born to be your villain

but still, he stumbles, he trips, he takes a misstep and finds himself crumbled onto the cement gravel. somewhere around him, he can hear music pulsing around him, and people, their breezy conversations, their jewelry, their perfumes—he is getting closer to civilization. he can’t think for a moment, wondering if he should come nearer to them all, or shrink further away. he is covered in filth, not a pretty sight, and when he lifts his head, he can vaguely make out the figure of a person, a girl, standing just a few meters away.

and alyiah might be one of those. she’s a real person of course, but her relationship with him might be as solid as a puff of smoke, for all the clues she gives him that she actually likes him. to anyone watching them, it might seem like she doesn’t, like maybe she’s just leading him on, but on some level, he likes being her toy, he likes being messed with. it means he can mess with her too, they can be even. it feels grounding for him, it feels concrete enough to let him smile. besides, for all her protests, she still kisses him hard enough to break mountains, and lets him touch her like he owns her, occasionally.

but as much as he enjoys the rough coarseness of alyiah’s tempter, the way her inner hurricane rears to life behind her eyes, right now he is wounded and even her teasing is making the aching worse. he groans tiredly when she brushes her nose against his, his heart stopping for a moment as she pulls away, but he doesn’t move, continues straining himself forward to meet her. “ahh, so i need to be dead to get a kiss? well, why didn’t you say so before, it’ll probably happen in a few minutes.” he’s being overdramatic and she most likely knows it, but he still grins at her anyway, before flinching and cringing at the stinging of the antiseptic.

and jiyong lives his life in that dredge, drapes himself in the disgusting mess of it, weaves the edges of his skin to its horror. and revels in it.

she says “of course” as though it is an obvious choice, to save her by getting rid of him, but he doesn’t know if she really understands the magnitude of what she’s giving permission for. her voice is deep and sturdy, reminiscent of the goddess to which ares pays homage to regularly, but her eyes don’t know him. wide and uncertain, if a bit disgusted and uncomfortable, as anyone would be in such a situation. he studies her facial expressions a moment longer, hesitantly careful of any signs of regret for her words, any belated take-backs.

the guy behind her is somehow appalled at jiyong’s question and her answer, yelling that they shouldn’t be talking, yelling that they need to shut the fuck up, there is nothing for them to discuss. he still thinks he has the upper hand here, still thinks he has leverage enough to convince jiyong to let him live. he thinks he’s walking out of this alleyway alive, and jiyong is about ready to put an end to that nonsense.

the man takes a single step backwards, like he’s about to make a run for it, but jiyong is quicker than any other normal human alive and his accuracy is perfect. he throws the left knife hard enough to puncture through the fist wrapped around the gun handle, piercing through his flesh and into the space of the trigger, jamming it so that the gangster can’t fire. while the man is reeling backwards, only a split second between actions, he throws the other knife straight into his head, through his eye socket.

he takes the cig back from her, catching it before she tries to fucking touch him, but he doesn’t let himself get angry at her. he doesn’t smile back at her, repositioning the stick between his lips and side-eying her grin, nodding a bit in acknowledgement, but he doesn’t return the light-heartedness. “true.” he replies in the simplest form, because, well, he is disgusting. no one can slaughter as many people as he has for such awful reasons as he has without bearing the mark of the truly abhorrent.

he can’t change that about himself, not even for her, his daughter, and all her vengeance for justice type ways.

he listens to her story, both their eyes pinned on the same spot, and deep inside him, he feels ares growl. he’s seen things like that before, in jungles of trees and dust and sand—the way men pretend to own women, through sex and pain. he’s been around it far too much, although he can say for himself at least that he hasn’t ever gone that far with another human being. ares is a different matter but most of his most gruesome acts are still fuzzy and indistinguishable from the centuries of simple warfare.

he chuckles and shakes his head a bit as she pulls off a piece of stone and crushes it. he wonders if she’s this gusto about every target she takes on or if she’s just showing off. when she mentions about this target’s entourage through, is when he finally takes a deep breath and nods. “ahh thank the gods, for a moment i worried you’d brought me out here just to kill one guy.” he’d brought way too many knives and bullets just to take out one single asshole. a group of assholes is much better prospects.

