Wₑ'ᵣₑ ₐₗₗ ₘₐD ₕₑᵣₑ

The man stood in the mansion just in the outskirts twilight town. Rain pattered against the grass outside and the roof as he refrained from going out any farther. A smile was on his lips as he turns to look at the teenage boy. Or should he say 'young man' at this point? The man was dressed in a fine suit, stubble, with a fine slick back haircut.

"You are back. Why here?" He asked as he walked over to a broken chandelier and looked down at it. Dripping from the ceiling landing on a puddle on the floor beside Riku made cheshire grin. His eyes flexing in the sun rain's sunlight from the outside. Almost like a cat's eyes before he vanished into a ploom of green smoke. His body just vanished..?

Before reappearing beside Riku. But it wasn't the man. No. It was Ansem. His yellow eyes pinned on him but the thing that didn't look right was his smile. Dark and ominous. With a sprinkle of madness beneath the surface as he speaks.

Riku had gone motionless upon entering, not having expected to see anyone else there. DiZ wasn't due back yet, though that wouldn't have been too surprising, but this stranger--

No. No, not a stranger at all. Somehow that knowledge didn't let him breathe any easier, continuing his way into the room. Why here? He wondered if it was a rhetorical question. He wondered if his answer made any sense, even to himself. "This is the safest place, for now." For who? For Sora? For DiZ? Certainly not anyone else.

It was something in the grin that tapped at instinct, not quite fight or flight but near enough. Something he couldn't put his finger on set him on edge, and the unknown grasped at him even more. The disappearance wasn't as startling as turning to see--

Riku jumped back with the kind of sound that might have embarrassed him if he'd had any awareness of it. He'd stopped himself from manifesting his Keyblade, but only just; that wasn't Ansem. And yet it looked exactly like he pictured the man in his mind, together the details making the man's appearance slightly more disturbing. He couldn't stop himself from placing a hand against his racing heart, trying to take a breath, trying to calm down.

"Embrase it again. You won't be gone. You'll come back." It was almost reassurance. Almost. His tongue licking his fur to clean off a piece of dirt that had befallen upon him." You did so well back at the castle why quit now?" That abhorrent castle. It made Sora forget who he was, and forced Riku to face his demons. How entertaining. But there was more. Of course there was more to the story. It doesn't end unless they say it could end.

"Relax and breathe, Riku. Lest the form of Ansem will likely scare you again." The cat's form shifted agaib. Becoming not Ansem but someone else. Roxas. His blue eyes pinned on Riku as his voice shifted with him." You may need that power to beat him. You need him. To get Sora back." The boy hums as he takes a step towards Riku." You do want that..right?"

Cheshire whistled a tune. A face he hadn't seen in a while as he appears just before disaster. To whitness the outcome. And if the outcome wasn't in Hanzo's favor. He'd somehow interfere in his supposed outcome. But he never showed himself. He remained out of sight. Until now.

In a fight with Shao Khan things were getting out of hand against Hanzo's favor. But before anything could be done. The man stepped in before his weapon could come down. Dressed in a fine suit with stubble and fine slick back hair with a rather unnatural smile on his face as he whistles too loud after the climax of his whistled tune. His eyes pinned on Shao Khan from the outskirts of the area they were fighting in.

A beast like Shao Khan had no right taking him out. His fingers twitching as he vanished. Through the ground Chesh popped his head up beneath Khan's foot. His eyes looking up at him before grabbing Hanzo's hand and-

'BOOF'

One second he was under Shao Khan's boot. The next he was in a crystalline cave with a waterfall in the background. The man standing over him as he crouched down and holds his dripping hand over Hanzo's mouth. Purple blood dripping into his lips that instantly began to heal broken bones and cuts alike as he helped him sit up.

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The pain recedes before Hanzo even registers its absence - bone knitting, flesh sealing, the purple ichor working through him like something alive and hungry to mend what violence unmade. He does not thank it. He does not thank the hand that offers it.

He surges upright instead, breath torn ragged from a throat still remembering the crush of Shao Kahn's boot, and the crystalline peace of this stolen cave feels like an insult layered atop injury. Water falls somewhere behind him, indifferent, glittering, mocking in its serenity. He wants blood on his hands, not water at his back.

"You dare." The words come low, scraped raw, more growl than voice. His obsidian eyes - dark, incandescent with a fury that has nothing to do with the fight he was pulled from and everything to do with the one he was denied - fix upon the smiling man before him like twin blades seeking purchase. "I did not ask for rescue."

His hands curl to fists, knuckles whitening, as if he might still find Shao Kahn's throat beneath them if he only wills it hard enough. The insult of it burns hotter than any wound the tyrant carved into him - hotter than the boot, hotter than the broken bone now already forgotten beneath healed skin.

