussuria’s happy smiles.

…For the first time in his life, Fran is not content with being a coffee cup, and Hibari seizes the moment and exploits it.

He’ll teach the child how to sharpen his teeth yet.

Fran is fifteen, still a child, and maybe, just maybe, it’s going to be alright.

Omake:

Somewhere, Fran just knew, Mukuro was laughing his ass off.

As far as Hibari was concerned, all Fran needed to do was cease getting kidnapped.

Hibari didn’t give a damn about the stained glass. He wanted his fucking body back, and preferably before he did something like accidentally slit the green carnivore’s wrist on said stained glass while bursting through.

Why did the baby carnivore get kidnapped again? Hibari needed to reconsider Fran’s carnivore status like yesterday.

The Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 2020

Screw your introductions. It’s 2020, we haven’t got time for a pre-amble. This is the best list.

THE TOP 10 BEST HIT SONGS OF 2020

For 2018 and 2017, I did four massive lists with at least 10 songs each discussed in depth for the end of the year. I’m proud of them and I stick by them but they’re tedious to write and read. You really need some kind of visual medium for them to work that well, at least in my style of year-end lists. Thankfully, there are hundreds of people doing just that so instead, I’m just going to take 10 songs I remember from the predicted year-end list and ramble about them in hopefully a more precise way. Let’s start with... oh, for f—

#10

“I Hope” – Gabby Barrett

Peak: #3

I don’t like country music, or really get country music. I’m British, I’m not supposed to, but as I do watch charts I see country music gaining increased prominence on the charts, in an era of streaming I didn’t think it could really cope with. I’m using SailorCharts’ predictions for the Billboard Year-End Hot 100; this is at #10, which is crazy to me. That’s probably thanks to that nonsensical Charlie Puth remix but let’s ignore that for the sake of my sanity. “I Hope” is vindictive, overly harsh and absolutely repulsive. It shows an uglier side to Gabby Barrett that you’d usually only be able to see if you look up her political views, but that’s what makes it so uniquely cathartic to me. This is a person who I disagree with heavily on a moral principle ripping off a middling Carrie Underwood track with blown-out, compressed and really gross production... but that’s 2020 for you. It’s hard to listen to with a straight face or without turning it off, but you have to endure it. You have to listen to this woman croakily belt her overlong chorus until the melody of that hook grounds itself into your mind, and you remember that climax point. “And then I hope she cheats”. Barrett isn’t destroying the guy’s sports car as a metaphor for her revenge fantasy like Underwood, she is just completely upfront about how much she wants this guy to be left emotionally distraught by this new relationship out of pure spite. Nothing represents the constant aggravation of 2020 finally releasing and expressing all of the fears and anger society has kept curled up until they were forced to isolate for the sake of common human respect and dignity, and the fact that people are adamant that they’ve had enough of oppression, inequality and the elite, than those squealing guitars in the second chorus and Barrett’s raspy delivery. This song is far from perfect – I’ve seen many argue it’s not good at all – but it feels necessary this year as an avenue for the public to vent their frustration. Now let’s do that with someone who isn’t a Trump supporter.

#9

“The Bigger Picture” – Lil Baby

Peak: #3

Yeah, speaking of songs being necessary, I admire Lil Baby, a person with a platform who people, especially the youth, will listen to, for making a protest song like this. Regardless of how many rappers express their grievances about racial inequality and societal issues, the person with the biggest and most impactful voice will always matter the most to me. The most important issue Baby gets at here is that racism isn’t new or simple. It’s complex. It’s deep-seated. It’s systematic. It exists in the very way people function under their governments and how people live their lives and do business. Even me mentioning business is a sign of how capitalism undermines the struggle for the economy. Lil Baby speaks from his own experience in Atlanta and gets to the heart of real Black struggle in the United States, with the inherent fear and defiance that many young Black men have of the police and authority, regardless of background or criminal record (oftentimes non-existent, unlawful or directly targeted). Sure, he dips his toe into some centrist ideas, which I’m not a fan of, but they aren’t rooted in this “why can’t we all get along?” crap often spouted by those who don’t want to see social upheaval affect the money flow. It’s not just rich old white dudes either, look at Lil Pump, Lil Wayne and Kanye West, and how buddied up they got with Trump for their own desperate financial security and outright refusal, in many ways hypocritical, to help the working-class and the disadvantaged. They’re only disadvantaged because of the elite. It should not be an inherent birth right to be impoverished, but that’s how we live, and I admire Baby for attempting to make a change over the melancholy pianos and trap skitters. Oh, and yeah, he’s flowing and spitting over this. He’s not boring and overly pretentious. He’s engaging. He makes you want and need to listen to him because he, like many Black people in America and oppressed minority groups worldwide, has got something to say. We’ve got to start somewhere. Black lives matter. Now for some honourable mentions.

Honourable Mentions

Let’s have a lighter tone, perhaps, for these next few entries, but first, let’s run through some honourable mentions, in no particular order other than where they are on the predicted Hot 100.

“Blinding Lights” – The Weeknd

This song has already been talked about to death, by about March, so I’d be doing a disservice to discuss it here.

“Don’t Start Now” – Dua Lipa

Same here. This is a weird list because whilst this would be in the top five if I had more to say about it, I don’t have much to say about it other than how it is a perfectly composed pop song. I want to discuss songs I actually care about on a level more than pure sonic enjoyment, so make of that what you will.

“ROCKSTAR” – DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch

Roddy Ricch should be absolutely treasured while he’s still here.

“Life is Good” – Drake and then Future

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about pop music in 2020 it is that Future, when he’s on, is an absolute monster. Anyway, more honourable mentions soon, and let’s hop back onto the list proper.

#8

Screw it, it’s my list.

“All I Want for Christmas is You” – Mariah Carey

Peak: #1

At the start of this year in January, it felt like just another monotonous routine of a year that started exactly how it would end: with apathy about the world in ruins. This is true for most years but 2020 decided to spice it up a little with... you know... 2020, and all of its pandemics, riots and chaos. So, for just a short time, can I talk about a song that provides absolute joy to absolutely everyone? It peaked at #1 at Christmas in 2019, which was part of the 2020 chart year, and it’s on the predicted list, so it counts and it is an incredible song that reaches into the holiday festivities with manufactured cynicism, before plunging into that jolly bag of cash and producing the most organically happy Christmas song ever. The song is, by name, not even about Christmassy commercialism, and rejects it entirely, with how Carey croons beautifully about how she isn’t asking for gifts, snow or Santa Claus. It’s telling how a single about wanting personal connection every holiday season is the biggest Christmas song of all time instead of any of the other schlock that gets reissued and has a resurgence in this time of year. It helps that it is a gorgeous and intricately composed song with that mellow intro building up into the sleigh bells and pounding percussion carrying the wonderfully 90s strings. This is a timeless classic and I’m so glad it’s a Christmas standard, for what it stands for as well as it being just an amazing song that really only comes around every so often to be a bonafide smash hit everyone loves and appreciates... except maybe every retail worker since December 1994. Walmart is a cesspit anyway, I assume that bile can be chalked up to overplay and negative connotations, of which this song on its own in a vacuum, has absolutely none.

#7

“We Paid” – Lil Baby and 42 Dugg

Peak: #10

How do I even...? I mean... just listen to the song. It clicks. I’d love to leave it there but I am obliged to ramble so... I find this song impossible to explain. I mean, it’s just “We Paid” by Lil Baby and 42 Dugg, an absolute anomaly. It’s barely a song, with a chorus unrecognisable from its verses, two nasal and uninteresting vocalists, flows I’ve heard before and clearly rushed, awkward bass mastering and mixing overall... yet it’s so, so addictive. It’s all about that intro for me, where it starts with a whistle and off-beat, complete nonsense producer tags and pre-verse rambling from 42 Dugg, before the bass kicks in and it just hits so hard. I couldn’t care less about any single line after “’Fore I go broke like Joc”, and I don’t have to. Both Dugg and Baby have stiff flows but are full of character that is so, so necessary over this menacing trap beat that survives only off of the melody so incredibly low in the mix I can’t tell what it’s even trying to be. Oh, and, while we’re here...

“24” – Money Man, remixed by Lil Baby

Peak: #49

This is good for a lot of the same reasons, and wasn’t even a hit. I just wanted to highlight this song for many of the same reasons I really love “We Paid”. It’s a complete nobody rapping robotically over a trap beat that bumps but only because of the cadence and charisma of the two rappers here... which is kind of non-existent in both songs. It relies on the flows, and they’re just kind of monotonous after each of the iconic opening lines. It’s also telling that this chorus acknowledges two Black men who have since become iconic in their fields and died within a month of each other, those being Kobe Bryant and Pop Smoke, may they rest in peace. It’s pretty tragic, actually, and adds a sense of depth to the braggadocious triumph these deflated singles attempt to convey. I am bemused by these songs and whilst you can try to fully understand popular music to the point of deep analysis and Genius annotations, the best music has a sense of mystery and intrigue, at least to me, and something about the whistle in “We Paid” and the vocoded guitar line in “24” makes these two tracks incredibly replayable. Also, you know, Lil Baby’s verse on “24” might be the verse of the year.

Honourable Mentions #2

The sequel is never as good as the original. Regardless, here are some more honourable mentions.

“WHATS POPPIN” – Jack Harlow, remixed by DaBaby, Tory Lanez and Lil Wayne

This guy is a bad omen. “I’mma spend this holiday locked in” is an eerie prediction of this dour year. Also DaBaby is awesome when he tries.

“Roses” – SAINt JHN, remixed by Imanbek

The original song is dreadful, I have no idea how this Kazakh house DJ pulled this remix off but it is a massive improvement from about every possible angle you could think of.

“10,000 Hours” – Dan + Shay and Justin Bieber

That’s well over a year, like that’s 416.7 days. These guys are devoted... and honestly kind of scary.

“Ballin’” – Mustard featuring Roddy Ricch

Chorus of the year.

“Blueberry Faygo” – Lil Mosey

This song is awful, absolutely reprehensible, with no redeeming factors and a clear lack of effort put into anything in the song itself... but at least it’s optimistic. At least it sounds happy and like a true Song of the Summer, and, oh, my God, we needed that this year.

#6

“Lemonade” – Internet Money and Gunna featuring NAV and Don Toliver

Peak: #6

NAV is on my best list. NAV is on a year-end list. NAV has a #1 hit in the United Kingdom, Portugal and Greece. NAV, the Brown Boy himself, has one of the biggest hits of both 2020 and 2021, given that this isn’t caught between years, and I’m not complaining because this song is a riot. I did say that this list wasn’t based on pure sonic enjoyment but I’m going to throw that absolutely out the window for this one. If anything, “Blinding Lights” and “Don’t Start Now” aren’t on the list out of pure fatigue, because this song is just as incredible as it sounded on release, with that slick, watery acoustic guitar coating a light trap skitter and bouncy 808s. That’s a description I could use about most hip-hop this year, but “Lemonade” has this liquid-smooth quality to it and it is safe to say that NAV and Gunna fill up all of the space available in their container here, whatever that means. NAV, for once, co-opts a flow that sounds great from his whiny Canadian mumble, mostly because he takes Don Toliver’s flow from the chorus, and whilst he didn’t write this chorus, he absolutely sells it with his soulful crooning. This song is a hedonistic celebration of everything materialistic and meaningless, but it’s having fun doing it, and that is seldom seen in 2020’s trap efforts. Gunna’s flows here are playing with the beat in a way that is reminiscent of Young Thug but finally in a way that sounds uniquely interesting and fitting for Gunna, and not just straining his limited vocals out to testing out a flow that clearly doesn’t fit the guy, or settling for something a lot less engaging. Man, out of all people to be praising this year, I did not expect it to be Lil Baby, NAV and Gunna... back to back, several times. Let’s get back to people I did expect to be gushing about by the end of the year.

#5

“everything i wanted” – Billie Eilish

Peak: #8

Much like “The Bigger Picture”, this song made the list out of necessity, mostly in its lyrics. I would be absolutely selling this year short to not include one of the most thought-provoking young women in pop music on a list like this, and thankfully, she wrote a gorgeous song that I can discuss here. Firstly, the sound of this song is brilliantly subtle and intimate, with panning keys, light-weight clapping percussion and such little focus on everything surrounding Eilish’s soft, dead-pan cooing multi-tracked to add that extra depth and convincing delivery to the lyrical content, which we’ll discuss later. It’s not that this makes the song sound unfinished or lazy, or even uninteresting, because it has that degree of elevation that is necessary for a lyrically focused song like this, with the second verse starting off with just the muted 808s emphasising that intimacy that Eilish attempts to convey through the lyrics, which are mostly an ode to her and her brother’s especially close relationship. Eilish details her depression and even nightmares, relating to a lot of her music’s themes surrounding sleep paralysis and the very concept of dreaming. That first verse is heavy in content, and honestly distressing to even write about here, but it can be summarised in this: Eilish had a dream where she committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a common location for these types of deaths, adding that unnerving realism to the verse. The verse may be about betrayal but you could interpret it and much of her music as a response to the press and the media, which seems to flip on how they portray and criticise her, which has been increasingly obvious this year. That makes the idea of no-one, not even her fandom and those keeping the most attention and eyes on her, caring about her suicide even more damaging and raising the stakes to something that doesn’t feel like meaningless teenage angst or even just dropping off emotional baggage. The song is, in many ways, a love song to the only person she thinks would care: her brother, FINNEAS, with the chorus reciting his words of wisdom and reassurance to Eilish as she struggles with suicidal thoughts. The verses may be a specific and detailed level of insight into her psyche, but the chorus, with its wider scope and lesser detail, doesn’t come off as unrealised. Rather, it appears motivational, to both Eilish and the audience, but with the following verse and final leg of the chorus making it incredibly clear that words mean nothing without an action to follow it up or back up what has been said. Motivation doesn’t mean a quote on a wallpaper or Genius lyrics page. It’s about the willpower and the inspiration to change the way you think about yourself and make self-improvements to battle these demons, even when it seems impossible, and if it does seem impossible, there’s always your close support bubble that can reassure you and bring you back down to Earth when it all feels so unreal and that you can’t handle it.

     Ee-ooh.

#4

“The Box” – Roddy Ricch

Peak: #1

It’s tough to go into extreme depth about the personal impact a hit song has had on your mental health and what this means for the audience of said artist, and then completely dismiss it for another wacky Young Thug clone, but I did it before – in this very list twice already – and I’ll do it again, God damn it. “The Box” is pure chaos. It starts with this triumphant brass section that sounds dusty and classic, but then you immediately hear that damned “ee-ooh” sound, barely on beat and barely holding a note. It sounds like a poor falsetto imitation of a door creaking, and it is perfect. It’s just such an engaging hook, as if the actual hooks and choruses weren’t engaging and interesting enough. There’s so many intricacies to Roddy Ricch’s performance here and his array of flows are put on display excellently over this menacing beat with that reversed 808 that sets this apart from any other trap beat, especially with the eerie keys and especially with Roddy Ricch, who delivers possibly the best performance on this list second to my #1. The song starts with that mighty, iconic hook and even with that, Roddy rejects his flow before the measure is even up, outright refusing to continue and stalling with a muted “mm” sound. The lyrics aren’t cryptic by any means but it’s not like they’re all that simple, forming some kind of trap-rap word association all about “the box”, which could really mean anything at this point. He goes for a whiny elongated ending to each line in the second part of the chorus before switching sides to elongating the middle of the line in contrast to him spitting the last few words in rapid succession with a carefree cadence that’s almost inspiringly smooth. His verses are littered with charisma and hilarious ad-libs, and that’s before he goes into that falsetto for the second half of the first verse, with a simple but joyously stiff delivery, that makes his voice get closer to cracking with every syllable. Then we have the second verse, where the dude even laughs on beat and makes it sound great. The yelping in the second verse is endearing and amazing, with the way the beat cuts off for him to belt “BITCH, DON’T WEAR NO SHOES IN MY HOUSE!” at the top of his lungs like a misogynist toddler absolutely completing the song for me, and how the beat comes in afterwards is just perfect. It’s hard to explain this song without listening to it, again, but one listen of these flows and how he plays around with the beat like a kids’ toy is enough to understand truly why this song is one of the best of this year, and that Roddy Ricch is an absolute treasure.

I’m a 2020 presidential candidate / I done put a hundred bands on Zimmerman

This might be the best lyric on this list by the way. Speaking of ridiculous trap bangers with quotable lyrics and incredible flows...

#3

“Heartless” – The Weeknd

Peak: #1

How did both of these songs hit #1? Sure, they’re trendy, they’re catchy and they’re by popular artists, but there’s something about these songs that feels so chaotic and messy, yet so grounded in reality despite how loony these guys and their performances are, including the lyrics. For “The Box”, you have 30 Roc’s pounding trap beat to make sure Roddy doesn’t completely go off the walls, and for “Heartless”, well, the same is true, but replace 30 Roc for the absolute legend of modern hip-hop production that is Metro Boomin. The intro going into the first verse is one of the highlights of pop music this year. I love how it leads you in with the mystery of the coating of reverb-drenched synths, all of which sound oddly alien, before revealing the layer of the trap beat and furthering the mystery via The Weeknd’s whispering “sheesh” ad-libs. Then, when that first verse hits, all subtlety is dismissed as excessive and unnecessary, even with that first cocky opening line, but especially when the heavy 808 bass continues to crash multiple on each bar surrounded by air horns and Abel’s never-ending luxury porn. This song is an ode to self-aware, reckless and absolutely self-indulgent materialism, highlighting its effect on not only how Abel copes (most notably with the amphetamines making his “stummy” feel “sickly”) but also on who surrounds him, particularly his inability to settle down and find a partner, and how frustrated he is with this, which is especially true in the chorus, before he puts on the disguise once again for the verses, in which he spits a list of endless excessiveness in his bars carrying as much swagger as he usually does. This song in all its maximalist production is oddly minimal in how it presents the raw psyche of the character of the Weeknd and his drug-addled mindset that couldn’t care less about the effect he has on his friends, family, women, himself or even society, as long as he has a good time... but it’s increasingly clear that he knows the impact this life style has and he understand that it makes him “heartless”, but only because that’s what he decides is directly affecting him and of course, Abel has always made sure that the character of the Weeknd is as selfish and self-obsessive as possible. It helps that this isn’t a moaning and moody piece of self-indulgent boring trap slop. It isn’t conveying a message through music that can’t represent it, it’s effectively pulling off its narrative through the whole sonic package, and you know what helps even more? It’s fun, and it’s funny, and the revealing bridge where Abel looks back at his past relationships and how this life style is a response to the damage and pain inflicted on him by said relationships, comes as a genuine shock because just seconds earlier, the guy said this:

So much pussy, it be fallin’ out the pocket

What an incredibly thought-out song, and definitely one deserving of a couple GRAMMY Awards in whatever category those racist out-of-touch elitist executives decide to retroactively slot the Weeknd into when the backlash becomes too much. With that said, here are some more honourable mentions.

