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DISCLAIMER: All featured Tekken characters are the property of Namco and not the authors.

Notes: In this part Jin and Hwoarang's backgrounds are explored. If you get queasy easily I recommend skipping over Hwoarang's. One of the greatest things about Namco is their economy with character origins -- it leaves room for all kinds of interpretations. ^_~ As always, constructive criticism is welcomed!

Warnings: Eventual lemon parts, language & violence.

It was late in the day, and the sun filtered through the hazy air and dense growth to cast blazing shadows throughout the forest in which Jin stood. There was the hum of life and a gentle, humid, welcoming breeze.

And then Jin saw her sitting in a patch of sunlight on a giant, mossy log, watching him with gentle, loving eyes. Her soft arms were loosely folded across her lap and her legs were crossed under the thin, light cloth of a plain white dress. She was beautiful in all of the ways that Jin remembered and many that he didn't.

"You can't let Him take control of your life, Jin." She pleaded it with a smile -- but those eyes were sad, sadder than Jin could ever recall seeing them. "You must look beyond what He tells you, and see what He's trying to do."

Jin could already feel his eyes stinging. "Mother." His limbs were too heavy to move and standing only a short distance away he could not make his arms reach for her or his legs to move him closer. "I don't understand..."

"Your hatred and fear are what fuel His strength and tighten His claws around you. Cleanse your heart of them, Jin; He is already growing stronger."

"But what do I do? How do I stop Him?"

"Counter those feelings with their opposites. Learn to trust what makes you fearful, and love the ones who stir your enmity."

"I don't know how to do that." Gazing upon her again after four years he could feel the stinging break free, trickling down his smooth face. "Mother, help me," Jin whispered desperately. "Don't go. Please. I miss you."

She smiled at him again, and said, "I'm always with you, Jin, but the strength to stop Him lies in you alone."

And then Jin saw Him behind her, ripping through the growth of the forest and setting it ablaze as He raced towards his mother.

"Mother--!"

He was almost upon her.

"I love you," she whispered.

His taloned fingers reached --

"MOTHER!" The terrified scream echoed through the vast, still room as Jin tore the sheets from himself, panting and sweating and clutching his face hot and sticky with tears. He sat on the edge of the bed, still shaking, and for a long time did nothing but stare about himself at the harmless, tangible bedroom that slowly settled back into his consciousness. It was several hours past sunset. "Joon," he remembered suddenly as he turned searchingly back into the bed. But it was empty.

Jin's eyes searched the room as if to assure himself that he had not imagined Hwoarang as well. He knew Hwoarang wasn't a dream. "Joon?" he tried again, to be met with the same answer. Standing slowly from the bed, Jin padded on socked feet to his closet for a robe, drawing it tightly about himself. He went out into the hall. "Joon? Joon..." he murmured, baffled.

And then Jin began to worry-- a cold, sharp little pinch on his heart that refused to die, and urged Jin away from logic and closer to instinct. He hurried to the first guard he saw, and immediately had to assure the man that he was all right, that he wasn't ill or feverish, it was just a startling dream. Then he asked: "Did Hwoarang-san come by here? The man I came back with; he has red hair; have you seen him?"

"Feed that child, woman," the supervisor barked, irritation informing his scowl. He'd come to the end of the conveyor belt.

"I can't, sir," returned the cog, a fourteen year old single mother whose wailing, gaunt infant was strapped to her hunched, delicate back. Standing no more than five feet, she couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds.

"Why not? It's starving. Feed it!" The supervisor regretted the day he allowed the girl to bring her child on the job. He never allowed any such exception for his other girls because it was unprofessional, but this one held the distinction of being what a man who hadn't already fucked her might have called beautiful. But he'd fucked her, and she wasn't beautiful any more -- with her dull, flat hair and sallow face -- and the child was not his. The child was the reason she'd offered herself in the first place.

"I can't, sir, I cannot." She whispered; women like her didn't have voices to speak up with.

"Just open your shirt and do it!"

"But I cannot, sir, I have no milk, and he only vomits up the blood."

At this moment the supervisor saw -- when she drew her cheap, polyester garment from a bony shoulder -- that her flat, wasted breast was tipped in red, the wrinkled kernel of a nipple crusted with blood. She had been feeding the infant her own blood, like a pelican feeds its young. He covered his mouth with a handkerchief and rushed away.

The matter of where Seung Joon-Hyung was raised was a tender one, because his mother was a raped Korean woman. She was poor enough to have no recourse for the affront, but fortunate enough to flee with her child before she could lose him to her rapist, a Japanese soldier of the Mishima Zaibatsu who had only daughters. She worked in a Pusan factory alongside women who stood to stitch men's suits and hang them from the shoulders of white mannequins who would not say thank you for the great number of needles sewn through flesh to put food on the table.

She worked with women bleeding through triple-layered toweling, who were afraid to leave their machines the length of time it took to wash and change the wadded cloth between their legs -- afraid to lose the pittance the manager doled out at week's end.

And more than once a woman had to go -- but not soon enough. Once a woman sprawled against the white commode, the dark fluid splashing across the floor, she clenched her yells with her teeth while two or three other women stood guard against the door, offering up the solution: quinine to bring on the quick violent abortion that might let her stagger back to a machine to stand and stitch together collars and lapels and pockets to decorate white mannequins propped up in better stores throughout the United States.

She was a woman without a husband and with only one child, because she refused the solution as an insult to the beliefs of the village that rejected her for her pregnancy. She squatted, and ejected the nearly full-term moving mass, and felt its warm head in her hand. And then she flushed the afterbirth down the toilet and wiped between her legs.

Seung Joon-Hyung -- who'd subsisted on blood first when he was three weeks old -- was raised in South Korea by his teacher, Doo San Baek, a respected martial artist who instructed at his own temple. Joon was a four year old gamin -- a hustling urchin in the streets of Seoul when Baek plucked him from the gutters infested with the rotting afterbirths produced by American GIs -- and there were some things he did that he could not remember now.

Baek, who remembered Joon's mother from the village, and who lived in that same village and played with her as a child, returned from the Ironfist Tournament to find her progeny unwanted, ostracized by the village who hated the Japanese. It wasn't until Joon was thirteen that he learned of his poor mother who died in Pusan when she was only one year old than he was, why Doo San Baek raised him, and why other Koreans looked on him with scorn.

He wanted to go to Japan to find his father and kill him. He wanted to destroy Mishima Kazuya. It would be a rite of succession for the Korean-Japanese mutt turned Hwoarang, the Blood Talon, who would alone know he killed his father. But when Doo San Baek was murdered, Hwoarang nearly choked from the pain of an intense love, and his obligations to his only true father preceded those of a rapist to the mother whose bloody taste he could not remember.

"Hey, I'm right here," Hwoarang called from down the hall, ambling towards the guard and a bothered Jin. Although he was rubbing his ribs through a torn shirt with his hand, a haughty curve lined the Korean's mouth.

"I can't say I like sparring before breakfast, but it was good exercise." As he reached them both, he studied the guard's face, a feigned wrinkle of concern appearing between his brow. " .. you might want to call an ambulance. Your friends are in the courtyard."

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