Introduction

Disclaimer: the Badlands in this fic and the Badlands that Ashley Fragipane (Halsey) created are different. I do not own Badlands nor do I own Halsey. Halsey wrote the stuff down below, I did not.

Hello, and I'm sorry.
A salutation and a farewell.
I don't have much time.

This Times New Roman is gonna fly through my fingertips,
like a plague of moths.
The hollow black letter shells crunched into the ground
like the skin of a cicada.
This is all that's left.
And you can do whatever you want with it.
Keep it to yourself,
or let it serve as a warning.

This city is disgusting;
a corpse of what it used to be.
The people are filthy, gluttonous,
ruled by the power exchange of sex
from the hands of the proletarian to the bourgeoisie.
The tops of the skylines buzz with the lackluster enthusiasm.
The ground level is caked in dirt and rust and grime,
and the people that dwell there awake and rub the filmy layer off their lukewarm eyes.

There are some here I love,
some who fear me,
and some who wish I was dead.
I didn't ask for this;
no one asks for this.
You're born into it.
You grow up oblivious and sheltered
and one day the evil realities of this place hit you square between the eyes like a perfectly aimed bullet.
If this were a movie,
I would ride off in some blood red sunset down a stretch of desert road
into the wasteland that keeps us captive here.

But this isn't a movie,
these are the Badlands.