Honourable Mentions #3

Now in IMAX 3-D!

“Break My Heart” – Dua Lipa

INXS are fuming.

“Good as Hell” – Lizzo

This is beautifully composed and genuinely motivating, and Lizzo has so much charisma but in 2020, I do not feel “good as hell” enough to justify this being on the list. Hey, what can I say? Truth hurts.

“Truth Hurts” – Lizzo

That failed gag was about as on-the-nose as this song itself, but Lizzo totally embraces that.

“For the Night” – Pop Smoke featuring DaBaby and Lil Baby

“Wishing Well” – Juice WRLD

I’m not a fan of these songs in particular but it would be awful of me to not include these two artists on the lists, even if it’s tragic that it has to be posthumously. Both were gone way too soon, and way too close together for it to feel anything more than distressing and really depressing. Sure, they represent two completely different issues rappers face, but the fact that the two biggest hip-hop artists of 2020 are both gone and not able to see this immense success is just a tough, bitter pill to shallow. Rest in peace to both of these men and I hope out of respect for their legacy, and out of apathy for how the record labels milk both of these audiences, that I won’t need to talk about them in the years ahead.

#2

I have just discussed a lot of important songs with meaningful concepts, deep lyrics and insight, sonically innovative instrumentals and genuine emotional trauma as the background for their creation... but when I discuss my #2 as well as my #1, I need you to keep in mind this question: what is the purpose of pop music?

#2 – “RITMO (Bad Boys for Life)” – The Black Eyed Peas and J Balvin

Peak: #26

Popular music and especially the charts should always be taken with a grain of salt. Art doesn’t necessarily mean anything without meaning appropriated to it, and that meaning has a bunch of baggage that correlates to the lyrical meaning and contextual history behind whatever is being analysed and what is being criticised or praised. The Billboard Hot 100 is a glorified stat pad, as many have pointed out, and there are flaws in the system that don’t even make it a perfectly accurate set of data. This isn’t to undermine popular music and its impact. I’m not saying Elvis Presley and his ludicrous amount of weeks at #1 is to be scoffed at, or that Michael Jackson’s Thriller is an inconsequential piece of music that shouldn’t be remembered as fondly and as often as it is. These albums and artists had a genuine effect on culture, and the society that follows it, especially in the United States’ desperate attempts at gathering an “American” culture to cope with their extreme levels of regional, ethnic and economic diversity and disparity. Neither my #2 nor #1 pick reflect that at all. In fact, “RITMO” is a laughably bad song, but to call it a song implies there is art here, when in reality this is a pure product made for a soundtrack to a mildly successful Will Smith movie, made as a cash-grab by a fading producer-rapper and a tacked-on genuine mega-star who was offered millions of pesos to rap on this dated, lazy house-adjacent reggaeton beat. This isn’t just a product, it’s packaged and not with limited edition decoration, just typical, disposable plastic that’s harmful for the environment. I’m not doing a worst list this year because I want to celebrate what remnants of fun we had in 2020, and it’s telling that a lot of these songs are from 2019 or earlier in the year, and feel like separate landscapes even. Do you seriously remember “RITMO” in any capacity? Or even the movie that it was made for? It’s almost outstanding that a song that samples a band called Corona can be so oddly tone-deaf to the current situation, and not even one of the pandemic, but one of social progression and worldwide oppression that this song ignores to sell a product... but ignorance is bliss.

#1

It’s misleading to say that 2020 started off awful in March. That would just be blatantly untrue. Hell, the virus was discovered in Wuhan in December and made its way to Europe and the United States by the time late January rolled around, and even by then the US had killed important Iranian military secretary and one of their national heroes Qasem Soleimani ostensibly on grounds of “terrorism” for the sake of a power play and risking a potential world conflict. Diplomatic incidents don’t just happen, they have reasoning and they have a background. Not even in popular music do things just happen, they follow a trend or a burgeoning genre, and if they don’t, they are pioneers of a trend that follows to varying success. You can see this in 2019 producing the biggest hit of all time with “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, which felt like a sudden insurgency of this random country-rap pop song by a complete nobody becoming suddenly one of the most important cultural milestones in the country’s history. It’s less of a sudden event and rather an exemplification of things that were happening over time, like the dominance of streaming, conglomerates manipulating what was believed to be organic digital and social media to benefit them and the elite, the increasing saturation of white men in the country genre that has yet to improve from his bro-country years, the racism that runs rancid in the South as Republicans steer closer to extremism and anyone who can challenge them decides to clear their way to the centre or is oppressed and ignored by the government that can continue silencing them. You may say that it’s not that deep but if you talk about popular music, you absolutely have to consider its wider impact. With all that said, sometimes it’s better to live in the moment.

“Hot” – Young Thug featuring Gunna

Peak: #11

Maybe it’s bizarre for me to dismiss everything I said about the cultural impact of popular music and its existence as a product for the big three record labels as well as a milestone for culture and the audience that consumes it, just so I can put my favourite hit song at the top of the list. I would completely agree with you, and I wasn’t planning really to put this song so high until it immediately clicked in a contrast with “RITMO”. “RITMO” isn’t self-aware of its existence as purely a product and nothing else, but it’s not like that fact is hidden from you when you listen to the track. It is pure ignorance of the wider world and pure ignorance of anything that is actually and genuinely important to people across the States and across the world, but not in a way that can move people and become important. Sure, the song is fun and catchy and actually a pretty damn great song, that is why it’s so high on this list, but it’s more to represent how heavily these songs juxtapose each other. “Hot” is in equal proportions a promotion of commercialism and materialism, much like “Heartless”, but without any of the emo-adjacent moaning about fame and without any of the self-awareness... which may seem like “Hot” misses the point but it absolutely does not. “Hot” is the absolute peak of the trap genre. It’s not conceptually important, but it is a song that means the most to me in this particular period and in this particular year. The song is an album cut from 2019 that is only big because of a Travis Scott remix and SpongeBob memes, so it sets itself up to be perfectly detached from 2020, even before you hear those triumphant horns from Wheezy and the trap percussion that bumps harder than anything else on this list or in Thug’s discography. That immediate release of energy coated in smoky, whispery ad-libs isn’t what makes this song important, though, it’s the subtle build-up of Gunna’s simple, direct but menacing flow that feels like he is directly talking to you and almost wagging his finger at you whilst doing so. It’s just Gunna appreciating and absorbing the peak of hedonism in a cohesive and monotone Auto-Tuned flow. Just like the years of the Trump administration and prior, it creates a routine and a pattern that despite how outrageous it may seem, gets you used to believing what is expressed and revealed, which is often completely petty and ridiculous nonsense, just like Gunna’s bars here. Then Young Thug comes in. The aura of mystery surrounding his reverb-drenched mumbling in the bridge intrigues you and pulls you in, taking you out of the Gunna-infused hypnosis and dragging you face-first into starstruck astonishment. The song finally releases in full-blown explosive trap-rap fashion with one simple meaningless phrase: “I took the Bentley coupe back then I hopped in a Cayenne”, followed by that energetic screeching ad-lib that book-ends nearly every bar here. Finally, there’s liberation. Sure, this is hyperbolic, and I’m not trying to make some insanely pro-Biden political statement here, but it feels significant to me that this is one of the biggest hits of one of the most historically essential years in recent history, even if it didn’t make much initial impact. Thugger switches from sing-songy melodies to repetitively imitating a machine-gun in a guttural yell, and it feels natural. It feels chaotic and that there is very little focus, but that’s because there is. He is completely ignorant of anything surrounding him and indulges in his own self-aggrandisement with rapid but smooth flows in his signature yelping delivery. The lyrics are frankly meaningless and irrelevant listing of luxury brands and cars, but that’s because Thugger couldn’t care less about the wider world or what surrounds him or even the impact he himself has on society or culture. It’s not like that means the song can only be appreciated in a vacuum because it creates that vacuum for itself, and by using that one manic Thugger verse – the best verse I heard in 2019 and one of the best verses to ever hit streaming services on pure energy and delivery alone – allows itself to release and indulge in the little things, the petty fantasies, those precious albeit unimportant elements of life that add up to form some kind of self-satisfaction and dare I say in 2020, happiness, and before you can even truly appreciate that...

Turn the whole top floor to a whorehouse / Hundred racks in ones, dude bought the flood out

...it’s taken away from you once again, and you have to scour your way through a fading trap beat without any of the additional touches that made it so great in Thugger’s verse, without the playful flutes, and most importantly, without the fun. You’re left there with what remains of Wheezy’s composition after it was ravaged by Thug and with only the same whispery, barely audible repetitions that started the song off, and you realise that whilst the release may feel great and liberating while it’s there, until you break the routine and bring about change, your happiness and your freedom is meaningless and any attempt to replicate that same feeling is futile. So to answer that question, the purpose of pop music is to reflect on how culture and society develops, evolves and adapts with what it’s faced with, but ultimately, to us as people and consumers, music serves as a fleeting moment of joy, self-expression and most importantly, a release of what has to be bottled up and silenced in the everyday routine of life, because of powers outside of our control. Farewell, 2020, and good fucking riddance.

The Black Cat

The house stood small and slouching in the forgotten garden, with time-stricken walls and buckled carpentry against the shiny residential complex and its construction noises. The narrow walkway paved with river stone had been taken over by weeds long ago, and the rusty fence, mended here and there, did a steady job in keeping foes, as well as friends at a distance. A rose bush alone, tended for and in full bloom, confirmed a living soul still haunted the dying house.

An old man, white hair in disarray and sunken eyes, was leaning on the kitchen sink, water making its way through a babel tower of plates and bowls and pots and pans. He reached for a fork and a plate in the sink and, after a quick wash, he turned last night’s leftovers into some kind of lunch. He made his way through the dimly lit house, with only the creaks of the wooden floors as company, stopping for a breath or two in front of a framed photo of a young couple in tones of sepia and happiness. His slender fingers caressed the frame, then wiped away a solitary tear. The plate in his left hand shook with the weight of solitude.

The living room looked deserted under undisturbed layers of dust and the grayed sheets protecting skeletons of muted furniture. Only the couch was still visible, worn-out and cluttered with pillows and a blanket, faded and threadbare. Big enough for eight, the living room table was hidden under a pile of crumbs and only one chair kept it company.

The long screech of the gate made the old man frown, tears and lunch caught in his throat. Soon a skinny silhouette taunted the soft pour of the midday sun through the garden side window.

“Hey, gramps!” the boy greeted, somewhat cautious. He fumbled with a plastic bag, then stepped out of his shoes by the door and into the living room.

“Told you I don’t need anything,” the hoarse voice answered, replacing the tired sound of fork on plate.

“It’s nothing, really, and some dinner. Mom said to tell you it’s Sunday tomorrow, in case you’re tempted to make plans without us.”

“As if you’d let me forget…”

“What was that? Happy to join us, you say?” the kid went on with the banter, scratching himself ungainly behind one knee. “Don’t give me that look, it’s the stupid nettle. And your gate almost killed me, you know, when it finally opened…”

“Yet here you are, yapping away my peace…”

“I take after you, that’s what mom says when I’m driving her bonkers… Twice a day and then at noon…”

“Twice a day and then at noon…” the grandfather mumbled softly, half a breath behind the kid. He was now looking up from under his bushy eyebrows to the spitting image of his younger self, all legs and smug. “Go on, get out of here, let me be already!”

Hands clasped in his lap, eyes watery again, the old man followed the lanky boy through the open window.

“Gramps,” the kid yelled back from the garden, with a grin, “there’s a cat under your rose bush. Looks like it didn’t get the memo.”

“That makes two of you,” he answered, under his breath, getting up with a groan, but looking like a man with a plan. Walking stick in hand, he went straight to the cat, all curled up and lazy in the shade. He was shooing and waving his hands and stomping his good leg to send the uninvited guest away. The cat heeded him not, slumber undisturbed, but for the white flower flies catching in the lush black fur.

“I look like an idiot to you, don’t I? Here you are, barging into my house, into my life, clueless and all entitled. This doesn’t end here, you hear me?” But the cat didn’t hear and didn’t seem to care either.

“I’ll let you to it, then, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Bring candy and your best self,” the kid waved over the fence with a mischievous wink.

 Sunday family lunches used to be the highlight of the week, full of stories and laughter and not one, not two, but three types of dessert. French toast, the old man’s favorite, to be savored with a pinch of salt before or crunchy brown sugar after, always ruled over everything from the white platter with golden dandelions on the rim. The spring past, the six of them turned to five, daughter and husband, the smart-ass teen and his sunny haired younger sister, the widower and an empty chair. And now he had to look his best and put on a smile big enough to thwart any significant questions and to reassure them he was fine, of course, as fine as he could be and no, he didn’t need anything, anything at all. He had  never been a good actor, though, and small talk kept getting smaller and awkward silences longer. From starter to chocolate cake, the passing of heaped plates around was met with a heartbeat skipped whenever he turned first to his right, where she used to sit, all smiles and joy, for the better part of the last five decades. French toast would never taste the same again and that made him even sadder.

And now there was the business of the damned black cat, who bugged him beyond measure, to the obvious amusement of everybody around. Every Sunday, for the last three or four or them, he would show up covered in black long hairs, with the purring machine sound asleep under his arm, oblivious to the uncomfortable position, the welcoming giggles of the little girl or the calling of princess-inspired names, every time a new one. It would walk around for a bit, stretch, indulge in some scratching between the ears, maybe order some food. Then it would curl on the sofa or under the TV table for another well deserved nap. Lunch would end, goodbyes would be exchanged and the cat left behind, only to find it on his door step on Monday, 7 am sharp, sharpening its claws on the old wooden frame or sprawled in the sun, as if it owned the whole garden, hell, the entire world.

He thought that putting a good half an hour walk between him and the monster would be enough, but it looked like he met his match and the creature kept showing up. During the week, he would do his best trying to gift his unwanted housemate to one of the neighbors, praising its spotless fur or its quiet step. It was the most he had spoken in the last year or so, and he started getting tired of all the socializing, so he moved on to guerrilla tactics. He took it to the curb and tried sneaking away, but he found it waiting by the rusty gate when he got back and his limp almost disappeared in utter annoyance. He tried ignoring it, scolding it, shaming it for being ignorant of good visiting manners, so unlike the elegant cat that it was. Nothing worked. The days went by and the cat was still there, entangling itself between the old man’s legs, reaching for a pat, napping on the couch, wagging its tail every time a fork touched a plate. He was adamant to rid himself of the nuisance shedding fur all over the place, but in the meantime a bowl appeared by the foot of the living room table and fresh water filled the plastic cup on the porch every morning, it was the polite thing to do. Pats became more frequent and he would find himself with the cat on his lap, stroking the long fur, like she would have, tears gathering in the corner of his eyes.

Then, one morning, he got up to find the damned cat sleeping, without a care in the world, on her very chair on the porch. Her garden apron was on the floor and the cat was dangling its tail, insensitive and insolent and lazy in the morning sun. She used to love to sit on that chair, in that exact spot, when the sun shone just so, before the buzz of the day started. It was the final straw. Without a second thought, he grabbed the animal and headed out.

He knocked three times, loud and outraged. Before his daughter could greet him in surprise, she found herself holding the cat under a breathless tirade.

“It was fun but no it’s done. Keep the damn cat this time, will you? That’s all I need from you. Not food, not phone calls every morning, noon and evening, not mending my fence or meddling in my business. Just keep the damn cat away from me. How hard can that be, huh?”

“We can’t very well keep it tied, can we?” she managed to babble, but he wasn’t listening.

“I don’t want to see it again, you hear me? Keep it or I’ll do away with it!” By the time these words flew out of his mouth, he caught the look on his granddaughter’s face. Ashamed and silent, he turned around and walked away.

 Days passed, and there was no sign of the black menace around the garden, in the shade of the rose bush, under the couch where the afternoons flowed cooler. The old man paced the length of the walkway, again and again, pulling nettle here and there, to look over the crouched fence, just to go back to the porch and sit on the chair on the left side of the small table, with his gaze lost in immeasurable distance. In a feat of inspiration, he went through the boxes lined up on the porch, from where the little bugger dragged out some scraps of fabric and the old roll of fishing wire, no scratching paw met his hand. Day after day, he kept doing his rounds, from the porch to the gate and back, pulling weeds as a cover, when all he wanted was to look deep into the street and see the damned cat coming back. He wanted to know it was safe, of course.

On Sunday morning, he woke up early, tidied the porch, folded the apron the other way around. He emptied the plastic cup and threw away the dried cat food catching flies. Running his fingers through his unruly hair, eyes filled with regret, he arrived at the family lunch half an hour early. The little girl welcomed him, excited to get a visit from the cat and her weekly supply of candy. The news that the cat wasn’t with them either worried the old man. He wanted it gone, not run over or injured in a ditch somewhere.

