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It takes a person twenty years or so for their brain to fully develop, to reach adulthood and to leave behind the comfy hold of childhood. Yut Lung was six years old when he was ripped from any possible warmth. Any concept of a childhood was ripped then and there, watching his own brothers beat his mother, tear her clothes off as she yelled and cried, while he was powerless to help her. He’s read about childhood trauma before, skimmed through thick books that to him feel like they’d be more useful as paperweights than anything else, and they’ve told him that even kids who go through horrible events when young can learn to overcome them and live happily if they are allowed to then grow up in a safe environment with the help they need. Of course, he does not need to read any more to know what happens when there’s no help and no safe environment, because he was six years old when he was dragged away by his own brothers after watching them rape and kill his mother.
It takes a person twenty years or so for them to be considered adults, but Yut Lung is sixteen and he has the gaze of a man who has seen it all and has been hurt and let down by what he saw. Well, he has not seen it all. Yut Lung has seen the bad and the ugly, he has seen how important rich men crumble into disgusting monsters that wag their tongues like dogs at the sight of a young child offered to them, has seen how a human folds into themselves and foam at the mouth when poison slowly eats through their nervous system. He has seen how easy it is for powerful men to negotiate with the lives of others to get what they want, even for them to use their own infant brother as a bargaining chip without much care. But for all he has seen, there’s a lot he has never experienced. He has never experienced comfort in his own skin, not since he was six. He’s never experienced being comforted after he’s been hurt, has never had someone soothe him and help him, much less anyone try to rescue him. Maybe if he had seen and had such things, he wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that there’s not much to life other than kill or be killed, but he did not get those things and it’s far too late for fate to try and coddle him now when he’s been broken and put back together in the shape of what he is.
He does not feel regret, which is something rather grand considering the things he’s been made to do. Regret implies he wishes things had been different, and considering how his life has gone so far, what good would wishing bring him? Should he allow himself to escape into a sweet little dream where his mother escaped the clutches of his father and raised him? Should that fantasy then also bend enough to make it so his mother- a single mother, a young woman with no education and no working skills saddled with a child- would be able to provide for herself and for him without having to fall back on jobs that would endanger him? At that point he’s not even dreaming of the real world, but rather a completely logic-defying world that does not have any semblance to reality and so he could probably just start also adding that he has a pet unicorn that lives under his bed or something equally ridiculous.
If he were to try and wish things had been like that, he might as well just wish he hadn’t been born, because that’s the most realistic scenario for things to be different in a good way for him. And wishing he hadn’t been born is out of the question, because he is alive despite all what has happened and he will continue to live for as long as it’s needed until he can crush his brothers under his heel and make them wish they had never been born. So regret, as logical as it would seem to an outsider, has no room in Yut Lung’s life, even for actions he has taken entirely of his own accord. He does not regret picking up alcohol, for example, even if it’s something that he knows in the back of his mind will harm him in the future, because by the time that can come around and bite him in the ass he will have already achieved his revenge.
And then he gets his revenge. And then he has a rather interesting time- not the most violent or most painful period of his life, because he is really not in any position to try to rank those aspects when they’re so common to him- and even if it ends with him being choked with his own hair and with the barrel of a gun pressed to his body and also a humiliating tumble down a set of stairs, it all concludes and he’s left off better than where he started. He’s left with his brothers dead and with power, and is that not all he wanted for so long?
He does not regret feeding into Lao’s fears and having that conclude in Ash’s death. It infuriates him to a degree, because he did not expect Ash to die like that: to silently let himself bleed out in the library, holding a note from that infuriatingly useless Japanese boy like it was the most precious gift he could be given. It was not a mortal wound, and Yut Lung knows it, deep in his bones, that even if it had been, Ash would have somehow pulled himself together enough to walk to the hospital because if there was such a thing as a man who just refused to die, it would be him. So the fucking fool just let himself die, let himself bask in the joy of knowing someone out there cared for him more than anything else, and then died? Fine, the whole ordeal does not infuriate him to ‘a degree’ as much as it pisses him off more than it should.
Because Ash was supposed to be like him and he was supposed to burn through his pain and his trauma and come out of it just as hollow as Yut Lung. Ash was supposed to suffer and be Dino’s plaything until the disgusting man croaked just like Yut Lung would be a toy for his brothers to throw around until he could finally kill them. Ash was supposed to take power of the Corsican Mafia just like Yut Lung would control the Lee family and then Yut Lung would crush him as well and perhaps also fall during the process. It’s not like his and Ash’s circumstances were extremely similar, if compared, but the fact they both suffered loss and had their childlike wonder ripped away violently at an age where they could do nothing but hold the broken pieces of themselves and cry and then grow stronger from it was enough of an uniting factor. Yut Lung was unloveable and had his hands stained by blood, had to live knowing the types of adults who had seen his bruised and battered body as a teen and found it attractive, had to live knowing he would be seen as a piece of meat in people’s minds, a killer, but so did Ash, and so then why did Ash get to get revenge, find someone who looked at the jagged edges of him and embrace him without fearing getting hurt, and then just die peacefully by his own choice? Why, when out of all that, the only thing Yut Lung got and will get is his revenge?