“the number of men doesn’t matter,” he tells her, reassuringly—which he’s sure he doesn’t need to say. the two of them together are pretty well unstoppable, and that’s when he does finally look over at her with a slight upwards quirk of his lips, a dark grin reminiscent of every moment preceding a good battle. “i don’t usually try for slow deaths, but for you, i’ll do my best. let’s just go out there and have some fun.”

but even though he doesn’t usually find other people unsettled being cute, something about the way this girl flips around, her eyes wide, her cheeks red, the tiny hand just barely covering over her lip—it’s a bit adorable and it just pulls his smirk a little bit wider. him calling her beautiful had just been simply to catch her attention at first but now that he’s face-to-face with her, it’s actually quite accurate. he hardly notices her staring until she spins back around away from him, breaking the eye-contact they’d shared ( since he’d sort of been eyeing her as well ), and now he can’t really help but feel slightly embarrassed for no reason.

he tilts his head at the vending machine in front of them, spotting the problem and mulling over their options. they could go and get someone with a key to open it up, or bang on the glass more than she already has been, but that doesn’t seem to be working and it’ll take up too much time. and there’s something in the air at the moment that he doesn’t want to crush with the presence of another person; he’s got to fix this himself.

he doesn’t know what he’s searching for, but he thinks of jihyo and how she wanders through the city trying to save people. he doesn’t want to be like that, he’s no one’s savior, but it’s so easy to find the corrupt in this town, it’s so casual with its torture. sex dens on any street corner, yells and shouts and lewd remarks from the alleyways, drunk groups of stupid kids making their way from club to club. he passes all of them by, not giving anyone the time it would take to even just look up from the ground. he’s not interested. he’s empty. he’s a wasteland.

but then the sound of fists on skin fill up his hearing, the pressure of boots against someone’s gut, coughing up blood, cringing at the sudden pain—all of these things jiyong knows too well to not recognize instantly. he finally looks up, looks around, hunt around the corner for the sight of two guys in the middle of a mugging, and jiyong grits his teeth. he’s no hero, he doesn’t like standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, but in the heat of the moment, ares is always ready for a fight. he growls and rushes at the kid doing the kicking, who sees him in time and takes off running. jiyong can’t tell if he got the wallet or not, but once he hears the small, weakened pleas behind him, the familiar voice broken and damaged, all of that ceases to matter.

he turns back to the boy on the ground and his eyes widen. he hadn’t been searching for anything this night, but here he is, standing in front of one of the softest spots in jiyong’s soul. seeing him down like that, crumpled up and bleeding and gasping for breath, twists something inside jiyong like a knife, and he drops to the ground in front of him. “seunghoon..?” shit shit shit—he fumbles a bit and feels around the boy’s chest and torso, checking for broken ribs or punctures or anything, his hands frantic and nervous. nothing, thankfully.

ares rears his fury for a moment, burning jiyong’s eyes into glowing red, and all he wants to do is follow that sonovabitch, track him down, and murder him in the most gruesome way possible, very bloody, very painfully, and in several severed pieces. he growls and grits his teeth, looking over his shoulder after the assailant. but he knows if he leaves seunghoon here, worse could happen to him.

at the moment she comes up to him, he is a bit busy with the drunken scoundrel, his singular goal for a whole ten seconds being to beat the life right out of him. what’s the world without one more scumbag in it right? jihyo would be so proud of him right now maybe—perhaps she’s actually rubbing off on him a little bit. is that sort of thing even possible though? he’s older than her. well, sort of, in spirit, which is really the only bit that matters to him in this particular case ( that and the fact that his ares side of him is absolutely never going to forgive that her host was born before jiyong was and ergo, he’s younger than his own daughter; talk about a shit show ).

he’s in the middle of a strike though when she grabs him and punches him hard enough to push him off balance into the grimy alleyway floor, effectively off the other man, still unconscious. with anyone else, that might have knocked them the fuck out, or broken something, but ares is burning under the surface of jiyong’s skin, bringing him power and density and strength. he raises a hand up to his jaw and turns up to look at her, his eyes shining red and furious, and for a dangerous moment, ares wants to attack her too. how dare she hit him? who the fuck does she think she is?

because who could ever love someone like this? who could ever imagine spending the rest of their life with a guy who murders people he doesn’t even know? haunted by their spirits in his dreams, in his thoughts, in his daily cup of morning coffee? why would seunghoon ever stay? why is he still staying even now? jiyong can’t quite be sure if he had told him to scare him away on purpose or give him a reason to dump him… or if he really had been seeking something the god of war would never let him achieve?