The lunch was more despondent than ever, the black cat was yet another matter to tiptoe around. The old man kept sneaking looks at the couch, thinking that nobody would notice, but no sign of the cat. Once dessert was out of the way, he took his doggy bag without a comment and headed home, with long strides and a bit a hope, but in vain.

The garden was silent in the afternoon sun, with the walkway now cleared of weeds leading the way to the tiny porch. The old man was sitting in his chair, hands in his lap, lost in deep thought, when the silence broke. The gate squeaked open and the four-legged patch of fur glided in. It reached the porch in several elegant steps and rubbed against the tired, waiting legs.

“Where have you been, you rascal?” His face lighted up with unashamed joy. “That’s quite an entrance you made there, who taught you to use the gate? Hungry? You look like you could use some food. Here, I’ll give you some of my French toast, it’s good. But we have to go get you some real cat food.”

Grunting with old age, but eyes smiling, the old man poured fresh water in the cup and, with a renewed spring in his step, he headed for the gate. “I have to get this oiled, if you’re all mannered now, you’ll drive me crazy with the squeaking.”

Pleased with the late lunch, the cat circled the table a couple of times, negotiating a nap.

“Not on her chair, you stinker!��, the old man shouted over his shoulder, while the cat made itself comfortable on the chair on the right. “Pfff, pardon me for calling you well-mannered. I guess Rascal it is, and you’d better answer when I call you.”

Too bad, too sweet (m)

Characters:  Lust!Hoseok & demon hunter!OC

Setting: supernatural au, demon au

Genre: 50% background story 50% filth

Warnings:  Explicit language, (dark) humour, violence, blood and sexual content including brief mentions of voyeurism and exhibitionism, dom/sub undertones, breathplay, light bondage without safe words and lots of talk about sex. (Kind of dubcon at some parts but not really.)

Summary:  Hoseok, the Sin of Lust has loved all era he has lived in but the 21st century might be his favourite. He owns a popular place in Las Vegas: an ordinary bar on the surface but basically a sex club underground. However, rumour has it that a reckless demon hunter is coming after him. He couldn’t care less until Black Widow steps into his bar but then things get heated quickly. Hoseok is determined to break her resistance and teach her a lesson: there only one rule of lust: no love. Everything else is fair.

Words: 12502

Moodboard

Part of the 7 Sins collab for BTS’ anniversary. Check out the other stories as well!

People are fragile. Weak and predictable. They were born to sin. And what could be a better place to do that than the infamous Las Vegas?

The dark city with its pretty neon lights awaits sinners with open arms and a charming smile. The kind you see in toothpaste commercials: expensive, artificial and full of intent. Because once you set a foot in there and trespass its threshold, there’s no way out, there’s no confession or prayer that could save your soul. In Vegas even the air is poisonous. It doesn’t damage your body or brain, instead it secures your spot in the deepest pits of Hell. After all, nobody comes here with a soul as white as an empty canvas.

A pair of careful eyes watches over the crowded streets discreetly, hidden in a shady corners waiting for a certain person to move. The girl wears a tiny crimson dress, her pale thighs displayed on the big screen, her curly hair bouncing on her shoulders and a pretty laugh coming out from between cherry red lips. Her sneaky fingers are wrapped around the necktie of a rich looking man, if the Rolex on his wrist and the Armani tuxedo is enough to give that away. She’s beckoning him closer under the dim lights, tugging him towards the end of the blind alley. The man is way too gone by now, he doesn’t think, his eyes are hazy with want as he licks his lips. He trips, maybe it’s a sign that he should stop and turn back but no, he clings to the girl like latex.

The shadow follows them closely.

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Actually, it’s a cobbled road with casinos, shiny skyscrapers, haute couture boutiques and nightclubs with fancy names most people can’t even pronounce. The lighting is supposed to set the mood: glowing purple and red hues decorating the buildings and painting the already drunk and/or high jaywalkers in lively colours.

The girl with the businessman is only one of the many grotesque pairs on the street but she seems different from the rest of the wasted, freshly turned 21 years old who came to the so-called Sin City. The way she knocks on one certain metal door and pulls the man after her seems practiced, almost robotic. Her smile is forced and the glint in her eyes is dangerous when they vanish from sight under the gilded gate and the huge scarlet sign.  It draws a lot of attention to the place but there are no long queues or well-built security guards. It looks like every other club on the street but there’s something unique about it. It’s a little more private and a lot more mysterious: maybe it’s because of that luring dark feeling that intrigues people who doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

Highway to Hell, the sign says in messy handwriting and the caped man behind chuckles; he could have guessed. He is fiddling with his jacket and chewing on the now tasteless gum. It was once minty mixed with the metallic taste of his own blood.  He waits a minute or two more then spits the gum out as if it was venom and strolls straight to the door.

He doesn’t know if he should be surprised or not at the arrogance it implies but there’s nobody who checks up on the newcomers. Or at least, they cannot be seen. It makes him even more aware of his surroundings and loosening his shoulders, he tries to blend in.

It’s impossible to tell from the plain facade because the place doesn’t look much from the outside, but inside it’s more than extravagant. The owner really lives up to his name, exceeding everyone’s expectations after his previous similar businesses. The ground floor seems like a conventional club: with loud, sensual music, the dance floor full of sexually frustrated people grinding onto each other, cute waitresses in barely enough clothing and expensive drinks. It’s all glitter with shady corners and drunken people. Ordinary, isn’t it? It should be disappointing because the man expected more, something much more interesting but he doesn’t give up. He has already come a long way here and he knows very well that the real business is done below. He just needs to find the entrance and for that, the girl from earlier will be his pass card.

And just like this he catches a glimpse of her dark hair swirling around in the air as she confidently follows the red lights leading the way to a white door at the end of a long hallway. She waves to the man guarding the entrance while she kisses a path up on her current partner’s neck. Her bare tan back is glowing under the fluorescent lights as she disappears beyond the door and the man following her suddenly feels like he stands out too much in his simple jeans and hooded jacket. He expects the guard to stop him, to shoo him away or at least ask him what he wants when he approaches the door but he is merely acknowledged while passing by.

Behind the ivory door there are several steps of stairs dissolving into the darkness. Hues of vermilion paint the pitch black walls from time to time, their colours pulsing to the sweet sounds of enchanting music that’s flooding from beneath. The man smiles at the thought of how accurate it is, the stairs leading downwards. Just as Virgil said once: the descent to Hell is, indeed, easy.

“Welcome to Hell! How may I help you?” a sickly-sweet voice greets him as soon as he reaches the end of the staircase and he can’t help but grimace at the word play: so the ground floor is the highway and this is hell. It looks like the owner hasn’t changed that much since the last time they met. When was it again? Maybe in the early 1900s? Yet, the other guy still seems to be fond of puns.

“I’m looking for the boss,” the visitor steps in front of the model-like girl who looks way too young to be doing this kind of job. Yet, her onyx eyes lack any sort of innocence as she flutters her lashes or the way her hips sway to the sensual music. Her beautiful Ariel-hair spreading all over her chest is the only thing that covers her breast in that flashy, see-through revue costume she wears.

“Like everyone. If you don’t have an appointment, get in line,” with an artificial smile she motions gracefully towards a corner where young girls and guys are lying on sofas, sipping of suspicious looking liquors, wearing clothes that barely cover anything.

“It’s important. He wants to see me,” the man shakes his head but soon a giggle’s melody fills his ears.

“I’m sure he doesn’t. He has company. Prettier than you,” the girl shrugs much less sweetly by now. She looks annoyed and bored, she must get lots of requests like this.

It’s not surprising, Hoseok or whatever his name is in this life has the reputation for it. No wonder keys hang on the wall behind the receptionist. It makes the place look like some kind of love hotel with private rooms. Which kinda it is. Expect it has nothing to do with affection, personal feelings, caring, there’s just the love for the body itself.

“Tell him it’s Henry and I’m here because of business,” the man doesn’t back out, it’s too late to retreat now. “Not the pleasure kind. Unless he makes it one,” he adds, to make it clear before the girl could rudely interrupt him again with some wild suggestion.

The receptionist, Candy as the name tag suggests, frowns deep in thought. She hesitates for a whole long minute until a loud moan coming from the hallways snaps her out of it. She is so unfazed by the bewildering sound, it must be common around here.

“Wait here,” she demands and walks away like a professional heartbreaker: swinging her hips seductively and flips her hair behind her shoulder. It doesn’t take long for her to come back with an answer: “He isn’t happy about it but you can go in. The second room on the left.”

“Thanks,” Henry says dryly while his hands itch to leave a report in the book of complaints. However, this isn’t a normal place like any other. There’s probably no such thing like that around here.

He isn’t surprised when on his way, a guy with a hand whooping his ass is practically shoved out of the door he’s heading to. The guy doesn’t wear anything, his clothes are in his hands pressed against his chest. But rather than being shy because of it or uncomfortable about his nakedness he seems blessed (or more likely fucked) out of his mind.

Henry rolls his eyes at the human’s pathetic state and steps into the said room, shutting the door behind him. The sound resonates throughout the place that has a whole wall made of glass. It immediately catches the newcomer’s attention because on the other side of it, there’s a stage looking like a podium for shows and the pair he followed here is having sex there while others watch them like they were circus performers. He grimaces in disgust but doesn’t comment on it. He has never understood this exhibitionist kink but it’s none of his business. “He was tasty,” the room’s habitant pouts complaining about being disturbed. He tugs himself back into his tight leather jeans and fixes his belt. Henry clicks his tongue.

“Your secretary is a pain in the ass.”

“But at least she has a nice ass and a thing for lingerie,” Hoseok shrugs licking his lips at the thought. The carmine robe still hangs on him opened, revealing his tan chest and abs. “Nevermind. She’s a good labour, keeps the unwanted out.”

The young man seems no older than twenty-five as he looks up at his visitor with a teasing smirk playing in the corner of his mouth. There’s something undeniably attractive about him that lures people in. It might be his confidence in the way he stands tall or those deep dark orbs that take anyone to places they only dreamed about. They might discover wonders they have never knew about and all that because of a man who has the body of a masterpiece sculpture blessed by the Heavens - or the next best thing humans are obsessed with – but the attitude of the worst of worst miscreants. His piercing gaze sends shivers down their spines, filling every fibre of their bodies with want and only a few of them can find it in themselves to tear their gaze away. He can’t help it. He’s Lust after all, it’s in his blood. However, Henry has known him for long enough to not fall for his dark charm.

“Long time no see,” he greets the older demon with a knowing smile. They go way back, it would be foolish to pretend to be strangers.

“Oh yes, the Roaring Twenties in New York City, those were the good days,” the club’s owner plops down on one of his leather chairs and grabs a drink from the table. He doesn’t offer a seat for his guest but Henry sits down anyway. “We had so much fun until you were stupid enough to fall for that human girl. Did it end in blood and tears like I predicted?”

Nostalgia usually isn’t Lust’s thing, he loves to live in the present and taste the fresh meat. Going down on the memory lane is only for the sentimental ones, he claims but he can make an exception just for now.

The lower ranked demon sniffs at his sarcastic tone.

“I hate it when you are right,” he mumbles bitterly, still tasting the faint metallic flavour in his mouth.

“I know,” the demon singsongs cheerfully without any trace of solidarity and gulps down half of the golden liquor in his glass. As he moves, the gilded accessories glint around his wrist and neck under the hazed warm lights exposing their high-class brands. The expensive Rolex made of gold and silver tinkles on his left arm even though he couldn’t care less about time. As an infinite being time isn’t a concept he cares for. What’s more, down here the Sun never comes up, the night never ends.

The whole place screams lust, not only for sex but for anything expensive. There’s lace, cashmere and silk everywhere, the marble is glossy and smooth while the carmine lights create that glamorous, mysterious, dimmed atmosphere that makes the clients feel like it’s a different universe. A dimension where social norms and the expectations of society can’t limit them, here only their most carnal needs and desires matter and define their actions. There are no taboos or rules. Hoseok only meddles in when things got way too out of hand. Until then he lets them get lost in here. People can waste their lives satisfying their cravings in his luxurious underground dungeon, completely forgetting about the outside world. And in Las Vegas, his business is soaring.

“You’re really predictable. A brothel in Vegas, really?” Henry has the balls to call him out on how effortlessly he made his luck but only laughter bubbles up from Hoseok’s throat.

“It’s easy. Everyone is a sinner here,” he shrugs. Challenges are fun but he likes if his things go smoothly. The city is called America’s Playground for a reason so why would he have missed this opportunity? In the past, he owned one of those famous ginseng houses in Japan in medieval times then the Moulin Rouge in Paris in the 1800s. He finds liking in these so-called red light districts more than anything. And to be precise, this isn’t a brothel. Sure, people pay for their stay but there are no sex workers here, only clients.

“Don’t you get bored?”

“Bored of what? Sex? Absolutely not. How could I when there are always new people, new kinks and the advancement of technology always brings new, exciting things? Have you seen the latest toys?” he snorts as if the question itself was downright ridiculous. But the wide, thrilled smile on his face soon turns into an irritated grimace and his stone-cold gaze stays on the lower demon scornfully. He had enough of this crap and has better things to do. Quite literally.  “Okay, so what do you want? I hope for your own good, it’s fucking huge, a good enough reason to bother me during fun.”

“You are always having fun.” Henry snickers disrespectfully.

“Well I can’t argue with that,” Lust raises his hands in a theatrically defensive manner but the bored look on his face shows that his patience is already running thin.

His unannounced guest squirms in his seat uncomfortable and steals a glance at the obscene sight not so far from them.

“Can we...” He points to the curtains on both side of the glass wall that makes the other man crack up.

“Oh, don’t worry, they can’t see us.”

The demon lets out a small ‘Ah’ sound at the realization. Other days, other ways indeed. Two way mirrors are the modern peep-holes they used to use to pry into the affairs of others.

“Still...” he requests not wanting to get distracted by that.

“You are such a killjoy prude. Go on!” the Sin waves for him to hurry up because, of course, he wouldn’t do it himself. He’s used to getting his way in and out of the bed, too.

Henry stands up with a sigh and closes the curtains just as the couple on the other side reaches their high. Good for them, but it’s time to get down to business, he decides and shoves a picture on the table in front of the higher level demon.

Hoseok seems amused as he picks up the photo of a girl in her early twenties. From the angle it looks like a candid shot and it probably is one. The girl doesn’t look like she’s aware of being photographed but there’s something confident in her presence as she turns around in the busy street. Everyone around her fades into oblivion but she’s still there, outstanding.  In her leather jeans, heels and trench coat that most likely hides wonders under. But the most prominent thing about her is that fierce look in her eyes.

“Woah. Collecting girls for me, are you?” Lust licks his lips imagining all the things he could do to a pretty doll like her. However, the answer is totally different from what he expects.

“She’s a hunter.”

“And hunting what? Bambis?” he deadpans but his visitor doesn’t find it so funny and sends him a look of haughty disdain.

“Our kind.”

The words have their own weights. Yet, the club’s owner tsks. “You mean your kind.”

Being arrogant as always, the Sin hates being associated with lower ranked demons. Like Henry. They were both humans once, they died and they are here but Hoseok isn’t just an ordinary demon sealing deals left and right, trying to bring people misery. Oh no, he has lived more than a millennium already and he enjoys nothing more than to seduce mundane and transcendental creatures as well to the dark side. He’s one of the seven deadly sins’ embodiments, no less.

“I always forget you think you’re better than us,” the other man scoffs and gets the conversation back on its original track. “They say she’s worse than the devil himself. She’s only a human yet she makes demons beg. She killed dozens just last week.”

Oh, a demon hunter. It’s been a while since Hoseok last encountered one. They are even rarer nowadays and most of them can’t even do more that pulling that damn trigger. They are lucky if they found a demon who’s an even bigger idiot than they are. He sighs stoically and brings the glass back to his mouth.

“Why is it my problem, again? She can’t kill me,” he reminds his companion peering over the brim of the glass but Henry isn’t quite convinced.

“And what if she has angel blades?”

Hoseok snorts loudly, almost spilling out his drink but recovering fast and smoothly. “Angels? Huh, they don’t exist.”

“You are such a non-believer,” the lower demon shakes his head in disbelief but the older only shrugs.

Stupid demons, they have no idea how this systems works. Virtues, sure. But angels? He only heard about fairy tales made up by pathetic humans so they can pray for their souls. Some would think after turning a demon, they suddenly know everything but no, they are still groping blindly in the dark. Even if angels really existed, he wouldn’t know but no angel has ever tried to meddle in his business and as long as it stays this way that, Hoseok simply doesn’t care.

“Never seen one. Why would I believe in them?”

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, he has no reason to do otherwise.

“Haven’t you heard what happened to Wrath?” Henry enquires further bringing up a normally sensitive topic. However, Hoseok has lived long enough to see others come and go, so another Sin dying and being replaced by a new one isn’t newsflash for him. He doesn’t feel sorrow or pity, even if he kinda liked the dude. Okay, he may have tried to kill him one time but could you really blame him though? They are demons after all.

“It had nothing to do with angels. He was weak, too sentimental,” he brush the question aside since the possibility of something like that happening to him doesn’t mean a threat for him. It’s impossible.

Not long ago, Yoongi called him to see if he had anything to do with the latest attempt to kill him. If he recalls it correctly, Wrath mentioned something about someone who had his number but he couldn’t find out who it was. Usually he doesn’t associate with stupid hunters and he wonders faintly if the girl on the photo is targeting the Sins. It doesn’t really matter because in the end, she wasn’t the one that took Wrath down but that disgusting thing humans call love.

