2025-06-25: What Are These Scars?
- Log: What Are These Scars
- Cast: Gauma, Knight
- Where: Nouvelle Tokyo
- Date: June 25, 2025
- Summary: Knight and Gauma work some things out with their fists.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
It's late. The stars are gone - of course they are, but that happened many years ago; Nouvelle Tokyo is far too light-polluted for anything dimmer than the Orbital Ring itself to show itself. The false constellations of colonies and, nearer, skyscrapers dominate the sky. But on the ground, slumping outside a streetside 7-21, a man in pink hair with a deep blue jacket over his vibrantly yellow top which resembles bandages (surely those aren't actually--) watches the heavens from behind sunken eyes. "Khhh," he grumbles.
The door opens. Another man, with an awkward bowlcut and an almost perfectly reversed, backwards and more passive slouch, emerges, and holds up a bag to the first. Gauma takes it and plucks out a pack of imitation crab. "Thanks. 's not payday yet," he mutters, and then they both wordlessly move toward the corner, where there's an alley out to a more spacious sidewalk. They are not quite the right age to crouch outside a 7-21 with beers.
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
The deadened sky isn't something Knight's gotten used to seeing, even after leaving Tsujitsudai full-time - the sky there was artificial, a beautiful starry night every night.
Now, though, the hollow night is something more fitting for how Knight feels right now. Empty, abandoned of natural light. As they stand on the sidewalk, gazing up at the empty sky, their dull blue eye traces the shape of the Orbital Ring, high above. As the duo walk onto the sidewalk, the suited figure with an oversized toy katana at his waist is immediately recognizable. Knight turns.
"Oh. It's you." Knight turns his head over his shoulder, moving just enough to let that one eye make contact with Gauma's.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
"So Diver's still--" Koyomi says, because when something's bugging him it's hard for him to forget about it.
Gauma grunts, then fishes a beer out of his bag and cracks it with two fingers. "No luck yet. We'll get there," he mutters. "Seems like things are heating up aga--"
He TSKS loudly, clicking his lip as as Knight comes into view. "Hell, it's this chump," he says, and then winds himself up to a fully straight-backed standing position and slugs back the entire drink.
"Hey, wait, why!?" Koyomi yelps, because he can already tell where this one's going.
Gauma tosses it aside. Koyomi skitters over to pick it up because littering is bad. "Yeah, it's us, bigshot," Gauma says with a swagger. After their last confrontation, Gauma's stung pride won't let him be looked down on, even when he kind of deserves it. "Head in the clouds, for once?"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"I have things to be thinking about. More pressing matters than you." Knight's voice curdles with contempt.
"So if you're done tossing your garbage everywhere, why don't you be on your way," Knight says, still not turning to face Gauma.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Gauma's eyes linger on Knight for some seconds. He just...can't...
"What, you contemplating the darkness or something? It's light pollution, it's not that deep," he scoffs, and starts past. He sinks back into his slouch, feeling his own mood assemble itself. "It's a sign humans don't stop moving forward. They'll keep going."
...he intentionally shoulders Knight on his way past. "Somethin' I'm learnin', myself," he mutters.
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Keep moving forward. . ."
"It must be easy if you're born human," Knight mutters, and then Gauma gets really close and-
Knight recoils at the shoulder touch, immediately taking an aggressive stance and shoving Gauma back.
"Get- off!" It's instinctual, a fight-or-flight reaction, but it's enough.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Koyomi startles, jumping back as Gauma goads Knight into an altercation. "Wha!? Whoa-wha!?"
Knight shoves Gauma back and it sends the magenta man stumbling the whole way back to the far wall, earning a wild-eyed grin from him. "Heh! Nah!" he yells, and charges back with a full-send haymaker of a punch. "Not with a look like THAT on you!"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Come on!" Knight roars effortlessly dodging Gauma's wild swing and rearing into a low-blow to the mummy's stomach.
"You damned thug!" Knight spits.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
"WHUGH," Gauma calls out as a fist sinks into his stomach. He is frankly not Knight's equal even in this level of slobberknocker combat. Gauma has become too human for that.
Still, he stumbles back, wheezing for breath, and stands up tall anyway. "Yeah, that's right! Down low and in the dirt! Kh," he coughs, diaphragm struggling, then slings for Knight again. This isn't magnificent battle among masters, even if they both maybe could muster those skills.