either way, it doesn’t matter now—the boy knows now and has stayed anyway. seunghoon is still here, is still standing there, looking at him, smooth cheeks, concerned eyes, teeth over his bottom lip in worry, as though jiyong is the one that needs to be worried over. it’s not him though, it’s everyone else—jiyong is nothing but a weapon, a killer, engorged in his own mess, entrenched in his own bloodlust. the world should be kept away from him, small children with terror in their faces, beautiful boys with nothing but love in their hearts. just stay away.

jiyong wants to die, wants to vomit, wants to cut himself open and pull out this disease, this acidic tumor of a god inside him, find some way to be clean—but even as he thinks that, he knows, he knows, he knows… he never would. he enjoys it too much, and that’s the awful truth. he likes who he is and what he does, it gives him power and control and the fury is as much a part of him as it ever was for ares. and releasing that fury is not like something else taking over him, it’s more like stepping into who he actually is, beneath all the skin and hair and fingernails; some beast, some monster, all claws and steel and maddening hatred.

and seunghoon doesn’t deserve to be chained to something like this. he looks up at the other, the water running from the faucet, soap still on his hands as he leans against the sink in the bathroom. for a moment, meeting the other’s gaze, all he wants to do is lean over and kiss him, fuck all these emotions, fuck the suds and the water and the time of evening, and just make love to him in the hallway, bury himself in the feeling of seunghoon’s sighs and moans. but then he blinks and hears the wailing of that little girl’s mother.

one can only imagine his surprise and shock at his first sight of her, of the sea lord, stuck in the body of a blonde, gorgeous woman—definitely not the shell he would have assumed someone as proud as Poseidon would pick, but then after getting to know her, he’d realized real quick just how perfect she fit the criteria. and somehow it’s a lot sexier coming from her than it had ever been from her god counterpart. beforehand, he’d always wanted to fall asleep whenever poseidon opened his mouth, but now he just wants to get alyiah out of her pajamas and into the bedroom.

he chuckles at her response though, never denying him his wish for a drowning. she’s obviously thought about killing him a few times now, but she never would, even though he’d probably let her if she accompanied it with a kiss. he practically falls against the toilet seat, a white-knuckled grip on the wall to steady himself as his face contorts in pain and sweat for a moment, his lungs heaving painfully shallow breaths. he feels better sitting down, but only just barely, and for a moment, he just shuts his eyes and holds onto the wound with his other hand, pressing into it to stop the bleeding.

at her request, he peeks up at her and lets the shit-eating grin pull at his lips again. time for another diversion. “trying to get me out of my clothes already? i’m starting to wonder if this whole nurse’s office thing is a turn-on for you—it definitely is for me.” he grunts but leans forward a bit, reaching out for her again, his limbs moving by instinct at this point. “if i do, can i have a kiss? for my last dying wish?” eventually he does finally relent to her insistence, but he can’t lift his arm to pull the shirt up, so he ends up just ripping it open down the front. he looks like a horror movie, all scars and tattoos, sticky red and black from his blood mixing with mud and dirty outside.

he wants to say something, mouth something at her, but what? he can’t just tell her to wait or stop or meet him somewhere, that would be too awkward wouldn’t it? he presses his lips together in an effort to keep all his words inside, all the things he knows he wants to say to her that don’t make any sense like “i broke us and i wish i hadn’t” but he’s not even sure if that’s true. he’s not sure of anything at the moment, because even this might be some sort of mirage, some hallucination from working out too hard? or maybe it’s not her, it’s just someone who looks a lot like her.

but then she jolts away, turning and heading into the locker room, and jiyong is certain, absolutely positive—it is her. why would anyone else look at him like that, like they could remember him and live to regret it. he watches her rush away and for a moment, the panic doesn’t let him react or move, not until she disappears and the driving need to see her again bangs inside his chest, like an addict, already hooked on her spell. he rushes across the gym, running around people and almost running into them, before approaching the girl’s locker room.

he wants to knock on it, he wants to go inside—but if he does, he’ll probably be kicked out of the building and never allowed back in. he pants and paces a little bit in front of the door, his thumbnail stuck between his teeth as he bites down and tries to think up a way around this, a way to talk to her. is there a backdoor to that room? doesn’t she have to come out sometime? maybe he should just wait?

