Author notes will be done in my bio from now on. Next chapter of BP should be out soon. I love you all.
Breaking Point
Interlude: Pass the Hours
Click-click: tick-tick
Clock snips time in two
Lap of rain
In the drain pipe
Two o'clock
And never you.
…To bed and sleep
And tearless creep
The formless seconds
Minutes hours
And never you
The raindrops weep
And never you
And tick-tick,
tick-tick,
pass the hours.
-From the Journals of Sylvia Plath
I've done crazy shit all my life. I can't remember a time when I didn't somehow slip out of the worst situation possible, and ended with a cynical smile and a cigarette on my lips. Nothing could ever limit me or hurt me. I was invincible, and I had no doubt in my mind that I would always be. Yeah, most people feared death, but not me. No matter how hard I tried to die, I just goddamn wouldn't.
The year 2052 had been long lost and forgotten along with dozens of memories I hardly cared to retain inside me. Not because they caused pain and trauma, or any of that. They were useless to me, and as I lived my life they just somehow blended into the background—into me. I got so fucking angry then. I tore up everything at home when they told me to collect my belongings, perhaps because I knew I no longer had a home. I think I was angry at my parents. I was angry at them because they had left me. How dare they die and leave me here? For some reason at eight years old it never occurred to me that other people did this. That the bastards from one of the many syndicates out there caused a bullet storm that swallowed my parents and along with their lives, and any decent remnants of mine. I felt so angry for so long, and then I realized the coward I had been. My mother—she pushed me off to the side when she heard the shots and my body smacked against some car. I was so damn scared, so I slid under ignoring the smell of gas and mud, and covered my ears with my hands. I pushed my palms so hard against my head fearing my brain would implode from the explosive screams and loud bullets grazing everywhere.
Everything shook, my lungs, my heart, my arms and legs, but my eyes they trembled so fiercely I thought they would drill out of my sockets. I shut them so tight that the tears just slid down my face. I wasn't crying. My lids were just pressing so damn hard so my eyes wouldn't move at all. It must have taken me a long time to snap out of it. I didn't hear the sirens or feel the warmth of the blood until my entire body was soaked in it. When I opened my eyes and saw the red, everything became so cold.
The first thing to hit my gaze was my mother's bright blue eyes. They had become the color of ice, and they stared right at me with deep black pupils as thin as needles. Blood dribbled out of her mouth and nose, and I realized that the puddle I laid in was hers. I immediately tried to move away, but my feet and hands and head would not move. I was stuck like that staring at my mother's haunting expression contorted to this ghastly shape as if she had choked on her blood in mid-scream.
I remained there numb from every dendrite to every blood cell, just frozen in that moment, until they removed my mother's body. I later learned that my father had died a few feet away from her attempting to protect us, and she been shot in the back as she ran away once they had killed him.
"Do you have any other family?"
People in white had cleaned me. I reeked of alcohol and iodine.
"Cousins, brothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents?"
I couldn't feel my hands or my face.
"Anyone at all with whom you can stay with for the night?"
I got to my house and ripped through everything. I tore up the posters on the wall, broke vases and ornaments, and punched—and punched—and punched through all the pictures on the walls, desks, stands, and everywhere else.
"Stop it! You have to grow up now. It's hard, but you have to grow up now."
Angela, that was the social worker's name. She put me in this piece of shit home full of kids ten times angrier than me. All my parents ever did was leave me—die without me. Some of those kids' parents had raped the child out of them and killed them into adulthood. Yeah, they were so much angrier than I ever had it in me to be.
"Sources now say that the skirmish was caused by the rivaling syndicates: the White Tigers and the Red Dragons, though no statement has been issued by the police. Five people were killed and two injured due to this incident."
Bastard reporters called it a skirmish. People don't die in a skirmish. That's a word you use for a fucking fight between the neighbor kids, or in some stupid little bar. It doesn't imply guns, or blood, or dying mid-way through a scream.
I think I'm dying. I think I've been ever since then, but I can never quite get there. It's as though I'm untouchable, and every time it hurts more. And every time I can feel it even less.
Shit happens, doesn't it?
