A DAY IN THE LIFE

(Inspired from Dante's Inferno)

Title: A Day in the Life

Author: ivybluesummers (ivybluesummers@yahoo.com)

Disclaimer: Slam Dunk is not mine nor Dante Aligheri's part of the Divine Comedy, The Inferno. This fic was born from pure inspiration, sweat and blood on thinking what apt philosophical context I can put in, and well... this was supposed to be a blabber I made for my literature class. Oh well...

Warnings: Gruesome metaphors, philosophical rhetoric's (I mean it...) and well... shounen-ai (depends on your interpretation).

I've warned you.

Now, on with the fic.

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Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here - an inscription before our gates that meant desolation from Divine Illumination. This is where worldliness exists; a place where every human nature, apart from human reason, continue on tormenting the men and women who compensate for their earthly sins. This is where the horrors of the horrors come to life, and to tell you the truth, I really like it.

I am a fallen angel. I am one of those creatures who rebelled against God Himself; a creature that took his own path without God, a creature that joined others who wanted to serve no one. I am enjoying it at the moment, no rules or no boundaries that'll limit me to use my own resolves. And the opportunists (the outcast angels who took no sides when the Rebellion of Angels happened) back there at the gate better be regretting for not changing their minds, but then again repentance is a divine grace, and anything godly is not allowed for anyone except for God's minions. What the heck.

Fallen angels like me reside here at Dis, the capital of Hell. Contained in this city lies all the pits of Lower Hell, where fire is usually used to punish tormented souls. The walls are made of hot iron and designed with mosques that spit fire at the top, where at the center you'll find Papa Satan set on ice caps. This metropolis is very nice to look at, especially when you are afar from it.

Before the entrance of the city gates is the limbo of the Wrathful, where their bodies (or souls, that is) are submerged in the stinking Styx and packed with filth. Every often I come here flying with my bloody sword to rip anybody who dares to even to peek outside the stinking river, for chances like that is not tolerable here in Hell. As soon as you enter the gates of Dis, the first limbo you'll come across is the Heretic's, those who denied God's existence and the soul's immortality. Here they are buried in iron graves and wrapped in flames. I often come here, too, to slash anyone who would dare to take their body off the tomb, for without intervals they must suffer through all eternity.

Sometimes we fly around Dis to torment souls further; sometimes we even go too deep that we tear souls apart even if Papa Satan is already eating them. Infernal Furies and Gorgons like Medusa are regularly summoned to guard the gates, but of course, who could guard the gates better without us? The Lower Hell is where gory retributions to the souls who have immensely sinned in their living days are bestowed, that is why passage is only allowed through divine aid and the soul to be tormented itself. Mere human reason cannot handle the spirit of Ultimate Evil.

We are wrathful and heretics, arrogant and superior, but then again I wonder if God could understand us. He is omnipotent, right? He must have known that a rebellion in Heaven would be happening. If goodness of the goodness is God Himself, I wonder why there is Hell. If He can be wrathful, too, just like what he did to us and souls tortured here, then the badness of the badness must be Him, too. Satan is just a linguistic symbolism to differentiate goodness to evilness. Logic or no logic - that's the way I see it.

I brushed off my blue-black hair and started flapping my black wings and blinked at my bloodstained sword. I stared at the souls who dared to enter the city, and neither of them looked brave enough to ramble us. Their leader had a spiked hair, with blue eyes and a pale skin. Beside him is a redhead lad clutching the spike-haired man's arms, with eyes displaying fear, horror and awe all at the same time. His other five companions, a brown-haired boy with long tresses on his bangs, tall but not as tall as the redhead. The other standing beside him had a boyish look based on his features, with the same hair with mine, only that it's shorter and pure black. The one standing at the back of the brown-haired boy was a very tall man that wore a glass with thick black frames. The one beside him, his eyes showing neither courage nor audacity was a very tall and dark man, the pink lines on his external mouth emphasizing his lip's feature. Next to him was a girl, with curled set of hairs that gleamed at when fires spit from the corners of the Hell. The Infernal Furies already summoned Medusa to turn these souls into stones, but I sense that a Divine Messenger will be coming to tear us down. I saw it in their leader's eyes (leader whom I meant the leader of the group of souls who dared to enter the city walls).

I wonder if God could let me be his warrior again? No, it is so preposterous, and such thoughts are prohibited in Hell. Here, angels like me have free will. Back there in Heaven, free will is considering if God would be happy or not. It is a teleological free will, when here in Hell free will is an existential free will. We do things to satisfy ourselves. God is a limitation to our potentials - a hindrance to what everybody, including humans, call freedom. If God didn't set standards of what things must be, we could've surpassed Him! The angels up there should've known it.

Thunders shrouded through the clouds and as the Divine Messenger approached, a storm finally trembled the foul air of Hell and the light, the light that I instinctively longed for, drew nearer the Dis' gates. He was indeed an angel, with his wings and his garments gleaming in God's glory. He has hazelnuts eyes and brown locks that were fine to the touch, even to its sight. He had a palely dark skin, but even so, his body shimmered in the bright holy light, his features melting my eyes, and if felt like I had a heart, pulse quickening, beat fastening. He was such a marvelous sight, and I wonder if that angel was one of the reasons I fell from Heaven. With a sprawl of his palms the gates broke open, and the Furies and Gorgons wandered off, and some of us, too. Then the group of souls freely entered the gates and went swiftly to the first limbo. I stood by the gate's posts and looked at the Divine Messenger, and he looked at me, too. I tried to hide my smile while he stared at he still. Somehow that angel looked familiar; I wonder if he remembers me still?

This is my typical day - to exaggerate the eternal miseries of the damned, to utter blasphemies to God, and to fear Him, even his petty messengers. I wouldn't call it everlasting, for at Judgment Day all of us in Hell will vanish in sulfuric fires. But a fallen angel like me must live at the moment, for if not then the bargain we risked for will be useless.

NOTES:

1. This one-shot is an inspiration from one of the chapter (or something like that) of Dante's Inferno, a part from his Divine Comedy. This situation was set where the group of people tried to enter the lower pits of hell but was disallowed because of their lack of ability to counter an ultimate evil. Those group of people were poets (the main character in the Diving Comedy is named Dante, but scholars say that it was not the author but a fictional character), which included Virgil, and Homer among others. Check info sites if you want more details. I've read the comedy for like years ago so I can't really tell it in full detail.

2. The people I replaced in the original work were: Sendoh Akira (the leader), Hanamichi Sakuragi (the supposed-to-be Dante), Kenji Fujima, Toru Hanagata, Takenori Akagi and Ayako. The fallen angel and the divine messenger were... you know who are they, right?

3. Before entering at the gates of hell (according to the Inferno, that is), you would see creatures called Opportunists, wherein in an event that happened when the rebellion of angels took place, those creatures took no sides. In that limbo they are punished by big sort of wasps that fly around them and sting them everlastingly. The other sinners in the fic... well, I have explained it in the fic.

4. Teleological means you think of the consequences before doing something. Deontological is its opposite. Existential (in existentialism) believes that free will is free will as it is, without thinking any external forces that can affect anyone's decisions in life. Existentialism is hard to describe/define, so read philosophy books if you want.

5. Did I miss anything? Reviews!