Predatory Instinct: MPC-025-03
Jan 1, 2014 16:20:21 GMT
Post by defectiveImmediately on Jan 1, 2014 16:20:21 GMT
A broken jaw. A bloody nose. Black eyes. Chipped teeth and crimson spittle. A blanket of adrenaline to protect against the leaping fiery prongs of pain that lanced in time and time again. His face was a purple-and-red quilted patchwork of bruises and splits in the skin. His body felt like it was running on gasoline vapour and battery acid; there was nothing there, just the burn of him forcing himself past the barrier, crushing through it, the edge of it all numbed with a deadly neurotic cocktail of adrenaline, testosterone, and loathing for the guy at the end of his fist as each shot connected.
Human beings aren't by default configured to the pretexts of "good" and "evil". To begin, any who argue they have the ability to discern that "good" and "evil" are two binary concepts, two ends of an absolute, two areas with no crossover, with no seeping lapse into one another, with no breakage or spillage or otherwise... are idiots. Plain and simple. Morality is not a switch that after enough evil deeds are performed, or appropriate fulfillment of the month's redemption quota, flicks from one end to the other. It just isn't that simple. This is something that the philosophical one-percenters of the Earth all tend to agree on, by and large.
Morality can be far more easily considered as a scale in the eyes of these individuals' minds. Help an old lady across the road? Plus one point. Kick a dog on your way to school? Minus two. And so and on so forth, with exponential increases til the whole thing felt like it contained the moral relativism of a video game with little else left. This is the element of morality people argue about. To what extent or degree is it a scale; is it entirely triggered by environment and our responses to it, or is it innate? There are a series of moral debates, but the position Daichi Kumo had been inadvertently mulling over was a sort of numbness to the sliding scale of "good" and "evil". Well, that was an understatement, really: he was experiencing moral nihilism.
He pressed his beaten and bloody hand against the mirror as he stood there, panting, holding himself up. The locker room stunk of sweat and blood; it was just a downstairs bathroom they had repurposed, with a rail haphazardly screwed into the side containing an assortment of towels, each matted with patches of blood through respective stages of drying; the further left you moved, the less it turned from a liquid into a solid scraping on the surface of the rag's bristles, and vice versa for the right. His face was ruined and his head was pounding. The crowds were roaring for more outside; and he had every intention of giving them. Above him there flickered a single light hanging from a frayed wire with a musty bulb that crackled and sparked every now and then.
Daichi propped himself with the one hand and continued panting; before reaching down with the other to wrench the rusty head of the faucet loose and splatter out water that may as well have been a flow of blood the moment it touched the grimy porcelain; with all the bleeding he had done into the sink, it began to spiral, a foreshadowing crimson whirlpool beneath him that whispered echoing tales of further pain and physical exhaustion he already knew he wouldn't respond appropriately to. It was past the time for gingerly self-administering bandages and tying rags over open wounds like the other fighter presumably was. The boxer splashed some water over his face. It was the same formula every fight. They exchanged blows with bare knuckles and tape; at the cost of his own health, the gargantuan fighter slammed his fists into the side of the opponent's skull, aiming for the temple to get an immediate knockout, dangerous an exploit as it was.
Peeling off the rags on his hands, already soaked with bloody water from the taps, he collapsed down onto a small bench laid down solely for the use of Daichi and flexed his fingers one at a time. It was funny; between all the blood, dried or fresh, his or the opponent's, name irrelevant to him at the end of the day, underneath the tape, none had seeped through. All there was there was clean, dark skin, bruised and swollen, but with the boxing tape pulled tautly enough around, circulation hadn't got through yet, so for all intents and purposes, they were without mar or mark. He couldn't feel any of the pain that would undoubtedly grow there, either. And in the gaps between the tape there was a small triangular sliver of bloody knuckle flesh poking out from within.