According to Don Juan, love is the only sacred thing. For Lust it’s definitely a weakness. It only brings destruction and havoc, a painful mess. A feeling so unnecessary and yet powerful that it never fails to amaze him that people still yearn for love heartbreak after heartbreak. Masochists. But luckily for him, humans are especially weak when it comes to the sin of flesh.

Of course, for staying ‘pure’ you don’t have to keep celibacy. Sex itself isn’t a sin. It’s natural, a must for human reproduction and enjoying it doesn’t make it sinful. Sex is a sin if the partners don’t love each other, if their sexual desire is separated from true affection. When it’s not making love but just a good fuck, it becomes self-seeking and that’s the sin of lust... among other, more brutal and disgusting ones. They just crave the body to satisfy their own needs. It’s selfish and if the insatiable hunger isn’t handled properly, it can most definitely subvert propriety.

“Look… this girl...” Henry takes a deep breath trying to reason and convince the more powerful demon that it’s a serious issue he should be concerned about. But Hoseok easily cuts him off:

“Look,” he mimics the others tone mockingly. “She could knock on my door for all I care. Why me? I like to stay out of this business. Can’t you bother someone else to do the dirty work?”

Centuries passed, demons died and were born as well as humans but he only ever participated in their pitiful games if he found it fun. That’s all he has ever wanted. Revenge, power, leading a country to revolution? Sounds nice but he had better things to do. It was during the French Revolution when he last saw Pride and the beginning of World War II when he had business with Greed. He isn’t a social figure among their own kind, he would rather get lost in human crowds and then control the stray ones.

“I know you like the feisty ones,” Henry brings up a new argument, knowing well it should be the closest to a good explanation. “And I heard she’s after the Sins. Rumour has it that she got her hands on Pandora’s Box.”

A legend, a stupid fiction but nothing more. Still, lots of people were after it over the times: adventurers, rulers, Hitler and even Greed himself. Lust doesn’t know anyone who really saw it or could prove it really exists. He only helped Taehyung to see how it goes. You could say he was curious but not about the box. He couldn’t care less about the mythical object. He just wanted to see if the Sin could taint such a pure soul. Also, it’s always a rewarding feeling when even his fellows give into lust.

“How many tales are going to tell me tonight? I might fall sleep... or no, I have some more girls to fuck. So hurry up!” Hoseok groans impatiently. He has never been the kind who likes speeches with no end, maybe that’s why he doesn’t like to be teased either.

“She’s called the Black Widow,” Henry adds throwing in the information like it should mean something but that only makes the other roar with laughter so hard it makes his shoulders shake.

“She’s even named after a comic book character. Is she even real?” he snorts and all it takes to successfully piss off the lower demon.

“I shouldn’t have come here. You really don’t care about your kind. It’s true what they say after all,” he stands up so quickly it’s an achievement worth mentioning even for demon standards. However, he shouldn’t have been so quick on the mouth because the amusing glint disappears from Hoseok’s eyes all at once. He knows what the man implies because of course, he has heard the gossips they whisper behind his back. They say Lust is the least serious capital sin and even a lame excuse of a demon. He does nothing else than clubbing and fucking because these are the only things he can do.  Normally, the Sin wouldn’t care, he would let them talk but Henry really does have a death wish if he had nerve to say it to his face.

“Say that again and I will make sure you can’t use your dick more than a hose pipe,” he hisses dead serious, his gaze looking like it could cut through glass and no matter how quietly he speaks, the threat is obvious in his tone. “Get out before I change my mind and kill you on spot.”

“Gladly,” Henry yammers and strides to the door slamming it shut after him. The harsh sound still resonates through the room when Lust finishes his drink.

It takes one more glass of gin to forget all about this whole intermezzo an pick up the photo from the table.

To be honest with himself, he has found this mystery girl quite entrancing so far. A challenge, something exciting. A girl on heaven’s side killing demons much stronger than her petit human body. It isn’t something you hear of everyday. And she’s looking for the Sins? Well, let her find him and let the fun begin!

Being a demon hunter isn’t an easy job but it’s not like she wanted it. Her father has always been obsessed with training to be the most excellent in all kind of martial arts. Of course, he just wanted the best for her – aren’t all dads? - but he was a little extreme. Instead of taking her to ballet lessons or paying for extra language classes, he made sure that she learnt a dozens of fighting techniques, that she was skilled in archery, could fire a gun without a problem and that she recognized demons before they could even touch her. You could say that his wife’s sudden death drove him a little crazy.

Black Widow got herself a name in a certain company quite quickly. And no, she didn’t choose the alias, it just kind of stuck since everyone called her that. It’s a little embarrassing, even though she likes how badass it sounds. It made hunting and killing demons sound cool, rather than terrifying and disgusting. While doing this unusual job, sometimes she got tired, sad or lonely but at the end of the day she was grateful for his father that he taught her how to live in this cruel world, seeing it for what it is unlike the ignorant people.

“Please, let’s make a deal, I can give you anything you want…” the demon begs on his knees in front of her. The shiny dagger with her monograms in it points to his throat and makes him bleed burgundy.

“Bullshit. I don’t need your deals. Pathetic,” she spits out. Even though Kindness is a virtue she can’t find it in herself to be nice to a demon. They’re monsters after all. “Let's talk about where I can find the Sins.”

“I... I don’t know,” he utters out in ragged breaths looking more scared than a dreadful evil spirit should.

“Wrong answer,” she presses the dagger’s edge more into the demon’s deceivingly human skin that now has red spots all over it because of his own dripping ink dark blood and the holy water she sprayed on him earlier.

“I swear I have no idea,” he mumbles in desperation, clearly fighting with tears. It’s a laughable sight. She didn’t even know these creatures are capable of crying.

“Lying is a sin, did you know?” she reminds him almost gently and keeps stroking his neck with the steel. “So where are they or how can I find them?”

“I’m telling you the truth. They are higher ups, they can be wherever they want and they would kill me if I would tell you anything,” he explains hastily but she doesn’t have any of this.

“Well, in this case I will kill you sooner. Bye,” she rolls her eyes and raises her right arm up ready to strike.

“Wait!” the demon grabs her wrist as if he was clinging on the last string of hope. “I heard one of them is in Vegas. I am not sure…” he trails off trembling.

“Where?”

“There's a club called Highway to Hell where a lot of demons hang out, you might find him there,” he says a little bit more confidently than before. That’s the only thing that makes the hunter believe that he is telling the truth despite the ridiculous club name. The owner is an AC/DC fanboy or what?

“If you lied to me, I will find you again and kill you,” she shakes him by his collar and drags him to his feet. As soon as she releases him, he runs off like Hell is after him.

The girl in all black chuckles. Her phone buzzes in her pockets but she lazily wipes the blood off the blade before she picks up.

“Where are you? I’m going insane here! I thought you are dead,” the guy on the other side practically hollers into the phone.

“Hey, you should know it’s not that easy to take me out,” she lets out an offended huff and leaves the dark, bloodied dead alley behind.

“I know but still, it’s dangerous! Don’t disappear from the map again like this! I should be your eyes, remember?”

Yeah, that their team: the Chwe sibling against the world. While she does the killing, her little brother works behind his computer, hacking into databases, tracking suspicious people and keeping eye on the mission sites. This has always been like this, ever since both of their parents died. They make a good team despite their disagreements about her methods. Judging by his voice, Vernon is still mad but also relieved because she seems okay and more than that: enthusiastic.

“I think I have a lead,” she tells him the big news that got her so happy but her brother immediately tenses up in suspicion. They just finished a job, they wouldn’t need leads for a new case. He just wants one peaceful night without monsters. Is it too much to ask for? Apparently it is.  

"A lead for what?”

It’s funny how the silence drags out. The girl builds up the anticipation on purpose.

“To the Sins.”

“What do you mean the... oh my god, you must be kidding! No, that’s a suicide mission, you absolutely can’t!” Vernon yells at her, first confused then terrified.

He has nobody but his sister, only the two of them left. He cannot lose her too. He just can’t let it happen. He’s already a saint for letting her go to hunt these assholes in the darkest hours of the day. Of course, he does as much as he can from the background because you learnt from quite bad experiences that the field job is not for him. He’s good at fighting and strategy so it’s not about that. He just can’t stand what violence brings: the blood, the chopped heads, the stabbed hearts or anything like this. Why can’t all demons just turn to dust, only the old ones? Why do they seem so human-like? He doesn’t know how his sister does it, but it’s like she is immune to these things. Maybe she even enjoys it but not in the sadistic way. The fact that she does good for innocent people by saving them without them knowing and gets revenge on these evil creatures to make amends meet, it means salvation for her.

Ordinary, pitiful demons? Okay. But the Sins? That’s a whole new level. Rumour has it they can’t be killed, at least not permanently and anyone who has ever tried, failed, ended up dead in some alley or being ripped to pieces and thrown to the dogs. The siblings used to laugh at the idea of them existing. What’s next? The Horsemen?

But then they met Chastity, a Virtue. She was beyond beautiful and as pure as one could get. She got Vernon totally whipped, feeling harmless puppy love for her.  So if Virtues were real, walking among humans, why wouldn’t Sins be real too? It’s written in the ancient balance.

“I can and I will,” the so-called Black Widow argues in an authoritative tone that ends the discussion. Vernon knows he can’t stop her from doing something she has already set her mind to. He can’t do anything but trust and help her. “Get me a plane ticket to Vegas or I will hitchhike my way there.”

“Okay, just… Hey sis, don’t do anything…” dangerous? he asks her to take care in his own way every single time but she hangs up on him before he could finish. She can’t promise him that. She lives on adrenaline and dangerous things. What’s fun about it if it’s not risky a little?

Most of the times, Hoseok is in the basement watching over the orgies and the BDSM business where people can experiment with their kinky side under control. He doesn’t want anyone to die just yet, after all. Lust has a special treat for anyone visiting his hidden den: he could spread aphrodisiacs with a simple touch which gives people the sense of being in ecstasy but also dirties their already impure thoughts. Sometimes, he joins the fun or invite the lucky ones into his private room. Unlike his fellow Sins who often like to stay behind, hidden in the shadows, not revealing their faces, he soaks up all the attention. But sometimes he actually gets bored like Henry presumed and those times, he comes upstairs to observe the clueless humans and a few reckless demons from behind his glass of Scotch at the bar.

Tonight is boring. There’s nobody interesting who caught his eye and he almost regrets not asking Henry about that girl. It has already been couple of days since his sudden visit but nothing happened. Maybe all that fuss about Black Widow really is just a gossip among their kind.

Or not.

Hoseok can feel the change in the atmosphere right away as the light breeze of late summer nights rushes through the opening door. It brings the faint scent of something bitter and burnt like caramelized sugar. The aroma is so sweet it clouds his senses for a moment but his gaze is hungrily searching for the owner of the expensive perfume and chattering heels. It doesn’t take a minute for her to come in her glory: knee high boots that make her slender legs look longer and a pretty black dress sticking to her skin like second skin. It could be the low cleavage or the lace pattern running along its whole back not leaving much to imagination but her presence immediately gains attention. Her long, dark hair is brushed to one side displaying her flawless swan neck almost teasingly. Her soft skin looks unfairly delicious, waiting to be marked.

Hoseok is aware of the dozens of predatory eyes focused on the new arrival and he can sense the increasing level of arousal and the spreading nasty thoughts. Oh if she knew what others would like to do with her! But it’s her fault dressing like the embodiment of seduction, a real life femme fatale, every man’s wet dream. However, she seems oblivious of the massive interest in her sudden appearance or simply ignores it as she strides to the bar confidently. Even the barista is licking his lips as he takes her order, a Sex on the Beach coctail. It’s like an open invitation that anyone would be a fool to reject.

And Lust is the last person you would call a fool.

He stands up from the barstool and brings his glass of whiskey with him as he walks to this phenomenon of a woman. He flashes a triumphant smile towards the men who were too slow to approach today’s jackpot while his aura emits something intimidating that makes them retreat.

“Hey, beautiful, can I buy you a drink?” he casually plops down next to her, his voice sweet like saccharine. That particular sweet aroma fills his nostrils once again as he leans closer. The girl in smoky make-up doesn’t even look at him, just throws her hair behind one shoulder.

“Sorry, I’m waiting for someone.”

Oh, even her voice is smooth like honey. Hoseok feels more and more thrilled. It’s an exciting change to meet someone who doesn’t fall for his charms immediately. Nowadays, it’s so rare to find ladies who play hard to get just right, well enough to rile him up.

“Really? Who’s the lucky bastard?” he asks truly interested, not even slightly disheartened.

“A sin,” she replies casually as if it was evident. The sly smile she has on her pretty, soon-to-be-bitten lips makes the demon a little baffled, just a little bit. He didn’t expect her to be so straightforward.

Was she kidding? Or she actually meant what she said and provoked him on purpose? Whatever it is, Hoseok is ready to play along with the game. Hell, he could even seduce Virtues in the past just because he likes seeing them fall out of grace. He especially takes pleasure in getting under the skin of the actual virtue of Chastity from time to time. So he definitely enjoys games like this.

“You can’t just wait for him to come to you,” he makes a small remark emphasizing the fact that sins are, indeed, walking around among ordinary people in their human shell.

“Well, he just did, didn’t he?” she turns her head towards him with a playful glint in her eyes. Her smile is dangerous in the same way beautiful things can be dangerous: unseen, silently but deadly. She really does know who he is and she isn’t afraid. What a rare combination!

“Touché,” Hoseok chuckles amused because oh how much he loves these witty comebacks! “You know, only a handful of people made it out alive knowing who I am. What makes you think you are one of them?”

“And what makes you think I don’t want to stay?” she whispers sinfully putting down her cocktail and bending towards him so there’s only a few inches between them. Her gaze lingers on his plump lips for a second too long before she pulls back. Such a tease. “I quite like this place and there are some really handsome men over there. I bet they would fuck me so good.”

“Not as good as me and someone like you deserve the best. Don’t even bother going to them,” he orders firmly while possessiveness poisons the blood in his veins. He doesn’t want to share her with anyone else, not yet at least.

“Well, watch me,” she raises an eyebrow cockily, rising to her feet gracefully. The playful, fake innocent curve of her rosy lips makes it obvious that she’s really just toying with him. Daring little girl. It’s time for him to teach her a lesson: don’t tease Lust.

“I am watching you and I like what I’m seeing,” he muses with a smirk, his eyes glowing dark with intent. It’s the worst pick-up line he could use but it makes her stop in the tracks.

“Do you always flirt like this? It’s lame,” she rolls her eyes but sits back nonetheless, crossing her right leg over the other. The demon shrugs, not at all offended but rather amused. Hardly anyone dares to complain about that to him and even less of those who know about his true nature.

“Usually, I don’t even have to flirt,” he winks in a playful manner, knowing very well why he doesn’t need that. A touch is enough to drive anyone crazy with all that lust they have pent-up in them. A touch and all their hidden dirty fantasies are only a step away. Only a touch, literally that’s all it takes to become a slave of devil. Lust is an addictive aphrodisiac trapped in a human body waiting to affect.

Yet, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t flirt. He knows very well how to, thank you very much. Who do you think taught Don Juan and Casanova everything they knew to seduce all those women all around the world? They were his favourite sons, not biologically, of course, but still. His most successful pupils or the devil’s disciples as some said.

“You’re so full of yourself,” the bold girl grumbles with that loose tongue she has. Hoseok hasn’t decided yet that he likes her more with or without her sass. It makes her interesting, challenging, out of ordinary but he has always hated disobedience. It’s only fun because he knows he can break off any walls and turn her legs into jelly.

“No, I just know what I want,” he flashes a predatory grin that can only be described as mischievous.

“And what is it?” The pretty girl asks curiously with tilt of her head. The sudden movement bares her neck even more while her silver earrings tinkle to the sensual background music. The way her rouge lips twitch upwards is cunning, sinfully so. But the demon has never loved it more.

“Right now, it’s you…” he itches closer to her ear but she doesn’t back away. His breathe is fanning over the shell, his lips lightly nib on the soft skin there as he huskily whispers those sinful words: “...pinned to the wall, tied up in my bed, naked, crying out my name in pleasure…”

“Please,” the girl chokes on the word grabbing his lounge-jacket in desperation and Hoseok smirks. That’s it: any resistance can be broken.

“Please what, babygirl? Lust teases sliding his hand down on her side following the dress’ curves. Her body seems fragile under his fingertips but he knows she can take a lot because she already bears dozens of scars hidden by the dark dress.

The girl shudders at the pet name and her body goes pliant under his hands.

“Can we… Can we go somewhere private?” Her voice cracks so beautifully, dripping need. It’s music to the demon’s acute ears, since he’s feeding on humans’ lust after all.

“Sure we can. That’s why you were waiting for me in the first place, isn’t it?” he asks in a hoarsely whisper. His teeth tugs at her earlobe teasingly and she lets out a slight moan between her parted rosy lips. Her cheeks are flashed red like a good, aged wine and she’s so gone already, she can’t even form a sentence. Almost too easy.

Hoseok detaches her fumbling finger from his collar and grabs her by the wrist. He isn’t gently at all, there’s firmness in his touch like always as he walks her straight into the lion den. Straight across the long corridor, through the door and down, down, down the rabbit hole.

The eyes of half-naked, staring people follow them as they pass by velvet curtains and dozens of doors. She clinging to him for dear life, body pressed achingly close and her breath is coming out ragged as if they came running. They almost did.

The last door on the right is different, it doesn’t have a door knob or handle, nor does it function with locks and keys. Hoseok simply puts his palm flat on the wood and it flings open revealing a room full of glinting crystals. Based on the expensive interior design, the silk bathrobe carelessly thrown on the floor, the vitrine full of expensive liquor and the unmade double bed, it looks like Lust’s private suite.

