violence speaks
Decaying peace was finally announced dead as flustered reporters shouted from the screens, the backdrop - a mass of angry faces. Shouts. Demands of justice on both sides. Funny, that each side seemed to have their own brand of justice, and was convinced regarding its superiority. It is nothing that should concern Sungjong. He doesn’t care one way or the other, it is all however too close to home. In fact, it is right outside. There’s a frown on Sungjong’s face, as he stares at the flat screen, newsflash after newsflash on the riots would be boring if it wasn’t so annoying. His daily routine is disrupted. Streets blocked, shops closed, subway stations closed off.
How fucking inconvenient. The city centre is blocked off, chocked full of police and protesters. He weaves his way through the unrelenting crowds, trying to make it to his appointment on time. An exercise in futility. His client doesn’t come. In lieu, she sends a message. “In current political climate, employing you might be unwise…” The message in-between professionally worded lines: you are a bad, bad mutant. And it makes Sungjong see red.
He seethes at being lumped with that lot. He is not a fucking mutant. No wings, no superpowers, no freaking anything. He is a psychic, and she should grasp the difference. The fact that Ms Park and the likes of her will come back to him quietly, as things will settle down is a poor consolation, what a waste of a day. From this point on, it only gets worse.
The day bleeds into the dusk and there’s a word of a shooting going on. And of police attacking protesters. A jumbled message passed by retreating crowds, but as a thick smoke of military gas creeps into backstreets suddenly there’s a unanimous silent decision to RUN. As if a switch was flipped off. It is getting darker and it seems a feeling of panic suddenly rises with encroaching night. Sungjong gets pushed and shoved, formerly safe backstreets are suddenly full of tear gas and running people and it gets confusing. His eyes are suddenly useless. The darkness is impenetrable. And he finds himself panicking too, inexplicably as he tries to get to his building, but is pushed one time too many and loses his orientation. And suddenly, he is lost, his eyes blindly blank, but his senses on high alert as he tries to pinpoint where is his home.
@avtsoohyuk
It was over a decade ago.
The air smelled like blood then; that place always smelled like blood, but Hyuksoo ignored it when the blood wasn’t his own, perhaps even reveled in it. He let his new friend, the thrumming distortion, tear through the walls and release more bloody and angry creatures not so different from himself---there were people shouting, pointing at him, militant officers trying to corral the mutants that resisted like frightened animals.
That was over a decade ago, and yet something’s wrong in Soohyuk’s head---this is too similar, his vision’s blurring in his single eye, images of then and now overlaying all too harmoniously for his liking. He steps back, tries to ground himself, but there’s a weakness in his legs.
He should leave before he loses himself in the blur---that’s the last thing he clearly remembers thinking.
This has happened before, too, this kind of loss of time and place. It’s all the noise, the screaming---the blood, the rhetoric. His body hurts as if all his wounds have opened up yet again, and he can very nearly feel the blood spilling from his skin; he doubles over, trying to gain his footing, presses his back into the alley wall. The unpleasant things he tries so hard to bury rise up within him, clawing at his sense of self: sadistic violence, self-hatred, memories of ill-placed devotion, of the mistakes he’s made, the sheer number of people he’s tormented.
These people should know not to toy with him---they made him this way, took something already programmed for destruction and turned it into a true monster. Hyuksoo catches his breath, tries to stand up straight but finds his body isn’t entirely listening to him the way he’d like---he stumbles again when someone bumps into him, and that’s when everything snaps clear.
“Where are you going, boy?” he hisses, tone barely betraying its usual sing-song madness; he brusquely grabs the collar of the boy’s shirt, staring down at him through only one eye. (Why isn’t the other one working? Everything looks so strange this way---oh, it was taken from him when these damned wounds appeared, wasn’t it?) There’s a snarl on Soohyuk’s lips that’s half-mutated into a grin. “You should be more careful, you know---you could run into something dangerous.”
(He is a monster, a killer, a torturer of innocent things---here he is, in all his glory, the rage and sorrow and disdain his present self has forgotten all boiling up to the surface and telling him to do what he’s been made for.)
