[ TENSION ]ย one muse is patching up the otherโs injuries which leads to intense eye contact,ย lingering touches and them finally crashing their lips against each otherโs.ย (early relationship days between his favourite infirmary physician and the commander, which is just a week before the yellow sundress, the night at the beach; which is before they went on that date after hanzo lowkey got jealous but he ended up taking her to his hotel room anyway =D)
ย SOME MORE SMUTTY MEMESย || @vulpuslunae || accepting
[ TENSION ]ย one muse is patching up the otherโs injuries which leads to intense eye contact,ย lingering touches and them finally crashing their lips against each otherโs.ย
๐ฅ|| He does not speak.
He has commanded battalions with a single syllable, has silenced rooms full of decorated officers with nothing more than the particular quality of his stillness - and yet here, in the low amber light of the infirmary's back room, with her fingers pressed against the architecture of his ruin, Hanzo Hasashi finds that language has abandoned him entirely. Left him. Gone the way of easy things.
She peels back the dressing with the careful economy of someone who has done this a thousand times, and perhaps she has, but he is certain - certain in the way he is certain of trajectories, of wind allowance, of the particular weight of consequence - that she has never done it quite like this. That her hands have never carried this specific gravity. That the air between two people has never been quite this dense, this reluctant to move.
The crash comes for him quietly, the way it always does.
This is the part they do not put in the briefings. The part that lives in the negative space of every after-action report he has ever filed - clean, declarative, stripped of the hours that preceded the filing.
The adrenaline that carried him through the operation, through the debrief, through the particular performance of composure that command requires of him regardless of what his body is doing underneath the uniform - it does not leave all at once. It never does. It withdraws the way a tide withdraws, slow and total, and what it leaves behind is always the same: the full, honest accounting of everything he refused to feel while there was still work to be done.
His ribs ache with a depth that is almost geological.
There is a particular quality to exhaustion at his level of it - not the clean tiredness of physical exertion, which he has always been able to manage, to metabolize, to set aside with the practiced efficiency of a man who long ago made his peace with discomfort.
This is something older and less cooperative.
This is the exhaustion of sustained hypervigilance finally releasing its grip, of a nervous system that has been running on threat-response for hours deciding, all at once, that it is done. That whatever he needs from it next, he will have to find elsewhere.
His hands, he notices, are not entirely steady.
He keeps them still through force of will - years of practice, muscle memory, the accumulated discipline of a life spent ensuring that what he feels and what he displays remain two separate, carefully managed countries - but the effort costs him more than it should. More than it would have, ten years ago. He does not allow himself to linger on what that means.
She works. Her hands move across his chest with the practiced confidence of someone who has made peace with the human body's capacity for damage, who has stopped being surprised by what men in his line of work come back carrying, and he finds that he is - grateful, obscurely and unexpectedly, for the absence of her alarm.
He has sat in too many rooms with people whose composure was a thin thing stretched over visible distress, people who wanted him to reassure them even as they were meant to be reassuring him, and he has always found it quietly exhausting, the management of other people's feelings about his injuries while the injuries themselves went unaddressed.
She simply works. And he is so tired that the simplicity of it undoes something in him that he had not realized was still clenched.
The cut along his left pectoral pulls when he exhales.
He exhales anyway. Slowly. The way a man exhales when he is trying very hard to remain composed and is only partially succeeding.
Her hands are warm. He had not expected that. He had catalogued her in the professional architecture of their prior interactions - her precision, her directness, the particular way she does not flinch when she tells him something he does not want to hear - but he had not accounted for the warmth of her hands. For the way her fingertips press gauze against his skin and he feels it somewhere considerably further inland than the wound.
The warmth of her hands is - it is difficult to articulate, even internally, even in the private country of his own mind where he permits himself a vocabulary he would never use aloud. It is difficult to articulate because it is not simply physical.
Because somewhere beneath the cut and the bruising and the bone-deep ache of a body that has been asked, again, for more than it was designed to give, there is something that responds to the warmth of her hands the way parched ground responds to water; not gracefully, not with any particular dignity, but completely. Immediately. Without reservation.
He is so tired in a way that has nothing to do with tonight and everything to do with the accumulation of every night that preceded it. Twenty-some years of operational command. Twenty-some years of being the steadiest thing in whatever room he occupied, of calibrating his own reactions to the needs of the mission, of putting the weight of himself - all of it, the full considerable architecture of his will - in service of something larger than his own comfort.
He does not regret it. He would not undo it. But the body keeps its own ledger, separate from conviction and duty and the clean narratives of purpose, and tonight, in this room, with the adrenaline draining out of him like water from a wound, the body is presenting him with the bill.
This is dangerous. He is aware that it is dangerous the same way he is aware of an elevated heart rate, of a trip wire underfoot - the body registering the intelligence before the mind consents to acknowledge it. She is close enough that he can see the precise line of her concentration, the slight draw of her brow as she works, the way her lower lip catches between her teeth for just a moment when she smooths the tape over the new dressing, sealing him back together as though he is something worth the effort of repair.
As though he is something worth the effort of repair.
He does not know what to do with that.
