hunter; d1 [wip]

"What's your name, son?"

Bruised knuckles, bloodied blade.

"I'm not your fucking son." There is no rose to be planted in this flat and barren voice of his, nothing worth growing beneath his soil poisoned his hatred. He is a firestorm trapped in a young boy's skin, a blaze with a set of lungs and a heart, but ice drips from his tone and his tongue is forked; he is glass that cannot shatter. He takes comfort in the contradiction.

His father rises within the red sea, stepping across a crimson blood trail clutching his son's collar between his fingers and his fist. "Back chat me again and I will mark you bloody, boy. What's your name?"

He decides he doesn't like this.

"Hunter." He keeps the apathy, because fear and Hunter Kai have never been good lovers. Not since his father ran his hands across his mother's skin, caressing her hair with his fingers, and closed his fingers around her throat. And he squeezed, she struggled and she sobbed. Father's men gripped his clothes and dug their nails into his skin, pulled him back as he struggled and sunk a fist into his gut when he broke free.

He is driven by presumed dictionary definitions and factory smoke. Memories have a way of rising, clouding his mind in his sleep and gripping his own throat when he meets his father's eyes. This is not a glorious dance, not a battle between polarized perspectives because they both lie on a spectrum of grey, his greatest enemy has always been himself. He always stood in the corner and watched his father leave his mother's jaw black and blue, always pretended he never heard her sob when he brought another junkie home and fucked them in her own bed. He never cared, she can take care of her own damn self, and his father sent him on his way to train.

("Gotta make you fuckin' useful somehow, right?")

His teeth are formed from stainless steel while his tongue is forked -- it's the only way to explain how he downs his own venom everyday. He sees the world in black and white, but the subject morality was always his shade of grey. He spits and he rages, he is a firestorm trapped in human skin, but he's forgotten what it means to cry. Only to curse.

Tear open his ribs and he's empty space.

"What are you worth?" The question is posed like flawed conjecture. He sees yellow teeth and smells cigarette breath, but Hunter's face remains stoic. He doesn't flinch at the fire for he knows what it means to ignite brighter than a star (he's seen it all) and he doesn't shudder at the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple; the threat of a single bullet wound will not be his undoing. He listens to the click of a trigger and watches the barrel turn at every twitch of muscle.

This isn't meant to be a pretty dance. "I'm not worth much." He answers conjecture with a base case, fact, because he knows what it means to find comfort in a contradiction. He is everything but he is worth nothing. And he wants nothing, for ambition is a concept not found tangled with his blackened veins and his sharpened fangs are stained with the blood of insignificant innocence. There's no purpose to be found in a heartbeat that never quickens when a match is held to its skin. "I'm worth nothing."

His collar is released, fingers slipping through the fabric and he steps back. "Worth nothing, just like your mother." He rolls his shoulders and cracks his knuckles, nothing releases tension quite like being an asshole, and his feet carry him to his shelf of liquor. Each footstep brings forth the echo of a thunderstorm, as if the sky falls beneath the Earth's heliocentric motion, he smiles once he allows it to silence. "They teach you anything good in career training, boy?"

Anything to help his drug ring function.

Hunter Kai is familiar with the mechanics that drive madness to thrive. He finds solace in the movements that drive irrationality to howl, he finds comfort in the broken clock buried in each corner of his mind. "Perfected my knife throwing, buried the blade right in the back of the target's neck." It'll be his head soon, I swear it. For his mother, who spent her life being cheated on and beaten only to be strangled when she was naive enough to confide in a friend that she was planning on leaving her husband. It was a stupid decision, it's well known that this man has over a thousand eyes around the district. A collection of the helpless, the weak and the cruel. Hunter has seen them all.

He finds amusement in the irony. His father pays to send Hunter off to become a career so he can use Hunter to murder his enemies while paying him fuck all and treating him like shit. Once the time comes, he'll use those skills and pull his insides from his stomach. It's never a fleeting thought either, he imagines pulling open his rib cage and tearing his beating heart from his chest.

Perhaps he will find a heart blacker than his. The fantasy is enough to make him smile.

"Well then, go make yourself useful."