It has taken Yut Lung sixteen years to get something good in his life, and that good thing was to spill the blood of his brothers and their families. His achievement is more blood splattered onto his hands and power to now command the same people who did nothing when they would see their bosses drag around a bruised, limping child to the bedroom of whatever politician or god knows what title of a guest they had invited. It took him ten years to master poisons and to become so good at masking pain and disgust that he almost forgot how it felt to be genuinely ok and not just faking it. It took him that much time to get that much. But Ash- to the one person on earth who he can see himself in, the one person on earth whose experience should parallel his own right down to killing the head of the mafia who caused his life to go to hell- in less than a fraction of the time it took Yut Lung to get what he god, Ash found love and a ragtag little dandy group of adults tripping over themselves to help him, found fucking Eiji who saw him for what he was and instead of trying to use him for his power or run away from the danger decided to embrace him, and then he just fucking died and left all that behind.
If life is supposed to have a message then what the fuck is he supposed to glimpse from Ash dying like that? That Ash finding someone who loved him was his end? That having found the comfort of mutual love was enough and once someone got it they can just die? Life does not have nice, easily spelled out meanings, of course, but it still gnaws at him. Because he is not so much of a fucking idiot he’d just let himself die like a little damsel in distress, because Hua Lung is still alive as a figurehead, and Yut Lung’s work is not complete even if his one remaining brother is alive as a husk of his former self. Is he supposed to be grateful that nobody will ever love him, because then he will never let himself die like Ash did? Is that supposed to be his takeaway? That unlike Ash, he will never let himself die holding a letter from someone who wholeheartedly loves him? It’s ridiculous. It’s literally so fucking enraging that, while he does not regret the fact Ash died, he wishes he could bring him back to life just for a second to slap him and scream his head off and then maybe kill him again.
It takes twenty years for a person to grow up, but apparently it took Ash just two years to get everything he needed from life. It took six years for Yut Lung to lose the privilege of being able to be a child, ten years to master poisons and to become used to his body being abused without a care, and about as much time to avenge his mother.
He remembers Blanca’s words- that pompous, self important bastard who so very clearly breaking his arm trying to reach and project his past onto him despite the fact there was no connecting thread other than the fact he experienced loss and decided he had the holy answer for anyone else who had suffered in life. From the moment he met him, Yut Lung knew the man would be the type to dish out flowery and hollow words that probably sounded profound to him and were about as useful to anyone else as an umbrella in the middle of the desert, but he had his uses: Blanca was a tool to Yut Lung, in the same way he knew he was a tool to Blanca to get back to Ash’s side and ‘protect him’.
And for all he was a tool and for all Yut Lung understood this was just another transactional relationship that would end the second one of them got all the use they could out of the other, Blanca was still a fucking adult who at least pretended for some time to care for his wellbeing, and Yut Lung isn’t stupid enough to think the man ever saw him as someone to be actually protected and not just a reflection of his younger self that he wanted to impart his oh-so-important wisdom upon, but it still leaves a bitter taste to think that the bastard decided to have his last sagely advice be a winding talk about how those who are broken and completely submitted to their hatred have no saving- that there’s a threshhold that makes people completely unsaveable and unlovebale, and then he has the gall to say that Yut Lung may once find love as if he didn’t know there is not one person on earth more driven by hate and more willing to kill than Yut Lung.
What is he left with, then? Ash’s death should mean nothing to him, and yet it enrages him. Blanca’s words should be as easy to brush off as all his stupid metaphors about all he spoke, and somehow they still ring in his ears. He’s watched Sing mourn and cry, even months after Ash’s passing; is he supposed to wonder if the boy would cry just as much if he were to die like that? Because the few times he’s let himself listen to the boy’s grievances, it’s always the same thing: Ash’s life was finally getting better, he had finally found something good, and now he’s dead. So then if Yut Lung died, would it be tragic? Would him finally finishing his job and jabbing a needle coated in Poison into Hua Lung’s neck be the crowning jewel of his life, the signal his life ‘had finally gotten better’ and so mark a tragedy if he were to die?
He isn’t the sentimental type, and he can’t pretend like he understands Sing’s teary and emotional mourning (because Yut Lung has only had the chance to mourn a person he cared for once in his life, and he wasn’t even afforded that opportunity before being tossed to the wolves), but it feels like the answer is no, because he is unloved. He is sixteen years old, and even for all Sing might try to say he has a full life ahead of him, he won’t ever get to have what Ash got in those two years of having Eiji, even if he were to somehow live until he was a hundred years old, because all he can know is blood and poison and pain.
It takes most large trees over thirty years to grow to full maturity, but it takes a weeping willow fifteen years to be done growing. Despite both starting out as delicate seedlings, the willow will be a solid tree standing as tall as it can while other trees are fragile and small. But then it grows no further: it’s nature makes it grow fast, and yet once it has sped through its growth, it can do nothing but stand there and watch the trees around it grow taller and stronger, be allowed to have the time they need to grow into behemoths while the weeping willow can never grow taller than it did after those fifteen years, even if it lives on past that time.
1988butterfly Thu 18 Nov 2021 08:45AM UTC
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