Daichi re-administered the tape in a matter of moments, pulling it tight and fresh, the off-white tint of it glistening, new and virginal under the dim light. It would be but moments before it felt the warmth of blood, both his and his foe's, soaking into its length once more. The door pushed open and the roars of the hungry crowd, ravenous and thirsty for blood, sweat, and money, seeped through. Whichever coach or sponsor he had taken on this week pressed his head through, blanketed in shadow, and meekly stated the timings. "Two minutes." Daichi gave no response and in a moment the door clicked shut.
Rising back up to the sink again, he reached for an orange bottle first, a slender cylinder. It rattled in his hand as he shook it and held it up to the mirror, grey eyes gnawing through the plastic before them. A label on the front in Japanese, and then the English translation below. "Codeine 300mg. Do not drink alcohol with tablets or take if pregnant. Take two every two hours. No more than eight in twenty four hours." He counted out two pills and opened his palm, screwing the lid back on and pressing the bottle down with another stutter of tablets within. The boxer stared at them in the palm of his hand. That was another thing that took the edge of. The adrenaline could fade at any moment and he would be left at the mercy of his own agony. That could not be allowed to happen. He didn't need them; but he was three fights in, and his body was starting to falter. Daichi counted them into his mouth, the fifth first, then the sixth. Of the day, that was. Well, and the hour.
To wash them down he grabbed the bottle of Bell's conveniently sat next to them and took a long, heavy swig, burning down as it went, with the two little codeine pills fizzling in the whiskey through his throat, gullet, past his uvula, and down into his stomach. Who needed instructions, anyway? If he counted right, that was a minute and a half left; so he slammed his hand back against the mirror, back where they had started in this little sidebar, fingers extended and leaving a bloody handprint of grease, blood, sweat, and residual alcohol. "You can do this, Daichi," He growled lowly to himself. It wasn't a statement of motivation, though; an affirmation of an absolute, binary truth he already himself knew.
And then he did something he hadn't done so far. With ninety seconds left on the clock, fingers against the mirror as one gripped the sink, still panting, still blocking out the pain of a bruised jaw, a broken rib, and a shattered knuckle of his little finger, he ran the free hand through his sweaty, bloody, clammy, clumpy hair... and looked into the mirror. First at his chest, bare, bulging and unsightly, past the point where exercise had become a visual necessity but now more a physical one. Ruined with a patchwork ensemble of off-colour ridges; scars, from nicks, cuts, stabs, punches, burns... just about anything. Then up to his shoulders; the bones barely visible, the flesh and muscle raised up to sustain and grip in place a neck even he, with his hands as big as sixteen-ounce sirloins unable to grasp at full breadth. Finally, he rose further; chin with the makings of stubble. Colours mixing together. Skin. Red. Purple. Blue. Green. Black. White. Grey.
His eyes.
It was when he looked into his eyes that time seemed to stand still around Daichi Kumo and he felt himself become entwined by and engulfed within the moral conundrum that he had never wanted to consider. And it was then that he decried the existence of morality to himself; then that he found himself defiantly rejecting the idea that principles of binary or even vague "good" or "evil" existed. That wasn't what humans were born of. They were - he was - beings of chaos, of luck, of circumstance. When pushed, they responded, and did what they could to survive. When allowed, they relaxed, and became decadent in their own ways; greed, lust, envy, any of the cardinal sins you wanted to choose - there was a seven-man cast of them after all.
There was no morality. There were just the primal instincts and emotions between it all that people tried to label and give reason to. There was no morality; there was just how far you retained your cruel and natural origins beneath it all and whether they had remained sustained. There was no morality: it was just luck of the draw and what your environment turned you into, a bullet-point list of variables, locations, memories and experiences that together added up to create a person. There was no morality. It was just how far you managed to get in touch with the beast within.
