arse moriendi;
There are things within Karma's lifetime of about a millennium or two that comes naturally to him, like being able to hunt out some shittily cheap restaurant in the district within the next five minutes. Or ten, if the weather was bad, like now, he curses, pulling his hood further down his head.
He probably fucking reeks, he reasons, wincing at the stench from his hood. It's no wonder that he's tired. Tired of living, more like. Karma pulls out the gun from his pocket and fires a shot into himself and a few more into his open mouth, just for good measure, cramming the gun in and waiting for the bullet to pierce his skull and hear the sound of his brains splattering against the wall.
But it fucking hurts, Karma steps doesn't stop as he digs his finger into his skull, or rather, where a part of his skull was blown out, to dig out the bullet, gripping it between his fingers and watching the bloodstained thing fall out of his head with a clink on the ground.
He prods at the place where a part of his skin, muscle, bone is missing from half his face and sighs. It'll probably grow back in half a minute or so. There's no regret in his action, he realizes, tugging his hood even lower to cover half of his missing face in case someone saw and called the cops and he had to explain to them that he was an immortal god and he couldn't die.
(And the pain is a brutal reminder that he's still alive after all his time
There was this one time where he had been dragged ungraciously into a mental asylum and stayed there for fifty years or so until the bombing of Nagasaki where the whole building practically fell apart like matches and he'd been stuck under the rubble for ten years or so.
It was hilarious watching the construction men's reaction when they saw him, a red haired boy, looking no older than fifteen, in a perfectly healthy condition, looking a bit bored, sandwiched between two pieces of cement.
They called the cops again afterwards but he somehow managed to escape.)
Karma can safely say that he's never really been brought up by anyone notable, so it just settles with being an excuse every seventy years or so when he's bored and enrolls himself in high school and in between getting into fights, selling drugs, picking fights in the underworld or simply getting involved with all sort of shit.
Immaturity, or rather, boredom as he had always liked to call it, has always been a strong point of his, that was until one a certain day that no one really gave a flying fuck about, he realized that he was alive and also not really at the same time.
(Oh woe be him)
There's an infinity between life and death.
Not so much between being alive and breathing.
It ended up taking a week or two to shake off that concept and shove it to the back of his mind. After all, ignorant was a bliss.
And then there are some things that he's never really been weaned from.
Things that were hammered into his brain from the moment he was born, no, created.
Like…how to do Geometry and other completely worthless shit that included –
.
aesterna respice
caduca despice
.
Old fashioned teachings that held not a single virtue of this modern shit, Karma thinks, eyeballing the textbooks on display from a bookshop in passing.
Well whoever the fuck came up with this philosophy could eat shit. One lifetime was enough. A next is not. Oblivion would be perfectly fine.
.
look upon eternity
look down on a fallen thing
.
Love for a fallen thing was much easier to achive.
Karma runs his hand over his face and just as he expects the wound, or rather, that half of his face is blemish-less. Hell, if his scars didn't fade, he'd probably no longer look human. Not that he really was human in the first place, he frowns, looking at the shop windows and peering at his faded reflection.
"Did you just attempt to commit suicide again?" A figure slinks up behind Karma and he has to shy away from the stench of cigarettes and something much more bitter smelling like sweat and sex.
The other exhales and blows a puff of smoke on Karma. "How long haven't you cleaned yourself up, Karma? You smell like shit. Have a cigarette," he says, thrusting the packet of lung cancer into the redhead's hand. "Here, have a smoke, kill some time and then let's go dick around or something."
"Maehara," the red head greets in return, albeit a bit scathingly. "It's been a while. Isn't Isogai with you?"
"He's down at the ramen stand around the corner. Want to join us?" Maehara questions, nodding at the alleyway that stretches down a corner, too dark for Karma to see.
"Yeah why not, come on," the blonde says, completely ignoring Karma's reaction, or rather, lack of reaction and looping a hand around his shoulder, steering him into the alleyway.
The first memory that Karma has, and frankly he doesn't remember much, is something akin to waking up in the Garden of Eden or some poetic shit along those lines.
Karma was not born from an entity. He was created, like God breathed life into him or something as equally eloquent. He had no idea. It was like waking up from a very hazy dream, with knowledge of all sorts crammed into his head, but not a single drop of understanding and that fucking pissed him off.
(And to this day, Karma still doesn't really understand why he has such an irrational distaste towards snakes)
And then after an hour or two of just walking around, he'd met Maehara and that dickwad had tried to rape him. "Embracing his animalistic side," as he said. Karma had stabbed him in the neck with a tree branch and watched as he bled out his life, but oh noooo, that fucker didn't die.
