PART I: Headcanons
1 // It feels as if light, the very thing he bends and morphs, pulls away from him as he descends into the city like a plague, a wraith spreading and sinking into every foul piece of land and chunk of flesh he can tear at. Or perhaps, instead, he wills it away, the flashes in his direction revealing walls painted red, misery falling endlessly in his trail. He hides from his shame, protects himself while devouring others. This is not what he set out to do, but it’s what he has to in order to survive, the mental box he’s pushed himself into, the model son he was raised to be designed in bullets and knife wounds. Self care makes the mind kill it’s darlings, his favorite parts of humanity and empathy pushed underwater until they stopped gasping for air leaving only the parts of him that can survive, only the parts that can persevere -- and so his teeth are sharper, so his fingernails become weapons, his face never wet with tears but instead soaked in blood.
Why else would they call him a monster?
2 // At night his muscles twitch and ache in sync with the pain in his chest, stood in his bathroom mirror with smudged glamour and horrid eyes – humanity, and disdain for his humanity. Who is this person in the reflection? Weak, and caked with dirt, hideous, with weighted skin under dull eyes that look pitifully vengeful? At night he stalks the streets and devours prey to avoid the man he shares his living space with, the one who glares at him through the framed glass in his bathroom, the sleepless beast that feels everything he ignores, drunk and full of nightmares, regurgitating all the buried demons so that he can work and spit and jeer and kill. The man who cowers under sheets and stares at blinking clocks is human, disgustingly so, and he rots and rots until he hunts again. He does not cry, but seethes, and then he pulls himself together, all intoxicated and wild, the character, the jester, the mercenary. He plants his hands on the cold porcelain edges of his sink, locks eyes with the reflection he sees, and laughs as if mad. 3 // Why create something beautiful just for the sake of making it monstrous? Innocence and childhood not even things of memory, only blood over blood over blood -- family is not something he covets, not anymore, not since he stopped wearing pull ups and claimed his first life. Not since he’s tasted blood. Now the memory of his parents is tinged sour, the idea of family nothing but another invisible chain around his neck, the weight suffocating, the subject too sore
Most things are easy to bury, but the banging coming from the trunk sounds so much louder when you know who’s inside.
PART ii: Sample Paragraph: TW // gore, blood, mutilation (vague)
MILLIONS SQUARE was awash with neons and precious metals; silvers, blood, gold, filth, and decay lining the streets of the wealthy and the robbed -- the poor man’s gamble poured out onto sleek cobblestone with the clicking of expensive shoes or scabbed, barefoot soles. Then comes Ujin in poor taste; sharpened and faded nails adorned like small knives, loaded guns and all black clothes, but so damn pretty. He’s giddy with it, pupil’s thin like slits and iris’ melted red and savory. He comes hungering for a thrill, starving and ready to pick flesh from between his teeth. Who else can gamble in his place? Who can tear into holy wounds and sinner’s pockets more steadily then the executioner, more bloodthirsty than man? He’s made of one part desire and two parts insanity, a mere shadow of a person, indistinguishable; a patron saint of switchblade fights. Where he walks tendrils follow, where he hovers cities fall, men die, like Death himself with silver-dressed fingers and throat.
The cards are laid out on the table one by one and he watches with sly, sharpened eyes, wisps licking under the table, stretched like elongated shadows around the other patron’s feet. Do they see it yet? His poker face is that of a smile, always stationary and wide like the cat that caught the canary, teeth bright and shining luminescent, glowing in the dark. He doesn’t know what it’s like to lose, because even missteps on his way to victory end with his hands and pockets full; it’s because he’s a cheater -- filthy and unstoppable, a liar for sport. His fingers roll chips back and forth, back and forth, eyes finding the other players, the sweat of their brows, the shifting of their pupils. The mounted lights feel brighter, burning hot as if center stage, their cards suddenly feel like a worse hand, or perhaps, a better one -- no... a trick of the light.