About three years passed until I finally decided to get the hell out of that orphan home. I was starting to absorb the pain of others and the bitterness slowly. I had no idea who my parents were anymore. I wondered if they had beat me like Chris' dad, or if they had thrown me out like Yumi's.
So I ran away and found my way into Annie's. I don't know really how it happened. It just somehow did. She found me in some corner and lifted me up, and I weighed nothing. As light as feather, she said.
She let me work at her store and stay there. I have no idea what made her take to me, but she did. I was no easy kid though. I never talked to her. I never smiled or told her thank you. I just worked and went out. She never knew what the hell I did. Smoking pot, or playing billiards for money. She knew none of that, and I never felt guilty for not telling her.
It was an afternoon in October I think when I passed by for about the thousandth time of this JKD training place. I hadn't noticed it before, but I stood by the large window and watched those kids just fighting with each other so orderly it made sick. So I scrounged around to find a big enough rock, and as I lifted my hand to lunge it at the glass someone's hand grabbed me from behind and twisted my arm to my back.
"You shouldn't do that."
"Get the fuck off me!" I yelled and he released my arm after the stone fell from my hand. I whipped around to face my enemy only to encounter an old man. "Mind your own business old man!" I thought of myself as real witty then. I lunged at him with all I had, and I missed. I went straight for him with fist extended, and I just missed him. I went at it again and again, and he would just flow from side to side avoiding completely, hardly moving. In the many lunges, and kicks I threw he managed to trip me. I literally laid there with a half-baffled and half-fearful expression.
"How old are you?" His gray eyes examined my limbs carefully as if he were planning to dissect me or chop me into pieces.
"What's it to you?" I spat, but I still wasn't ready to stand up with his body looming over me. His glare focused on my eyes, staring right through as if he had now moved on to studying my organs and could see it all through my pupils. "I'm fourteen."
"Are you in school?" His eyes kept still, unblinking and filled an unreadable intensity. I shrugged in response.
He nodded as if to himself, clasped both hands, and turned around. He stopped right before entering, and without glancing back at me he said, "Follow me."
It wasn't a request, and I glanced to both sides trying to decide in which direction I should run. The left would have been easiest because it would lead me to the closest alley, but he spoke before I even got up.
"Don't."
I don't what made me follow him. He didn't threaten me. I didn't feel threatened, but I just got on my feet and entered the dojo after him. He made me sit down in a corner and watch the kids fight with each other. They all momentarily stared at me like I was an abominable sight blackening their white pure-bred faces. I entered with my ripped jeans, and dirty t-shirt, I probably smelled like hell not having taken a shower for days, but I smirked at them. Their eyes widened and they turned to their master, who just nodded. One nod, and it sent them all back to whatever punch, kick, or maneuver they had been doing. The whole time they pretended that I had been an obscenity momentarily muttered, and quickly forgotten.
I just sat and watched their milky faces red from the thrusts and sweat. I wanted to snicker at their calculated movements, but I reserved it not minding being ignored.
I don't know how it happened, but the old man went off somewhere and left me alone with the prissy boys. One of them remembered my existence, blonde with green eyes, and a duplicitous smile that resonated from his perfectly straight teeth.
"Hey you, what are you doing here? Out in the front begging or something?"
I think my mouth must have slightly parted, because I was so damn shocked that he actually thought that to be a witty remark of some sort. The rest of the boys stopped what they were doing and turned to look at me.
"What, you can't talk?" Boy wonder chuckled glancing around him like he had just told the greatest joke and was waiting for a response of approval. The rest just stared.
I smirked.
"What are you smirking about, you little shit?" His smile didn't fade still, white pearly teeth shining like the Cheshire cat's. It stayed silent for about a minute, and I could tell he began feeling embarrassed like the idiot he was. "Answer me, you little fuck." He came over a kicked me right in the calf like a stubborn three year old.
I stood up, my smirk fading, and my eyes narrowing.
"What you think you can take me on?" He laughed, and a couple of others chuckled. "Please." He pointed to his red belt like I knew what the hell that meant. I walked towards him, the little spoiled shit, letting him know that of course I could take him. And he just lunged at me, arm extended forward, so damn fast, but I had seen them dodging it enough to know how to avoid it. So I swayed my body to the side and grabbed him his fist and flipped him with his own force to the ground.