On day ten, Karma got bored and tried to kill himself by hanging himself with a vine. He'd ended up hanging under the tree for a good week or two before he had to untie himself because that was hardly entertaining.
On day fifty, Karma tried to drown himself and tied himself to a rock and jumping off a cliff. The vines tying him to the rock broke after a good few days and half his body had been eaten by fish.
And all his muscle and skin and shit had grown back in the next five minutes or so.
And then in the next whatever, he's lost count already -
- stopped celebrating his birthday when he was fifty-eight-
- things started to get interesting when Napoleon kind of fucked shit up, deciding to fight Russians during winter, and he sat back and watched.
(But to be honest, it wasn't something new compared to the redundancy of Japanese daimyo, civil wars and emperors regimes all crammed in between his daily attempts of multiple seppuku rituals)
And then World War One started, and then came along World War Two in which he had gotten drafted into the Japanese army (no thanks to Maehara and Isogai) and watched the nightmare that unfolded in front of his eyes.
Of course he couldn't feel pity or anything. It was more like a beginning of his understanding and everything something happened, like that time where he was deployed to Hong Kong, he had only just begun to understood human desires.
"Oh," he had uttered one morning, leaning against the railing on his navy ship, and holding back his cap to prevent it from blowing away from the wind. "Oh."
So that was that, he mused, sipping on some more milk tea and finding a whore to fuck.
And then capitalism somehow wormed its way into communism when he had been quite ungracefully thrown into China and then Russia and then shipped back to Japan like some unwanted cargo.
And that was that too.
"I'm bored," Maehara drawls, downing his bowl of soup and earning an exasperated look form Isogai.
The ramen stand was empty as always, full of leftovers and somehow, despite being gods, or maybe just immortal beings, beggars can't be choosers.
"Haven't we been bored for the past two thousand years?" Isogai laughs, prodding at his noodles with his chopsticks and Karma can't help but snort into his noodles, eliciting his own slightly hysterical laughter as well.
"So pray tell, Isogai, why are we eating ramen again when we've been eating this for the past hundred years or so with no change in our diet?" Karma questions, picking up a strand with his chopsticks and watching it get swallowed up by the bowl when he releases his grip.
"Because we probably won't be able to eat this in the next millennium," Maehara chirps, poking his head from behind Isogai's. "Do you remember when was the last time we had the chance to eat some real Russian cuisine? Like when bear hunting was still legal?"
"Exactly," Isogai says, slurping up even more noodles. "We won't get to eat this when time passes. We are gods. We eat what we desire and what we do not desire. It' a law, right, Karma?" He continues, turning from Maehara and pointing his chopsticks at the redhead.
Karma only shrugs, turning away from Isogai, a small smile gracing his lips. He was a god and obtained what he desired, did what he desired, preached what he desired. Such a shame he could never love the things he desired.
"That's easy for you to say, Isogai," Karma scoffs, taking a sip of the too-salty broth. "How long have you and Maehara been together, hmmm?"
"How old are you, Karma?"
"You know, Karma," Maehara starts, grabbing another bowl of udon, "Everything, at some point, in some time of our lives, will be devoured, from the lowest of the garbage to the best of gourmets. What will you plan to do then? Waste away lamenting the fact that you couldn't appreciate it? Never learnt to love it?"
Karma doesn't reply and settles with glaring at his bowl instead.
"We," Isogai motions to both himself and the blonde, "are essentially just like you. We are gods, therefore we cannot love, but yet we love everything that we devour. It's the only reason we're still alive."
Karma nods, sliding his gaze over the lanterns of the ramen stand. "I know," he sniffs and Maehara chuckles.
"I know," Karma repeats and finishes off his bowl of ramen. "I'll be heading off now," he says curtly and there's a perk of curiosity from Maehara when he stands up, kicking the stool underneath the table. Karma's quite grateful that Isogai doesn't say anything.
"We'll get you something from the convenience store later, Karma," Isogai grins, and Maehara copies his actions, giving Karma a salute and heading down the alley behind the ramen stand.
Karma chuckles, turning in the other direction, the soft padding of his shoes ringing out in the alleyway.
There's the silent click of his gun when he releases the safety, the cold metal pressing against his temple.
A soft clunk when the trigger is pulled and something akin to an explosion in the stagnant silence when the bullet is released.
Too bad being a god, he could never love, but only preach what he ever loved.
.
.
"How old are you, Karma?"
Isogai really hadn't been kidding when he asked that.
In fact, Karma grimaces, hadn't that asshole been mocking him all along.
終
a/n
hmm dark and slightly crude (not to mention abstract) as always
i will love you if you understand the references to the real ars moriendi, although squinting is required
concrits appreciated. reviews even more so.
~Ichiro