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Objectively speaking, he knows the role he’s meant to play. It’s not the role his brothers forced him into: at least, he knows he’s more than a killer trained in needles and venom. He’s more than a pretty face used by the Lee family to sweeten deals, to be thrown in as a bonus for gross powerful men to use like a toy. Inevitably, those elements are part of him, but he’s more than that. He’s both those things and he’s also the judge, jury, and executioner who will be putting an end to the Lee bloodline. That is a role he chose for himself. That’s the only goal he can have, the only path destiny has for him, and it’s one he chose.
If he starts to think too hard about ‘what ifs’ he knows he’s just going to make himself upset. If there’s one thing he’s learnt, it's that there’s no time to be lost in idle imagining: no amount of dreaming can ever get him out of this shady, disgusting world he’s already adapted into. The only way out is for himself to claw out, to painstakingly drag himself through hell until his fingernails are broken and his knees bloody. Yut Lung knows better than anyone that the path to his goal is covered in blood and entrails, coated with poison and lies that will dig at him even if he’s careful. He isn’t crawling out of hell; the doors have been long shut, any chance of him living a normal life snuffed out at age six when he was forced to witness the extent of evil in his own blood. He’s crawling to the throne, to the very top, where he’ll burn, but where he’ll be too powerful for anyone to hurt him.
It gets harder to not daydream when days are slow and all he has for company are glasses of wine worth thousands of dollars that he drinks as if they were just juice. Yut Lung knows better than to assume he’s ever safe, but when he’s alone, the door to his room locked, curtains drawn, it’s the closest he can be to comfort. Alone and drunk, it’s near impossible for him not to think. He’s doing what he has to, he’s doing the only thing that will make him feel an amount of satisfaction, set on the path of killing his brothers and their families to make them suffer a fraction of what he did.
He wonders if things could’ve been different, if he had been born earlier. Had he not been the youngest. Would he have become like his brothers? The thought makes him nauseous, to imagine himself holding down a woman like they did his mother, the horrible things they did to her. The idea that he could’ve been raised to be like them. It makes his head hurt and his eyes burn, because he’s not like them, those disgusting bastards, but isn’t he a Lee too in the end? They killed his mother, who had nothing to do with them, and dragged him into this hellhole.
He thinks of his brother’s wives and their children, and how in time, he will have them dead too. They’re innocent, and Yut Lung would bet good money that the wives his brothers brag about- quiet, demure women with a faraway look that Yut Lung can’t look at for too long on the rare dinners where he’s met them, because their eyes remind him too much of his mother’s- aren’t there because they want to be. He would bet that the children that cling to those empty eyed women, that lower their head when their fathers approach, don’t exist out of any loving union. Vaguely, in the haze of wine and champagne, he understands it, that he should see himself and see his mother in them. That he should feel bad for them- that of all people on earth, he’s the one who should understand their plight. But he does not. When he thinks of them, all he sees are things his brothers care for- things he must destroy.
As he serves himself another flute of champagne, he wonders what would happen if one of their children lived. Perhaps the child would be too quiet, too well hidden away. Maybe the assassins Yut Lung would send would be too softhearted to kill a child, would lie to him and assure him they killed their targets when in fact they left one behind. He wonders if that child would grow up to be like him- if that hypothetical child would get dragged down to the dredges of this dark world it was brought into, if it would let itself be consumed by hatred. Yut Lung wonders if such a child- if it were to exist- would try to kill him. A single child trying to take down a powerful figure in the Chinese Mafia should be laughable, but in the end, isn’t that what Yut Lung himself is? A child who’s been playing the long game, letting himself be used and abused, knowing that when the chance comes, he’ll strike and spill the blood of his own family?
Yut Lung lives for hatred. But hatred does not live for Yut Lung.
He can’t die as long as his brothers live, that much he knows. He’ll cling to life and grovel on the ground if he must: as much as his brothers may call him vain or compare him to a peacock for his care over his appearance, Yut Lung does not have much honour left, not after all what he’s been forced to do. He hasn’t broken yet because he has one goal left, one single factor that drives him forward, because no pain, no humiliation, no wound can hurt more than his drive to see his brothers dead in the ground burns.
He thinks back on his brother’s children. If one were to survive, would they be as resilient as Yut Lung is? Just like Yut Lung, would they endure the depths of hell, endure the depravity and ceaseless hunger of the adults around them? Would they break under it all, or would their circumstances just make them mature faster, make them steel themselves in a resolve to kill him for what he did to their family? He wonders what he’d do if he woke up one day and found one of his nephews or nieces with a gun to his head. If he opened his eyes and saw that what had once been a quiet and reserved child had grown up into a jaded monster only driven to end his life. He wonders if he would fight back or if he’d just let them pull the trigger- after all, life after he has killed his brothers is not something he has thought about. Maybe he would let them, just so they can deal with the same emptiness he fears he’ll be faced with once his only goal in life is done.
He knocks a wine glass off the table by accident, movements rendered clumsy because of alcohol. Yut Lung glances at the door: it’s locked, nobody can get in. Nobody can get to him while he’s vulnerable. He looks at the windows, curtains drawn; there’s no metal bars in them. Worst case scenario, he could jump out of them. He’s only three floors up, and there’s bushes below. The alcohol in his veins would surely dampen the pain of the fall. He’s fine, he has a plan, nobody can touch him now, not when he’s unprepared. So it’s fine for him to keep drinking, to keep chasing the playfully numb feeling of drowning his sorrows in wine. The wineglass on the floor doesn’t break upon impact, the carpet allowing for it to bounce lightly and then roll slightly. Yut Lung doesn’t care to pick it up, instead serving himself more in another glass.
The role he has given himself is that of an angel of death. Of the destructor of his own rotten family, not because he wants the world to be a better place without them, but because he wants revenge and he lives for hatred. If that weren’t his role, maybe he could rescue the children of his brothers. The poor little kids who didn’t choose to be born into such a horrible bloodline, who probably fear their fathers as much as Yut Lung feared his brothers as a little child. Children who have probably watched their fathers put their mothers through pain and abuse, too small and weak to protect them. If he wanted to, Yut Lung thinks as he swirls the wine around the glass, he could save them, could show them a second chance at life. Maybe send them to school. Find them good families to be raised in somewhere far away, where they would eventually forget they were born as Lee’s.
But he doesn’t. Nobody saved Yut Lung, so why should he save those kids? No matter how much he cried and prayed, nobody ever stopped and said ‘this kid is innocent, this kid should be going to school and playing with other kids his age’. Nobody ever tried to help him. So why should he? Why should it be up to one scarred, traumatized kid to save other children? It’s not his role. He does not want it to be his role. It’s not who he is, and it never will be, because rescuing would need tenderness and love and he does not know any of that. All he knows is pain and hatred: the smallest mercy he can show those kids is for them to die instead of having to become a second version of himself.