This is too men who hate each other communicating something ephemeral with their fists.
He does have the skill to fake a right before punching high, sneering, "Where the people are!"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Crawling in the dirt is where you seem most at home!" Knight dodges Gauma's feint on instinct and steps right into the path of his high blow, meeting it head on, his skin twisting around the blow. He snarls, grabbing Gauma's arm and delivering a chop with his free hand.
"I'm not one of you."
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Grab and smash. Gauma curses and holds his hand limp, then rears back with an ungainly but fierce front kick. "So what!?" Gauma yells back.
He follows the distance-opening blow by lunging through what he hopes is an opening in Knight's guard to grab his tie, pulling him close to glare straight in his face. "So what," he repeats, heated. "Not even humans know what humans are! I don't give a damn if you crawled out of a cave, a rock, a chick, or a friggen television! You standing on that pedestal of yours pisses me off!"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Being a human is PAIN!" To really emphasize this point, he HEADBUTTS Gauma directly in the skull.
"It's bleeding and being cut and being scarred! What's so wrong with not wanting that!?
Knight claws at Gauma wildly with his nails, baring his teeth.
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Gauma makes a wordless bark as Knight headbutts him straight on, losing his grip and also his balance as he staggers back. He's defenseless then, and Knight capitalizes on that too, slashing bright red lines across his good cheek and down his neck before Gauma rallies himself enough to shove Knight away...and force himself to a full stand, glaring. "Yeah!" he yells, and jabs a thumb at the scar shaped like an S across the left side of his own face.
"Humans are animals! Every one of us is a dirty, stinking, beast! The whole game is finding someone whose stink doesn't piss you off!"
He doesn't advance again. He just stares, teeth grit and nostrils flaring.
"Scarring each other the whole time."
"Because every scar means someone learned how to hurt you less."
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"The PERSON who I-!" Knight stops themself before they finish that sentence.
"I was born from a scar. What does that make me?" Knight says, low and hollow.
"If they're supposed to hurt less. . . then why . . ."
"AAARGH!" Knight roars into the night, screaming upwards. His fists are clenched so tight they look like they're about to snap and fly off.
"Why . . ."
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Gauma watches Knight crack and break apart in front of him, and doesn't gloat one word. He settles back, down, slouching back. One hand finds his pockets.
"Suppose that'd make you a pretty 'strange beast,'" Gauma says, acknowledging the wordplay to Kaiju. "...but I think it means you know they still find a way to hurt when you're not expecting it, too." He thumbs the line of his jaw, across his scars. ...
He watches. The ten billion emotions whirling and fusing and ripping him and each other apart within Knight. His eyes tip down.
"They're gone, huh," he says, quietly.
"...'fraid nobody's figured out how to make that one numb."
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
Knight doesn't cry. They're not supposed to cry.
"I. . . they hurt. I didn't realize how much they hurt. I've never . . . not like this."
Knight's hands sink down as he slumps, his posture disintegrating as all the rage flows out of him.
"How do you. . . ?"
"How do you make it not hurt?"
<Pose Tracker> Gauma has posed.
Knight struggles, strains, and Gauma nods to his observation. "Yeah. That's what makes 'em scars. They cut 'you' out of the beast you were. And stuff that was part of you...is gone now."
But then he asks the most obvious question in the world, something everything with a heart asks one day, and Gauma finds the words stuck in his throat. The answer is there, easily-found platitudes that everything with a heart learns one day.
He sees her smile, warm and kind and all for him, and his jaw hangs open, limp and useless.
Koyomi stands up from where he'd hunkered down behind a trash can, slowly, anxiously finding his feet. Fidgeting with his hands, until one comes up behind his neck as if he had to physically tilt his head up to peer through those bowl-cut bangs with piercing blue eyes that seem like they could look straight through a man.
"Like any wound," he says, the words quietly forming in him. "...You stop poking at it. And then one day...you can put weight on it again."
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
Knight stands there across from Gauma silently. Knight knows now. The bandaged man understands too. He doesn't know what to say.
When Koyomi finds the confidence to speak, Knight just nods wordlessly.
"I . . ." This is one of the hardest things Knight has ever said in their life.
"Thank you."
Knight gives Gauma a nod of acknowledgement, and then reaches to straighten his tie and dust off his suit. With that, the Hyper Agent walks off into the night, his footsteps echoing across the empty street and eventually fading into silence.