As soon as the door shuts, they are all over each other, fighting for dominance: hands wandering on bodies, nipping on exposed skin and kissing the warmness they find there. Hoseok isn’t tender in the way he marks her up leaving dark magenta hues all over her swan neck then lapping his tongue all over the bruises. She’s trembling out of pleasure but it’s fake. Just like the sweetness in her voice and all the little noises she makes; a huge lie.

She is a good actress but she can’t fool the devil. Or stab him so simple, it’s a matter of fact.

“Tsk-tsk-tsk,” Hoseok clicks his tongue disapprovingly as he catches the girl’s moving arm and pins it to the wall beside her head. Fighting back is useless and soon, she also accepts that he has better reflexes and senses than any human could have. There’s no way he would have fallen for this trick. It seems being an experienced demon hunter doesn’t mean they aren’t stupid and naive.

“Bad girl,” he growls into her ear and the shudder running through her is more of an adrenaline rush than lust this time.

The demon pulls back so he can take a good look at the dagger in her right hand. It’s silver with a marble grip and sacred symbols all over it. It would make a pretty nice toothpick but nothing more, the demon thinks with a low chuckle. It’s just a pretty knife with all of its holy patterns carved in it but none of them would do much damage on him.

“Did you…” the girl hisses between her white teeth, questioning with eyes angry dark. Lust raises an eyebrow arrogantly.

“Oh honey, I knew you were a hunter the moment you walked in. You reek of holy water. Such a pity it doesn’t work. On me at least,” he sniffs into the air indulging in the sweet scent of something burnt. He had heard other demons complain about it being bitter for their nostrils but Hoseok has always found a liking to its peculiar aroma. (Maybe because the forbidden fruit is always the finest of all.) But it wasn’t the only thing that gave her away, he immediately recognized her from the photo Henry brought. She was impossibly to mistake with someone else. She has that aura that definitely leaves on impression on mankind. So maybe that’s why he didn’t kill her the moment she dared to step into his club. What would have been the fun in that anyway?

“And still, you came to me,” the girl with red-tinted lips doesn’t have fear in her eyes. Maybe she’s a little uncomfortable based on the way she fidgets in his hold but scared? No. Hoseok can see curiosity and confidence in her eyes, so she’s definitely planning something. He wonders what it could be behind this poorly-executed attempt to kill him.

“Of course, I would never back out of a challenge,” the demon grins amused and takes the girl’s wrists in one hand so he can rid of that shining, edgy object threatening to draw blood. He carelessly drops it to the floor in close proximity. For one, he isn’t afraid of that it might hurt him and who knows? Maybe she’s into those bloody sexy times.

There’s a slight pause. A moment when the world stills and they just look at each other. Dark universes of eyes bore into each other observing any flicker, searching for any hint of uncertainty. Hoseok is finds truly interesting what he sees. The girl is around her early-twenties, so young, only a fleck of dust in history, yet the bitterness in her coal-like orbs hold stories of millenniums.

“You are really Lust, aren’t you?” she furrows her eyebrows dubiously and it makes the Sin laugh out loud. The situation is so surreal: them in his underground playroom having sweet small talk about who he is while he keeps her caged in his arms.

“Oh shoot, where are my manners? Sorry. I probably forgot to properly introduce myself when you tried to kill me,” he reminds her with salty irony dripping from his voice. “To be honest I’m quite impressed. That’s why I didn’t kill you the moment you stepped into my club. Plus, it would be bad for business. You are a great actress, I will give you that. I almost believed what you said. But did you really think you could get away with it?”

“It was worth a shot,” the femme fatale answers so casually like killing demons is the most natural thing to do on a Saturday night. She shrugs or at least tries to as much as her held down arms let her.

“Reckless little hunter,” he muses and finds himself pondering over her question. “What makes you think I’m Lust?”

At first, he thought, she knows exactly who he is but it seems like she only knew that he was a Sin. But then again, how can it be irrelevant to her, what kind of demon she’s attacking? Would she have tried to seduce any of them? Alright, he can give her that it is a good strategy, after all, he knows, that even demons fall in the trap of temptation from time to time (or more often than not). This tactic would have probably worked with Greed and Pride, maybe even Gluttony, but the others not so much. So it makes him curious how or when she found out about his identity.

“Well, the club speaks for itself,” she says and Hoseok nods, he can’t argue with that. “And you have this aura,” she adds the vague explanation and the demons brows shoot up.

“Is it your way of saying I’m sexy? Are we back at flirting already?” his teasing question makes her scoff.

“Why are you so chill?” she muses in clear disbelief. Her confusion is understandable since most demons kill before they ask questions. Maybe she has gotten used to those stupid lower class demons that overreact every little thing.

“You want me to rave with fury? What for? I knew you were coming and try to kill me. It’s unusual but I love exciting foreplays,” he licks his lips seductively, using his leverage in their current position to slot a thigh between her legs. She keeps the eye contact and her pretty poker face says she isn’t affected at all, but oh boy, does he know the truth!

“Is it all a game to you?” she asks brows drawn together seemingly with no care about her vulnerability. She must have something up her sleeves, Lust assumes.

“Describe it,” he tilts his head, curious, his eyes glinting with excitement.

“Sex.”

Now we are talking! Sex is his favourite topic since you could say he’s an expert in this field.

“Well, it’s in my job description so why not enjoy it?”

The girl lets out a snort at his life philosophy. Her judging look is surely meant to be offending. So does her suggestive tone. Not that Hoseok cares.

“Okay, let me rephrase: is it fun making people sin, making them commit rape, fornication, adultery, bestiality and other disgusting things?”

The blatant accusation of immoral sexual acts doesn’t catch him off guard. He has heard it all before. Still, it upsets him a little, that this human girl just barges into here all bossy and questions him. How dare she?

The grip on her wrist suddenly tightens.

“Just for the record, I don’t make them do anything. They do it themselves, because you, humans are so weak and fallible. And of fucking course, you all blame it on us,” he spits in return to the ridiculous accuse because humans can be so pitiful sometimes. “So yes, I am Lust. But I have been called so many things in life: master, daddy…”

“Sir?” she asks out of blue, huffs coming out erratically. Maybe it’s a part of her plan, just a game, a test but the demon likes it anyway.

“Yeah… yeah that too,” he nods hastily and the huntress cannot believe her ears. Maybe they are playing a trick on her but for a moment he sounds a little breathless. Could it be? Can she affect him in that way with a simple word?

“But you can call me Hoseok if you want, kitten,” the demon offers feeling oh so generous. Or maybe he just wants to hear his name from that pretty, loose mouth of hers.

“Don’t call me that!” she snaps, lips red and eyes wild. But she’s a true actress transforming in front of him from one role to another with a resigned sigh. She’s falls back quickly into the earlier, almost pliant one as she wriggles her trapped wrists in his hold.  “Would you...?”

The tilt of her head clearly indicates what she wants and Hoseok lets out a low chuckle.

“Let you go? Why so polite suddenly?” He strokes her jaw with his index finger ever so slowly and gently, like one would pet a prideful cat. “See, I wasn’t kidding about you pinned against the wall. Even though the position is quite to my liking, maybe if you are a good girl I might let you go, yes. So tell me, why are you really here? Do you really just want to kill a Sin, Black Widow?”

The emphasis on the name doesn’t go unnoticed. The girl’s eyes widen the slightest, a little taken aback by the fact that he knows who she is. Yet, she acts all smug.

“So you have heard of me.”

“Yes, your reputation arrived earlier.”

Thanks to Henry and his blabber mouth.

“You did yours.” the huntress nods acknowledging his reputation. “So your magic touch doesn’t work on me, I made sure of that.”

She says it so confidently Hoseok doesn’t doubt that she really did everything she could to make him powerless against her will. The only thing he doesn’t know is how.

It’s almost too simple, you see. She has tattooed the seven Virtues’ names on her back because according to the ancient balance names have their own power. That’s why some of them are sacred or forbidden and cannot be said out loud. If it was her strong will or the tattoos, she can’t be sure but she’s in control all the time and can’t be manipulated by demons. Sounds good, huh? But the tattoo process isn’t a piece of cake. The pen has to made out of a consecrated item and the ink has to contain ash from sacred places that has been burnt down after a pure soul sinned for the first time. It hurt like a bitch and was hell of a trouble to go through getting one name after the other every month. No wonder why she doesn’t know about anyone else who has all seven of them.

It doesn’t change the fact that Hoseok’s aphrodisiac touch didn’t affect her and yet she’s still tempted by the raw feeling of lust.

“Oh so you did your research. Flattering, but I know. I haven’t even used them yet. Up until now, it was all you, darling,” the demon gladly enlightens the over-confident girl as he brushes his lips against her soft neck and that sensitive area behind her ear. “You can’t deny that you find me attractive. I can sense your hormones. I can practically feel how aroused you are even though I barely touched you.”

It’s the truth: he can smell the rosy scent of her pheromones and a triumphant smirk spreads all over his face when she gulps.

“I am Lust. I know exactly what riles you up, your biggest secrets, your most hidden craving, the needs you are ashamed of. I know you like the danger and that you want someone to tie you up. I can do the honour if you want...” he offers, his sinful words pressed into the curl of her neck making her shiver.

“Fuck you!” she snaps, frustration evident in her dark orbs.

“Gladly,” the demon says with a devilish grin.

He steps back just in time before the girl pulls her leg up to knee his crotch when she finally had enough of being caged. It all happens so quickly that Hoseok lets go of her wrists in order to protect his precious manhood. She doesn’t waste a minute to grab the dagger from the floor and throws it in the demons direction. A swish sound later, the metal rips through the air and hit the copy (or who knows, it might be the real one) of a Botticelli dead on.

“Oh, I liked that painting!” Hoseok pouts even though if it wasn’t for his excellent relaxes, the dagger would have pierced through his heart. Leisurely, he shifts his gaze back to the huntress and in that moment, he agrees that the name Black Widow really suits her. She’s a siren: beautiful, alluring yet deadly. When Shakespeare wrote ‘she drinks no other drink but tears’ he probably meant her.

“You call yourself Lust all proud and think it makes you different but you’re just a manwhore,” she bolts forwards trying to kick or hit him with bare hands but Hoseok is always one step ahead, just barely out of reach. Until the back of his legs hit the bed’s edge.

“You just called me a whore? Wow.” he laughs out loud. If it was meant to be an insult, it didn’t work. “Show some respect to sluts, please, they are doing an amazing job! But what about you, little miss perfect? Flirting with the evil just to stab them into the back? Are you lust after power, honey? I know you enjoy seducing all those demons and making them beg. It makes you a sinner too, you know? Lust like most sins is more about what you feel or think rather than what do. Of course, rape and such things are sins even if they are done out of love. Otherwise all is fair.”

“Shut up!” the girl punches him. Hard. Its strength takes him by surprise, making him lose balance when he gets a well-aimed kick on the chest. He stumbles back and falls on the bed into the pile of black silk sheets.

Black Widow is on him in an instant, stretching herself to reach the dagger stuck in the renaissance painting that hangs just above the bed. Even before her fingertips could touch the object, the demon grabs her waist and flips them around. Soon they are in a similar position like earlier: Hoseok kneels between her thighs holding both of her wrists above her head and applying pressure on her abdomen with his body so she cannot move. Though, the bed is definitely more comfortable than the wall.

“When will you give up? Just give into lust,” he whispers temptingly, knowing fully well she won’t last long but she is a feisty one so she will try to defy him.

“Never.”

“We will see about that,” he challenges her and gets bored of the cat-mouse game. He lets go of her hands but grabs her jaw with one hand, not allowing her to turn her head away as he forces his lips on hers.

At first, she tries to push him away banging fists on his chest but soon enough, instead of pushing, she’s pulling him closer by the collar of his Gucci shirt. The shift in her behaviour is so obvious: instead of kicking, she wraps her legs around his waist, so she can pull him closer seeking some friction and oh, the way she moans! A symphony he could never get bored of listening. “You are so naughty,” he comments when his fingers run up to the insides of her bare upper thighs and finds a revolver there. He unclasps its case easily and throws it away. A second later he regrets it because it could have come handy but never mind. He doesn’t let himself get distracted now when he can finally feel her warmth. “So wet for me already, babydoll?”

“Ah, not for you,” she answers between broken whines, feeling heady but still resisting. Meanwhile her body is already a slave for the Sin, digging her nails into the sheets and arching her back to be closer to him.

“Are you sure?” he asks playfully and pulls her panties aside. Feeling how ready she really is for him, he doesn’t waste any more time to insert a finger. The girl gasps at the intrusion but her shallow breathing quickly turns into nasty moans, a music to the demon’s ears. No matter how hard she tries to fight him or tries to hide the bliss she’s experimenting, it’s in vain: he knows exactly how to please humans. Lust is a tempter after all.

“Good girl,” he praises her for taking him so well and without a warning he adds a second digit. It doesn’t take long to fill the room with the wet sounds of pumping in and out, sloppy kisses on her neck and her breathy moans.

“Do you like it?” Hoseok whispers with a wicked smile on his flawless face. He already knows the answer he won’t get anytime soon.

“Answer me, doll!” he switches to a brutal speed that makes the girl cry out from the mixture of pleasure and pain. She opens her eyes, staring at him with eyes hazy of desire. Yet, her dark gaze still holds hints of rebellion.

“No,” she lies even though her voice breaks. The challenge only makes her more interesting in the demon’s eyes. He immediately retreats his hand and she unconsciously whines at the loss as Hoseok tastes her on his fingers.

“Well, if you say so,” he shrugs and hooks his fingers into her lacy underwear. He pulls them down alongside with her boots and tosses them away carelessly.

“Don’t touch yourself until I say so or I have to tie you up for real,” he warns her strictly, voice lashing out but she shamelessly whimpers at the thought. A smirk creeps on the demon’s face in delight, because he can almost hear the walls of her resistance crumbling. “Oh do you want that, sugarcup?” he lets the new, experimental pet name roll off his tongue musically and sinfully as he feeds up all the broken pleas she sighs.

“Yea- yes.”

“Yes what?” he inquires further, eager to hear her beg while his practiced fingers make a lazy work of unbuttoning his own white shirt. The girl is watching the movement with teeth sank into the plump flesh of her bottom lip, chest heavily rising.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s it,” Hoseok grinned pleased and leans over her waiting body to kiss her briefly on the lips. “You act all bossy but you like to feel out of control, don’t you?”

Instead of answering, the huntress bits back a moan as she rolls her hips up aching to be touched and Lust takes it as a queue to continue. He may not be a gentleman in bed but he likes to leave his partners satisfied. Also, he’s known for being a tease. Hence, it shouldn’t be surprising that he keeps a silk rope within reach and it comes in handy when he ties her up to the headboard.

“Patience! Be a good girl for me,” he coos when the girl whines at the loss of their skin-to-skin contact when he pulls back.

Hoseok makes a show of undressing while the tied up girl is squirming before him. He isn’t some fucking teenager or overeager human, he knows how to savour the finest tastes. He knows that being patient gets rewarded in the end. When he’s finished with discarding the last of his clothes to the floor, it’s her turn. The demon basically tears her dress down so he can yank it off her without unbinding her. Meanwhile, he doesn’t miss the way her gaze loiters over his body or licks her lips appreciating the sight. Even if she didn’t show, her pheromones would betray her.

She is beautiful. Really, from head to toe. Like a delicate flower but with thorns. Especially since she has pure lust glinting in her eyes. He could probably get off just to the mouth-watering sight of her and all the fantasies he would do with her naked, delicious body. But why waste the opportunity if she’s in front of him so eager to take him?

“Will you even touch me or just continue to look at me as if I was an exhibit in a museum?” the girl complains with that sharp tongue of hers apparently not satisfied by watching Lust stroking himself to full hardness.

“I said patience. Now, turn around. On your knees,” he orders and when she obeys, he manoeuvres her to spread her legs more and grip on the headboard for leverage.

As the huntress turns her back to him, the black ink decorating her skin makes the demon smirk. The seven Virtues’ names in pretty handwriting take up almost all the space on her bare back, Chastity at the top. How ironic.

“You have them all, wow. But you are a real sinner. You belong here,” he mumbles against her smooth skin, kissing his way up but he doesn’t say what he means by here: Las Vegas, the city of sinners, his club or under him, ass up, face down in the pillows, naked.

“Your body is a sacred place I want to corrupt,” he leans close to her ear, voice dangerously low and hoarse while he’s pulling at her earring with his teeth from behind. The helpless girl can only shiver and melt at his touch while his skilled tongue laves over the hickey he has left on the juncture between her neck and shoulder earlier. He presses hot, open-mouthed kisses all over her back just to rile her up until she’s a moaning mess under him even without being properly touched.

It doesn’t take long until she breaks.

“Please... just fuck me already!”

“Shh… babygirl,” Hoseok soothe her licking over the reddening marks he let on her skin like an artist marvels at his finished masterpiece. “How bad do you want it?”

“So bad, sir. I need it,” she doesn’t even hesitate before answering, only nibbles on her bottom lip trying to suppress her pathetic sounds. That’s all it takes to end her sweet torture. He just wanted to hear her beg since she’s already let the unbridled sexual desire consume her.

“As you wish.”

Sex with Lust is never pretty: it’s messy and needy, almost aggressive but oh so good. He sinks into her heat right away because he knows she can take it. It takes her breathe away for a second but then she’s quickly gasps for air, grabbing the headboard harder, shutting her eyes and crying out in pleasure.

“Oh god.”

“Far from him. I’m quite the opposite but anything for you,” he grunts out amused, fingers digging into her waist so hard it’s definitely going to leave a mark. He pulls out for a moment and slams back into her setting an unforgiving rhythm. The room is soon filled with sounds of skin slapping skin and her breathy moans. She has been aroused for so long, she won’t last long. Lust can already feel her climax coming but slows down just to take her closer to the edge later.

“What do you want? Tell me and I will give it to you,” he breathes into her ear seductively because it’s a promise he can keep for sure.

