(closed) december catchall

[entreats]

Who: Ange (entreats), Chizuru (tealeafs), Daniel (miyagimagic) and various others.
What: December shenanigans.
When: During all of December.
Where: Locations vary.

Content Warnings: Bullying, (mild) violence, will edit to add more later.

( starters in the comments! if you want to plot anything with me, feel free to either pm the journal or contact me at queeningsquare, i'm always open to new ideas and threads! )

Comments

[survivalthroughhate]

"I'm not one much to feel sorry for other people or commiserate with what they've had to go through." Lack of empathy was one of Maul's biggest and greatest flaws, one he'd been trying to work on with very limited success.

"If that's what you want, alright then," Maul said in an oddly stiff and formal manner, the words a little clipped. It wasn't easy to tell but he was doing so in an attempt to bite back anything else he very much wanted to say to the man he disliked so much. His attention turned back towards the memory instead, not so much as even looking at the older Daniel anymore.

cw: blood, manipulation/intimidation of a child by an adult, mention of decapitation

[miyagimagic]

Daniel bites down a comment. No, getting into an argument will just make things worse here, he knows it. And what would it do, anyway? It's not like Daniel is seriously thinking Maul will listen to him even for a moment, so he'd just be wasting his breath and making this moment even worse to get through.

Just getting through this memory by itself is hard enough. He feels nauseous watching it, even now, as Terry leads the younger Daniel over to a rather odd sort of construction - a weird training dummy, but all of its limbs made out of solid wood, the plank where the dummy's 'head' would be covered up by a poster of a different teenage boy, the lettering on it reading 'karate's bad boy - Mike Barnes.'

Guided by Terry to start punching it, the younger Daniel pulls back his fist, starting to hit the dummy's 'head' - or rather, bashing his hand directly against solid wood. And not just once. He keeps doing it at Terry's guidance, even as the facial expression on Daniel changes into a wince, the boy in obvious pain.

"Visualize! This is not just a bunch of sticks and pipes anymore! It's a living, breathing fighting machine that wants to detach your head from the rest of your body!" Terry says, his voice getting more intense with each word - until, at that last word, Daniel has been hitting the board so hard and often that there's blood all over it, and all over Daniel's hand as well, knuckles having been burst open from the force. Daniel stops punching, in even more pain now, shaking his hand as if that might get rid of the pain.

Terry steps closer, grabbing a hold of the boy's wrist, lifting the hand up between them while he stares down at the blood on the hand almost hungrily.

"It's blood," he says, to which the younger Daniel nods, a faint 'yeah' that's more breath than an actual answer, the boy panting and shivering. His gaze raises to meet Terry's, looking every inch like an animal caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, unable to look away. "So what? Make believe it's his," Terry adds.

Then the man leans in closer, mere inches away from the younger Daniel's face, as he continues, basically shouting at this point: "This guy wants to break you, humiliate you, stomp you into the ground! Now what are you gonna do about it?!"

That seems to fire up the young boy, and he scowls as he approaches the wooden dummy once more, breaking the wooden legs with a kick, and then the torso and head with punches.

[survivalthroughhate]

Maul watched the scene without saying anything else, just taking it all in. He could see why Daniel wouldn't look back on this moment with any pleasure. He was weak in addition to being judgmental. The weak couldn't handle training such as this.

But for Maul?

This was all too familiar territory. He'd been trained in such a brutal manner from the time he was a child, both by his master and at a school later on called Orsis Academy, a place where they trained children on how to become cold-blooded assassins, bounty-hunters, and mercenaries as adults. He'd become inoculated to such methods after the experiences he'd had throughout his life, so he honestly didn't see how wrong this whole scenario was.

He turned back towards the older Daniel, looking at him with a judgmental expression on his face. "Are we done here?"

[miyagimagic]

Daniel has to look away by the time the figures in the memory start celebrating this. Like it's a good thing. It makes his stomach turn to remember how the other man had twisted his mind, to a point where Daniel briefly believed it was a good thing to do this every single day for training. To constantly hurt himself, come home with those injuries, and lie about it to mister Miyagi - because of some mistaken belief that this was the only way for him to survive.

It makes him feel awful, emotions mixing together in his gut, but all of them just as negative and painful as the next one.

He doesn't know if he could see more of it, so technically he's thinking the exact same thing as Maul is when Daniel sees a white stag standing by the dojo's exit, symbolizing the end of the memory.

At least it's one relief in the middle of all this. Facing such an awful memory, and then having the worst possible person seeing it alongside him. Maul, who wouldn't understand, who's a murderous psychopath, who knows Terry Silver as if Terry Silver is a man you can know, rather than a snake that poisons everything around it.

"Yes," Daniel says, not bothering to hide his curt tone, or the way he glares at Maul. Instead he just quickly paces over in the direction of the stag, and the moment it touches Daniel, the memory ends - both of the men returned to where they had been before any of this began.