or maybe membership to this goddamn gym is proving to be not as important as the urge to see her and speak to her. even though he doesn’t even know what to say. he doesn’t even know how to formulate his thoughts coherently—at this point it’s all gut inertia. her face, her eyes, the way she’s all grown up now mix inside his head with the memories of her laughter, her sighs, the way she used to run her fingers through his hair to help him sleep. shit, they’d only been around each other for a summer, back when they were both softer and brighter souls, but jiyong had never fallen so hard for someone before, and she had been so pure.

he’d been forced to leave her—it hadn’t been his idea, but he didn’t have a choice and he hadn’t gotten to say goodbye. fuck, she probably hates him by now ( he would hate himself by now ) but maybe if he could explain himself, explain what happened… what? what’s the point? think, jiyong, it’s not like she’s going to say she forgives and forgets and now they can be jolly good friends again or something. except they had never been friends in the first place, he’s pretty sure he waited a grand total of six hours after meeting her before kissing her, and he was fairly certain he couldn’t really be friends with her again now either.

still though, he can’t just go up and knock on the door. he goes over to a table with some sign up papers and writes a little note on the backside of it, before going up to one of the ladies about to head inside. “i’m sorry to bother you, but um… there’s a girl in there with blonde hair, named jin. can you please hand this note to her?” he gives it to the lady, who hesitantly accepts the task but only after reading it herself and approving of it.

Death’s gonna hold us up in the mirror, say: we look so much alike, we must be brothers. See, I had a job to do, but people like you have been doing it to one another. || @krjiyong

Jihyo is no longer the fragile girl she once was. Within her sleeps the soul of a warrior, of a queen, and she clawed her way through the ages to find her, to find solace within the hollow of her bones. Jihyo would not negate that honor, would not treat it lightly. This wisp of an ancient being, this glimpse of power, of might, she would see it live.

Jihyo knew she was unlike many, that this power reigning within her veins was a privilege. A responsibility. A queen took care of her own always and her kingdom would be safe. So she learned the names of men, of the enemy, and then she made those names go away.

That was when she met him.

Her first instinct, of course, had been to make his name disappear from time too, to let his memory fade before it could settle within her mind. But the voice inside her had stirred and stopped her. Trust him, she had spoken, and Jihyo would not disobey orders. She knew that whatever this voice inside her was, it would not hurt her. It was like a mother, and a mother doesn’t hurt her child.

She must admit, that by now, watching him light a cigarette in the darkness of night as they waited for their target, there was something like… understanding between them. She would not say friendship, not truly, but perhaps something like it. At least he didn’t hide it. He was clear, exactly what you would expect. Rude and gruff and tough as nails, all sharp edges and cigarette ashes. Jihyo liked that, the clearness of it, the acceptance of it, the fight in him.

he wants to be flattered, but it’s more simply irritating, same as everything being irritating to him honestly—although not usually so much as right this moment. under the pressure of needing to be silent and calm, still as death and twice as stealthy, ares tends to get even more troublesome. while it may be jiyong’s job to kill people from afar, distanced and removed, ares despises such means. ares would much rather go for the blunt-force murder, raging and terrifying his prey, every centimeter of him aching for a bloodlust that jiyong rarely indulges. he’s not a good guy, by any means, but he can’t just let himself go slaughtering people whenever the urge hits.

it’s difficult to quell, however, when he’s in the presence of jihyo, not because she angers him ( although there is that sometimes ) but more because whenever they contact each other for jobs, it’s either because he has need of her skills for a task, or she has need of his. and whenever she has need of him, it’s because of a particularly nasty target. jihyo is more than capable of handling herself, housing the spirit of one of the greatest warrior queen history has ever documented, and his own spirit’s daughter, but she doesn’t necessarily have the same type of weapons training as he does. not yet anyway, he’s still training her as often as they can both get together at the gym.

there is a certain, small swell of pride that jiyong gets whenever he looks at her, ares blooming from the idea that his girl is out here on the streets murdering men she dislikes. ares may be a masculine deity, but gods do not actually have genders, and as such, he’s %100 in favor of her taking out however many men she wants to. he’s less inclined to be so picky about his targets sexual identity, but he certainly cannot blame her.

although even so, she and jiyong do not necessarily get along well. he doesn’t have similar feelings towards her as ares does. the uneasiness of having to sit there for so long finally gets to him and he pulls out and lights up a cigarette, breathing in on it for a moment as he stares out at nothing. target hasn’t arrived yet.