“Please touch me,” Black Widow pleads voice full of yearning that makes the demon pleased with himself. Is she really the huntress that intimidates hordes of demons? In his arms she’s just another helpless, yearning mess. Yet, after all the headache she caused, he isn’t going to make it easy for her.

“You have to be more specific than that. I know what you want but I want you to say it.”

Hoseok knows it isn’t fair to press her to admit her most hidden desire, a kink she has been fighting for so long but he doesn’t care. In this game all is fair and she accepted the rules the moment she began flirting with him.

“Cho-choke me,” she mutters into the pillow too immersed in lust to feel ashamed and Lust rewards her with untying the knot of silk around her wrist. He whispers words of praise as he lays her on her back before entering into her again. He’s really good at giving what his partners want. It’s also a part of knowing exactly what button to push and how. He’s a giver, he’s a taker, whatever they need him to be because he feeds on their lust.

He looks straight into her blown pupils as he presses his thumb on her air-pipe. Gently at first just to test the waters but that look of pure pleasure she has in her pretty eyes gives him green light quickly. He hoists up her long slender legs as his thrusts become harder and the press of his fingers on her throat more daring. The thrill of danger is rushing in her veins, electrifying, just like the kind of adrenaline she craved.

“Please...” she whines, her voice worn out, barely above a whisper when the demon finally lets her breathe just before she could pass out due to the lack of oxygen in her lungs. It hurts but she likes this kind of pain. “Please let me come.”

Hoseok wonders how much he broke her will that she became so pliant. Even if he didn’t have that aphrodisiac effect on her, it looks like he is quite addictive. The thought boosts his ego more than it should.

“I never said you can’t. Go on.”

And she doesn’t hold back anymore when he presses down on her air-pipe especially hard, hard enough to give her that airy weightlessness that makes her feel like she’s up in the clouds. While she’s coming down from her high, Lust mercilessly chases his own release. Despite being sensitive she doesn’t complain, only tugs on the demon’s short ginger strands with her finally free hands and enjoys the way he gasps when he orgasms.

“Fuck,” he groans while pulling out. “It was nice, sweetie.”

He picks up the silk robe from the floor and casually puts it on. He pours a drink for himself before going back to bed to lie down by the hunter’s side in post-sex bliss. The girl wraps the sheets around her sweaty body fully aware that the Sin won’t be a gentleman to clean off the mess they left. She doesn’t really care either, because she has only wanted one thing: for him to think he has her wrapped around his finger.

Oh boy, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

She is quite spent, her legs are jelly and the tingling feeling is still all over her body but she hasn’t built her stamina during the past years for nothing! So she sits up like it’s nothing and that throws the demon completely off. Despite his superhuman abilities, he isn’t fast enough to stop her and the power of surprise when she pulls out her dagger from the painting above and straddles his hips over the dark, stained sheets. She digs the steel edge into the skin of his throat hard enough to bruise.

“I’m looking for Pride. Where is he?” she questions him with eyes on fire, ever so confident and the firmness in her voice is very different from the one that begged so lovely earlier.

“So you didn’t come because of me? Disappointing,” Hoseok pouts theatrically, not even hiding his amusement, still not getting the seriousness of the situation.

“Answer me,” the huntress snaps at him, pressing the metal even closer, totally dropping the submissiveness. She doesn’t have any of it anymore. She may have had the best sex of her life but this isn’t what she came for. She’s got a job and she’s planning on finishing it.

“Ew, bossy! Oh shit…” the demon hisses when the dagger draws blood and the touch of the dagger blessed by Virtues burns his wounded skin. “Okay, I will tell you what I know if you tell me why you are looking for him. Why Pride especially?”

Is it jealousy? Black Widow knots her brows together in confusion but doesn’t let herself thinking too much about useless things like this. Even though it’s quite flattering to think that she can make even Lust jealous.

“I have to return a favour by finding him,” she shrugs not caring about how much he knows. He won’t live long anyway to tell the tale.

“Hm, interesting,” the Sin muses aloud, clicking his tongue. “To be honest, I haven’t seen him in centuries. For all I care he can be anywhere.”

Wrong answer, she wants to say but before she could utter a word, the demon knocks the dagger out of her hand and turns their position once again. This time, the girl doesn’t even hesitate to punch him in the face. She tries to get away from him as she catches a glimpse of her gun discarded on the floor.

“Bitch,” Hoseok growls as he licks the blood off his split lip. He grabs a hold of the huntress’ long hair to pull her back when she reaches out to seize her weapon.

“Jerk,” she ripostes and kicks him violently until she can make it out of the bed. She must be a unique sight: hair and makeup a mess, the sheets rumpled around her and a revolver in one hand pointing at the half-naked high demon of Lust.

“You can’t kill me with that,” he laughs but doesn’t move or take his eyes off of her.

“Are you absolutely sure? The bullets are blessed by Chastity herself.”

Hoseok snorts. Virtues and their pitiful tricks.

“Go ahead. Give it a try,” he shrugs lazily but he’s dead serious when he warns her: “But if it won’t work, I’ll take you down, darling.”

Black Widow giggles. Death hasn’t scared her for quite some time now. She dares to take this chance. “See you in Hell,” she smiles ravishingly and pulls the trigger.

 (He doesn’t die, of course, - since love is his only real enemy or something brutal like chopping his head off - but it takes him almost two days to crack an eye open. With a hand clinging to his chest, the bullet pops out from the wound leaving it throbbing in pain.

“Ouch. It actually hurt,” he grimaces just before his memories come back to him.

Oh right, the hunter girl, the sex and the damned Virtues who can’t mind their own business. But at least, it looks like he won’t be bored one of these days. He promised Black Widow something after al land thinking about chasing after her makes him smile. It’s time to teach her another lesson: nobody can get away with fooling Lust.

“Oh... it's gonna be so much fun.”)

The Slim Shady 20

Eminem’s “The Slim Shady LP” came out, I’m told, 20 years ago. Though the album is, in many ways, dated, homophobic, problematic, sexist, and just as differently offensive now as it equally was originally, it’s still extremely excellent. Instead of going too think piece-y, I wanted to write about my favorite bars.

While Eminem’s career definitely hit higher highs with latter releases, this is my favorite album in his catalogue. He was just as angry, but it was channeled; not distorted by fame or worn down by addiction or jaded by lawsuits or persevering through death of loved ones. This was 26-year-old Marshall, getting his head above water in time to start machine gunning expletives at the world around him.

And please remember, in his words, “If I’m talking too fast, it just means you’re listening too slow.”

20.

I wanted an album so rugged, nobody could touch it Spent a million a track and went over my budget (Oh, shit) Now, how in the fuck am I supposed to get out of debt? I can't rap anymore, I just murdered the alphabet

Immediate thesis statement.

19.

If I had a magic wand I'd make the world suck my dick without a condom on while I'm on the john

Really dislike this lyric, but it’s unflinching grossness hits every time.

18. 

I met a s*** and said, "What up? It's nice to meet ya I'd like to treat you to a Faygo and a slice of pizza”

This lyric does not exist going forward because any success carries you beyond it. Shades of “Exhibit C’s” masterful “When I was sleepin' on the train / Sleepin' on Meserole Ave out in the rain / Without even a single slice of pizza to my name” exactly 10 years later.

17.

This guy at White Castle asked for my autograph So I signed it, "Dear Dave, thanks for the support, asshole"

Doesn’t even rhyme; he hated his fans from the very beginning.

16. 

‘Cause I'm the one they can relate to and look up to better Tonight, I think I'll write my biggest fan a "fuck you" letter

Gave you every, immediate chance to get away.

15.

I'm freestylin' every verse that I spit 'Cause I don't even remember the words to my shit

Nah --  you’re way too meticulous, Shady.

14.

I'm not a player, just a ill rhyme sayer That'll spray a aerosol can up at the ozone layer

I like when his evil imagery turns half-baked adolescent; might as well brag about melting ants with your magnifying glass.

13.

Tell her you need a place to stay You'll be safe for days if you shave your legs with Renee's razor blades

Some fun internals; plus the part right before taught me what “gaffle” meant.

12.

I just remembered that I'm absent-minded Wait, I mean I've lost my mind, I can't find it

+

I used to be a loudmouth, remember me? (“Uh-uh”) I'm the one who burned your house down (“Oh”) Well, I'm out now (“Shit”)

Two of my favorite circular lines.

11.

Some people only see that I'm white, ignorin' skill 'Cause I stand out like a green hat with a orange bill But I don't get pissed, y'all don't even see through the mist How the fuck can I be white? I don't even exist

Had to address the elephant in the room.

10.

You beef with me, I'ma even the score equally Take you on Jerry Springer and beat your ass legally

Man with a plan.

9.

These are the results of a thousand electric volts, a neck with bolts Nurse, we're losin' him, check the pulse

Always a lab-created monster.

8.

I want to make songs all the fellas dub And murder every rich rapper that I'm jealous of So just remember, when I bomb your set Yo, I only cuss to make your mom upset

Cracked the code for us.

7.

Got b****** on my jock out in East Detroit 'Cause they think that I'm a motherfuckin' Beastie Boy So I told 'em I was Mike D They was like, "Gee, I don't know, he might be" I told 'em, "Meet me at Kid Rock's next concert I'll be standin' by the Loch Ness Monster"

This one checks many boxes: The D, local-yet-hilariously-dated celeb name check, misogyny, mythical creatures.

6.

But they love it when you make your business public So fuck it, I've got herpes while we on the subject And if I told you I had AIDS, y'all would play it 'Cause you stupid mothafuckas think I'm playin' when I say it Well, I do take pills, don't do speed Don't do crack, don't do coke, I do smoke weed Don't do smack, I do do shrooms, do drink beer I just wanna make a few things clear My baby mama's not dead, she's still alive and bitching And I don't have herpes, my dick's just itchin' It's not syphilis, and as for being AIDS-infested I don't know yet, I'm too scared to get tested

One of the only times he breaks the fourth wall.

5.

I hang with a bunch of hippies and wacky tobacco planters Who swallow lit roaches and light up like jack-o-lanterns Outsidaz, baby, and we suin' the courts 'Cause we dope as fuck and only get a ‘2′ in The Source

This was soon corrected.

4.

That's what I did, be smart, don't be a r***** You gonna take advice from somebody who slapped Dee Barnes? “What you say?” What's wrong? Didn't think I'd remember? “I'ma kill you, motherfucker” Uh-uh, temper, temper Mr. Dre, Mr. N.W.A, Mr. AK Comin' straight outta Compton, y'all better make way

Distilling Dre’s career -- warts and all -- into a flurry of knockout punches.

3.

I'll listen to your demo tape and act like I don't like it Six months later, you'll hear your lyrics on my shit ("That's my shit"!) People don't buy shit no more, they just dub it That's why I'm still broke and had the number-one club hit

Everything we’ve ever learned about Eminem has taught us he’s a tortured obsessive... yet this stretch feels effortlessly perfect. Plus, it gives us a clairvoyant outlook on the perils of massive-success-without-actually-making-money in the YouTube/streaming era.

2.

Me and Marcus Allen went over to see Nicole When we heard a knock at the door, must've been Ron Gold Jumped behind the door, put the orgy on hold Killed them both, then smeared blood on the white Bronco (We did it)

So offensive it almost laps itself back into normalcy. The unflinching “We did it” at the end is psychotic, horrible, and confident.

1.

 Fuck rap, I'm givin' it up, y'all, I'm sorry (”But Eminem, this is your record release party!”)

Tried to get out the game on his debut; Jay Electronica would be proud.

Honorable mentions...

I lay awake and strap myself in the bed With a bulletproof vest on and shoot myself in the head (Bang) I'm steamin' mad (Grr) And by the way, when you see my dad (Yeah?) Tell him that I slit his throat in this dream I had

There’s something casual about his fantasy murder of his father that really made the end stretch of this hit home. This is the closing of his final verse in “My Name Is”; he was never playing.

Man, ain't you ever seen that one movie “Kids”? No, but I seen the porno with Sun Doobiest

Em’s devil to Dre’s angel.

My palms were sweaty, and I started to shake at first Somethin' told me, "Try to fake a stomach ache, it works" I screamed, "Ow, my appendix feel like they could burst Teacher, teacher, quick, I need a naked nurse" "What's the matter?" "I don't know, my leg, it hurts" "Leg? I thought you said it was your tummy" "Oh, I mean it is, but I also got a bum knee" "Mr. Mathers, the fun and games are over And just for that stunt, you're gonna get some extra homework" "But don't you wanna give me after school detention?" "Nah, that bully wants to beat your ass and I'ma let him"

Even the teacher wanted him to get his.

Tired of bein' stared at Tired of wearin' the same damn Nike Air hat

Never had to worry about that after this.

* * *

Death section:

- I tried suicide once and I'll try it again That's why I write songs where I die at the end 

- The disaster with dreads, I'm bad enough to commit suicide And survive long enough to kill my soul after I'm dead

- The ill type, I stab myself with a steel spike While I blow my brain out just to see what it feels like 'Cause this is how I am in real life I don't want to just die a normal death, I wanna be killed twice

- And if you ever see a video for this shit I'll probably be dressed up like a mummy with my wrists slit

- (I'm Slim Shady) So come and kill me while my name's hot And shoot me 25 times in the same spot

* * *

I got a wardrobe with an orange robe I'm in the fourth row, signin' autographs at your show

Tries to be unique and boastful... falls apart and gets self-deprecating.

I take a breather and sigh, either I'm high or I'm nuts 'Cause if you ain't tiltin' this room, neither am I

I mean, someone was... right?

We drive around in million-dollar sports cars While little kids hide this tape from their parents like bad report cards

Eh.

If I had a million bucks, it wouldn't be enough Because I'd still be out robbin' armored trucks

Unquenched desire for chaos.

A lyricist without a clue, what year is this? Fuck a needle, here's a sword, body pierce with this

Always able to make a risky situation dicier.

Wait, what if there's an explanation for this shit? What, she tripped, fell, landed on his dick?

Solid one liner.

Drug sickness got me doin' some bugged twitches I'm withdrawin' from crack so bad, my blood itches

/eyes pop out

I don't speak, I float in the air, wrapped in a sheet I'm not a real person, I'm a ghost trapped in a beat

Super fun hip-hop imagery.

You were my best friend..

You were 14. You rode the bus home with us every day. We'd get to your house and run upstairs, only 15 or so minutes until your dad got home. We'd pack the bong, hit the patio, blast The Beatles and smoke until we were on the floor coughing. That 70's Show was always on at this time, right after Scrubs finished. We always talked about how similar your dad was to Red Foreman. We were young, high, and had no idea what the world had in store for us, but we were happy. Your house always had the best snacks.

You were 16. I drove us all home after school, and as always, we'd unload at your place. You and M*****would argue over who'd roll today's blunt, and I'd sit back and laugh at how dumb the two of you were. Your dad stopped caring about us smoking pot, cause we were on the verge of young adulthood and both got accepted into the college of our dreams. Getting stoned wasn't quite what it used to be, as with all the pressures of becoming an adult, came unwarranted amounts of anxiety. We were also too old to act the way we used to when we got high, something that really only seemed to affect me because you were always so damn mature. I hated that. Your cousin sold us some xanax, and we'd split one into three and drift away. For those couple of hours we were untouchable. Nothing mattered, we were the only ones who existed. We couldn't imagine life any other way, why bother? Nobody could tell us we weren't living life exactly how we were supposed to.

You were 18. You finally had set up our dorm exactly how we envisioned; TV's facing opposite direction so screen-looking was a thing of the past, microwave on top of the toaster oven on top of the mini fridge, a drawer full of weed paraphernalia and 7 posters of our favor artists, movie scenes and cliche college quirks. You passed me the straw as I broke my roxy in half, pieces flying everywhere that I would eventually try and find later.. You were more accurate then you thought your were when you would joke about me doing that. I'd separate the big, fluffy line into three smaller ones, and you'd suck yours down all at once. My tolerance was the same as yours was, but I lacked the $200 check you'd get from your parents every Monday. I was always kind of annoyed by that, but you'd occasionally show my broke-ass some love. Me and my girlfriend were fighting, and it got so bad that you drove me 400 miles to see her while your car was literally falling apart every step of the way. Your parents were so pissed that you drove while your car was in that kinda condition, but you told them it was something you had to do. It actually hurt you to see me cry, cause it was something you had never seen me do in the 14 years we were friends. Your transmission was replaced and your parents were $2400 poorer, but we were on our way back to school. You had just affirmed yourself as the most caring person in my life. My dad had passed and my mom was back in France, but I had you.. and for that I was pretty damn lucky.

It was your 19th birthday. It was my birthday literally just the day before, and we would always celebrate them together. You walked into the dorm and I pretended not to notice you, which had recently become the norm. I had the funniest story of this failed attempt to spit game at some girls after psych class, but I knew I'd be saying that for someone else. We had stopped talking for about a month now, due to your stubbornness and my inability to break a grudge, regardless of how petty it may have been. You were wearing long sleeves in July, but I didn't notice. You'd sit on your bed and watch ancient aliens, and I'd find some excuse to leave the dorm. Your presence drove me mad, as I'm sure mind did yours. Truthfully, I don't think either of us knew why we were fighting, only that we were and that any attempt to act otherwise would make us look weak. My connection to all things opiate were officially cut off, but yours only grew stronger. After a fun week of dope-sickness, I finally started feeling like myself again. The benzos would kick in, and I'd head out to my new friends house. We'd hit every club, every big sporting event or social gathering we caught wind of, so we could take dope photos for people to admire on Facebook. You'd sit at the dorm, and watch ancient aliens with the lights always off.. No matter what time I'd come home, you were at the dorm watching that damn show. I brought some girl home one night, praying that you had found something else to do. You hadn't, and I officially had to take her somewhere else. I made sure to be as loud and obnoxious as I could while grabbing my shit, ensuring that you acknowledged my presence and current lifestyle as better than yours before walking out. It still hurt to see you like that... You said nothing. You were still wearing a long sleeve shirt, and I still hadn't noticed.