To be humbled by Kahn's brutality was one shame he could have answered. Steel meets steel, and even in defeat there is honor in the trying, in the falling, in rising again to strike back harder. But this - to be plucked from the field like some errant piece swept off a board, mid-motion, mid-vengeance - this is a wound no blood can close.

"You think you have spared me." Hanzo's voice shakes now, not with weakness but with the sheer effort of restraining what wants to erupt. "You have stolen from me. That was mine to finish. Mine to answer. I do not need a cat's mercy to survive a beast - I needed one more breath, one more step through the earth, and his skull would be split beneath my blade where he stood."

He rises fully now, robes torn, chest still heaving, staring down the man who wears his unnatural smile like it costs him nothing. "You call it entertainment. You call me important, as if that absolves you. But you took my kill from my hands as surely as if you'd guided his fist yourself." His jaw tightens, teeth bared like something feral beneath the composure he still, barely, wears like armor. "Do not mistake my breath for gratitude, Cheshire. I did not ask to be pulled from the abyss. I asked to stand in it - and end him."

The waterfall continues its indifferent song behind them both. Hanzo does not look at it. His eyes remain locked on the cat who smiles too wide, too knowing, too pleased with a rescue that Hanzo will carry now like an unhealed wound beneath skin made whole again by force he never wanted. ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

He approches Hanzo but refrains from touching him. He holds his hand up as a vision plays. Hanzo's head crushed in. If not that then another where he does manage to break free but winds up getting killed anyway. Countless outcomes play within the palm of Cheshire's hand." Countless universes. Countless outcomes. More universes than most you are dead by this point." The visions stop as he shuts his palm. He knew honor was something Hanzo held closely. Shao lacked such a thing. He'd rather crush anything smaller than him and make sure they die painfully before they had the chance to oppose him. Cheshire watched Shao Khan for a while. But not as much as he watched Hanzo.

His expression shifted to something more understanding. He'd be angry to if he was taken away from a fight like that. But Hanzo was broken. Bound for death if he hadn't stepped in the way he did. Cheshire's jump in resulted in outrage. But Cheshire remained calm.

"There's other chances for you, Hanzo. More than you can count. That. Wasn't the right time." He shook his head slightly." I don't expect you to understand my methods. Nor go like them. But know that the advice of a god goes a long way. Even if I happen to be..well. batshit insane."

He looks down at his palm where his blood stained the white skin purple. No doubt Hanzo felt stronger now." If you wish I can bring you back to the Khan." He offered. No sense in keeping him away from what he wants. He could so easily kill the Khan but where's the fun in that? Outworlders tasted like ash and rotting flesh more than a person does. Not worth it in his eyes.

His eyes look over Hanzo. That anger. Something that Cheshire could never understand. People get angry but never Cheshire. He smiles. Always smiles. He gets sad of course but angry? Never. He was a complexity in the form of a feline dressed in the body of a man.

"You're bound to win now. Yet. Thats not the point now is it?" He tilts his head." You wanted to prove you could beat him even when you were already beneath him." He looked him in the eyes." Honor. Something I could never truly understand." He admits it cooly. His form shifting as he takes a seat on a stone." I've seen people die because of it. Countless. To me. It seems like an excuse to walk into danger and never walk back out. There's a difference between being honorable. And being stupid."

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| Hanzo does not flinch at the vision. He does not need Cheshire's palm to show him death - he has worn death like a second skin, has clawed his way out of its jaws more times than any mortal tongue should dare to count. He has died screaming. He has died silent. He has died with his throat opened to the Netherrealm's black sky and risen again reeking of sulfur and vengeance, and so a mere possibility, however vivid, however many-mirrored, means nothing to a man who has already worn every shroud there is to wear.

He plants his feet wide upon the crystalline stone, though his body still remembers the boot, the crush, the splinter of bone beneath Shao Kahn's weight. His spine straightens by will alone, vertebra by vertebra, until he stands at his full and terrible height - a column of scarred flesh and torn robe, swaying only slightly, refusing with every fiber of sinew to let the healing skin beneath him dictate the posture of his defiance. Let his knees ache. Let his ribs whisper their old complaint with every breath. He will not bow. Not to Kahn's memory, and certainly not to a cat playing prophet with a borrowed god's smile.

"You show me my death as though it were a threat," he says, voice low, a blade dragged slow across stone. "I have lived my death, cat. I have bled it, drowned in it, clawed my way back from its belly more times than your countless visions could ever conjure. Do you think I fear the dark? I have been the dark. I have been the thing that other men fear when they close their eyes at night."