Inadvertently Daichi's hand had, in the internal musings, staring at himself, curled into a ball. And almost as if running on some bestial, primal overdrive, he had pulled it back behind his head, an in an instant, sixty seconds left on the clock, slammed his knuckles into it. Crack. The image behind shattered; pieces of smoothed silver, shards of reflection, fell down into the bowl below. Some stayed stuck into the Kumo boy's hand, fresh blood tainting the new, parched, thirsty tape he had applied just moments ago. Here, it seemed, he had found his answer. Over time, civilisation sensitised people; it pulled them away from the life their ancestors had known, the truth, the base, ugly, truth of human existence. That they were animals. Animals that slept, ate, and f*cked to survive. That was it, nothing more, nothing less. They were flesh, blood, and instinct, rolled into a creature with two arms, two legs, and a head. Sure; their intuition had put them at the top, made them the apex predator; but intuition's father was, and had always been, instinct.
And in a stunning rebound, he had turned around and embraced the monster inside his soul. It wasn't a darker side; it wasn't wrong to indulge decadence and what some people renounced as "sin" or "hatred"; piety was a lie and, deep down, the clergymen in their ivory f*cking towers all knew it. Sooner or later the world was going to blow up and become nothing but an irradiated wasteland; and the only people who would be left would be those willing to make the sacrifices others couldn't. It wasn't the question of how far one could go; but whether or not one possessed the constitution to go as far as was needed in the plan of things. By doing this - by smacking a lesser man around in the basement of some shoddy bar or club three nights a week - he was just honing his body and getting ready for when the inevitable happened and they all had to call on the roaring, writhing, screaming, hate-filled and prejudicial demon within.
So when he looked back behind the cracked glass and saw the contorted image of the man he was, Daichi Kumo felt not alienation but empathy; what little empathy he could muster. He was better as a misfit; an outcast; a mutant. Hulking and massive, slamming his forehead on door frames indiscriminately all through younger and less perceptive life. The uneven man behind those shards of shattered and smudged silver was closer to the reality in his soul than the face he maintained for his family and the masses ever was. Reaching down as the door opened and the waves of applause and chants of his name from the crowd lulled in like the ambient noise behind a yacht at sea, his lips curled into an expression half a snarl and half a grin, he turned away and threw his body unto the breach once more. Not before telling himself one single, absolute, indubitable about what the ethereal fabric of his bloody soul was created from, however:
It wasn't darkness. It was predatory instinct.
OOC: And again, posts please. Reposting.
Human beings aren't by default configured to the pretexts of "good" and "evil". To begin, any who argue they have the ability to discern that "good" and "evil" are two binary concepts, two ends of an absolute, two areas with no crossover, with no seeping lapse into one another, with no breakage or spillage or otherwise... are idiots. Plain and simple. Morality is not a switch that after enough evil deeds are performed, or appropriate fulfillment of the month's redemption quota, flicks from one end to the other. It just isn't that simple. This is something that the philosophical one-percenters of the Earth all tend to agree on, by and large.
Morality can be far more easily considered as a scale in the eyes of these individuals' minds. Help an old lady across the road? Plus one point. Kick a dog on your way to school? Minus two. And so and on so forth, with exponential increases til the whole thing felt like it contained the moral relativism of a video game with little else left. This is the element of morality people argue about. To what extent or degree is it a scale; is it entirely triggered by environment and our responses to it, or is it innate? There are a series of moral debates, but the position Daichi Kumo had been inadvertently mulling over was a sort of numbness to the sliding scale of "good" and "evil". Well, that was an understatement, really: he was experiencing moral nihilism.
He pressed his beaten and bloody hand against the mirror as he stood there, panting, holding himself up. The locker room stunk of sweat and blood; it was just a downstairs bathroom they had repurposed, with a rail haphazardly screwed into the side containing an assortment of towels, each matted with patches of blood through respective stages of drying; the further left you moved, the less it turned from a liquid into a solid scraping on the surface of the rag's bristles, and vice versa for the right. His face was ruined and his head was pounding. The crowds were roaring for more outside; and he had every intention of giving them. Above him there flickered a single light hanging from a frayed wire with a musty bulb that crackled and sparked every now and then.