You were 22. You were outside of the gas station when I drove up, smoking a cigarette. You were bench pressing 185lbs at 14 years old our freshmen year of highschool, and here you were a senior in college looking like you weighed maybe a buck twenty. Your skin was pale, and the bags under your eyes hung about as low as my thoughts of you at that time. I smiled and you smiled, but we had nothing to say to one another. We were strangers, and we both had very different things to do. I saw you a couple weeks later, and I was pretty drunk. You looked even worse than you did the last time I saw you, which had to have been a hard task to accomplish. I was worried. I spent twenty minutes lecturing you and trying to mirror your image onto yourself so that you could see what I saw, but it was hopeless. You didn't see the issue, either that or you were too far gone and refused to acknowledge it. The kid behind you was sketchy and hung around you like a shadow, stepping in when I started to get emotional. He told me to fuck off, and I blamed him for destroying my best friend. The drunken tears started to fall, but my friends in the car were yelling my name. The tears were wiped away quicker then they fell, but I know you noticed them. Your friend laughed, but you didn't. I still cared, and you did too.

You were 23. Your oldest brother had received his sentence, and would be doing 17 years for trafficking, possession and selling to an undercover. Your younger brother still wouldn't talk to you. You had just gotten out of jail for violating probation, after getting caught stealing a drug test at Walmart. I heard the news and almost laughed, I couldn't understand how far you had fallen. You were always so much better than me in life, it was unreal to see how things had changed. I had my degree, a good job and a support system of friends that held through everything. You had a criminal record, a pocket full of pills and contact list full of people you either bought drugs from or sold to. I'd see you occasionally as I drove to work, and every time it was like seeing a ghost. I had no feelings for you anymore, no judgement. My painkiller habit had picked back up, but for some reason I still felt above you. I ended up running into you a few weeks ago, while I was picking up a few oxy 30's from my dude. You seemed almost excited that we were back on the same plane of existence, but I was disgusted. You tried conversing, generally interested in how I was, what I was doing these days and how my mom was. My answers were short, and I couldn't get away from you fast enough. It was obvious, and it didn't take you long to notice. You had fallen pretty low, but you were still as conscious as ever. I watched you take a long drag of your cigarette as I pulled away, staring directly into eachothers eyes. We were officially on two different planes of existence. I had no business on yours, and vise versa. This was the last time I ever saw you.

I got the news today. Your name and face was plastered across my Facebook wall, where every memory and funny instance with you was on full display. I considered writing my own status in your memory, but I couldn't. It just didn't feel right after all we had been through, and how I had treated you over the years. The cause of death wasn't broadcasted, but it didn't need to be, I already knew. Though it feels like 10 years since I've spoken to you, I can't help but think about all the time we spent together. Every minute of my life from 7 years old until 19, involved you in some way. You were the kid who I experienced life with, who I made mistakes with, who I got my first kiss next to.. You always gave me shit for having my eyes wide open. You brought me to parties, you fought alongside me, you accepted me as a brother and let me into your family when I felt like I didn't have my own. You cheered for me when I won, cried with me when I lost, and threw up with me when I was drunk or dope sick. You cared about me, through everything, and I threw you out of my life when you needed me the most. You never needed me, you were always the one I relied on for anything I went through, but you were always okay. When the time came that you weren't, I no longer had a need for you. I abandoned you, and you still forgave me. You still sent me invites on Xbox live, you still told funny stories about me with mutual friends and you still told your parents about all I had accomplished. You still gave a shit, you still cared. You were no longer a part of my life, but I was always a piece of yours, just a little lost along the way. You were the greatest thing I ever gave up in this lifetime, I'm sure of that.

You were my best friend.

Looking in, in times of Quarantine

I thought most of us had a bad 2019, but 2020 proved it can do better.. errr, badder. lolol. I’ve been working remotely for almost 8 years, and if not for the Covid-19 pandemic, i wouldn’t know that they call my set-up a QUARANTINE. While most of you probably are working from home, i am here in my same routine, same set-up at home - but literally without work to do. All my clients from the F&B and Hospitality are the major industries affected with the lockdown. While most of the employers and government officials are announcing how the employees will be paid and covered during this lockdown, Freelancers and most people in the creative industry are left unsupported just like the rest with no-work no-pay workers. Tough times i know, but as they say, you wouldn’t know what you’re made of if you haven’t been pressed. 

So that being said, let me share with you some of my takeaways from the first week of under being on lockdown, and may i have many more takeaways to come after this:

1. God’s sovereignty and power cannot be refuted. 

Sovereign means He is in full-control, all-authority to the whole world and whatever happens in it ( which includes calamities, sickness, death, etc). No matter how invincible we think we are, God can change it in a snap of his fingers. He is THAT powerful. First world countries suffer just like the third-world countries, no one is greater than Him. I know this virus is man-made, or we can say caused by the evil in this world, but it is still God who allows it for His greater purpose. And just as powerful as He is, He is also the same God who is merciful, loving and patient to His people.  

2. Having a work/job is a blessing, not a burden.

Most of us are so tired from jobs that we feel it is a burden to carry day in and day out. I completely understand that some of us have so much load to carry and that they are just working to have ends meet, and it has been the cycle of their lives. Let me share you that when the Covid-19 was just starting and the local news has began saying it’s been spreading from one place to another, i got anxious too and couldn’t help but worry that my clients would soon need to freeze my services. True enough, they didn’t have a choice but to close and freeze my contracts. During these times that i constantly remind myself who God is - a father who provides, the God who owns everything, the God who is a promise-keeper. I praise God for giving me a job that i love, i learned to constantly pray for my clients for them to easily recover, and as i expectantly wait for His answer to my prayers, everyday i choose to put my confidence in Him that i shall lack nothing. So for those of you who feel so burdened working from home and can’t go out, maybe it’s time to look at the less greener side to appreciate where you’re at. :)

3. It’s okay to slow down. Take care of your well-being.

I’ve been working hard since the day after i graduated from college (17 years?!) and this is the loooongest time i ever stayed at home without doing anything work-related. Even if i’m on vacation, i still have my laptop with me doing some work, so it’s pretty uncomfortable for me to watch each day pass without the thought of checking and sending emails. God is telling us that it is okay to slow-down and take a rest. A much needed rest. Taking care of our body and health is also a form of worship to God. Do not abuse it, do not consume anything that can eventually cause sickness. We cannot accomplish God’s mission if our body is not working. Use this time to recuperate for bigger things ahead, to sit still, reflect and communicate with Him. We have no excuses now that we have all the time to pray and seek Him.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

4. Save, Save, Save!

Who would know that this could ever happen to the whole world in just a couple of months? I praise God for the past months of provisions and opportunities that i was able to save up, without even thinking of some deadly virus would soon creep in. I just thought of saving because i know i cannot depend on anyone but myself and God during hard times. I was also taught by my mom to always save a portion of my income, no matter how small or big it is. So now that i literally don’t have work, i don’t need to sell some designer bags just to keep up. Who would see it if you’re locked down inside the house anyway? What i’m trying to say is that, learn to prioritize and be a good steward of God’s blessings.

Proverbs 13:7 One pretends to be rich,[a] yet has nothing;   another pretends to be poor,[b] yet has great wealth.

5. At the end, it is still family that matters most. 

With all the news and Covid-19 cases coming in daily, it is a big reminder how life is short, and that nobody is invincible. Today we are forcefully pushed to stay inside, spend time with family and look after one another. Maybe this is the perfect time to check on your aging parents, notice their lines and wrinkles and realize they are happy you are finally home. Same goes for busy parents, take time to talk, laugh and share stories with your kids without being in a hurry. Make good memories out of the bad times.

6. Take care of Mother Earth, please!

Now is a time where mother earth speaks for herself, no need for the rallies and demonstrations. Her voice is much louder than ours! Goosebumps every time i see posts showing nature taking back its place now that humans are inside their houses. It’s like looking at a zoo, but switching places. What a joy to see bluer skies and big fluffy clouds every time i look out the window. Maybe that’s one of the silverlinings that God gives us a better view outside even if we’re locked in. Imagine if we have no choice but to see a smog-filled skyline.  I hope that when this pandemic ends, we’ll learn to take care of mother earth more and be conscious in our little ways. Even spitting, throwing that candy wrappers, or even buying plastics. May this be a huge lesson for all of us. 

7. Count your blessings!

I admit, there’s a constant fear that creeps in my heart everytime i watch news, listen to the latest updates and realize this isn’t going good anytime soon. But that’s why we need to CONSTANTLY battle in prayers too. Everytime i get anxious, i need to remind myself and pray that God is good, and that He is unchanging. Truly, if you look just for yourself, your rights, your needs - you will be depressed and anxious, no doubt about that. But if we learn to look at others who are less fortunate, those who still need to go to work even if they will be at risk because they have no choice but to feed their families, and those frontliners who continuously battle for those who are sick, we will see how blessed we are inspite of our circumstances. My heart truly breaks for these people. This is also a chance to shine during the darkest times for our brothers and sisters in need, whatever and however way we can help, do it so as if we’re doing it for God as a sign of our thanksgiving to Him.

Philippians 4:8

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

First week and i got a handful of lessons already, how about you? Share your reflections and blessings below! God bless everyone, sending my virtual hugs and stay safe. We’ll get through this!

Baseball Quotes

Official Website: Baseball Quotes

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• A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings. – Earl Wilson • A baseball game is twice as much fun if you’re seeing it on the company’s time. – William Feather • A baseball manager is a necessary evil. – Sparky Anderson • After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that. – Reggie Jackson • Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man’s hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance – thrown hard and with precision. – Roger Angell • As a kid, before I could play music, I remember baseball being the one thing that could always make me happy. – Garth Brooks

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Baseball', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_baseball').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_baseball img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine. – Pat Conroy • Baseball gives … a growing boy self-poise and self-reliance. Baseball is a man maker. – Albert Goodwill Spalding • Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it. – Whitey Herzog • Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. – Terrence Mann • Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. – George Bernard Shaw • Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is a fun game. It beats working for a living. – Phil Linz • Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. – Willie Mays • Baseball is a lot like life. It’s a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is a man maker. – Albert Goodwill Spalding • Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game – Edward Abbey • Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off. – Bill Veeck • Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast. – Joe Garagiola • Baseball is dull only to dull minds. – Red Barber • Baseball is just a game, as simple as a ball and bat, yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead. – Jackie Robinson • Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand. – Leo Durocher • Baseball is like driving, it’s the one who gets home safely that counts. – Tommy Lasorda • Baseball is more than a game to me, it’s a religion. – Bill Klem • Baseball is more than a game. It’s like life played out on a field. – Juliana Hatfield • Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical. – Yogi Berra • Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up. – Sharon Olds • Baseball is the greatest game in the world and deserves the best you can give it. – Babe Ruth • Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game. – W. P. Kinsella • Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. – Ted Williams • Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width. – Bill Veeck • Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror. – George Carlin • Baseball is the only sport I know that when you’re on offense, the other team controls the ball. – Ken Harrelson • Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. – Mark Twain • Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport. – Philip K. Wrigley • Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It’s the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot. – Dick Gregory • Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become. – Mary McGrory • Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field? – Jim Bouton • Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything. – Toby Harrah • Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. – Bob Lemon • Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world. – Babe Ruth • Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal. – George Will • Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. – Steve Busby • Casey (Stengel) knew his baseball. He only made it look like he was fooling around. He knew every move that was ever invented and some that we haven’t even caught on to yet. – Sparky Anderson • Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades. – Frank Robinson • Cricket is basically baseball on valium. – Robin Williams • Defense to me is the key to playing baseball. – Willie Mays • Despite reforms in steroid control, serious problems still occur in and out of baseball. – Jim Sensenbrenner • Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You’ll be an old man before you know it. – Al Lopez • Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young. – John Thorn • Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. – Pete Hamill • Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is. – Bob Feller • Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That’s baseball as it should be played – in God’s own sunshine. And that’s really living. – Alvin Dark • Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things. – John Thorn • How can you not be romantic about baseball? – Billy Beane • I don’t know if he throws a spitball but he sure spits on the ball. – Casey Stengel • I don’t know what you guys say, but at home, life is way different from baseball. – Barry Bonds • I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery. – Ty Cobb • I haven’t had the time to say, ‘I’m retiring.’ But baseball says, ‘You’re retired.’ – Rickey Henderson • I just want to play baseball. – David Ortiz • I live in L.A., so I go to basketball games. But I love baseball. – Penny Marshall • I never thought home runs were all that exciting. I still think the triple is the most exciting thing in baseball. To me, a triple is like a guy taking the ball on his 1-yard line and running 99 yards for a touchdown. – Hank Aaron • I see great things in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. – Walt Whitman • I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can. – Babe Ruth • I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning. I think about it all day and I dream about it at night. The only time I don’t think about it is when I’m playing it. – Carl Yastrzemski • I think it puts baseball back on the map as a sport. It’s America’s pastime and just look at everyone coming out to the ballpark. It has been an exciting year. – Mark McGwire • I was born to hit a baseball. I can hit a baseball. – Barry Bonds • I was lucky enough to have the talent to play baseball. That’s how I treated my career. I didn’t think I was anybody special, anybody different. – Carl Yastrzemski • I watch a lot of baseball on the radio. – Gerald R. Ford • I would be lost without baseball. I don’t think I could stand being away from it as long as I was alive. – Roberto Clemente • I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world. – Bill Lee • I’d be willing to bet you, if I were a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball. – Pete Rose • I’d never even been to Wrigley Field. I never even enjoyed baseball that much, but I loved being there, the crowd was lovely, and they all sang with me! – Bea Arthur • I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball. – Pete Rose • If God wanted football played in the spring, he would not have invented baseball. – Sam Rutigliano • If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. – Babe Ruth • If it weren’t for baseball, many kids wouldn’t know what a millionaire looked like. – Phyllis Diller • If the Cincinnati Reds were really the first major league baseball team, who did they play? – George Carlin • If you don’t think baseball is a big deal, don’t do it. But if you do, do it right. – Tom Seaver • If you have a bad day in baseball, and start thinking about it, you will have 10 more. – Sammy Sosa • If you put a baseball and other toys in front of a baby, he’ll pick up a baseball in preference to the others. – Tris Speaker • I’ll play out the string and leave baseball without a tear. A man can’t play games his whole life. – Brooks Robinson • I’m not an athlete. I’m a professional baseball player. – John Kruk • In baseball, I was always in control of everything until I let the ball go. – Curt Schilling • In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end. – Tom Seaver • In baseball, there’s always the next day – Ryne Sandberg • In baseball, you don’t know nothing. – Yogi Berra • It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course. – Hank Aaron • It was a terrible day for baseball, it was a worse day for Congress. – Fay Vincent • It’s no coincidence that female interest in the sport of baseball has increased greatly since the ballplayers swapped those wonderful old-time baggy flannel uniforms for leotards. – Mike Royko • I’ve got a wife, four kids, a business, and a baseball career. – Curt Schilling • Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets. – Yogi Berra • Making love is like hitting a baseball. You just gotta relax and concentrate. – Susan Sarandon • More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. – Thomas Boswell • My dream was to play football for the Oakland Raiders. But my mother thought I would get hurt playing football, so she chose baseball for me. I guess moms do know best. – Rickey Henderson • My mom, she wasn’t like a baseball mother who knew everything about the game. She just wanted me to be happy with what I was doing. – David Ortiz • No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball. – Casey Stengel • No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. – Paul Gallico • Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation. – Temple Grandin • Now there’s three things you can do in a baseball game: You can win or you can lose or it can rain. – Casey Stengel • Nowadays, they have more trouble packing hair dryers than baseball equipment. • One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something. -Nolan Ryan • One of the beautiful things about baseball is the history. – Jim Abbott • One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures. – Curt Schilling • People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. – Rogers Hornsby • People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball. – Sandy Koufax • Playing baseball is not real life. It’s a fantasy world… It’s a dream come true. – Dale Murphy • Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. – Robert Frost • President Bush left for Canada today to attend a trade summit. Reportedly, the trade summit got off to an awkward start when the president pulled out his baseball cards. – Conan O’Brien • Sadly, this problem of steroid use is not isolated to baseball. – Jim Sensenbrenner • So, baseball is probably more physical of the two mentally. – Bo Jackson • Tell me the truth – do you think I’ve lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I’m shouting at fights or at baseball games. – Cleo Moore • The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can’t think of one single book that changed my life in any way. – Charles Kuralt • The good rising fastball is the best pitch in baseball. – Tom Seaver • The great thing about baseball is that there’s a crisis every day. – Gabe Paul • The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again. – James Earl Jones • The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball. – Babe Ruth • The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love. – Bryant Gumbel • The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them. – Hank Aaron • The trouble with baseball is that it is not played the year round. – Gaylord Perry • There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball. – Bill Veeck • There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem – once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. – Al Gallagher • There are three types of baseball players: Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen and those who wonder what happens.- Tommy Lasorda • There is but one game and that game is baseball. – John McGraw • There is no room in baseball for a clown. – Chuck Dressen • These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks. – Jimmy Buffett • Well, there are three things that the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else. Build a fire, run a hotel and manage a baseball team. – Rocky Bridges • When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game. – Joe DiMaggio • When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch. – Ty Cobb • When you’re in a slump, it’s almost as if you look out at the field and it’s one big glove. Vance Law Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. – Bob Lemon • Whether you want to or not, you do serve as a role model. People will always put more faith in baseball players than anyone else. – Brooks Robinson • Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. – Rogers Hornsby • Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams. – Jacques Barzun • You can sum up the game of baseball in one word: ‘You never know.’ – Joaquin Andujar • You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too. – Roy Campanella • You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possibly be – in baseball and in life. – Pete Rose • You teach me baseball and I’ll teach you relativity…No we must not. You will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball. – Albert Einstein [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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Baseball Quotes