His hands, still trembling with restrained violence, uncurl slightly - not in surrender, but in something colder, something more absolute. Blood, both his own and the fading purple ichor, cracks faintly at his knuckles as he flexes them, a reminder written in dried rivulets across his skin of exactly what he walked through to stand here now, upright, unbroken in the ways that matter.

"I have long since made my peace with the ending. Whichever ending comes. If Shao Kahn's boot was to be the final period at the close of my story, so be it - I would have met it with my spine straight and my blade still reaching for his throat, and that would have been enough. A warrior's death is not a tragedy, Cheshire. It is a completion. I have grieved enough in this life to know the difference between an ending earned and an ending stolen."

He steps closer now, close enough that the cat's unnatural smile fills his vision entire, close enough that his voice drops to something almost intimate in its fury - and still he does not sway, does not hunch against the pain singing through mending bone. If anything he draws himself taller with every step, as though sheer will might finish what Cheshire's blood had only begun.

"That is what you do not understand. It was never about winning. It was never even about honor, though you cling to that word as if it were the whole of my rage. It was about what comes next — the natural order of blade meeting flesh, of fate closing its hand around a man's throat and either sparing him or not. That order is older than your countless universes. Older than your palm full of maybes. And you - " his teeth show, feral, " - you reached into that order like a thief reaching into a dead man's pocket, and you took what was never yours to take. Not my life. Not my death. The choosing of it."

The waterfall roars on behind him, uncaring, and Hanzo does not look at it, does not look away from the smiling god before him. His chest still heaves with the effort of standing so tall on a body that has not finished mending, but he wears the strain like a badge rather than a wound - proof that even torn open, even half-healed, he answers to no one's mercy but his own resolve.

"Shao Kahn is a beast who crushes what kneels and what does not kneel alike - this I have always known, cat, long before you whistled your tune into my war. I do not need your visions to teach me what iron rule tastes like. I have tasted it. I have bled it. But whether I was to be one more insect beneath his heel, or the blade that finally cracked his crown - that reckoning belonged to me. Not to your amusement. Not to your mercy dressed up as rescue."

His obsidian eyes burn, twin embers refusing to gutter, and still he stands - unbowed, unbent, a monument carved from grief and fury both, refusing the very healing gifted to him if healing means kneeling before another's judgment of when his story ends.

"You did not save me, Cheshire. You robbed a dying man of the one thing grief and war had not yet taken from him - the right to his own end. And for that, no purple blood mending my bones will ever earn your forgiveness." ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

He lost his family to. There wasn't a day where he didn't want them back with him. To sing songs and drink tea together. He missed them and it hurt. The deep underlying factor was that his family was gone and he wanted death to take him so he may see them again. Cheshire felt hurt. Not to the fact that Hanzo was angry. But at the fact he stripped a man of what he wanted.

"I will not ask for forgiveness. I don't expect you to." He said with a hint of sadness in his tone. The echo of the cave seemed to grow increasingly louder as Cheshire spoke. His eyes wandering away from Hanzo as he let a short breath escape his nostrils. His gaze couldn't reach Hanzo for some reason. He never met someone he liked who wanted to die the way Hanzo did. Perhapse he picked a bad person to help? Or was he simply too protective? He took a step back as he shook his head.

There was no real way to fix it. He was healed and away from the fight thst should have ended his life. He couldn't send him back there was no point in it. If there was one thing cheshire wasn't good at. It was actually understanding other's feelings. How they desired to live. And Hanzo didn't want that.

His green eyes finally meet Hanzo's again as he shook his head." I'm sorry." He somehow knew that wouldn't fix the problem. Nothing could until Hanzo reached his next meeting with death. Thats was unless Hanzo decided to attack him for his actions. In which Cheshire would be less than inclined to grant him his wish.

"I want to fix this. But..I'm a god incapable of rewinding the fabric of time..if I'd have known..I'd have given you your wish and let it happen." He walks over to the waterfall. The droplets burning his skin as he got wet. The scent of burning fur hit the air as he looked at his reflection. Instead of a man. A cat stared back as he thought to himself.

Cheshire whistled a tune. A face he hadn't seen in a while as he appears just before disaster. To whitness the outcome. And if the outcome wasn't in Hanzo's favor. He'd somehow interfere in his supposed outcome. But he never showed himself. He remained out of sight. Until now.

In a fight with Shao Khan things were getting out of hand against Hanzo's favor. But before anything could be done. The man stepped in before his weapon could come down. Dressed in a fine suit with stubble and fine slick back hair with a rather unnatural smile on his face as he whistles too loud after the climax of his whistled tune. His eyes pinned on Shao Khan from the outskirts of the area they were fighting in.

