The Bad Boys' Soft Boys' Lonely Hearts Club - The Full Package

The Ballroom Blitz

What awaits me beyond the portal can only be described with one word: despair.

Sure, "clusterfuck" would work nicely, but "despair" has a nicer gravitas to it. A real ha-rump, if you will. Though "clusterfuck" also works to describe the literal situation around me as I fall through the portal, dragging a goddess by her weave with me.

Everything is pretty much fucked. A huge-ass black hole is swelling both the earth and sky in a spiral of infinite despair so magnificent, it would make Junji Ito cry. If he weren't dead from reality tearing itself apart.

Clusters of floating debris--putting the "cluster" back in "clusterfuck"-- drift aimlessly through the red sky, devoid of sun and stars. Huh. That wasn't supposed to happen until a few eons into the future. That's the least of our problems, however, as we seem to be falling into a black hole.

You know, for being someone presented with the utter destruction of reality as we know it as atom by atom is crushed to a pulp, I'm surprisingly calm. Maybe there's some comfort in facing an excruciatingly imminent death, a sense of release, if you will. I've been having a tug-of-war with the universe for my own self-determination, and now that both me and the uncaring universe I've been placed in are coming to an end, I can't help but feel peace. Peace that the end is near. And a little melancholy that it's ending.

At least I can give the universe one last "fuck you" by dragging Fortuna with me.

Heh, it's funny. In the end, Aiden was right. I've been fighting my whole life. Fighting against my bad boy instinct. Fighting against a universe that wants to typecast me. I'm the modern day King Sysiphus, and my only crime was to cheat fortune of her fuckboy. In the end, I must find happiness in my own futile--wait, is that Brayden's mansion I'm about to crash? A piece of it, really. Like the last slice of a key lime pie, all broken and spilled over.

This bitch! She literally was going to throw me towards Hayden and make me die next to him! Well, joken's on her, because I'm made of precious little organs. But her? She's made of the good stuff!

"What in Hades name do you think you're doing?!" yells the goddess as she tries, and fails, to stomp me away from her. It only works to bring her other foot closer to my claw as I snatch her other foot.

"Let, me, go!" she yells. Not gonna happen, bestie. We are far approaching the mansion, and daddy needs a cushion!

She claws at my scalp, elbows my ears, pokes between my ribs, but I slowly but surely climb her like a koala looking for eucalyptus leaves. Gravity works in my favor here, as she cannot push me away harder than we are being pulled down. Finally, I have her beneath me in a bear hug, her pink hair hitting my face like flacid dicks in a geriatric orgy.

"Unhand me at once, you tsundere piece of shit!" yells the goddess. Ohhh, saying big words now. But it doesn't matter. My answer comes in the shape of a roof hitting her square in the back. The goddess draws a sharp breath as the air is knocked out of her. She works like an excellent battering ram.

But not an excellent cushion. We both hit the floor with a sickening crunch. Well, her's is mostly a wet thud. I'm more of a snap, crackle and ouch. I think I broke my ribs.

Fortuna shoves me off her, and judging by the sharp pain somewhere between my lungs and my duodenum, I'll say that, yep, got a broken rib or three. Shit, I'm the main protagonist, I'm not supposed to feel pain! I feel like a damn turtle on my back, gasping for air. It's a miracle I managed to survive the fall at all. The only good miracle this good for nothing goddess ever pulled, that's for sure.

Speaking of the devil, Fortuna stands up, feet first, like a fucking limbo dancer on steroid. There's a very distinct Ayden-shaped hole in her chest. At least I'm not the only one with broken ribs.