He has spent so long being the one who holds the line, who makes the call, who absorbs the weight of decision so that others don't have to, that the simple act of someone tending to him - not managing him, not deferring to his rank, not performing care while actually watching for his approval - lands somewhere undefended. Lands in the gap between his ribs where the exhaustion has made room.
He thinks: you should not look at her like this.
He looks at her like this.
The silence between them has changed. It began as the silence of professionalism - the clean, manageable quiet of a physician and her patient - but it has curdled into something else entirely. Something that breathes. Something that has weight and heat and a particular awareness of the inches that remain between his mouth and the crown of her head.
Her fingers trace the edge of the bandage. Checking adhesion. Standard procedure.
She looks up - because of course she looks up, because the universe is apparently committed to his complete undoing - and for a long, suspended moment, neither of them moves. Her eyes are dark and close and he can see the exact instant that she registers what she has walked into.
The quality of his gaze. The fact that he is not bothering to disguise it anymore, that the exhaustion has burned through his reserves of careful indifference and left him - stripped of it. Honest in the way a man becomes honest when he simply does not have the energy remaining to be otherwise.
This, he thinks distantly, is perhaps the most tactically vulnerable he has been in years.
He finds that he cannot bring himself to care.
He should say something measured. Clinical. He should reconstruct the appropriate distance with words the way he would reconstruct a perimeter - efficiently, without sentiment. He has done it before. He is good at it. He has made an art form of the strategic retreat, of the conversation redirected before it can arrive somewhere inconvenient, and he knows exactly what it would take - one sentence, two at most, delivered in the register of command that closes doors without appearing to close them.
He does not say anything measured.
His hand comes up - unhurried, deliberate, the gesture of a man who has made his decision several seconds ago and is only now allowing his body to execute - and his fingers find the curve of her jaw with a precision that has nothing to do with battlefield calibration and everything to do with the fact that he has been thinking about exactly this, and has been refusing to think about exactly this, for longer than he is prepared to admit.
Tonight, in the amber light, with the adrenaline gone and the exhaustion running deep and honest through every layer of him, the refusing costs more than he has left to spend.
There. That small, involuntary sound - barely a sound at all, more the shape of one - and something in his chest cracks open in a way that has nothing to do with the bruising. In a way that is quieter than he expected. In a way that feels less like fracture and more like - relief. Like a door he had forgotten was locked finally opening from the other side.
He does not rush it. He has never been a man who rushes. He closes the distance between them the way night closes over water - inevitably, completely, with a patience that is almost unbearable even to him, even now, even with his hands not entirely steady and his ribs pulling on every inhale - until her mouth is against his and the world outside this amber room ceases to have any operational relevance whatsoever.
She tastes like the end of a long day.
She tastes like something he is going to have considerable difficulty categorizing and then considerable difficulty forgetting, and some exhausted, honest part of him - the part that the adrenaline crash has stripped down to the structural - does not particularly want to forget. Does not want to reconstruct the careful distance. Does not want to file this away in the same drawer as everything else he has set aside in service of the mission.
His hand curves further, thumb resting just below her cheekbone, and he kisses her with the same devastating thoroughness he brings to everything he has ever decided matters - which is to say: entirely. Which is to say: there is no version of this that is casual, no version where he is not already, irrevocably, in a great deal of trouble. He is aware of this. The awareness sits somewhere behind his sternum, calm and complete, and he kisses her anyway.
He kisses her like a man who is tired. Not weakly - never that - but with the specific gravity of someone who has finally stopped bracing against something and allowed it to be what it is.
He pulls back only far enough to breathe.
The room is very quiet. The amber light has not changed. Somewhere in the base above them, the ordinary machinery of the night shift continues its rotation, indifferent to the particular realignment that has just occurred in this room, between these two people, in the space that used to be professional distance and is now something else entirely.
His forehead drops to hers.
He does not speak immediately. There is nothing yet that language is adequate to, and he has learned - slowly, at considerable cost - that the impulse to fill silence with words is almost always about the speaker's discomfort rather than the listener's need. So he stays. His forehead against hers, his hand still curved to her jaw, his chest rising and falling with the careful rhythm of a man whose body is reminding him, in no uncertain terms, that it has had enough for one night.
He is tired and his ribs ache and there is a bruise developing along his left side that will be spectacular by morning, and her hands are still resting against his chest, and he is - he is not unhappy.
This is perhaps the most surprising thing. He had expected, somewhere in the architecture of himself, that crossing this particular line would come with the familiar weight of complication, of consequence catalogued and managed. Instead there is only the quiet. The amber light. The warmth of her hands against the wreckage of his chest.
When he opens his eyes and looks at her in that light - her face close, her eyes searching his with something that is neither clinical nor afraid - he thinks:
A week from now, she will be standing in a yellow dress at the edge of the ocean, and I will already be lost.
He does not yet know this.
But some part of him - the part that reads terrain, that calculates odds, that has survived this long by understanding the difference between a manageable situation and one that has already escaped containment - that part already knows. Has perhaps known for longer than tonight. Has perhaps been carrying the knowledge quietly, in the way he carries most things, waiting for a moment when the exhaustion finally outran the discipline and there was nothing left to do but let it be true.
He exhales slowly against her temple.
This, whatever this is, has just begun. ๐ฅ||