A beast like Shao Khan had no right taking him out. His fingers twitching as he vanished. Through the ground Chesh popped his head up beneath Khan's foot. His eyes looking up at him before grabbing Hanzo's hand and-

'BOOF'

One second he was under Shao Khan's boot. The next he was in a crystalline cave with a waterfall in the background. The man standing over him as he crouched down and holds his dripping hand over Hanzo's mouth. Purple blood dripping into his lips that instantly began to heal broken bones and cuts alike as he helped him sit up.

▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥|| The pain recedes before Hanzo even registers its absence - bone knitting, flesh sealing, the purple ichor working through him like something alive and hungry to mend what violence unmade. He does not thank it. He does not thank the hand that offers it.

He surges upright instead, breath torn ragged from a throat still remembering the crush of Shao Kahn's boot, and the crystalline peace of this stolen cave feels like an insult layered atop injury. Water falls somewhere behind him, indifferent, glittering, mocking in its serenity. He wants blood on his hands, not water at his back.

"You dare." The words come low, scraped raw, more growl than voice. His obsidian eyes - dark, incandescent with a fury that has nothing to do with the fight he was pulled from and everything to do with the one he was denied - fix upon the smiling man before him like twin blades seeking purchase. "I did not ask for rescue."

His hands curl to fists, knuckles whitening, as if he might still find Shao Kahn's throat beneath them if he only wills it hard enough. The insult of it burns hotter than any wound the tyrant carved into him - hotter than the boot, hotter than the broken bone now already forgotten beneath healed skin.

To be humbled by Kahn's brutality was one shame he could have answered. Steel meets steel, and even in defeat there is honor in the trying, in the falling, in rising again to strike back harder. But this - to be plucked from the field like some errant piece swept off a board, mid-motion, mid-vengeance - this is a wound no blood can close.

"You think you have spared me." Hanzo's voice shakes now, not with weakness but with the sheer effort of restraining what wants to erupt. "You have stolen from me. That was mine to finish. Mine to answer. I do not need a cat's mercy to survive a beast - I needed one more breath, one more step through the earth, and his skull would be split beneath my blade where he stood."

He rises fully now, robes torn, chest still heaving, staring down the man who wears his unnatural smile like it costs him nothing. "You call it entertainment. You call me important, as if that absolves you. But you took my kill from my hands as surely as if you'd guided his fist yourself." His jaw tightens, teeth bared like something feral beneath the composure he still, barely, wears like armor. "Do not mistake my breath for gratitude, Cheshire. I did not ask to be pulled from the abyss. I asked to stand in it - and end him."

The waterfall continues its indifferent song behind them both. Hanzo does not look at it. His eyes remain locked on the cat who smiles too wide, too knowing, too pleased with a rescue that Hanzo will carry now like an unhealed wound beneath skin made whole again by force he never wanted. ▬▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥||

He approches Hanzo but refrains from touching him. He holds his hand up as a vision plays. Hanzo's head crushed in. If not that then another where he does manage to break free but winds up getting killed anyway. Countless outcomes play within the palm of Cheshire's hand." Countless universes. Countless outcomes. More universes than most you are dead by this point." The visions stop as he shuts his palm. He knew honor was something Hanzo held closely. Shao lacked such a thing. He'd rather crush anything smaller than him and make sure they die painfully before they had the chance to oppose him. Cheshire watched Shao Khan for a while. But not as much as he watched Hanzo.

His expression shifted to something more understanding. He'd be angry to if he was taken away from a fight like that. But Hanzo was broken. Bound for death if he hadn't stepped in the way he did. Cheshire's jump in resulted in outrage. But Cheshire remained calm.

"There's other chances for you, Hanzo. More than you can count. That. Wasn't the right time." He shook his head slightly." I don't expect you to understand my methods. Nor go like them. But know that the advice of a god goes a long way. Even if I happen to be..well. batshit insane."

He looks down at his palm where his blood stained the white skin purple. No doubt Hanzo felt stronger now." If you wish I can bring you back to the Khan." He offered. No sense in keeping him away from what he wants. He could so easily kill the Khan but where's the fun in that? Outworlders tasted like ash and rotting flesh more than a person does. Not worth it in his eyes.

His eyes look over Hanzo. That anger. Something that Cheshire could never understand. People get angry but never Cheshire. He smiles. Always smiles. He gets sad of course but angry? Never. He was a complexity in the form of a feline dressed in the body of a man.

"You're bound to win now. Yet. Thats not the point now is it?" He tilts his head." You wanted to prove you could beat him even when you were already beneath him." He looked him in the eyes." Honor. Something I could never truly understand." He admits it cooly. His form shifting as he takes a seat on a stone." I've seen people die because of it. Countless. To me. It seems like an excuse to walk into danger and never walk back out. There's a difference between being honorable. And being stupid."