Daichi propped himself with the one hand and continued panting; before reaching down with the other to wrench the rusty head of the faucet loose and splatter out water that may as well have been a flow of blood the moment it touched the grimy porcelain; with all the bleeding he had done into the sink, it began to spiral, a foreshadowing crimson whirlpool beneath him that whispered echoing tales of further pain and physical exhaustion he already knew he wouldn't respond appropriately to. It was past the time for gingerly self-administering bandages and tying rags over open wounds like the other fighter presumably was. The boxer splashed some water over his face. It was the same formula every fight. They exchanged blows with bare knuckles and tape; at the cost of his own health, the gargantuan fighter slammed his fists into the side of the opponent's skull, aiming for the temple to get an immediate knockout, dangerous an exploit as it was.
Peeling off the rags on his hands, already soaked with bloody water from the taps, he collapsed down onto a small bench laid down solely for the use of Daichi and flexed his fingers one at a time. It was funny; between all the blood, dried or fresh, his or the opponent's, name irrelevant to him at the end of the day, underneath the tape, none had seeped through. All there was there was clean, dark skin, bruised and swollen, but with the boxing tape pulled tautly enough around, circulation hadn't got through yet, so for all intents and purposes, they were without mar or mark. He couldn't feel any of the pain that would undoubtedly grow there, either. And in the gaps between the tape there was a small triangular sliver of bloody knuckle flesh poking out from within.
Daichi re-administered the tape in a matter of moments, pulling it tight and fresh, the off-white tint of it glistening, new and virginal under the dim light. It would be but moments before it felt the warmth of blood, both his and his foe's, soaking into its length once more. The door pushed open and the roars of the hungry crowd, ravenous and thirsty for blood, sweat, and money, seeped through. Whichever coach or sponsor he had taken on this week pressed his head through, blanketed in shadow, and meekly stated the timings. "Two minutes." Daichi gave no response and in a moment the door clicked shut.
Rising back up to the sink again, he reached for an orange bottle first, a slender cylinder. It rattled in his hand as he shook it and held it up to the mirror, grey eyes gnawing through the plastic before them. A label on the front in Japanese, and then the English translation below. "Codeine 300mg. Do not drink alcohol with tablets or take if pregnant. Take two every two hours. No more than eight in twenty four hours." He counted out two pills and opened his palm, screwing the lid back on and pressing the bottle down with another stutter of tablets within. The boxer stared at them in the palm of his hand. That was another thing that took the edge of. The adrenaline could fade at any moment and he would be left at the mercy of his own agony. That could not be allowed to happen. He didn't need them; but he was three fights in, and his body was starting to falter. Daichi counted them into his mouth, the fifth first, then the sixth. Of the day, that was. Well, and the hour.
To wash them down he grabbed the bottle of Bell's conveniently sat next to them and took a long, heavy swig, burning down as it went, with the two little codeine pills fizzling in the whiskey through his throat, gullet, past his uvula, and down into his stomach. Who needed instructions, anyway? If he counted right, that was a minute and a half left; so he slammed his hand back against the mirror, back where they had started in this little sidebar, fingers extended and leaving a bloody handprint of grease, blood, sweat, and residual alcohol. "You can do this, Daichi," He growled lowly to himself. It wasn't a statement of motivation, though; an affirmation of an absolute, binary truth he already himself knew.
And then he did something he hadn't done so far. With ninety seconds left on the clock, fingers against the mirror as one gripped the sink, still panting, still blocking out the pain of a bruised jaw, a broken rib, and a shattered knuckle of his little finger, he ran the free hand through his sweaty, bloody, clammy, clumpy hair... and looked into the mirror. First at his chest, bare, bulging and unsightly, past the point where exercise had become a visual necessity but now more a physical one. Ruined with a patchwork ensemble of off-colour ridges; scars, from nicks, cuts, stabs, punches, burns... just about anything. Then up to his shoulders; the bones barely visible, the flesh and muscle raised up to sustain and grip in place a neck even he, with his hands as big as sixteen-ounce sirloins unable to grasp at full breadth. Finally, he rose further; chin with the makings of stubble. Colours mixing together. Skin. Red. Purple. Blue. Green. Black. White. Grey.