Official Website: Baseball Quotes

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• A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings. – Earl Wilson • A baseball game is twice as much fun if you’re seeing it on the company’s time. – William Feather • A baseball manager is a necessary evil. – Sparky Anderson • After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that. – Reggie Jackson • Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man’s hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance – thrown hard and with precision. – Roger Angell • As a kid, before I could play music, I remember baseball being the one thing that could always make me happy. – Garth Brooks

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Baseball', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_baseball').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_baseball img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine. – Pat Conroy • Baseball gives … a growing boy self-poise and self-reliance. Baseball is a man maker. – Albert Goodwill Spalding • Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it. – Whitey Herzog • Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. – Terrence Mann • Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. – George Bernard Shaw • Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is a fun game. It beats working for a living. – Phil Linz • Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. – Willie Mays • Baseball is a lot like life. It’s a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is a man maker. – Albert Goodwill Spalding • Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game – Edward Abbey • Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off. – Bill Veeck • Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast. – Joe Garagiola • Baseball is dull only to dull minds. – Red Barber • Baseball is just a game, as simple as a ball and bat, yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion. – Ernie Harwell • Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead. – Jackie Robinson • Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand. – Leo Durocher • Baseball is like driving, it’s the one who gets home safely that counts. – Tommy Lasorda • Baseball is more than a game to me, it’s a religion. – Bill Klem • Baseball is more than a game. It’s like life played out on a field. – Juliana Hatfield • Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical. – Yogi Berra • Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up. – Sharon Olds • Baseball is the greatest game in the world and deserves the best you can give it. – Babe Ruth • Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game. – W. P. Kinsella • Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. – Ted Williams • Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width. – Bill Veeck • Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror. – George Carlin • Baseball is the only sport I know that when you’re on offense, the other team controls the ball. – Ken Harrelson • Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. – Mark Twain • Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business, and too much of a business to be called a sport. – Philip K. Wrigley • Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It’s the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot. – Dick Gregory • Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become. – Mary McGrory • Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field? – Jim Bouton • Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything. – Toby Harrah • Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. – Bob Lemon • Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world. – Babe Ruth • Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal. – George Will • Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. – Steve Busby • Casey (Stengel) knew his baseball. He only made it look like he was fooling around. He knew every move that was ever invented and some that we haven’t even caught on to yet. – Sparky Anderson • Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades. – Frank Robinson • Cricket is basically baseball on valium. – Robin Williams • Defense to me is the key to playing baseball. – Willie Mays • Despite reforms in steroid control, serious problems still occur in and out of baseball. – Jim Sensenbrenner • Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You’ll be an old man before you know it. – Al Lopez • Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young. – John Thorn • Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. – Pete Hamill • Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is. – Bob Feller • Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That’s baseball as it should be played – in God’s own sunshine. And that’s really living. – Alvin Dark • Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things. – John Thorn • How can you not be romantic about baseball? – Billy Beane • I don’t know if he throws a spitball but he sure spits on the ball. – Casey Stengel • I don’t know what you guys say, but at home, life is way different from baseball. – Barry Bonds • I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery. – Ty Cobb • I haven’t had the time to say, ‘I’m retiring.’ But baseball says, ‘You’re retired.’ – Rickey Henderson • I just want to play baseball. – David Ortiz • I live in L.A., so I go to basketball games. But I love baseball. – Penny Marshall • I never thought home runs were all that exciting. I still think the triple is the most exciting thing in baseball. To me, a triple is like a guy taking the ball on his 1-yard line and running 99 yards for a touchdown. – Hank Aaron • I see great things in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. – Walt Whitman • I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can. – Babe Ruth • I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning. I think about it all day and I dream about it at night. The only time I don’t think about it is when I’m playing it. – Carl Yastrzemski • I think it puts baseball back on the map as a sport. It’s America’s pastime and just look at everyone coming out to the ballpark. It has been an exciting year. – Mark McGwire • I was born to hit a baseball. I can hit a baseball. – Barry Bonds • I was lucky enough to have the talent to play baseball. That’s how I treated my career. I didn’t think I was anybody special, anybody different. – Carl Yastrzemski • I watch a lot of baseball on the radio. – Gerald R. Ford • I would be lost without baseball. I don’t think I could stand being away from it as long as I was alive. – Roberto Clemente • I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world. – Bill Lee • I’d be willing to bet you, if I were a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball. – Pete Rose • I’d never even been to Wrigley Field. I never even enjoyed baseball that much, but I loved being there, the crowd was lovely, and they all sang with me! – Bea Arthur • I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball. – Pete Rose • If God wanted football played in the spring, he would not have invented baseball. – Sam Rutigliano • If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. – Babe Ruth • If it weren’t for baseball, many kids wouldn’t know what a millionaire looked like. – Phyllis Diller • If the Cincinnati Reds were really the first major league baseball team, who did they play? – George Carlin • If you don’t think baseball is a big deal, don’t do it. But if you do, do it right. – Tom Seaver • If you have a bad day in baseball, and start thinking about it, you will have 10 more. – Sammy Sosa • If you put a baseball and other toys in front of a baby, he’ll pick up a baseball in preference to the others. – Tris Speaker • I’ll play out the string and leave baseball without a tear. A man can’t play games his whole life. – Brooks Robinson • I’m not an athlete. I’m a professional baseball player. – John Kruk • In baseball, I was always in control of everything until I let the ball go. – Curt Schilling • In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end. – Tom Seaver • In baseball, there’s always the next day – Ryne Sandberg • In baseball, you don’t know nothing. – Yogi Berra • It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course. – Hank Aaron • It was a terrible day for baseball, it was a worse day for Congress. – Fay Vincent • It’s no coincidence that female interest in the sport of baseball has increased greatly since the ballplayers swapped those wonderful old-time baggy flannel uniforms for leotards. – Mike Royko • I’ve got a wife, four kids, a business, and a baseball career. – Curt Schilling • Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets. – Yogi Berra • Making love is like hitting a baseball. You just gotta relax and concentrate. – Susan Sarandon • More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. – Thomas Boswell • My dream was to play football for the Oakland Raiders. But my mother thought I would get hurt playing football, so she chose baseball for me. I guess moms do know best. – Rickey Henderson • My mom, she wasn’t like a baseball mother who knew everything about the game. She just wanted me to be happy with what I was doing. – David Ortiz • No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball. – Casey Stengel • No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. – Paul Gallico • Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don’t have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can’t stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there’s too much stimulation. – Temple Grandin • Now there’s three things you can do in a baseball game: You can win or you can lose or it can rain. – Casey Stengel • Nowadays, they have more trouble packing hair dryers than baseball equipment. • One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something. -Nolan Ryan • One of the beautiful things about baseball is the history. – Jim Abbott • One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures. – Curt Schilling • People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. – Rogers Hornsby • People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball. – Sandy Koufax • Playing baseball is not real life. It’s a fantasy world… It’s a dream come true. – Dale Murphy • Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. – Robert Frost • President Bush left for Canada today to attend a trade summit. Reportedly, the trade summit got off to an awkward start when the president pulled out his baseball cards. – Conan O’Brien • Sadly, this problem of steroid use is not isolated to baseball. – Jim Sensenbrenner • So, baseball is probably more physical of the two mentally. – Bo Jackson • Tell me the truth – do you think I’ve lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I’m shouting at fights or at baseball games. – Cleo Moore • The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can’t think of one single book that changed my life in any way. – Charles Kuralt • The good rising fastball is the best pitch in baseball. – Tom Seaver • The great thing about baseball is that there’s a crisis every day. – Gabe Paul • The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again. – James Earl Jones • The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball. – Babe Ruth • The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love. – Bryant Gumbel • The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them. – Hank Aaron • The trouble with baseball is that it is not played the year round. – Gaylord Perry • There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball. – Bill Veeck • There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem – once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. – Al Gallagher • There are three types of baseball players: Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen and those who wonder what happens.- Tommy Lasorda • There is but one game and that game is baseball. – John McGraw • There is no room in baseball for a clown. – Chuck Dressen • These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks. – Jimmy Buffett • Well, there are three things that the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else. Build a fire, run a hotel and manage a baseball team. – Rocky Bridges • When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game. – Joe DiMaggio • When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch. – Ty Cobb • When you’re in a slump, it’s almost as if you look out at the field and it’s one big glove. Vance Law Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. – Bob Lemon • Whether you want to or not, you do serve as a role model. People will always put more faith in baseball players than anyone else. – Brooks Robinson • Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. – Rogers Hornsby • Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams. – Jacques Barzun • You can sum up the game of baseball in one word: ‘You never know.’ – Joaquin Andujar • You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too. – Roy Campanella • You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possibly be – in baseball and in life. – Pete Rose • You teach me baseball and I’ll teach you relativity…No we must not. You will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball. – Albert Einstein [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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[MF]In the Shape of the Big Dipper

Celine had eyed me curiously while I paid for our lunch at the little grille we found in Charleston. I did spend a lot of money that day, but Celine acted like I was a drug lord or at the pink Caddy level of a pyramid scheme. I simply paid cash to keep better track of my spending, that’s all. Money, much like life, doesn’t last. You can’t keep either, so you must learn to spend both the way you want. I never had a red cent to theorize about until recently, much less a fortune of dirty money to move twelve hours away to avoid confronting. Here I was, though, hiding out in the boonies with nursing students, numbing myself with crab cakes and sweet grass baskets. Trusting Celine wasn’t the hard part— she was a good, Christian girl who didn’t believe in strangers, white shoes after Labor Day, or mole people. The problem was I hadn’t told anyone the truth yet— my parents are thrilled; they think I left to go to school. School is a joke, but I enjoy the curriculum and making my folks happy. I owed them that much; they left the beauty of Palermo, the Catholic Church, and the 20th century behind for me. My ex-fiancé, Rob, was just fine with it. He doesn’t know that I know he had an affair and isn’t so excited I’m moving on to bigger and better things. He screws his next-door neighbor every Saturday, the 35-year-old named Judy, with a hideous affinity for vintage bobble head Dobermans and flesh colored lipstick. His mother told me on my way in the night I left, told me I needed to kick the little bastard to the curb, so I obliged her. She was a wonderful mother.

As important as they all were, I didn’t belong to the Maple Street gang anymore. Diana was the catalyst to my new life. We got to know each other during her monthly check-ups. She

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was a patient of Dr. Hales, a sweet old man who’d traded Scarsdale balloon boobies, expressionless faces, and ski-slope noses for his beach house. Diana’s favorite thing was to make me uncomfortable, and if she could encourage my wild side, all the better. She often brought me coffee, offered me cocaine a time or two, and told Dr. H he wasn’t paying me enough every time she visited.

After Celine went home, I had some time to myself, so I began to tell myself the truth. Diana had come into the office for a checkup, after which I relented to a long-standing rain check to visit her apartment. She was a fine thief, something she had no doubt spent a long time perfecting, but I worked with the public.

“Please don’t steal the magazines,” I urged her.

“I paid for these, baby, this doctor charges me $500 just to talk,” Diana said.

“Well, they’re going to ask me what happened to them—I’ll be responsible for replacing them.”

“No, not okay, that’s arrogant and unfair. You’re just a kid and cannot possibly be expected to answer the phone, file papers, take a lunch break, then do the same thing until 5 o’clock while corralling unruly patients.”

“Are you making fun of me? I’m not stupid. I choose to be here and interact with the unruly patients, do my job, and find time to craft 200 Christmas cards by hand.”

“Big shit, I bet you never made a croquembouche while glancing up to make sure Pierre’s boogers didn’t fall into your nearly burning glaze.”

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“Is Pierre your boss?” I asked.

“Nobody has ever had that displeasure—he was my mentor and my friend. He died when AIDs had us all too scared to swap spit with anyone but WASPS.” Diana answered.

“The Princess of Wales wasn’t afraid. Have you seen Dallas Buyer’s Club?”.

“No, I refuse to see Matthew McConaughey in such a state.”

“It was pretty graphic—what are you always seeing Dr. Hales about anyway?”.

“That’s for me to suffer through and you to look at later when I leave, and you file it away.”

“I can’t look at your medical records, they’re all online now.”

“All the juicy stuff is. Since we’re doing personal questions, how long have you been married?”.

“I’m not, well, I hope he proposes soon. We’ve been together for a year, and I do everything I can to make him happy. He just seems so disinterested in me these days; I’m not really sure what to do if he doesn’t.”

“You’re making 200 Christmas cards and have no husband? You never fail to disappoint me, Greta. Come have a drink and read this Cosmo I’m taking home. You’ve been avoiding my invitation for years.”

I took a cab with Diana back to Manhattan after her appointment while my conscious and Changes by 2Pac blared in my head. We pulled up to a gorgeous brownstone that smelled like leather and rain. The first floor was all tile hallways lined in thick, pastel rugs with shiny, mahogany stairs-- her actual house was the next story up. Once we got in there, I sat down with my pack of smokes and decided I was going to stay for an hour, have a drink, and take 1 aspirin when I got home.

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Once I was settled, I rammed the business end of my flip-top box into the leg of Diana’s white director’s chair. I inadvertently bounced my curls and breasts, the latter nearly out of my shirt. I flipped the first cigarette I touched upside down, placing it back inside to pick another one, just like Pop- pop showed me. Diana noticed my ritual and nodded in approval.

“What’s up D?” I asked, sucking out my first draw.

“Well first, nice tits. Second, your options are now a sex lesson from me instead of the daft editors at Cosmopolitan or the greatest adventure of your young life.” Diana said.

“What’s more interesting than sex?” I responded, carefully tugging up my dress.

“Stamp collectors, the price of bananas, warts.” Diana said.

She walked over to the left of her living space, squinting to see the sunset out of the bright stained-glass window.

“I’m disappointed you didn’t pick the second option, Greta.”

“I don’t need another adventure, D. I’m already uncomfortable.”

“Your coming here is part of it, so just calm down. You won’t have to actually do much more, sweets.” Diana cooed.

“That croak in a bush thing you mentioned earlier sure sounded interesting.” I said as I surveyed her true crime selection. I noticed most were stolen library books, which seemed overly fitting.

Page 5

“You need professional help. Maybe this was a mistake.” Diana said.

“I don’t mean to be rude--I joke when I’m nervous.” I was enjoying myself more than I thought, but it was getting late. I’d had enough of deciphering these interactions for one day.

“I brought you here to give you something.” Diana turned on her heels and walked over to me. “Something I would give to my kid, save only for two facts: I cannot track him down, and I don’t have enough time to track him down. Either way, it will get passed on just as I received it: from strangers.

“You have a kid?” I asked.

“Yes, and I left him just like my parents left me, no family and no explanation but lots and lots of dough. Any more questions?” she said.

“Not right now. Except maybe for what exactly you want to give me?” I asked.

“More than you bargained for.” Diana said as she walked back to her window. She was squinting harder now, to see the stars through the thick smog.

I had worried when I got there that she was either going to kill me or seduce me. Although I think she could have easily done one, and certainly managed either, Diana didn’t bother me again until 2 days later: the Sunday after my visit to her, when I picked up the Times. She was dangling from a gaping hole where that stained-glass window had been, for all the world to see. No cat eyeliner, no hair, and wearing a suit. The glass on the ground below her had shattered in the shape of the Big Dipper.

Page 6

I excused myself from my parent’s breakfast table, taking page 6 and a lox bagel with me to my room. I wondered about a lot for the rest of the day, but the most unsettling of my ponders was the way D had looked. I knew she probably hadn’t started off as a lady, but I figured her masculine days had to have been far behind enough to disregard. I guess it made sense we got along, I was a sucker for complicated men.

I arrived early to work on Monday. Dr. Hales was also surprised that she’d killed herself, although he did admit he was not a psychiatrist. He’d spent Sunday much the same way I did as he had known her for a long time. Apparently, Diana used to be a Mr. David Dawson; her transition required hormone therapy when those medicines were not yet regulated. They caused a rare and aggressive cancer that would have killed her no later than Valentine’s Day. Dr. Hales was trying to reverse her damage, begging her to do chemo, but D had insisted on more hormones: male ones. My best guess was that D had too many regrets about transitioning, perhaps because it made her so sick. When it didn’t work, she killed herself. This was what I resigned myself to believe, and it made me feel better as well as it explained her strange behavior every step of the way.

For the first few weeks after D’s death, I worried about being questioned. I was the last one there, surely someone else knew that. The papers even called it a most unusual suicide, updating the public every so often on the charismatic chef who’d met a gruesome end before they eventually began to lose interest. On St. Patrick’s Day, I got a call from a guy who told me he was a lawyer who wanted me to meet him outside of Bay Ridge about a patient of Dr. Hales. He wouldn’t give any details, but I knew who it was about. Worst case scenario it was a setup to

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interrogate me about D’s death, best case it was information about her that further explained my narrative. I decided I would make an appearance, no matter how it shook out.

Finally, after 3 hours in gridlock, I arrived at a small, but clean hotel. The concierge handed me two credit card style keys. They unlocked the door to room 340, where I found no lawyer and no cops, but a short letter accompanied by a bank card, checkbook, and briefcase. The letter is where I learned of the more-than-I’d bargained-for gift D had set me up with.

Dear Ms. Cannuciari,

We thank you for your assistance in the removal of D.D., simply some of the most extraordinary work we have seen. He was our most beloved detective, but the betrayal we experienced was far too great. The sum is broken down into 1 million USD in $100 bills, which are lining the briefcase. A secure account with our financial institution will house the remaining 76 million USD until either the day you die or the day you speak of our transaction to anyone, for any reason. Mr. Dawson chose the option that’s no longer available, which is to have your genitals cut cleanly off with a Jian--we greatly implore that you do not Google that.

Thank you again, madam. We do hope you will work with us again sometime.

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