"Mike, get up." The old man came in from within a room in dojo. He signaled me to go inside it, and I waited there for half an hour. He finished his lesson and then sent them off. He came inside, and observed me for what seemed like hours.
"Where did you learn to do that?" He asked me.
"What, that earlier? You showed it to me." I shrugged, and he smiled.
"Come here. I will teach you, four to six in the morning every day. Twice as long on weekends. Do you know Japanese or Mandarin?" I shrugged again. I had a learned a little from the signs all around us. You just eventually picked up some phrases and symbols, but not much worth anything. "Then you'll learn some."
It started every day like that, and to keep the deal I had to start going to school. I hated it, but the fighting in the morning made up for it. That's how I learned everything I know, from an old man, Master Ling.
I had never liked my life in retrospect, even when I was in happy blissful middle class land with my parents. But those two years I spent mastering JKD, it had been a good time for me. I probably failed one class the whole time, which was an all-time record for me. What do they say? You know that old cliché that goes "Nothing good ever lasts." I understand it now, because it's true.
Truth and reality are not easy concepts to deal with. I think that is why I have receded into myself, into numbness that fails recognize anything anymore. I think that's why I understood Vincent, and why Vicious and I differed so strongly. When we were young, we were merely gangsters. Then we became killers, and finally demons. What got it all started was his death, Master Ling's.
There was no practical or actual reason of why he died. That stirred me, and it hurled me to a depth within myself I would never return from—that lack of reason behind death. It targeted people randomly, as if daily it would do some computerized or technical survey of people left alive and bam—the millionth and ten, the two millionth fifth, sixth, and seventh of people alive would die today.
A bunch of little pissing gangster kids surrounded him, tried to beat him up, and of course failed miserably. To spite him, two of the kids whose brothers belonged to a syndicate got called upon, and a sniper took him out from atop some roof of some bank. A sniper. Jesus Christ, like he was some fucking prime minister. No, he was just an old man.
That's when I decided guns were quite useful too. I disappeared for a while. Freelanced my way around, mainly composed of stealing, bullying, and a couple of killings—self-defense and all. I was the real fucked up angst teen of the posters. A middle class boy whom life fucked over, and he ended up on the streets, the next psycho or serial killer.
Fate had something else in mind for me. I had some money, and I knew I owed Annie. I don't know what kind of Catholic guilt seeped into me, but it spread like malaria inciting some feverish and itching anxiety. I headed that way with a couple of thousand woolongs in my back pocket. I spotted a black car with windows to match the paint job coming around the corner street of where Annie's shop was located. I had seen it circle around me once already. At the stop they slowed down and drove almost slower than I walked. They parked on the side of the road, and I went inside of the liquor store, two doors away from Annie's. I watched them; my sentinel eyes wary of a death omen headed my way.
An Asian man in his early forties, dressed in a suit and red tie, exited Annie's gun store and the black car's wheels spun with a screech. My impulses took over and a shot of adrenaline heated my neck. I whipped out my new Jericho as I saw the long mouth of a rifle protrude from a window cracked open.
I shot at the wheels, and the rifle pelted a bullet that shattered the left window of the gun shop. Men sprung from this dark blue car parked on the front and surrounded the Asian man, and started shooting back. I ran and stretched my hand aiming at the back window. I shot three times, and it shattered. The other men took all the shooters out.
Annie's bulky form emerged once the street had gone silent, and she took one look at me and damn near screamed.
"Spike!" She recognized me, as if it had only been yesterday that I had left.
"Is that your name?" The Asian man in the suit asked me. The other men in the black soldier suits glared at me. I thought Annie had made friends with a politician, and later on I learned he was close enough to that. "You're a good shot." I put my gun back behind me.
"Thanks." I muttered, and one of the soldiers lowered his head to the man's ears and whispered something. The man nodded.
"I would like to talk to you, Spike. My name is Mao Yenrai."
My life would never be the same again. I would go from chaotic petty thefts and kills, to organized and calculated murder, and so much more. But by then, I was already numbed to my death. I would become one of the men that killed my parents, my master, and me. And when I look back, the reason I gave myself for doing all that was to pass the hours.