Disgust.
The fundamental drive to avoid the contamination of the individual.
Most people tended to skip over it when listing the simplest, most basic emotions, but the truth was that it was a fairly intrinsic, instinctual thing that needed fairly little time to be translated from the brain to the tips of the nerves, something elemental that couldn't be formulated as a subset or combination of something else. Disgust certainly wasn't anything akin to happiness or surprise, but it wasn't quite anger, fear or sadness either – from a scientific perspective, you could say that a marker of its distinctiveness was the fact that, unlike all of those, it was associated with an actual decrease in the heart rate, and one of the six most essential facial expressions – Being a negative sort of perception may have been a common denominator, but in the end, the sets of contortions it was capable of imposing on the fairest, smoothest of human faces were its very own, and it could contort them like no other urge or feeling could.
Its sighs were quite universal even across cultures, people born blind showed them in the same way, and even people born deaf could correctly interpret them for what they were.
Daryl Yan never had the nerve to even listen to that sort of scientific babblings up until the end, being more a person of action, but he knew anger, he knew sadness, and he knew disgust, and he knew that they were distinct.
Perhaps it was talked about less because disgust, as a concept, was more something that happened between a human and their environment, than in the setting of social coexistence like anger, happiness, or sadness, which became part of the webs that held society together, and thus deemed worthy of many distinct, flowery words, but the mechanisms and frameworks behind it were undoubtedly just as profound and primal, if not more so; Regardless, or maybe because of its inherently selfish nature and its intricate relationship with the boundaries of the individual, the immediate reality of disgust could perhaps only be rivaled by fear, certainly enough to fill an entire being, or to become the defining emotion of an existence, and didn't deserved to be showed away, just like that tangible existence that was tired of being showed away like a little parallel something, that woke and became aware of the waxing and waning of consciousness by the of disgust that pulsated within, seeking to make the flesh constrict and convulse and draw folds like old used material, laced perhaps with a layer of pain, defining his outline, but mostly concentrated on his chest, nothing a trained fighter couldn't deal with with the help of some gritted teeth, but just enough to make him aware that he had a body, soft, weak pile of hydrocarbons so unlike the firm Steel of an Endlave, liable to interact with the exact same chemicals that made up its environment, to contaminate, rot and decay, and just circularly feed into the casual disgust, strong, domineering drive to empty himself out, not just the contents of his stomach, but all of his tears and emotions and other sorts of fluids, until he hung there like he had done on that fateful day of the second coming, after a job fulfilled, waiting for the next one to storm the tower that now lay shattered around him and stopped his miserly being from doing just all of that, just from lack of sheer space.
The funny thing was, he hadn't even particularly liked Rowan.
At least, he had been liable to throw his equipment across the room, to who-knows-where and never-seen-again, and the universal destination of crystal shards, and the steady remainder that he had just cared fairly little about what became of his body, as long as he could rid himself of some deeper corruption that wouldn't just shatter away or rot off his bones, and things did that o so easily – Breaking a human being to pieces was easier than one would assume – it was only natural that that knowledge would make him cautious, cautious of all the rubble and debris and faraway noises registering at the edges of the all-encompassing revulsion that formed the fabric of his very soul, revulsion that no longer needed to be directed outwards to find a valid target, for he had been taken, wholly and alive, and he had become something he didn't recognize, something that certainly wasn't good old Kill-Em-All-Daryl, that wasn't under his control , or even vaguely familiar territory, something that made him feel that useless person's blood burning in his veins like it was some sort of foreign body, even if he could never quite decide which of his parents he meant by that.
He came awake, almost against his will, and voices and sensations broke into his being, all of which came from outside, came from beyond, came from what threatened to make him like itself, threatened to grip and contaminate him, and never let him be, like these sudden feelings of shock and debt and confusion and everything that went with what he just couldn't dismiss as a fool throwing his life away, not in these first few seconds of childlike consternation that it took him to form even the strongest of reactions, the most urgent of repulsion.
