Chapter Text
He doesn’t feel any regret when he needs to leave his home.
There’s only a burning sense of purpose that crawls in the inner hollow of his chest. He wonders, at that moment, if his heart beating in his chest has transformed. If he drives his fist into the cavern of his ribs, splintered white bone shattered, and somehow, finds his heart replaced by a creature with fangs and deadly venom.
He absentmindedly taps the skin of his chest with the dagger that his father had gifted him. The silver blade of the dagger gleams in the moonlight, oddly hypnotizing. He can feel the simple ridges in the handle of the dagger, his fingers pressing against the intricate designs.
He remembers the feeling of his father’s hands, calloused and hard, brushing against his arm. For a brief, impossible moment yesterday, he wondered if his father was going to pull him into a hug. But instead, a dagger was pressed against his hands, and he was left staring with burning, aching desperation in his chest as his father walked away.
It had only been yesterday.
Yesterday. Yesterday was a day full of possibilities, now shrunk into a day of fixed possibilities. Yesterday feels like a forever ago—hours, days, lifetimes stretching like a thread from a spool strewn across the ground.
After his father left him with the dagger, he remembers only blurs of motion—packing clothes and essentials for the trip, watching his father tell his sister the news, staring at the crisscrossed hatches of the ceiling at night. He doesn’t remember in which order they happened; there is too much length in the thread of yesterday for him to untangle.
But there is the task. The dagger in his hands. The promise of warm sticky blood on his hands. The thing that is his heart opens its maw wide and preens, nose flared wide for the scent of vengeance, of violence that is still yet to come.
He flips his dagger up and catches it with one smooth motion. Breathes in the night sky. The air trickles through his nose, brisk and biting. It still has the harsh scent of sharp scrubbing soap that had been used to clean up the blood spotting the ground a few days ago. There is something alive in the air; tension seeps through the night breeze and fills his lungs with possibilities. The dagger in his hand vibrates, perhaps with excitement, perhaps with fear. He has forgotten the difference a long time ago.
The thing inside his chest thumps and bleeds and opens its jowls in desperate, needy hunger as he slides the dagger back into its sheath. The thing in his chest is eager, but for what reason yet, he is not completely sure.
It only takes a few seconds for Shang-Chi to slip on the sheath, attaching it to his thigh.
He is ready.