DISCLAIMER: All featured Tekken characters are the property of Namco and not the authors.
Archives: Sure, but please ask first! ^_^
Credits: Lines are from "Unravelled" by Björk, a very fitting song, don't you think? `-_^
Notes: This is the first of three parts of a very brief transition piece into Jin and Hwoarang's Tekken 4 period -- two years after "In the Skin of a Lion" and "Impending Fury." Both deal exclusively with Hwoarang's view of the situation. Please see "Witness" for an accounting of Jin's period in Australia. A longer series will immediately follow these up. For long time readers, thanks for your patience!
Interstices
Part 1
By Orfik
while you are away
my heart comes undone
I have so many reasons to hate you.
slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn
Wanna know who killed my mother? You.
the devil collects it
with a grin
Some old Mishima soldier in Pusan, getting his thrills cheating on his wife, raping Korean women left and right. Raped my mother and left her. She was only thirteen. Fucked her over and just left her. Tainted. Sound familiar?
our love
I have so many reasons to hate you, but sometimes I find myself wondering. I wonder -- if you were here, would you bother asking how many reasons I had left to love you?
in a ball of yarn
I wonder what it is that I really wanted of you, too -- those tortured nights I spent in a damp cell with Bryan Fury. I hung around Tokyo for a year after his death, looking for you. I knew you weren't dead. Bryan Fury gave his life waiting for you to come. You didn't come.
he'll never return it
so when you come back we'll have to make new love
I never told what remained of my gang why we'd suddenly concentrated ourselves on Mishima Zaibatsu. Taisho gave me a hard time because I wasn't living up to my duties as renju leader. We weren't putting on any shows, weren't making any cash flow. We were starving, and it was my lazy ass fault. I couldn't explain to them how the ache in my heart superseded the one in my belly.
Ryo inferred not so inaccurately that some chick did it to me. Things weren't the same after Hachi and Kim died, but we'd had each other, and I had you. But now their deaths made every breath I took obscene. I was scum. I'd flown away in the arms of their killer and fallen hard for him. There were days that I couldn't look at Taisho or Ryo, let alone bear my reflection in a mirror. Every place you touched, kissed -- my entire body -- it crawled with the vermin born of my betrayal. What rights to life did I have, giving Hachi and Kim to you, fucking you for your trouble?
I left Japan a year after you disappeared.
he'll never return it
And now I hear of you again, when your grandfather has announced the fourth Tekken Tournament.
when you come back we'll have to make new love
I remember reasons to hate you.
The lapis waves of the Pacific lap at my soul, and this far from land the salty air whips my face with mild bursts of wind, clearing my thinking. The sarge imagines its his doing, this whipping 'Red' into shape. Keeping me calm. The same asshole told me my hair had to go, said the color should be more natural, then liketa had an aneurysm when I dyed it the same hue of wine the boys in my company were always pouring down their throats.
Nah, it's not the sarge's doing. There's something about the moments before a mission when I feel a calm. The camouflaging, oily paints splotch my face and my fatigues are still fresh, and everyone else in the company's silent -- even Nobuo, who never seems to shut up and sort of reminds me of Hachi. There's only the wind, and the ship cutting through the waves, and the cries of the seagulls calling up memories in me.
I left Japan when your grandfather sent his men after me, asking me about your whereabouts. I had nothing to tell them, and they realized that. They realized I didn't know shit, and let me leave.
But it made Taisho and Ryo question why they asked me at all, and my gang distrusted me and I left them. I feared then that you might not be alive. I wouldn't have survived in Japan without you anyway, and so I went back to Korea and I got a job teaching little kids tae kwon do in Seoul. Freaky shit, I know, but some of those little boys reminded me of myself. Most of them were poor bastards with the American coloring of their fathers. Not too many with my Japanese mouth, but a few. It was fine enough for a few months, even with the nightmares.
Every night I had them, each with subtle variations that always yielded the same end. The nightmares in which I'm praying to you and falling, falling, falling through blackness, and you are diving through the cold air beside me. Your eyes are glowing red and those magnificent black wings are tucked against your body, and you're staring at me as the winds of our descent drive your hair from your beautiful and cold face.
No. You are staring through me. And when the ground is inches away, you distance yourself, and when the ground has broken my body, you are flying away. In a few of them, you hovered about, your regal wings flapping majestically, watching the life bleed from me. But one aspect remains static in them all: your face lacks expression.
I wake up sweating, clutching at the dog tags around my throat, each metallic plate an insignia of my resignment to this empty, despairing existence. But the nightmares won't let me alone.
The military isn't for me. If I could just serve on a ship I'd be fine, but they send me into these villages to do what the Japanese did to Korea, what the Americans did to Korea, what that Mishima soldier did to my mother: to fuck innocent people over. I can't describe what I see; it sickens me that I block out the suffering because my own's numbed my soul.
And now I hear of you again, when your grandfather has announced the fourth Tekken Tournament, and there is a spark in my spirit that I can't understand.
I have so many reasons to hate you, but sometimes I find myself wondering. I wonder if I were to find you now, would I bother recalling how many reasons I had left to love you?