"Hey, I think there's someone down here!" he heard the sounds take form, and he wanted to force it back into the undefinedness of noise that was not able to carry a meaning.
"Shu, is that you? Shu? Inori-san?"
Boy, were they in for a surprise.
"Shu?" another voice called, older, and with a quite universal sort of tone to it, one that every human would instantly recognize, no matter what langue they were speaking, a melody, resonance of words that triggered the tangled connections of nerves and associations in his brain, down to it's root, down to this annoying no good person he couldn't quite divorce from his own reflection, the prime example that had shown him just how easy it was to slide from thee category of the "clean" into that of the swine, and how preciously little value they held in the environment his thoughts and feelings had formed it, a connection that was much harder to deny when every single firing of his neurons reminded him of just where he currently was in that hierarchy, a smashed insect at the mercy of his enemies, whose voices were steadily getting clearer and closer.
"Whoever it is, they probably owe their lives to this elevator casing."
He wanted to punch into that talk-hole until no more sound came out of it, no more moments were detectible from its form, and no more blood would flow, but he didn't even have the energy to vomit into their faces as they finally uncovered his shoulders and pulled him away from the debris.
If he could have chosen death right there and then, he would have preferred it over this undignified spectacle, but with the state of affairs, all he was capable off were weak protests against their handiwork, slurred words whose intelligibility his drained lips couldn't even guarantee for.
"Leave… me…" he rasped, shaken by his own powerlessness, struggling to make his abused limbs move in a halfway coordinated manner, for the sole purpose of slapping his would-be saviors' across the face "Stay away… from me… away…" he almost pleaded. "Don't touch me…" he doubted that he accomplished more than aimless flails. His voice died down into a whimper as his consciousness sunk back into delirium, as he kept cursing his enemies – if it were him, he would have had the decency to "sever" their prisoner a long time ago. Heck, they should have let him be the moment they realized he was wearing a ripped-up endlave plugsuit rather than whatever rags that 'faceless bastard' had been dressed in, which should have been a damn long time ago.
Instead, they kept going, ultimately uncovering his face enough to expose it to the stinging, cold air above the collapsed tower – Did they even recognize the suit (a custom model), let alone his face?
Hell, where these goddamn bastards even aware of his existence, or had they just never spared a thought to whoever piloted all these random Mechas they kept smashing or hijacking with about equal frequencies? Or was his existence ultimately as easy to ignore as the date on which it began, a wobbly triad of numbers that not even he could keep straight in his current state…?
Attempts to force his eyes open and ascertain the situation for himself failed miserably in a matter of seconds, but not before presenting him with a few scraps of vision, some pissed-off looking female in bright red, and that other face, the one he wanted to punch into most of all, for the fear that looking at it for too long might make him want to do something very different, a petite girl made up of small, but perky shapes and curves, with silky dark hair framing her face, stirring as she let out a sigh.
"Look at what we have here!" the lower, more 'womanly' voice of her red-suited companion stated, not without a fair share of sarcasm and contempt of her own. "The one and only Kill-Em-All-Daryl!"
How much more humiliation would he have to bear because of these people?
He couldn't stand it, any of it.
"Stay… away…" he still managed, hoarsely, his voice barely more than a whimper, in spite of all his efforts; The revulsion caused by the sorry sound of what he hardly recognized as his own voice was motivation enough to get his arms to finally move in a remotely meaningful way, but it was little more than a mild annoyance to his would-be-saviors – the girl in red securely stopped his aimless hands in a matter of split-seconds, touching him in the process – even through the suit, he could feel the filthy, biological warmth of her vigorously functioning, messy biologic tissue, which didn't exactly dampen his attempts to pose some sort of resistance, weak as it may have been.
"…away… from me…" at this point, his voice was little more than a faint whisper – speaking of voices, it was the higher, girlish one that answered.
"Didn't I tell you before? When someone does something nice for you, you should just shut up and accept it. Really… you're one weird guy. "