Two folds and a flush, a look of indignation and he breaks out into laugh, deep and crackling in his core. He will continue to win until he grows bored, until fists fly and the casino breaks out in security, until batons are swung and blood spatters the floors and ceilings of such flashy poverty. He will continue to win until there’s no one left to play, until his pockets overflow with plastic coins that he doesn’t exchange for currency, clicking and jangling, sliding between fingers and clattering to the concrete. Ujin stuffs himself full on the feeling of victory, gorges on the other’s suffering and the widened eyes of desperate men starving for just a taste of what he holds in spades. For now he soaks in the gasps and the furrowed brows of lesser men, the feeling of a meal for their families or a safe ride home from this church of agony caught tight in his gluttonous grasp.
His hands slam onto the velvet of the poker table, body leaning heavily with a joker’s grin and a jester’s laugh, teeth sharpened and stained the color of bloomed roses he says, “Again.”
Then he’s walking the streets at night, his gun adorned on his pointer finger, spinning carelessly as he explores the furthest gutters with a name burning a hole in his pocket. Impetuous as he walks among the poisonous field of the city’s most vibrant flora, it’s most tempting and dangerous wildlife in the form of Renegades and rogues, all vying for the most useless of all things: survival.
Divinity is not something that welcomes them, the afterlife not promising the demons and devilmen any reprieve -- as if this hell on Earth could be any better, as if it could be worse. A Machivellian thief, a pessimist of a killer -- perhaps he’s doing them a mercy. A horrible thought. If he plagued himself with the idea that he was sending scattered filth to a quick and painless “better place” he isn’t sure he’d be able to bear picking up a gun again -- a knife, however…
His steps halt, head turned, curious. He hears shuffling in the depths of the alleyway, “Hiding?” He’s made of heat, of pumping blood and a slow simmering pot, a maelstrom devouring, destroying only for the sake of destruction. His spine is bent, hunched, as if he’s hiding as well, “I’m good at games.” It comes sharp and low, almost a dark playfulness buried in it. Black hair hangs long enough in front of his forehead that it shadows his eyes, the usual thinness of his pupils blown large as if euphoric. Power, what he coveted in spades, spilled forth from those full pockets as a man shakes and trembles behind mountains of trash. Familiar are the Greek Gods to what mercy looks like from a devil, what kindness means when received from a wooden horse, a face that appears both warm and friendly, handsome and charming, but cracks in two with the hunger of his posture, the shape of a spine that is not merely human, cracking open to something disgusting, something terrifying, falling out and bleeding onto itself -- it’s an illusion, of course, something of his design, a mutation created to be seen by only one person at a time.
AND WHAT AN ILLUSION IT IS.
He makes himself something he is not, he makes himself an evolving mass, a thing of nightmares because no freedom from pain is quick, not from him. If he’s a monster then this city is hell, this city is what grows and breeds things like himself. He wants to see the man suffer, but as he grows more horrid still his vision goes dark, his trigger hand grows hungry, and just as he reaches his peak (fifty feet tall, open wounds cracking into voids of gore and featureless faces, he’s greeted with a scream of terror) he sees black and the sound of a bullet rings loudly.
For a moment, the world is bright, flashing near blinding behind his eyes and when it clears there’s nothing, the darkness too dense, his eyes not yet adjusted to the depth of this blackness. Luckily he doesn’t need light to see it, the image seared into the backs of his eyelids, the makeshift image of the empty sockets, the stickiness of a liquified brain seeping out of a cracked skull, pouring damp and harsh against the pavement. He makes his own gore, manifests the warm feeling of adrenaline. His hands don’t shake anymore, but his fingers clutch tighter to the gun, the cocked trigger and the feel of steel in his hands. He doesn’t linger long, the silence following the bullet broken only by a whistled tune, the first movement he makes the pursing of lips, eyes blindly staring down at what is surely a mangled body, before he turns, the gun slowly beginning to revolve around his pointer finger once again.
From the end of an alleyway, an onlooker sees the disappearing silhouette of what can only be a man; the only thing clearly visible is the embroidered symbol glowing bright red on the back of his jacket; a cat with it’s teeth sunk into the throat of a snake.