His eyes.
It was when he looked into his eyes that time seemed to stand still around Daichi Kumo and he felt himself become entwined by and engulfed within the moral conundrum that he had never wanted to consider. And it was then that he decried the existence of morality to himself; then that he found himself defiantly rejecting the idea that principles of binary or even vague "good" or "evil" existed. That wasn't what humans were born of. They were - he was - beings of chaos, of luck, of circumstance. When pushed, they responded, and did what they could to survive. When allowed, they relaxed, and became decadent in their own ways; greed, lust, envy, any of the cardinal sins you wanted to choose - there was a seven-man cast of them after all.
There was no morality. There were just the primal instincts and emotions between it all that people tried to label and give reason to. There was no morality; there was just how far you retained your cruel and natural origins beneath it all and whether they had remained sustained. There was no morality: it was just luck of the draw and what your environment turned you into, a bullet-point list of variables, locations, memories and experiences that together added up to create a person. There was no morality. It was just how far you managed to get in touch with the beast within.
Inadvertently Daichi's hand had, in the internal musings, staring at himself, curled into a ball. And almost as if running on some bestial, primal overdrive, he had pulled it back behind his head, an in an instant, sixty seconds left on the clock, slammed his knuckles into it. Crack. The image behind shattered; pieces of smoothed silver, shards of reflection, fell down into the bowl below. Some stayed stuck into the Kumo boy's hand, fresh blood tainting the new, parched, thirsty tape he had applied just moments ago. Here, it seemed, he had found his answer. Over time, civilisation sensitised people; it pulled them away from the life their ancestors had known, the truth, the base, ugly, truth of human existence. That they were animals. Animals that slept, ate, and f*cked to survive. That was it, nothing more, nothing less. They were flesh, blood, and instinct, rolled into a creature with two arms, two legs, and a head. Sure; their intuition had put them at the top, made them the apex predator; but intuition's father was, and had always been, instinct.
And in a stunning rebound, he had turned around and embraced the monster inside his soul. It wasn't a darker side; it wasn't wrong to indulge decadence and what some people renounced as "sin" or "hatred"; piety was a lie and, deep down, the clergymen in their ivory f*cking towers all knew it. Sooner or later the world was going to blow up and become nothing but an irradiated wasteland; and the only people who would be left would be those willing to make the sacrifices others couldn't. It wasn't the question of how far one could go; but whether or not one possessed the constitution to go as far as was needed in the plan of things. By doing this - by smacking a lesser man around in the basement of some shoddy bar or club three nights a week - he was just honing his body and getting ready for when the inevitable happened and they all had to call on the roaring, writhing, screaming, hate-filled and prejudicial demon within.
So when he looked back behind the cracked glass and saw the contorted image of the man he was, Daichi Kumo felt not alienation but empathy; what little empathy he could muster. He was better as a misfit; an outcast; a mutant. Hulking and massive, slamming his forehead on door frames indiscriminately all through younger and less perceptive life. The uneven man behind those shards of shattered and smudged silver was closer to the reality in his soul than the face he maintained for his family and the masses ever was. Reaching down as the door opened and the waves of applause and chants of his name from the crowd lulled in like the ambient noise behind a yacht at sea, his lips curled into an expression half a snarl and half a grin, he turned away and threw his body unto the breach once more. Not before telling himself one single, absolute, indubitable about what the ethereal fabric of his bloody soul was created from, however:
It wasn't darkness. It was predatory instinct.
OOC: And again, posts please. Reposting.
